“It is.”
“Then where’s your key?”
“My bag... it was stolen.”
“Right. And you’re the Virgin Mary, and I’m a monkey’s uncle. You’re going to come with me, girlie.” He folded his hand around my bicep.
The door opened and Benji filled the frame, rubbing his eyes. Without thought or dignity, I threw myself into his arms.
“Hey, Zanzibar girl!” He prised me off him and regarded me quizzically at arm’s length. “Zanzibar drowned rat,” he corrected.
Benji paid for the taxi, giving the driver a tip large enough to make him polite.
“He was rude,” I said.
“Always tip well,” he replied, as if I was his student. “When you have money you should tip well as an investment, and when you don’t have money you should tip well so no one will guess.” Benji’s laws; he always seemed so certain.
“You look frozen. I’ll run you a bath.” He was quite at home.
“Are you alone here?”
“I was. I just came by to watch a video in peace. Then I fell asleep. A Fellini film—Italian. You know him?” “Italian? No, of course not. Benji, you know Adnam and Ismael?”
“Monique’s Adnam? Of course. Our business paths cross sometimes. Very well connected. Heads of state, that sort of thing. Arms sales mostly, I think. Our Monique is moving in the stratosphere these days. Ismael’s just one of his assistants, isn’t he?”
“I thought they must be arms dealers.”
“Well, it’s the biggest export business. The one governments are most interested in.” He was matter-of-fact and I thought he might be concealing his disapproval, but it could have been his envy.
While we watched the bath fill, I told Benji about the evening. When I finished, he said, “You don’t want to get involved in their parties. Monique is all right because she has Adnam, but Ismael’s just a nobody. He’s just a go- between for rich people. Maybe you had a close escape. I love Monique but sometimes she’s got no judgement.” “I needed something—I left my job on the first day. My customer was murdered.”
“Something will come up. Take your bath. Look at you. You’re an incitement to riot.”
He acted like an older brother, and he was older, but it seemed to me he had none of the fixed things of life that made age old. “Tea?” he called through the bathroom door. “Or something stronger? Scotch?”
“Is there brandy?”
“Absolutely. No ice, I take it.”
I stretched out in the very hot water, luxurious in the sisters’ bubble bath. This was comfortable, to be sleepy in the bath with Benji taking care of things next door.
After a while, he roused me with “Your drink’s ready when you are.” His voice through the door was very close to my ear.
“Can you pass it to me?”
The door opened a few inches and Benji’s hand with the glass in it curled around towards the bath, searching for a surface to put it on and coming up short. “Shall I leave it on the floor?”
“No, wait. I’m getting out.” I stood and wrapped a towel around myself. “You can come in now.”
Benji pushed open the door, his eyes modestly brushing past me, only pausing to notice that my hands were occupied with the towel. “I’ll put it here, on the shelf.” Then he stated the obvious, “You’re wet,” and as he turned to leave he gave my back a little perfunctory rub through the towel. Which turned out to be both too much touch and too little because I found myself pushing back against his hand. He pecked at me in an enquiring sort of way, then we kissed, soft, warm and limitless. I opened my eyes to find his still closed, his face so intent and unguarded that I smiled inwardly at my tender victory. Benji’s arms surrounded me and it felt as much like home as Piccadilly Circus, an hour or two before, had not.
I remember love. There was an ease to it. Making love with Benji was not the teenage hotness I had with Ali, nor the sexiness of illicit meetings with Zanzibar lovers, nor the greediness for novelty with Didier, and certainly not Geoffrey’s confusing ambiguity. We were lost in blessed roughness and then we were gentle, interested in the news from our fingertips, tiny movements inside, small alterations in our humid weather, how we looked together underneath the sheets, him vanishing into me, our legs all tangled. In the early days we would lie like this for hours, not risking the disruption of a clumsy word or movement.
“Where do you get your self-control?” I asked at the end of one long morning. “Or is it just that you’re old?” “Experienced, Marcella. Not old.”
An ease to it. An ease to talking. To touch. An ease in our laughter. An easy understanding. I was not alone.
On the night that he rescued me from the taxi driver, he left in the small hours.
“Where are you going now?” I asked sleepily. Benji had not talked about his home.
“Oh, there’s some people I should see.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“Business, like beauty, knows no pain.” He kissed me.
At school in Zanzibar I was always the one the other children wanted to come to the front of the class and tell stories. The nuns encouraged them to choose someone with a tamer imagination, but my classmates wanted me. My stories were fantastic, full of incredible adventures in magical kingdoms. My sister Maria complained to our mother that I told lies, but it was only that I preferred more exciting versions of our lives. When I came home from school I learned to say to Mummy, “I’m going to tell you what happened today but none of it is true.”
The brilliant storyteller was lost when I was nine or ten. But the child was returned to me that night, after Benji left. I imagined myself a long-legged giantess walking daintily through the night-time city. I had to set my feet down carefully since they filled the spaces
