Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by Ruth Rendell

commitment,” or, more likely, as an unwelcome duty because you were pregnant. They never said, as Jims had just said, “Will you marry me?” It made her hesitate about taking him seriously. Besides, there was another reason why he couldn’t possibly be asking her to marry him. “Did you really say what I think you did?” asked Zillah.
    “Yes, I really did, darling. Let me explain. I want to marry you, I want to live with you, and I want it to be for the rest of our lives. I like you. I think we’d get on.”
    Zillah, who had been driven by poverty to stop smoking a week before, took a cigarette out of the packet he had put on the table. Jims lit it for her. “But you’re gay,” she said.
    “That’s the point. I am also the Conservative member of Parliament for South Wessex and between you and me I think I shall be outed some time in the next six months if I don’t do something to stop it.”
    “Yes, okay, but everyone gets outed these days or comes out. I mean, I know you haven’t been, but it was always only a matter of time.”
    “No, it wasn’t. What makes you say that? I take the greatest care to be seen about with women. I’ve been talking about that ghastly model, Icon, for weeks. Just think about my constituency. You live in it, you ought to know what it’s like. Not only have they never returned anyone but a Conservative, they have never, until me, returned an unmarried man. They are the most right-wing bunch in the United Kingdom. They loathe queers. In his speech at the annual dinner last week the chair of the North Wessex Conservative Association compared what he calls ‘inverts’ to necrophiliacs, practitioners of bestiality, pedophiles, and satanists. There’ll be a general election in less than a year. I don’t want to lose my seat. Besides . . .” Jims put on that mysterious look his handsome face often wore when he made reference to the corridors of power. “Besides, a little bird told me I have the weeniest chance of a post in the next reshuffle if I keep my tiny paws clean.”
    Zillah, who had known James Isambard Melcombe-Smith since her parents moved into the tied cottage on his parents’ estate as land agent and housekeeper twenty-five years before, sat back in her chair and looked at him with new eyes. He was probably the best-looking man she had ever seen: tall, dark, film star–ish in the way film stars were when beauty was a Hollywood prerequisite, slim, elegant, too handsome, she sometimes thought, to be hetero, and far too handsome to sit in the House of Commons. It amazed her that those people like this chairman and the chief whip hadn’t rumbled him years ago. She’d even have fancied him herself if she hadn’t known since she was sixteen that it was hopeless. “What do I get out of it?” she asked. “No sex, that’s for sure.”
    “Well, no. Best to call a spade a spade, darling. It would be, as you might say, a
mariage blanc
but also an
open
marriage, only that part would be our little secret. As to what you get out of it, that will not be cat’s meat, not in anyone’s estimation. I have quite a lot of dosh, as you must know. And I’m not talking about the weeny pittance I get from the Mother of Parliaments. Plus my charming home in Fredington Crucis and my very up-market apartment within the sound of the division bell—valued, I may add, at one million smackers only last week. You get my name, freedom from care, lots of lovely clothes, the car of your choice, foreign trips, decent schools for the kids . . .”
    “Yes, Jims, how about the kids?”
    “I love children, you know that. Don’t I love yours? I’ll never have any of my own unless I set up home in a same-sex
stable
relationship and contrive to adopt one. Whereas I’d have yours ready-made, lovely little pigeon pair with blond curls and Dorset accents.”
    “They have
not
got Dorset accents.”
    “Oh, yes, they have, my darling. But we’ll soon change that. So how about it?”
    “I’ll