Night Over Water

by Ken Follett

  Now she felt as disloyal to him as she had to Mervyn earlier. She kissed him guiltily, and the familiar warmth of desire glowed in her veins; but she pulled away and said: “I can’t go with you.”

  He blanched. “Don’t say that.”

  She looked around the suite. He was packing. The wardrobe and drawers were open, his cases were on the floor and everywhere there were folded shirts, tidy piles of underwear and shoes in bags. He was so neat. “I can’t go,” she repeated.

  He took her hand and drew her into the bedroom. They sat on the bed. He looked distraught. “You don’t mean this,” he said.

  “Mervyn loves me, and we’ve been together for five years. I can’t do this to him.”

  “What about me?”

  She looked at him. He was wearing a dusty pink sweater and a bow tie, blue-gray flannel trousers and cordovan shoes. He looked good enough to eat. “You both love me,” she said. “But he’s my husband.”

  “We both love you, but I like you,” Mark said.

  “Don’t you think he likes me?”

  “I don’t think he even knows you. Listen. I’m thirty-five years old. I’ve been in love before. I once had an affair that lasted six years. I’ve never been married but I’ve been around. I know this is right. Nothing has ever felt so right to me. You’re beautiful, you’re funny, you’re unorthodox, you’re bright and you love to make love. I’m cute, I’m funny, I’m unorthodox, I’m bright and I want to make love to you right now—”

  “No,” she said, but she did not mean it.

  He drew her to him gently and they kissed.

  “We’re so right for each other,” he murmured. “Remember writing notes to one another underneath the silence sign? You understood the game, right away, without explanations. Other women think I’m nuts, but you like me this way.”

  It was true, she thought; and when she did oddball things, like smoking a pipe, or going out with no panties on, or attending Fascist meetings and sounding the fire alarm, Mervyn became annoyed, whereas Mark laughed delightedly.

  He stroked her hair, then her cheek. Slowly her panic subsided, and she began to feel soothed. She laid her head on his shoulder and let her lips brush the soft skin of his neck. She felt his fingertips on her leg, beneath her dress, stroking the inside of her thigh where her stockings ended. This was not what was supposed to happen, she thought weakly.

  He pushed her gently backward on the bed, and her hat fell off. “This isn’t right,” she said feebly. He kissed her mouth, nibbling her lips gently with his own. She felt his fingers through the fine silk of her panties, and she shuddered with pleasure. After a moment his hand slid inside.

  He knew just what to do.

  One day early in the summer, as they lay naked in a hotel bedroom with the sound of the waves coming through the open window, he had said: “Show me what you do when you touch yourself.”

  She had been embarrassed, and pretended not to understand. “What do you mean?”

  “You know. When you touch yourself. Show me. Then I’ll know what you like.”

  “I don’t touch myself,” she lied.

  “Well ... when you were a girl, before you were married—you must have done it then—everyone does. Show me what you used to do.”

  She was about to refuse; then she realized how sexy it would be. “You want me to stimulate myself—down there—while you watch?” she said, and her voice was thick with desire.

  He grinned wickedly and nodded.

  “You mean... all the way?”

  “All the way.”

  “I couldn’t,” she said; but she did.

  Now his fingertips touched her knowingly, in exactly the right places, with the same familiar motion and just the right pressure; and she closed her eyes and gave herself up to the sensation.

  After a while she began to moan softly and raise and lower her hips rhythmically. She felt his warm breath on her face as he leaned closer to her. Then, just as she was losing control, he said urgently: “Look at me.”

  She opened her eyes. He continued to caress her in exactly the same way, just a little faster. “Don’t close your eyes,” he said. Looking into his eyes while he did that was shockingly intimate, a kind of hypernakedness. It was as if he could see everything and know everything about her, and she felt an exhilarating freedom because she had nothing left to hide. The climax came, and she forced herself to hold his gaze while her hips jerked and she grimaced and gasped with the spasms of pleasure that shook her body; and he smiled down at her all the while and said: “I love you, Diana. I love you so much.”

  When it was over, she grabbed him and held him, panting and shaking with emotion, feeling that she never wanted to let go. She would have wept, but she had no tears left.

  She never did tell Mervyn.

  Mark’s inventive mind came up with the solution, and she rehearsed it as she drove home, calm and collected and quietly determined.

  Mervyn was in his pajamas and dressing gown, smoking a cigarette and listening to music on the wireless. “That were a bloody long visit,” he said mildly.

  Only a little nervous, Diana said: “I had to drive terribly slowly.” She swallowed, took a deep breath and said: “I’m going away tomorrow.”

  He was faintly surprised. “Where to?”

  “I’d like to visit Thea and see the twins. I want to make sure she’s all right, and there’s no telling when I’ll get another chance: the trains are already becoming irregular and petrol rationing starts next week.”

  He nodded assent. “Aye, you’re right. Better go now while you can.”

  “I’ll go up and pack a case.”

  “Pack one for me, will you?”

  For an awful moment she thought he wanted to go with her. “What for?” she said, aghast.

  “I’ll not sleep in an empty house,” he said. “I’ll stop at the Reform Club tomorrow night. You’ll be back Wednesday?”

  “Yes, Wednesday,” she lied.

  “All right.”

  She went upstairs. As she put his underwear and socks into a small suitcase, she thought: It’s the last time I’ll ever do this for him. She folded a white shirt and picked out a silver-gray tie: somber colors suited his dark hair and brown eyes. She was relieved that he had accepted her story, but she also felt frustrated, as if there were something she had left undone. She realized that although she was terrified of confronting him, she also wanted to explain why she was leaving him. She needed to tell him that he had let her down, he had become overbearing and thoughtless, he no longer cherished her as he once had. But now she never would say those things to him, and she felt oddly disappointed.

  She closed his case and began to put makeup and toiletries into her sponge bag. It seemed a funny way to end five years of marriage, packing socks and toothpaste and cold cream.

  After a while Mervyn came upstairs. The packing was all done and she was in her least attractive nightdress, sitting in front of her dressing table mirror, taking off her makeup. He came up behind her and grasped her breasts.

  Oh, no, she thought, not tonight, please!

  Although she was horrified, her body responded immediately, and she blushed guiltily. Mervyn’s fingers squeezed her swelling nipples, and she drew in her breath in a small gasp of pleasure and despair. He took her hands and drew her up. She followed helplessly as he led her to the bed. He turned out the light, and they lay down in pitch-blackness. He mounted her immediately and made love to her with a kind of furious desperation, almost as if he knew she was going away from him and there was nothing he could do about it. Her body betrayed her and she thrilled with pleasure and shame. She realized with extreme mortification that she would have reached orgasm with two men in two hours, and she tried to stop herself, but she could not.

  When she came, she cried.

  Fortunately, Mervyn did not notice.

  As Diana sat in the elegant lounge of the South-Western Hotel on Wednesday morning, waiting for a taxi to take Mark and her to Berth 108
in Southampton Docks to board the Pan American Clipper, she felt triumphant and free.

  Everyone in the room was either looking at her or trying not to look at her. She was getting a particularly hard stare from a handsome man in a blue suit who must be ten years younger than she was. But she was used to that. It always happened when she looked good, and today she was stunning. Her cream-and-red dotted silk dress was fresh, summery and striking. Her cream shoes were right and the straw hat finished the outfit off perfectly. Her lipstick and nail varnish were orange-red like the dots on the dress. She had thought about red shoes but decided they would look tarty.

  She loved traveling: packing and unpacking her clothes, meeting new people, being pampered and cosseted and plied with champagne and food, and seeing new places. She was nervous about flying, but crossing the Atlantic was the most glamorous voyage of all, for at the other end was America. She could hardly wait to get there. She had a filmgoer’s picture of what it was like: she saw herself in an Art Deco apartment, all windows and mirrors, with a uniformed maid helping her put on a white fur coat and a long black car in the street outside with its engine running and a colored chauffeur waiting to take her to a nightclub, where she would order a martini, very dry, and dance to a jazz band that had Bing Crosby as its singer. That was a fantasy, she knew; but she could hardly wait to discover the reality.

  She felt ambivalent about leaving Britain just as the war was starting. It seemed a cowardly thing to do, yet she was thrilled to be going.

  She knew a lot of Jewish people. Manchester had a big Jewish community: the Manchester Jews had planted a thousand trees in Nazareth. Diana’s Jewish friends watched the progress of events in Europe with horror and dread. It was not just the Jews, either: the Fascists hated the coloreds, and the Gypsies, and the queers, and anyone else who disagreed with Fascism. Diana had an uncle who was queer and he had always been kind to her and treated her like a daughter.

  She was too old to join up, but she probably ought to stay in Manchester and do volunteer work, winding bandages for the Red Cross....

  That was a fantasy, even more unlikely than dancing to Bing Crosby. She was not the type to wind bandages. Austerity and uniforms did not suit her.

  But none of that was truly important. The only thing that counted was that she was in love. She would go where Mark was. She would have followed him into the heart of a battlefield if necessary. They were going to get married and have children. He was going home, and she was going with him.

  She would miss her twin nieces. She wondered how long it would be before she would see them. They might be grown up next time, wearing perfume and brassieres instead of ankle socks and pigtails.

  But she might have little girls of her own....

  She was thrilled about traveling on the Pan American Clipper. She had read all about it in the Manchester Guardian, never dreaming that one day she would actually fly in it. To get to New York in little more than a day seemed like a miracle.

  She had written Mervyn a note. It did not say any of the things she wanted to tell him; did not explain how he had slowly and inexorably lost her love through carelessness and indifference; did not even say that Mark was wonderful.Dear Mervyn,I am leaving you. I feel you have become cold toward me, and I have fallen in love with someone else. By the time you read this, we will be in America. I am sorry to hurt you but it is partly your fault.

  She could not think of an appropriate way to sign off—she could not write: Yours or With love—so she just put: Diana.

  At first she had intended to leave the note in the house, on the kitchen table. Then she had become obsessed by the possibility that he would change his plans, and instead of staying at his club on Tuesday night, he would go home, and find the note, and make some kind of trouble for her and Mark before they were out of the country. So in the end she had mailed it to him at the factory, where it would arrive today.

  She looked at her wristwatch (a present from Mervyn, who liked her to be punctual). She knew his routine: he spent most of the morning on the factory floor; then toward midday he would go up to his office and look through the mail before going to lunch. She had marked the envelope PERSONAL so that his secretary would not open it. It would be lying on his desk in a pile of invoices, orders, letters and memos. He would be reading it about now. The thought made her guilty and sad, but also relieved that she was two hundred miles away.

  “Our taxi’s here,” Mark said.

  She felt a little nervous. Across the Atlantic in a plane!

  “Time to go,” he said.

  She suppressed her anxiety. She put down her coffee cup, stood up and gave him her brightest smile. “Yes,” she said happily. “Time to fly.”

  Eddie had always been shy with girls.

  He had graduated from Annapolis a virgin. When he was stationed at Pearl Harbor, he had gone with prostitutes, and that experience had left him with a sense of self-disgust. After leaving the navy, he had just been a loner, driving to a bar a few miles away any time he felt the need of companionship. Carol-Ann was a ground hostess working for the airline at Port Washington, Long Island, the New York terminal for flying boats. She was a suntanned blonde with eyes of Pan American blue, and Eddie would never have dared to ask her for a date. But one day in the canteen a young radio operator gave him two tickets to Life with Father on Broadway, and when he said he did not have anyone to take, the radioman turned to the next table and asked Carol-Ann if she wanted to go.

  “Ayuh,” she said, and Eddie realized she was from his part of the world.

  He later learned that at that time she had been desperately lonely. She was a country girl, and the sophisticated ways of New Yorkers made her anxious and tense. She was a sensual person, but she did not know what to do when men took liberties, so in her embarrassment she rebuffed advances indignantly. Her nervousness got her the reputation of an ice queen, and she was not often asked out.

  But Eddie knew nothing of this at the time. He felt like a king with her on his arm. He took her to dinner, then back to her apartment in a taxi. On the doorstep he thanked her for a nice evening and screwed up his courage to kiss her cheek, whereupon she burst into tears and said he was the first decent man she had met in New York. Before he knew what he was saying, he had asked her for another date.

  He fell in love with her on that second date. They went to Coney Island on a hot Friday in July, and she wore white slacks and a sky blue blouse. He realized to his astonishment that she was actually proud to be seen walking alongside him. They ate ice cream, rode a roller coaster called the Cyclone, bought silly hats, held hands and revealed trivial intimate secrets. When he took her home Eddie told her frankly that he had never been this happy in his entire life, and she astonished him again by saying she hadn’t, either.

  Soon he was neglecting the farmhouse and spending all his leave in New York, sleeping on the couch of a surprised but encouraging fellow engineer. Carol-Ann took him to Bristol, New Hampshire, to meet her parents, two small, thin, middle-aged people, poor and hardworking. They reminded him of his own parents, but without the unforgiving religion. They could hardly believe they had produced a daughter so beautiful, and Eddie understood how they felt, for he could hardly believe such a girl could have fallen in love with him.

  He thought of how much he loved her, as he stood the grounds of the Langdown Lawn Hotel, staring at the bark of the oak tree. He was in a nightmare, one of those hellish dreams in which you start by feeling safe and happy, but you think, in a fit of idle speculation, of the worst thing that could occur, and suddenly you find that it is actually happening, the worst thing in the world is actually, unstoppably, terrifyingly happening, and there is nothing you can do about it.

  What made it even more terrible is that they had quarreled just before he left home, and had parted without making it up.

  She had been sitting on the couch, wearing a denim work shirt that belonged to him and not much else, her long, suntanned legs stretched out in front, her fine fair hair
lying across her shoulders like a shawl. She was reading a magazine. Her breasts were normally quite small, but lately they had swollen. He felt an urge to touch them, and he thought: Why not? So he slid his hand inside the shirt and touched her nipple. She looked up at him and smiled lovingly, then went on with her reading.

  He kissed the top of her head, then sat down next to her. She had astonished him right from the start. They were both shy at first, but soon after they returned from their honeymoon holiday and started living together here in the old farmhouse, she had become wildly uninhibited.

  First she wanted to make love with the light on. Eddie felt awkward about it, but he consented, and he kind of liked it, although he felt bashful. Then he noticed that she did not lock the door when she took a bath. After that, he felt foolish about locking the door himself, so he did the same as she did, and one day she just walked in with no clothes on and got right in the tub with him! Eddie had never felt so embarrassed in his life. No woman had seen him naked since he was about four years old. He got an enormous hard-on just watching Carol-Ann wash her underarms, and he covered his dick with a washcloth until she laughed him out of it.

  She started walking around the farmhouse in various states of undress. The way she was now, this was nothing. She was practically overdressed by her standards. You could only just see a little white triangle of cotton at the top of her legs where the shirt did not quite cover her panties. She was normally much worse. He would be making coffee in the kitchen and she would come in wearing nothing but her underwear and start toasting muffins; or he would be shaving and she would appear in her panties, with no brassiere, and just brush her teeth like that; or she would come into the bedroom stark naked with his breakfast on a tray. He wondered if she was “oversexed;” he had heard people use that term. But he also liked her to be that way. He liked it a lot. He had never dreamed he would have a beautiful wife who would walk around his house undressed. He felt so lucky.