Thankfully, neither of them asked me why I’d been out swimming in a dress.
‘I’m going to take a shower,’ I declared, while trying desperately to compose myself. ‘Please, Jack, won’t you come back here at six pm for a drink. I’ll open the cognac. It’s the least I can do after your bravery and for saving me from drowning.’
He gave me that look again. The one that looked straight into my eyes and saw my soul.
He nodded in acknowledgement, but as he didn’t actually say yes or no to my invitation, I was left not actually knowing if he had accepted it. I took my shower and wrapped myself in a towel and lay on my bed. I felt foolish and embarrassed. I suspected that Jack knew I’d deliberately put myself in harm’s way. What must he have thought of me?
I dressed for the evening in a pale blue silk shift with a scooped neck and a low back. I wore my hair down, allowing it to cascade down my back in golden waves. I also chose to wear my pearls, a single strand with drop earrings. I hoped to achieve a look of classic understatement.
At six pm exactly I walked out onto the porch just as Jack arrived.
Grace escorted him through and then excused herself to the kitchen.
He’d brought a bottle of wine with him but he only offered it to me after he had stooped to take up the back of my hand for kissing. He wore chino-style trousers and a pale blue, short-sleeved button-down shirt with a collar. In our matching blues, I thought we looked like a couple. I think I might have blushed as his lips lingered on my fingers for far too long and then his eyes came up to meet mine. I realised then why I found this man so disturbing. His good looks had never escaped me, but my burning attraction to him had, until that moment.
He kept hold of my hand and butterflies fluttered in my stomach.
‘I trust you have fully recovered from your ordeal?’ he asked, in a tone of utmost concern.
‘Yes, thank you. I’m so grateful that you happened to be on the beach today, Jack.’
‘Me too. You must be more careful. When the tide is turning it can be very dangerous for swimming. The reef and the rocks, they create rip tides, underwater currents that can take you out to sea in no time at all.’
All this time, he never once broke eye contact.
I felt quite mesmerised until I found the fortitude to break away and turn to the drinks trolley.
‘Jack, let me offer you a drink. I took the liberty of selecting one of Ernest’s finest cognacs. I’m sure he won’t mind one bit.’
The moment I poured drinks, Grace appeared. She placed small trays of canapes on the side table.
‘Will there be anything else, madam?’
I turned to Jack. ‘Will you stay for dinner? We have plenty.’
Jack shrugged his huge shoulders and so I took that as a yes.
‘Grace, please serve dinner out here on the porch tonight. There is such a lovely breeze.’
‘Indeed, madam. I’ll set the table for two.’
‘Oh, and Grace…’ I said, catching her before she disappeared into the kitchen. ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t mention what happened today. I simply wouldn’t want Ernest to worry and I promise to be much more careful now that Jack has warned me about rip tides.’
‘Of course, I completely understand,’ Grace proffered before rushing off.
‘Can I ask you one thing, Kate, before we are taking this to bed…?’ Jack asked.
His voice was low, his broken English rhythmic on his native tongue.
I felt my breathing quicken. I doubted he was being unduly suggestive, just simply using the phrase ‘taking this to bed’ erroneously. I took one step closer to him.
‘Yes, of course. What do you want to know?’
‘Did you try to end it for yourself today?’
I hadn’t expected such a direct question from him. I took a slug of my cognac.
‘I was upset. But no, I didn’t want to die.’
‘Upset? About what?’
‘I was feeling lonely,’ I whispered.
‘I understand lonely, but I cannot understand how Ernest can leave a woman like yourself all alone for such a long time. I call it neglecting his duties to you.’
And that was when he took me in his arms and kissed me. I’d never experienced such a passion.
My body seemed to melt into his in some kind of fiery liquid state, and I heard myself moan into his mouth as he forced open my lips and kissed me deeper than I’d ever been physically kissed before. His hard body pressed up against mine and I couldn’t help myself, I was completely swept up in something I can’t explain. This wasn’t love – it was pure lust – and I was lost.
I gasped in pleasure as his mouth left mine and his tongue slid across to my ear lobe and then down my neck, leaving a trail of fire. All I could think about was taking this man to my bed and having the kind of sex that I’d never had before. When Jack slipped his hand under my dress and rammed it between my legs, he had to silence my cry by kissing me even harder on my open mouth.
‘Let’s take this to the bedroom, shall we?’ he growled into my ear.
And I practically dragged him there, shamelessly.
Today I went to see Jack on his boat. ‘I was hoping you’d come,’ he said. ‘I was hoping that last night wasn’t just a one night stand.’ I told him that’s exactly why I had come, to end it. To tell him that we should make a pact to forget what we did and to never speak of it again. ‘Please, Jack, I don’t want Ernest to ever know about us, about what we did.’
He just stared at me with those menacingly dark eyes of his until I fell into his arms.
Whenever I’m not with Jack, all I can think about is the excitement of his mouth on my mouth, the roughness of his hands on my skin, the firmness of his rippling arms and the weight of his naked body on mine and the heat and intensity of his passion when he thrusts himself inside me. I know this is not making love. This is something else entirely. I ask myself how I am capable of such basic sexual predatory behaviour? Every time I see him, I insist that we are over and this is the last time we will be together, but he doesn’t believe it and somehow neither do I.
Jack wants to give me presents and he was angry with me today because I wouldn’t accept anything from him. I mean, I’m tempted to keep his gifts because they were beautiful, but how would I explain a ruby encrusted wine goblet or a vintage emerald necklace or a bracelet dripping with diamonds to Ernest?
Jack tells me he is a treasure hunter. He said he’d made lots of money from recovering lost artefacts and from royalties received from the shipwreck treasures in the waters around this part of the Caribbean. His pirate lifestyle makes him even more exciting to me and I encourage him to tell me more of his adventures. Some evenings, on his boat and under the stars, he tells me fabulous tales about Spanish galleons laden with gold and silver and precious stones that he has already found or that he hopes to discover one day. He claims there are still thousands of these lumbering bank vaults at the bottom of the sea waiting to be discovered, and that he has a very unique and special way of finding them. All these stories of treasure and adventure on the high seas have such an aphrodisiac effect, that we end up tearing the clothes off each other.
It’s almost the end of March and so Ernest is due home soon. I know I really must end it with Jack because now I have started to feel guilt and shame over my infidelity. I’ve broken my wedding vows and just because those vows have been said in jokey haste in a tacky Elvis chapel in Vegas, doesn’t make what I had done any less of a crime or a sin. I can hardly believe what I have done.
Ernest was due home today. I waited at the harbour until it went dark but his boat never came. While I waited, I asked myself questions to which I have no real answers. I asked myself, why would I risk my marriage, my true love, my happiness and my island home, for a torrid extra-marital affair with my husband’s friend? I don’t love Jack, I know that, I guess I’m just obsessed with the way he makes me feel. I love Ernest, really, I do. But each time he goes away, part of me never rea
lly expects him to come back. Although I desperately want my husband to come home to me. I want to live my life with him. I want to sweep away this awful affair and erase it from my mind and my body, like it never happened, so I can feel whole and clean again.
Today I heard from Ernest at long last. He sent a telegram via Grand Cayman to wish me happy birthday and to explain that he is delayed in China. He says he expects to be away for another few weeks or perhaps even a month. I wondered why he was delayed and how he could be so vague. This was such an indistinct time-frame that I feared it could actually lead to him being gone forever. I felt like I was being punished and I was afraid. Grace made me a birthday cake and I spent a quiet evening alone. I told her to tell Jack I had a headache if he called because I really didn’t want to see him.
As with so many hot and passionate affairs, mine and Jack’s rampant delight in each other has finally and thankfully consumed itself. Today I went to see him to tell him we were finally over. I found him in his boatshed. He must have known that I really meant it this time because he didn’t take it very well. He went from gently coaxing me to change my mind to begging me to see him again.
‘I love you Kate and I thought you felt the same way about me?’ he pleaded.
‘Jack, you have to understand this has just been a fling. I’m married to Ernest.’
‘No. It’s been more than that, Kate. Admit it. Leave him. Live with me at Mango Cay?’
When I laughed at this preposterous suggestion, he lost his temper and began to curse me.
I had to walk away. He was being difficult and then he started being crude.
‘I know you’ll come running back to me, Kate. As soon as Ernest’s back is turned, you’ll be begging me to take you to my bed. Mark my words!’
I turned and assured him that would not be the case. ‘Jack, it is in your own interest as well as mine not to ever speak about what we had together. It’s over. I know it will be awkward. But for Ernest’s sake, we really must try to get on as just friends.’
I was walking along the beach today in a melancholy mood wondering how I was to hide my terrible guilt from my husband? Should I live with my lies or confess my betrayal and beg for his forgiveness? But then I wondered if Ernest could ever be so forgiving?
I doubted he could and really couldn’t blame him. Ernest was a gentle and generous man. Everything a lover and a husband should be.
Jack wasn’t gentle. He behaved like an animal.
I was a terrible woman. An unfaithful wife. I truly hated myself.
I sat down in the shade under a tree with a book I wasn’t reading. Instead I was watching a small sailing boat slipping away towards the horizon. Then, glancing further along the beach, I noticed a man whom I hadn’t seen before sitting at the tide line.
I stood up and shaded my eyes against the sun to take a longer look at him. I could see he had long wispy hair tied back into a ponytail, a large canvas bag by his side and he was wearing a colourful loose-flowing kaftan. He was smoking what looked like a hand-rolled cigarette. I walked over to introduce myself and to ask his name.
‘I’m John,’ he told me. He offered me a draw on his joint.
I didn’t normally smoke weed unless I was with Jack but because of my low mood I decided I would. So I sat down next to John and we smoked and watched the boat that had brought him here disappear into the horizon. Then we talked and he took a bible from his bag.
‘I’ve come here to spread the word of God,’ he told me, and he began to read from it.
By strange coincidence, he chose a passage about the need for confession and, although I’d never embraced religion in my life, I felt as though the hand of God had reached out and comforted me.
‘Psalm thirty-two,’ he read aloud. ‘David felt weak and was miserable when he did not confess, for day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.’
‘I feel weak from my sins too,’ I confessed to Minister John.
‘If you do not weaken sin then it weakens you,’ he told me. ‘But if we confess our sins, then the Lord will forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’
I nodded my head in understanding and held on to his words forgive and cleanse.
‘Kate, do you believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ?’
I decided that if it unburdened me of all my wrong doings before Ernest came home, then I did.
I nodded my head keenly again. ‘I do.’
‘Then repent to me right now. Whatever you say to me is protected under the sacred vow of confessional privilege. It is between you and me and God alone. Free yourself of sin in the past, the present and the future. Unburden your heavy heart and repent all of your sins and they will be immediately forgiven.’
I wanted to shout out ‘Hurray!’ but I whispered ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Amen’ instead.
John replied, ‘Praise be the Lord!’
I gave him my confession and I let him teach me how to meditate and to pray. I felt so happy and unburdened that I offered him the little cottage next to the church. I asked him if he would supervise the repairs to the old island church. It must have been a pretty place once but now it stood derelict on the hill. I had been told that the roof had been damaged in a hurricane and it was now unsafe because the spire was teetering on a dangerous angle.
He agreed and I said I’d send him the same army of workers that had fixed up our house.
Today John introduced himself formally to his new flock by giving a sermon on the beach below the old church. He wore a flowing white cassock made for him by Grace. The people of the island, who hadn’t received religious instruction for many years, embraced him wholeheartedly. It was so uplifting to hear the whole congregation singing ‘God Bless Our Little Island’ together in Spanglish – a name that Ernest had given to the strange local dialect.
John’s practices are a little unusual. Amongst other things, he has encouraged children to bring their pets to church, which of course would be fine in the western world where kids had kittens and dogs and hamsters, but here in the Caribbean the youngsters often had tarantula spiders or baby boas as their pets, and I know the wicked ones will bring small black scorpions and let them loose amongst the congregation for fun.
To encourage attendance, Minister John has suggested using fine port wine for his blessings and the best filtered vodka as holy water, although I got him to agree to using plain water during the baptism of infants. As he predicted, this Sunday, there was a queue for communion and a great demand for adults to earnestly profess their faith. John’s sermons too are rather unconventional as he often quotes Bob Dylan or Pink Floyd or John Lennon lyrics rather than those of the Bible. But he is charitable and honest and I can see he really cares about people.
I truly believe that John has saved me from myself, as he has stopped me from thinking about drowning myself in the sea again. He counselled me and has helped me to see that I had been lonely and depressed and anxious, to the point of almost having a nervous breakdown.
He explained that my suicide attempt and my sexual affair had been a cry for help.
He also explained that my fear of leaving the island – he called it a condition called agoraphobia – had manifested itself over the past ten years into uncharacteristic behaviour as a direct consequence of the panic attack I’d had on the plane and from the humiliating experience I’d suffered on the boat while coming over to the island. Suddenly, through his eyes and from his sympathetic understanding, I am able to see things more clearly and I’m feeling far less anxious.
With Ernest home after four long months away in Asia, I put Jack firmly out of my mind and I became myself again. I introduced Ernest to Minister John, who sang my praises and told my husband what a lucky man he was – which had me blushing with embarrassment. Ernest too agreed that we had been blessed the day that John had been guided ashore on our little island and the two of them struck up an immediate friendship.
Ernest had, as usual, brought back
with him a suitcase full of cash and a large cache of jewellery.
This time there were also Chinese silks and jars of tea and Asian trinkets. Pretty fans for both Grace and I. Folk art, sculpture, and paintings, which he said were from the Tang Dynasty. My favourite gift was a solid gold bangle in the shape of a dragon, encrusted with rubies. He also brought me a suite of emeralds, which he placed around my neck, on my wrist, and on my ears.
That evening, as we took our cocktails on the porch, he kissed me and he held me tightly. I breathed in his body heat and his cologne and realised what a fool I’d been and just how much I’d missed him. He said that he had something important to tell me that would make me very happy.
He told me that he wasn’t ever going away again and with immediate effect he was retiring from professional gambling. He was going to stay with me here on the island, and that more than anything he hoped we could start a family together at last.
His words took my breath away. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.
‘My darling Kate,’ he went on to say with such love and devotion in his eyes, ‘I’m sure the only reason you aren’t pregnant right now is because I’ve been neglecting you by not being home to make love to you every night over these past weeks and months.’
I began to cry. I told him it was with happiness but, of course, it wasn’t.
It was because I knew that I couldn’t have his children. After complications from having Maggie that option had been taken away from me. I worried that if I admitted this to Ernest, he might decide to postpone or even delay his retirement, and I really needed him to stay here with me.
So I played along and I agreed that we’d try for a baby together.
Isla put down the journal in her hand and sighed. She was shocked to the core by what she’d read but she was also touched by the total honesty of it all. In life, Kate had been the least honest that a person could be with all her lies and her secrets. She’d made no excuses for herself or for her behaviour even though she had behaved quite appallingly. After the discovery that she was Kate’s granddaughter and not her niece, the affair with Jack Fernandez was perhaps the second most shocking revelation.
Island in the Sun Page 16