gaze with a steadiness he found endearing.
“We might as well finish it today.”
“That sounds very final.”
“All things come to an end and the painting is, save for a few final touches, all but finished.”
“But we’re not, are we?”
He retreated quickly to his Maginot.
She drank her wine in one. Her lips were left with the touch of sangiovese grape – sanguis Jovis – the blood of Jove. She reached down and placed the glass on the small table where her handbag lay, just out of reach from the sofa. Her breasts sagged slightly then firmed up again as she stood upright.
“So this is what it has come to.”
He smiled sweetly.
She reached beneath her dress and bent again and her breasts sagged again and she stepped out, one foot then the other, and left the flimsy yellow underwear on the oak floor. She watched his eyes but they didn’t flicker. But his lips moved and she was drawn to them. “Everything is coming back,” he said. “It is all so clear now.” She reached down to the hem of her dress and drew it over her thighs, over that tricky uncomplicated place, the Devil’s Triangle, over her navel and jutting hips.
Navel and jutting? Naval and Jutland came to mind, the largest naval battle in history, the battle that no one won. Life’s like that, he thought, with both sides, life and death, claiming victory. He smiled. He couldn’t help it. Everything, suddenly, was so maddeningly clear. The Devil’s Triangle, also known as the Bermuda Triangle, seemed so delightfully befitting.
He shook away the thought and concentrated again on that glossy overgrown thatch, black as coal and burning bright, the burning bush, hayah on Mount Horeb, the downfall of so many men – a blue would do it, with burnt sienna or raw umber and in that way, the sheen, the rainbow of split coal, would have the heart leaping with spring lambs in the silence of a dewy meadow. What was it about the common crack, he wondered, that could send men wild, to murder, to suicide, to go head-to-head with antlers or knives and guns? What was it about the crazy slit, marked indelibly and incomprehensibly in the head and no longer requiring the stink of readiness or the animal clock, that slow turn to spring, that could send the blood – Chinese blood in particular – rushing to the rut.
It was beyond him and he shook away the questions but another came at him, out of nowhere, and he smiled again.
Was he a religious man?
What simpletons to ask such a question? And what a silly girl to think that the dance of veils – in her case just two – would be the answer.
And from the pond and through the dark bracken the ducks took off across her sleek behind.
And Mr Lawrence shook his head in wonder.
“On or off?” she said, tugging apprehensively at her dress. He remembered their first meeting when she’d asked that very same question about her spectacles.
“Off, for now,” he said, repeating his line too. It could all have been a rehearsal, he smiled, and now it was for real.
She dropped the dress and stepped out of it, all arms and legs. Her breasts were nothing more than small swells, no more than force two or three, with dark nipples that stuck out and reminded him of the pink rubbers on the end of school pencils that you could nibble and suck until your lips turned pink. He thought about his school in Nicosia and the first girl he’d ever played with. She was a Cypriot so didn’t count and a couple of years younger, about five, maybe. While the sun blistered his bony shoulders he’d explored every inch of her limp body before covering it with huge rocks he carried from the dried-up riverbed.
Even then he knew that rigor would not begin to set in for three hours or so. He’d learned that much from the lizards.
For a few moments she stood motionless then, without taking her eyes from him, she took three long strides to the sofa and keeping her knees firmly clamped together, she sat down.
He selected a brush and nodded. “The finishing touches,” he said. An unexpected feeling of panic tightened her chest. Her risky position became all too apparent and even the knowledge of Sam Butler stationed outside did little to stem her sudden reluctance to continue. She said too quickly, “You can’t blank out the dress so easily. I don’t want my picture ruined.”
He tut-tutted. “I’m only concerned with your face. I want that uncertainty that your nakedness has brought about. I have seen defiance and provocation, even a challenge, but never before this hint of fear.”
“I’m not frightened of you, Mr Lawrence.”
“Not that. Not that at all. It’s more to do with modesty and propriety.”
He filled a fine brush with the colours of blush.
“I want to bring out that vulnerability a little more. I’ll tell you what we’ll do for, after all, at the core of your splendour is your pudenda.” “I don’t think so. That’s a little too far.”
“Mrs Harrison went that far.”
“I saw the painting. I don’t need reminding. And I’m not Helen Harrison.”
“But you do want to see her.”
His suggestion brought a sudden rush of thoughts, jumbled and confused, and she felt quite disorientated. For an instant she considered the whole situation ludicrous and she laughed out loud.
Mr Lawrence shared the joke and smiled back.
Colours deepened in waves and she felt light-headed. She put it down to anxiety and the adrenalin she’d used up. She gulped a few deep breaths, trying to control her racing pulse.
She thought of Butler listening to it all and imagined his expression should he burst in. She laughed out loud again. The DS might have dreamt of her in such a position. For a moment she wanted him to walk in just so she could see the look on his face.
“Sam, you better get in here,” she called out and Mr Lawrence’s smile widened.
She felt the heat radiating from her body and the colour rising in her face, just as Mr Lawrence wanted, but she laughed again in the knowledge that it was out of elation rather than embarrassment. Mr Lawrence had got it wrong. She was leading him on, too far gone, invincible, and nothing else mattered. What was it he wanted? Giddy with euphoria and with the room starting to slant this way and that, she tried to bring back the notion of what she was doing and why she was there at all. Even as she frowned in concentration she knew there were things she had to do and defiance returned with a steely look. Mr Lawrence smiled knowingly.
She lay back, without hesitation, and in that same moment drew her knees apart.
“It’s such a mysterious place,” he said. “A little Milky Way, a spreading supervulva.”
“You shouldn’t be looking, not really. I shall have to arrest you and take you in. I feel strange, like I’m swimming.”
“Relax. Do what you want to do. It’s the wine, you see, or rather, what is in the wine. I should market it.”
“Oh, Mr Lawrence, my head is spinning and I’m out of control. Why haven’t you seduced me, Mr Lawrence, like the others? Did you fuck the others, Mr Lawrence?”
“In my own way, my dear.”
“Are you going to fuck me, Mr Lawrence?”
“In my own way, my dear.”
He put aside his brush for the painting was complete and just right. Those questions in her dark eyes were answered by a subtle smile that left the faintest of dimples on her cheeks, an enigmatic expression – alluring and aloof – that hinted of triumph.
She watched him move from behind the easel and shuffle to the very edge of the studio. There, using a steel lever, he prised up a long floorboard. He moved again and pulled the hook and tackle along the rail until it hung directly over the narrow opening. He used the controls to drop the hook. The steel groaned and squealed as pulleys turned on their blocks and released the chain. As each clashing link fell over the wheel the chain extended with a clanking and screeching that reverberated through the room.
She sat quite immobile and watched a brick wall rise from the floor until it stood as tall and as wide as a door. Clumps of dusty black cobweb dropped from the crumbling edges and settled on the floorboards.
He moved back to the sofa and extended his hands toward her. She reached up, childlike, and took them and
