treatment before the tenth day of her cycle, she will almost certainly experience a fertility backlash effect and become considerably more susceptible to impregnation when she ovulates,' he had assured Ramsey.
The slim pack of pills was in one of the compartments of her black crocodile-skin purse near the bottom of the bag. Once again, Ramsey straightened up to listen. There was no sound of voices from the courtyard, and he darted back to the window. He saw that Isabella still sat at the table and that the innkeeper's black cat now had all her attention. The supercilious creature had settled in her lap and was allowing her to tickle behind his ears.
Ramsey stepped back into the bedroom. There were seven pills missing from the separate date-marked compartments in the packet. From his inside pocket Ramsey slipped the identical Ovanon packet with which the embassy doctor had provided him. He removed the first seven pills from their compartments and dropped them into the toilet-bowl. Then he placed the two packages side by side and compared them. Now they were identical in every respect, except that the second package contained only aspirin tablets cunningly coated to resemble birth-control pills.
He slipped the packet of placebo tablets into Isabella's purse and replaced her shoulder-bag in the alcove. He pocketed the original package and flushed the toilet, making sure that the seven pills were gone before he washed his hands and went down the narrow staircase to where Isabella waited in the courtyard.
In Granada, Ramsey took her to the corrida de toros and exulted in their great good fortune that they were to be Able to watch El Cordobes work.
Had not Ramsey's father been a patron of this most famous of all matadors when he was a mere novillero, they would never have procured tickets to the performance at such short notice. As it was, two tickets were delivered to their hotel on the morning after their arrival. Not only were they seated at the ringside directly to the right of the president's box, but also before the spectacle they were invited to watch El Cordobes dress for the corrida.
Of course, Isabella had read Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, and she realized the honour of that invitation. Nevertheless, she was unprepared for the obvious depth of Ramsey's respect as he greeted Manuel Benitez, El Cordobes, or for the semi-religious solemnity of the ritual of dressing.
'You have to be Spanish to understand the bulls,' Ramsey told her ab. they took their reserved seats, and indeed she had never seen him so moved and emotional. His involvement was so powerful and infectious that she found herself as wrought-up as he was.
The trumpets of the entry parade sent thrills down her spine, and the spectacle was magnificent: the horses and the costumes encrusted with silver and gold and seed pearls, and the matadors strutting in their short embroidered jackets and skin-tight trousers that blatantly emphasized their buttocks and their bunched genitalia. Even the flaring coral pink and incarnadine satins of the capes glistened with the lubricious tones of intimate feminine flesh and served to underscore the essentially lascivious nature of the frenzy that descended upon the tiered ranks of spectators.
When the bull surged into the ring, horned head high, the great hump of his shoulders swollen with rage, white sand dashing from under his hoofs and his engorged scrotum swinging to the pounding rhythm of his charge, Isabella came to her feet and screamed with the crowd.
As El Cordobes performed the initial passes, Ramsey gripped her arm and leant close to her, describing and explaining the significance of each graceful evolution, from the pure elegance of the simple verenica to the more complicated quite. Through Ramsey's eyes, she came to see it as the beginning of some movingly beautiful ritual, steeped in ancient tradition, which did not attempt to disguise its cruel and darkly tragic essence.
When the trumpets saluted the entrance of the picadors, Isabella moaned aloud and pressed her knuckles against her teeth, for she had been dreading the horses. She had read of the horror of the disembowelled horses with their entrails tangled about their legs. To calm her fears, Ramsey pointed out to her the thick armour of compressed cotton and canvas and leather that protected them. In the end none of the horses was harmed even when the bull hooked viciously into their padded bodies and drove them up against the barriers.
The picador leant from the saddle and worked the steel into the bull's hump, and, the blood sprayed up in a roseate nimbus of light, and then slicked down over the bull's shoulders so that its hide gleamed like metal in the sun.
Isabella shuddered with awful fascination, and Ramsey murmured: 'The blood is real, everything you see here is real, as real as life. This is life, my darling, with all life's beauty and cruelty and passion.' She understood it then, accepted it and allowed herself to be carried along on the flood.
El Cordobes took his own banderillas. He posed in the sunlight and held high the long darts wrapped in coloured paper streamers. He called to the bull, and when it came he ran to meet it with light dancing strides. As they came together, Isabella gasped, and then the master had planted the banderillas and pirouetted away. The bull dropped his head and bucked at the sting of the barbs high in his withers, but his momentum had carried him out of goring range.
The trumpets sounded the final tercio, the hour of truth, and a new mood descended upon the stadium. El Cordobes and the bull engaged each other in the stately intimate dance of death. With only the floating cape between them, the passes were so close and dangerous that the bright blood from the beast's shoulders smeared the matador's thighs as it swept by.
At last El Cordobes stood below the president's box and lifted his montera cap decorated with black silk pompons to ask permission to dedicate the bull. Isabella was overwhelmed when he came to where she sat and dedicated the bull to her beauty. He tossed his montera up to her and turned and went back to face the bull.
El Cordobes performed the final passes in the centre of the ring, each one more graceful and closer to the horns than the last. Every time the crowd erupted with one primeval voice, a great burst of sound that punctuated the aching silences in which each separate pass was performed.
In the end, he prepared for the kill directly below where Isabella sat. As he sighted the bull over the long silver blade, Ramsey gripped her arm hard and whispered to Isabella: 'Look! He will take it recibiendo, the most dangerous manner of all!' When the bull made its last desperate rush, instead of running to meet it, El Cordobes stood four-square and went in over the top of the horns. The bright point of the estoque severed the great artery of the heart, and the blood gushed up in a fountain.
On the return from the bull-ring to the hotel, neither of them spoke. They were entranced, caught up in a rapture which was mystic and semi-religious.
The cruelty and the blood, the tragic beauty of the spectacle had not wearied or jaded their emotions, but had enhanced them to the threshold of a kind of spiritual agony, which cried out for release. Isabella sensed that Ramsey's need was even greater and more uncontrollable than her own.
In their bedroom whose double doors and wrought-iron balcony overlooked the gardens of the old Moorish palace, Ramsey stood her in the centre of the floor. While the blades of the old-fashioned fan on the high ceiling revolved overhead, he undressed her. It seemed that in doing so, he 70 performed another ritual as ancient as that of the corrida. When she was naked, he knelt at her feet, clasped her around the hips and buried his face in the dense warm pillow of hair in the basin of her pelvis.
She caressed his head with a tenderness that she had never felt for another human being, yet it was tinged with a great sadness and humility. She felt that a love like this was divine, and that she was not worthy of it. It was too great for any mortal being to bear.
At last he rose and took her up like a child in his arms and carried her to the bed. It was as though it had never happened before, as though he had broken through to such secret depths of her physical and spiritual being that even she had not suspected their existence.
The laws of time and space were redefined while she was in his arms. It lasted an instant and a flaming eternity. Like a comet she was transported through the full circle of the heavens. When she looked up into his green eyes, she knew with a lambent joy that his spirit was locked into hers as deeply as his flesh was entrapped within her throughout all that incredible odyssey. When she believed that she could reach no higher, survive no longer, there was an outpouring within her, as hot and copious as a flood of volcanic lava.
As the last light of day faded and their room filled with shadows, she found that she was so devastated that she could no longer speak or move; she had only the strength left to weep, and while she wept with exhaustion and fulfilment sleep overcame her.
Her entire world was a brighter, more joyous place now that she had Ramsey.
London, that most fascinating and vital of cities, transcended itself and became for her an earthly paradise. She saw it all through a shimmering golden mist of excitement. Each minute spent in his company was like a precious jewel set in that gold.
When they had come to London three years earlier, Isabella had resumed her studies and gained her bachelor's degree. Surprised at her sudden studiousness, her father had encouraged her to enrol in the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, and she had embarked on her doctoral thesis. She had chosen as her subject 'A Dispensation for Post-Colonial Africa'. Her thesis was advancing well, and she had hoped to complete most of it before her father's term as ambassador ended and they
