by Anne Weale
‘Because you are not a lemming. You have too much intelligence to try something merely because other people are doing it. You wouldn’t try cocaine, would you?’
‘That’s not a fair comparison. Coke can ruin people’s lives.’
‘So can sex,’ he said grimly.
‘Oh, Van...loosen up. That’s a one-night stand with a stranger... completely different from a relationship with someone you know and trust. If you weren’t fond of me, why did you spend the earth on these glorious earrings...why did you kiss me?’
He looked down at her. ‘I’ve been giving you birthday presents since you were eleven...of course I’m fond of you. The kiss was a mistake...an impulse I should have controlled.’
When she couldn’t conceal the pain this brusque statement caused her, his expression became exasperated. ‘For God’s sake, Anny, you know basic biology. I spelt all this out for you years ago, on the trip to Minorca when that Spanish boy made a pass. Do you think those same urges aren’t felt by adult males? You know better than that. Any man without a woman in his life feels...keyed up sometimes.’
His black eyebrows drew together in a forbidding scowl. ‘I guess most of the men you’ve been dancing with tonight, including some of the husbands, would have felt the same impulse if you’d been standing close with no one else around. It’s almost a standard male reflex. We all get turned on by a pretty woman. Most of the time we tell ourselves, “Down, boy!” This time, foolishly, I didn’t.’
She didn’t like what she was hearing, and she wasn’t convinced it was true.
Knowing she was being mulish, but unable to help herself, she said in a challenging tone, ‘If you turn me on and I turn you on, why can’t we do something about it?’
For a moment his exasperation flared into visible anger. His mouth became a hard line, his eyes looked so fierce that, had it been anyone else, she would have instinctively stepped back. Even with him she flinched from the glimpse of the furious reaction her provocative answer had aroused.
It was only a glimpse. Almost at once he masked it, saying coldly, ‘Because being turned on isn’t enough. People who run their lives on that basis never amount to much. Making love was meant to be more important than a roll in the hay.’
Perhaps he could see he was hurting her. His expression softened a little. ‘Trust me, Anny. That’s not a good route for anyone...man or woman. What happened was my fault and I’m sorry about it. It doesn’t have to change things. Right now the most important thing for both of us is our work. I have to get Project X off the ground and you have to get your career in orbit.’
It was, she realised, an oblique ultimation. She wasn’t going to get anywhere by arguing with him. If she persisted, it would only make matters worse.
What was behind his attitude she wasn’t sure. Later, unable to sleep, she had a horrible feeling that the reason he had been ‘keyed up’, as he put it, was because of Emily’s presence. Perhaps he was holding off from kissing her until he had more to offer her and, somehow, Anny’s thank-you kiss had triggered the desire he felt for Emily.
This theory had a number of holes in it but it was the only one she could come up with. Anyway, whatever lay behind the humiliating set-down on the dance floor, it was plain that her dearest dreams were not about to be realised yet, if ever.
The rest of her time in America was a depressing anticlimax. Van made sure they were never alone together. Instead of driving her back to New York, he arranged for her to fly there on the shuttle from Hartford. Even on the short drive to that airport, they had Emily with them. She was staying on at the country club for another couple of days. The thought of what might happen between them in those two days made Anny’s return to Paris the opposite extreme from the eager anticipation of the outward journey.
Van didn’t come to Paris again for the rest of that year. He was never at Orengo when she went to see Bart. All her carefully thought out schemes to undermine his determination not to follow through came to nothing because he was never available for her to put them into practice.
His forecast that the publication of her profile of Aristide might lead to bigger things proved correct. Two French publishers approached her about writing a fulllength biography and very soon she had an agent, a contract and an editor to advise her. Writing the book while keeping her day job meant cutting out almost all social life, but she continued to do the hospital-visiting which had replaced keeping an eye on the old man as her small contribution to the general good. Whenever she could spare an hour or two, she went to a children’s hospital to read to and play with those who, for various reasons, had no one else to come and see them.
As Julie and Fran were going home for Christmas, and Anny wasn’t able to get away for long, she persuaded Bart to come to Paris. Van, who was keeping in touch by E-mail, telephoned on Christmas Day. He was spending the holiday with Kate who was expecting a baby.
One comfort was that, when Anny asked if Emily was with them, he said, ‘She always spends Christmas with James and Summer.’
When the all too brief call was over, Anny thought about that and decided that if Emily’s attitude to Van was anything like her own, she would surely have fixed for him to join her relations. Or, if Van was mad about her, he would have made sure he was invited.
After Bart had returned to the Riviera, Anny caught a bad cold which, combined with some atrocious weather, made her long for the sunnier south. She had recovered from the cold but was still feeling under par when one of the children at the hospital died. He was a little boy of seven, of whom she’d become very fond. At the end there was nothing the doctors could do for him except take away the pain. Anny sat by his bed, holding his bony little hand, while his life flickered out.
She managed not to break down there and then, but when she got back to the apartment, which was empty because the other two were still away, she didn’t have to control herself. She flung herself down on her bed and cried, mostly from grief for Pascal’s short and lonely life—he had lost both parents as a baby and been raised by unloving relatives—and a little for her own aching longing to love and be loved.
The tears were drying on her cheeks and she was bracing herself to make the effort to get up and do something useful when the door bell buzzed. She blotted her eyes with a tissue and, not caring what she looked like, went to the door and looked through the little peep-hole Fran’s boyfriend had insisted on putting in for them.
What she saw made her heart almost stop beating. Standing outside was Van. For a moment she thought about rushing to the bathroom to wash her face. Then he pressed the buzzer again and she was torn between trying to think of a reason why she couldn’t let him in immediately and being afraid that if she didn’t call out something he might think she was out and go away.
In the end she unfastened the chain and let him in. What did it matter if she wasn’t looking her best? He was here. Nothing else was important.
‘Why didn’t you say you were coming?’ she demanded, her voice croaky from crying.
He grinned. ‘It wasn’t a planned trip. I came on an impulse...’ He noticed the state of her face. ‘Hey, what’s the matter? It’s not Bart, is it? He isn’t sick?’
‘No, no...Bart’s fine...or was when he left here. It’s just something sad that has happened.’
‘Tell me.’ Van dumped his suitcase and his laptop case. He put his hands on her shoulders, looking down with such kindly concern that all her emotions bubbled up to the surface.
‘Oh, Van...I’m so glad to see you...’ she blurted shakily. Her face crumpling, she flung herself against his chest and, as he put his arms round her, burst into tears again.
What happened then was different from any of her imaginings. It began with Van hugging and comforting her, then drying her tears with his handkerchief before giving her a brotherly kiss on the forehead and then suddenly, with a deep groan, starting to kiss her the way he had once before.
From then on it was better than her most vivid daydreams. Sh
e kissed him back. His kisses became more passionate. He crushed her to him. She melted in willing surrender. Then he picked her up and carried her to the living-room sofa where they subsided together and went on rapturously kissing as if breathing had suddenly stopped being the way to stay alive and non-stop kisses were now the key to survival.
Eventually Van let her go, but only to strip off the raincoat he was wearing over his sweater and shirt. While he was at it he took the sweater off too. The timeclock had started the apartment’s central heating and it was no longer chilly as it had been when she came home.
After they resumed their embrace it wasn’t long before he began unbuttoning Anny’s fine wool shirt. As he slipped a warm hand inside it, she knew with joyous relief that there was no going back now. They had gone beyond the point of no return and clearly he wanted to go on as much as she did.
They spent the night in her bed, not doing a great deal of sleeping.
Some time in the small hours, when she was lying with her head on his shoulder, he said quietly, ‘I didn’t mean this to happen until you were older. If you hadn’t been crying when I got here, I’d have gone on trying to hold out...at least for another year. But once you were in my arms...once I’d kissed you...it was impossible. It’s always been difficult...trying to act like a brother. Since the night of Kate’s wedding, it’s been worse. I kept remembering the way you felt in my arms. Staying away from you was a kind of slow torture.’
‘But it’s over now...we’re together,’ she murmured, snuggling closer.
After a pause, he said, ‘I still wish you weren’t so young.’
‘Time will cure that, as Bart says. All that matters to me is that now I can tell you I love you instead of keeping it secret.’
In the morning, waking up first, Anny lay propped on one elbow, looking with pleasure and gratitude at her first and forever lover. She couldn’t believe that anyone but Van could have taken a virgin and made her into a woman with such tenderness and understanding of what her body needed to carry it through that transition with a minimum of discomfort and the maximum sensual delight.
She thought the nicest way to wake him was by making love to him in the way described in the French manual of love Bart had given her long ago.
Van didn’t wake up at once but he smiled in his sleep and his body responded to her touch even while his mind was dormant. He came awake all at once and saw her caressing him.
‘Oh, God...I thought I was dreaming...but it’s really happening.’
He reached out with eager hands. Moments later it was she who was lying on her back with him bending over her, kissing her with a passion that was like a raging inferno, consuming them both.
He had come to celebrate New Year with her. Until Fran and Julie came back he stayed in the apartment. The day they were due to return, he announced he had found a top-floor studio flat in the Marais where they could set up home together.
‘Distance is dead,’ he told her, when she thought he ,might have to commute between Paris and America.
All through January it seemed to Anny amazing that, if most people were making love on a regular basis, they weren’t all walking around smiling like Cheshire cats. She felt as if she were in heaven because, at the end of the day, Van would be waiting to make love to her before taking her out to dinner in one of the neighbourhood restaurants.
For the time being her book was on hold. She hadn’t told him about it in case he insisted she worked on it instead of spending every free moment with him.
That he hadn’t asked her to marry him didn’t bother her. Marriage was only important if you wanted to have babies. As she didn’t plan to do that until she was around thirty and had scaled all the peaks on her career-plan, marriage was for later, when they had both achieved what they wanted to do in their public lives.
Anny was naked except for a narrow gold bangle on her right wrist which she never took off. The outside had a simple design and the inside was engraved with their initials and the date of their first night together. Van had given it to her on her twentieth birthday. Now it was May, early summer, and they were relaxing in the gently swirling warm water of the vast pale green oval Jacuzzi, large enough for four or five people to wallow in it.
It was in their bathroom in a country hotel not far from the Chateau de Courson, thirty-five kilometres south of Paris. The château was the scene of an event called the Journées des Plantes which drew gardening enthusiasts from all over France and beyond.
Anny had been assigned to write a feature about it and Van had come with her because he was interested in the grounds of the château. They had been reclaimed from a state of considerable neglect twenty years earlier and were now an economic asset rather than a drain on the estate.
At the moment he had his eyes closed and she guessed he had decided to switch off for a few moments. It was something he did most days, preferably by stretching out on the floor, relaxing every part of his body and emptying his mind of all thought. If necessary he could do it almost anywhere. She had taken to doing it too, and found it incredibly refreshing and invigorating when the pace of life was hectic, calling for maximum energy.
She smiled at his withdrawn expression, admiring the muscular lines of his shoulders as he lay with his arms stretched out sideways along the rim of the bath.
When she judged it wouldn’t be long before his eyes opened, she left her side of the bath, took a deep breath and submerged. There being no soap in the water yet, she could open her eyes and see him looking like a Michelangelo sculpture of an athlete at rest.
Between his long, outstretched legs his body was quiescent, but it wouldn’t be in a few minutes’ time, she thought, smiling to herself.
She moved towards him, her hands brushing lightly upwards from his knees to his hips. Almost instantly she felt his thigh muscles tighten, his mind return to alertness. Her lungs developed by years of underwater swimming, she had plenty of breath to spare. She put her lips to his skin, just above his navel, and trailed her mouth slowly upwards, pressing herself ever closer, feeling him tense. By the time she reached the top of his breast bone, his hands were gliding down her back and she could feel the expected response.
She drew back enough to look at him, knowing the softness of her breasts against him did the same thing for him as the hard wall of his chest did for her.
Van had the look in his eyes which always sent tremors through her and probably always would even when they had been together for years and years.
They kissed with the slow, sensuous pleasure of lovers who had explored every part of each other and, each time, become more accomplished in prolonging their mutual delight
Without taking his mouth from hers, Van suddenly tightened his embrace and stood up, bringing her with him. He had to break off the kiss to reach for one of the enormous his and hers bath sheets the hotel provided. Lifting her onto the bathmat, he wrapped the big towel around her and reached for another for himself. While the bath sheet was mopping up most of the water on her body, Anny grabbed a smaller towel and, with impatient haste, rough-dried her hair. Then she discarded both towels and ran for the bedroom, with Van in hot pursuit
Like boisterous children, they took a flying leap onto the king-size bed. As it gave under their weight, they were already reaching for each other. There was the usual brief playful tussle for supremacy which Van always won, unless he was in the mood to allow her to overpower him. This time it ended with Anny on her back, a willing prisoner with her captor looming over her, ready to take her but holding himself in check in order to prolong the ecstasy.
A long time later Anny gave a luxurious sigh. She loved this moment when, all passion spent, they lay quietly together, their heartbeats slowing down to normal, their bloodstreams ceasing to rush like white-water rapids, their breath no longer sounding like sprinters nearing the winning tape. If there was such a place as heaven, surely this must be what it was like. Somewhere totally carefree and peaceful where everyone had this wonderful sense o
f well-being, but all the time instead of, as here, on earth, only after making love and then only after making love to the person who held your heart. She couldn’t believe that people who made love casually, without their hearts being involved, could experience the same deep satisfaction that heart-and-soul lovers did.
Lying with her arms round Van’s neck, gazing into his blue eyes, so close that she could see her own reflection in his pupils, she said softly, ‘I love you.’
He kissed her softly on the forehead before lifting himself on his forearms and easing his body away.
But when they had separated and Anny had turned on her side, Van curled himself round behind her and kissed the back of her neck, one of his hands enclosing one of her breasts as gently as if he were cradling a dove in his palm.
As she drifted into a light doze, she wondered why other people had so many problems with their love lives. The agony columns were full of cries for help from people who seemed unable to communicate with those supposedly closest to them. Between Van and herself there were no taboos, no inhibitions, no hang-ups.
At long last it had come right for them and she could see no reason why it shouldn’t stay like this for ever.
That it might not always be plain sailing was signalled by the first major conflict between her job and their social life. In September Van, who was good at planning exciting surprises and giving her unexpected presents, most of them inexpensive but chosen with touching thoughtfulness, had arranged a weekend in Normandy, renowned for its superlative cuisine, to celebrate his thirtieth birthday. At the last moment Anny was obliged to stand in for a colleague who fell sick on the eve of covering a conference for leading businesswomen.
It was a chance for her to show she could handle a more complex assignment than any she’d dealt with before. But Van, although he didn’t rage or sulk, was irritated.