Chapter Thirty-One
It is easy to tempt a frog to the river.
(Serbian proverb)
The suite is like nothing Noreen Millburn has ever seen.
Considering that until very recently she had seen nothing much outside of a ramshackle old hovel in northern England, a few hills of the rugged kind and a cobbled Lakeland village, this is perhaps not saying a great deal.
But even the full tally of what has she has witnessed in Las Vegas itself over these past few surreal hours seriously pales against her surroundings right this minute.
It is not that a single suite of rooms, however presidential, can be even more lavish than a string of dancing fountains, breathtaking floorshows, vast Italianate lobbies or palatial casinos – logic would clearly dictate otherwise.
What has nailed Noreen to the spot, with her eyes and mouth doing almost cartoon-like things, is that practically everything in the expansive set of rooms is something that she has encountered before – a sofa, a table, a bed, a bathroom…
okay, that weird thing she can glimpse in the bathroom that is something between a toilet and a tub confuses her – yet of a grandeur, design and elegance that makes her suspect they are of a totally different species.
And that she has been silently transported to an alien planet, perhaps one inhabited solely by giants blessed with impeccable taste and enviable hygiene.
Noreen has to sit down. She does so with some force, plonking herself onto a comfy-looking leather chair that immediately reclines and almost sends her flying over the top.
“Whee!” she cries, like a child on a rollercoaster.
Lyle smiles with pleasure. “Horizontal works for you. Excuse me a moment, Noreen, my dear.”
Her charming host steps into the bedroom. In what can’t have been more than two seconds max, Lyle returns wearing the same adorable smile but a completely different outfit.
Noreen has never before seen a man in a red, velvet dressing gown and Turkish slippers, holding a long cigarette holder.
This is not the outfit her father slipped into when he came home from a long day on the fells with his livestock – taking his cap off did it for him – and no other man has ever changed his attire in her presence.
“Ahhhh, that’s better,” says Lyle. “What was it dear Dorothy Parker once said, something about getting ‘out of that wet coat and into a dry martini’?”
Noreen is about to say that she doesn’t know Miss or Mrs Parker (or a martini) but is rendered quite speechless by the fact that Lyle’s cigarette appears to be happily lighting itself on just a commanding gaze from its owner.
When she has recovered from what must have surely been a trick of the light, or indeed her lightheadedness after so long awake (not that she could sleep with all this going on – and anyway, she is accustomed to often staying up all night for her needy badgers), Noreen finds a large remote control.
As she has never felt the need for a television or indeed for anything electronic, she has not come across such an object, so she can be forgiven for pressing a button or two.
Suddenly, the drapes open with a soft purring sound to reveal a private terrace and compact, blue-tiled swimming pool, the whole set-up lit with multicoloured fairy lights.
“Oh my God!” says Noreen, throwing caution to the wind. She stands up and almost twirls. “This is incredible, Lyle. It’s like the best sort of dream. Even without the livestock.”
In less than a second, Lyle is across the vast room and beside her.
His hand, now alighting on her exposed shoulder, sends a rush of heat around her body that she hasn’t experienced since she rescued a poor squirrel that had fallen down the open chimney and into her crackling winter fireplace (Jeremy still comes to visit).
“If this is a dream,” says Lyle, mellifluously, “I just pray that I never wake up, is all. I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman quite as beautiful as you, Noreen.”
“Oh you!” she says, smacking him hard on his shoulder, a blow which sends even Lyle reeling. “I’m not beaut— look at me! No one could call me beautiful, and no one ever has. Sheep-face is about as near—”
Lyle immediately interrupts, shaking his exquisitely sculpted head. “Because no one’s ever seen right into your souls – soul!”
He beckons for the enraptured woman to sit back on the leather chair, which is still resolutely on the recline, and settles himself right next to her.
The hem of his dressing gown has slid away to reveal the first ebony leg Noreen has ever seen.
She can’t seem to steer her admiring eyes away from it.
She almost feels that she would like to get out the Pledge and polish it, like the finest antique furniture, which is in itself unusual, as she has never been an assiduous polisher in the past.
Without moving a finger, Lyle reclines the chair a little further and glides a fraction closer. More than a fraction, if we are measuring, although it feels as if he has hardly moved. Their faces are now inches apart.
“Most women, Noreen,” he whispers, yet still with that profound resonance, “most women in this town, they’re no more than glossy billboards for some Silicon Valley surgeons. The kind of ladies your sleazy friend Arnie is so drawn to. But you, you just let Mother Nature take its inexorable course.”
“I try my best,” she says, not entirely certain what he’s talking about.
Lyle reaches out with slim, strong fingers and cups her newly plucked chin.
“W-what are you doing?” she asks, never having had her chin or anything else cupped, so far as she can recall.
Lyle shakes his head and withdraws his hand, slightly.
“I apologise, Noreen, for my appearing too forward. I’m just being swept along on a torrent of emotions that I’m utterly powerless to stem.
They’re rattling my spirit and my very frame in a way that has never happened to me before.
Tell me to stop, and I’ll go somewhere cold and desolate and never bother you again. ”
Noreen says nothing, but she is clearly giving the option some thought.
Although not a great deal. This isn’t like some of her really big decisions, such as should she donate one of her kidneys for transplant.
(In fact, she had at one time offered up both kidneys but was rejected just in case being bonkers was cellular.) Lyle’s face moves closer to hers.
Noreen instinctively closes her eyes. So she doesn’t notice, as her paramour licks his perfect lips, that his tongue is just a tiny bit forked.
Suddenly they hear a violent, cracking sound and turn in shock. Someone is hammering at or possibly even kicking in the door to their luxury suite. Arnie, now clearly in the most excruciating pain, barrels one-footedly into the room. He looks both determined and terrified. But mostly terrified.
“Shit! That is one heavy door. Noreen – stop! You’re about to shtup Satan!”
Noreen just glares at the intruder, miffed that a mood she was rather enjoying has been so impolitely crapped upon.
“Arnie!” she berates. “Have you been drinking? On an empty stomach?”
Before he can respond, not that he feels that this is the dominant question requiring an answer, Lyle is beside him, a warm yet somehow irredeemably evil smile on his face.
“Hello, Arnie,” he says in that wonderful voice Arnie is just beginning to loathe, “you look like you’re about to self-combust. Or would you like some help?”
Arnie, who knows that the Devil gets all the best lines, decides there is no point in competing. So his response is terse and to the point. “C’mon, Noreen! We’re getting out of here!”
He moves to grab her wrist, but Noreen smacks him away, adding a pain in his arm to the one in his foot and an even larger one where his soul should be.
“We are not going anywhere!” insists Noreen. “I’m a big girl, Arnie. I can take care of myself… or Lyle can.”
“But he’s the Devil!”
“No, Arnie. He’s in real estate. He told me in the lift coming up here.”
“Same difference. C’mon!”
Arnie, who is himself all fired-up by now, makes a sudden lunge for Noreen, causing her massive old handbag, which was still wrapped around a newly exposed arm, to go flying onto the floor. Its contents – knitting, spare bobbly hat, peppermints, et al. – spill out.
Then the fallen bag begins to move.
The threesome watch in some fascination as the well-worn relic, which Lyle had been unable to persuade her to replace, shuffles of its own accord across the plush, grade-A carpet. Eventually, Stanley the ferret pops his little head out and scurries away.
Taking advantage of the furry distraction, Arnie commences to drag Noreen, who is now scouring the room in some desperation for her favourite rodent (whilst plaintively calling out his name).
They shuffle towards the battered door. Arnie grabs the door handle then immediately pulls back his hand as it begins to sizzle.
“Owwww! Ooohh! Hot!”
He glares through the steam at a smiling Lyle as Noreen slips away from her ineffectual would-be rescuer and returns to the safe harbour of the other male’s warm, welcoming arms. This slimmer and infinitely better-looking gentleman adopts a conciliatory tone, whilst throwing Arnie a look of comradely disdain.
“Arnie, sport. Accept it like a mensch. You lost.”
“Oh,” says Arnie weakly, following it up with a muttered, “go to hell!”
“But it’s my day off.” The taller man laughs.
As Arnie turns to leave, knowing now that his own end of days have just played the numbers game and lost, there is a knock at what is left of the door.
“Ahhhh,” says Lyle, with a little self-congratulatory nod. “Room service. Entrez!”