Free The Crack by Emma Tennant Page B

his own hands he would bathe her in the waters of the Serpentine. With his love he would bring her self-esteem and respectability.
    Thirsk summed up the situation and signalled to Harcourt. In the distance, and exhibiting every sign of distress, Mrs Waters was making for her husband at full speed. The woman-doll was no more than a broken toy. The children had abandoned it already.
    As Waters stood with his arm round Baba, Thirsk gathered up his flock with the promise of Smarties all round at the end of the journey, and they crept away in the direction of the river.

13 Baba Fights her Way back to the Playboy – Just in Time
    Park Lane was deserted except for the animals. It seemed that every pet in London, tired of waiting for the return of its owner, had decided to assemble there.
    Baba, escaped from the reforming embrace of Waters, rounded Hyde Park Corner and stopped in her tracks. A phalanx of Securicor Alsatians growled menacingly at the frail mud-caked figure. Coyly aware of their attractions, a small band of trimmed white poodles danced along the road towards her. Escaped pet mice, disoriented by the absence of their toy wheel and breeding box, ran like drifting snow across her feet.
    â€˜Oh dear,’ sighed Baba. ‘Now what am I to do?’
    So near, yet so impossibly far stood the imposing building of the Playboy. It was strange, Baba thought as she gazed longingly at the two erect ears still glowing luminously outside it, that the Playboy was the only place not to have suffered in some way from the catastrophe. The top storey of the Hilton – and here she had to admit to a twinge of nostalgia for poor Simon Mangrove – had fallen off completely. The Dorchester had grown extraordinarily thin in the middle and wide at the edges, so that some of the rooms, Baba imagined, must be two feet square now, and others pointlessly distended. As for Apsley House – but Baba made up her mind not to look back at the smouldering ruins of St George’s and the fallen mansion of the Iron Duke. The lucky part was that the Playboy stood firm. And somehow, through this jungle infested by dangerous animals, she had to reach it.
    Inside the Playboy, everything went on as it had before. Because of the failure of electricity there was no closed-circuit television, and fiery torches lent an air of late Roman extravagance to the cocktail bar, the Bunny girls resembling some kind of startling mythical animal as they handed round thedrinks and waggled their tails for the customers. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to tell that a catastrophe of such proportions had taken place outside.
    â€˜What I say is,’ remarked Nicholas Ebbing-Smith as he sipped at his fifth Old-fashioned, ‘is let them know we’re not giving in this time. We can manage without their electricity better than they can manage without our money.’
    â€˜Power cuts bring the country down,’ Jeremy Potts agreed drunkenly.
    â€˜Starve them out.’ Ebbing-Smith strengthened his point.
    Potts and Ebbing-Smith sat in companionable silence for a time. Potts glared down at his watch and sighed. ‘Five o’clock,’ he said. ‘Another late night, Nick. But what’s the use of going to the office when the air-conditioning doesn’t work? Think I’ll skip it again.’
    â€˜I used to envy you, having an office to go to,’ Ebbing-Smith confided. Eyes moist, he turned to his friend for sympathy. ‘But seeing what a worry it’s been to you, I’m pretty glad now I didn’t take the plunge.’
    â€˜Ulcers,’ Potts confirmed. He glanced at his watch again, puzzled. ‘Hey, Nick, it can’t be five in the morning, you know. It must be – how long
have
we been here, anyway?’
    â€˜You mean to say it’s the afternoon?’ Ebbing-Smith chortled. ‘Well, well.’
    Although both men laughed, a tiny shadow of fear crept across their faces. In the light