and I were left on the boat together drinking brandy. The night was very hot and still. An owl hooted in a nearby spinney. The first star flickered like a white moth in a dark blue sky. Gareth smoked a cigar to keep off the midges. The wireless was playing Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. If only it was Jeremy sitting there, I thought. Nevertheless, I’d made such good progress that day. I felt nothing could dim my happiness.
Gareth got up, flicked his cigar into the water and strolled over to the other side of the boat to stand looking at the darkening horizon.
‘How’s your weekend of sun, sex and sleep going?’ I asked.
‘Not quite as eventfully as yours,’ he said.
He came and stood over me, looking down at me, huge against the sky. Suddenly my heart began to thump unpleasantly, perhaps at last he was going to try his luck with me after all.
‘I want another drink,’ I said, getting quickly to my feet and wandering into the saloon.
Gareth followed me. ‘Aren’t you beginning to wonder why I haven’t made a pass at you?’
I turned round. ‘Since you seem quite incapable of passing anyone up, it had crossed my mind.’
He looked at me for a minute and then grinned.
‘Because I don’t like bitches, and you’re the biggest bitch I’ve ever met.’
Wham! I let him have it, slap across the cheek. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t even put his hand up to his face.
‘And that seems to substantiate my theory,’ he said, pulling a packet of cigarettes out of his hip pocket and offering me one. I shook my head dumbly, appalled at what I had done. He selected a cigarette carefully and then lit it.
‘You’re not really my type,’ he went on. ‘I like my women gentle and loving, soft and tender. Women so vulnerable I want to protect them just as I’d look after a kitten or a little girl lost in the street. Women who don’t automatically expect me to love them more than they love me. Maybe once upon a time before everyone started spoiling you you were like that, but not any more. You’re so hard now, lovely, they could cut a diamond on you.’
‘How dare you speak to me like that!’ I said furiously.
‘Because I’m probably the first man you’ve ever met who’s been left completely cold by you. I’ve met your sort before; you’re just a prick teaser or what the French call an “
‘Shut up,’ I said in a choked voice. ‘I don’t want to listen.’
‘And another thing,’ he went on, pouring a couple of fingers of brandy into his glass, ‘although you’ve probably seen more ceilings than Michaelangelo, I guess you’ve never got any pleasure out of all those men you’ve slept with, and that troubles you a bit, because you’ve read somewhere that sex is supposed to be rather enjoyable and you can’t understand why it doesn’t work for you.’
It was like a nightmare.
‘Stop it, stop it!’ I screamed. ‘You don’t understand anything. I was going to get married but he was killed in a car crash only a few months ago.’
‘I know all about that,’ he said softly. ‘Tod was never going to marry you.’
I clutched the table for support; my legs seemed to give way.
‘You knew him?’ I whispered. ‘I don’t understand. Then you knew. .’
‘. . All about you long before I met you?’ said Gareth. ‘Yes, of course I did. Tod was living with an old girl friend of mine, Cathie Summers. They were fantastic together until you came along and broke it up.’
‘I didn’t break it up,’ I whispered.
‘Oh yes you did, lovely. You waited until Cathie’d gone to the States for a week and then you moved in. But it wasn’t any good. Tod was fallible like most men, but he saw through you pretty quickly.’
‘You’re wrong. You’re wrong. He loved me far more than he did her! He was with me the night he was killed.’
Gareth turned to me, his eyes suddenly stony with contempt.
‘I know he was. But as usual Miss Brennen — Myth Brennen I ought to call you — you’re bending the facts. Tod and I had a drink in the Antelope that night. Cathie was due back the next day, and Tod was in a panic about what she’d say if she found out about you. He was steeling himself to come round and tell you it was all off. I told him not to bother, just to let you stew. But Tod, being an ethical sod, insisted on going through with it.’
‘That’s right,’ I stammered. ‘And the moment he saw me he realized it was me he loved, not Cathie, and he was going to give her up.’
‘You’re a bloody liar,’ said Gareth. ‘Tod left me in the pub at five to eleven. He must have been with you by eleven o’clock. He was killed at ten past eleven — driving like the devil to get away from you.’
For a second I couldn’t move or tear my eyes away from his. Then I gave a sob and fled out of the saloon down the passage to my cabin and, throwing myself down on my bunk, broke into a storm of weeping. I couldn’t stand it. Gareth knew Tod, he knew all about me. He’d looked into my mind and seen everything — the aridity, the desert, the emptiness — and he’d brought to light terrible things I’d never admitted, even to myself, disproving lies that even I had begun to believe were the truth. I cried and cried, great tearing sobs until I thought there were no more tears inside me, then I just lay there, my face buried in my sodden pillow, trembling with terror.
Much later I heard Jeremy and Gussie come back. Oh God, I thought in agony, I expect Gareth’s giving them a blow-by-blow account of the whole incident. They must have stayed up to watch the midnight movie, because it was half-past two before Gareth came to bed.
‘Octavia,’ he said softly.
I didn’t answer. I ached for Jeremy. I wanted him to take me in his arms, to caress and console me and reconcile me with myself.
I didn’t sleep all night. Great waves of anguish kept sweeping over me. I toyed with the idea of creeping off the boat before anyone was up and going back to London. But how would I get there? There wasn’t a railway station for miles. I suppose I could ring one of my boyfriends and ask them to drive down and collect me. But would they? I’d never doubted I could get a man back at the drop of a hat. Now, suddenly, I wasn’t sure.
I was feeling so paranoid I could hardly get myself out of bed. Thank God I’d brought the biggest pair of dark glasses in the world with me. In the kitchen Jeremy and Gussie were cooking breakfast.
‘If you’ve got a hangover like the rest of us,’ said Gussie, ‘there’s some Alka Seltzer in the cupboard.’
‘No, I haven’t actually.’ Gussie poured me out a cup of coffee.
‘Do you take sugar?’
‘Of course she doesn’t, she’s quite sweet enough as it is,’ said Jeremy, smiling at me. He was so used to getting the come-on sign from me, he seemed amazed I didn’t crack back, and when he handed me my cup, his fingers closed over mine for a second. Yesterday I would have been certain he was trying to make contact with me; now my self-confidence had taken such a bashing, I felt it must be accidental.
I took my coffee up on deck. Three vast pairs of pants and the biggest bra in the Western Hemisphere were dripping from the railing. Gussie had obviously been doing some washing. A silver haze lay over the countryside. Pale green trees rose tender as lovers from the opposite bank. I couldn’t stop shaking. Amidst all this beauty and sunshine, I felt like an empty shell.
A minute later Gussie came and joined me.
‘What a beautiful shirt that is,’ she said. ‘I do envy you, Tavy. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a hangover or feel off colour, you’ve got such a lovely figure and such marvellous hair, people still think you’re a knockout. But with me, my face is the only thing I’ve got — and that isn’t all that great — and when that looks awful,’ — she squinted at herself in the cabin window — ‘like today, with this spot, I’ve got nothing to offer.’
She looked down at her left hand and flashed her engagement ring in the sun.
‘Jeremy’s wild about you,’ she said wistfully. ‘He was teasing me yesterday, saying that I was lucky I’d got his ring on my finger before he met you, or heaven knows what would have happened.’
I suddenly wondered what Jeremy was playing at.
‘He’s got no right to say that,’ I said crossly. ‘He adores you. You’ve only got to see the way he looks at you when you don’t know he’s looking.’
