51

Ewan had given Sally a few seconds to vacate The Manor before his hand leapt to the purple handbag. He wrenched the clasp open. Empty! Empty! His heart beat rapidly. As if his eyes had deceived him, he thrust his hand inside and roughly searched. Nothing. There was a wide zipped compartment on one side and a deep, open pocket on the other, but not a line of writing did either hold. Not even a note to say she’d changed her mind, that there was nothing for him to read after all. His heart finally died. Her last precious line of contact was gone.

His breathing began to calm. Things would remain the same, then. Perhaps it was for the best. No revelations, no pleas for clemency, no taint on her character or loss of face. Their perfect love would remain intact, with no murky shadows or reading of the runes. This was her house, he was alone in her house, and he had the freedom to try and find her essence. From above the fireplace her glorious cornflower blue eyes looked down at him and he stood, contemplating the soft loveliness of her youth for several minutes.

He got up and walked out into the hall, hoping that voices of her presence would whisper to him from the walls, and evocations would be round every corner. Through every door he went; the garden room, the morning room, the formal dining room and the library, but there was no sound of her merry laughter, no swish of her skirt, no click of her heels.

A long corridor led to the kitchen, and he stood within its cream walls. Free-standing units resembled a French farmhouse, with a four-oven Aga and a walk-in larder. Curtains of duck-egg blue. Brass pans on hooks. Swathes of dried herbs and lavender hanging on the walls. A bookcase of recipe books. He walked back up the corridor to find the front staircase, and once upstairs, searched for her bedroom. When he found it, he turned on the lights and closed the curtains. Some three years ago, when decorating this room, she’d gone into intense detail for him. ‘It’s really retro fifties,’ she’d enthused. ‘Soooooo old-fashioned, but I adore it.’

The wallpaper was of cerise cabbage roses, the curtains flouncy drapes of blush-pink velvet and the deep pile carpet a pale green. A mirrored dressing table was adorned with cosmetics and perfumes, and a collection of family photographs. Several of the poor, troubled man who was her son in various ages and poses. A postcard of Crucifix Man. How gratified he was to know that when she awoke every morning her eyes had alighted on him. No image of her daughter, but two of her dead husband.

From an ornate silver frame, the grisly judge stared out, captured in sharp-focused monochrome, with the curly sheep’s ears of his wig resting on his shoulders. A bulbous nose and each bagged eye etched with deep crow’s feet. The chin neatly bearded, the neck short, the years obvious. The face was hard-set, terrifyingly austere and powerful enough to put the fear of God into any felon shaking in the dock. Ewan stared, trying to find the man she loved, which was immediately obvious in the kind eyes that no severity for the camera could ever disguise.

Her wedding photograph was more beguiling. She was so different, so young and so innocent. Her face showing the soft, rounded curves of a youthful chin, and cheekbones that would refine and surge into the timeless beauty she became. Her sweet, unadorned face, looking at her new husband with obvious adoration.

He undressed and got into her unmade bed. The ascetic, cold comfort of the cotton sheets shocked him into his usual shivering, and he trembled under the counterpane until he was warm. It was here she had breathed her last breath. He gathered up the lace fabric with both his hands and held it to his face. At last it was her time.

September 1984

Her appointment was for three, but she arrived at nearly twenty past. His face showed a grateful relief. ‘You’re late. I thought you weren’t coming.’

‘I’m deliberately late. I’ve given you a little more time to wrestle with your conscience.’ He was aware of a sharpness in her voice and a distinct change from her softness of yesterday. She looked at him with her familiar swan’s stare, an aloofness that seemed to convey she had no real interest in the matter. ‘Well, Ewan. Do you want me or not?’

‘I want you,’ he said. ‘I think of nothing else but you. I’m in love with you. Those who judge me will declare my love for you is a sin, but it’s one I must commit to survive my calling.’

‘So I take it you intend to remain a priest?’

‘I do, so our love must be carefully concealed.’

‘Oh, thank God for that,’ she said. ‘I had a terrible dread you might reject me, and then a worse horror you might want to leave the church and marry me. You see, I realised that you weren’t the only one with a crisis of loyalty. I accept I must share you with God, but you in turn must share me with the treasured memories of my dead husband. Are you still sure you want me?’

‘I’m quite sure, but only if you really love me. You talked yesterday of obsession, but it has to be love.’

‘I love you. The love I have for you is one I’ve never known before, but be assured it’s true and devoted.’

Ewan’s bedroom was plain, and white-painted, with no evidence remaining of his younger life as the schoolboy. The windows had been tightly shut all day and the hot September sun had boiled the room to an airless heat. It smelled of clean linen and an embedded sea-sidey smell that had been absorbed over a hundred years of winter mists and summer winds from the estuary. His bed was a large French antique, with head and foot boards of intricately carved walnut. Two matching wardrobes filled the entire length of one wall and on the opposite side was hung the room’s only affectation: a life-sized reproduction of Crucifix Man. At the side of his bed stood a small shrine for the Madonna, twisted prettily with a rosary.

Nakedness between first-time lovers induces shyness and fear of disappointment. Bodies that look so standard when clothed reveal unexpected surprises. The distribution of surplus flesh, imperfections of the skin, the first sight of the genitalia, the obvious deviance from the stereotyped perfection of the Hollywood beach movie. Marina’s skin was pale cream with the surface of smooth wax. She was lean, but athletically curved. Her breasts were firm and elliptical, but seeming too heavy for her narrow rib cage. Long silvery splits on her abdomen led to a sparse pubic triangle, and long, slim-thighed legs. After a few seconds of silence, she took his hand.

‘Look at your body, Ewan. You’re a beautiful young man. By rights, you should have a young girl to make love to, but I’m far from that.’ She took his fingers and ran them gently over the weak gouges of the silvery splits. ‘See these. Feel these. The damage of my babies. You must look at me and touch me, and really love what you see and touch, or this whole thing will collapse into farce.’

Her words were unheard and unheeded. He had no need to examine her for fault or comparisons. He was in love with her. He bowed down to kiss each side of her abdomen, and to press his tongue deeply into the damage. He laid his palms upon her, sliding his hands around her warm skin, following her lead as she stretched and shimmied against him, forcing him to bend and crouch and twist into contortions of discovery. Their long hair rasped together; her flowing corn silk against his own, darkest brown, but already heavily shot through with white. He was vaporised and weightless, acting with the unconscious impetus that before had only come in dreams. His hands cupped her breasts, losing all sense of gentleness as he took her nipples into his mouth, drawing them in and feeling them lengthen like rose hips. His eyes were open and alive as his body leapt out of his holy vows without reticence or shame.

She raised her knee to rub the underside of his erection, and took his hand again, but this time she led it to the mysterious, complicated and frightening place that was now open and wet to his fingertips. She guided, defined and encouraged his gentle searches, and then reached for his penis, now strong and inflexible and threatening dispersal. Her leg wound around his thigh, she leaned back and, with no warning or instruction, slid him inside her. Trapped now, within her tight, ribbed walls, he found himself crouched over her, hard held, imprisoned and forced to take her weight, but he was empowered with a peculiar freedom. To indulge in this hammering, shaking thing that romantics such as himself referred to as making love. Ewan was in love, but he knew that he was fucking. It surely had to be the most perfect word constructed to describe this magnificent convulsion; to indulge in this powerful, primordial force of procreation. With no hope of delay, and having neither the skill nor need for restraint, a magical, musical overflowing possessed him. A man fulfilled like any other.

Seeking her own gratification, she was strong and mechanical, programmed to complete, hanging heavily onto his neck while he fought not to drop her. She cried out, each wordless sound ascending in pitch. She grabbed his thighs, pulling him tighter inside her, seeming to try to consume him. As her own climax overpowered her she screamed like a rabid witch.

Now still and breathing hard, they stared blearily at each other. Conjoined twins. Flushed faces, two heads of hair in birds-nested chaos, rivers of dripping sweat, limbs threatening collapse, each dizzy with the glory of saturating satisfaction. With ungainly shuffling, and not bearing to pull apart, they put themselves into his bed.