Roz was clearly very sexually motivated, and very sexy, everyone said so, and that just made everything worse, for she would be there, inevitably, a strong, fearsome presence haunting the bed; Phaedria, with yet another pang of terror and misery, wondered just how she was going to handle any of it. Well, there was no escape now. Short of staying on the plane and going back to London, or telling Michael she had changed her mind, she had to go through with it.
She suddenly heard the beep going that meant they were beginning the descent. She washed her face for what seemed like the hundredth time that morning, cleaned her teeth, brushed her hair, and walked as steadily as she could back to her seat, and on to centre stage.
‘You look terrible,’ said Michael, holding her at ami’s length away from him. ‘I cannot believe how terrible you look.’
He had been standing waiting for her by customs; her heart tipped over at the sight of him. She was struck forcibly, not for the first time, at the way he projected sexual power. He had an immense suppressed energy; he moved slowly, but as if he was waiting for something, as if he was about to take off at great speed. He had obviously made a great effort to look impressive for her; he had on a grey coat she had not seen before with a black velvet collar; his hair was neatly brushed, he was very freshly shaved, his tie was straight, his shirt uncrumpled. His dark eyes, exploring hers, exploring her, were tentative, tender; his mouth oddly soft and half smiling. He looked, she thought, almost cheerful.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You, on the other hand, look very nice. Did anyone tell you your face looks as if you had slept in it?’
‘No, I don’t think so. But if it’s your phrase I like it. What have you been doing, for God’s sake?’
‘Throwing up,’ said Phaedria slightly sheepishly.
‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘if you are to continue to vomit every time we come close to one another, I’m not sure there is a great deal of future in this relationship. Come on, darling, Franco is outside with the car. Should I get some strong paper bags in for you?’
‘No,’ she said, smiling at him, thinking how, as always, he carried happiness for her in his wake. ‘No, I’m all right now.’
‘Good.’
The mammoth black stretch waited by the kerb; Franco was ignoring, with an earnest insolence, the harassment of a traffic cop. ‘Good heavens,’ said Phaedria, surveying the car’s length, its tinted windows, its waving aerials, ‘you’ve brought the apartment with you.’
‘Yeah, there’s a double bed and a Jacuzzi inside. Get in, darling, or we’ll all be arrested.’
She got in. ‘This is quite a car,’ she said.
‘It gets me about.’
‘I never understand why these things have two aerials.’
‘One’s for the TV. Keeps me awake while I’m driving. Franco, we’ll just go home for now.’
‘Sure thing, Mr Browning.’
They pulled away from the airport; she sat awkwardly, slightly apart from him, on the back seat, silent, looking out of the window. He looked at her, and his lips twitched.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s the matter, or shall I tell you?’
She looked at him startled. ‘Nothing’s the matter.’
‘Of course there is. Otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting over there like a frightened rabbit.’
She smiled sheepishly. ‘Well, I – well, it’s –’
He smiled at her. ‘OK. Let me tell you. You’re scared. Here we are, two people hardly knowing one another, and the Man Upstairs has shacked us up together for two whole days and told us to get on with it. And in among all the other things we have to get on with is a whole load of screwing. And you know I’ve been to bed a great many times with Roz and I know you’ve been to bed a great many times with her father, and neither of us knows quite how we are going to handle it. Well, let me tell you, baby, I’m shit scared too.’
‘Oh, Michael,’ said Phaedria, crawling thankfully across the seat and into his arms, ‘how is it you always make everything absolutely all right?’
They went to bed as soon as they got back to the duplex. Michael said firmly, removing her coat, taking her hand, leading her up the stairs, that it was really the only thing to do, to get it over and done with. ‘We will deflower one another,’ he said, very seriously, ‘and then we can start to enjoy ourselves.’
‘Good God,’ said Phaedria, standing still, looking round the black and white bedroom, its massive circular bed with the battery of switches and lights set into the head, its arced video screen, the mirrored ceiling, the jungle of plants and brilliant tropical flowers all along one wall, the aquarium of dazzling sea fish built in all along another, ‘this is no place for a virgin.’
‘Don’t you like it?’ he said, and he looked so anxious, so near to hurt, so desperate that it should please her, that all her nervousness left her and she sat down on the bed, kicking off her shoes, smiling up at him.
‘I love it,’ she said, ‘and I think I’m going to love you.’
Michael took off his jacket, his tie, his own shoes, threw them on the floor, lay down on the bed, and pulled her up beside him. He took her in his arms and said, ‘Now let’s just quit worrying. Let’s just go with it.’
There was a bad moment: after he had kissed her for so long and with such delicious slowness she felt as if she would scream if she couldn’t have more of him; after he had removed her clothes and his, and lain for a long time, just looking at her; after he had stroked her and smoothed her and played with her pubic hair and kissed and teased and sucked at her nipples; after she had, relieved at her own hunger, climbed on to him, lain there, rising and falling slowly on to him, feeling his penis silky hard against her clitoris, feeling the fire mount, heat, roar; after he had turned her suddenly, looked into her eyes, said her name over and over again; after he had moved down, kissing, teasing, caressing her with his tongue and she had lain, her eyes closed, thrusting herself at him, rhythmically, gently; after she had felt her whole body turned liquid, white hot, and he moved up again and slowly, tenderly sank into her; then, suddenly then, a face swam into her consciousness, a pain-filled, frightened, dying face, and she tensed, tightened, froze. He drew away from her then at once, looked down at her, said, ‘Look at me, Phaedria, don’t think, don’t think, just know that I love you.’
And she opened her eyes again, looked into his, different, eyes, loving, concerned, patient eyes, and the moment was gone and she smiled and threw back her head; arched her body, drew him in, in, all the great longing urgency of him, and he groaned, cried out suddenly and came, clutching at her, and she was left, still suspended, alone, empty, and yet happy, oddly triumphant.
‘Oh, God,’ he said after a moment, and there was a sob in his voice, ‘oh, God, I would have given the world for that not to have happened.’
And no, she said, no don’t mind, don’t, it doesn’t matter, it more than doesn’t matter, it was good, it was the right thing, I needed to wait, please don’t be sad.
‘Very well,’ he said, moving from her, lying on his elbow, looking at her with a wealth of love, ‘you shall wait. But not for long. I promise you not for long.’
‘Now,’ he said, after they had breakfasted off brioches and strawberries and orange juice laced with champagne, and coffee he had made himself with enormous care and exactness on his espresso machine, ‘now I think we should go out. I want to take you for a walk in the park, and then I want to take you for lunch at Le Cirque and then I want to bring you back here and make love to you again, and then I want to take you shopping and then I want to take you to tea at the Plaza and then I want to make love to you again, and then I have tickets for My One and Only, and then I thought we could have supper at Un Deux Trois and then we can come home and make love again, and we can see the New Year in in an absolutely outstanding, shattering, earth-moving, mind-blowing way. How does that grab you, as they used to say? If you trust me to deliver the last,’ he added slightly soberly.
‘I trust you utterly a
nd it grabs me beautifully,’ said Phaedria, leaning forward, kissing him tenderly, ‘the only thing is it’s an awful lot of eating. I shall get fat.’
‘No, you won’t, as long as we keep screwing. Do you know how many calories a good screw uses up?’
‘No, I don’t think I do.’
‘Three hundred. At a modest estimate.’
‘Three hundred calories isn’t really very much food.’
‘Then,’ he said, lifting his hand, stroking her cheek with infinite gentleness, ‘there will have to be still more screwing.’
‘I have a New Year present for you,’ said Michael.
They were sitting in the Un Deux Trois, encased in a warm, bright pleasure that was almost tangible, smiling indulgently and detachedly at the increasingly frenetic revelry around them; Michael has been drawing hearts on the paper tablecloth with the coloured crayons provided by the thoughtful management, and writing ‘I love you’ in ever larger and more florid letters on every spare inch of it.
Phaedria looked at him, and felt a moving and stirring in her heart that she knew as more than tenderness, more than sex, more than love itself; that was a warm, melting, joyous longing to take him to her, to be with him, of him, always and for ever, to become part of him and to have him part of her.
‘I love you,’ she said, and it was the first time she had said it, and there were tears in her eyes, ‘I love everything about you.’
‘Now listen,’ he said, ‘you didn’t get your present yet. It might put you right off.’
‘No,’ she said, very serious, ‘nothing in this world could put me right off you.’
There was a catch in her voice; he looked at her startled, saw the tears, felt his own heart lurch.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘don’t start crying. You’ll be throwing up on me next.’ But in spite of the lightness in his voice, he was emotionally shaken too; his own eyes felt suddenly burning and moist.
‘This is ridiculous,’ he said, smiling at her slightly shakily, ‘we are supposed to be enjoying ourselves. Do you want me to shred up this cloth to dry your tears?’
‘No,’ she said, laughing suddenly, taking his hand, kissing it, ‘don’t, please don’t. I want to keep this cloth for ever and ever, to remind me of when I was perfectly happy.’
‘I intend to see you stay perfectly happy,’ he said.
‘No, you can’t, even you can’t do that,’ said Phaedria, serious again. ‘You can’t stay up there, for ever, balancing on the tip of the world. You have to come down, take on real life, let other people in.’
‘That’s dumb. That doesn’t mean you can’t be perfectly happy. I love other people. I’m happy to share you with them.’
‘Oh, all right, we’ll stay perfectly happy. But just now I am extra perfectly happy. How’s that?’
‘That’s OK. Now can I give you your present? Maybe I should get a spare tablecloth or something just in case it makes you cry again.’
‘You can, and I won’t need a tablecloth. Please give it to me.’
‘All right. But now I come to think about it, maybe we should have some more champagne first.’
‘Goodness. It must be quite a present.’
‘It has, I hope,’ he said, with his oddly gloomy smile, ‘a certain style to it.’
He ordered another bottle of Bollinger; poured some out, raised his glass to her. ‘Happy New Year, honeybunch.’
‘Happy New Year, Michael.’
‘OK. Here we go.’
He opened the briefcase he had under the table, pulled out a large envelope, handed it to her. She looked at him, smiled doubtfully, opened it slowly. A big glossy folder was inside it.
‘Michael, what is this?’
‘Look at it. You can read, for Christ’s sake.’
She looked. ‘Lederer and Lederer’ it said in embossed letters on the cover ‘Real Estate Agents. Madison Avenue, New York’.
‘Michael,’ said Phaedria, looking at him, ‘Michael, what on earth have you been doing?’
‘Buying you something to play with. Go on, look inside.’
She opened the folder slowly. A photograph fell out. A low, white house, two storeys high, with a veranda running its length. Another photograph: paddocks, with horses; another: a stableyard.
‘Michael, what is this? Where is this? No, I can’t read, I forgot to tell you.’
‘It’s a house. You will have heard of houses, I imagine. This particular example is for you. It’s in Connecticut. Horsy country, or so I’m told. The horses are an optional extra.’
‘And you’ve actually bought this for me?’
‘Well, I didn’t have anyone else in mind.’
‘Michael, this is just amazing. I just don’t know what to say.’
‘You could say you like it.’
‘I like it. I love it. I adore it. But why did you do it?’
‘That’s a pretty dumb question, I’d say. I bought it for you because I love you. Because I thought you’d be pleased. Because I know you like horses. I think they’re pretty scary myself, but maybe you can convert me. Because I reckoned if I was to keep you happy over here you’d need a few of them around. I don’t have too much room for stables in the apartment. Because – oh, well, I suppose because I could just see you there. Because I wanted you to have it. And I thought maybe you might invite me down occasionally as your house guest.’
‘I might. Are you really scared of horses?’
‘Shit scared.’
‘I didn’t think you were scared of anything.’
‘Honey, you just got yourself laid by the biggest coward in the US of A.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘It’s true.’
‘What else are you scared of?’
‘Oh, all kinds of things. Spiders.’
‘Spiders!’
‘Yup. The dentist. Getting sick. Right now I have a new one.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Losing you.’
‘Oh,’ said Phaedria, looking at him, a whole loving heart in her dark eyes, ‘you don’t have to be scared of that. Not in the very least.’
‘I’ll try to believe you.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said, returning to the brochure, thumbing through the particulars, gazing at the pictures, ‘this is just so beautiful. I love it, I love it. But, oh, Michael, this is too much of a present. It’s spoiling me.’
‘I am planning on spoiling you,’ he said, ‘a lot. Every day for the rest of our lives, if I can manage it.’
‘Well, you’ve certainly made a good start. It is just the most lovely place, and the most wonderful thing is it’s so exactly what I would have chosen myself. It’s quite quite different from Marriotts and yet it has the same kind of feel. I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘I’ll think of a way. When did Julian buy Marriotts?’
‘Oh, years and years ago. When he was married to Eliza.’
‘And how many gee-gees do you have there?’
‘About a dozen altogether. Two of my own. One, my own special favourite, she’s called Grettisaga, is in foal.’
‘She is? When’s it due?’
‘Oh, in the spring.’
‘Does she have to go to hospital to have it?’
‘No, I thought a home birth would be better.’
‘And why do you love this pregnant lady so much?’
‘I’m not sure. She’s beautiful. She’s powerful. She’s seen me safely through a few scrapes. I just love her.’
‘Well, maybe you can find me a very very ploddy old creature and try and convert me.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘I tried to learn once before. Carol thought I might make a good accessory for her behind the hounds. It was terrible. I just fell off over and over again. In the end, I decided I was over twenty-one and I didn’t have to carry on with it. She was terribly cross. I liked the clothes, though,’ he added, brightening up. ‘I thought they were terrific.’
‘There’s a tailor’s
in London,’ she said, ‘called Hunstman’s, where they have a wooden horse to sit on, so you can make sure your breeches fit properly.’
‘Really? Would you take me? Maybe I could buy their horse, and not worry about having to get along with a real one.’
‘I don’t think they’d sell it to you.’
‘Oh, nonsense. Everything has its price.’
‘Even you?’
‘Even me.’
‘And what exactly is your price, Mr Browning?’
‘To you, Lady Morell, a special knockdown offer. A big double bed and you sprawled across it with absolutely nothing on at all, and I’m yours for life on easy terms.’
‘All right,’ she said, standing up, holding out her hand. ‘Come on, let’s go. I want to take possession right away.’
‘Please let me come to the Bahamas with you,’ he said.
‘You can’t,’ she said, ‘I don’t think my body would survive it.’
‘I could leave your body alone.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘You’re right, I wouldn’t.’
Old Sins Page 105
