“No, I went to a Protestant school. The Protestant schools teach Latin, the Catholic schools teach Gaelic, I just picked some of the language up from a book. I’m pretty good at languages. The one thing I am good at.”
“Tell me more about yourself,” she said.
“You know everything, you saw my résumé.”
“We both know that was closer to fiction than truth, right?” she said, again with a smile.
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“You know, despite his many travels, Charles is hopeless at languages, most Americans are, you know. I have Spanish, though,” she said.
“That’s cool, it’s always good to know a language.”
“I think I’d like to learn Irish, it sounds beautiful.”
“It can be pretty guttural. It’s not beautiful like Italian.”
“Ireland’s nice, though? Donegal, you say, is lovely.”
“It’s really nice, you’ve got the Atlantic Ocean, big, empty beaches, the Blue Stack Mountains, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory on Station Island.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a pilgrimage site, you can wipe away your sins if you go there on a pilgrimage, you walk around the island barefoot and when you’re done you’re free of sin. Seamus Heaney wrote a very famous poem about it.”
“Did you go there?”
“What makes you think I have any sins?” I asked.
She laughed at this. A big sincere laugh. And it wasn’t that funny. She took a sip of the whisky and then another and then she grabbed my glass.
I touched her hand.
She looked at me.
And, oh God, I wanted to kiss her, I wanted to hold her, I wanted to be with her. I wanted her to tell me everything. I knew it would be all right. I wanted her and I wanted to have sex with Charles’s beautiful wife while he was out of town. To punish him.
“Maybe I should go,” I thought and said.
“Oh, don’t go, I was just about to try a different whisky, another glass won’t do me any harm, and I can’t drink alone,” she said.
She poured us both some Laphroaig. The conversation failed. She crossed her legs. Her skirt hiked up a little.
“So, no, I never went to Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, it’s only for Catholics, really,” I said.
She looked at me, inspected me. She seemed to make a decision, poured herself some more whisky, added ice, knocked it back. But then said nothing, sat back down on the sofa. And asked dreamily:
“Is Belfast close to Donegal?”
“Geographically close, you know, less than a hundred miles, but the roads are quite bad, so it takes about three hours to get there.”
“And you never went to Carrickfergus, even though it’s only about five miles from Belfast, I checked that on the map.”
I studied her again. Nothing betrayed on her face. No subtlety, no fear, no repression of hidden emotion. Normal.
“No, like I said, I’ve never been to Carrickfergus,” I answered as carefully as if I were a bomb disposal expert, cutting the blue wire, not the red one.
I waited for her to bring up Victoria Patawasti. Was she about to crack? Was she suddenly going to tell me everything because I was a compatriot of the dead girl? Was all this Irish stuff getting to her, filling her with guilt about what she knew? Her lips did not quiver, her eye was steady. No, she wasn’t going to blurt out anything like that, instead she surprised me by saying something quite different:
“I suppose you know you’re very handsome, too skinny, maybe, but very handsome. Tall, dark, and handsome, in fact.”
“How do I reply to that?” I asked, embarrassed despite myself.
“You say thanks for the compliment and then you compliment me. It’s basic civility,” she said.
“Ok. But I don’t want you to think that I’m saying this because you asked me to give you a compliment, I’m saying this because it’s perfectly true. You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met in my life. I’m not good at saying things, but you don’t just look beautiful, you have that rare thing that gets said too much, and I’m sort of regretting saying it right now, but the thing called inner beauty, too. You have it. It’s a purity of spirit, I can just tell that you are both lovely and good. Since I saw you first, I’ve felt bewitched, it’s like that stanza from Yeats, ‘It had become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair, who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening air. Though I am old with wandering through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone and kiss her lips and take her hands…. And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.’”
“That’s incredible,” she gasped, genuinely touched.
I knew half a dozen Yeats poems, all memorized to impress a different girl in a different world. But it had done the trick and I knew I had to deflate the moment, so I finished off the whisky, gave her my best winning smile, and said:
“Yeah, Amber, maybe I’m cynical, but it’s true that when you’ve got an Irish accent and you’re trying to impress a woman and as long as she’s not Irish or a hard-bitten professor of literature then Yeats will generally do the trick. ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ is by far the most popular choice, but I like ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus,’ it’s got that great last line, the chicks love it.”
She looked at me for a second, fury on her face, and then I saw that it was mock fury and then she started to laugh and laugh. Laugh so much tears were running down her face. Relief? A huge pent-up flood of emotions suddenly let loose? I was going to ask if she was ok, but before I could, she was standing up and she was reaching out her hand to mine, and I gave her my hand and she pulled me to my feet and kissed me. Hard, passionate, angry kisses. Her mouth was hungry with desire. She was drowning, she was suffocating, she was dying, she was living again through me.
I carried her to the bedroom and laid her on the bed. I pulled her dress down on one shoulder and kissed her arm and the top of her breast. There was a scar on the shoulder, a tiny imperfection in all that beauty. It made her more desirable, not less.
She wriggled out of the dress and undid her bra and ripped off my jacket and shirt. And still having my wits about me, I dimmed the lights, to hide the track marks. She looked up from the bed.
“I need you, Alexander, I need you, now, tonight,” she moaned.
I didn’t say anything. I took off my trousers and her panties. Her body pale, slender, carved in white marble, her hair like the faery gold; her red mouth open, so hungry, there was never anyone so hungry.
I kissed her neck and between her breasts and she pulled me close, her nails in my back holding on to me as if we were in danger of being torn apart. Sucked away into a vortex by terrible forces, the malignancy of Charles, by the blackness pursuing me. We were alone in this land of light. Secure. As long as we stayed together it would be good. Outside there were horrors, waiting like traps. But not here, not here. Here we were safe, safe, in this bed, in this one night.
“We’re shipwrecked,” she said, and I, agreeing, added nothing.
The bed and the silk sheets and her smooth skin and those eyes, blue like that ocean in Donegal. And her hands in my hair and on my back. And her voice in those soft harmonized American vocals.
“Oh, Alexander, you don’t know, you have no idea.”
“I want to know,” I said.
“No, no,” she said.
“Tell me,” I said.
“No.”
“Tell me,” I insisted.
“Kiss me,” she demanded.
My hands stroked her long beautiful legs and her belly and her arms. And I held her close and I kissed her and she tasted of champagne and whisky and ice.
And I kissed her and she didn’t speak and I came inside her and her body ached, hurting with pleasure and loss and she sobbed and we lay there in the dark, panting, breathing, holding each other.