A Rage to Live (29 page)

‘I have no idea. I can only imagine that all the missing pieces in my self will come together at the right time in the right place and with the right man. Sami, let’s just say, “who knows?” and what does marriage matter to us anyway? We’re in love and happy. A day at a time, forever, for me they are one and the same thing. So far the men in my life have not been the best rôle models as husband material, but they are the men I have loved. Byron for a father, a man I adore and have always adored. For as long as I can remember I have had to make my life around being loved by my father when
he
remembered he loved me, when
he
had time for me. He did always love me and still does somewhere down his list of priorities.

‘Then Kane Chandler, not a very good choice. Tommy, a profound disappointment in more than love. And Carlos. At least with Carlos I came to him less naive, with no expectations, on the rebound from other love and sex relationships. If he had been a different kind of man you would not have come across the Cressida you have here now. The Cressida who is very much in love with you. I am a less complicated person who
sees
with my eyes as against one who merely looks, who
hears
instead of just listens. My eyes are open now. I have seen where one-sided passion and love has led me. You and I, we need time to enjoy what we have together. I can’t, don’t want to, think beyond that, and I don’t want you to either. I will come and live with you, some of the time, when it suits us both. Not because I love you less but because I love you more.’

‘If that’s what you want, I won’t insist. That would only make us both unhappy.’

‘Good, great. It’s only fair. You see, I am already living with a man who is not wholly mine, sharing you with your work. Neither of us knows how much of you will be mine, where I will be on your life priority list once passion is spent, our erotic life is sated, if love burns us out.’

‘I have only one question. Carlos?’

‘Carlos set me free. He turned me into a libertine like himself for a short time.’

Sami began to laugh. ‘That’s Carlos. He did the same for me. He does have a corrupting influence. He pointed the way but only I made myself a free-thinking, licentious lover.’

‘Carlos and I have been friends and lovers for a very long time, years. We have an arrangement, an on-going affair that sometimes flares up and remains active for a time, and sometimes is quiescent. We talk almost every day. We are very much together. Being in love with you will not change that arrangement. Can you live with that?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll have to find out. You won’t give him up for me?’

‘It’s difficult to explain. You see, there’s nothing
to
give up. Carlos and I, we are what we are. One day that might change but when it does it will have just happened, our relationship will simply have evolved into something else. But no, I won’t give him up until it is over. But, Sami, try and understand, Carlos makes no demands on me. We are both free agents to find love, marriage even, elsewhere. Let’s just set him aside, he will understand about us. Can you about Carlos and me?’

Cressida moved in with Sami and they settled into the happiest years of their lives. Two things dominated those years: their work and their love for each other. They were a double act that took a great deal of juggling. But together or apart Sami and Cressida seemed to thrive on
the life they constructed for themselves.

Life was really happy and splendid for Cressida living with the men, Byron, Carlos, and Sami, who made up her world. It was rich and full and constructive and she could see something in her men that she herself possessed. It was their rage to live.

It had been pointed out to Cressida by Carlos, and it was Carlos again who kept reiterating, that she too had a touch of the genius she so cherished in her men. ‘Like finds like,’ he kept telling her, ‘so come to terms with it. Accept who you are and what you are and get on with it. Take that bold step. Just once in your life commit yourself to a project and stand up and say “It’s mine”. Recognise your own genius and you will no longer have to chase after ours. We treat you like an equal, why won’t you do the same for yourself?’ It was a challenge and not a challenge.

One hot summer afternoon, on the terrace of Sami’s splendid house in Hydra, while leaning against a huge old fig tree and looking out over the island houses shimmering white under a burning hot sun against a bright cloudless blue sky, something happened. Sami crept up from behind the tree and said, ‘Marry me, Cressida. Unless you have a better challenge than that, pick up the gauntlet.’

She smiled and with her hand caressed his naked shoulder, leaned forward and kissed it, then first one nipple and after that sucked hard on the other. She asked him, ‘And what if there is another gauntlet that has been thrown down, another challenge to be addressed, what then?’

‘Then choose well, win through, and go back for the second.’

‘Is that what you would do?’

‘Yes, that’s what I do every waking hour, especially in my work.’

‘And I don’t, and most especially not in my work?’

‘Honestly?’

‘Of course, honestly.’

‘No, only when you’re forced to. It’s not your nature, maybe even against your nature, to go for a challenge, compete with your peers, to be possessed of driving ambition.’

‘I think I’ll try it,’ she said.

‘Oh.’ The very idea excited Sami.

‘I’m leaving Owen Merrick, Wendell and Corey.’

‘And going to do what? Marry me?’

‘No,’ she told him, and unzipped his jeans and lowered her head to kiss him on his penis. She raised her head and made an attempt to close the zip again. He stopped her and instead placed her hands round him to clasp under the open jeans his naked buttocks. ‘Open an office of my own.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you are leaving OMWC, then come and work with me. We would really be pleased to have you, me especially.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks. I’m flattered by the offer but I’m bored with the huge architectural offices, though I’m not bored by genius. I would like to put a little of my own to the test.’

‘And about time, Cressida. What made you decide?’

‘Being really happy with you, my life, Carlos. He’s been after me for years and has finally pushed me into it. He’s offered me a project that really interests me. It would get me started. I know you’re disappointed I haven’t chosen marriage with you as the next challenge of my life. Will you forgive me?’

‘I have any number of other times.’

Cressida kissed him, pulled the skimpy thin sleeveless shirt up over her head and threw it to the ground. He took her in his arms and they kissed. His hands caressed her breasts and hers his flesh, wherever she could lay her hands on it. She pushed his jeans down and he stepped out of them. He pulled off the thin sarong wrapped around her and threw it up into the air. Naked they walked together to a chaise and lay down. Still caressing him, Cressida told Sami, ‘Marriage would never work for us. For you maybe, but not for me. Don’t wait for me, Sami. If we are ever to marry, it might not be to each other’.

‘But then it might.’

‘No promises. Can you still live with that?’

‘No promises,’ he confirmed. Cressida was immensely relieved that he pressed her no further on the subject.

She had been a working architect for more than ten years before she became the ‘overnight’ success story in architecture with her first independent commission. She took every award going that year and created a name for herself. Though not in the top league of world famous architects, she was certainly top middle league.

Sami Chow was
the
name, his offices huge, his staff in their hundreds, his commissions the best, the most prestigious. Not so Cressida’s. She scaled her offices down, kept them to thirty people and most of these freelance and hired when needed. She won her prizes, received her accolades, made all the glossies and art magazines, and was a media hit for women in architecture, but it never gave her that buzz and excitement, the thrill that success gives to some. Being in the limelight, the big winner, that was fun, but it didn’t feed her ambition the way it did Sami’s, or inspire passion for her work as it did him, or Byron for that matter. She was not the workaholic Sami was. She did not enjoy the pressure, the anxiety that goes with a job at that
level. That was not to say that she disliked or couldn’t handle it, merely that it wasn’t enough for her the way it was enough for men like Byron and Sami. Power and pressure helped to fuel them, feed their genius.

Sami learned to live with being in love with a liberated lady who didn’t want to marry him. He learned to accept those times when she went off with Carlos. He knew that she would never choose between them. Just as Cressida had predicted, Sami had other priorities in his life that came first, no matter how much he loved her.

It was implicit in Sami’s and Cressida’s relationship that they never discuss the time she spent with Carlos. Sami had come to understand that was private, her business, and that it did indeed have no bearing on her relationship with him. Amazingly it had no bearing on his relationship with Carlos either.

Unreasonably, it was different for Cressida. She herself decreed that Sami should have other women: the exotic beauties he favoured when they were not together which was, on an average across the year, seven months of the time. Though the couple never talked about that either, there were times when Cressida was alone or off on a trip with Byron when she would think about Sami with other women. She trained herself to block out of her mind the pain of jealousy before it could take hold.

It had not been planned, more that it had just happened: Cressida, Sami, and Carlos together sexually several times, when it had been the right time and the right place and lust had taken them over. They were always exciting and thrilling sexual encounters, dangerously lustful, but Cressida always went home with Sami.

She took a holiday in Java with Byron. One moonlit night in the hills they were sitting on a terrace overlooking a sea that looked like a blanket of moonbeams. Except for the silvery sea, and a bright full moon and myriad stars, the night was black as pitch. They were listening to a jungle symphony of night animals and insects.

‘Do I ever tell you how proud and pleased I am to have fathered you, Cressy?’ Byron asked her.

‘Not often enough.’

‘You have a special patina that’s all your own. There is about you a dangerously sensuous charisma. You attract men to you like a siren. But only a special kind of man. It’s subtle, this sensuality of yours, that’s what makes it so dangerous. I see the way both men and women look at you. The women envy your having men like Sami and Carlos. For the men you pose an excitement that is different from other women’s. It’s your freedom, the wholeness of your personality, the way you hold the world in the palm of your hand as if you can spin it any way you
want it to go. You have that same rage to live life on your terms that Rosemary had.’

‘And you still have, Dad.’

‘Yes, I guess that’s still true. You inspire a great deal of unhappiness in other women. That’s why we have had all these years of grief with Carol.’

‘I don’t understand why?’

‘Because you have it all as a woman. You could always get everything you ever wanted, ever since you were a baby. And because you aim for that moon up there and always hit those stars shining down at us, and most women settle for less. And because you’re not afraid to die for your pleasures. You have the passion, the looks, and you live in the moment. I would have hated having a lesser daughter than you.’ One of Cressida’s proudest moments.

Several months after she’d returned from her Javanese holiday with Byron, Sami was living in a suite of rooms in Paris at the George V with several of his colleagues. They were there to finalise drawings for a new wing to be added on to the Louvre. He was interrupted by his personal assistant. A telephone call, an emergency. Carol Vine insisted on speaking to him.

Over the years he had lived with Cressida he had become close to Byron and had on several occasions met Carol. It never occurred to him to question how she had traced him to Paris or why she was on the telephone. A pragmatic man, he merely took the call.

Only after he had hung up the telephone did he realise how devastating Carol’s news would be for Cressida. He never hesitated but called his first assistant, Minn Whey, and told him, ‘You will have to take over for me, Minn. Something has come up. I’m leaving for New York. I’ll check in every day but I don’t know when I will be back or where I will be.’

Sami was lucky. They held the Concorde flight from Paris to New York for him. A matter of hours and he was walking into Cressida’s office.

She kissed him. ‘You’re a surprise, I thought I was joining you in Paris. How did I get that wrong?’ There was something in his face. Something she hadn’t seen before, ever. A deep sadness, pain. ‘Something is wrong, very wrong. That’s why you’re here.’

There were several people standing round her desk. A look from Sami and they left the room. The very idea of anything happening to Byron was so unthinkable to Cressida it never entered her mind. ‘You’d better tell me right out. You are leaving me? You have found someone who will marry you?’

‘Cressida.’

At first she could think of nothing else that would pain him. ‘How stupid, how vain and selfish of me! It’s one of your family. Something has happened?’

‘Not mine, Cressida.’

She collapsed more than sat down into the chair. All colour drained from her face. Sami went to her. ‘Something has happened to Carlos?’

‘No, Carlos is fine. It’s Byron. He is very ill.’

‘Byron is
never
ill.’

‘Carol called me in Paris. I’ve come to take you to him. We are going to take Concorde to London.’

‘She might have called me.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘No, of course it doesn’t matter. What did she say? What’s wrong with Byron?’

‘Let’s go. I’ll tell you on the way.’

‘Can’t we fly direct to Venice?’