We were in the garden behind the villa when he came to call.
Kit was hunched up on a sun lounger in the shade, reading a book. He wore a distant frown. I was wandering around on my own, in my usual daydream, skimming my palms ticklishly over the heads of the bougainvillea flowers, the oleander and hibiscus and the green tracery of the jasmine. It was very hot. There was a light wind but it was humid, the libeccio, blowing in from the southwest across the Mediterranean from North Africa and picking up all the summer mist of the sea as it came. It muffled everything, made everything, even the lizards on the crumbling villa walls, dreamy and slow. My thin cotton dress clung to me with light perspiration. I thought of nothing. Except maybe Kit.
A man was standing just the other side of the gate when I looked up and saw him, gasped, almost swallowed my tongue. I held my hand up to my mouth, schoolgirlish, infuriated by my own timid reaction. He smiled. He had a wolfish smile.
In fact, all his features had the properties of beasts of prey: the wolfish smile, the aquiline nose, the leonine mane (albeit greying at the temples), the deep-set eyes of some other unnameable hunter species glaring out of the dark night. “Signorina?” he said. His voice was a low growl, of course.
“Signora,” I corrected him, lowering my eyes briefly to check for the shirt unbuttoned to the navel, the extravagantly hairy chest, the gold medallion. But he wasn’t like that: navy blue shirt, only top button undone. No jewellery that I could see except a fine gold wedding ring. I opened the gate to him.
He was lean and rangy, with a high sunburned forehead and a wide sensuous mouth that looked good when he smiled, which was rarely. His hands were large, with strong, prominent veins; his stare piercing but not hostile – well, not quite. I guessed his age to be about mid-fifties, maybe older.
He held his hand out to me. “Leopoldo,” he said, in a cultivated Italian accent. “My wife and I live next door.”
I shook his hand. “Nancy,” I said. “My husband and I . . .” I paused, bent my head, smiled self-consciously. I was beginning to sound like the Queen. I looked up again. “Kit – my husband – we’re just staying here for a couple of weeks. It’s lovely here.”
He nodded gravely, said nothing, He stared at me for fractionally too long for comfort, and then said, “We would like to invite you over to dinner tonight. Just a simple dinner – the four of us.”
I babbled that it was very kind of them to invite us, and what time should we be over, and we’d be delighted. He told me, nodded again, and turned and strode away. When he was gone I felt my shoulders relax.
Kit, of course, doesn’t want to go.
He lays his book down on his chest and looks up at me and holds his hand up to his forehead to shield his eyes from the setting sun. A hank of hair flops over his hand. So young. I love him so much. “Do we have to?” he says.
“I’ve already accepted.”
“You could have consulted with me first.”
“I thought you’d . . .”
“I came here to get away from all that, and now you’ve gone and fixed up some tedious dinner party with a couple of old farts who’ll have nothing to talk about and expect us to entertain them all evening, Thanks a lot.”
“He didn’t look like an old fart.”
“Who didn’t?”
“Leopoldo.”
Kit mouths Leopoldo back at me in a sarcastic fashion, and then slams his book down and struts off into the villa to get ready for dinner.
I love him even when he’s petulant.
Kit wears his ivory linen suit that he knows I like him in. So that’s OK. I’m not so sure about the tie – too hot, surely? But I don’t say anything.
I wear my long emerald-green dress with the narrow shoulder straps, and some bright red lipstick. Really bright. Kit looks quite startled when he sees me, and then smiles. “Hi, beautiful,” he says, kissing me delicately on the forehead.
We walk next door arm in arm.
Leopoldo’s wife is called Teresa, and she is extremely beautiful. She is perhaps ten years younger than he, very elegant and self-possessed, with eyebrows permanently arched high over her big eyes. Not plucked, just arched: sceptical, amused, worldly, permanently set for flirtation. Her skin appears finely stretched over high cheekbones – but not, please God, face-lifted – and her lips are quite thin. She compliments me immediately on my dress and on my lipstick, and she kisses me warmly on both cheeks. She herself is wearing a long black evening dress, and a gorgeous hematite choker, and, would you believe it, long black gloves up and over her elbows. Like some fifties film star: subtler than Sophia Loren, more voluptuous than Audrey Hepburn . . . a darker, more Mediterranean Grace Kelly?
Teresa obviously likes dressing up for even the smallest occasions. She must notice me eyeing her gloves because she looks down and caresses them lightly, each one, and gives me her most charming smile, and says, “Oh, any excuse to dress up these days, my darling!” in her charmingly accented English. Leopoldo takes my right hand and kisses it, his eyes fixed on my face from under his heavy brows as he does so.
Dinner is taken out in the garden. And what a garden.
We couldn’t see it from our side because of the dense row of cypresses that they have growing around their private patch. Leopoldo leads us immediately round the side of the villa – I can tell it is large, and in rather better condition than the one we’re renting – but other than that we don’t get to see inside it. Behind, a wonderfully elegant, classical-style lawn stretches down to a grove of almond trees at the end, and down the centre of the lawn runs a very ancient-looking, stone-clad, long and narrow pool. Walking beside it I see that the pool is lined randomly with coloured tiles that reflect through the water and give it a strange metallic sheen. Leopoldo to my right, taking my elbow in his large hand, says, “Perhaps a swim later on, if we have not eaten and drunk too much?”
I nearly blurt out that I haven’t brought a swimsuit, but I stop myself just in time, realizing that it would only justify his making some lecherous remark about skinny-dipping. I bite my tongue. Something lurches, deep inside me. I feel a slick of sweat over my upper lip.
It is all impossibly beautiful. The night is warm, and we dine outside, among the grove of almond trees that thickens into an orchard beyond. To either side are citrus orchards too, their tangy fumes filling the night air. The libeccio has dropped off, leaving the air still and sultry. An oval pine table and four chairs stand in the grass, surrounded by flambeaux on chains and poles dug into the ground. When we sit down, the orange light from the naked flames leaps and dances over our faces, emphasizing the brightness of our skin and our eyes, and (I imagine with a thrill) the sluttish scarlet of my lips.
Teresa and Leopoldo – “Call me Leo, please” – have a cook, of course: Tancredi. (No one could afford so palatial a villa along this bit of coastline and not afford a cook as well.) Tancredi mixes us our drinks – Kir Royales all round to start with – and then brings us our meal: zuppe di cozze, mussels in a hot-pepper sauce. Leopoldo tells me they were fresh this morning, relishing their taste, his wide lips glistening in the torchlight. Kit by my side starts to relax, I can feel it, and with the second glass of wine – some unidentifiable but perfect floral white – he begins to talk. And when Kit actually chooses to talk, he is wonderful. Soon he is deep in passionate argument about the real significance of the bull-run in Pamplona, and then the bull-leapers of Knossos, and then he even engages Teresa in conversation about the sad decline of haute couture. Teresa used to be a model – naturally. She often stays with Yves St Laurent in his pad in Morocco, it appears, and she tells an amusing story about Yves and the time he unwittingly ate a raw potato.
Leopoldo doesn’t laugh, I notice. He watches her from the other end of the table, taking a steaming mouthful of sea bass – our main course – his dark eyes fixed on her, weirdly adoring. Teresa, it seems, rather ignores Leo. Clearly she knows him well. I feel I do too, already: and his name may be Leo, but if he’s not a Scorpio – I’ll swim naked in that pool, indigestion or not.
There’s cheese, and fresh grapes and almonds, and peaches baked and drizzled with sweet almond wine, and we are all a little drunk, I think, but not so drunk that we will feel ill tomorrow morning. Drunk only on conversation and good food and fine wine and flirtation and the strange and unexpected beauty of this hidden garden and these two enigmatic people – as old as our parents but, I have to admit it, far, far cooler.
I need the loo. Teresa gives me directions – “Go in through the sitting-room doors and turn left and then right down the corridor and . . .” Something like that. But by the time I’ve got there I’ve completely forgotten, so I stumble around the darkened villa, giggling softly to myself, wondering at how huge it is, and badly needing a pee.
Somewhere down one of the hallways I find myself in a smaller room, with bare terracotta walls and a small, circular fountain in the middle, of grey-green stone, maybe marble, and looking very ancient. The fountain is running softly, trickling down over the stone into the basin, and above it is the figure of a naked girl. But not the kind you’d see in a civic fountain – not doing what she’s doing. Not with that brazen abandon, her eyes stone-blank and closed, entirely absorbed in her own erotic oblivion.
And then I am abruptly aware of Leo beside me. He doesn’t look at me, only at the naked figure there over the fountain. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he says.
“I . . . yes, I suppose . . .” I stammer, wishing I could think of something wittier to say.
Then, only then, he turns to me and says, “I will tell you all about her. But later. First you need a bathroom, I think?”
At last! He shows some sign of chivalry!
But it doesn’t last. The “bathroom” he leads me to doesn’t have a lock on it. In fact, it doesn’t even have a door. It is a beautiful little room at the back of the villa, tiled in sand and terracotta with marine motifs in the walls and floor – but no door. Quite open. Leo sees me hesitate and shrugs. “Go ahead,” he says. “I won’t watch.”
I could have been offended. But suddenly I think, Fuck it, and do as he says. And what does he do?
He lights a cigarette. And watches.
Afterwards we walk back to dinner arm in arm as if it is all quite normal.
Maybe it is, round here.
Kit by now is gently, sweetly drunk. He gets drunk quite easily and becomes even more boyish than ever.
Teresa looks up and smiles at me. “Your husband is a university professor,” she says to me. “So clever – and so young!”
“You wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you?” I say dryly. Kit grins at me.
“Ah, poor darling,” says Teresa, reaching out and squeezing his thigh. “I think he is – delicious.”
Delicious, but drunk. Which is, no doubt, why he has completely forgotten, by the following morning, about their second invitation: to the island.
Instead, after final grappe e caffè corretto, and kisses and arrivederla’s and domani’s all round, we stumble back to our villa and fall into bed. And I want to make love to him then, across our bed, or rather for him to make love to me, pulling my dress up, not even taking it off. I so want him to make love to me. But he is too drunk. And even if he wasn’t, I know too well that he would probably just turn away from me and murmur that he was tired, another night, and then fall asleep.
I do not sleep. I feel the blood coursing through my body and it is full of wine and a certain anticipation or even fear, as if I know something is going to happen, something beautiful and terrible, before this holiday is over. And my blood is awake, wide awake. Some time later, lying there, ears straining to hear the waves breaking on the shore below, I hear louder sounds: splashing, and screams. They are coming from next door. I get up and go to the window but I can see nothing beyond the cypress trees. As if in a dream I go down into our garden and across the cool grass barefoot to the trees, and the cypress branches brush against my skin and I press in close and look through.
Leopoldo and Teresa are making love. Still clothed, or at least half-clothed, they are wrestling with each other, standing waist deep in the shallow end of the pool, Leo grimly silent, Teresa bucking away from him, screaming and laughing as he holds her tight. Then they fall silent, first as he closes her mouth with a long and ardent kiss, then as he flings her back across the side of the pool and falls on top of her. She is wearing only stockings now, and her black choker, and the long black gloves. She wears them for him, I realize. She still knows how to make herself desirable to him. Hungrily he trails kisses down her belly and between her thighs. I see her move her thighs wider apart, raise a hand to her mouth. They make love then in silence.
I return to bed and lie on my back and my hand creeps between my thighs and I come, weeping, eyes closed, mouth clamped shut in silence.
The sky is still grey with the very earliest dawn light when I hear through my sleep the front doorbell ringing, It rings a second and a third time before I get to it, eyes half-shut, in a tatty white bathrobe that I know is far too short for decency.
When I open the door, Leo and Teresa are standing there, Teresa with a slightly enquiring smile, her eyebrows arched.
“Ah,” she says. “You’re not quite ready yet”
“Ready for what?”
“The trip to the island.”
“Hmm?”
It seems that last night when I was indoors, Teresa asked Kit if he and I would like to join them for a boat-trip out to the island in the bay tomorrow morning, and maybe a picnic. They would pick us up early. Kit had accepted with alacrity – and then forgot all about it.
I wake him up with a vigorous thump on his head with a pillow. He’s grumpy at first, and then hungover, and then gradually, as he showers and shaves and rehydrates with tea, he begins to whistle and hum and I know that he is suddenly rather looking forward to the idea of a day on the island.
He wears jeans and deck shoes and a T-shirt and his linen jacket, and, just to cap the Italian playboy image, his shades. I’ll wear deck shoes too, and my short white cotton dress, and will sling my red jumper over my shoulders. Carry my straw hat.
“Swimming trunks, do you think?” he asks me.
“Shouldn’t bother,” I say, feeling mischievous. “We can always skinny-dip.”
He reaches out and pinches my bum. “I’ll see you downstairs when you’ve showered.”
Head back, eyes closed, face and breasts and belly and thighs streaming with hot water, when I hear the bathroom door open and then the shower curtain part. I’m thrilled. It’s been ages, too long, since Kit and I showered together. His gentle hands start to soap my back, massage my shoulders, plant tiny kisses in the dips and hollows, and I arch my back as his hand reaches down between my thighs and I twist my head to see him.
It’s Teresa. She has undressed, I can see her clothes on the bed in the room beyond, and her hand is between my thighs, caressing softly, her eyes steady on mine, knowing I am transfixed, helpless. I cannot move. She puts her other hand around the back of my neck as if to hold me still. But she needn’t bother. I am helpless and still, a willing victim, burning, immobile. I even slide my feet a little farther apart over the slick tiles to encourage her to touch me. I want to feel her fingers inside me. I have never done that before, with a woman, and never thought I would. It cannot be real. She moves her head slowly and sensuously under the falling water, as if feeling it thrumming on the top of her head like a hundred tiny fingertips, then she raises her face up to it, her mouth a little open, catching the warm water and letting it trickle out again over her face and throat. Then she presses herself hard against me, our naked flanks slippery against each other, and turns my head and devours my lips with hers. The water pours down over us, plastering our hair to our cheeks, mingled maybe with my tears, and I cannot move or speak and I do not stir. The kissing is slow and deep. I pull back a little so as to trail my tongue over her lips more lightly, but she does not let me, pulls me closer in again, our breasts sliding against each other, our nipples hard and tingling. She turns me half-sideways so that she can skim her flattened palm over my nipples, murmurs endearments in my ear, punctuated with flickers of her tongue against my earlobe, in the shell of my ear, gently probing – endearments in a language I do not understand, but that I understand perfectly. Then her hand moves down over my arched belly and between my legs again, and she reaches her other arm around my waist and holds me tight against her, curved into each other like spoons, and I stretch my legs apart even wider and feel weak and I have to turn and hold myself steady against her and bury my face against her, my mouth closing on her breasts and sucking them in deep, greedily. She rests her head on top of mine now, almost motherly, whispering what a beautiful girl I am, what a beautiful young girl, what a greedy girl, how hungry! Her fingers slick between my swollen lips and ease back and forth over the head of my clitoris, too slowly. I want to beg her to press harder, to reach down and press her hand harder into me with my own hand, but she will not let me, I know. I rest against her, utterly passive and obedient, knowing she knows best, and as I come, richly and shudderingly against her warm, moving hand ticklish with foam, I raise my face up to her again and want her, need her to kiss me again. She kisses me and then murmurs what a good, sweet, beautiful young girl I am, she kisses me on the top of my head, she nuzzles her mouth into my wet hair, she covers my face and neck with quick little kisses, she croons softly like a mother to her baby. I fall against her then as I might have done against my mother years ago, and she raises my face gently with a forefinger nestling under my chin and kisses me on the lips and parts my lips with the tip of her tongue and we stay like that for hours, it seems, just kissing, and the water cascades down around us and over us and through us, melting us, it seems. Melting the very heart of us.
And none of it matters. Afterwards we kiss and laugh and dress and return to normal. As if it is all normal.
Leo and Teresa are highly organized. I knew they would be, somehow. It’s bliss.
The car is a huge silver Merc. When Leo opens the boot for me to put my bag in, I see there’s this vast, old-fashioned hamper filled with bottles of wine and bread and cheese and olives and oil and . . . the Full Mediterranean Diet Plan.
Kit and I sit in the back and keep smiling conspiratorially at each other on that long drive down to the coast. The black leather of the seat is warm under me and I feel wet again already. I cannot stop thinking about it, and more of it, please, more. Down and down we go, round the hairpin bends, down from the hills to the sun-scorched coast, through olive orchards and lemon orchards, among cork oaks and sweet chestnuts, and towards the sea, ancient plane trees and stone-pines with the heat shimmering on their evergreen-grey canopies, and the odour of pine in the air so rich and intoxicating that I feel almost like bursting into tears, like a little girl. I squeeze Kit’s hand.
The harbourside is chaos, as usual, especially as the local fishermen are landing a huge catch of pilchards that they have just ring-netted out in the bay. It’s a cliché, I know, but these young Italian fishermen, these gods – glossy black hair, lean-muscled shoulders tanned dark and slick with sweat, their tight, white sleeveless T-shirts stretched across their chests, flecked brilliant red with fish blood, shouting and laughing and swaggering at each other – Teresa knows I’m admiring them because she is too, and a knowing girls’ grin flickers between us. I can’t believe it, but that brief exchange of looks makes me feel breathless, wetter still between my legs. What on earth is going to happen? I wonder. Everything, murmurs an inner voice. Everything is going to happen.
Leo gets a local boatman to motor us out to the island: hard-faced, bearded, scarily competent, navigating out past the rocks in the bay with one casual, strong hand on the wheel. Cigarette dangling from his grim mouth.
On the way out, I ask Teresa if anyone actually lives on the island.
“Not without our permission,” she says mildly.
I gawp at her. “You don’t mean . .?”
She smiles, lays her hand on my arm, a tiny caress. “I’m sorry, I thought you realized. It is our island. Leo’s, officially.” She looks away towards her husband and back to me again, her eyebrows arched even more ironically than ever. “My marito is, officially, you know, the Count of the Island of San Michele.”
I swallow. OK: I’m impressed.
“There will only be the four of us on the island,” says Teresa, raising her arms above her head and turning her face into the sun and stretching languidly. “Free as birds.”
The journey out to the island takes almost an hour, and the middle passage gets pretty bumpy, but as we draw near to the island both Kit’s and my nerves are calmed by the awesome view, and the thought that it is the private property of one man. On the south side, intimidating sandstone cliffs rise sheer from the sea, deeply ribbed and eroded like the sculpted relief of an ancient forest or the bones of a whale. Inland I can see further sheer cliffs of brilliant white – marble, surely. And directly ahead, where the boat is taking us, a deep gully between high cliffs, with a small jetty at the back, in cold shade.
We disembark, Leo extending a chivalrous hand to me, and then ordering the boatman to carry our hamper up the treacherous stone steps to the cliff top. We follow him up.
The island is a dream. It cannot be real. I know Kit is thinking the same, because we have both fallen silent in wonder.
We walk for ten minutes along the cliff top, and then strike inland a little way, down a slope to a kind of sunken plateau. And there, in the middle, surrounded by more trees, is an immaculate, tiny marble temple.
Leo gives one of his rare smiles. “Not an original, of course,” he says. “Built by one of my more eccentric ancestors, in the eighteenth century. You would call it a folly, I believe.”
The temple has a narrow, shady portico, and two cedarwood doors that swing open on massive hinges. Inside is just one small, stone-floored room, with a couch on either side, a small, low table in the middle, which looks incongruously Indian if anything, and a heavy oak dresser along the back. Leo orders the boatman to deposit the hamper on the dresser, and tips him generously for his pains. The boatman nods curtly and leaves.
Immediately Leo starts pulling the couches out onto the portico– Kit helps him – and then the low table, and finds plates and glasses in the dresser and brings them out too. Then he unloads the hamper and soon the table is covered in food and the glasses are filled with wine. In no time at all we are reclining on the couches, twirling glasses of iced champagne between our fingers while Leo, more relaxed than I have seen him so far, extols the beauty of his island, and its ancientness.
He tells us that holidays were invented here, in this great bay sweeping south of Rome, overlooking the sparkling Tyrrhenian Sea. He says that Rome was the first city in history that people felt a need to escape from, on occasion. “We all need a break from the usual, the habitual,” he says. “From custom. Something different, to reawaken us.”
“Cum dignitate otium,” he murmurs, conjuring brilliantly with faulty but vivid English, the poet Cicero on his farm in his peaceful Sabine valley, and other wealthy Romans here, Emperors even, in their great villas, enjoying their rest and recreation.
“And what recreations!” he says, eyes half-closed. “You know about the Emperor Tiberius, I suppose? The notorious passage in Suetonius, where he describes how the aged emperor built an entire palace to lustful pleasures hereabouts, with grottoes where groups of two or three young people would perform sexual acts for him. And where little boys were trained to swim underneath him when he was swimming and nibble at him. He called them his little minnows.” Both Leo and Teresa are smiling at this. “Do I shock you?”
Kit says nothing. I say, too firmly, “No.” My mind is filled and distracted by weirdly vivid images of those groups of two or three young people, acrobatically entwined, murmurous and ecstatic, in grottoes and shady groves, on an island just such as this . . .
“Oh, and he kept a pet mullet, encrusted with jewels,” he added. “Or was that Claudius? I forget now.”
Later, we go for a walk. Just Kit and I, hand in hand, still dreaming, saying little, dozy with wine but excited too. It is all too marvellous.
We walk up a narrow valley thick with grasses and scrub: scrub oak, yellow broom and purple sage, thyme, lavender, all headily aromatic, broken here and there by the red bark of arbutus. And such wild flowers: cyclamen, and tall asphodel, and white star of Bethlehem, and higher up between the granite outcrops, brilliant purple and yellow rock-roses. There is terebinth and carob, and down below in yet another secluded valley we can see tamarisk and oleander growing and swaying gently in the breeze beside a trickling streambed. We see swallowtail butterflies, and a hoopoe, and way overhead a big bird of prey: a buzzard, probably.
“Can’t we live here?” I say suddenly to Kit. I always say this when we go somewhere beautiful. “Rent the temple off them. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”
Kit smiles and says nothing. He knows it’s all a dream.
That long summer day passed so slowly – that last day, as I think of it now, that last day of the old life. We returned to the folly and dozed along with Leo and Teresa, they in each other’s arms on one couch, Kit and I on the other. Stirring and waking at one point, I saw that Leo’s hand was between Teresa’s thighs, and they saw me watching them and smiled back at me. I smiled, and closed my eyes, and tried to sleep again.
And when I awoke, much later, it was with a shock that I realized that the sun was setting over the mountains to the west and coming down over the bay to drown in the water before us, and it was rapidly getting dark. I asked when we were heading back, at which Leo stood abruptly.
“Soon,” he said. “But first, I promised to show you something, to explain the statue that you saw at the villa- the girl in ecstasy, yes?” And he held out his hand to me.
I stood, and he led me away from the folly and down into the valley and we walked for a long time and it grew dark. I was afraid, but more than afraid – my palms damp with sweat, unable to speak. And then we came down from the valley to another cove, shut in on one side by fierce rocks that ran straight down into the sea. And from here we could see the sunset perfectly. Oh no, I thought – this is just too clumsy a seduction attempt. I’m going to giggle.
But rather than lay me down in the sand and tell me he needed me, he desired me, he had to have me, Leo retained a firm grip on my hand and led me instead into the shadows under the cliffs, to a small crevice in the black rock. He told me to go in ahead of him. And inside, everything changed.
Inside was a vast domed cavern with mineral walls that glittered as if studded with gems, traced with mica and quartz, encrusted like the skin of the emperor’s pet mullet. Torches burned all around, set into the walls in iron bands; and illuminated most brightly, preternaturally illuminated, in the centre of the cavern, on a stone dais, stood a white marble altar, elaborately carved with figures, sea-creatures, mermaids, tritons, and nymphs entwined in foam. The torches also made the cavern hot, much hotter than one would have expected, like some primeval sauna, so that the air shimmered in the heat, and after the evening chill of the cove, I felt my body warming again and my skin suddenly breaking out in a slick of perspiration.
I could hear Leo talking to me now, explaining, but my head was humming so, I could barely take in his words. And the sea breeze was blowing in now from the mainland of Italy, soughing in the crevices of the rocks and sounding like a soft and far-off bugle call in the entrance to the cavern. Leo was talking about how water was the stuff of life, how some worshipped fire but really water was the heart of life, most passive and most powerful, seemingly shaped by everything and yet irresistibly shaping everything by its own primal force over all the aeons. The most ancient feminine principle, out of which everything is born. And any place dedicated to San Michele, he said, Saint Michael the Warrior-Archangel, was originally an ancient site of pagan worship, which is nature worship – such as this whole island, an island of unnumbered underground streams, and springs, and fountains, where people worshipped the principle of water centuries before Christ walked the dry and dusty roads of Palestine.
“And the mermaid, too,” he was saying. “What is she? Half-woman, half-fish: fertility? Sexuality? The personification of our eternal mother, the sea?”
From a darkened corner of the cavern Leo turned and I saw he was holding a white robe. He told me to undress and lay my clothes away and put this on. Even while my mind still hesitated, I did as he said. Round the waist I knotted the belt of golden cord. And then he took my hand and led me out of the cavern and we waited there on the beach hand in hand, my bare feet in the still-warm sand, saying nothing, thinking nothing. I was utterly passive and yet I knew I was nothing like his slave-girl. Leo had led me here, and told me what to do, and yet I was not under his command. I was – how can I put this? – I was only the servant to myself, and to something greater than myself. Leo held my hand no longer like some domineering father figure, but as my servant, honouring me. And I remembered the look of adoration I had seen him give to Teresa, so many times.
And then I could hear a distant drumming, hypnotic, antique, an inexorable, almost militaristic rhythm, getting closer all the time. I glanced at Leo, and he looked curiously serene, uncharacteristically dreamy, rapt. Content.
Then round the corner of the far rocks came those who were beating the drums. Some were naked, some were half-clad in white; some were walking slowly and stately, holding torches aloft, others were dancing and cavorting around them, dressed in grotesque satyr masks and goatskin cloaks. Those who were walking slowly were all by contrast beautiful, male and female alike. The torchlight burned on their faces and their bare shoulders, and their skins were golden in the glow. As they came nearer their faces shone with sweat and their otherworldly rapt attention to the delirium of the music. They banged drums and cymbals and moved along the beach towards was if themselves spellbound and bewitched.
“Who are these, coming to the sacrifice?” murmured Leo, and turned and smiled at me, reverential, a little sad.
Then he took my hand and led me back into the cave. There he took a black strip of silk and turned me round so that I faced away from him, and he tied it around my head and over my eyes and secured it firmly behind so that I was in utter darkness. Blinded. And immediately all my other senses came to life.
I heard a noise like someone shaking out a heavy tablecloth and I knew that he was spreading something over the altar, and then he laid me down on it and I felt it was a thick velvet and I pictured it as a deep golden colour, almost inlaid, cloth-of-gold, and I could smell incense and woodsmoke and also human sweat and sex. And then I felt the presence of many more people as they filed into that cavern, and the air was warm and thick with the smell of pinewood and smoke rising up to the opening in the roof of the cavern, and they drummed softly now and hummed or chanted a low song that was in no language I recognized.
I felt human bodies pressing all around me, and hands running over me, lips and tongues running over my lips and over my neck and throat, and one who kissed me I knew was Teresa from her perfume and I turned my head a little towards her and smiled at her though blindfolded and she touched a fingertip to my lips and I sucked it softly. Unseen hands loosened my white robe from around my shoulders and drew it down to my waist. Other hands loosened the knot of my belt and pulled it free – I raised my hips slightly to help them do so – and more hands raised the hem of the robe and pushed it up so that it formed a crested white wave around my waist and the rest of me lay naked.
Then there was a pause, and I heard a noise I couldn’t identify, and then the sound of hands being rubbed together, and when they returned to me I knew that they had been rubbing their hands to warm the oil they held cupped. Now they spread what smelled like olive oil over my skin, from my toes upwards, trickling it even between my toes, applying it with both fingers and tongues, warming it on my skin as they went. They held my hands outstretched and poured oil into my palms and massaged my fingers. They spread the grass-sweet olive oil up my legs and over my thighs, and I couldn’t hold back a sigh and a gasp as they slicked it between my thighs, so gently, lingeringly, and I parted my thighs and wished those unseen fingers would stay there longer. Then strong hands lifted my legs behind my knees and bent them right up, and they poured more oil over me so that it trickled down between my rear cheeks, and further hands held my cheeks apart, and then a slim, delicate hand reached down and a small, subtle finger – a woman’s finger, her little finger, surely – insinuated itself between my cheeks and inserted itself, just the tip, inside me, and caressed me there in a circling of oil and I begged silently for more, never to stop, oh more and forever.
They oiled my breasts and my neck and they covered me with kisses as they did so, so that I was exposed and caressed and fed on by countless mouths, tongues circling in dance-like movements over my breasts and around my nipples and then down over me until I bucked and writhed and wanted to hold my arms out to touch their hair and to embrace these unknown lovers, these worshippers. At last I could remain the passive body no longer, and I reached my hands out and caressed the naked flanks of those who stood around me, and a low murmur of delight went up from the throng and I guessed from the voices that the cavern held a hundred people or more and that every eye was on me. I felt two boys, young and firmly muscled, quite naked, standing to left and to right of me, and I ran my hand down over their lean bellies, my mind lascivious, whore-like, and found them rigid, standing out, and my fingers curled around them, each boy my slave in each oiled palm, and began to squeeze and caress them, and I heard their little gasps and felt their whole bodies tauten at my touch.
More mouths tried to kiss me, and I turned sideways to each in turn and felt tongue after tongue – some gentle, some feminine, some hard and probing, some hesitant, some greedy – entwining with my tongue, and then one brought a mouthful of wine and we drank it between us from each other’s ruby, wine-stained lips. Then one of the naked boys beside me pulled free from my hand and turned my head towards him and slid into my mouth and I closed my mouth tight about him and he tasted beautiful. I felt another naked form brush against me, and cool soft hands took my free hand and placed it between smooth thighs and it was a girl now and she pressed my hand flat into her curls and then, using my middle finger almost as she pleased, she used it to caress her lips and clitoris. Soon I was flicking my finger rapidly over her swollen bud, and she leaned forwards and her mouth closed on my breasts and she moaned softly and lay half across me while I brought her into raptures.
Between my legs, I felt tongues taking turns, and even competing to squeeze into me together, one on my clitoris, long feminine hair tickling over my belly, while another, perhaps a man, buried his face between my cheeks and ran his tensed tongue back and forth, slipping a rigid forefinger in and out of me.
My mouth filled with hot sperm, and then wine again, and then more tongues and another man pushed into me, and a woman must have straddled me and I felt her lower her salty lips onto my mouth. Then I felt a blind, probing head between my thighs, rubbing up and down and over the head of my clitoris and then back, teasing me cruelly, entering me just a half-inch and then easing back, and I arched towards him. I longed to reach down and grab the naked buttocks of that unknown lover and pull him deep into me, but my hands were filled with greedy men who would not let me go. Finally the stranger eased into me, strong and wide, stretching me, and beginning to pump faster and faster, fingers buried in the flesh of my buttocks. Others slipped their arms beneath the small of my back and lifted me up, exposing me more, so that a tongue, a woman’s again I guessed, could skim over my clitoris, circle it, her hair draped over my belly, while the man fucked me so hard. I forgot how many times I came, it was impossible to count. It was continuous, without respite, I knew no tiredness. I filled with sperm, the man still throbbing pulled out of me, sperm flowed free and mingled with oil. They turned me on my side and raised one leg and another man quickly slipped into me, while yet another nuzzled between my buttocks and, very gently, oiled and slow, eased into my behind. The unseen, naked orgiasts around me must have watched in delight, and held my cheeks apart for the men to ease in better, and I felt them stroke my skin and heard them murmur soft endearments in my ears as I took them in, took both men in, and lapped greedily on fresh, lemon lips that she, another lover, another worshipper, touched softly to my mouth.
And I thought how they say that the taste of a woman is supposed to be like the saltwater taste of the sea, and then I understood everything, not with my mind but with my body, and my understanding deepened, wordlessly, all that enchanted night as I lay there and was worshipped and adored and made love to by my lovers as numberless as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand by the sea.
When I awoke I was lying under a soft woollen blanket on the sand, and Kit lay beside me. He was awake, propped up on one elbow, looking over me as I slept. Normally he was always asleep until long after me. But he was awake, and his face was alight. We looked at each other for a long time, and I didn’t have a word to say. I knew everything was real. But where had Kit been? Did he know?
Then he leaned over and kissed me. “You were beautiful,” he said, “last night.” He smiled. “The Goddess.”
Then I remembered. “The last one, my last lover – that was you?”
He kissed me in answer.
As the sun came up – and exhausted though I was, though we both were, so tired that we laughed out of tiredness like unruly children – we made love in the surf where the sea broke on the beach of the Island of San Michele. There was no boat, nor another soul around. We might be stranded on the island forever, and we laughed, and didn’t care, and all we could think of doing was making love in the foam, fucking, laughing, he harder, harder, always harder, like a rock, a stone statue like that little smiling ithyphallic god that they worship in some places, and I melting before him and flowing around him like water like a mermaid like the spirit of the water that they worship here . . .