by Anne Weale
‘We’re nearly back to your hotel. I’ll see you to the door but say goodnight here.’
Before she realised what he meant, she was in his arms being kissed.
It was a long time since her last kiss and it hadn’t been anything like this. The man had been only a little taller than she was and had spent most of his life in a car or behind a desk. She had not felt herself overpowered, as she did now, by a superior force which, even though it wasn’t trying to subdue her, made her feel disturbingly helpless.
Nor had the other man’s mouth taken possession of hers with the same confident assurance that his kiss would be welcome. He had not been sure of himself. Put off by his lack of confidence, she had pushed him away.
Neal didn’t give her the option of accepting or rejecting his kiss. He held her securely against him, one arm round her waist and his other hand cradling her head while he made it clear to them both that he wanted to make love to her... and knew that she wanted it too but wasn’t ready to admit it.
It was so long since she had experienced such feelings that Sarah had almost forgotten how it felt to be swept away by the overwhelming emotions surging through her body now. She was intensely conscious of the tall, strong frame of the man who was pressing her to him.
She had thought that desire was over for her. That never again would she feel the wild, wanton longings she had once felt, with such disastrous results. But now, long dormant but not dead, they sprang into eager life as she felt the hard wall of his chest against her breasts, and the muscular breadth of his shoulders under her wandering hands.
‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind?’
The question was a husky murmur as he released her lips to explore, with his, the smooth texture of her cheek.
‘Let me go, Neal...please.’
With the flat of her hands, she attempted to make space between them, and, surprisingly, succeeded.
He did as she asked, stepping back and dropping his arms. ‘If you insist...though I can’t think why,’ he said sardonically. ‘It isn’t what you really want. It certainly isn’t what I want.’
She combed her hair with her fingers, trying to ignore the tingling and throbbing inside her. ‘We’re strangers... we’ve only just met. You may not mind that. I do. Attraction isn’t enough for me. I need to know people... trust them...before I—’ She left the sentence unfinished.
‘Trust is instinctive, like attraction,’ he answered. ‘All the important reactions we feel in our bones before our brains get to work. But if you want to postpone the pleasures in store for us, that’s your privilege.’
‘Men can take the pleasures for granted. Women can’t,’ she retorted somewhat tartly, remembering a relationship that hadn’t worked out. She began to move on.
‘I can’t argue with that,’ he said dryly. ‘But I think you know in your bones that it wouldn’t be like that for us.’
‘My bones aren’t always reliable.’
‘Have you had many lovers?’
Like his proposition at the table, the question startled her. In her world people didn’t ask such things. They repressed their curiosity...and much else.
‘Hardly any compared with your tally, I should imagine.’
He caught hold of her hand. ‘What makes you think I’m a womaniser?’
Knowing she wouldn’t be able to disengage her fingers unless he chose to let her, she said crossly, ‘Because that’s the way you come over.’
‘Time isn’t on my side, Sarah,’ he said gently. ‘The slow approach isn’t practical in these circumstances. You’re leaving town the day after tomorrow. By the time you come back, I shan’t have much time left. It will be a month after that before I get back to the UK. Between now and then, anything could happen. My motto is “seize the day”.’
‘Mine is “look before you leap”...especially before you leap into bed with someone.’
‘Are you naturally cautious, or has life made you that way?’
‘Most people get more sensible as they get older.’
How old did he think she was? she wondered. She knew she looked younger than her age because a lot of people expressed surprise when they found out what it was. All the things she had been through hadn’t left their marks on her skin as they did to some women. The ash-blonde look didn’t hide any threads of grey like the colour rinses of some of her stressed-out contemporaries.
‘Were you ever not sensible?’ he asked, on a teasing note.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, her tone wry. ‘At seventeen I was as crazy as they come.’ Crazy to break free. Madly in love. ‘But that was a long time ago.’
They had come to the gateway to her hotel. Still holding her hand, he came with her to the building’s imposing entrance.
‘If you decide to skip the official programme tomorrow night, you know where to contact me.’
In full view of the uniformed doorman who had already opened the door and was saluting, Neal lifted her hand and brushed a light kiss on the back of it. ‘Goodnight, Sarah. I hope we’ll meet again.’
He said goodnight in Nepali to the doorman before turning and striding away, leaving her staring after him, halftempted to call him back.
But she didn’t and moments later, without looking round, Neal went out of the gate and disappeared.
Sarah spent the free morning before the group’s departure by air to Lukla wandering round town, grappling with the realisation that she didn’t really want to go. She wanted to see Neal again more than she wanted to do the trek. Perhaps she would have felt differently if the others in the group had been more congenial. But they weren’t, and she knew that situation wasn’t going to improve with closer acquaintance.
After a while she went into the garden behind Pilgrims Book House and ordered a pot of jasmine tea. There were not many people there that morning but presently another woman on her own wandered in and sat down not far from Sarah. She looked interesting and Sarah would have liked to start up a conversation but the other woman began writing postcards.
Some time later she rose and hurried in the direction of the lavatories, leaving her pack at the table. Either she was unusually casual about her belongings or her errand was urgent.
While she was gone, more people passed through the garden, either coming from the bookshop or going in by the back way. Sarah kept an eye on the pack. Perhaps there wasn’t a high risk that an opportunist thief would steal it, but such things did happen.
Suddenly the pack’s owner reappeared, very unsteady on her feet and covered with blood. She reeled back to her table and sank down, looking as if she might pass out at any moment.
At this point a waiter arrived with her order, took in the streams of blood and said worriedly, ‘Is there are a problem?’
‘Yes, there is,’ said Sarah, taking charge. ‘This lady needs medical attention. Please call a taxi...quickly.’ She bent over the injured woman, trying to determine how seriously she was hurt. ‘What happened? Can you tell me?’
‘I was sick...it made my head swim...I fell against something hard. I think I knocked myself out I’m not certain...’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after you,’ Sarah said reassuringly. Luckily, she had the address of a recommended clinic on a slip of paper in her passport. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Rose Jones.’ She burst into tears.
The clinic’s waiting room, leading off the reception area, was crowded with people when Sarah and Rose arrived. But, seeing the state Rose was in, the woman on duty at the desk quickly arranged for a colleague to show them to a room at the back of the premises.
‘The doctor won’t keep you long,’ said the second woman.
Rose, by now a bit more composed, sat down and closed her eyes. Sarah looked round the room. In the centre was a high examination couch. Everything was very clean and orderly. She knew that the clinic was staffed by foreign doctors and was famous for its research into the causes and treatment of the illness jokingly known as the Kathmandu Quickstep.
<
br /> Moments later the door opened and Neal walked in. His left eyebrow shot up in surprise at the sight of Sarah. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘What are you doing here?’ she countered.
But already he’d switched his attention to Rose. ‘Hello...I’m Dr Kennedy. Let’s get you up on the couch and I’ll be taking a look while you tell me what happened.’
As he drew her to her feet and assisted her onto the couch, Sarah gaped at him in astonishment. He had told her he was a journalist, a staff writer on The Journal. He’d said nothing about being a doctor. Had he misled her deliberately? If so...why?
CHAPTER THREE
ALTHOUGH she had flinched and quivered when Sarah had tried very gently to clean up round the injury, Rose submitted to Neal’s examination without any nervous reactions. She repeated her explanation of what had happened and lay still while he worked on the wound.
‘It’s actually quite superficial,’ he told her. ‘The vomiting sounds like a food poisoning. Where did you eat last night?’
She told him, describing her meal which had finished with apple pie and curd, as yogurt was called locally.
‘Could be the curd,’ he said.
Sarah watched him perform various routine tests, including making Rose follow with her eyes the movements of his finger from side to side and from the tip of her nose to a point several feet away from it.
He then asked her what shots she had had before coming to Nepal and when she had last had a tetanus booster.
‘Right: the nurse will give you a shot to settle your tummy and then you can rest upstairs for half an hour before going back to your hotel. Take it easy for the rest of the day. Tomorrow you should feel OK,’ he told her.
Before leaving the room, he said quietly to Sarah, ‘I’ll have a word with you later...while she’s lying down.’
A few minutes later a nurse came to give Rose an injection. Then, with Sarah following, she helped Rose up two flights of stairs to a small room with a bed in it.
‘You won’t leave me,’ Rose appealed to Sarah, while she was having a blanket spread over her.
‘No, I may pop out for a coffee, but I’ll be here when you come down,’ Sarah promised.
In the light of what Rose had confided on the way to the clinic, she was in no state to be left on her own.
Neal was at the foot of the staircase when Sarah returned to the ground floor. ‘We’ll go round the corner for a coffee,’ he said briskly. ‘How did you come to get involved?’
As they left the clinic, Sarah explained what had happened from her point of view.
‘Now perhaps you’d explain why you fed me all that stuff about being a journalist,’ she finished indignantly.
‘I am a journalist... a medical journalist. I qualified as a doctor, then came to the conclusion it would be more useful to write about how to stay healthy rather than spend my time lobbing out pills to people who, in many cases, had wrecked their health either from lack of information or from deliberate disregard of the basic rules of self preservation,’ he added sardonically.
‘You didn’t say you were on the staff of this clinic.’
‘I’m not. I’m a friend of someone who is and as they were under pressure when I came by to tell him something, he asked me to take a look at Rose Jones. Is she here on her own or with friends?’
‘She’s alone at the moment. She came with her husband. It’s their honeymoon...but it’s gone wrong. He’s somewhere up in the mountains and she’s by herself. I gather they had a big row and she came back to Kathmandu on her own.’
‘It’s not the first time that’s happened, and it won’t be the last,’ Neal said dryly. ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. She didn’t like the rough and ready conditions in most of the trekking lodges. The very basic amenities were too much for her delicate sensibilities. She’d had no idea how tough it was going to be.’
‘I don’t think either of them had. They’d done some fell-walking together and Rose enjoyed that. But this trip went wrong from the moment they arrived. Apparently it was arranged by some people who run a small shop in their home town and have Nepalese connections. Even the hotel in Kathmandu where they spent their first night, and where she’s staying now, isn’t up to the standard they expected. But I can’t understand her husband letting her come back alone.’
‘Perhaps he can’t understand her being prepared to desert him so soon after marrying him,’ said Neal.
Preoccupied by her concern for Rose, and by Neal’s revelation that he was a qualified doctor, Sarah had been paying no attention to her surroundings. Only now did she realise that they were in familiar territory. The building looming ahead was the Yak and Yeti where they had come the night before last.
In the bar they sat at the same window table where they had had drinks.
‘Coffee...tea...or something stronger?’ Neal asked.
‘Tea for me, please.’ Reminded by where they were of the woman called Julia, she wondered if, yesterday, they had got together.
‘It could be tricky contacting Rose’s husband,’ he said, looking thoughtful. ‘Have you any idea when they were due to get back if their trek had gone to plan?’
‘I didn’t go into that. She was crying...on the verge of hysterics. I just tried to calm her down. I think she was fairly distraught before she threw up and knocked herself out in the loo. It’s a nervous-making situation: being alone in a nasty hotel in an unknown city after a major row with your bridegroom.’
Neal said, ‘Where did you go for your honeymoon?’
For a few seconds the question fazed her. Then she collected herself and said calmly, ‘I’ve never been on a honeymoon.’
He lifted an eyebrow. ‘You surprise me. I would have guessed that you’d walked up the aisle very young and it hadn’t worked out.’
‘You would have guessed wrong. Like you I’m a dedicated single.’
‘With women who look the way you do that usually means a career conflict. You said you worked with computers. Was that a throwaway reference to something extremely high-powered? Are you a computer scientist at the cutting edge of research?’
Sarah laughed and shook her head. ‘I’m the computer equivalent of the man who comes to fix the washing machine or the dishwasher...except that I’m female and I fix personal computers. But I have no idea how to fix Rose’s problem. There has to be some way to contact her husband, surely?’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll look into it. Do you have the time to take her back to her hotel? What time are you leaving town?’
It pleased her that he thought her capable of being a computer scientist and that he hadn’t forgotten today was the day the group left.
‘Not till after lunch. We’re leaving for the airport at two and spending the night at Lukla to start the trek tomorrow.’
Neal leaned towards her, his forearms resting on his knees, his long fingers interlaced. ‘I wish you weren’t leaving so soon. I feel this is one of those times that “taken at the flood leads on to fortune”...at least in the sense of some memorable days, and possibly nights, together.’
She didn’t know how to respond but just then the waiter returned and saved her from saying anything.
She watched him unloading his tray, thinking it far more likely that a brief affair with Neal, rather than leading on to fortune, would fulfil the continuation of that famous quotation and, like so much of her life, be ‘bound in shallows and in miseries’.
‘When you were here before, did you go to Bhaktapur?’ he asked, as the waiter went away.
Sarah knew the moment of truth could not be put off any longer. ‘I haven’t been here before. This is my first visit. I’m sorry my T-shirt misled you. It was lent me by a friend. But I should have put you right.’
Her confession was followed by a long moment of silence. She could not read his expression. Had the lie by omission made him distrust her?
‘Why didn’t you?’ he asked.
‘It’s hard to explain. I’m not
usually careless with the truth. I suppose I wanted you to see me as someone more interesting than I am. We were strangers on a plane and I thought you might be bored if I admitted to being a “newbie”.’
As a journalist, used to computer-speak, he would know that was the somewhat derogatory name given to the inexperienced by those who knew their way around.
‘Who makes you feel you’re not interesting?’ he asked.
‘No one...not in my own world. But your world is different. I’ve read enough to know that real travellers haven’ t much time for tourists. I’m not even much of a tourist. The truth is I’ve never been anywhere. This is my first time abroad, can you believe?’
‘Considering how comfortable you seem, I do find that hard to believe. When I saw you in the airport at Doha, I took you for someone who’d chalked up a lot of air miles.’
‘I wish I had. I always wanted to travel, but my life went another way.’ She glanced at her watch. Already it was fifteen minutes since they’d left the clinic. ‘We mustn’t be too long.’ She began to pour out the tea. ‘I’m glad I’ve got it off my chest. I didn’t like not being honest with you.’
‘As long as you promise not to do it again, I’ll forgive you. Only straight answers from now on...agreed?’
For a second or two she hesitated. If she agreed, would he want to open doors she would prefer to keep closed?
Another quotation from Shakespeare came into her head. This above all: to thine own self be true...thou canst not then be false to any man.
‘Agreed,’ she said firmly, handing him a cup of tea. ‘Tell me about this place you mentioned...Bhaktapur? What’s special about it? I don’t think Naomi has been there. She’s the friend who lent me the T-shirt and made me wear-in my boots.’
‘What’s special about Bhaktapur is that it’s still the way Khatmandu used to be when the only people who came here were mountaineers and hippies. I don’t think Bhaktapur will stay the way it is now. Tourism changes places... always for the worse unfortunately. But right now it’s still a magic place. You mustn’t go home without seeing it...especially the golden gate. It’s not as famous as San Francisco’s Golden Gate, but if someone could only see one of them, I’d recommend Bhaktapur’s.’
