'Your innocence,' he at once replied, his voice a purr. 'And your desire not to be.' His hand caressed her rump now, the merest touch of electric fingers tracing the curve of her buttocks, to and fro, to and fro.
Helen sighed, put a piece of straw between her teeth, slowly turned over on to her back. Her dress rode up even more. She didn't look at Yulian but gazed wide-eyed at the sloping rows of tiles overhead. As she turned so he lifted his hand a fraction, but didn't take it away.
'My desire not to be? Not to be innocent? What makes you think that?' And she thought: because it's so obvious?
When he answered, Yulian's voice was a man's again. She hadn't noticed the slow transition, but now she did.
Thick and dark, that voice, as he said, 'I've read it. All girls of your age desire not to be innocent.'
His hand fell on her belly, lingered over her navel, slipped down and crept under the band of her knickers. She stopped him there, trapping his hand with her own. 'No, Yulian. You can't.'
'Can't?' the word came in a gulp, choking. 'Why?'
'Because you're right. I am innocent. But also because it's the wrong time.'
'Time?' he was trembling again.
She pushed him away, sighed abruptly and said, 'Oh, Yulian — I'm bleeding!'
'Bleed — ?' He rolled away from her, snatched himself to his feet. Startled, she stared at him standing there. He shivered as if in a fever.
'Bleeding, yes,' she said. 'It's perfectly natural, you know.'
There was no pallor in his face now: it was red with blood, burning like a drunkard's face, with his eyes narrow slits dark as knife slashes. 'Bleeding!' this time he managed to choke the word out whole. He reached out his arms towards her, hands hooked like claws, and for a moment she thought he would attack her. She could see his nostrils flaring, a nervous tic tugging the corner of his mouth.
For the first time she felt afraid, felt something of his strangeness. 'Yes,' she whispered. 'It happens every month…'
His eyes opened up a little. Their pupils seemed flecked with scarlet. A trick of the light. 'Ah! Ah — bleeding!' he said, as though only just understanding her meaning. 'Oh, yes…' Then he reeled, turned away, went a little unsteadily down the steps and was gone. Then Helen had heard the puppy's wild yelp of joy (it had been stopped by the steps, which it couldn't climb)
and its whining and barking fading as it followed Yulian back to the house. And finally she started to breathe again.
'Yulian!' she'd called after him then. 'Your sunglasses, your hat!' But if he heard, he didn't bother to answer.
She wasn't able to find him for the rest of the day, but then she hadn't really looked for him. And because she had her pride — and also because he had failed to seek her out — she hadn't much bothered with him for the rest of their holiday. Perhaps it had been for the best; for she had been innocent, after all. She wouldn't have known what to do, not two years ago.
But when she thought of him, she still remembered his hand burning on her flesh. And now, going back to Devon with the countryside speeding by outside the car, she found herself wondering if there was still straw in the hayloft…
George, too, had his secret thoughts about Yulian. Anne could say what she liked but she couldn't change that. He was weird, that lad, and weird in several directions. It wasn't only the creeping-Jesus aspect that irritated George, though certainly the youth's furtive ways were annoying enough. But he was sick, too. Not mental, maybe not even sick in his body, just generally sick. To look at him sometimes, to catch him unawares with a side-glance, was to look at a cockroach surprised by a switched-on light, or a jellyfish steaming away, stranded on the beach when the tide goes out. You could almost sense something seething in him. But if it wasn't mental or physical, and yet encompassed both, then what the hell was it?
Hard to explain. Maybe it was both mind and body — and soul too? Except George wasn't much of a one for believing in souls. He didn't disbelieve, but he would like
evidence. He'd probably be praying when he died, just in case, but until then…
As for what Anne had said about Yulian at school: well, it was true, as far as it went. He had taken all of his exams early, and passed every one of them, but that wasn't why he'd left early. George had a draughtsman, Ian Jones, working for him in his London office, and Jones had a young son in the same school. Anne would hear none of it, of course not, but the stories had been wild. Yulian had 'seduced' a male teacher, a half-way-gone gay he'd somehow switched on. Once over the top, the fellow had apparently turned into a raver, trying to roger every male thing that moved. He'd blamed Yulian. That was one thing. And then:
In his art classes, Yulian had painted pictures which caused a very gentle lady teacher to attack him physically; she'd also stormed his bed-space and burned his art folios. Out nature rambling (George hadn't known they still did that) Yulian had been found wandering on his own, his face and hands smeared with filth and entrails. Dangling from one hand he'd carried the remains of a stray kitten. Its carcass was still warm. He'd said a man had done it, but this was out on the moors, miles from anywhere.
That wasn't all. It seemed he walked in his sleep and had apparently scared the living shit out of the younger boys, until the school had had to put a night-guard on their dorms. But by then the head had spoken at length with Georgina and she'd agreed he could leave. It was that or expulsion — for the sake of the good name of the school.
And there'd been other things, lesser things, but that had been the gist of it.
These were some of the reasons why George didn't like Yulian. But of course there was one other thing. It was something very nearly as old as Yulian himself, but it had fixed itself in George's mind indelibly.
The sight of an old man clutching his sheets to his chest as he died, and his last whispered words: 'Christen it? No, no — you mustn't! First have it exorcised!'
Anne could be strident if she had to be, but she was good through and through. She would never say a thing to hurt anyone, even though she might think certain things. To herself — if only to herself — she had to admit that she'd thought things about Yulian.
Now, lying back a little in her seat and stretching, feeling the cooling draught from the half-open window, she thought them again. Funny things: something about a big green frog, and something about the pain she'd get now and then in her left nipple.
The frog thing was hard to focus on; rather, she didn't like to focus on it. Personally she couldn't hurt a fly. Of course a child, a mere five-year old, wouldn't realise what he was doing. Would he? The trouble was that as long as she'd know Yulian he'd always seemed to know exactly what he was doing. Even as a baby.
She had called him a 'funny little thing', but in fact George was right. Yulian had been more than just funny. For one thing, he never cried. No, not quite true, he had cried when hungry, at least when he was very small. And he had cried in direct sunlight. Photophobia, apparently, right from infancy. Oh, yes, and he'd cried at least one other time, at his christening. Though that had seemed more rage — or outrage — than crying proper. As far as Anne knew, he never had been properly christened.
She let her thoughts take hold, carrying her back. Yulian had just started to walk — to toddle, anyway — when Helen came along. That was a month or so before poor Georgina had been well enough to go home and take him back. Anne remembered that time well. She'd been heavy with milk, fat as butter and happier than at any other time in her life. And rosy? What a picture of health she'd been!
One day when Helen was just six weeks old, while she was feeding her, Yulian had come toddling like a little robot, looking for that extra ounce of affection of which Helen had robbed him. Jealousy even then, yes, for he was no longer all important. On impulse — feeling a pang of pity for the poor mite — she'd picked him up, bared her other breast to him, her left breast, and fed him.
Even remembering it, the twinge of pain in her nipple came back like a wasp sting to bother her. 'Oh!' she said, stirring where she had fallen half-asleep.
'You all right?' George was quick to inquire. 'Wind your window down a little more. Get some fresh air.'
The steady purr of the car's engine brought her back to the present. 'Cramp,' she lied. 'Pins and needles. Can we stop somewhere — the next cafe?'
'Of course,' he answered. 'There should be one any time now.'
Anne slumped, returned half-reluctantly to her memories. Feeding Yulian, yes… She'd sat down with both
