‘And thank God for that,’ I said.
I stood up, and opened the glass door, and went out onto the balcony. The cool night was clear, with bright stars over the ageless Mediterranean. Waves rippled softly round the edges of the bay, and the gentle moonlight shone on the wide empty expanse where the boat had been anchored.
It was the weirdest of debts. She had saved me from recapture. I certainly owed her my wholeness of mind, if not life itself. If the only payment she wanted was something I didn’t much want to give, then that was simply too bad. One extreme favour, I thought sardonically, deserved another.
I went in, and sat down. Drank some wine with a dry mouth.
‘We’ll try, if you like,’ I said.
She sat very still. I had a swift impression that now I’d agreed she was hastily retreating: that the half-fear of her student days was definitely still there.
‘You don’t have to,’ she said.
‘No. I want to.’ Heaven forgive all liars.
She said, as if speaking to herself, and not to me: ‘I’ll never have another chance.’
The voice of longing teetering on the brink of the leap in the dark. Her strength of mind, I saw, would carry her through. I admired her. I determined to make Hilary Pinlock’s leap something that at least she wouldn’t regret: if I could.
‘First of all,’ I said, ‘we’ll switch off the lights and sit by the window for a while, and talk about it.’
We sat facing each other in dim reflected moonlight, and I asked her some fairly medical questions, to which she gave straightforward replies.
‘What if you get pregnant?’ I said.
‘I’d solve that later.’
‘You want to go ahead?’
She took a deep breath. ‘If you do.’
If I can, I thought.
‘Then I think the best thing to do first would be to get undressed,’ I said. ‘Do you have a nightdress? And could you lend me a dressing gown?’
I reflected, as I put on her blue candlewick in the privacy of the bathroom, that deep physical tiredness was a rotten basis for the matter in hand. I yawned. I wanted above all to go to sleep.
When I went out she was sitting by the window in a long cotton nightgown which had a frill round the neckline, but was not, of course, transparent.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll sit on the bed.’
She stood up. The nightgown accentuated her height and thinness, and revealed long narrow feet. I pulled back the bed-clothes, sat on the white sheet, and held my hand out towards her. She came, gripped my hand, and sat beside me.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Now, if at any point you want to stop, you’ve only got to say so.’
She nodded.
‘Lie down, then,’ I said, ‘and imagine you are twenty.’
‘Why?’
‘Because this is not a brain matter. It’s about the stimulation of nerve endings. About feeling, not thinking. If you think all the time of who you are, you may find it inhibiting. Age doesn’t exist in the dark. If you imagine you are twenty, you will be twenty, and you’ll find it liberating.’
‘You’re a most unusual man.’
‘Oh sure,’ I said. ‘And you’re a most unusual woman. So lie down.’
She gave a small unexpected chuckle, and did as I said.
‘Take off your glasses,’ I said, and she put them without comment on the bedside table. In the dim light her eyes looked larger, as I’d guessed, and her big nose smaller, and her determined mouth softer. I leaned over and kissed her lips, and if it was basically a nephew-to-aunt gesture it brought a smile to her face and a grin to my own.
It was the strangest love-making, but it did work. I looked back afterwards to the moment when she first took pleasure in the sensation of my stroking her skin; the ripple of surprise when she felt with her hands the size of an erect man; the passion with which she finally responded; and the stunning release into gasping incredulity.
‘Is that,’ she said, out of breath, ‘is that what every woman feels?’
I knew she had reached a most satisfactory climax. ‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘On good days.’
‘Oh my goodness,’ she said in a sort of exultation. ‘So now I know.’
7
Thursday morning I went back to the office and tried to take up my life where it had left off.
The same smell of typewriters, filing cabinets, reams of paper. Same bustle, adding machines, telephones. Same heaps of too much work. All familiar, all unreal.
Our two assistants, Debbie and Peter, had had a rough time, they said aggrievedly, trying to account to everyone for my unaccountable absence. They had reported my disappearance to the police, who had said I was over twenty-one and had the right to duck out if I wanted to, and that they would look for me only if I’d committed a crime, or was clearly a missing victim. They had thought I had merely gone off on a celebratory binge after winning the Gold Cup.
‘We told them you wouldn’t have gone away for so long,’ Peter said. ‘But they didn’t show much interest.’
‘We wanted them to get in touch with Mr King, through Interpol,’ Debbie complained. ‘And they laughed at the idea.’
‘I expect they would,’ I said. ‘So Trevor is still on his holiday?’
‘He’s not due back until Monday,’ Peter said, surprised that I should have forgotten something I knew so well.
‘Oh yes...’
I spent the morning re-organising the time-table and getting Peter to make new appointments to replace those I’d missed, and the afternoon discovering that as far as the police were concerned, my troubles were still of little interest. I was back home, wasn’t I? Unharmed? Without having to pay a ransom? Was there any form of extortion? No. Was I starved? No. Beaten? No. Tied with ropes, straps, shackles? No. Was I sure it wasn’t a practical joke? They would look into it, they said: but one of them remarked that he wouldn’t mind a free fortnight’s trip to the Mediterranean, and his colleague laughed. I gathered that if I seriously wanted to get to know, I would have to do the investigating myself.
I did want to know. Not knowing felt dangerously unsafe, like standing behind a bad tempered horse. If I didn’t know why I’d been taken the first time, how was I to stop it happening again?
Thursday evening I collected my Dolomite, which had been moved to the Cheltenham racecourse manager’s front drive. (‘Where on earth have you been? We traced that it was your car through the police.’) Next I drove to the house of the racecourse valet to pick up my wallet and keys and racing saddle. (‘Where on earth have you been? I gave the racecourse manager your car keys, I hope that’s all right.’) Then I drove back to my cottage (having spent the previous night in an airport hotel), and with faint-hearted caution let myself in.
No one was waiting there in the dark, with coshes or ether or one-way tickets to sail lockers. I switched on all the lights and poured myself a stiff Scotch and told myself to calm down and take a better grip.
I telephoned to the trainer I regularly rode early morning exercise for (‘Where on earth have you been?’) and arranged to start again on Monday: and I rang a man who had asked me to ride in a hunter ’chase, to apologise for not turning up. I saw no reason not to answer the questions about where I’d been, so I told them alclass="underline" abducted and taken on a boat to Minorca, and I didn’t know why. I thought at least that someone might come up with a possible explanation, but everyone I told sounded as flummoxed as I felt.
There wasn’t much food in the cottage, and the steak in the fridge had grown whiskers. I decided on spaghetti, with chopped up cheese melting on it, but before starting to cook I went upstairs to change new jacket for old sweater, and to make a detour to the bathroom.