Pact without desire

by Jane Arbor

  'You could have done, and that's why I'm grateful that you didn't.'

  'You underrate my discretion.'

  'No, your thought for Mai. And perhaps to save my face.'

  Rede shrugged. 'As you please. Anyway, how true is it now? Signed and sealed as the agreement was at the time, I'd thought we might tear up both our copies after I'd first daimed you as my wife. But though you co-operated and seemed to enjoy me, it was only with your body. Your heart wasn't among those present.'

  'I— You ' She blushed furiously.

  'Don't deny that your flesh did enjoy it! '

  'I found you very—experienced,' she managed. 'But I melted none of the rest of the ice between us?'

  'It's always been ice of your making. On occasion you've treated me like a wife; on others, as if I were a stranger.'

  'One isn't jealous of a stranger. And I've had enough reason for jealousy.'

  'Of Cliff? But you weren't jealous of him for love of me. Only because you thought he was encroaching on your—property.'

  They had reached the house and Rede halted the car, but made no move to get out of it. 'On the contrary,' he said, 'I was jealous of Iden for some time before I put in a tender for the property.'

  'Before you ? Oh no, that's impossible! ' she rejected.

  'True all the same. From my first sight of the girl who was crying for him at his wedding, I was ready to hate the man who'd driven her to it. Jealousy

  at first sight, you could call it—over a girl I didn't even know.'

  'And when you did know her, you despised her for wanting to pay out the man!'

  'I admit her determination for revenge surprised me.'

  'And revolted you? But you still proposed marriage to me—why?'

  'Because by then I wanted you so much—you and your "hell hath no fury" bit against Identhat I used it to make you the only brand of proposal you'd have entertained from me. Still half in love with him—'

  'I wasn't!'

  'Anyway, not within light years of any feeling for me, cocooned as you were in your bitterness. The only way I could reach you or lay claim to you was to present myself as an ally in your revenge.'

  'Which died on me very soon afterwards, if it hadn't already.'

  'As I guessed, from your lukewarm effort at "showing" him. So—they've turned each other on again. I told myself, and should be thinking it still if I hadn't more or less blackmailed him before I sent him to Hong Kong.'

  'Blackmailed him? Redd'

  'In a manner of speaking. I told him I'd take him back into Temasik and give him the Hong Kong job, only at the price of the truth about his relationship with you. He couldn't wait to tell it.'

  'And it was---?'

  'That Isabel has snared him like a rabbit. He's utterly infatuated, terrified of losing her, worships the ground, etc., etc. And when I put the awkward question as to why I had caught him with you in his arms, he hardly remembered having done it. Had he really? Must have been mad. And then we were back at Isabel's perfections again, and I said "Right, it's a deal. Good luck to you, man." But where did all that get me with you? Nowhere where I hadn't been all along—at the arms' length of your beauty and your dignity and your duty to my social affairs and to Mai, and at the eternal nag of knowing that when I've managed to arouse you against your will, you've seen my worship of your body only as evidence that I'm "experienced" in lovemaking. In any other way that matters in a marriage you've never let me get near you.'

  What was he telling her? Sara distrusted her hearing. 'Wanted'. 'Worship'. Spoken of her, what meaning dared she let such words have? She said, 'You've never let me guess you wanted any more of me than the uses for which you married me, and I've tried not to fail you in those.'

  'Though without reading any of my need of you into certain of them?'

  'You gave no sign of needing me. The first time you—took me, you called me a green girl for supposing you couldn't claim it as your right. And later, when you didn't ask even that of me, I thought it was because you were in love with Mai. That you were showing me you no longer wanted me even

  as a fillgap in your life.'

  'And if you thought that of Mai and me, why did you never accuse me of it until a couple of nights ago?'

  Elbows on her hunched knees, Sara sat forward, her hands cupping her face. That way she hadn't to look at him as she confessed, 'Because I was afraid of hearing you tell me that it was so.'

  'You mean your pride was afraid? Your status as my wife was afraid?'

  'Not my pride,' she whispered. `That didn't come into it.'

  'What then?'

  Silence.

  'What then?' He wrenched her round to face him. 'What was afraid?'

  'My sick jealousy of Mai. My—aching need of you.'

  He held her rigidly. With a kind of incredulous wonder he said, 'You were jealous of Mai, but you could still be kind to her for my sake? Because you cared enough for me; wanted me, as I've wanted you?'

  'As I've wanted you, loved you ever since—' 'At first sight, as I fell for you?'

  She shook her head. 'Not then. But as soon as I realised that if I hadn't married you, I'd have been lost for ever in a kind of desert of regret. You'd despised me for accepting you, but that was the price I had to pay for being near you ... loving you, even if you didn't love me—'

  'Didn't love you ! Oh, Sara ' He released

  her, took both her hands in his and bent over them. She put her lips to his hair, leaned against him, and for long minutes neither of them spoke nor stirred.

  Then Rede sat up, facing forward with a hand on the door-handle, and said to her utter dismay, 'I'm going back to Thailand tonight.'

  Hurt, bewildered by this cruel anti-climax, 'Oh, Rede! Tonight? Must you?' she pleaded.

  He was out of the car by now, coming round to her side. With an arm around her after he had helped her out, he ignored her question to add, 'And you're coming with me.'

  am?'

  'Who else?' He fell into step with her as they walked towards the house. 'D'you remember I refused once to take you with me on a stag affair in Rangoon?'

  'Yes.'

  'Well, this time you're coming along. But this time—no stags in the plural. Just one, with his mate, on the honeymoon they should have had months ago—' He stopped and turned her to him. 'Do you realise we haven't yet kissed as lovers— as two people in love and hungry for each other?'

  He kissed her then, but only lightly, in teasing promise of the rapture to come.

  In the darkness the sea lapped gently at the crescent of sand which was the tiny bay of Tikaya, east of Bangkok. Rede had hired a car at the airport and

  they were out at the quiet resort within an hour of their flight's landing. The beach itself was their hotel's forecourt and they could step out on to it from the balcony to their ground-floor room.

  They had arrived so late that they had been the only diners in the flower-bedecked restaurant, and afterwards they had walked on the sands and had lingered at the water's edge, daring the little wavelets to reach their toes.

  They had talked, asked wondering questions, groped through douds of doubt in search of reassurance.

  Once Sara had mused, 'You said you would have thought more of me if I'd refused to marry you. But if I had, I should have lost you.'

  'For good, you think?' Rede shook his head. 'I might have applauded your admirable scruples, but you wouldn't have been rid of me so easily. I'd have been back.'

  'But what made you fall for me?'

  'Do you expect me to analyse it? As soon as I saw you, you were there for me—all there. Fresh and virginal, but potentially all woman. Hurt and angry woman whom I longed to comfort, if she would let me, which I knew she wouldn't, so I had to approach her by another way.'

  'A cynical way !

  'And cynically accepted.'

  'No. I snatched at what I saw as my only chance of holding you, though without admitting why I had to.'

  'And when did you first know why?'
/>
  She had hesitated. 'I think—at the Lotus Room, when you dared me to repeat that I wished you'd never married me, and I couldn't. 'That night I thought you'd been cruelly designing and unfeeling, but I knew jealousy of you for the first of many times. What had Isabel been to you, I wondered, that you'd had to punish both of us by flaunting us at each other as you did?'

  'I thought I was helping you to flaunt your conquest of me at Iden, and I didn't mind if the message got over to Isabel too.'

  'Or that I got the wrong message, which Isabel did her best to fill out by taunting me with how close she and you had been?'

  'It didn't occur to you to ask her why she hadn't managed to pin me down to marriage while she

  aimed to have had the chance?' Rede's hand, loosely on Sara's wrist, drew her closer. 'You have been a push-over for jealousy without doing anything about it, haven't you?' he chided gently.

  'What could I do, until you told me she'd never meant anything to you?'

  'Did it say nothing to you that I'd done my best, for all to see, to marry her to Iden?'

  'You could have tired of her, I thought. And before you convinced me there'd been nothing between you Isabel had poisoned my mind about Mai.'

  Ah—What about Mai?'

  'Isabel hinted that there was nothing to choose between your relations with Mai and George Mer-

  Tin's with Katin Char, except that he called Katin his cook, while you, needing to be more discreet ; called Mai your protégée.'

  There was a sound as if Rede were grinding his teeth. 'Isabel fed you all this and you believed her?' he demanded.

  'I tried not to, but in the face of everything—'

  'In the face of nothing! ' he exploded. 'I believed in the child and I had ambition for her—too much belief and too much ambition in the professional field, as events have proved, and if I'd guessed sooner that your idea that Mai was my mistress was keeping the distance between us, I shouldn't have left you to that misconception for long.'

  'And how would you have convinced me otherwise?' As soon as the words were out, she realised how arch they must have sounded when he held her off from him to ask,

  'Do you really want to learn how—or are you just playing the coquette?'

  'I'd—like to know.'

  'Right!' Turning her about, he took her hand to lead her up the beach and to the french window of their room. 'Is this the first night bit where I carry the bride across the threshold?' he asked.

  Trembling with excitement, 'It's not our first night together,' she pointed out.

  'And this isn't the first time I've carried you to bed,' he retorted. Lifting her effortlessly, he pushed the door-pane with his knee, carried her across the room and sat beside her on the coverlet where he

  laid her. 'That time,' he reminded her, 'you were-in a vixenish temper. What kind of a mood are you in now?'

  She said nothing in reply; just looked at him and held her arms wide to him in welcome.

  'Ah, love—' His hands moved gently but expertly in search of the soft flesh of her shoulders, bare but for the straps of her square-cut sundress. Her own fingers found and explored the taut muscles of his back beneath his shirt, and male and female bodies shaped to each other, curve to curve and limb to limb.

  At first their eagerness was tempered by shyness on both sides. But gradually, at the instance of Rede's tenderness and the gentle, questing touch of his lips and hands, Sara felt desire glow in her blood and turn to flame, and then her response to him was equally a demand, as vivid and alive and urgent as his.

  Passion surged and erupted, thrusting them up, up to a peak of ecstasy at the same shared moment before it spent itself and ebbed like a dying cadence of music.

  His lips against Sara's closed eyelids, Rede murmured brokenly, `Loveliness—all loveliness!' and presently they slept.

  Sara woke to see and hear Rede crossing the floor to the windows.

  `Rede—?'

  He turned and beckoned to her. 'Come and look. It's nearly dawn.'

  It was. The surface of the sea was still dark, but there was a grey and faintly pink spread of cloud above the horizon and a promise of light between the cloud and the sea.

  'Will you swim with me?' Rede asked.

  Sara dimpled. 'I didn't bring ' she began.

  He grinned. 'Neither did I. I packed in too much of a hurry last night.'

  'Then how can we? People will see us.'

  'Only a seagull or two, as early as this. Come

  Hand in hand they ran down the beach, flung aside silk robe and towelling jacket, then waded in guilty haste through the shallows and when they were out of their depth, plunged. They came up laughing, to throw fountains of spray at each other before they plunged again.

  Water-babies. Boy and girl. Man and woman. Mates ...