Dearest Enemy

by Alexandra Sellers

  “Oh.” She breathed a moment. “Did they kill him?”

  “No one knows. He disappeared when they had him surrounded. The men said he had turned into a bird and so escaped.” Absently he rubbed her arm where there were a few beads of the gel. She could feel her sweat as a slippery bond between the palm of his hand and her skin. She wished he would touch her lips again. “A stonemason was called up from the village, and afterwards it was said that he had been forced to wall up a door.”

  “Oh, my God!” Elain started and sat up. She had been wishing he would kiss her, but if he did... “Do you mean she was immured and starved to death or something?”

  Math shook his head. “Not then, anyway. Jess was pregnant by her lover, and a few months later she was delivered of a healthy son, whom she named for him. But she did die soon afterwards. The grandson she had given her father was the only grandchild he would ever have, the only chance he had of leaving the land to one of his own blood.” He lifted the tube of sunblock, one eyebrow raised quizzically. “Will you do my back?”

  Ah. “Yeah, sure.” She took the tube and stared at it uncertainly. Why did it suddenly seem to be a rattlesnake in her hands? He turned and lay on his stomach, and she scrambled to her knees beside him. How strong his neck and shoulder muscles looked. She squirted, and the gel came out in a long, liquid spray all across his shoulders and down his side. Nervously she dropped the tube and began to rub.

  His skin was so hot. He was sweating, too, and the sweat mixed erotically with the gel under her palms. Idly she found herself wondering if his sweat-soaked skin would taste of salt...if he would be as warm to her lips as he was to her hands...how lovers held each other when they were so sweaty and slippery....

  “Otherwise it would go to the children of his sister’s son. It seems the old man didn’t want that.”

  “Do you mean that he wanted to leave it to the child of his tenant’s son, the man he wouldn’t let marry his daughter?”

  Her thighs were wet with sweat; the day was getting very hot. Did people sweat all over when they made love? Did it matter?

  He had a mole high on one shoulder, but his back was otherwise without a blemish, his skin smooth under her touch. She rubbed his shoulders and deltoids, and as he sighed and eased his neck, watched the play of muscles under his skin. “Ah, that’s good,” he said as though he liked the feel of her hands on him.

  She had strong hands; painting developed the muscles. She began to massage his neck, feeling his energy, his vitality flow upwards from his blood to hers, and thence to her heart. She felt they were cocooned in a glow of heat. His thighs were beaded with water, too, sweat or the sea, and his calves were covered in fine black hair and caked with a thin layer of sand. No doubt it would feel gritty against her skin if she touched him there.

  “He clearly did.”

  She blinked, roused from her sensuous reverie. “Did what?”

  “Want the child to inherit his kingdom. Perhaps he felt remorse.”

  “But—he was illegitimate. Surely—”

  His face on his arms, eyes closed, Math grinned. “Probably, but we’ll never know for sure. A few months after the baby’s birth, a record was discovered in the village register of a marriage between Jess and her lover, performed by the village priest almost a year before. So the old man was able to declare the child legitimate and his heir.”

  “They had been married all along? Why didn’t they just tell him so? What could he have done?”

  Math rolled over in mute invitation for her to do his chest. That, like his legs, was covered with curling black hair and beaded with liquid. She looked down at the dark purple nipples, the flatly muscled stomach and the whorls of his navel as if this were a foreign country, dangerous for the uninitiated. Then she squirted cool gel into her hand and slowly laid her hand on his stomach.

  He was silent for a moment, taking one deep breath that made his stomach slowly rise and fall under her touch. “There has always been the suspicion that the marriage register was forged, at the behest of Jessica’s father. The priest lived very well to the end of his days, it’s said, and so long as he was alive, whenever you needed a favour from the big house, if you could get the priest on your side, you’d won the battle.”

  “And the boy inherited the estate?”

  “In the fullness of time, he did.”

  “So why does Jess stay around? Waiting for her lo...for him to come and get her? And later, perhaps, to watch her son grow up, and then...she just got used to being here,” Elain said, talking half to herself. His nipples grew taut under her touch, but he didn’t seem to take any notice. She grew bolder. It was a new experience, touching a naked—a nearly naked man, and without any risk. It was so public, and so ordinary, she lied firmly to herself. It was what anyone would do....

  “Is that what you would have done? Waited for him even after death?” The curve of his thick black eyelashes was very attractive from this angle. Elain sighed. How could she possibly know what she would have done, with no experience of her own of love? Yet she could almost imagine staying around as a ghost if she were waiting for...Math, perhaps. Her hand stroked over his stomach, just at the edge of his trunks. She felt his muscles tense under her hands.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’d have tried to get out of the house before telling my father I refused to marry my rich, well-connected cousin. Especially if I were already pregnant.” His bathing suit was cold and wet against the side of her finger. She moved down and squirted gel onto his thighs.

  “They say there was a very strong attachment between father and daughter. She might have believed that she would convince him in time.” Math grunted softly as she began to massage the flesh just below the cuffs of his trunks. There was a bit of sandy grit now between her hand and his skin. She enjoyed the contradictory mix of creaminess and abrasiveness against her palm.

  “I wonder where he went, the lover? Do you think he was killed that night?”

  How muscled his thighs were. Hard and thick and firm. Nothing like her own skin at all. The boxer legs of his trunks weren’t very long, so there wasn’t much of his thighs covered, but she spread the gel a little under the hem, in case the sun caught him...

  “It seems unlikely that a murder could have been so completely covered up. There would have been some whisper, if only from a deathbed confession later.” Math sat up and lifted her hands from his thighs, though she hadn’t finished.

  “But he must have disappeared from the village afterwards, mustn’t he?” He grunted as if her guess was as good as any, and dusted sand from his legs. Elain screwed the lid back onto the tube and tucked it out of the sun against her bag. She didn’t want to ask, but she couldn’t prevent her mouth from opening, nor her tongue from forming the words. “What would you have done?”

  When he looked at her, it seemed as if his black eyes absorbed all the light of the sun. He smiled. “I’d have come back and got her,” he said. He spoke lightly, without emphasis, but suddenly her heart was beating as if she were the one he had come for, and he would not take no for an answer.

  Chapter 7

  “What I need now is a strong, hot shower.” Elain pulled her skirt away from her legs and gently lifted her sticky thigh from the leather seat of the ancient Land Rover. She laughed. “But I guess I’ll have to settle for a shower.”

  “It’ll be hot, won’t it?” Math glanced at her as he drove. The sun was low in the sky behind them. They had swum and eaten the delicious picnic Myfanwy had made for them, and now she had the beginnings of a tan and was full of the sensuous lassitude that a day by the sea induces. And her skin was sticky with several alternating layers of salt and sand and sunblock. She hadn’t felt so alive for years. “We do at least have constant hot water.”

  “True,” she said. “I’ll settle for a hot shower.”

  “How important is strong?” he asked with a grin.

  “Trade my eye-teeth,” Elain responded instantly, and he laughed, showing his own strong white t
eeth.

  “All right, I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve got a ‘power shower’ upstairs. You can use that if you promise not to brag about it.”

  “What’s a power shower?”

  “An electric motor that increases the pressure. The hotel water system doesn’t come directly off the mains, but down from a tank. That’s why there’s no water pressure.”

  “And you have one of those? Where?”

  “In my flat. I live on the top floor.”

  “And for the small price of my eye-teeth, I can have this incredible luxury today?”

  “The price goes up as the shower becomes a necessity. We work on the same principle as drug pushers here.”

  She laughed much more than the joke deserved. She couldn’t recall having laughed so much, or so light-heartedly, as she had been laughing today. It was because she saw a light in the darkness, perhaps. Elain marvelled at the ease of it. A man had kissed a patch of skin twice, and her heart was a soaring bird.

  * * *

  The flat was a beautiful mix of modernization with restoration. The high sloping ceilings, with reproduction decorative wooden rafters, had skylights that filled the huge rooms with light without altering the building’s silhouette. The dark, worn wooden floors were polished and gleaming under the scatter of area rugs. The huge fireplace in the sitting room had been restored to its ancient glory of massive grey stone, and the windows were the leaded glass of former times, with ivy fluttering around the edges. There was a mix of stone and plaster walls and wood panelling.

  The bathroom was a dream. Rough black stone tiled the walls and floor, including the floor of the walk-in shower, and around the basin. It looked basic and primitive, a bathroom Owen Glendower might have felt comfortable in.

  The shower pounded into her, a luxury she hadn’t had since leaving home five years ago. She stood under it without moving for five minutes, as if she had been rescued from a desert, sighing as it massaged her scalp, face, body, the soles of her feet.

  A huge full-length mirror was set into the stone wall opposite the shower. When she came out at last, it was fogged with steam, and her reflection was scarcely more than a ghost behind. She pushed a switch and a fan came on, and a heater began to glow. She dried herself, watching her reflection as the mirror cleared.

  It cleared from top and bottom first. For a moment, while the mirror was still fogged towards the centre, she could look at herself and see a perfectly normal woman. A woman a man might want to touch, to make love to: long, elegant legs, gracefully curving arms, a neat, curling patch of auburn pubic hair, slightly rounded abdomen, slender waist...long, slender neck, neatly placed head, thick, healthy auburn hair, creamy skin with a light tan showing on face and legs and arms...

  Then the fog cleared entirely. Elain’s jaw clenched, and she forced herself to watch, to see. Full, rounded breasts. One creamy white, perfect, with the dark-aureoled nipple, erect now from the shower, just where it ought to be, the other with an oblong patch of darker, coarser skin implanted across the top of the breast and around the side to just under the arm. The nipple riding too high on the curve of the breast, the erect nipple angled up, destroying the symmetry and any hope of beauty.

  “Holy Hell! What’s that?” His voice was so clear in the ears of memory it seemed to echo in this room of stone. “What’s the matter with your tits?”

  Her hand crept up now, as it had then, to shield her breast from his eyes. “It’s—it’s a skin graft. I got burned.”

  His nervous laughter rang loud against the stone. “Jeez, I’ll say you did! Jeez, Elain, you might have warned a guy!” Laughing.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, I can see why you wouldn’t want to. Gotta get some fun out of life, I guess. I guess I’m the sucker this time, eh?”

  She never looked at it; she hated seeing her deformity. But now she kept her eyes open, dry, her gaze fixed. Nothing’s changed, she told herself. A man kissed you twice, but nothing’s really changed.

  * * *

  “Shall we eat up here, away from the crowd?” Math asked, when she emerged into the sitting room ten minutes later. “I can ask Myfanwy to send up a tray.”

  She looked around the cool, shadowed room, at the purple-and-golden sunlight angling in through the leaded panes, at the flickering shadows of leaves on the floor, moving in the breeze. Dust motes danced in the light, and her body and mind were tired with the effects of the day. The last thing she felt like facing was the company of strangers. But worse still would be facing what was in Math’s eyes now. Because she knew how that look of desire would change, and she couldn’t bear to watch that. Not from Math. She didn’t ask herself why it would be worse from him than from another man, but it would.

  She would probably be leaving tomorrow. Suppose she risked it, just this once? No matter what the humiliation, she wouldn’t have to see him again....

  “No, thanks,” said Elain. “I’ll go down.”

  * * *

  “They want you to stay on awhile,” said Raymond.

  “What?” Elain’s heart thumped uncomfortably, as if she were being asked to stay in the lion’s den. “Why? He didn’t do it! It’s not possible!”

  “Look, they’re very pleased at the way you’ve managed to get on the spot, and they don’t want to give up that advantage just yet. Stay on the spot, pick up what you can, and they may have something specific for you to do later.”

  Elain swore.

  “What’s the problem, love? Painting not going well?” Raymond asked unsympathetically.

  “No,” she said. No way was she going to start explaining to Raymond that she was looking straight at another kick in the guts and knew she couldn’t stop herself walking into it if she stayed around.

  “Tough,” said Raymond. “Read a book. That’s supposed to help pass the time. And get whatever you can on tape. You never know.”

  “Never know what?”

  “Maybe he’s lying, Elain. But at least he’s talking to you. Who knows, he might tell you a different story another day. The tapestry wasn’t valued at its current worth. Get him talking about it.”

  If she were taping their conversations, she’d be less likely to let them get off the rails. Elain sighed. “He didn’t do it, you know. He’s not the type.”

  Raymond said, “Elain, my dear, this is a big client, and they are paying both you and me for every day you spend on this thing. Now, there’s a recession on. I need the money, if you don’t. Let’s not rock the boat.”

  She sighed again. “Raymond, there’s nothing in it. It’s stupid for me to stay here. They’re paying good money for nothing.”

  “Look, love, this is an insurance company. They are rolling in lard up to their snouts, and they want things to stay that way.” Rolling in lard? “I see no reason not to skim a little of that nice fat into my own trough. If you stayed there a month, they wouldn’t even notice the bill.”

  “A month?” Elain shrieked. “I’m not staying here a month!”

  “You sound like a Victorian maiden whose virtue is being threatened. Look, whatever you think, they have their suspicions and they’d rather pay us our pittance than that insurance. Now, get your little nose to the grindstone and produce something that looks as though you’re working. It does my heart good to talk about my agent in the field. Reminds me of the good old days.”

  * * *

  The countryside was more beautiful than she would ever have imagined. Deep, moss-covered hillsides covered in trees that seemed as old as the earth itself, and full of magic. High promontories and wide vistas. The sea blue as the Caribbean, the beaches wide and smooth. The houses old, nestled into the earth, surrounded by centuries-old drystone walls. Numerous lakes and rivers and streams, and green fields where black cattle and white sheep and handsome horses grazed more picturesquely than she could have dreamed. The stone circles, the rustling waterfalls, all the places that had not changed since her great-grandfather had left this land.

  Elain drov
e and walked around the countryside, dragging her easel and paints, recording the beauty she saw; and it was like a homecoming. The myth, the history, the magic—this was the land of her ancestors, and she would never be the same again. This was where she belonged.

  * * *

  “Wales does have a very wet climate,” Vinnie was saying as Elain stood looking out at the rain. She hadn’t taken her paints out for two days. “That’s why it’s so green.”

  They were sitting alone together over a late lunch, and had seen no reason to move from the table. Rosemary and Davina had gone out early in the day, covered with macs and with their lunch in a rucksack; Jeremy had gone to London to see a publisher about his poetry; Math had gone upstairs an hour ago. But Vinnie and Elain had nothing to do save share another pot of coffee and chat.

  She hadn’t been running her tape because the talk had been all about the past. The loss of a husband when you were twenty-two and pregnant, losing the child, never marrying again, and learning to run a hotel when you had been raised never to lift a finger even for your own needs. Then a violent gust of rain had drawn Elain moodily to the window. The fortress was completely obscured by rain and mist, so thick it might never clear.

  Now, as much from a desire to be doing something as anything else, she started the tape and returned to the table. “I’ve been thinking I’d like to paint the scene that was on the tapestry lost in the fire,” she said. “Especially if this weather keeps up. Do you remember it well enough to describe it to me?”

  Vinnie set down her cup. “What a very lovely idea, my dear! I’m sure Math would be delighted. He did admire the tapestry so much. Is he going to commission it from you?”

  “Oh—I haven’t mentioned it to him. I was thinking of a small canvas. Perhaps if he liked I could do something larger. But of course it would never be as valuable as the tapestry itself.”

  “Math didn’t care very much about its sterling value, I think. He intended to make it a showpiece when he restored the house.”

  “Where did he get it from?”

  “It has always been in this house, as far as we know. I found it in a store cupboard in 1956, but it wasn’t until my father died in 1970 that I took it out and had it hung. My father had never admired it the way I did.”