The Pleasure Seekers (8 page)

Arnold won, to the applause of Laurence and Max who were standing on the beach. He walked through the surf and collapsed at their feet. D’Arcy had no problem coming in second. She collapsed against Laurence and remained there, catching her breath, until Mark appeared, Melina still far behind. Mark had the good grace to slap Arnold on the back. ‘That was some swim, Arnold. Drinks are on me.’

Mark was a charming loser, too charming; he was always nicest when he was beaten whether it was in a race, a debate at the dinner table, or he had received a rejection letter from a publisher. He was one of those people who could always make you believe he had won, that you were somehow the loser. D’Arcy sat listening,
observing Mark. He and Arnold were discussing a friend of Arnold’s who was a frequent visitor to Livakia, at least once a year. Mark was trying to convince Arnold that his friend, a famous screen writer, should stay with Mark when next he came for a visit. ‘Your house is too small. You don’t cook, and the whole place needs painting. He would be more comfortable with me.’

It was at this point that an exhausted Melina arrived. She dropped down on the sand next to Mark and interrupted their conversation with, ‘Too bad, Arnold.’

‘Arnold won the race, Melina,’ Mark told her, and turning his back on her, resumed his conversation.

He was quite through with her, dismissed her without another thought. D’Arcy could see that the girl was upset that Mark had been beaten by Arnold. Some minutes passed and then in a moment of pique she jumped up, scattering sand everywhere, and asked, ‘Why are you talking to him? He’s nothing. You always tell me that he should be wiped from the earth like a piece of dung, so why do you waste your time being nice to him? What about our swim together, our walk? You are better than him.’

All this she said in not very educated Greek and spat out so quickly that Arnold could never have understood half of what she was saying. D’Arcy got every word. She saw the pain in the girl’s face, and the disappointment.

Mark was cool, icy cool, when he answered her without an apology, ‘We had our swim, now I’m with my friends. Why don’t you go find yours, or do some work, or read a lesson? Aren’t you supposed to be doing some work for Arnold? Is that finished?’

After she left D’Arcy could not help but remark, ‘That girl worships the ground you walk on, Mark. She only wanted you to win.’

It was at that moment that Rachel arrived, and all conversation stopped as their eyes followed her every movement. Her arrival at the beach was always a mesmerising performance: the shedding of her clothes, making herself cancer-proof against the sun. Today she was bubbling over with enthusiasm. They were opening Jimmy’s house. She had spoken to the maid and Jimmy Jardine was arriving on the island later that day, alone, leaving his rock star entourage behind, his girlfriends, the outside world. He was in retreat, here to meditate and write. ‘I’ve made up my mind – this time I’m going to spend the night with him,’ she announced.

Everyone looked at everyone else, trying to control smiles, laughter even. Over the years Rachel must have made that statement a dozen times, but she had never been able to accomplish a seduction of Jimmy Jardine.

The men began to tease Rachel about her inability to seduce Jimmy to her bed. It was Laurence who gave her the tip: something he thought, at the very least, would get her into his house: Jimmy’s serious commitment to Buddhism, his knowledge of Sufism. She must show an interest in that side of his life, let him know that all she wanted was to sit at his feet and talk about those things and what they meant to him.

The heat and the beauty of Livakia, the pleasures of life, the constant fun, seemed always to outweigh
any minor unpleasantnesses that flared up there. The Melina-Mark episode of just a few minutes before was forgotten by everyone before the girl had vanished off the beach.

Chapter 4

D’Arcy had a good knowledge of Crete. She had travelled extensively over most of the 160-mile, roughly oblong island and had criss-crossed it thousands of times from its narrowest stretch of 6 miles to its widest of 35 miles. She loved every inch of it. The other foreigners living in Livakia had that same passion for Crete. They knew it – maybe not as well, except for Max, but enough to want to know it as she and Max did. Except for D’Arcy, Manoussos and Max, few of the Livakians took the road over the Levka Ori range of mountains as D’Arcy had a few days before. There were easier, less dramatic routes from Livakia, by boat up or down the coast to villages and towns where one could catch a bus, or else keep a car and then drive anywhere on the island. Only Max had the advantage of a sea plane as well as his jeep and a boat.

Laurence had no car, the hassle was too much, he used public transport and lifts from people. Arnold kept his convertible Volkswagen in a cave above a village several miles down the coast. Mark was too poor to have a car and didn’t know how to drive anyway. The Plums had a car; Jane did the driving but wasn’t very good at it so they rarely used their own but hired a taxi. All in
all the foreign community had enough transport to keep them far from isolated unless they wanted to be. There was even a bus that did make the road twice a week to Livakia. Mark had dubbed it the Kamikaze Express. Only strangers and the desperate took their chances on its arriving anywhere at all.

Laurence and D’Arcy had been invited to dinner by friends of his who lived in a marvellous house in Rethymnon. Dinner meant staying overnight because it was on the opposite side of the mountain range from Livakia. D’Arcy had no problem with that, Rethymnon was her favourite town on Crete. It was on the north coast between Chania and Iraklion, smaller than those towns and filled with charm, a sleepy little place, looking very Eastern with its many minarets and wooden houses. Its buildings, like the great mosque in the fortress with its three domes and slender minaret, added yet another flavour. They seemed almost African. The ancient port, once made famous by the Venetians, and the early-seventeenth-century Loggia were always, for some reason, instant visual reminders of the history of Crete to D’Arcy.

‘Sure we’ll go. I always like going to Rethymnon,’ D’Arcy told Laurence, looking very happy.

‘But I thought you disliked the Chumleys?’

‘I do, but you don’t.’

‘So this is a sacrifice?’

‘Hardly a sacrifice. You get to be with your stuffy insular friends, I get a great dinner in a lovely house and to wander around town, saying hello to a few old faces I know they would never bother to speak to.’

‘I don’t know why you dislike them so. I’ve known Jeremy Chumley my whole life and no one I know dislikes him, or Celine for that matter.’

‘Have you ever listened to their conversation? I don’t think you have. You just accept what they have to say as interesting. It’s not, you know. It’s stultifyingly boring. When the four of us are together, the three of you talk in the past tense. “Do you remember when we were in India together? Saw Benjy the other day, remember when . . . Boo is divorcing, Tiggy is marrying. Bunny still asks after you. Are you going to the Chenedges’ party. Oh, do you know Phizzy, D’Arcy? What is D’Arcy a nickname for, D’Arcy? Ha, ha, ha.” Oh, really, Laurence, you left those sort of people behind when you left Eton and Cambridge.’

‘D’Arcy, one never leaves Eton and Cambridge behind.’

Peals of laughter from D’Arcy, and Laurence joining her. It was late-morning and they were still in D’Arcy’s bed. Having given up dinner in favour of lust, they had had a dawn breakfast on the terrace in the sun: fried eggs and bacon, slabs of cheese, toast, and English rough cut marmalade. They drank Fortnum’s Royal Blend tea laced with sugar and a splash of Scotch whisky, a restorative after-sex drink, or so Laurence claimed. Exhausted from their romp through a landscape of adventurous sex, they had fallen asleep only after they had made themselves replete with food.

D’Arcy rolled on to her side and looked at Laurence. She knew he was right. What you are, what you have been, you carry with you all your life. It’s what you add to it, what you do with what you’ve got, that makes the
difference, or no difference at all. She loved Laurence just as he was, would never want him to change, nor for him to change his friends, but that did not mean she had to make them hers. She had thought he understood that.

D’Arcy slid her body over Laurence. She watched him close his eyes and felt his tremor of pleasure. He caressed her bottom and sighed, then dropped his hands on to the bed. She sat up, straddled him, and adjusted the pillows behind his head. They gazed into each other’s faces and Laurence ran his fingers through her hair. ‘I do like Jeremy and Celine, you know. I like all my friends like them,’ he told her.

‘I know.’

‘You just don’t understand them, where they’re coming from. You think them silly with their love of nicknames – hot-house flowers rather than the wild thing you are. And maybe they are. But they like you, in spite of your not having a nickname or a normal background, an upbringing they cannot understand or accept. Your having a mother and several fathers but not one you can call your own; a name after a romantic hero from
Pride and Prejudice
but spelled more dramatically because your mother was an incurable romantic. You should give them some credit for that.’

D’Arcy was not offended to be told she was not a conventional girl from a conventional background. She did not, however, find that a hindrance in her life, nor had she thought Laurence did. For her it was just her life. She, her brothers and her sister all adored their mother for her beauty and her courage to have lived life the way she wanted to, bringing them up in the manner she felt would
give them the best beginning. But what did offend her was the tone in Laurence’s voice, the look in his eyes. He was being condescending about who and what she was.

She remained silent for several moments just sitting astride him. She needed that silence to compose herself, rattled by the way he was patronising her. She took a deep breath and reached out most tenderly to remove a lock of hair that fell on his forehead. Then she ran her fingers through his hair several times, all the while studying his face. She understood for the first time that they had a passion for each other; they loved each other but didn’t know each other. There was, she realised, the possibility that they didn’t even like each other.

Laurence understood what he had done. He could see in her face how he had offended her. He hardly knew how it had happened. He reached out to her and took her hand in his, drawing it to his lips and kissing it. ‘D’Arcy . . .’

‘No, please don’t say anything.’

‘I feel I must.’

‘I don’t think we can have a discussion about this. It occurs to me that you and I have never asked each other about our backgrounds. What we know are bits and pieces of each other’s lives learned third-hand from other parties. It never occurred to me that our life’s histories needed defining so that we might come to terms with them.’

‘You’re upset.’

‘Not upset. Not even disappointed. Surprised.’

D’Arcy bent forward and kissed him on the lips. He wrapped his arms around her and caressed her breasts. She slid smoothly from his arms and the bed and went into the dressing room. She was slipping into a white
silk kimono heavily embroidered with butterflies when she returned to him. Taking him by the hand, she led him out into the midday sun where she settled him in a chaise and brought him a cigar and a lighter, then went to sit opposite him on the terrace wall overlooking the sea.

The bedroom terrace was sheltered from all eyes and they often lay there in the nude, sometimes in the sun, at times in the shade under the enormous old fig tree. She watched Laurence smoke his cigar. Often she had thought he would make a good nude for Lucien Freud to paint. There was great strength, raw sexuality, in his nakedness. Such a contrast to the handsome, rather erudite face with its veil of secrecy, its depth of character, that was so inscrutable. Brett had always told her the upper-class Englishman was the Chinese man of the West. A man with two faces. That was what made him so attractive. He seemed relaxed, his usual self. That was possibly why she asked him to tell her what he did know about her and her family.

‘Do we have to do this, D’Arcy?’ he asked, but there was no annoyance in his voice.

‘No, we don’t
have
to do anything.’

Laurence was brief and to the point when he told her what he knew. It was quite a good deal and most of it accurate, and in a strange way that made his patronising of her a few minutes before even worse. She listened, and then when he was quiet went and sat down next to him. ‘May be one day you will get to meet some of my family,’ was all she said.

There had been no scene, the subject was closed. He had asked no questions, she had volunteered nothing.
His admiration for her, already great, increased tenfold. She had so many ways of seducing him, of keeping him enthralled. He loved her passionately for that, but his love was an ambivalent one. He disliked her possession of him as much as he loved it. She held him not with a string, not a single female ploy, nor did she play the games women usually like to play with men. He moved over on the chaise and asked her to lie down next to him. After removing her kimono, she did as he asked.

‘You’re too good for me,’ he told her.

‘You just might be right about that. We’ll have to see, won’t we?’ That was not the answer he’d expected.

‘After the Chumleys, shall we take a few days and go down to Phaistos, maybe visit the dig where Hannah and Yorgos are working?’ he asked.

‘That would be nice.’

There were good things and bad about leaving Livakia for a trip across the island. Time changes everything. Other places on Crete had not fought as hard as the residents of Livakia had to keep the village and the old port as they had always been. They had struggled to keep the concrete and the plastic out and their own little world locked in. To look around at other places was to realise Livakia had retained the heart of the real Crete and to understand that they were living in paradise.