‘You really are sure?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Irritation finally overcame her. ‘I’ve decided, I want to do it. It’ll be fine, I promise. Go on. And make me some more coffee. Go on. Please. Now.’ As soon as he left the room she threw back the quilt and quit the bed. She frowned, passing the mirror, seeing an unnatural sheen of perspiration on her body. Ruefully she cupped her breasts, passed a hand over her belly; at present they were too full for her own liking, although Nick enjoyed her extra flesh.
The heat of the morning was already in the room. Such a perverse season, summer, the sun provoking lust then the heat enervating it. Sticky silk, sweaty lace – all her lingerie was useless in this climate. At the back she found something that was mostly black ribbon; then, in an attempt to soothe her spirits, she went to the wardrobe and picked out a new dress, a loose voile shift, almost ankle-length, dark violet blue speckled with cream, and tossed the two together on to the bed.
The distant noise of the telephone told her that he had made the call; when he came back she was in the shower. A wisp of scented steam floated on the still air. The petal of chiffon, lurid against the crumpled white bedlinen, caught his eye. He felt a tension at the back of his neck, spreading down his spine, a crawling, tightening warmth.
‘All done,’ he called, and she heard the roughening of his voice which betrayed the preoccupation of his body. He added, ‘Jane sounded pleased.’
‘Perhaps she likes new faces. It must be lonely, out here all summer long.’ Even as she made this bland reply, annoyance at hearing the name of Michael’s wife in her husband’s mouth blasted the buds of her desire. For a while she retreated to silence and her aura of displeasure pushed Nick right out of the house. But in the act of dressing her body the wave of anger began to break, and the glimpse in the mirror of the black ribbon around her hips aroused her, so that when he came upstairs again and found her seated, pinning up her hair, there was a charge in the atmosphere.
‘I like your hair like that.’ He was standing behind her, fingers moving involuntarily as he considered touching her shoulders, weighing her mood.
She leaned her back against his thigh, his heat like sunshine beating down on her cheek. Turning her head, cat-like, she brushed her cheek against him, feeling him grow through the thin fabric.
Light, smooth chinos, colourless, textureless – her lipstick was fresh; she printed her mouth on him.
‘Now look what you’ve done.’
All at once she needed to be sure – of him, of them, of her life as it was now, of the past as the past, finished, an irrelevance. If she could take him inside her now she would know she was safe, completely and forever, but even as she was reaching up and opening her mouth their unity dissolved and their desires fell out of step.
He pulled her up by her shoulders and moved her back to the wall, turning her to face him, pulling up the hem of her skirt. The ribbon chafed her hips as his fingers pulled it away. After the shower her skin was tingling, alive, craving to be touched. She reached for him, but he was holding her at arm’s length, saying, ‘Please, darling, let me just see you like this, let me look at you…’
More than anything, she did not want an argument at that moment. When he pulled her dress off, the rough stone wall grazed her back. Then he was kneeling, his fingers holding her, parting, pleading. The sweetness of being overcome offered itself. Of its own volition her spine was sinking into a feral arch. Grace moved her feet apart and gave herself to his mouth.
In a while he surrendered to her; she fell on him on the floor, dragged off half his clothes and got what she wanted, the precious sense of being full of him and safe, and free of the past. Afterwards she felt drained. It was tempting to lie still on the boards where they had fallen.
She did not get up until he finished showering, then set about hiding her tension in activity. She dressed again, made the bed, and finding the kitchen immaculate went outside to water the garden in spite of the sun. Her limbs trembled slightly with post-coital exhaustion; she was physically relaxed and in places agreeably sore, but the certainty she had wanted to feel was not there. Physical pleasure was too feeble a remedy for the fever of anxiety taking hold of her mind.
Was it love he was afraid of, or guilt? He was afraid, watching
her face on the pillow, the eyes shut as if she were dead and the spray of hair lying precisely in the hollow of her cheek. So much of him already was anchored here. Her lips closed with such confidence, his pride folded in their forgiving bow. The high, clean arch of her brows, he thought, made a diptych where her eyes would write his destiny.
The smell of her hair was comforting to him. He inhaled deeply, feeling that he wanted to draw her whole being into his body with the scent. ‘My love. My love.’ The word did not hurt to say. Lightning did not tear open the sky. ‘My love.’
Her answer was a short breath, a protest stifled – by courtesy perhaps, or only tiredness. His new-blown world of happiness shuddered on its axis. ‘Don’t, don’t. Never do that, make fun of me for loving you. Serena, my love, I will call you that, you must let me.’
At her hairline the skin was salt where her sweat had dried, for the night had never sunk into coolness and there had been no interlude for the prudent opening of windows or peeling off the quilt. Reliving his violent impulsion towards her bed in this following tenderness, he felt ashamed.
Was she offended, even perhaps physically hurt? Here he had made errors with other women, acting from the feeling of possession he had with Jane. Women who lived free lives did not know the language and told him he assumed too much. She had caressed him, gently, he could feel the sweep of her fingers up his spine, and his ears remembered her chaotic breath and the faint repeated cries of her final pleasure, but now Michael could feel her body straining unconsciously away from him. He moved to fold his arm around her and although she consented she was tense, the cat who hates to be held but hates more to offend his owner. He imagined that he could even hear the turmoil of her feelings roaring inside the thin wall of her chest. Under his fingers polished skin lay evenly over flesh. Her back was muscular, evenly ridged like a beach marked by retreating waves; the breasts, half-liquid, poured against his own body, stirring with each breath.
‘I want to sleep now. Hold you and sleep with you, like this.’ He knew that he would have to leave her soon; what would she do when he was gone? Reflect with sadness, give way to her conscience, leave him when he had only just found her?
She answered him at last. ‘You must be tired.’
Her voice was almost without expression. If she was taking refuge in concern for him, what thoughts were troubling her?
‘No, I’m not tired. I want to sleep to be with you, that’s all. It’s strange, I want to feel completely close to you. Don’t you think you feel closest to someone when you sleep with them? It’s sharing something that’s more than intimate, being unconscious together. Lying down to release your souls. Does that sound daft?’
‘No.’ Neutral. Wary, disturbing.
The idea that she might retreat from him now, get up with a snappy comment perhaps and follow with good-mannered talk of her day’s obligations and a firm goodbye, was horrible. He imagined himself standing on the pavement outside with a great haemorrhaging wound in his spirit.
‘You aren’t saying anything.’
Her sigh was hesitant. ‘Is there anything to say?’
‘Yes. Yes. Oh, my love.’
She would not cry, or turn away from him. Instead she lay in his arms without moving, hoping he would sleep or leave her so she could restore herself. The enchantment of the night had gone. The wholeness of her life, the still perfection which had resonated like a country church bell in the early morning, had been cracked. Her sense of him now was threatening; besides, what they had done was wrong. It occurred to her that never before had she broken one of the ten commandments, except forgetting the Sabbath in working on Sunday. Her best hope now was that this all meant nothing to him.
‘Yes. Yes, you know there is. Let me make you something, coffee, tea, whatever you have. Where’s the kitchen? Come on, we must have a proper talk and I need a cup of tea for proper talking. You stay there. Tell me what you need. Stay there, I’ll bring it in.’
She picked at a fold of the sheet, troubled, wishing he would cease to be the tormented man who had reached out for her beside the river and appear in the daylight as an unfeeling shit temporarily diverted by lust from his all-devouring ambition. Easy to have mistaken him, but this was not the way an unfeeling shit behaved. She had some experience of them, and their style was to leave swiftly with cheerful promises, avoiding conversation at all costs.
He pulled back the quilt and reached behind her head to arrange her pillows. Feeling childish, she settled herself against them. ‘I usually have a tea. Whatever’s there, camomile, whatever. The kitchen is that door on the right as you come in.’
He had no deliberate intention of leaving her naked in the bed they had shared while he resumed most of his clothes and went out into the daylight. It seemed romantic to him, to make their tea on a Saturday morning, part of the glamour of their life which was to come.
Serena’s kitchen was as beguiling as he would have desired, a tiny galley made from the corridor. He registered no details, could not analyse the appeal of her modest collection of household equipment, neatly arrayed on blue-painted shelves with paper lace edges, or the strings of dried chillies and bunches of herbs hanging from high hooks. The necessary was his focus, a pair of bright modern ceramic cups, an eccentric old kettle on the gas cooker, teas and coffee in an old biscuit tin with a thatched cottage painted on the lid. The window looked out into blue morning sky; a half-length white cotton crochet curtain, of the kind photographed as typical at rural French casements, blocked out the lower view of a potholed city side-street.
He took the tea back to the bedroom. She had found something to wear, a crumpled blue shirt. ‘What do you think about love?’ he asked, when she had taken her mug from him.
A fearful look through the steam, and no smile. ‘What do you mean, what do I think about it?’
‘Do you think it’s important, I mean?’
‘Of course it’s important.’
‘I think that love is the most important thing in life. I do, I really do. I think you have to make it the centre of your life, let everything else that you do flow from that.’ He sat on the bed, facing her. ‘Not sentimental, lyric-writer’s muck, real love, the love that’s God or whatever living in us.’ At last she looked at him. It was strange to hear Michael Knight’s glorious voice become hesitant. ‘The best that a man can do is love. The most precious thing we can do, we ought to live for it, tend it, sacrifice whatever we have to, not deny it or make fun of it. I hate it when people use swear words for making love, don’t you?’
‘Fucking awful thing to do.’ Animation, laughter at last. She was not hating him, thank God.
‘I do truly believe love is the best in us. You have to just live for it. That’s it for me.’
‘That’s a very grand thought.’
‘Perhaps I’m feeling very grand just now.’ They withdrew to their own tender silences. Down on the street fire engine sirens sounded from far off, approached closer, then died away again.
‘I’m not used to people saying things like that,’ she broke in a few moments later. ‘People are just practical in my world. Why aren’t the visas through, why hasn’t the photocopier been fixed, why isn’t this trust giving this year…?’
He nodded, taking the empty cup from her. ‘We’re full of shit in the media.’
‘I didn’t mean that…’
‘I know you didn’t. I did. We are full of shit. Everything that happens in the world is just a prioritizing exercise to us, nothing’s real. People don’t mean very much – even if they have been raped and speak English; then they’re a story for a day, might make the year-end compilation if it was a very good picture. And everyone who isn’t a victim is just trying to get you over to their point of view. You have to cut off, emotionally, or you couldn’t do it. And you couldn’t do it if you had no feelings to start with. So you have this strange life, moral deprivation and solitary confinement in a building with five hundred people working in it. Sometimes when I go into the washroom at the end of the day and walk past the mirror I’m surprised to see my own face, surprised I’m still there, because I feel unreal. So to find someone like you is so precious.’
In his mind’s ear he heard Grace tell him it could stand another read-through. His mind’s eye saw her thick eyebrows rise in affectionate cynicism. He thought of Grace often, she was like a second conscience to him.
Serena was stricken now, he knew the look, that very gentle, fearful, yielding look of surrender. The tension had left her body, she was invitingly relaxed. Was there time to make-love to her again?
Curious that at this point he was immune to guilt. It would kick in later, in a big way. The load grew exponentially with every affair but, however heavy, it was never unbearable, he always needed the new love more. Guilt is your thing, isn’t it, Grace had accused him once. You without guilt would be like Saint Sebastian without arrows, lacking his reason for existence. You’re alive only when you’re being stabbed through with the knowledge of what you’ve done wrong. It’s agony, you love it. Her insight was still a loss to him. She was good, very good, far too good for that self-righteous right-wing newspaper. Maybe, when the Altmark thing was through …
Michael felt his energy flow freely, aligned with divine purpose, a surge of power. There was a later flight. He could telephone Jane, and Imogen in Paris, and later from Les Palombières he could phone Serena. He put his hand under the quilt, found her warm thigh and swept it towards him.
Sunflowers almost hid the track that led off the main road to Les Palombières. It curved around the brow of the hill like a loving arm around plump shoulders, nearly invisible between the swathes of joyous yellow sweeping to the blue horizon. Thousand upon thousand, the great dish-shaped blooms faced the house, their colour flaming in the full midday sun. The little cloud of white dust announcing a vehicle was hardly visible.
Louisa and Antony occasionally looked up from their books to admire the view. They had retreated from the scorching poolside to the shade of the side terrace, a structure which was more than a pergola but less than a verandah, formed by knocking out the stones of old barn walls but leaving the timbers and the roof beams. It was the best arrangement in a climate where it was warm enough to eat outside much of the year, hot enough to be unbearable in high summer but liable to a violent storm at any time.
The year he founded NewsConnect, Michael had announced that there was at last money to restore Les Palombières; Jane, in love with its semi-ruined romanticism, questioned the need, but was unheard. Tamara Lady Aylesham arrived the next day; Michael was a fool for titles, hers was an unjustified hangover from her first marriage. She was amusing company and a competent decorator, unembarrassed by the filthy looks the workmen gave her every time she changed her mind mid-project. Tamara had created the terrace, renovated the cellar, landscaped the pool garden, paved the courtyard and festooned the whole with wisteria, honeysuckle and roses.
Apart from the flycatchers squabbling in the holes in the wall, every noise was swallowed up in the deep vegetable calm of the land. It was too hot for the skylark. Emma and Xanthe were playing around the pool but their shrieks and splashes were barely audible, and the car engine was a distant hum until the last moment. When the vehicle appeared in the courtyard it was as if it had materialized from nowhere.
‘Good heavens. How extraordinary.’ Antony said this twenty times a day. It was getting on Louisa’s nerves.
The ancient grey Renault van rocked on its springs as the driver emerged. For an instant it seemed to be a skinny, black-haired young man, but in the swaggering stance there was a significant suppleness which identified her as a woman. Over her chest flapped a checked shirt and a cheap huntsman�
��s waistcoat, new from the hypermarket, dark green and much embellished with pockets, flaps, studs, zippers, D-rings and loops. Her face and arms were a weatherbeaten walnut tan. On her feet were tattered trainers which, like her jeans and the vehicle’s tyres, were extremely muddy.
‘I’ll see what she wants.’ Louisa approached the visitor, swishing pink pleated voile, and issued a greeting in her exquisitely inflected finishing-school French. The young woman nodded, businesslike, and growled a few words. She had a broad Gascon accent. Opening up the rear doors of the van, she hauled out a newspaper parcel, more than a metre long, rounded, stiff and damp, and dumped it in Louisa’s arms. Then she shut the doors with a tinny slam and, again looking around with a mixture of defiance and stealth, got back behind the wheel and drove quickly away over the potholes.
‘What on earth …? Ugh! It’s wet.’
‘Actually, it looks as if it’s bleeding,’ Antony informed her without stirring a limb. Louisa’s ability to get her clothes stained, and her inability to get them washed, was beginning to irritate him.
‘It’s the salmon lady.’ Emma pattered towards them, wet from the pool. Louisa looked at the child with distaste. Emma had never been a good advertisement for childhood. She was small for her age, with long hair of a lifeless brown which hung in snarled curls on either side of her small face. Her teeth looked too big for her little mouth and were newly disfigured with orthodontist’s train tracks. Her eczema spared only the parts of her body that were always covered with clothes. At present she had a livid red weal down one side of her nose, and red patches of inflammation around her neck and elbows.
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