I return to bed and lie on my back and my hand creeps between my thighs and I come, weeping, eyes closed, mouth clamped shut in silence.
The sky is still grey with the very earliest dawn light when I hear through my sleep the front doorbell ringing, It rings a second and a third time before I get to it, eyes half-shut, in a tatty white bathrobe that I know is far too short for decency.
When I open the door, Leo and Teresa are standing there, Teresa with a slightly enquiring smile, her eyebrows arched.
“Ah,” she says. “You’re not quite ready yet”
“Ready for what?”
“The trip to the island.”
“Hmm?”
It seems that last night when I was indoors, Teresa asked Kit if he and I would like to join them for a boat-trip out to the island in the bay tomorrow morning, and maybe a picnic. They would pick us up early. Kit had accepted with alacrity – and then forgot all about it.
I wake him up with a vigorous thump on his head with a pillow. He’s grumpy at first, and then hungover, and then gradually, as he showers and shaves and rehydrates with tea, he begins to whistle and hum and I know that he is suddenly rather looking forward to the idea of a day on the island.
He wears jeans and deck shoes and a T-shirt and his linen jacket, and, just to cap the Italian playboy image, his shades. I’ll wear deck shoes too, and my short white cotton dress, and will sling my red jumper over my shoulders. Carry my straw hat.
“Swimming trunks, do you think?” he asks me.
“Shouldn’t bother,” I say, feeling mischievous. “We can always skinny-dip.”
He reaches out and pinches my bum. “I’ll see you downstairs when you’ve showered.”
Head back, eyes closed, face and breasts and belly and thighs streaming with hot water, when I hear the bathroom door open and then the shower curtain part. I’m thrilled. It’s been ages, too long, since Kit and I showered together. His gentle hands start to soap my back, massage my shoulders, plant tiny kisses in the dips and hollows, and I arch my back as his hand reaches down between my thighs and I twist my head to see him.
It’s Teresa. She has undressed, I can see her clothes on the bed in the room beyond, and her hand is between my thighs, caressing softly, her eyes steady on mine, knowing I am transfixed, helpless. I cannot move. She puts her other hand around the back of my neck as if to hold me still. But she needn’t bother. I am helpless and still, a willing victim, burning, immobile. I even slide my feet a little farther apart over the slick tiles to encourage her to touch me. I want to feel her fingers inside me. I have never done that before, with a woman, and never thought I would. It cannot be real. She moves her head slowly and sensuously under the falling water, as if feeling it thrumming on the top of her head like a hundred tiny fingertips, then she raises her face up to it, her mouth a little open, catching the warm water and letting it trickle out again over her face and throat. Then she presses herself hard against me, our naked flanks slippery against each other, and turns my head and devours my lips with hers. The water pours down over us, plastering our hair to our cheeks, mingled maybe with my tears, and I cannot move or speak and I do not stir. The kissing is slow and deep. I pull back a little so as to trail my tongue over her lips more lightly, but she does not let me, pulls me closer in again, our breasts sliding against each other, our nipples hard and tingling. She turns me half-sideways so that she can skim her flattened palm over my nipples, murmurs endearments in my ear, punctuated with flickers of her tongue against my earlobe, in the shell of my ear, gently probing – endearments in a language I do not understand, but that I understand perfectly. Then her hand moves down over my arched belly and between my legs again, and she reaches her other arm around my waist and holds me tight against her, curved into each other like spoons, and I stretch my legs apart even wider and feel weak and I have to turn and hold myself steady against her and bury my face against her, my mouth closing on her breasts and sucking them in deep, greedily. She rests her head on top of mine now, almost motherly, whispering what a beautiful girl I am, what a beautiful young girl, what a greedy girl, how hungry! Her fingers slick between my swollen lips and ease back and forth over the head of my clitoris, too slowly. I want to beg her to press harder, to reach down and press her hand harder into me with my own hand, but she will not let me, I know. I rest against her, utterly passive and obedient, knowing she knows best, and as I come, richly and shudderingly against her warm, moving hand ticklish with foam, I raise my face up to her again and want her, need her to kiss me again. She kisses me and then murmurs what a good, sweet, beautiful young girl I am, she kisses me on the top of my head, she nuzzles her mouth into my wet hair, she covers my face and neck with quick little kisses, she croons softly like a mother to her baby. I fall against her then as I might have done against my mother years ago, and she raises my face gently with a forefinger nestling under my chin and kisses me on the lips and parts my lips with the tip of her tongue and we stay like that for hours, it seems, just kissing, and the water cascades down around us and over us and through us, melting us, it seems. Melting the very heart of us.
And none of it matters. Afterwards we kiss and laugh and dress and return to normal. As if it is all normal.
Leo and Teresa are highly organized. I knew they would be, somehow. It’s bliss.
The car is a huge silver Merc. When Leo opens the boot for me to put my bag in, I see there’s this vast, old-fashioned hamper filled with bottles of wine and bread and cheese and olives and oil and . . . the Full Mediterranean Diet Plan.
Kit and I sit in the back and keep smiling conspiratorially at each other on that long drive down to the coast. The black leather of the seat is warm under me and I feel wet again already. I cannot stop thinking about it, and more of it, please, more. Down and down we go, round the hairpin bends, down from the hills to the sun-scorched coast, through olive orchards and lemon orchards, among cork oaks and sweet chestnuts, and towards the sea, ancient plane trees and stone-pines with the heat shimmering on their evergreen-grey canopies, and the odour of pine in the air so rich and intoxicating that I feel almost like bursting into tears, like a little girl. I squeeze Kit’s hand.
The harbourside is chaos, as usual, especially as the local fishermen are landing a huge catch of pilchards that they have just ring-netted out in the bay. It’s a cliché, I know, but these young Italian fishermen, these gods – glossy black hair, lean-muscled shoulders tanned dark and slick with sweat, their tight, white sleeveless T-shirts stretched across their chests, flecked brilliant red with fish blood, shouting and laughing and swaggering at each other – Teresa knows I’m admiring them because she is too, and a knowing girls’ grin flickers between us. I can’t believe it, but that brief exchange of looks makes me feel breathless, wetter still between my legs. What on earth is going to happen? I wonder. Everything, murmurs an inner voice. Everything is going to happen.
Leo gets a local boatman to motor us out to the island: hard-faced, bearded, scarily competent, navigating out past the rocks in the bay with one casual, strong hand on the wheel. Cigarette dangling from his grim mouth.
On the way out, I ask Teresa if anyone actually lives on the island.
“Not without our permission,” she says mildly.
I gawp at her. “You don’t mean . .?”
She smiles, lays her hand on my arm, a tiny caress. “I’m sorry, I thought you realized. It is our island. Leo’s, officially.” She looks away towards her husband and back to me again, her eyebrows arched even more ironically than ever. “My marito is, officially, you know, the Count of the Island of San Michele.”
I swallow. OK: I’m impressed.
“There will only be the four of us on the island,” says Teresa, raising her arms above her head and turning her face into the sun and stretching languidly. “Free as birds.”
The journey out to the island takes almost an hour, and the middle passage gets pretty bumpy, but as we draw near to the island both Kit’s and my nerves are c
almed by the awesome view, and the thought that it is the private property of one man. On the south side, intimidating sandstone cliffs rise sheer from the sea, deeply ribbed and eroded like the sculpted relief of an ancient forest or the bones of a whale. Inland I can see further sheer cliffs of brilliant white – marble, surely. And directly ahead, where the boat is taking us, a deep gully between high cliffs, with a small jetty at the back, in cold shade.
We disembark, Leo extending a chivalrous hand to me, and then ordering the boatman to carry our hamper up the treacherous stone steps to the cliff top. We follow him up.
The island is a dream. It cannot be real. I know Kit is thinking the same, because we have both fallen silent in wonder.
We walk for ten minutes along the cliff top, and then strike inland a little way, down a slope to a kind of sunken plateau. And there, in the middle, surrounded by more trees, is an immaculate, tiny marble temple.
Leo gives one of his rare smiles. “Not an original, of course,” he says. “Built by one of my more eccentric ancestors, in the eighteenth century. You would call it a folly, I believe.”
The temple has a narrow, shady portico, and two cedarwood doors that swing open on massive hinges. Inside is just one small, stone-floored room, with a couch on either side, a small, low table in the middle, which looks incongruously Indian if anything, and a heavy oak dresser along the back. Leo orders the boatman to deposit the hamper on the dresser, and tips him generously for his pains. The boatman nods curtly and leaves.
Immediately Leo starts pulling the couches out onto the portico– Kit helps him – and then the low table, and finds plates and glasses in the dresser and brings them out too. Then he unloads the hamper and soon the table is covered in food and the glasses are filled with wine. In no time at all we are reclining on the couches, twirling glasses of iced champagne between our fingers while Leo, more relaxed than I have seen him so far, extols the beauty of his island, and its ancientness.
He tells us that holidays were invented here, in this great bay sweeping south of Rome, overlooking the sparkling Tyrrhenian Sea. He says that Rome was the first city in history that people felt a need to escape from, on occasion. “We all need a break from the usual, the habitual,” he says. “From custom. Something different, to reawaken us.”
“Cum dignitate otium,” he murmurs, conjuring brilliantly with faulty but vivid English, the poet Cicero on his farm in his peaceful Sabine valley, and other wealthy Romans here, Emperors even, in their great villas, enjoying their rest and recreation.
“And what recreations!” he says, eyes half-closed. “You know about the Emperor Tiberius, I suppose? The notorious passage in Suetonius, where he describes how the aged emperor built an entire palace to lustful pleasures hereabouts, with grottoes where groups of two or three young people would perform sexual acts for him. And where little boys were trained to swim underneath him when he was swimming and nibble at him. He called them his little minnows.” Both Leo and Teresa are smiling at this. “Do I shock you?”
Kit says nothing. I say, too firmly, “No.” My mind is filled and distracted by weirdly vivid images of those groups of two or three young people, acrobatically entwined, murmurous and ecstatic, in grottoes and shady groves, on an island just such as this . . .
“Oh, and he kept a pet mullet, encrusted with jewels,” he added. “Or was that Claudius? I forget now.”
Later, we go for a walk. Just Kit and I, hand in hand, still dreaming, saying little, dozy with wine but excited too. It is all too marvellous.
We walk up a narrow valley thick with grasses and scrub: scrub oak, yellow broom and purple sage, thyme, lavender, all headily aromatic, broken here and there by the red bark of arbutus. And such wild flowers: cyclamen, and tall asphodel, and white star of Bethlehem, and higher up between the granite outcrops, brilliant purple and yellow rock-roses. There is terebinth and carob, and down below in yet another secluded valley we can see tamarisk and oleander growing and swaying gently in the breeze beside a trickling streambed. We see swallowtail butterflies, and a hoopoe, and way overhead a big bird of prey: a buzzard, probably.
“Can’t we live here?” I say suddenly to Kit. I always say this when we go somewhere beautiful. “Rent the temple off them. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”
Kit smiles and says nothing. He knows it’s all a dream.
That long summer day passed so slowly – that last day, as I think of it now, that last day of the old life. We returned to the folly and dozed along with Leo and Teresa, they in each other’s arms on one couch, Kit and I on the other. Stirring and waking at one point, I saw that Leo’s hand was between Teresa’s thighs, and they saw me watching them and smiled back at me. I smiled, and closed my eyes, and tried to sleep again.
And when I awoke, much later, it was with a shock that I realized that the sun was setting over the mountains to the west and coming down over the bay to drown in the water before us, and it was rapidly getting dark. I asked when we were heading back, at which Leo stood abruptly.
“Soon,” he said. “But first, I promised to show you something, to explain the statue that you saw at the villa- the girl in ecstasy, yes?” And he held out his hand to me.
I stood, and he led me away from the folly and down into the valley and we walked for a long time and it grew dark. I was afraid, but more than afraid – my palms damp with sweat, unable to speak. And then we came down from the valley to another cove, shut in on one side by fierce rocks that ran straight down into the sea. And from here we could see the sunset perfectly. Oh no, I thought – this is just too clumsy a seduction attempt. I’m going to giggle.
But rather than lay me down in the sand and tell me he needed me, he desired me, he had to have me, Leo retained a firm grip on my hand and led me instead into the shadows under the cliffs, to a small crevice in the black rock. He told me to go in ahead of him. And inside, everything changed.
Inside was a vast domed cavern with mineral walls that glittered as if studded with gems, traced with mica and quartz, encrusted like the skin of the emperor’s pet mullet. Torches burned all around, set into the walls in iron bands; and illuminated most brightly, preternaturally illuminated, in the centre of the cavern, on a stone dais, stood a white marble altar, elaborately carved with figures, sea-creatures, mermaids, tritons, and nymphs entwined in foam. The torches also made the cavern hot, much hotter than one would have expected, like some primeval sauna, so that the air shimmered in the heat, and after the evening chill of the cove, I felt my body warming again and my skin suddenly breaking out in a slick of perspiration.
I could hear Leo talking to me now, explaining, but my head was humming so, I could barely take in his words. And the sea breeze was blowing in now from the mainland of Italy, soughing in the crevices of the rocks and sounding like a soft and far-off bugle call in the entrance to the cavern. Leo was talking about how water was the stuff of life, how some worshipped fire but really water was the heart of life, most passive and most powerful, seemingly shaped by everything and yet irresistibly shaping everything by its own primal force over all the aeons. The most ancient feminine principle, out of which everything is born. And any place dedicated to San Michele, he said, Saint Michael the Warrior-Archangel, was originally an ancient site of pagan worship, which is nature worship – such as this whole island, an island of unnumbered underground streams, and springs, and fountains, where people worshipped the principle of water centuries before Christ walked the dry and dusty roads of Palestine.
“And the mermaid, too,” he was saying. “What is she? Half-woman, half-fish: fertility? Sexuality? The personification of our eternal mother, the sea?”
From a darkened corner of the cavern Leo turned and I saw he was holding a white robe. He told me to undress and lay my clothes away and put this on. Even while my mind still hesitated, I did as he said. Round the waist I knotted the belt of golden cord. And then he took my hand and led me out of the cavern and we waited there on the beach hand in hand, my bare feet in the st
ill-warm sand, saying nothing, thinking nothing. I was utterly passive and yet I knew I was nothing like his slave-girl. Leo had led me here, and told me what to do, and yet I was not under his command. I was – how can I put this? – I was only the servant to myself, and to something greater than myself. Leo held my hand no longer like some domineering father figure, but as my servant, honouring me. And I remembered the look of adoration I had seen him give to Teresa, so many times.
And then I could hear a distant drumming, hypnotic, antique, an inexorable, almost militaristic rhythm, getting closer all the time. I glanced at Leo, and he looked curiously serene, uncharacteristically dreamy, rapt. Content.
Then round the corner of the far rocks came those who were beating the drums. Some were naked, some were half-clad in white; some were walking slowly and stately, holding torches aloft, others were dancing and cavorting around them, dressed in grotesque satyr masks and goatskin cloaks. Those who were walking slowly were all by contrast beautiful, male and female alike. The torchlight burned on their faces and their bare shoulders, and their skins were golden in the glow. As they came nearer their faces shone with sweat and their otherworldly rapt attention to the delirium of the music. They banged drums and cymbals and moved along the beach towards was if themselves spellbound and bewitched.
“Who are these, coming to the sacrifice?” murmured Leo, and turned and smiled at me, reverential, a little sad.
Then he took my hand and led me back into the cave. There he took a black strip of silk and turned me round so that I faced away from him, and he tied it around my head and over my eyes and secured it firmly behind so that I was in utter darkness. Blinded. And immediately all my other senses came to life.
I heard a noise like someone shaking out a heavy tablecloth and I knew that he was spreading something over the altar, and then he laid me down on it and I felt it was a thick velvet and I pictured it as a deep golden colour, almost inlaid, cloth-of-gold, and I could smell incense and woodsmoke and also human sweat and sex. And then I felt the presence of many more people as they filed into that cavern, and the air was warm and thick with the smell of pinewood and smoke rising up to the opening in the roof of the cavern, and they drummed softly now and hummed or chanted a low song that was in no language I recognized.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 2 Page 57
