by Неизвестный
It was a room embedded in the very centre of the house, and after Paul had closed the door and pushed the bolt into place, he pulled a cord and set in motion a ceiling fan with teakwood blades. Merlin smelled the dust as the blades began to rotate, and she smiled admiringly at Paul’s capability, which even his blindness couldn’t totally impair.
‘Well, what are you thinking?’ he asked.
‘That’s it’s a vast relief, mynheer, to have some of the noise shut out.
‘The fan squeaks a little, but we need the ventilation, and we’ll pretend it’s mice. You aren’t afraid of mice, are you?’
‘No, as a matter of fact I used to keep white ones when I was a child.’
‘Ah, childhood, how many dreams away for both of us! Is there a table in here, otherwise I’ll fetch one.’
Merlin glanced around and saw a floor-table tucked away in a corner of the room, of shining hardwood with a trim of pearly shell. ‘There’s one of those low oriental tables, and we’ll have to sit on the floor to eat from it.’
‘Do you mind doing that?’
‘Not at all. The chairs have squab cushions, so we can use those to make ourselves comfortable.’
‘Excellent. Almost all the comforts of home.’
‘The walls are completely tiled, mynheer. Did you know?’
‘Ja, I went round feeling them and that’s why I decided we would take shelter in this little lair. Come, let us have coffee and food! It smells good.’
‘There’s only cold meat, I’m afraid, but the sweet potatoes are hot and there’s a salad. I’ll arrange the table and cushions and wait on you.
‘Like a geisha?’
‘Wh-what makes you say that?’
He seemed to find her face with his blind eyes and she saw a faint smile twitch his lips. ‘You are still wearing your kimono?’
‘No—I have on a long skirt.’
‘Of silk, eh? I can hear it as you move about.’
‘Yes—defiance of the storm gods.’ She could feel herself blushing. ‘A little foolish, no doubt, and not very practical, but I couldn’t resist wearing something that I might not get the chance to wear again.’
‘You mean to go in style, eh? You should have told me you meant to dress up, then I’d have worn something a little smarter.”
‘You look fine,’ she said, seeing the dust across his forehead, his sweat-tousled hair, the rip in his trousers. He shattered her, the way he looked ... a blind man who had done all he could to make this house as secure as possible from the rage of the storm. She wanted to approach him, to wrap her arms around him and kiss his dirty face ... let her lips be free with all the love words that clamoured inside her to be expressed.
She fetched the table from the alcove, gathered up the cushions and arranged them at either side of a short-legged table. She guided Paul to his seat and as he took a lounging position he seemed to lean a little towards her and she saw the tensing of his nostrils. He had caught the fragrance of her perfume and as she set the plates and served the food she waited for him to make a sardonic remark. Something to the effect that she not only rustled around like a geisha but was all scented up like one.
‘Trimahkisih,’ he murmured, as she laid a napkin across his knees and guided his hand to the level of the table.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she just had to say something, ‘that I’m dressed up and scented up like—like some tart. I don’t know what got into me! You must think I’ve taken leave of my senses?’
‘I truly don’t think anything of the sort.’ he assured her, taking a spare-rib into his fingers and holding it poised for a bite. ‘It strikes me as perfectly natural that a woman should find some opportunity to wear a dress she has only recently bought. You are wearing eastern silk, for it has an almost sensual sound as it moves against the skin of a woman, and so I realise that you have been shopping in the kampong. And there you also bought the perfume, eh? Rather more effective than lavender water, if you don’t mind my saying so?’
His lips quirked and he took a hungry bite of the cold meat. Merlin shot him a questioning look as she lifted the coffeepot and filled their cups. ‘You do think I’m a fool, don’t you, mynheer?’
‘No, I think you are a shy woman who has rarely dared to be yourself. Why shouldn’t you indulge in a little vanity? There are females who indulge vices you would neither understand nor be capable of executing, so for the sake of heaven don’t call yourself a tart! You felt for once the natural urge to let the woman in you take over from the efficient secretary, and I do assure you that if your perfume offended me, I would request that you scrub it off. This is an excellent salad dressing, by the way.’
‘I’m glad you like it.’ She placed his cup of coffee within reach of his hand, and as always she felt a sense of wonderment as she watched the adept way he handled the act of eating, which to a sighted person offered none of the complications which someone blind came up against. She had taken care to lay his utensils exactly as they were laid by the houseboy, and to place his food as if his plate was a quarter-hour clock, with his meat at the twelve position, his potatoes at three, the salad at six, and the bread at number nine. He then knew exactly where to place his knife and fork and could make conversation quite naturally, without fumbling with his food. Whenever rijstaffel was served, the various small dishes were placed in a clockwise position on the table, making it easier for him to select what he wanted.
Merlin pushed her own food around her plate and she was glad he had a good appetite even if she didn’t feel very hungry. She had a fateful feeling that the tragedy which had started in London was going to come to a climax here on the island of Pulau-Indah ... the tempest, untamed and ferocious, was building up and she and Paul were facing together what might be their last hours on earth. It was said that confession was good for the soul, but she wanted him to go on respecting her right up to the end ... she shrank from him ever knowing who she really was.
‘You must eat your lunch,’ he said, having caught the restless movements of her knife and fork. ‘It might be hours before we eat again, for as the storm intensifies it will be safer if you remain here in this room. Come, you have provided an excellent meal and food inside you will help dispel the nervous tension. Eat, mevrouw, that is an order. I don’t want a fainting woman on my hands, for how should I cope with the method of revival when you are wearing that long silk skirt? It would be most awkward getting your head between your knees, ja?’
‘The mind boggles, mynheer.’ She broke into a smile, and started to eat her lunch, enjoying far more the luxury of feasting her eyes on Paul, lounging there on his cushions, casually eating pickled plums, the light of the hurricane lamps playing over his face. His grey eyes had a sheen to them under the heavy lids, as of oyster-shell, full of light and yet looking only into blackness as he seemed to gaze at her from across the table.
‘We face damnation or heaven,’ he said, his eyes so strangely brilliant above the sculptured bones of his face. ‘I think I am glad that you stayed to keep me company, Miss Lakeside. At least I have had a good lunch.’
Merlin felt her heart’s movement ... she knew that Paul was thanking her in his own way for not leaving him to face the typhoon in his lonely darkness.
‘You are welcome, mynheer,’ she replied. ‘Would you like some more coffee?’
‘If you please, my geisha.’
CHAPTER FIVE
As the afternoon waned the winds had reached such force that Paul estimated they must be tearing across the ocean and the island at the rate of fifty to sixty miles an hour, and they still hadn’t reached the peak of their intensity. The ocean swell would be terrific, he told Merlin, the sea rising to meet the rain-drenched skies in a kind of cauldron that a gigantic ladle would be stirring round and round in an anti-clockwise motion.
‘Do you think we might be in the eye of the storm?’ she asked him.
‘The devil’s eye,’ he drawled, cheroot smoke pluming from his lips. ‘If so it will come lik
e a clap of doom and there will be no time for goodbye or regret. Put another record on the gramophone, mevrouw. Let us stay as cheerful as possible, and those old recordings help to drown out some of the noise.’
He had found the ancient wind-up machine in the den, along with a box of equally old-fashioned records and they had passed some of the time playing them. He had also brought a bottle and a pair of glasses from that trip to the den; bang wine, he had said, which he was saving for the moment when he felt it would be most needed. He had smiled and explained that bang wine was a slang term for champagne used by the islanders, and upon this occasion more than appropriate.
Merlin sorted through the records and found an oldie with a sentimental title Goodnight, My Love, That, too, was appropriate, and as she wound up the gramophone she watched Paul in his bamboo long-chair, his large frame at ease but always a listening tension to the way he held his head. He was waiting, listening with ears far more acute than hers, to the signal for the opening of that long necked bottle with the gold foil around the cork. It was a good champagne, a powerful one, and she knew that he meant to blot out for her that moment, should it come, when the typhoon would rush down on them and sweep them into eternity. She knew it could happen, and the courage she had found to face it was rooted in Paul ... he was all and everything to her, so passionately at the centre of her being that she wanted nothing more than to live and die with him. The elemental forces all around them had brought that passion fully alive in her, and though it could never be released in a physical sense, at least she was free to love him with her eyes, with graceful movements of her body as she moved about the room, or knelt just beyond his hand as she listened to the music from another, more romantic time, when people had been unafraid to be sweet in their loving The honeyed words of the old song filled the room, and the lids of Paul’s eyes had a weight to them that Merlin wanted to touch with her fingertip, feeling the flutter of those gold lashes, bending forward with her heart on her lips to press kisses to where the pain had scorched away his sunlight.
Champagne to blot out the pain that might be waiting like a beast beyond those walls, and the yearning to give herself had to be kept in chains ... right up to the possible end the masquerade had to be played out that she was an old maid, grown passionless with the years. Only confusion, anger, could be her reward if she approached him right now and let him discover that her body was young and her heart was eager, and that it didn’t matter to her that his eyes were blind. He was a man, and a lonely one, and he might take what she offered, but there would be no real joy in it. He’d be scornful of what was flung at his head, unasked for. He was still so very proud ... still at heart a man who wanted to do his own choosing.
‘How very sentimental people used to be,’ he murmured. ‘I’d give a lot to see that tired old moon descending—you know, the trouble with being blind is that a man begins to live on memories; the good ones seem sweeter and the bitter ones even more sharp and sour. There doesn’t seem to be any awareness of a future, for how can a man look ahead when he can’t even see?’
Merlin’s arms tightened about her updrawn knees in the tulip silk, and her own slim knees were a poor substitute for the wide shoulders she longed to embrace.
‘A memory that haunts me is of Amsterdam the last time I was there, at my grandmother’s house,’ ash fell from his cheroot, spattering his trousers, and he was unaware of it. ‘A place so old the roof tiles are green-black as the shiny coat of a tramp, and rain, soft rain, had drenched the tulips in her garden and they shone like satin. I suppose you’ve never been there?’
‘No, but it sounds lovely, mynheer.’
‘It’s a very nostalgic city, and nowhere does the beer taste so cool as at a table beside one of the old canals, with wild onions, brown bread and cream cheese.’
‘Are you hungry, mynheer? I could make a snack.
‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘I’m only hungry for the old days—God, what would I give to have it all again, the modest pleasures, the hard work.’
‘Please,’ A sob broke from Merlin. ‘I can’t bear it.’
‘You mustn’t weep,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m a thoughtless fool to talk in such a way, when your nerves are already over-stretched.’
‘It just isn’t fair that you—a man like you.’ She couldn’t go on and had to cram her knuckles in her mouth or cry it all out, how she felt about him, the part she had played in the tragedy, letting it pour from her system but in the process losing what she had gained of him. He had to hate what had hurt him and cost him his brilliant career, and she would be his target, as they might be the target of that typhoon that roared in the stormy darkness out there.
‘I can feel you biting your knuckles,’ Paul said sharply. ‘If it will help to give way to a good cry, then give way.’
‘But you said you couldn’t stand a whining woman.’
‘Merely a ruse to try and make you go down into the valley. If the typhoon comes this way, then it will take this house apart like some great beast from out of a Lovecraft story.’
‘Then,’ she forced the humour from twisted lips, ‘if I give a curdling scream at the next loud noise you won’t take me for a complete coward?’
‘You are no coward,’ he told her. ‘You have spirit and feeling, and I couldn’t wish for a better companion in a crisis. Your nurse’s training, eh, and something tenacious in your character.’
Twinges of panic and pleasure were induced by what he said, but her endurance was welded to his, to that core of steel in his nature; the tempered strength of a fine blade that could yield without breaking. The hardest, bravest test for her was that she couldn’t find safety and sanctuary in his arms.
The music had died away and she lay back against the cushions of her long-chair and tried to relax. Long since her hair had loosened into a gleaming disarray about her shoulders, for every now and then she would press her hands to her ears, trying to shut out the sounds of trees whose very roots were being torn from deep in the soil, where they had stood since the days of the Dutch colonials. She knew that small, defenceless animals and birds were being driven crazy and she was frightened she might hear their cries.
She had played all those rather scratchy records and she supposed they could play them all again, but somehow she couldn’t make the effort to go and wind up the machine, and she could feel herself beginning to tremble.
‘Why do cruel things have to happen?’ she asked. ‘All those pretty children—the islanders—I can’t bear to think about it!’
‘The people of Pulau-Indah are extremely nice, aren’t they?’ His face was stern and shadowed in the moody light of the hurricane lamps. ‘I had to let them go to the valley, but I’m not certain it was a wise thing to do. A tidal wave would cost untold loss of life—all those merry-voiced children, who I feel sure are as pretty as they sound.’
‘Many of them are really beautiful,’ she said. ‘And so are their mothers and older sisters—remarkably lovely, with long dark hair, and eyes that hold mystery and humour. I can’t blame your cousin for being in love with one of them.’
‘Do you think it might be a good idea if I followed his example, mevrouw?’ Paul’s voice was both serious and a little cynical.
‘Why not?’ she said, forcing coolness and control into her voice. ‘There isn’t much to be gained from celibacy, is there? Loneliness can be hard to live with.’
‘As you have learned, eh?’
‘As I have learned.’ Her voice tapered off, as if she were indeed a woman who had lived a long time with loneliness, who accepted it as inevitable.
She watched as shadows crept about the room, waiting, hoping for a lull in the wind, a slackening of the rain, a lessening of the shrill noises and the crashings from outside. Her nerves were unbearably strung, yet never had she felt so alive to every pulse beat of her body, every awesome movement, every expression that came and went across Paul’s face. Beside him on an elbow table stood a brass elephant whose harness seemed to move in the s
hifting shadows ... and then she stiffened and leaned forward and her breath seemed to get locked in her throat. Something was moving on that table, and Paul’s hand was resting on his chair-arm just an inch or so from that section of the table, and the thing that moved was at least six inches long, with scarlet legs and mandibles. ..
‘Stay absolutely still,’ she cried across the room, ‘there’s a centipede on the table beside you!’
Even as she spoke Merlin was on her feet and making a dash for the food trolley which stood near the door. She snatched up a silver dish-cover, moved swiftly to Paul’s chair and slammed the cover down over that black and scarlet, venomous horror.
‘And now what?’ he drawled. ‘I gather you have trapped it?’
‘God—yes.’ She was staring down at the silver lid under which that thing was shifting about on its many legs. towards your hand.’
‘Don’t get into a lather now you have it trapped,’ he said. ‘Go fetch the bottle of cognac—yes, I said the cognac. You’ll recall that we had some after our lunchtime coffee.’
‘I—I’m not about to faint, mynheer!’
‘Am I suggesting that you are, mevrouw? Kerosene would be a little more efficient, but that cognac is strong stuff and when you have brought the bottle over here you will douse the centipede and burn it. You heard me! It can’t be allowed to escape, now can it?’
‘No, mynheer.’ Now she did feel a trifle faint and had to pull herself together as she went across to the cabinet for the brandy and returned across matting that seemed to be shaking under her feet. She had to do what he told her—he couldn’t see to do it, and that beastly thing had to be disposed of.