London. No, she could quite see, as he swiftly removed himself from her contaminating presence after satisfying his own lust, that he wouldn't be proud.
'Ashley… ' She switched on the shower purely to drown him out.
A long time later she crept out, no precise plan in mind except a fierce, overwhelming need to get away. Hurriedly she dressed, selecting a starkly cut white shift dress and a cerise jacket. After digging a few essential items into a beach-bag, she tiptoed out of the room and downstairs. The house was in darkness. The front doors were not even locked. As she came down the steps from the veranda, a white-clad figure rose from the shadows. 'Lady go out? Lady want car?' It was the middle of the night but his gap-toothed smile seemed to say that the eccentric habits of Europeans abroad were not worth even a show of surprise.
'Yes, car,' she agreed, delighted it was going to be so easy. 'I want to go to Colombo.'
'I get Bandu. Take time.' He looked anxious now. 'Can you take me?' Ashley asked hurriedly, envisaging the whole household being aroused.
'Me? Kumar?' Slapping his chest, he named himself and laughed with positive delight. 'Yes, I take lady. Kumar very good driver,' he asserted.
The fact was not immediately apparent in the way the car lurched round the side of the house but Ashley didn't waste any time in climbing in. Slamming his foot down on the accelerator, he thundered down the highway and they shrieked out on to the road on two precarious wheels.
'Could you drive more slowly?' Ashley gasped. 'Very slow, Kumar go very slow.' They raced down the road at what felt like ninety miles an hour. Kumar was curved round the wheel like a racing driver.
'Slow!' she finally shouted in terror about ten minutes later when she recalled the drop down to the tea terraces on the outer edge of the road. Kumar jumped on to the brakes in an emergency stop. The car skated out of control from one side to the other. The nearside wheel hit the ditch and the car careened into a skid before finally lurching to a halt. Ashley was screaming. Kumar was screaming even louder. The car rocked. Silence fell.
'Go slow, have accident,' Kumar groaned. 'Not go slow in movies, go fast.' Undoing her seatbelt, Ashley staggered out on to the road and threw up in the ditch. She was shaking all over in reaction and was only dimly aware of her companion’s shouted monologue of woe in his own language until a tremendous grinding noise drew her attention. In the moonlight, she stared in disbelief as the car simply rolled off the edge and went crashing down on to the terraces below. Kumar had forgotten to put the handbrake on. The steep incline had done the rest.
He gave a great shriek of horror and threw himself down on the road. He was in such a state that it was some time before she could reassure him that he would not lose his job and that Vito would not blame him for the loss of the car. He was unconvinced, his misery making her feel guiltier than ever. Finally she managed to establish that there was a small rest-house some miles down the road. They started to walk. It took an hour and the heel snapped off one of her sandals when she went over in a pothole. By the time Kumar had roused the owner of the rest house and the portly owner, soon joined by curious wife and excited children had heard the whole story, it was three in the morning and Ashley was wondering how on earth she could have been so crazily impulsive.
She was shown with warm hospitality into a small, sparsely furnished room. After washing at the cold tap over the ancient corner sink, she slid between the patched but scrupulously clean sheets and stared up into the white blur of her mosquito net.
Wasn't she a clever girl, then? But then, when had she ever been clever with Vito? Inexorably her thoughts turned back the years and found no comfort in the past either.
The morning after that fateful party she had persisted with her assertion that she never wanted to see Vito again right up until it came to the point of actually leaving him. Then grudgingly she had allowed him to drive her home. He had asked her out to dinner that evening. She had told him she was busy. He had suggested the following evening and she had told him that she would be busy for the rest of her life.
And he had laughed and said nothing. But that night he had simply arrived complete with an enormous bunch of roses. Her flatmates had been struck dumb. She had reasoned that it wouldn't be cricket to shoot him down in front of an audience, so she had gone to dinner.
'You really don't have to do this,' she had kept on saying, as prickly as a cactus in his company and ordering scrambled egg on toast in the five-star restaurant because she didn't want him to spend his money on her.
'Every day I start with a clean sheet,' she had told him. 'Last night? It never happened. You don't owe me anything.'
'Why are you so determined to drive me away?' he had finally asked.
Clearly it was a very new experience for him with a woman. He had switched on the charm with a smoothness an oil slick would have envied. Last night… it had happened too fast. He was older, wiser, should have known better. It was all his fault, his responsibility, and he wanted them to start over as if it hadn't happened.
'Why?' she had queried baldly.
A wry smile had formed on his beautiful mouth. 'I think I've fallen in love with you.'
'Lust,' she had countered stiffly. 'Fallen in lust.'
'I also think that I'm going to marry you if you ever keep quiet long enough for me to ask you,' he had drawled with complete confidence. That had shaken her, but she had quickly decided that he could not possibly be serious. Even so, she had spent the remainder of the evening explaining in no uncertain terms why she would never marry him or anyone else.
'So we have an affair,' Vito had murmured with immovable calm.
'I don't have time for an affair.' She had been seriously rattled.
An ebony brow had quirked. 'You will find time for me,' he had responded without a single doubt in the world.
And he had been right. But between them they hadn't found quite enough time, she conceded with wry hindsight. No two people could have had less free time available. Banking, at the highest level, was a very demanding career. With barely an hour's warning, Vito could be off to Europe for an unspecified number of days. Ashley had had her classes, her course-work to complete and the necessary hours she put in as a waitress to keep the wolf from the door. And she had also had male and female friends she didn't intend to drop entirely for his benefit.
Although the plan had been that they would start over and get to know each other properly, it hadn't worked out that way. The frustration of their conflicting schedules had meant they scarcely saw each other the first three weeks, and when he took her back to his apartment one lunchtime passion had, quite without prompting, once more flamed out of control. They had never actually discussed living together. He had suggested that she use the apartment when he was abroad to study in peace away from her crowded flat. Piece by piece her possessions had drifted over there, and night after night Vito had contrived to ensure that she didn't go home..
But no sooner had she begun hanging her clothes in one of his wardrobes than the disagreements they had frequently had had escalated into full-scale rows. Now that Vito really knew her schedule, he expected her to drop the commitments that he considered either unnecessary or unimportant. The fact that she insisted on holding on to her waitressing job had outraged him. He had never understood that she could only cope with the vast disparity between their finances by ensuring that she did not live off him like some parasite.
Her equal determination to retain her friends and attend occasional student functions had infuriated him as well. At the outset he had been irritated, but when one evening he chose to join her and discovered her sitting at a table with a male friend, irritation had become outright jealous, possessive suspicion.
When Vito had a relationship with a woman, he expected twenty-four hour exclusive rights. If he wasn't available, he had expected her to sit at home weaving little-woman dreams about him and hanging by the phone waiting for his call. The rows had become increasingly more passionate and destructive. A case of the irresistible force and the immovable object. Neither of them had been prepared to give an inch and Ashley had become more and more insecure, dismayed by how harrowing she found it when Vito was angry with her, trapped by the awful truth that she just didn't have the strength to walk away from him. More and more the bedroom had become the only place where they were ever in complete harmony. When he criticised her, argued with her or even attempted to reason with her, she had started to slam out of the apartment. She'd begun to lie awake nights worrying while he slept like a log. One of her tutors had told her plainly that her work was no longer up to standard. Her concentration was gone. All she'd thought about was Vito… Vito… Vito. He had tried to help her with her work but when one evening she had blamed him for the problems she was having he had lost his temper and told her that she was out of her element in accountancy because she couldn't seem to grasp the intricacies involved.
He had apologised, but she had known that he was telling her the truth, and bitterly had she resented hearing
