By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I’ll have another go skiing,’ said Peter, loudly. ‘That Chianti has set me up nicely.’ His sticky-out-ears had changed colour, chameleon-like, to match the pink of the awning.

  ‘Not me,’ said Ysabella. ‘That Chianti has set me up for a little nap.’ She trailed her gaze languidly around the little group, and, just for a moment, her eye met George’s. There was a little electro-something, a spark. ‘A little lie down,’ she repeated.

  ‘Why, Ysabella,’ he said, testing the instinct. ‘Surely you haven’t overindulged, winily speaking?’

  Ysballe looked him straight in the eye. ‘It was too tempting,’ she said, with a slight, voluptuous slur in her words.

  ‘Alcohol,’ he agreed.

  George had met her for the first time only days earlier. But this – this was the inward vertigo, that exciting and alarming sense of hurtling into something new. Everything was all about exciting possibilities. ‘What about you, darling?’ he said to Marie.

  ‘I’ve not come all this way to lie down,’ she replied, sharply. ‘I can lie down at home. I’m giving the slopes another bash.’

  ‘You could try the ice-cream slope,’ he prompted – because, after all, that was a whole hill away, more distant from the hotel, which would give him that much more time alone. To cover the obviousness of this gambit, he added: ‘It’s the big feature, after all. People come from all over the world to, and so on, and so forth.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow. Regular piste will suit me for now. Will you?’

  ‘No, I’ve done my death-dicing today,’ he announced. ‘I’ll go and see what’s happening in the games room. Or maybe just catch up on the news.’

  News was a dirty word, and the group flapped their hands disapprovingly. Life was too short for news. But news was one of George’s little eccentricities, and he was perfectly aware of the mild distinctiveness it gave his otherwise blandly unmemorable character. And now Marie was on her feet, so Peter scrabbled to his legs too, with just too much eagerness. And Ysabella bade them all good afternoon and wandered over towards the lifts. So George got up and sauntered away, carefully picking a trajectory across the balcony that made it look like he wasn’t simply following Ys. That was all part of the game, of course. And it was a splendid game. The Horner-Kings’ carer was emerging into the light carrying a wriggling bundle of tiny Horner-King – superfluously now, of course; for the point in having her brought down in the first place was to show off to the others.

  3

  He caught up with Ysabella by the lift. They ascended together. Not a word was spoken. This feature of the tryst was something that George found almost more thrilling than the prospect of actual sex. It was the thought that it was possible to arrange these things without ever having to spell out the awkward specifics in words. That an understanding could be arrived at spontaneously, as it were; like leaves coming voicelessly to the branches of trees, or like whisky-coloured sunlight laying itself down intimately upon the white snow.

  He kissed her in the corridor outside her room, and then they tumbled through the door like teenagers. Down they went, onto the crisply made bed. He grasped at Ysabelle’s splendidly ample flesh, dug his fingers in to the contours of thigh and buttock. She pushed him away for a moment, dialled down the glass balcony-doors’ glass, and then was straight back at him, pulling off his clothes with an efficient series of yanks and hoiks. In moments he was naked, and the fact that she was still fully clothed was – well, alarming, really. Perhaps there was simply something subliminally intimidating about her muscular confidence. Not that this did anything to diminish the visible solidity of his desire. He wouldn’t be the first man to be drawn precisely by the desire to be alarmed.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Shall we?’

  He went to her, fitted his arms around her broad torso and began kissing her neck, and kissing her face, rubbing his fingers over her bristly scalp. She undid the catch and shook herself free of her trousers. Her knickers fell to silky pieces with a twitch of her thumb. George’s heart was hammering. And in the moment the foreplay was a process of postponing the inevitable, terrifying exhilaration. It was getting the top half of her clothing off, running his mouth and hands over her dark skin, the small, low breasts, the nipples like black olives. It was all that. But it couldn’t be postponed for ever – and down we go.

  Superfast, superfast, superfast.

  He pumped away, despite the tiredness of his thigh muscles, for the longest time, all the while fumbling as best he could at Ysabelle’s cleft with his right hand. But it seemed to take her a long time to get where she was going. She lifted her long, mannish legs and brought the soles of her two feet together somewhere behind George’s head. This neither thrilled him, nor put him off. On and on he plugged, to a rising sound-effect of squelching that made him think, randomly, of jellyfish. The undersea kingdom. Bubbles, and bubbles, and bubbles. Then – finally! – a mist of opal crept over the oily surface of her eyes, and she was gone.

  Afterwards he got up for a piss, and loitered a little in the enormous bathroom. With a fine feeling of superiority, he poked a finger in amongst all of Peter’s myriad grooming products on the mirror-shelf. Coming back through he helped himself to a glass of wine from the minibar, and lolled on the bed, watching the screen.

  For quarter of an hour Ysabelle lay on her side. She snored with the noise of a fly trapped behind a windowpane. But then she awoke, with a shudder, and stretched out all her limbs enormously, and got off the bed, and took herself off to the shower.

  On the news, a stare-eyed US official, his widow’s-peak shaven into a cruciform shape, was being interviewed by a Japanese chat anchor. ‘Repetitive raiding heavily leverages our core capability to break states,’ the US wallah said. The screen ran his words along the bottom: repetitive raiding heavily leverages capability to break states.

  ‘But if Triunion government retains its oppositional—’ the interviewer tried to say.

  ‘Triunion needs to understand the investment the US Government has already made in military intervention.’ He rolled the phrase ‘US Government’ into a single word: five syllables compressed to three. ‘The financial investment,’ he added, as if there were any other kind.

  George scratched an itch on his kneecap with a circular motion. To the right, the darkened glass of the balcony door had turned the bright sky to a shadowy gentian colour. We are the immortal offspring of the heaven and the earth. The interviewer said, ‘Everything remains just as it was.’ The screen cut to a montage from Triunion. It was the usual thing: crowds surging like fans at a music concert, up and down dingy-looking low-rise streets. All with their crazy trailing hair. Another shot of a courtyard, or a town square, or something, filled with angry-looking longhairs. There was a shot of a military Quadpod pulling its metal legs up and hoofing them down again with almost comical fastidiousness, stepping over the tin roofs, striding up and down the dirt alleys. The guns under its belly looked like ski-poles. People surged, washed up and down the alleyways. The guns spat and sputtered. Here was a shot of a crowd tugging down street-lamps and rushing at the Pods like pedestrian Sir Lancelots. Here was another shot: the fat tiling of a wall of army riot-shields.

  Ysabelle came out of the shower with a towel draped over her shoulders, but otherwise superbly, enormously, statuesquely naked. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Riots in Triunion.’

  ‘I don’t want the specifics,’ she said, bending all the way down to the minibar to pluck herself a drink. Holding one of the miniature little wine bottles she looked for all the world like a giant, a vrai giant, something splendidly and erotically Brobdingnagian. ‘What I mean: you’re watching the news?’

  ‘I like the news,’ he said.

  She sat herself back on the bed, beside him. ‘I thought we sorted out Triunion last year,’ she said, shortly, perhaps so as to show George that she wasn’t entirely a news philistine.

  But, for some reason, George wasn’t in the mood to be placated. Something vaguely unsatisf
ying about the encounter was niggling at him. The sex, or the wine, or the anticlimax, or something. ‘I don’t believe the Republic of Canada had anything to do with it,’ he said.

  ‘By we I mean,’ she drawled, looking through the half-darkened glass at the flank of the mountain. But instead of finishing the sentiment she took a swig of yellow-white wine.

  They were silent for a while. The interview continued onscreen for a minute or more: the US guy explaining the scaled punitive tariff that would be applied to Triunion if hostilities continued. A barchart sprang up in front of him to illustrate his words; this many native deaths for this much resistance, this larger number if the unrest continued into next week, this much larger number if—

  ‘I thought you Americans sorted out Triunion last year,’ Ysabelle said, shortly.

  ‘You’re right,’ said George, changing the channel. ‘It’s boring.’

  They watched some sport; then a musical stab-match between two hard-pop superstars. Then they watched a book for a few minutes.

  ‘Did you say you had two children?’ Ysabelle asked.

  ‘Ezra you saw,’ said George. ‘There’s also Leah.’

  ‘And how old is Leah?’

  ‘Ten.’

  They sat in silence and watched a whole book. Belatedly, George grasped that Ysabelle had been prompting him. So he asked: ‘You?’

  Her posture on the bed relaxed marginally. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Do you think I have any kids?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he drawled. ‘How would I know, one way or another?’

  She moved herself a little closer to him. ‘Come along Sherloon. Would you say my pussy is the pussy of a woman who has had a child?’

  ‘Sherlock,’ he said.

  ‘Sherlock, whatever. Use your little grey cells.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Would be my answer. I’d say that pussy is too pristine.’

  The way she wriggled with self-consciously girly deliciousness really was not suited to her powerful frame. ‘I have,’ she purred. ‘I gave vaginal birth too – my lovely Ernesto!’

  ‘You’d never guess,’ he said, trying half-heartedly for gallantry. ‘Not by the state of – uh, state of your pussy.’

  ‘Oh and Ernie was enormous, too! One of the largest they’d seen at the clinic. It’s a good thing, for the health of the infant, but hard work for me, and for my pussy. But I had a genius surgeon called Mowat, called Lev Mowat, a graduate of the Moscow school. He did amazing micro-work up there. Amazing muscular work.’

  ‘Amazing,’ agreed George.

  ‘It’s tighter than it was before! It really is.’

  ‘I could,’ George began, starting to say I could tell. But this would be a ridiculous thing to say, for to say I could tell surely implied prior experience against which he was judging it. Instead he said, ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘He did something with the nerve-endings too. It’s much more pleasurably sensitive in there than it was before.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said George, feeling uncomfortable. ‘That is excellent.’

  Afterwards they strolled down together and had a coffee in the hotel’s Costa. The circular logo circumferenced the company name around the stylized representation of three coffee beans. George’s eye kept drifting to the logo, and its beans, like three torn-out brown tongues. He was in a morbid sort of mood, really. Caffeine wrestled with alcohol in his streaming blood. Ys chattered on. The encounter seemed to have perked her up.

  Eventually they parted, and George hung vaguely about the games room for a bit. His Fwn murmured, and it was Marie – breathless and strawberry-cheeked from her exertions. They agreed to supper à deux. After the call, George dawdled through the basement-level mall, and bought himself a complete new suit of clothes, all the while thinking that he ought to feel perkier than he did. It was not that he felt bad, exactly; but there was an insubstantial sense of apprehension somewhere in his sensorium. He couldn’t pin it down. From the basement he travelled up to the penthouse bar. He ordered a Poppy. He pulled a leaf of the hotel’s viewsheet from the dispenser, but found he couldn’t concentrate on the images, flicking through the channels until he ended up, almost perversely, back at the news.

  On a whim he took the elevator down again to the kids’ suite. He stepped in without knocking to find Leah almost upside down in an easy chair – her legs hooked over the back, her head dangling down, a gamescard in her hand. Those fantastically precise fluttery fingers going over the screen, like a Renaissance concert pianist, or something. Or an artist working the canvas – or something. He didn’t know what game she was playing. ‘Hellow Leah,’ he said with mock ponderousness, as if he were a fairy tale giant and she a princess to be rescued, or menaced, or however it was those sorts of stories went. She ignored him, of course. Pixels outrank parents in a child’s order of priorities. Ezra was in the next room on the playmat with his toys parading about him in a circle; and Arsinée was on the balcony, her long black hair spread wide and dangling.

  ‘Mr Denoone!’

  ‘Arsinée!’ he snapped at her, suddenly very cross. ‘But what are you doing?’

  What she was doing was hurriedly gathering up her queue, and tucking it away down the back of her shirt; and then she ran blushing through into the room to sweep Ezra into her arms.

  ‘Arsinée,’ said George, wagging a finger. ‘Are you not eating your regular meals? Is that why you’re sunning behind our backs? What do you do – sell the food on?’ He had only the vaguest notions how that sort of black economy worked, or, indeed, why it existed at all. But of course he had heard the stories.

  ‘No, Mr Denoone, no! Only, the children were so placid, and the sunlight is warm, and—’

  ‘I can’t talk to you,’ he said, feeling absolutely superb in the way he turned his shoulder to her and put emphatic dismissal into his voice. ‘I have a rendezvous with Mrs Lewinski.’ It was an ancient pleasure, this de-haut-en-bas play acting. The thing with master-and-servant, as with other games, was to cause the maximum emotional distress and insecurity in the underling with the least possible exertion on your part. ‘I will discuss this with you later. You should consider your position!’

  He swept out, past his upended and absorbed daughter. A flash of Arsinée’s aghast face. And, in the elevator going back up to the penthouse bar, he did feel a little better. These footling little humps of up-and-down emotion. Demeaning really. Not for the first time in his life he was aware of the sense that he needed some project. It didn’t really matter what, of course; only to find something purposeful to help elevate him, keep him on a more noble emotional level.

  4

  He and Marie spent an hour together in the shops; and then played a game of echo-ball in the holographic suite. It was perfectly pleasant. Then they made their way to the Arabian Eatery, and sat at a little table on the balcony. They had a very nice view. The angling sun played splendidly over the pyramidal southern flank of the mountain: conjuring not only light-effects of gold and plum and grape-pink and cherry-red on the planes of snow itself, but creating the most extraordinary shadows too. The shadows were perhaps even more beautiful than the lit areas, George thought: lines and wedges of the most extraordinary deep-sea blues and purples, bruise-greys, darknesses tinted green and ochre, slotted intricately into kaleidoscope tessellations.

  Marie had lately taken up the California habit of ordering a container alongside the table for her evening meal, so that she could, after chewing and tasting the various morsels, spit them out. Lunch for nutrition, supper for the taste. The fashionable mantra. George didn’t mind this, not really; although perhaps he was a tad annoyed by the way Marie pretended that this had always been her habit – he would have testified in court that she had started it no more than a week earlier. Of course these little quirks and petty fictions are part of the tapestry of marriage. Of course they are. We wouldn’t love our partners so much without their little eccentricities and peculiaritie
s.

  They finished the last of the Hormoz White with a clink of glasses.

  ‘Your health Mr Denoone,’ said Marie.

  ‘Your health, Mrs Lewinski,’ he replied.

  The waiter brought a second bottle of wine, an Indonesian vintage; and the shrimp-and-pomegranate purée arrived, two murex-coloured lumps. A memory passed through George’s mind of Ysabelle’s dark little breasts set firmly upon her powerful ribcage. And Marie, as if she were reading his thoughts – as perhaps she was, for long-married couples do acquire that quasi-telepathic ability – Marie asked him:

  ‘So did you boink Ysabelle?’

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘This Indonesian stuff is rather nice, don’t you think?’

  She squished a mouthful through her teeth, like mouthwash, and spat it into the bucket. ‘Not bad at all.’ Then she stuck out the tip of her tongue, and drew it back in again. ‘A little bit rhubarb, maybe. Do I mean rhubarb? The green one.’

  ‘The long, tubular green one?’

  ‘No. Round.’

  ‘Apple.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’

  They both tasted the purée, and Marie spat hers into the bucket with a retching noise.

  ‘Took her a long time,’ said George, shortly.

  ‘What?’ said Marie. ‘Ysabelle, you mean?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘My legs were achy anyway, from the skiing. It was hard work, really.’

  ‘I’m somehow surprised it took her a long time to come,’ said Marie, absently. ‘She’s so athletic. She does everything so quickly – she skis like the devil is after her. She’s one of life’s sprinters.’

  ‘She told me she had work done on her hoo-haa,’ he said, taking another slurp of wine. ‘After the birth of her, eh, son.’ He couldn’t recall the boy’s name. A boy, though, for certain. Was it? George thought so. ‘Talked about it as if she was super-pleased, but I reckon it mucked up her responsiveness.’