Oh, it
must
have been a dream, she told herself. No one with her history would voluntarily daydream the sequence of events which had followed that, so to speak, opening shot.
But when, by lunchtime, the dream remained clear and vivid instead of fading and losing reality as dreams usually did as the day went on, she began to suspect that she must have invented Ash's slow, remorseless subjugation of her struggling body.
'You're not talking to me today, Aunt Christie. Are you cross with me?' her nephew asked plaintively.
Glad to be distracted from her thoughts, Christie forced a bright smile. 'No, of course I'm not cross with you, darling. You're a good boy and I love you very much. Even when you're naughty, which isn't often, I still love you, you know. You'll be extra good tonight when a nice person comes to look after you while I'm out with Uncle Ash won't you? Her name is Mrs Jones. She sounds very much like Mrs Kelly, and you know how much you liked her.'
'Yes, I'll be a good boy,' John promised. 'But why can't I come with you and Uncle Ash?'
'Because it will be long past your bedtime before we come back, and we're going to have supper at a restaurant which is only for grown-ups in the evening. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow morning.'
Mrs Jones arrived half an hour before Ash was due, and quickly made friends with her charge. Christie had already been told that she was the widow of an official of the British regime.
'I'm what's called a "belonger",' she told Christie. 'That's the name given to foreigners who have lived here for more than seven years, and I've been here for thirty. I couldn't go back to England. I should be a foreigner there now.'
'Is this dress sufficiently formal for The Admiral's Inn?' Christie asked her.
She had put on the simple dress she had run up herself, using one of Vogue's Very Easy patterns and a remnant length of white cotton gabardine.
'You could wear something dressier if you liked.'
'I haven't anything dressier with me.'
'Oh, then that will do very nicely. Antigua isn't a formal island. One or two hotels insist on a tie or a shirt with a collar for men after seven o'clock, and some women like to dress up with their menfolk in lightweight sports coats. But in general it's all very casual. I've been to The Admiral's Inn and seen a young man wearing denim shorts with frayed hems. But most of the people who dine there strike a happy medium. Are you going to add a little jewellery, my dear?'
'Yes.' Christie returned to the bedroom and put on black shoes, and some black and white beads. The dress made the most of her tan, still pale by comparison with those of the guests nearing the end of their holidays, but a great improvement on the pallor she had had on arrival.
'Why not wear a flower in your hair—a red flower,' suggested Mrs Jones.
'I'm not the right type,' said Christie.
She had no wish to displease Ash by appearing unsuitably dressed, but nor did she feel it incumbent on her to alter her usual hyper-unobtrusive style.
Although she was expecting him, his rap on the door made her jump.
As she went to admit him, she remembered the curl of his mouth as she had seen it during the night—whether waking or sleeping, she still wasn't perfectly certain—and she felt her throat dry up with tension.
'Good evening, Christiana. Have you had a good day?' he enquired, as he crossed the threshold.
'Good evening. Yes, we have, thank you. This is Mr Lambard, Mrs Jones.'
'How do you do, Mr Lambard.'
It seemed to Christie that a flicker of perturbation showed in Mrs Jones's mild eyes, and that her acknowledgement of the introduction had a certain stiffness which had not been in her manner earlier.
Ash was wearing a suit of pale grey linen except that the top wasn't a coat but a combination of short-sleeved shirt and jacket with a vent at the back and pockets with flaps on the chest.
He said, 'We shan't keep you up late, Mrs Jones. We should be back here by eleven, and I'll run you home on my way home.'
So he wasn't spending tonight with Bettina.
'Thank you, but that won't be necessary. I didn't come by taxi, I drove myself here. I'm not nervous of driving at night. There's no one who would harm me, not even the Rastas, I'm sure,' she said. 'So there's no need to cut short your evening if you want to stay out until midnight, Mrs Chapman. I have my sewing and a book. I'll be quite happy to stay until twelve, if you wish.'
In his car, as they set out to drive to English Harbour on the south coast, Christie asked, 'Who are the Rastas?'
'The Rasterferians. They're young men who wear their hair in a style known as "dreadlocks". It looks like the head of a mop—usually a very dirty mop,' he answered, with a grimace. 'Most respectable, church- going-Antiguans regard the Rastas as thieves and troublemakers, but I know one foreigner living here who has one who works in her garden. She says he's a hard, willing worker who wouldn't dream of stealing from her. Generally it's the Rastas who sometimes behave in a hostile way towards tourists, and make them feel unnecessarily nervous. The fact is that here in Antigua there are people who dislike the whites in the same way that over in England there are people who can't stand the blacks. But by far the majority of people, both here and there, have no animus towards someone of a different colour. They're happy to live and let live.'
'I must have imagined it, I suppose, but I wondered if Mrs Jones might have a slight animus towards you. Have you ever encountered her before?'
'Not as far as I recall.'
'Then obviously I did imagine it.' She fell silent, glad of the wide bench seat which left a good space between them, unlike Bettina's white sports car in which, every time Ash changed gear, his hand would almost have brushed her thigh.
It was dusk when they drove down a long hill overlooking a large stretch of water which he told her was Falmouth Harbour, a much larger but more shallow anchorage than the nearby English Harbour.
'That's Pizzas in Paradise—a good place for a cheap, filling lunch,'
said Ash, as they passed a verandah restaurant, the tables packed with young people with the sun-bleached hair and tanned faces of yacht crews. Not much farther on he stopped the car on a parking area close to the water.
'The Dockyard is closed to most traffic. We'll dine now, before the restaurant fills up, then have our coffee aboard
Sunbird
where we can be quiet and discuss things. There'll be no one else on board her. The last lot of charterers flew back to New York this morning, and the next don't arrive till tomorrow.'
'Does that mean you'll be taking over as skipper?'
'No, not this time. Perhaps next time. It depends how things go.'
Holding her lightly by the arm, just above the elbow, he steered her along a roadway between a brick building on the left, and a high bank with trees growing on it. Ahead of them, lit by a lamp, for already the dusk had become darkness, were the gates of the Dockyard, surmounted by an old ship's bell.
Immediately inside the gates, Ash made a sharp U-turn and soon, a few steps farther on, they were in the grounds of the building which had formed one side of the roadway.
'This was the Boat House. The upper floor was a sail loft where sails were made and repaired, but it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1843, and these pillars were capped to preserve them,' he told her, indicating the immense stone pillars on their right, lit by concealed floodlamps.
Beyond the pillars was a small wet dock, and beyond this the garden terraces sloping down from The Admiral's Inn to the moonlit waters of the historic harbour.
The ground floor of the inn had a staircase ascending to the bedrooms, a bar, a comfortable sitting area with linen-covered sofas and large table lamps on the end tables, and two rows of dining tables.
There were also tables outside on the floodlit terraces, ^nd this was where they ate their meal, with a steel band playing under a tree over by the wet dock.
They began with pumpkin soup, followed by Lobster Thermidor with buttered christophene, a vegetable new to Christie. Ash said it was a squash of Mexican origin now grown throughout the tropics.
She thought the white flesh rather tasteless and wondered if, like parsnips, it might be more palatable roasted. The lobster, served in its shell, she found quite delicious, although it was not presented in the classic manner with dry sherry in it and a crisp topping of buttery breadcrumbs.
'As you probably realise, this lobster isn't the true French
homard,''
said Ash, pausing to drink some white wine. 'It lacks the delicious claw meat of the northern lobster, which is blue when it comes out of the sea. This fellow is a spiny rock lobster, reddish brown with extra long antennae and most of the meat in the tail. On the French islands it's called
langouste.
Here, purists call it a crawfish. In Antigua it's almost invariably cooked like this, but I feel there must be more varied ways to serve it.'
'Oh, there are—many ways,' she agreed. 'I can't say I've tried them all, because lobster in England is so expensive. But if it's cheaper here one could do the whole gamut—Lobster Newburg, Lobster Americaine, parfait, Mongole, Supreme . . . the lot. With adjustments for the lack of claws.'
'I gathered you were more than a good plain cook by the spices and off-beat ingredients I saw in your cupboards. Also Mrs Kelly told me she had known you to cook superbly on occasions,' he said, leaning back in his chair.
The terrace was not brightly lit and where they were sitting, under a canopy of leaves, there were romantic shadows and patches of moonlight.
His movement put a mask of shadow across the upper part of his face from the high cheekbones up to his dark hair. Christie wrenched her gaze away from his mouth with its wide rather thin upper lip and full lower lip.
'I—I don't know about that, but I do love cooking, which is half the battle. When my father was alive we used, occasionally, to feast ourselves in the grand manner.'
'And your husband? Was he a gourmet?'
'No, he had a hearty appetite—especially on Sunday after playing rugger on Saturday—but he only liked the traditional English dishes—roast beef, Yorkshire pud, apple pie.'
'Rugger . . . hm? I was always afraid of the injuries. A broken nose wouldn't
have
mattered.
Might
even
have
been
an
improvement'—stroking his large, high-bridged nose. 'But I never fancied the idea of having my teeth knocked out. Very gutless of me, I'm afraid, but there it is.'
'Not gutless . . . sensible. Mike had lost several teeth.'
Christie remembered the dismay she had felt on their wedding night when, just for a joke, her husband had taken out the bridgework replacing two lost teeth. He had put it back almost at once, but it had been the first jarring note. The second had been when she had emerged from the bathroom, shy in her white chiffon nightgown, and he had said, 'You won't need that on, old girl. I've been a model of good behaviour so far—not much chance to be anything else while your old man was breathing down my neck—but tonight's the night we start making up for lost time. So strip off, there's a good girl. I expect you spent a bomb on that nonsense, and I don't want to tear it.'
Had she been foolishly over-sensitive? Or had he been crude and crass? How could she ever know the answer?
'Were you really expelled from your school, or was that an exaggeration on Paul's part?' she asked, to shut out the distasteful memory.
'My father was asked to remove me. As my partner in crime was a member of the staff, it was a hushed-up expulsion.'
'What kind of crime?' she asked blankly. The only offence she could think of involving a master and a boy was unbelievable in relation to the man on the opposite side of the table.
He read her mind and his mouth quirked. 'No, I was always heterosexual. I was caught
in flagrante delicto
with one of the assistant matrons. Had a master come in and found us I should probably have got off with a beating. I was seventeen. She was twenty, and not inexperienced. Unfortunately it was the Headmaster's wife who caught us, a woman of the highest morals who was deeply shocked—and perhaps subconsciously envious, the Head being a scholarly aesthete of powerful intellect but somewhat lacking in red blood.'
'It's not brawn which makes a good lover,' Christie said shortly.
How would I know? she thought, the next instant. Maybe Mike was a wonderful lover. He wanted to do it every night, and sometimes again in the morning. So often ... so quickly ... oh, God, let me not think about it.
'No, it's not,' Ash agreed, his tone casual. 'But nor is it an intellectual exercise. A happy medium is desirable, wouldn't you say? Will you have pudding or cheese?'
She had the Chefs Cake, he the Stilton.
'No coffee, thank you. The bill, please,' he said to their attentive waiter.
When it came, he signed it and tipped. 'Now we'll stroll across to my mooring.'
On the way he paused by a building with tall Georgian doors and windows like those of The Admiral's Inn. But this was of timber construction, with a balustraded balcony above the wide verandah surrounding the ground floor.
'The Admiral's House. Tradition has it that Nelson lived there when he was based in Antigua between 1784 and 1787. In fact the house wasn't built until midway through the next century, and the house Nelson really occupied was on the site of the present officers'
quarters. This place contains quite an interesting museum which you should come and see another day.'
He moved on towards a three-storeyed building which he said had originally been the vast copper and lumber store.
'Now it's twelve self-catering apartments, done up in excellent taste, some for four and some for two people. I would have booked you in here, except that they're full at present.'
Passing other buildings they came to the dockside itself, the moored vessels spread round the semicircular quay like the sticks of a fan, their sterns to the quay, their cabin lights casting golden spangles on the dark still water between them.