by Wilbur Smith
There he was, standing in the front doorway. He was so tall that he towered half a head above those around him. A single lock of hair had fallen like a question-mark on to his forehead, and his expression was remote, almost contemptuous.
She wanted to shout his name. ‘Ramón, here I am!’ But she restrained herself, and set aside her glass without looking. It toppled over, and the girl on the step below her exclaimed as lukewarm champagne cascaded down her bare back. Isabella did not even hear her protest. She came to her feet in one fluid movement, and instantly, Ramón’s cool green gaze was on her.
They looked at each other over the heads of the swirling, gyrating dancers, and it was as though the two of them were completely alone. Neither of them smiled. It seemed to Isabella that this was a solemn moment. He had come, and in some vague way she sensed the significance of what was happening. She was certain that in that instant her life had changed. Nothing would ever be the same again.
She began to descend, and she did not stumble over the sprawling, embracing couples that clogged the staircase. They seemed to open before her, and her feet found their own way between them.
She was watching Ramón. He had not moved to meet her. He stood very still in the giddy throng. His stillness reminded her of one of the great predatory African cats, and she felt a tiny thrill of fear, an exhilaration of the blood as she went down to him.
When she stood before him, neither of them spoke, and after a moment she lifted her tanned bare arms towards him and as he took her to his chest she wound her arms around his neck. They danced, and she found every movement of his body transmitted to her own like a current of electricity.
The music was superfluous; they moved to a rhythm of their own. As she flattened her breasts against the hard rubbery muscle of his chest, she could feel his heart beating, and her own nipples swelled and hardened. She knew he could feel them pressing into him, for the beat of his heart quickened and the colour of green darkened in his eyes as she stared up into them.
She arched her back, a slow voluptuous movement that made the ridges of hard muscle stand proud along each side of her spine. His fingertips traced them down, moving lightly over the crests of her spine as though he were playing a musical instrument. She shivered under his touch, and pressed her hips forward instinctively, welding them against his, and she felt his flesh harden and swell just as hers had done.
For her he was a great tree and she was the vine that entwined it, he was a rock and she the current of a tropical ocean that washed about it, he was a mountain peak and she was the cloud that softly enfolded it. Her body was light and free, she seemed to float in his arms, and that was all of reality. They were alone in the universe, and transported far beyond all the natural laws of space and time; even gravity was suspended, and her feet no longer made contact with the earth.
He moved her towards the door, and she saw Roger mouthing something at her across the room. The tall girl was gone, and he was flushed with outrage, but she left him caught helplessly in the press of bodies like a fish in a net.
They went down the front steps, and she took the key of the Mini-Cooper from her sequinned evening bag and pressed it into Ramón’s hand.
He drove very fast through the deserted streets, and she leant as close to him as the bucket seats would allow and watched his face with such a fierce concentration that she did not see or care where he was taking her. She did not think she could endure another moment without touching him, without feeling his hands on her body again. She found that she was shivering once more.
Then, abruptly, he pulled into the kerb and parked the Mini. He came round to her side with long strides, and she knew his need was almost as great as her own. She clung to his arm, and she could not feel the ground beneath her feet as they crossed the pavement and went to the entrance of the red-brick house in a row of similar buildings. He led her up the stairs to the second floor.
As soon as he closed the door of the flat he turned to her, and for the first time she felt his mouth on hers. His face was as rough as shark-skin with new beard, but his lips were soft and hot, and sweet as ripe fruit, and his tongue was like a live thing deep in her mouth.
She felt something burst within her, and all reason and restraint were washed away on the flood. There was a sound in her ears like a gale-force wind over a turbulent sea, and a madness descended on her.
She twisted out of his embrace and tore at her own clothing in a frenzy of impatience, letting it fall around her feet on the polished wooden floor of the small hallway. He stripped his own clothing as swiftly, facing her, and she stared hungrily as every exquisite detail of his body was revealed.
She had never dreamt that a man’s body could be so beautiful. Where other men were gross and hairy, inflamed and knotted with veins, he was smooth and perfect. She felt that she could stare at him for ever, but at the same time she knew that if she did not instantly feel him against her she would scream aloud with frustration, and she flung herself naked against his naked chest.
She pressed hard to him, and his body was firm and sleek and hot. Yet the hair on his chest was unbearably harsh against the sensitive engorged tips of her breasts. She moaned and covered his lips with hers to prevent herself screaming out her desperate need.
He picked her up, and she felt herself weightless in his arms, and he carried her to the bed without breaking the clinging suction of their mouths, one upon the other.
As she came awake, Isabella was aware of an overwhelming sense of well-being. She felt as though she might burst with joy. Her body tingled as though every separate muscle and nerve had a life of its own.
For long moments, she could not understand what had happened to her. She lay with her eyes closed, clinging to the moment. She knew that such a magical sensation must be evanescent, but she did not want it ever to end. Then slowly she was aware of the man musk in her nostrils and the taste of his mouth that still lingered on her tongue. She felt the ache where he had been deep in her body and the heat of the pink rash that his beard had raised on the sensitive skin around her lips. She savoured it all, small pain transmuted into deep and fulfilling pleasure.
Then, with a sense of fresh wonder, the thought imploded into her consciousness: I’m in love! And she came fully awake. Her joy was almost delirious.
She sat up quickly, and the sheet dropped to her waist.
‘Ramón,’ she said, and the indentation of his head was impressed upon the pillow beside hers. A single strand of dark body hair was coiled like a watch-spring on the white sheet. She reached for it and discovered that the sheet was cool, the heat of his body long since dissipated, and she felt her joy sink into despair.
‘Ramón.’ She slipped from the bed and padded on bare feet to the bathroom. The door was ajar, and the bathroom was empty. Once again he had gone, and she stood naked in the middle of the floor and looked around her with dismay.
He was like a cat. His stealth was eerie, and a rash of tiny goose-pimples arose around her nipples. She hugged herself and shivered.
Then she saw the note on the bedside table. It was a single sheet of expensive cream-coloured paper embossed with his family crest. He had weighted it down with her key-ring, the keys to her Mini. She snatched it up eagerly. There was no salutation.
You are an extraordinary woman, and yet when you sleep you look like a child, a beautiful innocent child. I could not bear to wake you. I could hardly bear to leave you, but I must.
If you can come to Málaga with me for the weekend, meet me here at nine tomorrow morning. You will need your passport, but do not bother with pyjamas.
Ramón
She chuckled with delight and relief, all the lightness of her waking mood recaptured. She reread the note; the paper was smooth and cool as marble and had a sensuous feel under her fingertips. His skin had been as smooth, and her eyes turned dreamy and reflective as tiny disjointed episodes from the night replayed in her mind.
He had been far beyond all her previous experience. With
the others, even the most skilled and patient and perceptive of them, she had always been aware of their separate bodies, their divergent existences, of the deliberate attempts to please and to reciprocate. With Ramón, there had been no division. It was almost as though he had taken over her mind as well as her body. They had blended into each other in some semi-divine osmotic process; their flesh and their minds had become one.
So many times during the night, she had believed that they had reached the pinnacle together, only to discover that they were still upon the foothills and before them towered an alp and then another and another. Each higher and more magnificent than the last. There had been no end to it, only at last the oblivion of sleep so deep that it had been like dying, and a resurrection into this new charmed and joyous existence.
‘I’m in love,’ she whispered in almost religious awe, and she looked down on her own body, amazed that such a frail vessel could contain so much happiness, such abundant emotion.
Then she noticed her wristwatch lying beside her car keys on the bedside table.
‘Oh my God!’ she breathed. It was half-past ten. ‘Daddy’s lunch!’ And she leapt to her feet and flew to the bathroom. On the washbasin, Ramón had placed a brand-new toothbrush still in its sealed plastic container for her, and this small kindness touched her out of all proportion.
She hummed the lyric of ‘Faraway Places’ through a mouthful of foaming toothpaste.
She decided there was just time for a quick bath, and she lay in the hot water and thought about Ramón and found there was a great void in her body aching for him to fill it.
‘Enough of that, girl,’ she laughed at herself. ‘With a wave of his magic wand, he has transformed you into a shameless little raver.’
She jumped out of the bath and reached for the towel. It was still damp from his body, and she pressed a fold of it over her mouth and nose, and inhaled the faint but distinctive aroma of his skin. It excited her all over again.
‘Stop it!’ she commanded herself in the steamy mirror. ‘You have to be at Trafalgar Square in an hour.’
She was just about to let herself out of the flat when she exclaimed again, and darted back into the bathroom. She rummaged in her sequinned handbag for the Ovanon pills in their calendar-marked pack and broke one out of its sealed compartment.
She placed the tiny white capsule on her tongue while she ran half a tooth-mug of water from the tap and then saluted her image in the mirror with the raised glass.
‘To life, love and freedom,’ she said, ‘and to many happy returns.’ And washed down the pill.
Blood sports did not revolt Isabella Courtney. Her father had always been a hunter, and the walls of Weltevreden, their home at the Cape of Good Hope, were decorated with trophies of the chase. Amongst the family assets was a safari company that owned a huge hunting concession in the Zambezi valley. Only the previous year she had spent an idyllic fortnight in that enchanted wilderness with her elder brother, Sean Courtney, who was a licensed professional hunter and ran the outfit for Courtney Enterprises. On a number of occasions Isabella herself had ridden to hounds at Harriet Beauchamp’s invitation. Isabella was a passable shot with the lovely little gold-engraved Holland & Holland 20-gauge shotgun that her father had given her for her seventeenth birthday. With it she had shot snipe in the Okavango Delta, sand grouse in the Karoo, duck and geese on the great Zambezi, grouse on the highland moors, and pheasant, woodcock and partridge on some of the great English estates to which she and the ambassador had been invited.
She felt no offence at the sight of blood deliberately spilled, and in addition she had inherited her fair share of the family’s gambling instinct, so the contest intrigued her.
This was the second day, and the original field of nearly three hundred contestants had been whittled down to two, for it was a ‘one miss and out’ and a ‘winner take all’ competition. The entrance fee was one thousand US dollars a head, so there was well over a quarter of a million in the pot, and the tension was as hot and thick as minestrone soup as the American went to the plate.
He and Ramón Machado were the only two remaining contestants and they had shot level for the last twenty-three rounds. Finally, to break the deadlock and decide the winner, the Spanish judges had decreed that double birds must be taken from now on.
The American was a full-time professional. He followed the circuit in Spain and Portugal and Mexico and South America, and until last year in Monaco. Now, however, the tournaments had been banned in that tiny principality, after a mortally wounded pigeon had escaped from the stadium and winged its way over the palace walls to crash at last on to Princess Grace’s tea-table, spraying the lace table-cloth and the ladies’ tea-gowns with its blood. Prince Rainier had heard the screams halfway across his tiny realm, and that was the end of live pigeon tournaments in Monaco.
The American was Isabella’s age, not yet twenty-five years old, but his income was reputed to be well over a hundred thousand dollars a year. He was shooting a 12-gauge ‘side by side’ that had been made by that legendary gunsmith James Manton almost a century ago. Of course, the weapon had been rebarrelled and proofed to accommodate the longer modern cartridges and smokeless powders. However, the stock and action, complete with the engraved hammers, were original and retained the marvellous balance and pointability that old man James had built into it.
The young American took his stance on the plate, cocked the hammers, tucked the butt-stock under his right armpit, and pointed the double muzzles just over the centre of the semicircle of five woven wicker baskets that were placed thirty yards from where he stood.
Each basket contained a live pigeon. They were the feral birds of the type that live in flocks in the centre of most large cities. Big robust birds of variegated colours, bronze and blue and iridescent green, some of them with dark bands around their necks or patches of white in their wings.
To ensure a supply of birds, the shooting club had built a feeding-shed on the premises, a structure containing trays that were replenished daily with crushed maize and enclosed by drop-sides that could be released by remote control and trap the feeding birds within. Often a pigeon that escaped untouched from the killing-ground would head straight back for the feeding-shed. Many birds had been shot at numerous times before, and these were wily creatures who had learnt subtle little tricks to disturb the aim of the marksmen. In addition the bird-handlers who loaded them into the baskets knew how to pluck a feather or two from wing or tail to make them fly an erratic unpredictable course.
The baskets were operated by a random mechanism, with a delay of up to five seconds after the shooter had called ‘Pull’ for the release of a bird. Five seconds, for a man with sweaty palms, a racing heart and tens of thousands of dollars at stake, could seem like all eternity.
The baskets were thirty yards out, and the effective range of a 12-gauge shotgun was generally reckoned to be forty yards. Thus, the birds were released at almost extreme range, and in addition the retaining circle was a mere ten yards beyond the line of baskets.
The retaining circle was a low wooden wall, only eight inches high, painted white, which demarcated the boundary of the killing-ground. To qualify as a hit the carcass of the bird or, in the event of the blast of pellets tearing a bird into more than one piece, the largest portion of the carcass, calculated by weight, had to fall inside the low wooden wall. In this way, the shooter had to kill his bird as it rose from the release-basket within the ten yards before it passed over the periphery of the killing-ground.
The baskets were fanned out over a semicircle of forty-five degrees in front of him, there was no indication as to which lid would fly open at the command ‘Pull’ and no way to predict which direction the bird would take once it was released. It could cross either left or right, bear directly away, or sometimes – the most disconcerting of all – race straight towards the gunner’s face.
Added to all this, the pigeons were fast noisy fliers, that could jink and swerve in full flight, and now
the judges had decided that instead of a single bird two pigeons would be released simultaneously.
The American braced himself at the plate, crouching a little, left foot leading slightly like a boxer, and Isabella reached for Ramón’s hand and squeezed it lightly. They sat in the front bottom row of the covered grandstand in the padded leather chairs reserved for contestants and club officials.
‘Pull!’ said the American, and his Texan twang rang in the silence like a hammer on a steel anvil.
‘Miss!’ whispered Isabella. ‘Please miss!’
For a second and then another second, nothing happened. Then, with a crash, the lids of two of the baskets snapped open, numbers two and five, half left and full right from where the American stood, and both birds, hit by compressed-air jets from nozzles in the bottom of the baskets, launched into instant flight.
Number two went straight out, keeping low and going very fast. The American swung smoothly on to him, mounting the shotgun to his shoulder, and as it touched he fired. Five yards out from the basket, the silhouette of the pigeon was distorted by the rush of pellets. Its wingbeats froze in mid-stroke, and it died instantaneously in the air, and fell in a puff of feathers to hit well inside the ring and lie without further movement on the bright green turf.
The American swung on to the second bird. It had broken away towards his right, a glistening streak of burnished bronze, but at the sound of the first shot it jinked back inside the American’s swing so swiftly that he could not correct his aim in time. The shot was left of centre, but only inches out. Instead of slicing into heart and brain, the blast of pellets from the fully choked barrel tore away the bird’s right wing, and the horribly maimed creature tumbled and fluttered, streaming a trail of feathers through the air.
It struck only a foot inside the low white wooden wall, and a sigh went up from the watchers in the grandstand. Then, incredibly, the bird, one wing gone, pumped frantically with its remaining wing and found its feet. It tottered towards the wall, beating at the air ineffectually with one wing, uttering an agonized cawing sound in its puffed-out throat.