Authors: Roberta Latow
‘Eliza, you’re ill, as white as a ghost!’
How could she tell him she was not ill at all? That it had taken the Villa Montecatini’s being returned to her as her very own for Eliza to realise that she had never loved anything or any man, had never been loved by anything or any man, as Tuscany had loved her and she had loved it. There had been many things, places and men in her life since then but never pure unadulterated love. And certainly not here in Egypt, despite her work and her lovers. Only at that very moment did Eliza come to understand how much she’d missed being loved, and loving so completely as she had Tuscany. A whole life time of misunderstanding was coming together for her here in intriguing, beguiling Egypt.
What a long road she had had to take! The years danced before her eyes. She would not mourn all the failures, all that had gone wrong uselessly. Instead she would prepare herself and have the courage to say goodbye to all that. She was strong enough not to fool herself, never to say those unloved years were a dream. Nor would she degrade herself with empty hopes of what might be. She was long prepared and full of courage to go home to her final pleasure, to hear the real voices and the exquisite music of her beloved Tuscany, in pure heart and with a pure soul.
‘Eliza, sniff this, inhale deeply,’ instructed Dr Kharga as he broke open a small glass vial.
She did as she was told and was immediately revived. The colour came back into her face. She ran her fingers through her hair and undid the clasp that held it back off her face, running her fingers through it again. Then she smiled at Mirrit Kharga.
‘You did give me a fright, Eliza. I want you in my consulting room
now
so I can look you over.’
‘Mirrit, it’s really not necessary. I promise you, I’m all right. I just had some startlingly good news that overwhelmed me. The sort of news that changes one’s life for ever.’
‘I would still like to look you over, Eliza.’
‘No. I promise if I feel the least unwell, I will be at your door.’
Dulcima used always to tell her children, ‘What you really need always comes to you at the right time.’ Ever since that moment when Antonio had told Eliza that her health demanded she must leave Egypt, never to return, she had had no idea as to where she could go, what she would do, how she was going to live, if she could ever find work again. Middle-aged, without savings of any significance, no husband or a family home of her own to go to, her prospects had been grim. To begin again had seemed an even harsher prospect. To be dependent at that stage of her life on her mother or her sisters was unthinkable. In a very Forrester manner she had done what she and all the Forresters had always done: failed to dwell on what was to be but got on with living from day to day, all thoughts of the future simply drifting away. And now what Dulcima had said had come true: just when she needed it the most, she had a roof over her head, all her own, for now and for ever.
Not once had Antonio asked her what she had planned to do when she left Egypt. He had done what he had promised, put her departure out of his mind, and life continued for them as it always had since they had become lovers many years ago.
The evening after Eliza read the will was one of the evenings they were spending together. Antonio was particularly voracious for all things sexual and highly imaginative in his lust for her. There was a kind of urgency in their sex, a touch of violence, not to each other but in each of them, that put them on the edge of their sexuality. They rode that edge for a while and then slipped off it into sexual depravity that was thrilling and answered their needs. It was animalistic sex, devoid of any emotion other than the pleasure of sexual gratification at its peak, the exquisite oblivion that only exists in those split seconds of strong and powerful orgasm.
They had had that sort of sex before, many times, together and whenever they had shared their lust with Anwar. The three had become a rather extraordinary
menage à trois,
a three-cornered establishment in sex and friendship, soon after Anwar and Eliza became lovers. Eliza had the two men as lovers separately and together, and the arrangement had been handled with utmost discretion, leaving Anwar’s smart and very social Cairo friends to spend years guessing about the relationship, the three of them content with the life they had created for themselves.
Now, sated and lying in each other’s arms, Antonio spoke. Eliza heard a hint of anxiety in his voice, ‘Something’s happened, something is different about us tonight.’
‘What makes you think that?’ she asked, astounded he should have sensed that.
‘There was an undercurrent of anger in us, hidden, transformed into a suppressed violence that manifested itself in dangerously exciting sex. I’m not complaining, mind you, it was intensely satisfying. But very revealing. So what’s going on here?’
How could Eliza tell him that she adored having what they had together but that quite suddenly sex for sex’s sake was no longer enough? She missed love. Belonging to herself was great but she wanted to belong to someone else, for better or for worse, just as now she belonged to the Villa Montecatani and Tuscany, for better or for worse. But that sort of love had never been what they were about, not her and Antonio, nor her and Anwar. Eliza had no inclination to end their relationship on such a note. It had been one of the best, possibly
the
best and happiest relationship she had ever had with a man, and no matter what her feelings now, she felt it deserved an honourable ending.
She unwound herself from Antonio’s arms and sat up against the bed pillows. The dawn light was streaming through the windows and a bright red sun was inching its way slowly from below the horizon far in the distance. ‘My mother has left me the estate in Tuscany. I now have a home to go to. I would like to leave in a few months’ time – that’s how long I’ll need to wind up my work here and for us to make a few more excursions to places we have always promised ourselves we would visit.’
He remained silent, absorbing Eliza’s news. Then, after several minutes, when he did speak, he told her,
‘How extraordinary to know that when you leave here and I return to Florence, we will be so close and yet so far apart. But friends – you must promise me we will always be the best of friends?’
‘Yes, always,’ she told him, and slipped back into his arms again.
Eliza felt it was strange and yet not strange at all that they should have nothing more to say about the coming end of their relationship, one that had been so meaningful and incredibly happy, and so very important in her life. She could feel no sadness, only excitement that when the door closed on this part of her life, a new one would open and she would be able to step through it with pride and enthusiasm for whatever was to come.
Nothing about her departure was as easy as she’d thought it would be. It seemed that the moment she told Antonio that she was leaving Egypt, the fight went out of her. She relaxed that tight hold she had been keeping on her health problems and began to feel how much the climate was taking out of her. She managed to keep up appearances and to work as hard as ever she had, but of course Antonio had been right. A year at the most and her health would have been severely damaged. She would be leaving none too soon.
Anwar had been told about her departure when next he had flown up to visit her and Antonio. He had brought with him a beautiful young girl – there had been so many beautiful young girls over the years. He and Eliza were alone, walking together back to his plane behind Antonio and the girl. ‘I’m leaving Egypt for good in three months’ time,’ she told him.
He was silent for several seconds and then asked, ‘Is there a reason?’
‘My health. It seems the climate and the work have got the best of me.’
‘It doesn’t have to end here, Eliza.’
‘Yes, it does. In three months’ time when I board that plane for Rome. We both know that. Friends, Anwar, we’ll always be friends.’
‘Not when we have been lovers such as you and I have been. It would be nice, but I’m not the kind of man to want something and not have it.’
‘You’re angry when you shouldn’t be. We always knew that one day it would burn itself out, this intense sexual life we had together. Or else I would leave. Please don’t be angry and spoil the time we have left together.’
It was then that Anwar stopped and pulled her close to him. Gazing into her eyes, he told her, ‘I’m not angry, just telling you we can’t be friends. Not the kind who send postcards or exchange calls on birthdays.’ He kissed her on the lips and that sexual hold they had always had on each other was as strong as ever. ‘We can only be what we are for each other, Eliza. Oh, and I have no intention of spoiling our last months together.’
The most heart-rending thing about leaving Egypt for Eliza was not the staff and the many ambulatory patients who were down at the dock to bid her farewell when she, Antonio and Anwar boarded Anwar’s sea plane that would take the three of them to Cairo. She was deeply moved by that, of course, but more so by what was to follow. Once on board Anwar taxied the plane for take off, and when it rose steeply off the
waters and into the air, returned to circle the hospital where the many friends she had made there waved their last farewells to her, and then the oasis where the stabled horses were brought out and led to prance around in a circle for her.
Returning to the Nile, Anwar flew the plane, not low and straight down the centre of the river as was his usual practice, but skimming in long zig-zags from the east bank to the west until way past Luxor and Asyut. Lining the banks sporadically for those hundreds of miles, and occasionally on small boats, were poor, country men, women and children in large or small groups, dressed in their best robes and turbans, the women swathed in black. The huge population whom Eliza had worked for in the last seven years. There were many there who had merely heard of who she was and what she had done. Now they took this chance of one last look at her, offering their thanks and farewells with shouts of praise and good wishes, asking for blessings on her, waving her on her way. They tossed flowers and palm fronds into the river to follow her lazily down river to Cairo and thence to Alexandria and the sea. It was then and only then that Eliza broke down in floods of tears.
The two men were moved. They had known for days that word of her departure had leaked out, and rather than a mass of people making long journeys to the hospital, had sent word around that if they wanted to see her one last time she would be travelling down the river, but never had they expected the tribute they were seeing.
By the time they flew over Cairo and followed the Nile to Giza, Upper Egypt and all the magnificent
tributes seemed suddenly behind her. English calm and reserve took possession of Eliza and she was able to control her emotions enough to get her through the remainder of the day.
At Anwar’s house a late lunch was served on the marble veranda overlooking the river: champagne, foie gras, lobster and crayfish in a cream sauce served with baked rice, grilled baby pigeons and small spinach soufflés, a green salad, and for pudding whole purple figs peeled and covered with crème fraîche and sprinkled with crunchy demerara sugar. Tiny cups of hot sweet black Turkish coffee followed. Anwar had done what Eliza had asked of him: kept the day of her departure from the many friends she had made in Cairo, the social whirl of farewells was something she particularly did not want. And so it was only the three of them for lunch and the three of them who were driven to the pyramids. Eliza had wanted to be with Antonio and Anwar for her last look at them and the great Sphinx of Giza.
They rode around the pyramids on camels and the last Eliza saw of her lovers was when she watched them ride away into the desert towards Sakkara and the step pyramids. For the three of them sadness, even at a time like this, the departure of a lover, was not an option. They were as happy with each other as they had always been, and there was even something joyous about their last day together. Eliza realised how much they and she celebrated life; their highly sexual lives together had always been a celebration of it.
Ahmed helped Eliza off her camel and paid the camel driver. He escorted her to the car and then
got in the front seat with the chauffeur. They were headed for the airport. Eliza was leaving Egypt as she had arrived: alone and with great expectations of a new adventure.
Five days after Amanda Dix and Eliza Flemming had tea at Amanda’s house, Amanda was driving to
her
village, one of the many stone villages and towns perched on the slopes of the Tuscan hills. Only six miles from her farmhouse, the drive and the village were for Amanda two of the many perks she received for living in Tuscany. The village had, like so many other villages and towns in the area, the nearly obligatory thirteenth-century ruined Romanesque church and campanile that stood out starkly against the surrounding hills. It boasted a post office, bakery, a barber shop-cum beauty salon, a butcher, two coffee shops selling wine and spirits, two restaurants, one good, the other deserving of three stars that was quite famous, a police station and a bar-cum-discotheque. The small pretty piazza with its handsome stone fountain was where old men sat silently with nothing to compel or inspire them and where the village women, out to do their chores, greeted one another with the morning gossip. The English or other foreigners down from their villas in the hills passed the time of day at small tables under a relentless sun, saying little over an espresso or a glass of wine.
Everyone who came into the village walked or rode over a beautiful hog-backed stone bridge with arches of five different shapes and sizes that spanned a swiftly running mountain stream. The handsome, mostly abandoned stone and wooden-shuttered houses, some tilting at crazy angles on either side of the narrow cobbled streets, were at intervals spanned by remnants of elegant ruined or dilapidated arches. It was a village of few residents who mostly basked lazily under a hot sun, and where there never appeared to be more than a few people to be seen at one time except on market day, Wednesday, when the village became a place of bustle and vitality for a few hours. People came down from the surrounding villages for miles around for the fresh produce: succulent fruit, a variety of green vegetables, mounds of olives, cured meats, baskets of herbs and spices, the finest of virgin olive oils for tasting before buying, and fish caught that morning from the sea.
This was Monday and Amanda was looking forward to having her morning all to herself without intrusion of any kind, doing her errands at her leisure, having a cream and wild mushroom pasta and half bottle of the local wine for an early lunch in the shade of the village’s huge ancient fig tree. Amanda was thinking that days like this were much too rare in one’s life and all but praying she was not going to have her morning ruined by bumping into any of the other English in residence in the area.
She saw and enjoyed enough of them socially, but not today, thank you. Today was for her and being alone with the landscape. Ever since her tea with Eliza Flemming she had been made newly aware of how in all their years in Tuscany she and Philip were
still outsiders looking in. They had somehow managed not to become part of Tuscany but were still nothing more than the English abroad. She resented what she and Philip had made of themselves in Italy.
Amanda saw Vittorio Carducci standing in the middle of the road, which was lined with statuesque poplars rustling their papery leaves: a special music of their own conducted by the soft warm breeze. He was waving at her to stop. His dilapidated old open lorry was parked at the side of the road, the bonnet up, a stream of steam rising from the radiator. It was early-morning and the day was already hot. The sun filtering through the trees shaded the secondary road that wound down the mountain to the village and cast a dappled pattern of light and shade across the poorly maintained Tarmac.
Amanda was both surprised and annoyed by the intrusion. She almost always took this road because she rarely saw another car on it. It was a scenic drive to make the heart race for the sheer beauty of it: the Tuscan hills at their best, a landscape very nearly untouched by time.
She was acutely aware of how very handsome and sexy-looking a man Vittorio was, more so than she had given him credit for before. She studied him, yes, because he was attractive: as a handsome, virile-looking man, a little common, a little too provincial for her taste and what she would consider almost rough trade, but now she was curious about him. What more than sex could he offer a woman like Eliza Flemming … a woman like herself? All these years that she had been watching Vittorio cut her fields she had never thought of him as more than a good-looking, possibly
sexy, farmer, but having met Eliza Flemming she was disturbed to think there might possibly be more to him than she had given him credit for. Having had tea with his fiancée, she was obliged to think of Vittorio now as a man, a human being. And here he was in the middle of the road. She was irritated, felt as if he were intruding on her life. She slowed down and finally stopped a few feet away from him.
Vittorio walked round the Range Rover to speak with her through the open window. He started to explain himself, at first in Italian and then in mid-sentence suddenly switching to his very poor but understandable English. She resented that too. Amanda took pride in her ability with the Italian language. She felt the morning heat more now, or was it the warmth Vittorio exuded as he stood only inches away from her? His scent was not unlike the early-morning smell of straw, orris and roses, with a hint of warm, damp earth. Amanda very nearly closed her eyes to inhale deeply his lust for life, his perfume. She controlled herself and focused on his hands, clamped over the open window, as he continued to explain that he needed to trouble her for a ride as far as the turn off to the village. From there he could walk to Giovanni Stratsei’s. Giovanni had been seeing the lorry through its many crises for years.
His hands were large and rough from years of hard work, his fingernails and the cuticles around them ragged and stained with the yellow-green of car oil. Were these hands to caress fair skin, fondle a woman? Could hands such as these excite lust in a lady? He was handsome, yes, but a sensitive lover? Amanda was transfixed by Vittorio’s hands, the muscular arms and
biceps, the strong shoulders – all visible because he had discarded his shirt and was standing in an undershirt that gleamed white against his dark skin. No, they were not. These were the hands of a farmer, not a lover. At last she broke her gaze and looked into his face. He was smiling broadly at her. He had caught her out in her study of him. A look passed between them and Amanda saw a sweetness in his eyes that she had seen before, a kindness, but for the first time recognised that he was sensual, a lustful man, with that special quality that some sexy men have of knowing how to be passive at the right time, in the right place, to seduce a woman they want.
She was quite shocked and disappointed that although all that was there to be seen, it was not there for her. Once more she was consumed with curiosity about the lovely Eliza and her farmer lover. Had there been other foreign women in his life? You bet there have been, she told herself, and almost laughed aloud because this interest of hers in Eliza Flemming and the farmer was not at all like her. What did it have to do with her life after all?
She smiled at Vittorio, and the moment she had creased her face into that smile, realised that she had never done that with him before. ‘It’s a good thing I came along, Vittorio. Hop in, I’ll be happy to take you where you want to go.’
She watched him run back to the cab of his van and there slip into his shirt, take his shot gun and return to the Range Rover to slide into the seat next to her. They drove for miles without saying a word to one another. Amanda wanted to make polite conversation but simply could not think of anything to say to the
man. Though she kept thinking of Eliza she could not bring herself to strike up a conversation about her with her lover, it somehow seemed a kind of betrayal. It was during that silent ride with Vittorio by her side that Amanda realised she felt something very strong yet indefinable for Eliza, saw her as an Englishwoman, a sister under the skin, who had lost her way in lust and love with an Italian farmer which had excluded her from a whole segment of friends she might otherwise have had. Including Amanda. With Eliza on her mind, and the undercurrent of raunchy maleness that Vittorio was exuding, which proved to be unnerving, it came as something of a relief when he spoke up to say, ‘Here, at these crossroads, will be fine for me.’ He thanked her and left the Range Rover.
Once he was gone, Vittorio and Eliza vanished from her mind and the glorious day and the ride engrossed her again. Amanda did have the quiet day she wanted when she parked the Range Rover and walked, a basket over her arm and her shopping list in hand, across the hog-backed bridge into the village. She saw not one of the foreigners she had been so loath to have to make social chatter with, did her chores, briefly acknowledged several of the villagers with a nod and a smile from under her wide-brimmed straw hat, and enjoyed her lunch and half bottle of wine. She lingered over her espresso, long after the shops had closed and the piazza emptied, everyone having gone home for lunch and a siesta. Amanda heard the sound of a closing shutter from somewhere in the recesses of the village then total silence except for the water cascading over the rim of the fountain’s impressively large and elegant stone bowl.
The heat was oppressive and ate into her body and her soul. It weighted her down, rooted her to the spot where she sat. She felt stifled, barely moving a fingertip, a leg, never shifting in her chair for seemingly a long time. Then a breeze, slight and hot, the sort of intense heat that comes from the opening of an oven door, pirouetted into the piazza and shook Amanda out of her torpor long enough for her to rise to her feet and walk from the village. She was aware of her own foot steps on the cobblestones, and as she crossed over the hog-backed bridge, the sound of the rushing mountain stream.
She forsook the Range Rover for a nap in the shadow of a clump of tall cypresses down by the stream. There she fell into a deep sleep of erotic dreams. Philip was walking Eliza into their London bedroom. Eliza was naked. Her skin shone with youth and vitality. Her breasts were large and luscious and the nimbus that circled her long and thick nipples was rouged a plum colour. Her mound of Venus was shaved clean and henna-decorated with swirls and curlicues. Her waist was incredibly narrow and her hips seductive, as were her long and shapely legs and thighs that insinuated lust.
‘Now here is a woman who knows how to give herself, Amanda, watch and learn,’ Philip told her.
He proceeded towards the bed and took Amanda by the hand so that she accompanied them. Eliza, whose long blonde hair was piled prettily on top of her head, smiled at Amanda and told her, ‘There is nothing to be frightened about,’ as she seductively undressed her.
Once naked, Eliza caressed Amanda’s breasts, kissed them and sucked sweetly, sensitively, on her
nipples. Amanda was appalled at having a woman make love to her yet was helplessly coming in a series of short and delightful orgasms.
‘Don’t be afraid to die in the arms of Eros, such a death can be sweet,’ Eliza told her as she caressed Amanda’s body.
She felt Eliza’s tongue licking her flesh. She had never known such tenderness, such excitement, never been so ready and yearning for anything, everything, sexual.
Vittorio appeared as if from nowhere and went to them. He kissed Eliza and told her how much he loved her and thanked her for his gift. Then he took Amanda by the hand and led her to the bed. There was nothing tender in the sex she had with him, it was thrillingly hard core. He was a master in lust, wringing an endless stream of orgasms from Amanda. And then, when he was through with her, he handed her over to Philip and told her, ‘You get into the sexual dirt with Philip and enjoy yourself. That’s where he likes to be, and is, with other women. Now, after today, we all know that’s where you belong.’
The three of them, Philip, Eliza and Vittorio, now descended on her and the sex was outrageously thrilling, both men penetrating her, Eliza devouring her in tenderness. They broke down all Amanda’s defences and she lost herself to their lust and found her own, the real depths of it, for the first time in her life. She died many times in her orgasms, only to rise again and see herself and sex in a new perspective. And then they were gone, all three of them, and Amanda was left on her own, seemingly with no place to go.
Her father appeared, drunk, dirty, coarse and angry,
walking alongside Vittorio’s old open lorry. He was calling out in his sing-song fashion to the row upon row of terraced houses, grimy with dirt and poverty, for people’s unwanted possessions. ‘Your rag and bone man’s here, your rag and bone man’s here.’ On seeing and hearing him, Amanda ran away as fast as she could, determined that he should never again catch her and beat her. She never looked back.
Amanda awakened with a start, completely disorientated and drenched in perspiration, her heart racing. She struggled to realise where she was, what she was doing there. She slowed down her heartbeat by taking deep breaths and gradually came to herself and her present surroundings, the life of today, here and now, Amanda Dix style. The dream was fast receding from her mind but what was not was her reaction to it. Memory of sexual pleasure, the shock that she should have a lesbian encounter with Eliza even in a dream, was unnerving. The excitement of sex with Vittorio, a peasant farmer no more educated or refined than her own father and family had been – and how she had revelled in it. Base, raunchy, common … the very sort of sex and life she had run away from so many years before.
Run away from and blocked out of her mind and her life, never considered as anything but dead. Not even to Philip had she confided whence she came, her struggle to rise above the ignorance and poverty she had been born into. How he would have hated having to hear about the ugliness she had had to crawl away from. This was the first time she had ever dreamed about her father, her past, and if doing so affected her, she wasn’t aware of it. For Amanda the past was the
past and dead was dead. Now that she was awake her dream seemed not so much disturbing as impossible. Almost a joke to be laughed at.
But that delicious sensation that accompanies a strong and powerful orgasm lingered with her now. She rose from the grass, and with her basket of shopping in her hand, scrambled up the embankment to walk in the shade of the laurels until she reached the Range Rover. Amanda opened the car, rolled down all the windows and spread a blanket on the seat that was by now burning, so she was at least able to sit down and drive. She switched on the ignition and was on her way home.