FOUR

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA

TOBIAS BARRON WAS DRIVEN NORTH OUT OF DURBAN IN AN AIRCONDITIONED limousine with tinted windows. The heavy sunlit humidity, which bore the gaseous stink of the streets, seemed to penetrate the car in an unpleasant way. Barron sat in the back alongside a small man called Mpande, who represented the Department of Education and who kept wiping streaks of perspiration from the lenses of his glasses. At one point on the outskirts of Durban, Barron pressed a button to roll down the electric window of the car and found himself gazing across a vacant lot where a crowd of black kids in American-style jeans watched the limo with an almost hostile curiosity. Mpande reached out, touched the button, the window rolled shut.

‘A car of this kind makes certain people both envious and suspicious,’ Mpande said, and smiled.

He smiled, Barron thought, a great deal. Perhaps he was proud of his two gold front teeth. Barron settled back, and after some miles felt the rhythm of the car change as it moved from a paved surface to dirt. Mpande was fond of talking, usually in statistics, which bored Barron more than a little, but he listened anyway, and sometimes nodded his head. The percentage of blacks enrolled in universities – this was one of Mpande’s favourite themes, and he rattled off a sequence of stats concerning the number studying the humanities, or engineering, or medicine. Mpande talked in the sepulchral tones of a born-again actuary.

Two hours out of Durban the car finally came to a stop. Mpande said, ‘Be warned. There will be a welcoming committee. You will find its members perhaps a little overenthusiastic, but that is understandable. After all, you are a celebrity. A philanthropist. You bring, shall we say, hope into their lives?’

Barron said nothing. He wondered if there might be a slight mockery, a sarcastic edge, in Mpande’s tone. He stepped from the car when the driver opened the door. The heat was horrendous, a force, a great white foundry of light. Unaccustomed to this blinding ferocity, Barron took a little time to absorb his surroundings and the people who were waiting under the shade of a blue canvas awning to greet him. Mpande made polite introductions, the mayor of the township, various elders, the minister, the schoolteacher – more faces and names than Barron could possibly remember. Later, he’d reflect on how indistinct everything was, the smiles, the harsh sunlight, the scrubland, the aroma of putrefaction which came from an open sewer nearby, the shanties cobbled out of any available material, cardboard, corrugated tin, flimsy wood, metal pipes. A fragile place: one storm would destroy it utterly.

The mayor made a speech in English expressing the huge gratitude of the people of the township for Barron’s extraordinary generosity in establishing an educational trust fund for the youth of the place. Now the brightest children could go on to colleges and universities. Now they had – and here the mayor paused, and closed his eyes, swaying a little as if to give his choice of word extra significance – a benefactor. The crowd sighed with satisfaction and pleasure. Barron, sweating and uneasy in his white suit, listened with disguised impatience to all this. He wanted to get back to his air-conditioned hotel in Durban. He didn’t enjoy the feeling he had of himself as the great white saviour. He was only doing the kind of thing he’d done before in many underprivileged parts of the world – Guatemala, Somalia, Ethiopia: if it wasn’t money for education, then it was medicine; if it wasn’t medicine, then it was nutrition. Philanthropy – it was just one of the things he did.

Somebody took his photograph and he smiled, a reflex gesture. Then he was escorted across a dusty plaza to the local school, which was clearly an establishment of some pride to the township, even if the grey concrete was cracking in places and weeds grew from fissures in the play-yard and windows were broken. He was shown inside boxy rooms where rudimentary desks and chairs had been neatly aligned, clearly for the occasion of his visit. The rooms smelled of chalk-dust and rust and were filled with flies. He noticed a blackboard on which had been written the phrases Welcome, Mr Barron and Thank You, Mr Barron.

Kids clustered around him, pressing themselves against him, as if any brief contact with his flesh might bring them good fortune. A nun, Irish and freckled and withered from years in a climate vastly different from that of her native County Clare, said God bless you. She had tears in her pale green eyes. Barron modestly dismissed his contribution as a drop in the ocean, and the nun agreed there was much to be done in the world, but if there were only more men like himself so willing to give, wouldn’t life be better …

‘Education,’ she said with all the solemnity of belief, ‘is one means of curbing violence.’

Barron agreed with that.

He was escorted back to the shade of the blue awning, where he was expected to give a speech to the people of the township. He looked out across the five hundred or so black faces and spoke, as he always did on such occasions, in platitudes concerning the fulfilment of ambition and how, if you had the right attitude, anything was possible. He wondered if anybody ever truly understood what he was saying, or if the message was somehow too American in its optimism, too foreign – but they always applauded and cheered him anyway. A small girl in a gingham dress was ushered forward to present him with a keepsake, a tiny hand-crafted copper medallion on which his initials had been inscribed.

When the visit was over – it had taken slightly more than ninety minutes – he waved and stepped back inside the limousine, accompanied by the smiling Mpande.

‘You have made them happy,’ he said to Barron.

‘Perhaps.’

‘No perhaps. When you provide hope, you are also providing a lifeline to joy.’

Barron settled back in his seat for the trip to Durban. He stretched out his legs and noticed that a streak of pale red dust adhered to the turn-ups of his white trousers.

His hotel suite had a view of Durban harbour in which ships of varied registration lay at anchor. The sun was slipping out of the sky but the intensity of the day’s heat hadn’t dwindled. The sky over the harbour was hazy. The windows of the suite were warm to touch. He poured himself a glass of iced water and sat at the table by the window, where the air-conditioning unit was located.

He spread before him several folders which contained information about some future projects. Apart from the educational trust fund north of Durban, he had plans to raise finance for a glaucoma clinic in Haiti, and an agricultural research centre in the Guantánamo Province of Cuba – if he could ever find a way of bypassing Fidel’s leaden bureaucracy. He skimmed through the files, evaluating the reports of experts and bankers which were written in the kind of droning English guaranteed to induce sleep. Tired of reading, he pushed the folders to one side, then looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after seven; he was due to leave South Africa in an hour.

He rose, wandered the room, listened. At seven-fifteen precisely he heard the sound of Nofometo knocking on his door – a distinctive two raps, a pause, then three further raps. Barron unlocked the door and Nofometo, a lean black man whose face was scarred from the lobe of his right ear to the corner of his mouth, a yellowy zigzag disfigurement, entered the room. Nofometo wore a red T-shirt and baggy beige shorts; he had simple open sandals on his bare feet.

They shook hands. Nofometo walked to the table, opened the folders, scanned the pages, laughed. Barron had always thought Nofometo’s laugh suggestive of an exotic bird.

‘You are still busy doing good, I see,’ Nofometo said. He had the accent of a man educated in an English public school. He lay down on the sofa and put up his feet. He closed his eyes and added, ‘You are too perfect, Tobias. A perfect man in an imperfect world. How do you manage it?’

‘Practice,’ Barron said.

Nofometo opened his eyes, the whites of which were faintly pink. He twisted his face, looked at Barron. ‘A perplexing saint. Saint Tobias. Saint Toby has a better ring to it, I think.’

Barron sat in an armchair facing his visitor. He said nothing.

‘Don’t I merit a welcoming drink? Have you mislaid your manners?’ Nofometo made a clucking sound of disapproval.

Barron smiled. ‘I have a plane to catch.’

Nofometo swung himself into a sitting position. He tapped his bare knees with his fingertips. He took from the back pocket of his shorts a folded brown envelope. He gave it to Barron, who opened it and scanned the two handwritten sheets of paper inside.

‘Fine,’ he said.

‘Now you are going to ask about money,’ Nofometo said.

Barron said nothing. He had times when he enjoyed silences and the small discomfiture of other people. He stared quietly at the black man. Nofometo got up from the sofa and walked to the table, where he filled a glass from the jug of iced water. He took a sip and ran the back of one hand across his lips. ‘The usual wire transfer,’ he said. ‘Into the usual bank, I assume?’

‘You have the account number.’

‘Scorched into my heart,’ said Nofometo. He gazed at the envelope in Barron’s hand. ‘When can I expect delivery?’

‘Three or four days.’

Nofometo nodded. ‘Things go from bad to worse here. There is anger, impatience, people grow restless because the political process takes so long. Meantime, the killing goes on.’ His voice had become serious.

‘I’ll do everything in my power, Nofometo.’

‘Don’t you always?’

‘Always,’ said Barron. St Tobias, he thought.

VENICE

Barron slept on the private Lear jet that took him to Marco Polo Airport. He boarded a motor-launch named Desdemona which ferried him toward the Grand Canal. In Venice he felt more at home than anywhere else in the world – of which he owned a considerable amount, including property in Telluride, Hong Kong, Costa Rica, and Coral Gables. He collected apartments and houses the way some men are driven to accumulate butterflies, rare coins, or women. He stood alongside the driver of the launch, a squat Venetian called Alberto, and he sniffed the night air, which was cold – especially after Durban – and smelled faintly of old herring. A pale moon was visible in the sky, illuminating the palaces in their splendid clutter along the banks.

Alberto said, ‘Welcome home, Signor Barron. You will find nothing changed. Venice. Does she ever change?’

Tobias Barron said only that he was glad to be back. He wore a black cashmere coat over his white suit, and a black silk scarf knotted at his neck. Gulls, disturbed by the engine of the launch, flew out of the vaporetto stations and winged toward the moon like large moths mesmerized by light. Barron gazed at the lit structures that leaned against the water, admiring as he always did the sheer persistence of beauty, the way grandeur prevailed against floods of pollution.

The imagination of men, he thought. It encompassed creation and destruction; he found no paradox in this. The same inscrutable organ that could build was also able to destroy with equal facility. The human heart was a chamber in which dark and light might coexist.

He drew his scarf a little tighter at his neck. Venice was icy, cold to its soul. The Desdemona left the Grand Canal, steering into quieter waters, passing under low bridges. There were lights from cafés and trattorias. Lovers stood on a bridge and watched the launch pass under them. Laundry flapped against the sides of crumbling houses. Discarded plastic bottles that had once contained acqua minerale were agitated in the quiet wake of the boat and shuddered in pale white eddies. The smell here was stronger than it had been on the Grand Canal, danker, greener, as if just beneath the water fish were mysteriously decomposing.

‘We have arrived,’ Alberto said. He moored the launch and made sure in his fussy fashion that Signor Barron disembarked without hindrance. Then he gathered together Barron’s suitcases and stacked them on the dock where another man waited, Schialli, a taciturn fellow who had been Barron’s servant for years. Schialli, like Alberto, was armed; both men carried automatic pistols. It was a sorry fact, Barron thought, that he had made a number of enemies, that his rivals were ambitiously bloodthirsty.

Schialli and Alberto gathered the luggage and walked alongside Barron down a narrow thoroughfare called Calle dei Avocati, where at number 3720 Barron owned a house. He used only the upper two floors, converted into a large apartment; the rest of the place, although sumptuously decorated, was usually unoccupied.

Schialli, who always made a great business of the heavy keys, rattling them with a show of importance, unlocked the big door, which was sixteenth century and adorned by the carved heads of angry lions. The three men entered a flagstoned foyer, then stepped into an elevator. Schialli pressed a button, and the lift rose with a quiet cranking sound.

‘Is the woman here?’ Barron asked when the elevator stopped.

‘She is,’ said Schialli, with a slight inclination of his head.

Barron got out of the elevator, followed by the two men hauling his bags. The upper two floors of the house were joined by a spiral staircase; Barron’s bedroom was directly above the drawing-room. He directed the suitcases to be unpacked as soon as he entered the drawing-room. The central-heating system was blowing forced air throughout the apartment. He removed his coat and scarf, and walked to the unlit marble fireplace and stood with his back to the hearth, as if this was the source of heat. Alberto had silently withdrawn, and Schialli, having unpacked the luggage in the bedroom and hung the clothing away, brought Barron a negroni and soda.

‘Wait fifteen minutes, then send the woman to me,’ Barron said.

‘Of course.’ Schialli went out.

Barron sipped the drink and moved around the room, which was furnished in an eclectic way with pieces purchased here in Venice. There might have been an uneasy juxtaposition of periods in the eye of an antique dealer, but Barron bought whatever appealed to him. A room was your own because you made it so. It was the same with the world, he thought. It was whatever you wanted it to be – if you had the power and the urge to shape it.

He wandered for a time, rippling the keys of a seventeenth-century spinet that occupied the window space where amber and claret brocade curtains hung. Possessions and belongings: one might enjoy them, but never to the point where they owned you. Everything was dispensable in the end. Everything could be returned to the auction room. He went back to the fireplace, the mantelpiece of which was littered with framed photographs.

There was a picture of Barron arm-wrestling with the late Ferdinand Marcos in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. In the shot Marcos is smiling, but behind the smile is the stress of a man whose machismo is on trial. There was another of him dancing with Imelda at her private disco in the Malacanang Palace during the dizzily surreal days of her reign when, taking time out from grandiose schemes of building monuments to herself, all she did was dance and sing ‘The Impossible Dream’. He still sent her Christmas cards, hand-printed for him by a small company in Macon, Georgia. A third photograph was of Barron with Fidel Castro in the courtyard of a whitewashed house in the Granma Province of Cuba. Fidel, unsmiling, has one hand laid on Barron’s arm in a gesture that appears to suggest restraint. The last picture was of Barron in the company of William J. Caan, the United States Ambassador to Britain. Good old Bill has his arm linked with Barron’s in the shot, the big breezy ambassadorial smile in place.

Somebody had once half-jestingly said of Barron that he knew everybody in the world. He was on first-name terms with a variety of pols and show-business sorts. He’d known Visconti and Truffaut. He’d spent time in the company of Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Jerry Brown. Barron seemed to exist in that shadowland of fame where politics and show business become one and the same, that place of dreams and power. He’d fallen under the spell of this hinterland; its landscape enchanted him. Men of power had about them a special presence. They moved through the world with a disregard for the banal demands of life. They rose above the commonplace; they ascended into their own heavens.

Barron saw his reflection in a mirror over the mantelpiece. No matter the season, he always had a suntan. He habitually wore white or beige suits to underline his bronzed features. He seemed never to age. Rumours of surgical adjustment were always smilingly denied. Despite his public image, he remained a private man. He was congenial, wealthy, handsome, he had a marvellously photogenic face – but what did anybody really know about him? Where did his bucks come from? How did he get to be such a high-roller?

On the dinner circuit that rolled from Gstaad to Aspen and then to Monte Carlo, there were those who said he’d inherited wealth, while others spoke of a portfolio – suspect, nefarious – put together over a period of twenty years; there was also a wildly implausible story in which he’d gained access to Marcos’s legendary cache of Japanese gold. None of these rumours had any basis in truth.

As for his origins, he always said he came from the obscure Californian town of San Luis Obispo, but he’d never been near the place, never seen pictures of it. In the end he was a mystery.

And that was precisely the way he wanted it.

He turned away from the photographs and unlocked the door of a small antechamber, a chilly space. An electronic world map, surrounded by a dozen clocks showing the time in different parts of the planet, was located on one wall. Here and there red, yellow and green cursors blinked. These indicated the status of any project at a given time; red was the colour for a dubious area, green represented a situation already in hand, yellow stood for those places where negotiations were under way. On the surfaces of the oceans white cursors tracked the movement of ships; presently one was located off the coast of Madagascar, another in the Caribbean a hundred miles from Cuba, still another in the Baltic, about seventy miles from Tallinn. A fourth was cruising the Adriatic. The direction of land traffic – trains, trucks – was indicated by orange cursors, which flickered in such places as South Africa, Guatemala, Angola and Afghanistan.

Shelves were lined with computer equipment, video consoles, a couple of laser printers, three fax machines. He had rooms similar to this in all his other properties; machines interfaced with other machines, as if in some form of electronic polygamy. Barron’s world was wired, and the wires carried all manner of information. He looked at the messages that had come in over the faxes.

These fell into four broad categories. Some were detailed accounts of incidents in various parts of the world – a mass grave of women and children freshly dug up in Bosnia, the resurgence of the Communist party in various parts of what had once been the Soviet Union, a bloody uprising of the People’s Army in the southern Philippines, the deaths of seventeen blacks at the hands of right-wing extremists in Durban, two hundred dead during ethnic violence in eastern Zaire: these reports might have come from an exceptionally well-informed wire service, except that the correspondents were not employed by Reuters or Associated Press. They were not from journalists accredited in any sense of the word.

The second category consisted of analyses created by experts paid by Barron; computer-generated predictions concerning the possible outcomes of crises in places like Georgia, Nigeria, the Lebanon, Bosnia, Somalia, Northern Ireland. Key figures involved in these disputes – politicians, dictators, potentates, warlords, gangsters and miscellaneous scum – were meticulously profiled. Barron always read these reports carefully.

The third category of message were requests for assistance, sometimes in the form of money. The final classification, no less important than the others, concerned logistics, the movement of trains and trucks and ships, timetables.

Barron regarded all these messages for a while. As he did so, he was struck by the range of human dreams and aspirations. He considered his own role a moment. He was the man who provided the fuel for dreams. What did the nature of the dreams themselves matter? He saw himself sometimes as an illusionist, a magician whose art lay in imbuing dreams with substance, a shaper of other people’s worlds. It was as if he were at the centre of some enormous board-game whose rules he had devised himself. He brooded over this board, shifted this or that piece, studied the consequences of each move; unlike other games, there were no black or white pieces, no forces set in opposition to each other, no sides he favoured.

He turned off the light, locked the antechamber. Inside the drawing-room the woman was waiting for him. He went toward her, took her hand and kissed it.

‘You’re cold,’ he said.

The woman smiled a little forlornly. He drew her toward a sofa in front of the fireplace. The material of her blouse was icy to his touch. He observed her beautiful face which, already lightly touched by the process of aging, had begun to show small lines – but these contrived to add a dimension to her loveliness. Some women were destined to spectacular maturity.

‘Drink?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I think not. I’m not in the mood.’

He finished his negroni. ‘What mood are you in?’

She shrugged. ‘Hard to say.’

‘Ambivalent.’

‘Call it that.’

‘You should never be ambivalent in Venice,’ he remarked. He observed her briefly. What this room needed was genuine firelight, flames that would enhance the woman’s features. There was some danger in her expression, a cutting brittle quality. He knew she was in a state of some withdrawal. She had these times in which she abandoned any known reality and retreated to a place of her own making. He could never quite follow her down these mazy trails. He could never altogether imagine the inside of her head. She was beyond classification, a caller from another planet.

He mixed himself a second negroni – campari, a splash of vermouth, a generous quantity of gin. The woman watched him and thought: How typical of Barron to come out with a remark like that. You should never be ambivalent in Venice. It had a quiet certitude to it. It was the way he said so many things. He was so sure of himself. Cocksure. She stood up, pressed the palms of her hands against her thighs, felt the lambswool of her navy-blue skirt create a friction against her legs. She approached him, laid her face against his shoulder. The bronze of his skin seemed to emit a form of energy.

He put his hand against the side of her face. She always sent little depth-charges through him. He wondered about the bizarre nature of chemistry, of human attraction, desire. He wondered about love, if it were merely a matter of musks that stimulated certain areas of the brain. Did he love this woman? The question was unanswerable. All he could ever safely admit was that she held a deep fascination for him, that when it came to her he’d developed an uncharacteristic blind spot, that he experienced unexpected urges to protect her, both from the world and from herself.

‘I’m not sure I’m enjoying your mood,’ he said. ‘You’re too introspective. Too languid. If that’s the word.’

She wandered away from him, studied the pictures on the mantelpiece. ‘Why do you need these things?’ she asked.

‘My public persona needs them.’

‘And is there really such a difference between the public Barron and the private one?’

He stirred his drink. ‘You know that by this time.’

‘I’m not sure I really know anything.’

He said nothing. She’d never asked about his life, his past, his origins. It was as if she wanted him to have no beginnings.

‘I always think these photographs suggest a weakness,’ she said.

‘Are you going to tell me something obvious about my base need for recognition? If you are, skip it. I know what the pictures mean. There’s no mystery about it. I have an ego, which likes being stroked.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You have an ego.’

He caught her hand and held it against his chest. He was muscled, angular.

‘As big as your own,’ he said.

‘Maybe so.’

‘Except you’re wayward. More theatrical.’

‘And you’re not? What would you call these?’ And she gestured toward the photographs. ‘You’re a collector of famous people. What could be more theatrical?’

‘My public image is useful to me,’ he said. He gestured in a vague way.

She broke free of him, strolled the room, then she paused at the foot of the spiral staircase which led to the bedroom above. She gazed up along the intricate design of wrought iron to the shadows overhead. She thought of Barron’s oversized bed, the silken canopy, the tapestry on the wall. Turning, she parted the curtains and walked out on to the balcony overlooking the canal.

Barron followed her. They stood together in silence for a time. A couple of tarpaulined gondolas shivered like glassy black coffins on the water. The moon was flint, frosty. The night had an immeasurable density to it.

He kissed her. She turned her face to the side, gently pushed him away, shook her head.

‘It’s worse than ambivalent, I guess,’ he said.

‘You taste of gin.’

‘Since when was that a problem?’

She ran her hand over the cold balcony rail. She peered out into the darkness. She sensed the night as one might sense nearby the presence of a large, dangerous cat. Venice seemed to have a peculiarly feline quality just then, its passageways and darkened campos the hunting-grounds of foraging leopards.

He took her hand, stroked it softly. ‘Let’s go inside. Upstairs.’

She hesitated before following him. She started up the spiral staircase, then stopped halfway. She turned to look down at him, at the impossibly tanned face, the exquisitely handsome features. The sheer perfection of him scared her in some way. Nobody had any right to look like Barron. His beauty was unreasonable. And how had he stopped his internal clocks from marking their passage?

She kept climbing. When she reached the bedroom she lay down, sprawled across the bed, one leg upraised. ‘I’m not in the mood, Barron.’

‘You keep saying so.’ He stood over the bed, gazing down at her. She looked vulnerable all at once. But the trouble with her vulnerability was how it could change and become hard-edged. She was in that sense like the weather. And he had no barometer for measuring her changes.

He lit a red candle on the bedside table, sat on the edge of the mattress, slid his hand up and down the lower part of her leg. ‘Tell me what you feel,’ he said.

‘What I feel …’

He cupped his hand around her kneebone. With his other hand he picked up the candle and held it over her.

She turned to look up into his face. She knew she’d succumb to him, she understood the inevitability of it all. She watched the flame. She felt the first drip of red wax on her arm and then, as he moved the candle, the second fell across her knuckles. The wax burned, hardened on her skin as the heat dissipated. She drew the hand that held the candle closer to her face, and the shapeless hot wax slid against her cheeks, drip drip drip, each touch of heat bringing her momentary pain. She thought she felt some mild resistance in Barron, as if he wanted to set the candle aside.

‘Nearer,’ she said. ‘Closer.’

He eased her blouse away from her shoulders; hot waxy rivulets slithered toward her breasts. He worked the tips of his fingers along her inner thigh, back and forward, a gentle brushing motion. She shut her eyes and concentrated on his touch and the way wax spluttered upon her skin. She could still see the candle in her head, could still feel the heat against her face and neck.

She was losing her breath. His hand moved across her stomach and rested in the smooth flat area below the navel. She brought her hand down so that it covered his and she manoeuvred his fingers between her legs. She half-opened her eyes, drawn into the hypnotic shifting flame. She raised a hand, seized Barron’s wrist, made him bring the candle closer to her nipples. She experienced the exquisite intensity of the flame’s core, wax running and stiffening beneath her breasts, rolling and congealing on the surface of her stomach. The flame was searing, brilliant. She wanted to be sucked down into the explosive heart of it – but he set the candle back on the table and lowered his face toward her stomach. She felt his lips on her skin, his breath in her navel, and she caught his head between her hands, pushing him lower, down into herself, down into the secrets that were no longer secrets to him, but places so familiar he might have drawn maps of them from memory alone.

As if she were blind, robbed all at once of a sense, she guided his face between her legs, felt his mouth, his tongue, his teeth. It was free fall now, that loss of will and wisdom, balances upset, awareness no more than a series of fierce jolts to her nervous system. She drew herself up, her eyes still shut, and then she kneeled, pressing her face down into his groin, her fingers moving quickly, it was all haste, everything was grounded in the possibilities of the moment. Making a soft funnel of her tongue, she took him inside her mouth before he brought her face up with a mildly persistent gesture.

He gazed at the fine hair of her eyebrows, then he undid the buttons of her blouse more slowly than she liked, so she hurried him, helped him, then the room was shimmering away out of control, tilting on an unlikely axis, a contrary turning of the world outside her senses.

She felt him at the edge of entrance, that second before penetration. She heard herself say something, but the voice that emerged from her mouth wasn’t her own, she was speaking as if for somebody else, a distinct entity that existed outside of who she was. She was a disconnected sequence of impulses and thrills, a thing fragmented like stained glass struck by a shotgun. She felt him enter her. A dark scented breeze blew through her mind.

She hung to him, held him, rocked furiously against him. She clawed his spine, dug, wanted him deeper inside her, to feel him in her womb. Indifferent to anything around her, she had the feeling she might suddenly rise and go on rising from the bed, uplifted by an enigmatic current of air. She spoke his name aloud, hearing the syllables break inside her mouth, listening to the crazy collision of vowels and consonants. But passion had no grammar, no logic, no meaning beyond itself. She drifted out over a dark promontory, a place of madness. The fall was long and heartbreaking and when it was over she lay in the kind of silence that might be the aftermath of a dream, the juncture where waking thoughts trespass on the constructs of sleep.

She didn’t move for a long time. She was aware of Barron staring at her. She edged slightly away from him now, dismayed by the disarray of her clothes, by the sight of his cock glistening against his thigh, the dark crown of hair in his groin. Her appetites devoured her; she had no escape from the boundaries of herself.

She gazed at Barron, then looked into the flame of the candle. She ran her fingers through her hair. She hated that look of content on Barron’s impossible face. That satisfaction. It was as if she’d given him a gift she never intended. Rather, it was more like he’d plundered it, seized it from her.

‘Why do you make me behave like this?’ she asked.

He said, ‘I’ve never made you do anything you didn’t want to do.’

She got up from the bed. ‘You have a hold over me and I don’t understand it. But it makes me despise myself.’

‘What hold? You’re a free agent,’ he said. ‘I don’t own you.’

She laughed at this one. A free agent. ‘All I am, Barron, is your dirty little secret. The woman who comes and goes after dark.’

He picked a flake of wax from his fingertip and said nothing.

‘We never walk together in the daylight. We don’t go to restaurants. Theatres. What the hell. I don’t think I give a shit. Not in the long run. You want to be the hot-shot. You like to have people kissing your feet.’

Barron said, ‘You’re back in that weird mood again.’

‘How would you know anything about my moods?’

‘From experience,’ he said. ‘From watching you. From caring.’ He considered how defensive she could be when the whim seized her. ‘You’re capricious. You veer from one extreme to another.’

She walked round the bed, heading toward the bathroom. ‘You can get inside me, Barron. But you can never get inside me.’

She stepped into the bathroom. Her image came back to her from the mirrored walls, strange angles, diminishing reflections. She didn’t recognize herself in any of them. The hardened wax shapes on her flesh suggested fresh scars.

She locked the bathroom door, entered the shower, ran scalding water over her flesh, soaped herself vigorously, cleansed herself of wax, of Barron’s touch. But was it Barron she was trying to clean away: or was it that dark aspect of herself he managed always to explore? She closed her eyes and listened to the drumming of water.