Pact without desire

by Jane Arbor

  She could still remember how hotly her colour had flooded at his analytical scrutiny of her carelessly tied hair, the informality of the kaftan, down to her bare feet in mules. (Had she been aware of his magnetism even then?) He said, 'Physically? I'll have to remember—Yes, I told him you were young, twenty perhaps, not much more; that you had this centre parting to your hair held back with combs; that you were healthily honey-coloured with an upstage profile—which was about all you kept turned to me—that you were medium tall and walked with a swing from your hips, as all women should.' He had paused. 'I could have added that, on a cursory judgment, you seemed to curve in all the right places, but it wasn't necessary—Iden recognised you and was suitably embarrassed.'

  'How do you mean—"suitably"?' she had demanded.

  'Seeing that he was embarrassed, I made him tell me why, and got the story of his break with you before I let him go.'

  'And got my name and address too. As if it were

  any business of yours I '

  'Call it interest, rather. Haven't you ever wanted to add another scene to a real-life one you've witnessed? There was a pretty girl, weeping at a wedding to which she hadn't been invited—'

  'I wasn't crying! '

  'Near enough to it that you had to leave the church, lest it should be noticed. I could have followed you, of course. But what would you have thought of me if I had?'

  'That, because I'd let you speak to me in church, you thought I was easy game for a pick-up. But where's the difference in your going to Cliff? You've followed me up just the same! '

  'Added the missing scene, let's say. Not noticeably to Iden's credit, but

  'Nor to yours, Mr Rede Forrest, if I may say so,' Sara remembered having cut in. 'I can't believe Cliff wouldn't have told you he was engaged to a girl back here when you began to push him into-marrying Isabel Carbery. Well, didn't he?'

  'He called it a minor entanglement and made nothing of it, and as I was concerned to have him married, I didn't press the point. Temasik prefers married men on its Far East staff.'

  'As Cliff would have been—to me—if you'd left him alone. But why?'

  Rede Forrest had contemplated a corner of the ceiling above her head. 'The Malaysian women are very beautiful. Seductive too, to a degree, and marriage makes for a certain stability,' he remarked.

  ' Oh—I ' Again she knew she had blushed. 'You're saying you don't want your staff tempted to take mistresses. Are you married?' she had shot at him.

  'Not yet. I'm the exception that has proved the rule,' he had said, and then, 'Isn't it time you rewarded my concern by giving me your version of your broken engagement?'

  'You know it all. You had it from Cliff.'

  'But only a sneak view of your reaction—of your weeping for him in church.'

  She had turned on him then. 'Just how obtuse can you get?' she had demanded of him. 'I've told you I wasn't crying for love of Cliff. It was from anger with him, and scorn at myself for having believed in him, and hatred for—for anyone who'd encouraged him to think I didn't matter

  'Meaning me, I suppose?'

  'If you like. If the cap fits.' She had raged on, 'And what's more, I was so angry then and since that I've been ready to vow I'd marry the first man who asked me, just to show him. To show him! ' She had concluded wildly, oblivious of her hearer until he had said quietly, 'And supposing some "first man" held you to that?'

  She had laughed bitterly. 'No problem. Men have an instinct about jilts and they steer clear.'

  'So that, in asking you to marry me, I am your "first man"?'

  She had stared at him, open-mouthed. 'How dare you make a mean joke like that? You must know I wasn't serious! '

  'And I am. You vowed it, you said, and I'm justified in taking you at your word. You want to "show" Iden, you claim, and I'm affording you the chance to do just that.'

  'Which I'd have to be mad to accept!'

  'Not so mad that you aren't intrigued by my asking. And you realise, don't you, that in Singapore, as my wife, and with Iden already there, you'd be in the only position available to you just now to carry out your threat? Stay in England, and you have none, and where's the point of thumbing a long nose at your victim if he isn't there to suffer your doing it?'

  Sara had known she shouldn't have listened, but later she knew that the insinuation of that question had been the turning point of her resolve. From having no doubt that she was adamant against his assumption that she would accept his offer of marriage from so low a motive, she had come round to letting him- persuade her that to show herself to Cliff as the proud survivor of his rejection of her was good reason enough to accept him. Tempted and a little dizzy, she had heard herself asking at last,

  'You—you'd marry me in cold blood—just like that?'

  He had agreed tersely, 'Just like that. But don't think me merely quixotic. I find myself with a use for marriage now.'

  'To—to just anyone?'

  'I'm offering it to someone with enough motive

  of her own for accepting—a vengeance she needs to get out of her system,' he had said, and it had been too late for the sanity of refusing him when he slid down her finger the ring—a single diamond in a chased gold setting—which his assurance had brought with him. She had allowed him to commit her. She had committed herself.

  Beyond the drawn blinds the sky had darkened. Sara hadn't noticed its happening and couldn't understand why, until a glance at her watch showed that more than an hour had also passed without her knowing it. That meant that, rigidly awake as she had felt, she must have fallen asleep after all. She had not unpacked, nor done anything to make herself presentable to Rede when he came home. But she had only just swung her legs off the bed when she saw the door from his room opening very quietly, and she lay back quickly, pulling up the silk coverlet again.

  Rede came in and over to the bed. His hair was brushed back wetly, he was newly shaven and he wore only a knee-length robe. She had never before seen him not fully clothed; he had never yet seen her in only a slip, and the implications of this 'first time' sent a constriction chokingly into her throat.

  She swallowed upon it. 'I

  His voice clashed with hers. 'You were asleep when I came in earlier. I'm sorry I couldn't meet you, but I was too tied up. Lim would have ex-

  plained?' He looked about the room. 'You got my flowers?'

  'Yes. I left them downstairs for your man to arrange. They were lovely—thank you. I hadn't thought I was tired enough to sleep. Is it always as dark as this by seven o'clock?' (Talking for the sake of postponing having to say or to listen to anything more intimate, she thought.)

  Rede said, 'It isn't really dark. It's the heat which builds up storm conditions by early evening at this time of year. You'll learn to be prepared for rain before nightfall on a good many days.' He sat down easily on the bed, and she drew aside her feet to make room for him. He half-turned to face her; one hand on the far side of her knees supported him, the fingers of the other plucked at the hem of the coverlet, turning it slightly back. 'You really weren't tired by the journey?' he asked.

  'Not by it. During it, yes. There were so many comings and goings and interruptions. I'm sure they were all meant for my comfort, but I'd have given a lot to be left more alone,' she said.

  He did not reply to that. She watched the veins start on the back of his hand -at its increased pressure on the yielding bed until, knowing his eyes were intently upon her, she raised her own to meet his, darkly searching her face while his free hand at her back lifted her towards him. He said, 'Well— wife?' And then, 'Marriage-wise, we're behind on time, aren't we? The present will have to catch

  Marriage-wise! With the phrase he had answered the question she had posed to herself at Bahrain and before and since. He meant to take her, as a man would take his bride for love on their wedding-night; to take her—if not now, sooner or later—in a travesty of a physical union sweet with fulfilment, in the name of the loveless bargain he had struck with her—her surrend
er to him implicit in its terms.

  Fair was fair, was no doubt how he saw it. In return for her as yet undefined use to him—his name, his protection, his support for her already almost forgotten revenge on Cliff—he probably saw the scales of the transaction well weighted in her favour and meant to even things up by demanding and taking as of right the male prerogatives which marriage gave him.

  She shrank within his hold, feeling herself almost physically dwindle in contrast with the overplus of his strength and size. If he tried to force her, she couldn't fight him. But even short of compulsion, how could she endure the false caresses to which he would expect response; how yield to him without shuddering under a touch and an intimacy which he couldn't pretend meant any more to him than to her?

  It was going to be now, she realised, when he shifted position to lie beside her, to align his body to the length of hers and to seek her lips.

  Surprisingly, his kisses there were gentle as they were exploratory on throat and eyelids and temples,

  and though she could not answer kiss for kiss as if he were her lover, she felt her resistance lessen. Until, when he slipped a finger beneath the ribbon of each strap of her slip, baring her shoulders to the hollow of her breast, she thought in sudden revulsion, He is expert at this. He knows all the moves. How many shy, reluctant women before me has he schooled in this way, step by gentle step, towards the compliance he wants?—and she thrust away from him, panting and biting her lips.

  To judge by his frown, he neither accepted his rejection nor understood it. He said, 'You knew I should come to you. You were waiting.'

  She shook her head. 'No. I meant to unpack and bath and change, but I just lay down for a little while and fell asleep.'

  'With no plans for seeing me until you were clothed and in your right mind?'

  'You hadn't met me at the airport. You weren't here. I didn't know—I didn't expect—'

  '—That I'd want to rectify the omissions of our wedding-day as soon as I could? Come, you're no green girl; you were on the point of marrying Iden, and not without recognising the graces and favours to be given and taken in marriage, I should hope?'

  'But ours wasn't an ordinary marriage. It was It's called "of convenience",' she objected.

  'And, taking the world as a whole, very little less common than the other kind, I'd say. We Westerners are in the minority in demanding romance. And you surely don't suggest that all the arranged

  marriages of civilisation and of history are and have been strictly celibate?'

  She sighed emptily. 'I don't know. I only know about ours—that neither of us claimed it was for love, and

  Rede cut in, 'Not "and". "But". Agreed that neither of us claimed it was for love, but for all that it's going to be marriage in every other known sense of the word, and so'—his fingers bit deeply into the soft flesh of her arm—'are you a willing partner to its consummation or not?'

  Sara cried out in panic, 'You can't force me! It would be—'

  He put a forefinger to her closed lips. 'Don't say it,' he admonished. 'It's an ugly word, and it needn't apply if ' He broke off and drew her close again, holding her with one arm while his other hand wandered in search of warmth and softness and the signs of a quivering response.

  At first she lay rigidly, without protest or welcome to him. But slowly her senses awoke to a physical pleasure at his gentle, undemanding touch; pleasure as sweet as the stroking of a kitten's silky head or her nostrils taking the fragrance of a rose. The pleasure lasted, and from being at attention at her sides, her arms went round him, feeling the hardness of the muscles there and the ripple of tanned skin on his shoulder-blades. And then, somehow, the pleasure changed to an urgency of need, and she came alive in the arms of the body which

  had now abandoned gentleness for mastery, titillation for possession.

  She was drowning ... she was being drawn towards the sun of his passion ... she was crumbling, crumbling away in utter surrender and into a dreaminess of content when at last his savage claiming of her was over.

  She lay at his side for a long time after she could tell from his even breathing that he had fallen asleep. Then she slipped from the bed, and when she came back from her bathroom he had still not waked. She stood looking at him, vulnerable in sleep, her feelings a conflict between a gratitude for his pleasuring of her and a resentment of his assurance that their union was a foregone conclusion in a marriage which had pretended to no love or tenderness on either side.

  Again she questioned his motives in marrying her so casually. He had claimed to be above his Company's ruling on marriage, so why had he fallen into line now? And even though he had, he could have complied with the letter of the law by making her mistress of his house without asking any deeper relationship of her. But that, she supposed, had to be his need and power of dominance which she had sensed very early and which had her usually in thrall to his will. Which was strange. She had never regarded herself as biddable, but biddable she had been to him so far, even in a surrender

  which she knew he would ask of her again as his right.

  Very quietly she had taken a change of clothes and her make-up case from her luggage, and with her back to the bed at her dressing-table she did not realise Rede had wakened until he was standing behind her, his hands on her shoulders, looking at her reflection in the dresssing-mirror. As their eyes met, she was trembling a little. But his question was practical, matter-of-fact. 'Would you prefer to dine at home, or to go out?' he asked.

  She stopped trembling. 'I think your housekeeper expected you in to dinner,' she said.

  He shrugged. 'She's used to my changing my mind if I care to, and you'd probably like to have your first night on the town. Here you can eat Chinese, Indian, European, Indonesian—there are nearly as many cuisines as there are days of the week. I suggest we eat Thai seafood at the Lotus Room. I'll ring for a table for nine o'clock,' he said, and when he had used the telephone on the bedside table, he went back to his own room.

  Sara thought, If he'd kissed me, or said something kind or even laughed with me, I'd have been able to hope it was going to be all right. But after that--to discuss nothing but where to take me to dinner, I might be nothing but a call-girl he'd engaged for the evening! The phrase Bed and Board occurred to her. That was what she had bought with her agreement to marry him—Bed and Board. She had forgotten completely the temptation with

  which he had wooed her—the chance to triumph over Cliff, and very soon after she had accepted Rede, it hadn't been very important, nor counted enough for her to recall it now.

  What did matter now was the unknowable future with Rede—strangers still, both of them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BEFORE she had decided what to wear for the evening Rede came back into her room and she consulted him.

  He suggested a gold lame gown, as narrow as a tube from neck to ankle, with a high mandarin collar and an encrusting of beadwork giving epaulette width to the shoulders, which he had chosen for her himself in an Indian shop off Bond Street.

  Sara demurred, 'For a restaurant meal?'

  'For the Lotus Room it won't be too dressy,' he said. `And on our first night out you have to do me credit.'

  She did her best, using more elaborate make-up than she would have chosen in England, adding drop earrings and putting up her hair in a looped style drawn into a heavy knot. Standing before the mirror she hardly knew herself; fair though she was, she had gone exotic in a big way !

  There was a surprise in store when she went down

  to meet Rede in the hall, where he helped her into her wrap, saying, 'I thought we wouldn't take the car. I sent Chakan to fetch a trishaw instead and he has it at the door. You'll never have ridden in one, I daresay?'

  They went out into the silken warmth of a night from which all the storm threat had passed, leaving the navy blue sky pricked by a dazzle of stars. Chakan stood by the tricycle carriage, ready to help her into it; the rider-driver balanced impassively on his saddle, one foot on
the ground, moving off smoothly when Rede joined her, sitting thigh to thigh with her on the made-for-two seat.

  'It's today's version of the rickshaw,' Rede explained. 'The rickshaw man used to run in the shafts; his grandson takes it easy on a saddle.'

  'Easy work—toting two adults along?' Sara questioned.

  'Oh, they're well geared and they see that they're well paid, and for the passengers, with the hood up, the thing can be as intimate and romantic as a hansom cab. Or so the tourists seem to find them. The trishaw stands are always busy,' he said carelessly.

  The Lotus Room, he told her when they reached it, was an old manor house turned restaurant. It served Thai food in Thai fashion on low candlelit tables, decorated with bowls of floating water-lilies and orchids; the patron's choice of dishes was arranged crescent-wise around his place, and he helped himself from them in turn, taking his soup last.

  Later in the evening there would be a floor-show of dancing by the girls and men of one of the Eastern Culture schools of the city.

  Sara asked Rede to order for her and she savoured all her dishes with interest when they came, deciding on a snap judgment that, of her prawns and noodles and spiced oysters and vegetarian curry, the accompanying sauces were all. Sweet or piquant or lemon-fresh, they made everything attractive, different, mouth-watering to a degree. She was acutely aware of Rede's watchful eye upon her, amused and, she hoped, gratified by her enthusiasm for everything strange. Though she drank only the light white wine he had ordered, Wimbledon and cold rain and crowded Tube trains seemed very, far away, in another world.

  The candles cast dark shadows; one's neighbours at the next nearest table weren't to be seen very clearly and people walking about the room were largely in silhouette. Which was probably why Sara did not realise what was happening until Rede stood, the inclination of his head acknowledging a man and a woman who had approached their table.

  She looked up—and froze. The man was Cliff in a tropical dinner-suit, the woman in a flowered silk gown Sara had last seen at an altar with him. She was russet-haired with a creamy skin; her arm was tucked possessively into Cliff's; she was looking at Sara with interest but with none of the blank surprise on his face. He was staring at Sara as Robin-