Captive of Desire

by Alexandra Sellers

  She knelt on the sofa, gazing over the back to the bookshelves that ran from floor to ceiling along the wall, and let her eyes run along the lettering on the spines of the books.

  She felt sure the line was taken from a love poem, but that was as far as her memory would take her—if even that much were correct. John Donne? Yes, perhaps....

  Half an hour later, when the doorbell rang, she was sitting on the floor by the bookcase with a stack of poetry books beside her, still hunting down the elusive quotation but no nearer to it. As the warm tones of the bell sounded, she leaped to her feet, surprised to see that the rain had stopped and it was dark out. How long had she been reading, then?

  She pulled open the front door with a book of poetry closed in one hand, her finger marking the place.

  “John!” she exclaimed blankly.

  John Bentinck had been smiling, but now his face darkened.

  “When you look at me as though you’ve forgotten my existence it means you’ve been thinking of Busnetsky,” he said bitterly. “Is he after you again now he’s back in England?”

  Laddy sucked in a startled breath.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” she laughed. “If I’m absentminded it’s because I’m trying to track down a quotation.” She held up a volume of John Donne’s poetry and stepped back from the door.

  “Come on in. Where does ‘Love is strong as death’ come from?”

  “I don’t know,” John said, moving inside as she closed the door. He eyed her briefly up and down, noting her worn blue jeans and scruffy sweater. “You must want to know pretty badly if it made you forget to get dressed. How long have you been looking for it?”

  “Not very long. Anyway, what’s the matter with the way I’m dressed?” Laddy smiled quizzically.

  “Nothing, I suppose,” John said after a moment. “I did get seats in the stalls, though.”

  Laddy made a moue of contrition.

  “Good heavens, is it that late? I thought you were early!” she exclaimed. “I must have been flipping through those books longer than I thought!”

  She was lying: she had totally forgotten the date she had made with John to see a show tonight.

  “It’s just on seven,” John said.

  Laddy scooped up Love of a Lady as she passed behind the sofa to the bookshelves and slid it onto a shelf along with the volumes of poetry she had pulled out in her search for the quotation. She indicated the bottles on the sideboard.

  “Help yourself to a drink, and I’ll be ready in ten minutes, no more. What are we going to see?” she said, pausing at the door.

  “Not the musical I promised. A friend of mine had tickets he couldn’t use for Much Ado About Nothing,” John said. “At the Aldwych. It’s supposed to be a very good production.”

  “Super!” she said, and disappeared into her bedroom.

  It was very good, with a stronger actress than usual playing Hero, reminding Laddy of her own pain at being falsely accused, and making her take a dislike to the weak but handsome Claudio that was almost cathartic.

  “He didn’t love her at all, he just wanted to make a good marriage,” she said to John afterward. They were sitting over a late supper, which Laddy was attacking ravenously, having eaten nothing at all since lunch. “Would you throw off a woman you loved like that?” she asked, and her eyes gave away more than she knew.

  John smiled and reached out a hand to cover hers.

  “Never, love,” he said, allowing a deeper shade of meaning to colour his voice. “No man who loved a woman could do that to her.”

  She knew it was true; yet later at her front door when John bent to kiss her good-night, she allowed his kiss but let it go no further.

  She hated Mischa Busnetsky, but his face still stood between her and any other man.

  * * *

  The reviews of Busnetsky’s books in the large Sunday papers the next morning were unanimous raves. Mikhail Busnetsky was a powerful, compelling writer, and To Make Kafka Live was a uniquely disturbing indictment of the Soviet system of repression.

  But it was obvious to everyone that Busnetsky’s great talent lay in fiction. “Mr. Busnetsky has said that his political writings were made necessary by the society he lived in, but that fiction was made necessary by his soul,” Laddy read. The reviewer was quoting from her published interviews with Mischa, and she couldn’t help remembering the sunny spring day on the cliffs when he had said it to her. “If Love of a Lady was necessary to the author, it will become equally necessary to many readers....”

  Another reviewer compared Love of a Lady, surprisingly, to the Song of Solomon: “...tremendous passion that, like the Song of Songs, also cloaks an inner meaning. The Song of Songs, a quote from which prefaces the book, is of course held by some to be an allegory of God’s love of Israel. Future students of this work will be more than usually justified in considering the Lady of the title a metaphor for freedom....”

  Thoughtfully Laddy let the paper fall. A metaphor for freedom! Was it possible? Was the deeply passionate love she had discovered last night in Love of a Lady directed towards freedom and not herself at all?

  Well, what did she care, anyway? It was an academic exercise. Whether Mischa Busnetsky had once loved her or had never loved her made no difference—except to her pride. If she could think that Mischa had believed he loved her for a while, she would feel less of a fool for having believed him. But it made no real difference to her at all.

  And at least she now knew the source of the quotation he had used. Laddy got up and walked into the living room to pull down a Bible from the bookshelves. She sat down and, captured by the power of the words, stopped skimming for the quotation and read the Song of Songs right through. She found the quotation towards the end:

  For love is strong as death; passion is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

  Laddy finished the Song, breathing shakily. If Solomon had indeed written this, she hoped he was famous for more than his wisdom! But whoever the writer was, she had the feeling he might have laughed in delight to hear the scholastics label this poetry an allegory of anything at all, that he would have felt that this passionate love poem was an end in itself.

  With a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, she realised that she was hoping that Mischa Busnetsky was laughing, too, this morning—and for the same reason.

  Chapter 17

  For the next ten days Mischa Busnetsky stayed out of the pages of the Herald and, for the most part, out of the public eye, while Laddy and the world wrestled with some ominous developments in the Middle East. But by the end of November things had settled back into their normal insanity, and Laddy, who had told herself more than once during those busy days that she was glad she had heard nothing of Busnetsky and hoped she never saw so much as a press release about him again as long as she lived, gave in at last and began to phone her contacts to find out what the man was up to.

  Richard Digby was out of town and his office was not familiar with Busnetsky’s movements, so she rang the ICF. Nobody seemed to know where Mischa was. Finally she got in touch with an old friend of her father’s who was one of the officers of the ICF, a woman named Mary Regent.

  “I don’t think he’s doing much of anything except settling down in England,” the woman said. “And he may be working on his book. He’s not taking any kind of lecture engagement till January at the earliest, I know that.”

  “Where has he gone to do his writing?” Laddy asked.

  “I really don’t know.” After a few more aimless remarks, Laddy was about to sign off when Mary Regent said abruptly, as though she had just come to a decision, “You know, Laddy, no one who read those interview pieces could seriously believe you’re hostile to Mikhail Busnetsky. But more recently he’s been coming across in your writing as…oh, as selfish and self-centred. I don’t know what’s made you take that attitude, but it is certainly mistaken.
And I think you should know that Mischa has signed over all future royalty earnings from To Make Kafka Live jointly to the ICF and the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse.”

  Laddy sat up and reached for a pencil. “Really?”

  “I wanted you to know for your own information.”

  Laddy’s pencil paused. “For my own information? But may I publish this?”

  “Oh!” The kindly voice sounded taken aback. “Well, I don’t …nothing’s been said formally, and I suppose if he wanted an embargo he would have made it clear to us all.”

  “Well, if nothing’s been said...” Laddy suggested.

  “Yes, I don’t see why you shouldn’t publish it,” Mary Regent said, with quiet decision, and Laddy thanked her. “The Soviets are doing their best to discredit him, and I think this, properly handled, should counteract their efforts.”

  When she hung up the phone Laddy was laughing. Mary Regent was either very naive or very canny, and Laddy did not think she was naive.

  Laddy herself knew perfectly well that Mischa would not want this information made public. Since the publication of his interviews with her, he had given no personal information whatsoever to the media. He talked about torture, he talked about psychiatric abuse, he talked about the Russian state—but he did not talk about Mikhail Busnetsky. Laddy knew as though he had told her that this piece of information was not for publication.

  She felt her blood singing with challenge as she called three other people listed in her contact book to get confirmation of the facts from them. None of them seemed concerned that she had got the information, but that only meant they didn’t know Mischa Busnetsky as well as she did.

  And if Mischa didn’t like her hostile stories, he was going to like her favourable publicity even less, she told herself grimly. With an excited, nervous laugh she rolled paper into her machine and wrote up the story for the late-afternoon edition.

  “Mischa Busnetsky, well-known Soviet dissident and exile who arrived in the West ill and penniless just six months ago, has donated all future earnings of his critically acclaimed book To Make Kafka Live to international civil rights groups....”

  *

  He was waiting for her in the street when she left work that evening just before five o’clock. Laddy’s heart skipped a beat as she saw him, and then it rushed into wild thumping, as though this were a meeting with a deadly enemy. As Mischa approached her across the pavement, a black cab slid out from between two navy-and-white Herald delivery trucks and pulled up beside them.

  Mischa took her wrist in a deceptively light grasp and opened the taxi door.

  “Get in.”

  His voice was a low growl, and his posture was threatening, like a predatory animal. She felt that if she moved a lightning velvet paw would crush her before she had even decided on a direction.

  Laddy looked around. The cab driver was absorbed in a football game blasting from his radio. A couple of tabloid journalists were heading for the pub. No one she knew well enough to be sure she wouldn’t end up as a titillating story in tomorrow’s paper.

  “What the hell do you want?” she demanded in a low, angry tone that she hoped disguised her nervous confusion.

  “You,” Mischa said. “Get in or I’ll pick you up and throw you in.”

  “You will not!” she declared, and stepped back—into the taxi door standing open at her back. She was trapped.

  Mischa’s eyes glittered at her, silently underlining her predicament. He smiled. “Get in.”

  “If you don’t let me walk away right now, I’ll scream,” she said. “Think what they’d make of that story!”

  His black eyes caught her gaze; she couldn’t look away.

  “If you start to scream I will kiss you,” he said flatly. “Here in the street in front of your colleagues. Who do you think will win then?”

  “You can’t kiss me forever,” she said. “When you stop, I’ll start screaming again.”

  “Have you learned so little?” he asked, his voice sparking her nerve ends. “If I kiss you here in public we will end up making love in the back of the taxi. And you will not cry out until I make you do so. Get in the cab.”

  In a million years she wouldn’t understand why she obeyed, but she did. Her knees shaking almost uncontrollably, Laddy scrambled in and sat in the far corner. Mischa said something to the driver through the window and climbed in after her, and suddenly the roomy interior of the cab was too small for comfort.

  As the cab pulled out into the rush-hour traffic Laddy shifted nervously and crossed her legs away from him.

  Mischa smiled at her, but his smile only increased her nervousness. His emotion filled the cab—she could taste it when she breathed.

  “Where are you taking me?” she demanded, so hoarsely she could hardly be heard over the football commentator.

  “To a place where we can talk,” Mischa said shortly. “And we will talk when we get there.”

  In the rush-hour traffic the drive was tortuously slow, and the panic and anticipation his silent presence caused in her was just becoming unbearable when the cab stopped in front of a large white terraced house in Queen’s Gate, not far south of Kensington Gardens. Laddy stepped out of the cab and blinked at the expensive house in the dusk.

  “Where are we? What’s this place?” she asked, when Mischa had paid the driver. He took her arm firmly to lead her up the wide white steps to a black-and-brass door.

  He unlocked the front door without speaking, then the vestibule door and ushered her into a well-lighted black-and-white-tiled hallway where a marble staircase curved up to another floor. There was only one door on the main floor, and he unlocked that and waited for her to enter.

  “We are in my home,” he said finally, as he closed the door behind them.

  If the apartment covered the whole of the main floor, it must be huge. She walked into a massive, high-ceilinged room and simply stared.

  “Yours?” she repeated, gazing up at the high ceiling, which actually had a mural painted on it, like some baroque cathedral. “What do you do for money?”

  “You are mercenary minded,” he said. “Paperback rights for Love of a Lady have now been negotiated. You may publish that piece of information, if you must. But I do not care to see any mention of this place in the pages of your newspaper.”

  He took off her coat and his own and threw them onto a sofa in a nearby cluster, the casual action belied by a nervous tension, in his body, in the air, that she could almost touch. Involuntarily she shivered.

  He moved over to a well-stocked drinks table and lifted a crystal decanter.

  “Are you cold?” he asked. “Would you like sherry, or do you prefer, perhaps, whiskey?” He smiled. “Vodka? I have some of the best.”

  “Sherry,” Laddy whispered. She did not want a drink, but there was wisdom in saving her energy to fight more important battles. She silently watched him pour their drinks, her tension increasing in direct proportion to his studied calm. Crossing the few feet of space between them, Mischa handed her a glass and raised his own to her. Laddy lifted the heavy glass in response but did not drink.

  “Would you mind telling me what I’m doing here?” she demanded, moving away from him to stand in front of a giant arched window that looked out on the quiet street. She saw her own face, the lighted room behind her.

  Mischa’s reflection lowered his glass and gazed at her, his dark eyes unreadable. She turned.

  “Don’t you know?” he asked, his deep, rough voice dragging out the last vowel on a sensuous note that brushed up her spine and made her shiver again.

  “No, I don’t know!” she said hotly. “But if it’s because of the article this afternoon about your book royalties, let me remind you of the way you threw me to the wolves awhile ago, and of the fact—”

  “But this was a very friendly article you wrote today. Why should this cause me to be angry?”

  “Because you think you’re above everything, that’s why, because you don’t want people t
o—” She broke off in surprise as a new expression entered his eyes, as if a light had just come on in his brain. His gaze, now very black and intent, riveted her.

  “In fact,” he said slowly, “this article, like all the others, was written to make me angry.”

  “No, it wasn’t!” she protested sharply. “Whatever I write is news, without regard to—and stop pretending it didn’t make you angry, because it did! You think you ought to be untouchable, whatever you do. Your god is privacy, isn’t it, and who can blame you after all those years of surveillance? But don’t expect me to apologize, after the way you threw me to the dogs.”

  She stopped speaking because he was laughing, a husky, caressing laugh.

  “But this is not why I have brought you here,” he said, smiling at her. “You are here because I want you.”

  “What?” she demanded shrilly. “You want me for what?” The look in his eyes froze her into immobility, and she stared at him in angry fear.

  “No!” she cried, flinging up her hand instinctively, without conscious intent. He understood, however, and moved aside, and the beautiful crystal glass she had been holding shattered into bits against a marble fireplace. In the next second Mischa’s own glass was on the table, and his powerful dark body was moving across the room to her. Laddy tore her startled eyes away from the shards of glass and turned to run to the door.

  He let her battle frantically with the impossible lock for several seconds, standing watching her from a two-foot distance as she jerked uselessly on the door.

  “There is a bolt above your head,” he said at last, and as her hand snapped up and turned it, the length of his body was against her back and his broad fingers closed ruthlessly over the slim white hand on the bolt and forced it down.

  “Do not fight me, my Lady,” he whispered, his lips moving erotically against her ear as he spoke, his voice sending waves of melting heat through her body.

  “Stop this!” she moaned into the door panels, her teeth clenched against the passion his nearness was arousing. “Damn you! Why can’t you leave me alone?”