The Labyrinth Makers

'Your teeth are chattering.'

He gritted his teeth. 'Sorry.'

There was a pause.

'You can come in with me if you like, under the blanket.'

Audley sat bolt upright, unable for a moment to believe his ears.

But there was no mistaking the invitation: she was holding up the edge of the blanket. The flame of the candle flickered and her shadow danced on the wall behind her.

At length he shook his head.

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'I'm cold and I'm tired and I feel a hundred years old, my girl. But I'm still flesh and blood. And when I crawl under a blanket with a woman it'll never be to stop my teeth chattering. You just try and go to sleep.'

She raised herself on one elbow, looking at him.

'I'm cold and tired too, David. And I'm frightened and I've mixed myself up in I don't know what. And I think my father stole something so big it makes me sick just to think of it ... And–and I'm flesh and blood too.'

She tossed back her pale blonde hair and he saw with surprise that same curiously haughty stare which he remembered from the churchyard. Yet the offer of comfort in exchange for comfort could hardly have been more explicit. Bafflement, rather than any last ditch shred of conscience or caution, held him back.

She wasn't wearing her glasses!

The contradiction which had plagued him since she had knocked on his door the previous night dissolved: it wasn't haughtiness–she simply couldn't see him clearly!

Without stopping to analyse the curious mixture of relief and lust and protective affection, he reached out for her, and she met him halfway, and more than halfway.

'You silly, silly man,' she whispered in his ear.

He pressed her gently backwards, feeling the old, long-lost excitement: the softness and firmness of her small breasts, the length of her, the smell of her hair mingling with the faint perfume he had sensed in her room.

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She was shrugging herself out of her dressing gown, out of her nightdress–as it came over her head, loosing the pale hair, he felt the skin move over her ribs, skin that impossibly combined warmth with coolness.

The candle was extinguished suddenly–knocked over, snuffed out, it no longer mattered. And the tiny secret room was no longer cold: it was no longer tiny and no longer a room. It was a velvety nothingness moving in its own time and space, starless and endless, with nothing outside it or beyond it, spiralling into infinity.

And then she was holding him tightly and he felt the rough blanket on his shoulders and the sweat prickle on his chest, and he lay holding her until the darkness stopped revolving around them.

She moved into the crook of his arm and he reached across her to feel for the candle.

The matches spilt as he fumbled for them, one-handed, and he struck one against the stone wall. She lay unmoving beside him with the blanket drawn down, unmoving, strands of hair lying damp across her forehead.

'It can't happen often like that, can it?' she said slowly, without looking at him. 'It can't be so good?'

'I don't know. Never before for me.'

'Nor for me.'

Maybe it was only once in a lifetime, he thought. Maybe only when the need and the desire and the fear are united in exactly those proportions. And the person?

He looked down at her again, and then drew the blanket over that dummy4

little schoolgirl's bosom, so different from his old imagined ideal.

My God, he thought: what have I done? I've laid John Steerforth's daughter–maybe got him a grandchild!

She turned towards him, with a small, satisfied smile which faded directly into seriousness as she saw his expression.

'Was I a disappointment then?' she said.

'You know very well you weren't! But that doesn't make it—' he searched for the word '—right.'

It was the wrong word, and she laughed.

'Dear out-of-date David! If it's like that it has to be right. That's what it's all about!'

'It's not right to mix business and pleasure.'

'Business and pleasure ought to be mixed–why on earth shouldn't they be? And it was my fault, anyway. You only did what you had to, in the line of duty.'

She was mocking him, and she was wholly irresistible now. He kissed her softly on the mouth, then on the breast, and took her in his arms again and lay still beside her.

'That wasn't in the line of duty, David,' she said very quietly.

'No, Faith. That was just for me.'

'Then I think I'll go to sleep, David, because nothing nicer can possibly happen to me now . . . and I couldn't possibly be safer anywhere than here, could I?'

She snuggled against him.