by Anne Weale
The first person to leave, quite early, was the frail-looking General Foster. Before saying goodbye to his host, he came to where Anny had been standing, looking at the moonlit sea, since detaching herself from a group a few minutes earlier.
‘When one reaches my advanced age there’s always the possibility that one is looking one’s last on all things lovely,’ he said to her, taking it for granted that she would know he was quoting from a poem by Walter de la Mare.
‘When we were introduced, I had one of the lapses of memory elderly people suffer from. I didn’t immediately realise where I had seen you before. Although it’s not public knowledge yet, allow me to tell you that the man you are going to marry is one of the most estimable people it has been my pleasure to know. Perhaps even you aren’t aware of the extent of his kindnesses. I belong to an organisation which assists elderly expatriates such as myself should they fall on hard times. Mr Carlisle has been extraordinarily generous in financing medical care and, in two cases, repatriation. I also happen to know he has given several very substantial endowments to French charities.’
‘General... what makes you think that Mr Carlisle and I are...might be involved with each other in that way?’
‘He told me so...but even without his disclosure, I might have guessed it. When two people are deeply attached to one another, even before they inform their family and friends they tend to reveal their feelings. More than once, during dinner, I noticed him looking at you, and you looking at him, in a manner which confirmed what he had already confided to me.’
‘What and when did he confide in you?’
‘A few months ago. He had left me alone in his library to look through a portfolio of some very fine botanical drawings he has collected. Among them was a water-colour drawing of a beautiful young woman... yourself. When I asked who you were, he said, “The painting should not be in there. It belongs in another portfolio.” And then, after some hesitation, he added, “That is the girl I hope, eventually, will live here...as my wife.” Seeing you together tonight, I gather it won’t be too long before you announce your engagement?’
She couldn’t think what to say.
Misinterpreting her silence, the old man patted her arm. ‘You can rely on my discretion. If there are reasons why you are keeping it private for the time being, no one will hear it from me. I merely wanted to tell you how much I admire your future husband. To have won such a man’s heart, you must have a character to match your lovely young face. I hope we shall meet again. Goodnight, Miss Howard,’
He turned away, speaking to some of the others on his way to take leave of Van.
The General’s revelation left Anny feeling devastated. Could it be true that, as recently as he claimed, Van had still believed they would get back together? Where had the painting come from? She had never sat for a portrait. She could only surmise that it must have been painted from the photographs Emily had taken on the night of Kate’s wedding. For Van to have had that done supported the premise that his real feelings towards her were very different from those he had displayed so far today.
The General’s going did not break up the party. The rest of the guests were still there at midnight when Anny could stand the strain of being sociable no longer.
She made her way to where Van was deep in conversation with another man. When her approach made them pause, she said, ‘I’m very tired and would like to go to bed. Will you excuse me?’
‘By all means. Goodnight.’
The look he gave her was curiously impersonal. It was hard to believe the General had really noticed him watching her with the ardent gaze of a lover during dinner.
Yet there was no denying that, two or three times, while Van was attending to the animated chatter of the women on either side of him, she had stolen glances at him, perhaps with her heart in her eyes instead of masking feelings as she was now.
‘Goodnight.’ She gave a polite smile to the man with him. Not bothering to say goodnight to anyone else, she went up to her room.
For a long time she paced the bedroom, considering the situation, unable at first to see any resolution. She remembered Emily’s half-resigned, half-exasperated exclamation outside her London club. ‘Stalemate... deadlock...impasse!’ And so it remained, unless...
As she realised that there could be only one way to break through the barricade of pride which was making Van appear contemptuous of her while she pretended to dislike him, Anny became impatient for the guests to leave.
It was obvious that if Van still loved her, he would never come to her room and force himself on her. Those threats had been made out of rage: the understandable feeling of a man confronting a woman who had rejected everything he had offered her.
It was she who must make the first move towards reconciliation.
As soon as the guests had gone and Van came upstairs to bed, she would go to his room and ask him about what the General had told her.
It was nearly one in the morning when the last guests departed. Anny waited for another fifteen minutes before leaving her room to go to what had once been the contessa’s bedroom and now, she assumed, was where Van slept. She had undressed, let down her hair and taken off her make-up. Now she was wearing a short nightgown bought in Nice and the terry robe and matching mules provided in the bathroom.
Her heart beating in nervous thumps, she went softly along the corridor to the door she had so often passed through in times gone by. There was no response to her knock. When, thinking he must be in the bathroom, she opened the door, there was no light on. She felt for the switch. In the flood of light she saw that it was indeed Van’s bedroom. The bedclothes were turned down and there was a photograph of Kate and her husband with two small children and two older ones on top of a chest of drawers. She recognised the dust jacket of a novel by one of Van’s favourite writers on top of a stack of new books on the night table. But where was the room’s occupant?
She found him where she had guessed he might be, sitting in the moonlight by the swimming pool. There wasn’t a breath of wind but the surface of the water was no longer glass-calm as it had been earlier in the day. He must have had a quick swim and now, like her, was wearing a robe and had rough-dried his wet dark hair with the towel flung down on the flagstones.
For once he did not get up as she walked towards him but remained lounging in the chair. His damp and dishevelled hair gave him a raffish air. Under a full moon his skin, now shadowed with stubble, looked even more darkly bronzed than by day. The shifting reflections from the water made his eyes gleam. There was a bottle of champagne and a half-empty glass at his elbow. She wondered if he had had too much to drink. She had seen him angry before, but never out of control. Tonight he looked wild and dangerous. From years ago came the echo of Julie’s voice saying, ‘If someone drove him too far, I think Van could become very uncivilised.’
‘You said you were tired,’ he said brusquely. ‘What are you doing down here?’
‘I thought you would come to my room. You said that was what you intended.’
‘I changed my mind,’ he said curtly. ‘Go back to bed. I shan’t disturb your sleep.’
‘You’ve been disturbing my sleep almost every night since we separated, Van. When I told you I was tired, I didn’t mean physically. What tires me is living a lie.’
She paused to take a deep breath before plunging on. ‘I’m sick of pretending to myself that I can live without you. I can’t. I shall never be able to. If you’ll have me...I want to come back.’
The sinews at the angles of his jaw were visible knots of tension.
‘Why do you want to come back?’
‘Because I love you. You’re part of me. According to General Foster, I’m still part of you. He says you have a painting of me and you told him it was the woman you expected to marry. Had he got that muddled...got it wrong?’
Van sprang to his feet and covered the distance between them in a couple of strides.
Grabbing her upper arms with fingers which felt like steel clamps
, he glared down at her upturned face.
‘I could wring your neck. It would give me great pleasure to throttle you! Do you realise how many years of happiness you’ve wasted? If you knew it was a mistake, why in God’s name didn’t you come back to me? Why did I have to drag you back here by force? Did you think that my feelings for you would evaporate as soon as you weren’t there?’
In spite of his bruising grip, she didn’t flinch or protest. She could see he was ferociously angry, his temper a hair’s-breadth from snapping point.
‘I lied to you this afternoon,’ he said savagely. ‘I told you there’d been other women. There haven’t. Five years is a long time for a man to be celibate. It must be hard for a monk. It was a bloody sight harder for me. But there was nothing I could do about it The woman I wanted had walked out to marry a career.’
Then, like a hawser taking impossible strain, he lost his last shred of control. With a sound like the snarl of a tiger, he snatched her up in his arms and tossed her into the pool.
Briefly, Anny went under, but with her mouth closed and her breath held. Instead of coming up gasping and spluttering, she was able to yell some extremely rude words at him.
‘Guttersnipe!’ Van shouted back. And then, in a transformation as startling as his sudden rage, he began to laugh. Stripping off his robe and flinging it down beside the discarded towel, he leapt in to join her, causing a surge of water which almost swamped her.
As one powerful butterfly stroke brought him alongside, he said, ‘That’s better. being wet makes you look like my mermaid again.’ Treading water, he hauled her against him.
Sometimes, in the past, they’d indulged in wild rough-and-tumbles, although only because it was fun to play at resistance and conquest. This time she didn’t resist but accepted the punitive kisses with joyful submissiveness.
A few minutes later, he propelled them both to the nearest steps and bundled her up them ahead of him, the thin nightgown clinging to her body like some exotic and transparent seaweed
‘You won’t need that any more,’ he said, stripping it off her. For some moments they gazed at each other, both breathing hard, both with bright drops of water spangling their naked bodies.
‘Now I’m going to make up for all the nights when I wanted you and you weren’t here,’ he said huskily.
Much later, they had a hot shower together in one of the changing rooms. While they were towelling their hair, Van said, ‘I’m sorry about this afternoon in the belvedere. I didn’t intend to be such a swine to you. But you looked so damnably self-possessed and stand-offish that it drove me insane.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Everything you said was true. I did want you...as I do again now,’ she told him, smiling.
They didn’t want to go indoors. The night scents from the garden, the star-spangled mystery of the universe overhead and the calm, moonlit surface of the pool were all part of their joyous reunion. They took armfuls of thick bathing towels onto the loggia and spread them over the damp cushions of a luxuriously wide lounger where, not long ago, they had made frenzied love without stopping to dry themselves first.
Now they could take their time, rediscovering all the erotic pleasures of the past which somehow, after long abstinence, induced even greater rapture.
At the end, Anny wept with happiness as she lay in his arms and felt their hearts beating in unison.
She woke up to find herself cocooned in more of the thick soft white towels of the kind found only in the grandest hotels or the bathrooms of the ultra-rich.
She could tell by the position of the sun that it was very early. No breath of air stirred the surface of the pool. No footsteps or voices disturbed the peace of the garden. She could hear nothing, not even birdsong.
As she lay, listening to the silence, she remembered a TV interview with a distinguished musician in which he had said noise was an enemy of thought. Now, in a place where there were no intrusive noises, she understood how great a luxury silence had become in the big city world she had come from. As a child she had taken it for granted. As a woman she had lost it. But Van hadn’t. For him, silence was an everyday pleasure.
Van...the memory of last night brought her to full alertness. She knew it had not been a dream. The fact that she was here was proof of that and anyway dreams were never like reality. There was always something missing, or something wrong, or they were cut short at a crucial moment.
Last night had not been a fantasy invented by her subconscious. It had been real. But where was the man who had shared it with her? Why had he left her to sleep here?
As she sat up, she saw the baskets. On the floor round the wide cushioned daybed where she was lying stood basket after basket of roses. They could only have come from the flower market in Nice and what they must have cost she couldn’t imagine. Even the last time she was here—and that was years ago—an ordinary bouquet of roses had been quite expensive. Here, massed in the baskets, were the makings of hundreds of bouquets.
How deeply she must have been sleeping not to hear them being put in position. Had he done that himself, or only directed the operation? If the latter, how amazed his assistants must have been. Such extravagant gestures belonged to the belle époque at the start of the century, not to this down-to-earth end of it.
Anny unwrapped herself. Inside the cocoon she was naked. She draped one of the towels around herself like a sarong. While she was doing this she saw that, beyond the phalanx of roses, there were other flowers. Carnations had been laid on the floor in groups of three. It took her a moment or two to grasp that the stems formed arrows, and the arrows led out of the loggia and round the edge of the pool.
Her clothes and shoes had disappeared, but a pair of rope-soled mules had been left at the edge of the loggia. Wondering where the arrows would lead her, Anny wished she had a comb and a mirror to sort out her tousled hair.
Realising the changing rooms would have mirrors, but wondering if they would be locked, she went to the door of the women’s room and tried the handle. It opened. Within was a spacious changing area with handbasins, showers and lavatories. On the counter surrounding the immaculate basins stood a neat row of toiletries and a tray holding a comb and various hair accessories visitors might want to borrow. There were even two hairdryers. If she had wanted to, she could have showered and blowdried her hair. But she was far too impatient to follow the arrows to do more than the essentials. She couldn’t wait to join Van, wherever he was.
At the far end of the pool, the arrows didn’t turn in the direction of the house but led downhill, towards the sea. Halfway down, on the belvedere terrace, she paused to look over the balustrade. Yesterday the bay had been empty, a distant ferry to Corsica the only shipping in sight.
Now, a few hundred feet below her, a smaller vessel lay at anchor. The sight of it made her gasp in astonished recognition. What was Sea Dreams doing here?
She ran the rest of the way down. When she reached the beach, the appetising aroma of frying ham was drifting across the water from the schooner’s galley.
She cupped her hands round her mouth. ‘Ahoy Sea Dreams!’
Almost at once Van came on deck. He was wearing a pair of white shorts. His tanned shoulders gleamed in the sunlight.
‘Good morning. May I come aboard?’ she called.
‘If you haven’t forgotten how to swim.’
She laughed and unfastened the towel, letting it fall at her feet. For a moment she spread wide her arms, delighting in the air on her body, the sun in her eyes, the tall figure watching her from the schooner.
Then she kicked off the espadrilles and stepped gingerly over the pebbles, giving a little mew as the cold water swirled round her ankles. Once she was swimming it felt warmer and by the time she reached the schooner it felt wonderful. She didn’t make straight for the ladder but circled the hull, pretending to be inspecting it and to be unaware that Van was following her round, watching her move through the clear water.
‘You see...I haven’t forgotten.’ She
rolled over, swimming a lazy backstroke, smiling.
‘I didn’t think you would, but right now it’s time to stop showing off that beautiful body and come and have breakfast.’
He was waiting at the top of the ladder, holding out a long terry robe when she stepped on deck. She slipped her arms in the sleeves and pulled it around her. Then Van turned her to face him and kissed her.
‘When I woke up and found the roses...it was like that poem,’ she murmured, when he released her mouth.
‘What poem?’ Van’s voice was husky.
She snuggled against him. ‘“...and I will make thee beds of roses, and a thousand fragrant posies.” What time did you have to get up to arrange my lovely awakening?’
‘Not that early. I had to find something to do to stop myself waking you up before you were ready to wake.’
‘If you had, I shouldn’t have minded.’
Van put her gently away from him. ‘I wanted to talk to you, Anny, and for that you needed to be rested. Sit down at the table and I’ll bring you some coffee.’
Since her last sight of Sea Dreams, the schooner had undergone a major refit. Taking in the details, Anny wondered what changes had been made between decks.
‘Where did you find her?’ she asked, when Van reappeared with a tray.
‘I’ve had her a long time, but yesterday the guy who looks after her and crews for me took her up the coast and didn’t come back until late. If things worked out for us, I wanted her to be a surprise for you.’
‘If things worked out for us?’ she queried.
‘We’ll come to that in a minute. I’m hungry.’ Having unloaded the tray onto the table set for two, he returned to the galley.
Anny, whose usual breakfast was an apple and a carton of yogurt, suddenly found she was ravenous.
When Van put a plate of ham, eggs and fried banana in front of her, she couldn’t wait to tuck in. There was also a napkin-lined basket of hot croissants from which she deduced that the galley now had a microwave.
