Victor Hugo, and she shuddered as though she had felt the brush of the black angels” wings across her skin.
“I would have been there,” she admitted. “You chose the two best sites. Yves has arranged a private showing for me on the sixth of next month. I would have gone to it.” Then you saved me the trouble. You invited me here.
I knew that it was an invitation to die, that you knew I had become aware, that I had learned you were Caliph. I saw it in your eyes during that meeting at Orly Airport, I saw it proven by the way you were suddenly avoiding me, the way you were giving me no opportunity to do the job I had to do.”
“Go on.”
“You had me searched when I landed at Tahiti-Faaa.” She nodded.
“You had the grey wolves search my room again last night, and you set it up for today. I knew I had to strike first, and I did.”
“Yes”
she murmured. “You did.” And rubbed her throat again.
He went to recharge the glasses from the concealed liquor cabinet behind the bulkhead, and came back to sit beside her.
She shifted slightly, moving inside the circle of his arm, and he held her in silence. The telling of it had exhausted him, and his body ached relentlessly, but he was glad it was said, somehow it was like lancing a malignant abscess the release of poisons was a relief, and now the healing process could begin.
He could feel his own exhaustion echoed in the slim body that drooped against him, but he sensed that hers was deeper, she had taken too much already and when he lifted her in his arms again she made no protest, and he carried her like a sleeping child through to the master cabin and laid her on the bunk.
He found pillows and a blanket in the locker below. He slid into the bunk with her, under the single blanket, and she fitted neatly into the curve of his body, pressing gently against him, her back against his chest, her hard round buttocks against the front of his thighs, and her head pillowed into the crook of his arm, while with his other arm he cuddled her close and his hand naturally cupped one of her breasts.
They fell asleep like that, pressing closely, and when he rolled over she moved without waking, reversing their positions, moulding herself to his back and pressing her face into the nape of his neck, clasping him with one arm and with a leg thrown over his lower body as though to enfold him completely.
Once he woke and she was gone, and the strength of his alarm surprised him, a hundred new doubts and fears assailed him from the darkness, then he heard the liquid puff in the bowl of the heads and he relaxed. When she returned to the bunk, she had stripped off the terry to welling track suit and her naked body felt somehow very vulnerable and precious in his arms.
They woke together with sunlight pouring into the cabin through one porthole like stage lighting.
“My God it must be noon.” She sat up, and tossed back the long mane of dark hair over her tanned bare shoulders but when Peter tried to rise, he froze and groaned aloud.
“Qu’a tu, cheri?”
“I must have got caught in a concrete mixer,” he moaned.
His bruises had stiffened during the night, torn muscle and strained sinews protested his slightest movement.
“There is only one cure for both of us,” she told him. “It’s in three parts.” And she helped him off the bunk as though he was an old man. He exaggerated the extent of his injuries a little to make her chuckle. The chuckle was a little hoarse, but her voice was stronger and clearer and she favoured her own bruises only a little as she led him up onto the deck.
Her powers of recuperation were those of a young and superbly fit thoroughbred animal.
They swam from the diving platform over the Chriscraft’s stern.
“It’s working,” Peter admitted as the support of warm saltwater soothed his battered body. They swam side by side, both naked, slowly at first and then faster, changing the sedate breast-stroke for a hard overarm crawl, back as far as the reef, treading water there and gasping at the exertion.
“Better?” she panted with her hair floating around her like the tendrils of some beautiful water plant.
“Much better.”
“Race you back.” They reached the Chriscraft together and clambered up into the cockpit, cascading water and laughing and panting, but when he reached for her, she allowed only a fleeting caress before pulling away.
“First Phase Two of the cure.” She worked in the galley with only a floral apron around her waist which covered the dark bruises of her belly.
“I never thought an apron could be provocative before.”
“You are supposed to be doing the coffee,” she admonished him and gave him a lewd little bump and grind with her bare backside.
Her omelettes were thick and golden and fluffy, and they ate them in the early sunlight on the upper deck. The trade wind was sheep-dogging a flock of fluffy silver cloud across the heavens, and in the gaps the sky was a peculiar brilliant blue.
They ate with huge appetites, for the bright new morning seemed to have changed the mood of doom that had overpowered them the previous night. Neither of them wanted to break this mood, and they chattered inconsequential nonsense, and exclaimed at the beauty of the day and threw bread crusts to the seagulls, like two children on a picnic.
At last she came to sit in his lap, and made a show of taking his pulse.
“The patient is much improved, “she announced; “is now probably strong enough for Phase Three of the cure.”
“Which is?“he asked.
“Peter cheri, even if you are English, you are not that dense. “And she wriggled her bottom in his lap.
They made love in the warm sunlight, on one of the foam mattresses, with the trade wind teasing their bodies like unseen fingers.
It began in banter and with low gurgles of laughter, little gasps of rediscovery, and murmurs of welcome and encouragement then suddenly it changed, it became charged with almost unbearable intensity, a storm of emotion that sought to sweep all the ugliness and doubt. They were caught up in the raging torrent that carried them helplessly beyond mere physical response into an unknown dimension from which there seemed no way back, a total affirmation of their bodies and their minds that made all else seem inconsequential.
“love you,” she cried at the very end, as though to deny all else that she had been forced to do. “I have loved only you.” It was a cry torn from the very depths of her soul.
It took a long time for them to return from the far place to which they had been driven, to become two separate people again, but when they did somehow they both sensed that they would never again be completely separated; there had been a deeper more significant union than just that of their two bodies, and the knowledge sobered them and yet, at the same time, gave them both new strength and a deep IN
elation that neither had to voice it was there, and they both simply knew it.
They slid the big inflatable Avon dinghy over the stern, and went ashore, pulling the rubber craft above the high-water level and mooring it to one of the slanting palm holes.
Then they wandered inland, picking their way hand in hand between the seabird nests that had been crudely scraped in the earth. Half a dozen different species of birds were breeding together in one sprawling colony that covered most of the twenty-acre island. Their eggs varied from as big as that of a goose’s, to others the size of a pullet’s and speckled and spotted in lovely free-form designs.
The chicks were either grotesquely ugly with bare parboiled bodies or were cute as Walt Disney animations. The entire island was pervaded by an endless susurration of thousands of wings and the uproar of squawking, screeching, feuding and mating birds.
Magda knew the zoological names of each species, its range and its habits, and its chances of survival or extinction in the changing ecosystems of the oceans.
Peter listened to her tolerantly, sensing that behind this chatter and studied gaiety she was steeling herself to answer the accusations that he had levelled at her.
At the far end of the island was a single massive takamaka tree,
with dense green foliage spreading widely over the fluffy white sand.
