back.
He had loved Chantelle Christy to the limits of his soul, and had
devoted almost half of his life to Christy Marine.
He realized then that those things could never change, not for him, not
for Nicholas Berg, prisoner of his own conscience.
Suddenly he found himself opposite the Kensington Natural History Museum
in the Cromwell Road, and swiftly he crossed to the main gates - but it
was a quarter to six and they were closed already. Samantha would not
have been in the public rooms anyway, but in those labyrinthine vaults
below the great stone building. in a few short days, she had made half
a dozen cronies among the museum staff. He felt a stab of jealousy,
that she was with other human beings, revelling in their companionship,
delighting in the pleasures of the mind - had probably forgotten he
existed.
Then suddenly the unfairness of it occurred to him, how his emotions of
a minute previously had been stirring and boiling with the memories of
another woman. Only then did he realize that it was possible to be in
love with two different people, in two entirely different ways, at
exactly the same time.
Troubled, torn by conflicting loves, conflicting loyalties, he turned
away from the barred iron gates of the museum Nicholas apartment was on
the fifth floor of one of those renovated and redecorated buildings in
Queen's Gate.
it looked as though a party of gypsies were passing through. He had not
hung the paintings, nor had he arranged his books on the shelves. The
paintings were stacked against the wall in the hallway, and his books
were pyramided at unlikely spots around the lounge floor, the carpet
still rolled and pushed aside, two chairs facing the television set, and
another two drawn up to the dining-room table.
it was an eating and sleeping place, sustaining the bare minima of
existence; in two years he had probably slept here on sixty nights, few
of them consecutive. It was impersonal, it contained no memories, no
warmth.
He poured a whisky and carried it through into the bedroom , slipping
the knot of his tie and shrugging out of his jacket. Here it was
different, for evidence of Samantha's presence was everywhere. Though
she had remade the bed that morning before leaving, still she had left a
pair of shoes abandoned at the foot of it, a booby trap to break the
ankles of the unwary; her simple jewellery was strewn on the bedside
table, together with a book, Noel Mostert's Supership, opened face down
and in dire danger of a broken spine; the cupboard door was open and his
suits had been bunched up in one corner to give hanging space to her
slacks and dresses; two very erotic and transparent pairs of panties
hung over the bath to dry; her talcum powder still dusted the tiled
floor and her special fragrance pervaded the entire apartment.
He missed her with a physical ache in the chest, so that when the front
door banged and she arrived like a high wind, shouting for him,
'Nicholas, it's me' as though it could possibly have been anyone else,
her hair tangled and wild with the wind and high colour under the golden
