Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  ‘Colin?’ she said, some while later.

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘I think I’d better warn you—I’m out of practice at this.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘So I see.’

  There was a long silence, while Colin demonstrated the truth of his last statement. Lindsay discovered that she was losing her residual control.

  ‘Colin,’ she began again, in a somewhat shaken, husky voice, as he lifted his head from between her thighs, having given her revelatory pleasure. ‘Yes?’ he replied, in a distracted way, kissing her stomach, then her breasts, and moving so that Lindsay could close her hand around his cock.

  ‘Colin—we could stop this now.’

  ‘No, dear Lindsay, we could not.’

  ‘Wait a minute. I have to ask you something. Do you like me, Colin?’

  ‘Yes. This bit of you especially. This bit I love.’

  ‘Listen, I like you too…’

  ‘There?’

  ‘Especially there. But—listen. I don’t want to stop liking you, or you me, and sometimes sex has that effect.’

  ‘If you imagine’, Colin said, with great firmness, ‘that I’m going to discuss that now, you must be mad. Now be quiet. Open your legs. Is that nice?’

  ‘It’s amazing. I—’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell. I don’t have any condoms.’

  ‘I’m on the pill.’ Lindsay kissed him. ‘I don’t have any sexually communicable diseases…’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘In that case—’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘Colin, as long as you understand—it’s so long since I’ve done this that I’m practically a virgin. I’m practically a nun…’

  ‘I find that an encouragement,’ he said, with a lift of one diabolic eyebrow. ‘Especially the nun.’

  ‘As long as you’re sure. I—’

  Colin saw there was only one thing for it. He silenced her with a kiss; shortly afterwards, and as he had suspected might be the case, she began to demonstrate a response and a proficiency unlikely to be found in a nun; and although not silent, she stopped talking as well.

  Some time later, Colin disentangled himself from her arms with the greatest reluctance. He went into the bathroom, closed the door and stared rapturously at the air. He turned on all the taps to drown the sound of his voice, and told the taps and the walls and the bath how much he loved Lindsay.

  When he had done this several times, and felt he had got it out of his system, so there was no danger of his saying it to Lindsay herself—festina lente, after all—he returned to the bedroom. As soon as he saw Lindsay lying back against the pillows, her skin rosy and her hair damp from their exertions, he felt that since he had scrambled his schedule anyway, and just performed an act he had intended not to risk attempting for at least two weeks, he might as well admit the truth.

  He was about to do so, indeed it was hard for him to look at her and not do so, when he remembered those occasions in his past when such lack of caution had served him ill.

  He began to walk about the room, and, slowly a terrible uncertainty, a terrible post-coital misery settled about him. What if Lindsay never came to reciprocate his feelings? What if she were regretting their love-making right now? He began to see that it was possible, even probable, that Lindsay would never let him make love to her again. He groaned aloud.

  ‘I need a cigarette,’ he said. ‘I need two. Four.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ Lindsay smiled and stretched. ‘You can give me one as well.’

  ‘You don’t smoke.’

  ‘I need one now. I’m feeling overcome.’

  Colin found ‘overcome’ encouraging. He lit two cigarettes and returned to the bed. Lindsay curled up like a cat in the crook of his arm. She puffed, coughed, and gave up. Colin stared hard at the wall opposite. Do not mention love, said a stern admonitory voice in his mind; don’t use that word under any circumstances; no sneaking it in; play it cool.

  ‘That wasn’t very good,’ Colin burst out. ‘In fact, it was disastrous. It was an unmitigated disaster, from beginning to end.’

  ‘Was it?’ Lindsay smiled and curled closer. ‘I thought it was wonderful. I enjoyed it. The beginning, and the middle, and the end.’

  ‘You didn’t come,’ Colin said, in the tones of one approaching the scaffold, ‘and I came too soon. Oh God, God.’

  ‘I very nearly did,’ Lindsay said, in a comfortable way. ‘I was only about two millimetres off. And I didn’t think you came too soon; I think you came at exactly the right moment. One can’t always synchronize, and it felt so good when you did.’

  ‘It makes it worse if you’re kind.’

  ‘I’m not being kind, I’m telling you the truth. And it was the first time.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Colin’s demeanour brightened. He found he did not need the cigarette; in fact, he decided, he would never need one again. He abandoned it and took Lindsay in his arms. Her eyes dazzled him. Don’t even think about saying it, said that voice in his mind.

  ‘I expect it’s me.’ Lindsay sighed. ‘I expect I was a disappointment.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘I have stretch marks on my stomach; I expect they put you off. Tom’s nearly twenty and I still have stretch marks.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There, and there, and there.’

  Lindsay indicated some faint silvery lines. Colin began to kiss them. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘I love your stretch marks. I love every single one of them…’ Be very, very careful, said the voice in his mind.

  ‘I expect my rhythms weren’t very good,’ Lindsay went on in a doleful voice. ‘I told you I was out of practice. You went into this amazing sort of tango sequence and I was still doing the waltz.’

  ‘Oh, God, God. I wasn’t giving you the right signals…’

  ‘Oh God. I wasn’t picking them up…’

  There was a small silence. Colin stopped kissing the stretch marks and looked up. Lindsay smiled; he smiled. His diabolic eyebrows rose in two quizzical peaks. Lindsay kissed them. She kissed his marvellous hair. That now familiar warmth and amusement returned to Colin’s eyes.

  ‘You’re teasing me,’ he said. ‘You’re sending me up.’

  ‘I most certainly am.’

  ‘I love you when you do that,’ Colin said. At which point the admonitory presence in his mind washed its hands of him and gave up in disgust.

  Dalliance ensued. During the dalliance, Colin suggested that in view of Lindsay’s comments on making love for the first time with a new partner, a second experiment might be wise. Lindsay agreed. After this, they slept in each other’s arms very peacefully for a while; on waking, they discovered that Colin did not have to work that day, and Lindsay, who had been going to begin her Chanel research, could put it off with no problems at all.

  They lay side by side, talking quietly and companionably. Lindsay, feeling at peace, realized that she was happier than she had been in a long, long while, and Colin experienced an absence of anxiety so unusual he decided it must be bliss. He told her of the long, strange and painful night he had spent, and she listened with a care and concern that belied the criticisms of Rowland McGuire. ‘I’m proud of you. You slew the dragon,’ she said, when Colin recounted his battle with that tape-recording machine, and Colin, who had not thought of it like that, felt comforted and hoped this was true.

  ‘So I didn’t sleep at all last night,’ he explained, some while later. ‘I had no sleep and then I walked about a thousand blocks in the rain. All I could think about was seeing you. I had to see you, and now I see why.’

  He bent across and kissed her hair, then her mouth, which opened with an already sweet familiarity under his.

  ‘Considering you hadn’t slept and I’d been so miserable,’ Lindsay said, ‘it’s astonishing the progress we’ve made, don’t you think?’

  ‘I do. One millimetre, that time?’

  ‘Less. Half a millimetre at most. Very close inde
ed.’

  ‘I thought so. We’re beginning to know each other. I think, next time…’

  ‘Mmm. So do I.’ She stretched. ‘What shall we do now? It’s afternoon. Colin, you must be longing to sleep properly…’

  ‘I’m not. I feel astonishingly awake. We could order up some food from room service. Some champagne.’

  ‘Oh, let’s. And have it in bed?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We could watch some stupid movie on television…’

  ‘We could. I love watching television in the day; it always feels debauched. So we could watch a movie, or talk, or I could just lie here and look at your eyes…’

  ‘You could tell me all about this lovely house you’ve found…’

  ‘I’ll do better than that. I’ll take you there, after Thanksgiving. We could go back to England on the same flight. I’ll have a little gap before filming starts. I could drive you down there. We could stay at an inn and sit by a fire, and I could make love to you all night…’

  Lindsay sat up. ‘Colin, did you know this was going to happen?’

  ‘No, not today. I hoped—well, in due course. You know.’

  ‘I didn’t see it coming at all. Not until just before you kissed me.’ She gave a small frown. ‘At least, I don’t think I did.’ She hesitated. ‘Colin, what I said to you before…’

  ‘Not the best timing.’

  ‘I know, I talk too much, and always at the wrong moment. I was nervous…’ She paused. ‘Colin, it can be a very bad idea to go to bed with someone you like. I learned that years ago. A friend becomes a lover; you lose the lover; you lose the friend. I wouldn’t want that to happen to us.’

  ‘It won’t happen to us.’

  ‘Can we promise each other that? We agree now: no regrets ever, or complications? Just something that happened to make us both very, very happy at the time?’

  She held out her hand to him. Colin bent over her palm, so she could not see his expression and kissed it.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s a deal.’

  Colin finally left the Pierre at around ten-thirty that night. The third experiment had fulfilled their predictions, and as they both agreed, the fourth was a conclusive triumph. Colin walked along anonymous hotel corridors, missed the elevators, circled the Pierre several times, and eventually found himself in the lobby. He walked through it, cloaked in joy. He bumped into a tall thin young woman with very short blond hair, unseasonably dressed in a crop-top, pedal pushers and ballerina slippers. Some while after she had greeted him, he realized that this was Lindsay’s assistant, Pixie, who when last seen two days previously had had shoulder-length black hair.

  He examined her, smiling. ‘Got it,’ he said finally. ‘Jean Seberg, in Breathless?’

  ‘Spot on.’ Pixie looked at him closely and raised one eyebrow. ‘You look happy,’ she said.

  ‘Pixie, I am happy. I am extraordinarily happy. Isn’t it the most wonderful world?’

  Pixie looked at his dishevelled hair, dishevelled clothes and radiant expression. Aware that she had become invisible to him, she raised the other eyebrow, smiled, and kindly showed him to the exit door. Colin left the hotel and soon afterwards discovered he was back at the Conrad, though he had no recollection of any period of transit between the two. Emily, seeing at once that he was in no condition to understand the English language, kept her news to the minimum, despite the fact that she had been longing to impart it for most of the day.

  ‘She’s in,’ she said. ‘Natasha Lawrence is in. She has been admitted to the Conrad, God help us all. I voted against, and those four darned male simpletons voted for. This we will discuss further tomorrow, Colin. Meanwhile, Thalia with an unpronounceable surname called. You are to fly out tomorrow afternoon to Montana, and continue your work with that peculiar director man there. Perhaps more importantly, and certainly more urgently, your friend Rowland McGuire has called.’ She paused. ‘He first called at ten-thirty this morning, and spoke to Frobisher in a somewhat heated way. He has called on the hour, every hour since, and if I am not mistaken, that will be him calling now. So take this call in your room, Colin, which you will find at the end of the corridor. And collect your wits, because I’ve already spoken to him, and he does not sound in the most tractable of moods.’

  Colin did as he was bade. He found his own room. He found the telephone.

  ‘Hello, Rowland,’ he said. ‘What a wonderful world.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to explain just what the fuck you think you’re doing?’ Rowland said, in tones of great politeness. ‘I’m now at home. It’s four o’clock in the morning. In front of me is a postcard from you which I received four days ago. It reads as follows: ‘New York glorious. Lindsay adorable. O brave new world. Love, Colin.’ The style didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t altogether surprised by the content, but now I’m confused. If Lindsay is so adorable, would you like to explain why you’ve been lying to her? You can thank me for not giving you away this morning, while you’re about it. Shute Farm? Owned by someone your father knows? Available at a miraculously low rent?’

  ‘All true,’ said Colin, gazing out of the windows at the moon.

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘Not on alcohol, no.’

  ‘All true? Then your interpretation of truth must be very different from mine. Maybe you’d like to explain why you failed to tell Lindsay the exact truth: to wit—that house is owned by your father and entailed to you, as it will be entailed to your sons, or—failing that—your cousin’s sons. To all intents and purposes, Colin, you own it—along with Shute itself, God alone knows how many other tenant farms, cottages and houses, plus an obscene amount of Oxfordshire. I find it surprising that you neglected to mention these belongings of yours. Were you similarly reticent about the forty thousand acres in Scotland, and the umpteen million you inherited from the Lancaster clan? Colin, it was perfectly obvious that Lindsay knows none of this, and you, for some reason I cannot comprehend, are deceiving her and manoeuvring her into becoming your tenant at a knockdown rent. You’re doing this, what’s more, at a time in her life when she’s especially vulnerable to assistance of that kind. Now I know your schemes, Colin, and I’ve seen them blow up in everyone’s faces a thousand times. So I’m warning you, if you end up harming Lindsay, or hurting her in any way…’

  ‘I love her,’ Colin said, in a beatific voice, still staring at the moon. ‘I love her. I adore her. She’s the most wonderful woman ever born.’

  This checked Rowland for rather less long than Colin had hoped.

  ‘Then this is worse than I thought,’ he said, in a brusque way. ‘You do not love her, Colin. You fall in love the way other people catch colds.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Colin, in a robust way. ‘I used to, I admit that, but I haven’t done that for at least eight years. I love her. I love her with all my heart. I worship the very ground on which she walks.’

  ‘Colin, you’ve known her less than two weeks.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ Colin replied, his wits returning, and a note of unmistakable conviction entering his voice. ‘You can love someone just like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘You meet them, you know you’re going to love them, and the love starts to grow. And if you don’t know that, Rowland, you’re a great deal stupider than I thought.’

  Rowland hesitated. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I concede that can happen. It doesn’t last.’

  ‘This is going to last. I’ve just left her now. I’ve been with her all day—and I’m so happy I can hardly speak. She’s loyal and good and candid and funny and warm…’

  ‘Colin, I wouldn’t argue with any of that. I know her too well; she’s also scatty, impetuous and naïve. She has a terrible temper, a nasty tongue and a marked inability to think. She is, without a doubt, one of the most impossible goddamned irritating women I’ve ever known…’

  ‘You see? You’re fond of her too!’ Colin proclaimed, on a note of triumph. ‘I can hear it in your voice
. She’s a paragon. And you know the best thing of all, Rowland? She likes me. She can see my faults and she still likes me. She doesn’t know about the money or Shute—she likes me for myself. For the first time in my life I have no doubts about that—in fact, if she knew about the money, I’m afraid she might like me less. So I want her to know me, really know me, before she finds out. I want her to see Shute for the first time, and not know it’s mine, so she can just love it for itself, and then I want her to marry me. I’m going to marry her, Rowland, and if you come between her and me, I’ll fucking well kill you, because she is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Apart from you, she’s the one good thing, the one incontestably good thing that has happened to me since Edward died.’

  There was a long silence then. In London, knowing Colin would never mention his brother unless he passionately meant what he said, Rowland bowed his head in his hands. In New York, Colin thought of Lindsay in his arms and felt blessed.

  ‘I’m going to marry her, Rowland, and I’m going to marry her within six months,’ he continued, in a quieter voice. ‘I’m going to ask her the very second I think she might accept, and I damn near asked her an hour ago—so you can draw your own conclusions from that.’

  ‘In that case,’ Rowland said, after a pained hesitation, ‘I shall say nothing to Lindsay about Shute. I hope you know you can rely on that. But I also hope you know what you’re doing, because Lindsay would be very easy indeed to hurt—’

  ‘As you should know,’ replied Colin, in a flash, ‘considering how you hurt her today. You reduced her to tears—’

  ‘I did what?’

  ‘You made her cry, and you’re not going to do it again. She was in an utterly miserable state—and I’m not surprised. You destroy every bit of confidence she has. She’s trying to make a new start in life, and what do you do? You roll in like a fucking Centurion tank, and you tell her she’s naïve and childish, and only a fool would have signed that book contract. Not everyone has your fucking unshakeable self-confidence, Rowland. Why don’t you think?’