Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (148 page)

But this time he had to. This time he had no choice. He couldn’t wait any longer.

I heard the water splash behind me, and knew he was swimming after me. I ground my teeth. This was life or death.

I thought quickly of my wrecked plant, wilted and lifeless. In a garbage pail. Tony had done that.

I thought, God help me, and I swam faster.

I knew he was not far from me, and I took a long, deep breath. Another breath … and then I plumeted down under the water. I hoped … prayed … that I was swimming toward shore. I was somehow saying, please, please …

In a flash, I thought of the massive urn on top of the armoire.
That
could have killed me.

Please, I thought. Please.

The attack on the stairs …

My car almost burned …

And now this.

The simplest kind of murder …

I had to surface. My lungs were bursting.

He was dog-paddling, his head turning from left to right He was only yards away. But the shore was close now. I could see the waves breaking on the beach. I was almost there. I was almost there.

I fantasized myself climbing the hill, streaking for the cottage, gaining it, and then inside, locking the door, and safe, safe.

I thought he was in love with me … what a fool …

I rode in on the waves, felt the slippery sand under my feet, and raced crazily toward the sandhill. I did it. Did it, I thought, with the breath wheezing in my throat.

I did it.

Then, horrified, I heard him panting behind me, his heavy footsteps … I saw him loom up. An arm reached out.

Sobbing, I shrieked, and veered round, just in time to elude his grasp.

He had me again
.

This time my voice rang out, mad with terror. “No,” I cried. “No …”

I was blubbering now, retching, crying uncontrollably. I wanted to live, nothing more, even. Without love, without anything wonderful … but life. To go on breathing …

He lost his balance as I sprang aside; he almost sprawled on the sand. I sprinted, in the opposite direction, across the beach. I had nowhere to go. I realized this almost instantly. In this direction there was only a dead end, where the beach came to a steep, rocky ascent, a sheer stony hill with only tenuous footholds.

And I heard him tamping after me. Heard him with horror, despair.

Why hadn’t I left a note for Eric?

For the first time I envisioned my own death. Unthinkable only recently. But now I knew it could happen. I was alone with a madman, absolutely alone. This stark moment on an East Hampton beach. The whole world was sleeping, and I, with a murderer at my heels, was without help from any quarter.

I became maddened with terror. I thought of my dead body under the waves. Tossed, heiter skelter, in the churning waters …

He was almost on me. I had no alternative. My options had run out. I raced for the water again.

He followed me. The waves splashed over us. I was directionless now. I was without a plan. Gaining minutes, that was all. Putting off the inevitable, the hideous moment when those arms would wind around me again and push me down, down …

I was by now terribly tired. Tired and nearly mindless. I had done my best. God knew I had done my best.
Girl from Manhattan drowned in choppy waters off East Hampton
.

An item in the newspapers.

I was crying hard. I was crying for so many things.

I knew I was going to die. He could never let me live with the knowledge that he had tried to kill me. He was strong and he was desperate. He
had
to win.

It was that simple. Then he caught up to me. I was blind to his face, I couldn’t see it any longer. I was blind to everything. I had lost. It’s over, I thought, and there was only sadness now. I too could die. I had lived so little of my life.

At last Anthony said something. I heard it as if in a dream: I had come to terms with death; I was beyond help, and I was going to die.

Thickly, he said, “Damn you … Christ damn you …”

And then, as I became conscious of another voice, and a violent collision near me, Tony’s voice came again.

“I’ll kill you too
…
I’ll kill you both.”

After that, pandemonium exploded. A hideous thrashing in the water miraculously freed me from the octopus arms. I had a delirious vision of great whales churning up the water in a death struggle only yards away. I cried out, and then went mute; I could only try to stay afloat, with my heart thudding — like an animal writhing inside me. There was a tinny taste in my mouth, along with salt, and my stomach heaved mightily; I sank tiredly, wanting oblivion.

Then a life force surged in me again, and I fought my way to the surface, flailing wildly. I came up and breathed air again … and saw the stars.

The most horrible sound of all came next. Like a butcher’s cleaver hitting a block … a sound of bone striking bone. I saw the gigantic splashes in the water, and I knew that sound meant a lethal blow. I cried out once more, ran out of breath, and whirled down into watery nothingness.

I was not wholly unconscious: I was just unwilling to accept what was happening. I went almost inert, my mind finally boggling in sheer refusal to tolerate what was taking place.

I wanted no more of it. I had had enough horror.

Then there were arms around me again, different arms. They became life-supporting, and a voice spoke into my ear.

Dimly, I knew it was Eric’s voice.

“Don’t fight me, for the Lord’s sweet sake … Jan, don’t fight me.”

A long interval in the dark followed, and an impression that I was in an ambulance, riding crazily in the night, and then I knew I wasn’t in any ambulance, that that was simply my imagination. I lay on the beach, and next there was a bright light making me squint, and a voice saying something rapidly. That sounds like Tom, I thought, then I knew it was indeed Tom, and knew, too, that the other voice was truly Eric’s.

I was lying on the beach, limp, half dead from exertion and fear, and the three of us were alone there. Tom, Eric and I. We were in East Hampton, and I had been fished out of the water. Slowly, reality came back to me.

Then someone was straddling me, manhandling me; I felt pain and then vomited. Blackness claimed me, soft and much-desired, and when I came to there was a rotten taste in my mouth, and more clarity. I knew everything that had happened, and knew I was alive, and I said, “Where is he?”

“I’m here,” Eric said.

“Tony. Where’s Tony?”

“Jan, are you all
right?”

“Where’s Tony?”

“Jan, for God’s sake, are you okay?”

I stared up at the sky, at all those millions of stars. I didn’t ask any more questions. I knew. I didn’t ask any more, because I knew that Tony wasn’t with us, that he was gone and would never come back, that I was alone in the night now with Eric and Tom, both of whom had saved my life.

I said yes, I was okay, and together the three of us climbed up the hill, on that night of August’s end, one of the most beautiful nights I have ever seen.

Caroline took the news of Tony’s death magnificently.

A little too magnificently for my taste.

Of course she had had time to take it all in before I saw her. When we did come face to face after that ghastly tragedy she seemed calm and resigned. This troubled me. I wasn’t calm and resigned — far from it.

But Caroline seemed to be, though she confessed to disbelief. “I can’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head. “Can you? That he went that way?”

I said no, I still couldn’t believe it.

“I’ve always thought death by drowning a sickening end. Like being decapitated. Somehow … I don’t know. Almost obscene. Almost … disgraceful, though that does seem a cruel thing to say.”

She saw my discomfiture. “Oh, you
are
grieving, aren’t you, Jennie?”

“People should be mourned, shouldn’t they?”

She said all the things Caroline would be expected to say. Grandiose things, things that chilled me, made me want to turn away from her. “Whom the gods love they must first destroy,” for example. No one says things like that about someone they deeply love. You don’t say anything, you just grit your teeth and suffer.

But Caroline said things like that, and I had to settle for it. Nothing she said, or didn’t say, could bring Tony back.

So it didn’t really matter what she said. I just thought … a tear or two, ravaged face … if she had told me, “Go away, I don’t want to see anyone, Tony’s dead,” I would have understood. It would have showed me that she had loved him dearly, and couldn’t bear his dying.

But two days later she broke down, and I knew it had penetrated at last. “My God, Jennie, he’s
dead,”
she said, white-faced.

She writhed her hands, those eighty-year-old hands, beringed and age-veined. And I saw the single tear trickle, as if it had difficulty getting past the corner of her eye, down her velvet but withering cheek. “He’s dead, he’s gone.”

Crying wasn’t easy for her, and that was it.

I sat and held her hand; she said, brokenly, that she had loved that young bastard. “He was a friend,” she told me, “and I have damned few friends. In spite of his faults I loved him.”

“I’m sure you did.”

She gave me a quick, almost hostile look. “All very well, but don’t try to
canonize
him. He was no better than he should be. Little more than a stud, surely you must realize that?”

She saw my distressed look and laughed harshly. “I
said
, a stud,” she cried. “Oh yes, my dear. He had his ‘way,’ as they say, with others here. Bobo … naturally. Kathy, too. Yes, even Kathy.” She laughed scornfully. “Emily has ways of knowing these things. She keeps me informed. Oh, I know I seem rotten to her, but she’s my right arm, and has been for a good many years. So I know what goes on here.”

She kept staring at me, unblinking, assessing. “I was rather glad to know,” she said, deliberately, “that the cottage was occupied this year. It’s been rather a haunt for Tony on a few random occasions.” She thrust her head forward belligerently. “Where do you think they did it?” she demanded. “In
this
house? In
their
houses?”

She exhaled, letting out her breath. “No,” she said quietly. “In that cottage, where you live and sleep.”

I felt smirched and sick.
In that cottage
… where, in other years, Tony had coupled with Bobo … and even Kathy, correct, finishing school Kathy.
A born stud
.

And what about me? Hadn’t I, in my deep subconscious, known it? That Tony had been little more than a stud, a professional lover.

“And in the end,” Caroline said harshly, “you were bound to do his bidding. Every woman, I don’t care which.”

I looked at her blindly and thought, God, had I really wanted him.

“You see,” she said, “I always knew what he was, Jennie. From the first, I knew what he was. A man without a conscience.”

She stopped talking and we were silent for a while. Then, at long last, I found my voice.

I looked across at her and said, my voice steady, “I wasn’t one of his victims, Caroline.”

She said yes, she had been almost sure of that.

But I looked closely at her and saw that, in spite of what she had just said, she wasn’t sure. So I said, this time clearly and ringingly, “I wasn’t, you know. I did think about it, and maybe almost was, but I changed my mind. You see, Caroline, there was always Eric. Even when he wasn’t here.”

It was later, quite a bit later, that, alone in my cottage, with Eric in the village for some groceries, the words she had said returned to me, and I could hear her voice again.

“… you were bound to do his bidding. Every woman, I don’t care which.”

But of course, I thought. Of course!

Every woman …

Caroline!

When had it started? When he was a handsome devil-may-care youth and she still attractive … desirable … like a Colette novel … Lea and Cheri, bedding down together, he a novice, she well-learned in the arts of love.

But had it ever
stopped?

I reeled at the thought of it. Caroline — over eighty — and Tony, still a long way from forty.

Passion between them …

But of course!

She might be old, but she could pass for fifteen or even twenty years younger. I had seen her naked body as I undressed her. The years had dealt well with her. Her skin, no longer young, was still not dry, still not yet loathsome. Her arms, I remembered, were still handsome, without flab, her thighs firm and slim. She had lasted well.

Some men would not find it impossible to make love to such a body … particularly if boundless riches were dangled before their eyes. Money alone could bring the juices of sex to a man avid for fortune.

And an accomplished lover like Tony Cavendish …

It could have been like that, I thought. The two of them, under one roof, lovers still.

I was glad, very glad, that I had been able to tell her, in all honesty, that I had not been one of his “victims.” She may have believed me, and she may not have. I thought she had wanted to, but with what she knew, there must have been a doubt in her mind that would last for as long as she drew breath.

I didn’t really care now. It didn’t seem all that important. Anthony Cavendish was dead, and nothing could bring him back.

Some of us, I knew, would never be the same again.

I wouldn’t be the same. I had turned away from Eric — and I soberly admitted that inwardly — long before he turned away from me. His leaving me was no rejection at all: he had seen my sick infatuation for Anthony Cavendish before I had acknowleged it. He had left me to come to a decision, that was all.

L’affaire
Cavendish hadn’t been a casual flirtation: it had been far more than that. Tony had been Svengali, in a way, and I his Trilby. There was something unnatural about his lethal charm, something eerie, something that had enslaved me, robbed me of my will.

Eric wouldn’t be the same either. He said, “I killed him, you understand. I knocked him out in the water and he drifted away and drowned.”