Past Caring (63 page)

I looked back and saw that Eve had stood up and was gazing towards me. But, when I waved, she didn’t respond. It was as if she were gazing beyond me, into the blueness of nothing. Turning back to the sea, my eye was caught by a flash of white on the beach. I stooped to inspect it. No, not paper, but a bleached cuttle bone. I tossed it aside and stood up again.

It could only have been a few minutes since I’d looked back.

Certainly, I didn’t hear her approach. She walked past me silently, 382

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without speaking or glancing, strode on towards the sea. She was naked. She was Eve as I’d dreamed and dreaded she would be: finely poised between an elevated perfection of beauty and a mature peak of sexuality.

She must have known—must have planned—how it would look. Her bare feet stretching slightly with each unhurried step.

The muscles of her calves and thighs working with easy elegance as she moved. The pale, curved flesh of her buttocks quivering with the rock of her hips. The line of her back reaching to where her dark hair tumbled onto bare shoulders. She must have known I couldn’t withstand her.

She walked—without change of pace—into the sea, wading out until it reached her waist. Then she plunged down into it, swam out a few yards, turned, shook the spray from her hair and stood up, the water coursing down over her shoulders and breasts.

“Aren’t you going to join me, Martin?” she said with a smile.

Gripped by my desire for her, my dream of what she meant, my knowledge of all that went with the act about to follow, I stood for a moment immobile. Then I abandoned all the lost causes for which I might have resisted her and began to pull off my clothes.

She could have seen how ready I was for her as I ran into the sea. Half in play, half to test me one more time, she swam away down the line of the shore and I followed. At first, she outdistanced me, then slowed, as if permitting me to overhaul her, laughing breathlessly as she moved into the shallows, where I caught and embraced her, stopped her panting with kisses and ran my hands over her wet body. I felt her nipples stiffen against my chest, felt her hand move down to cradle my testicles, then one finger trace the jutting line of my penis to where the head butted against her stomach.

She gently bit the lobe of my ear. “The water wasn’t too cold for you then, Martin?”

“God, you’re beautiful. How was I so lucky to meet you?”

“Perhaps you deserved it.”

We splashed out of the water, stumbled up the beach a few yards to where the dry sand began and fell to our knees. The force of my desire and the urgency of the moment meant we couldn’t go any further. Eve began to slide her fingers up and down my pe-

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nis, while I kissed her face and neck, bit softly at her nipples, ran my hand down her back and reached between her crouching buttocks for the place where I wanted to be.

She rose onto her knees as I pushed my finger into her, tensed as I felt for—and found—her clitoris with my thumb. She arched her neck back and rubbed her large, firm breasts across my face.

“Oh God,” she breathed.

“Is it good, Eve?”

“Oh yes, it’s good . . . You must know that.”

Her fingers were still working on me and I felt I would come in her hand if she didn’t stop soon. I reached behind her back and lowered her gently onto the sand, parted her legs and eased her hand away. I felt unbearably eager but disablingly nervous, aware—which she couldn’t have been—that this was, for me, the first time since I’d broken the bounds with Jane Campion four years before.

I lowered myself onto her. “We must stop,” I said anxiously.

“We can’t do this, not here on the beach—not in the open.”

She looked up at me and smiled. “We can’t not do it, Martin.

What does it matter where we are?” She touched my penis with her finger and it jerked upwards. “I can feel you can’t stop now.”

“I don’t want to.” She was right. We couldn’t stop. The act was as knowing as its prologue.

“Then come into me.”

I thrust into her with the dry sand patching our wet, flexing limbs. It transcended the forbidden pleasure of Jane. Eve was everything in a woman I thought had been denied me. Yet there she was, returning my frantic kisses, joining her arms round my neck and her legs behind my back, slewing with me on the sand as we moaned and moved in time to the driving rhythm of our lovemaking. Eve, who’d shown favours and withdrawn them, who’d played a subtle hand of feminine vulnerability and intellectual remoteness, who’d turned heads and conquered minds in Cambridge, was mine in the simplest, most exclusive manner.

I tried to hold myself back, but couldn’t. Eve’s words whispered in my ear, her firm yet yielding body beneath me, our exposed location on the beach, sped me towards a climax.

“Come on, Martin. Come for me. I want you to fill me up.”

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“I will, Eve, I will. I can’t stop. You’re so beautiful. To be inside you is . . . too much.”

“Then give it all to me.”

And I did. We reached a crazy, intertwined crescendo, my hands clasped beneath her parted buttocks where they scraped a hollow in the sand with their rocking motion. I felt my spine and legs stiffen and my penis sink to the root inside her, braced myself for the climax, but, somehow, remained poised on the brink, in agonized ecstasy.

That was when Eve looked up into my eyes and smiled with a timeless satisfaction divorced from the moment. She ran her tongue along the edge of her teeth in a gesture at once familiar and forgotten, tightened the grip of her legs behind my back and, with one barely audible word—“Now”—spurred me over the top.

I burst and pumped inside her with all the helpless momentum inspired by her teasing, tasted perfection. It went on dangerously long, passing a point where I thought—for one mad, fearful moment—that I could spurt into her forever and still not wipe the trace of mocking superiority from her smile. But it did end, of course, subsiding through ever gentler throbs to a twitching quiescence. Our sweat-soaked limbs, plastered with sand, stopped writhing, but remained locked together, fused in awe of our own, frightening passion. My mind, after all the doubt and evasion, struggled to comprehend the surging force of what we’d done.

Eve had devoured me.

Somehow, exhausted and satiated though we were, we got back across the beach to the shelter of the dunes and fell together into a hollow of sand. We were drained by the violence of our mating, confused by the potency of the act. As the dried heat of the afternoon moved towards an over-ripe evening, Eve fell asleep on my shoulder, one arm draped across my chest and one of her legs across mine, my ribs cushioned by the softness of her breasts. I could feel her breathing against me, could feel her limbs wrapped around mine, and the feeling was a glory in her closeness, a triumph in possessing her.

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With my free hand, I began to brush the dried sand from her hip and thigh where they were propped across me. My gaze moved out across the beach to the lazy, lapping ocean, to where my clothes lay in a bundle thirty yards away. I thought I should go and collect them—but not for a while. I too fell asleep.

We returned to the world by way of a country pub halfway between Barnstaple and Exeter. The locals eyed us as if they knew how we’d spent the day. Eve nonchalantly disregarded them, let them notice us kissing, smiled disarmingly at their glares.

“What now?” I said, at a genuine loss. No conversation or social occasion seemed to measure up to the enormity of what had already taken place. Eve, smiling at me over her drink, still slightly flushed from the beach, was my dazzling goddess in a monochrome world.

“The day’s not over yet, Martin—and we promised ourselves the whole of it.”

“It’s a day I’ll never forget. But does it have to be just one?”

“That’s up to you.” Her smile hinted at an offer of something more permanent, although, even then, I didn’t think it was really up to me at all. Eve’s prerogative encompassed my future.

“If I had my way, today would last forever.”

“Perhaps that can be arranged.” I almost believed it could be, in the way that beauty verges on sorcery, in the way that love—or the hope of it—transforms life. Most of all, I nearly believed it in the way that a man cannot help staunching a fear of the worst with a naive faith in the best.

We drove through Exeter to Topsham, a picturesque, genteelly decayed outport of the city on the eastern side of the Exe estuary.

There, Eve explained, she’d been given use of the house owned by the historian who’d taken her place in Cambridge. We parked in a small courtyard behind a pottery shop and made our way out onto a narrow street lined with elegant Georgian residences, punctuated unexpectedly by openings and alleyways leading to 386

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tiny, tucked away dwellings and unsuspected gardens. It was the sort of area, once the preserve of retired naval officers, where enthusiasts for whole food and cottage craft industries had moved in with a vengeance. Cats on widows’ doorsteps blinked across at feminist posters in mullioned windows.

Which category Dr. Petra Sutcliffe of Exeter University fitted into was hard to say. Book End was a slender, end-of-terrace address in the Georgian sector of the street, with a rather too grandly pillared and fanlit doorway. The interior was fussily and exclusively feminine, dominated by flower-patterned upholstery on antique furniture, the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot and assorted female academics arrayed in glazed and polished bookcases.

Other influences stood in contrast to Dr. Sutcliffe’s self-containment. The winding staircase and porthole windows commanding views of the estuary had a tang of whichever veteran of Trafalgar had first settled there. The scent of coffee in the kitchen, the choice of perfume in the bathroom, the open files in the lounge: they, on the other hand, were Eve’s, displayed carelessly but gracefully, with all her characteristic confidence.

“Petra’s choice of décor is beginning to depress me,” said Eve as she poured me a gin.

“How much longer do you have to put up with it?”

“Just another week. But it should be quite bearable, so long as . . .”

“So long as what?”

“So long as I have . . . uplifting company.” She handed me the glass and left her hand on mine.

“Can I volunteer?”

“I was hoping you would. The best of it is”—she smiled wickedly—“that Petra would so disapprove.” We laughed and toasted each other in gin. The chink of glasses, my ex-wife’s foible, in the sort of home she’d have made for herself if she hadn’t invested in children and county society, mocked with benign precision by one who’d perfected a combination of success and womanhood, one who understood us all better than we did ourselves.

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Later we dined at a quiet restaurant in Topsham’s High Street.

Dark wood and candlelight suited our mood: more subtle, less fre-netic than earlier in the day, yet wine and seafood sustaining the intoxicating, maritime flavour—deep beyond plumbing, heart at odds with the surface, warmly flowing around us with a cold, ebbing undertow. The subjects we moved towards were as dangerous in their way as any carnal act. Natural, innocuous and inevitable as their discussion seemed, it constituted, in fact, a more complete surrender than any other that day.

“After what’s happened,” I said, “I don’t want to keep anything from you. Now that things have . . . changed . . . between us, you should know everything I know about Strafford.”

“Go ahead,” she said. As simple as that, so simple I could have believed she was giving me permission rather than direction.

So I went ahead—and told her everything. Looking back, I remember how unmoved—how transfixed but undismayed—Eve was by what I’d found a shattering revelation. Strafford innocent.

Couchman a bigamist. Sellick implicated. Christabel Pankhurst a traitor to her cause. Eve preserved her serenity in the face of every detail.

“Your sponsor not the disinterested hotelier you thought?”

she said when I’d finished.

“Hardly.”

“Mine not the injured parties they’d claim?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“And Christabel Pankhurst one of the schemers?”

“It looks like it.”

She smiled. “Quite a bombshell—for everyone.”

“You don’t look as if it is.”

“Oh, Martin, you mean my book? That hardly matters. Let’s forget feminist first principles and go for the truth. I can be flexible. Historians ought to be, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, you’ll hardly feel any obligations to Sellick after this.

How about forming a partnership with me instead?”

“A literary partnership?”

“Not just literary. Not now. But, if you like, we’ll get at the truth—as historians—along the way.”

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“I like very much.”

“Good. I hoped you would. After all, you were right about Strafford and I was wrong. Where is his Postscript now?”

“Safe.”

“With these people—the Bennetts?”

“No. But secure. Don’t worry. We can collect it tomorrow.”

“Fine.” She paused. “So—what do you think happened to Strafford and his nephew?”

“To Strafford, I don’t know. But if it wasn’t murder, why are the Couchmans so upset about my investigations? As for Ambrose, it’s too big a coincidence to believe he drowned accidentally just after sending me that letter. Timothy knew about it, remember.”

“True. But do you see Timothy being able to kill a man?”

“Frankly, no. Nor his father. But there’s some connexion, I’m sure of it.”

“So what do we do about it?”

“Decide when you’re satisfied the Postscript’s authentic.