CHAPTER 25

NORMAN OLIVER BAILEY IVES WATCHED the patio through the closed glass of the sliding doors. Out there Marilyn, his wife, was pedaling slowly and laboriously on her exercise bike.

She was five foot six, and weighed a little over eleven and a half stone. Her tanned body bulged from the small zebra-striped bikini. Her blond hair was tied up by a shocking-pink scarf. Despite the careful hairdressing attentions of Jason, there was a brassy tinge to Marilyn's hair that infinitesimally hardened between each weekly visit.

Marilyn stopped pedaling.

She reached out to the green ironwork table and took three or four chocolates from a dish. She crammed them quickly in her mouth.

Marilyn was always cutting out potatoes, but she could never go without chocolate. It gave her energy, she said. Besides, she said, a bit of extra flesh was all right, providing your muscles were firm. Anyway, chocolate was not fattening, it just burned off. Poor old Marilyn.

Tracy liked sweet things too. But she never put on any weight. She had been a slim, doelike child, and so she grew, in perfect proportion, into her glove-fitted golden skin.

It amazed him, that he and Marilyn could have produced between them something so lovely.

Marilyn was still quite attractive, of course, and when they went out she dolled herself up, made the best of herself. But he—well, he could never win any prizes. Stop a procession, he would. Ugly git.

He grinned, seeing a vague reflection of this ugliness in the glass. Short and squat, with big muscled arms from his days as a plasterer before he took to running the show —and he would still take a stint, liked to, if someone was off sick. His belly was large too, bulging out his white vest. He was brown, a tan that never faded, from his years of outdoor work, and his brown bullet head sat on his shoulders without the intermediary of a neck.

None of this had ever stopped him. His mother, the Old Girl (and that was how she had always been for him, an old girl), she had said, "You ain't pretty, but you're a good boy, Nobbi." It was she who had given him the nickname first, after his father, the rotten old sod, had landed him with that Norman Oliver mouthful.

Nobbi had liked his mother. He liked all women, and they tended to like him. When he first went with Marilyn, she had really been a stunner. The heads had turned.

Maybe that was where Tray got her looks from after all. Or from his own mother. The Old Girl had been quite a piece in her youth, he had seen the photos.