A Rage to Live (3 page)

Curious glances, the shrugging of shoulders. More, not very discreet, whispering. Names from Cressida’s youth suddenly came popping into her head, faces followed, and now she scanned the crowd looking for them. What she saw was not the very social ladies of the New York, Paris, London party circuit on the arm of ‘walkers’ for the wealthy since husbands were dead or too business-busy to accompany them. No, these well past middle-aged women were something else: the New
England division of the so-called ‘X-ray ladies’, but dressed with more subtlety than their big city sisters, and without those driven women’s social angst. The women her age and younger seemed no different, and they and their well-tailored, dressed for evening men seemed to be very close, very interested in each other. There was a delightful absence here of people compulsively glancing over one shoulder for fear of missing someone more intriguing, famous or fashionable, à la New York. Equally pleasant was not to see a single vulgarly dapper man in the room. There were other glaring absences, though. Not a black, a Jew, a Catholic, or an Hispanic was among the members and their guests. This very WASP group of friends and neighbours, the non-climbers of this world who all appeared to be cut from the same cloth, were out having an evening of fun among their own strictly segregated kind.

This country club dinner dance was undeniably pleasant, a relief even from all the social pressure that was part and parcel of a New York event. Cressida could understand now, for the first time, how Byron could have been both scathing of and yet a member of the club. If he were still alive, and here this evening, Cressida might well be seeing a Jew, a black, a foreigner. The club’s rules never meant a thing to her father. And the members would have smiled and indulged Byron in his flaunting of the outside world at them. Cressida was reminded of the times he would tell her of his latest assault on the club’s rules, adding, ‘The family has membership in perpetuity but it’s not that or the family name and fortune – it’s only my fame, world respect for me, that keeps them from throwing me out. I have no doubt it will be the same for you, Cressy.’ But then, if Byron were alive, Cressida knew she would not be at the country club. She sighed.

‘That’s a very telling sigh.’

Cressida turned to look at the couple, especially the woman who had spoken. She was no longer pretty, quite ugly in fact. No life in the eyes: hollow, loveless. Once they had been happy, smiling eyes. Her lips had not been so thin, nor so harsh. They were acrid lips. A kiss from such lips would indeed taste bitter. The pinched expression, where had that come from?

‘Oh? Telling what?’ asked Cressida.

‘That you need another drink,’ the man answered pleasantly, offering a smile and taking Cressida’s empty glass from her hand. He was far more attractive and dashing than the woman, almost embarrassingly so. But, in spite of that, he bent down and kissed her, smiled and said, ‘And so do you,’ before taking her empty glass and walking away. ‘He’s a very attentive husband,’ the woman told Cressida.

‘You’re a lucky lady.’

‘I know that,’ she shot back. Rather too sharply, Cressida thought. The two women were gazing at each other intently. They moved towards each other at the same time. It was awkward, embarrassingly so, but they did clasp hands.

‘Cressida.’

‘Victoria.’

And the two women stepped further towards each other and into a tentative hug.

Within minutes the news that Cressida Vine was at the club had travelled through the crowd. Almost immediately, she was greeting several other people whom she had known during her school days in New Cobham. They were surprised and in some cases she sensed embarrassed.

She saw her step-mother enter the room with a coterie of friends. The two women’s eyes met and Cressida could tell by the look of hatred in Carol’s, and disapproval on her friends’ faces, that she had announced her abrupt departure and the cause of it. Cressida caught sight of Mr Stud walking across the room and watched him slip his arm around Carol Vine and kiss her on the cheek.

He glanced across the room at Cressida. How she disliked the sly smile in his eyes. It was unsavoury, and so unnecessary that it mobilised Cressida. She made excuses to those around her, ‘I must say hello to my step-mother,’ and went directly to Carol Vine.

Her greetings received only a stony silence; the friends around Carol stood firm. One of them, the woman Cressida had seen in town with her daughter earlier in the day, spoke up. ‘I should think you would have better manners than to show up here this evening after what you’ve done to Carol. I think you should leave.’

Cressida was aware of people watching the scene but was not at all fazed by Martha Nickerson’s words. Hesitating barely for a second, in a calm, cold and determined voice, she addressed not Mrs Nickerson but her step-mother. ‘Your friend is quite right, Carol, people should have good manners. Speaking to me as she has, she is a case in point of someone who has obviously dispensed with hers.’ A gasp of astonishment escaped from Mrs Nickerson. A flush came to Carol Vine’s face.

‘You don’t belong here, Cressida, you never will. Say no more, just leave.’

Cressida ignored both the gasp and her step-mother’s embarrassment, and continued. ‘Ah, you look bewildered, possibly a little frightened, Carol. Why? Can it be because I have told the truth, and you’re afraid that I might continue to tell the truth about the Carol Vine I know? The
mean-hearted, pathologically jealous step-mother whom I allowed, for more than twenty years, to prevent me from returning to Hollihocks and New Cobham? That I have been a voluntary victim of yours because my father loved you and made you his wife? That, above all else in life, I wanted my father to be happy and so became a nomad, making my home wherever I was made welcome? Drop a bombshell like that and blow up all those lies you manufactured as to why your step-daughter never came home?

‘Well, here’s another truth for you, Carol. Father and daughter love, that relationship you never could abide, decided my banishment from Hollihocks. Though no small price, it was one we had to pay for peace in the family. When he was alive my father made my loss up to me in a million ways: all those hotels we stayed in, our holidays together without you, the lunches and dinners, the thousands of telephone calls and years of correspondence. All the love and affection.’ Cressida hesitated for only a second to release a sigh and then continued: ‘And even when he died he found a way to compensate me, and himself, for your determination that I should never live beneath the same roof as you and my father. He bequeathed Hollihocks to
me
. It was his way of telling you how you wronged us both.’

Mr Stud withdrew his arm from Carol, and spoke up. ‘I think you’ve said quite enough. We don’t want a scene for all the club to see, do we, ladies?’

Before Cressida could make a retreat, Carol attacked. ‘So this is Byron’s and your revenge? Evicting me, throwing me out in the street!’

‘Not revenge, Carol. I choose to think of it as poetic justice.’

With those words, Cressida began to walk away, thinking how very stupid her step-mother had been. None of that need have been said in public if only she had greeted Cressida in a civil manner.

Carol stopped Cressida from leaving by grabbing her arm in a tight grip. Vindictiveness seemed to ooze from every pore of her body. ‘I’m not through with you yet.’

Someone came up behind Cressida and, placing an arm around her, said, ‘Ah, but you are, or rather she is with you, madam, because I have come a long way to have a dance with Cressida.’ Having said that the man firmly removed Carol’s hand from Cressida’s arm. ‘Ladies, gentlemen, if you will excuse us?’

Sami Chow told Cressida as they walked away from the unpleasant confrontation: ‘You look ravishing.’

‘Do I?’

‘Ravishing plus,’ he told her, a great smile breaking across his handsome oriental face.

‘Which comes first, a drink or a dance?’ she asked him, brimming
with happiness that he had managed to come and be with her on such short notice.

It was obvious that Cressida’s meeting with her step-mother had not affected her in the least. It did, however, point out to Cressida how hard and cold, ruthless even, she could be when it came to such situations, emotional confrontations. Others had found those qualities in her admirable. Not Cressida. Despite the fact that those so-called qualities had become a part of her essential character, and were now natural to her, she was more than ever aware of how very reprehensible they were. Only Cressida knew the pain and anguish she had suffered; the disappointments, losses, tragedies she had gone through during her formative years. How she had had to pull hard, cold, ruthless attitudes that had lain dormant, locked in her psyche, out of her soul. Use them to protect herself in a world she saw as wonderful, full of adventure, beautiful, but knew from experience to be cruel, arbitrary, unrelentingly unfair.

By now there were many more people milling around the room, the crush of people even deeper at the bar. If Cressida had fast been becoming a figure of interest before Sami Chow’s arrival, the two of them were now the undisputed centre of attention.

It had never occurred to Cressida when she had called Sami from Jane Alden’s and asked him to come out for the country club dance that that might be the case. In New York, Sami Chow and Cressida blended into the celebrity-cum-social-cum-creative scene as ‘beautiful people’, stars in the international architectural world. Labels that neither Cressida nor Sami took seriously. In fact, ignored. The only thing that had mattered to them these last few years was working hard and living fast.

Chapter 3

Cressida was not unaware of how attractive women found Sami, and here again it was confirmed. The New Cobham ladies, mostly those of her age and younger, were stealing hungry glances at him while trying to conceal their interest. Sami was sensual; he spoke to women’s libidos without having to say a word. He was beautiful, not merely good-looking. There were no rugged features, no rough edges. Everything about Sami was smooth: the thick, black, silky hair, his pale, honey-coloured skin. Smooth, yes, but there was nothing unctuous about Sami Chow.

Over six foot tall, with a slender but muscular physique, his oriental features gave no more than a slight hint of the American side of his family. He had a stunningly attractive face, every feature perfect: incredibly sensual lips, eyes dark and mysterious set in a shape more almond than slanted. It was not a delicate face but sensitive, and the least little smile breaking over it revealed deep and sexy dimples.

Everything about Sami was a tease. A beautiful face, yes, but an acutely intelligent one as well. There was kindness there, the most dominant thing in his face, and sexual charisma, instant seduction for both men and women. All these Sami faces combined to show him to be a man of substance, strength and power. This quiet, exotic creature who moved like a sleek black panther was many things to many people. Many very special things to himself. What he appeared to be to the people milling around that room was a man who loved women, an exotic sexual animal, exciting erotic fantasies; a dangerous tempting man, an adventurer suggesting, ‘Come and play with me.’ A threat to the emotional stability of some, a danger to the neat, conservative family lives of others. Together as a couple he and Cressida represented the outside world though by now nearly everyone in the room was aware that Cressida Vine had come home to stay. As for the oriental man, no one knew. She was merely introducing him as her friend Sami Chow.

‘The prodigal daughter has returned. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,’ Sami teased as he passed her third daiquiri to Cressida and paid the bartender. With a smile over the rim of his tumbler of scotch
on the rocks, he asked, ‘How does it feel? Now that you are well and truly here. That it’s reality after two years of struggle with the dragon step-mother to claim your heritage.’

‘Wonderful. I have had a gorgeous time, and I don’t use that word lightly. It has been a richly colourful day. Jane Alden’s is not the Ritz in London, the New Cobham church no Rome’s St Peters, the inn a long way from being the Carlisle in New York but they are just as exciting to me. I have been passionately enjoying them all day. And as for the Clam Shack it has always been in a class of its own.

‘Not just a trip down Memory Lane?’

‘Hardly that at all. You know I’m not the sentimental type. The occasional sense of the familiar, old places, old faces, yes, but that old chestnut of trying to recapture one’s youth, that’s not for me. You know very well that I want to make my home here because Cape Cod, and Amiable Bay and Hollihocks, are still some of the most beautiful places on earth and I know how great and good a life I can have living and working here.’

Sami was thrilled for Cressida. She was really happy. He knew she was not fooling herself about her return. That was the problem: Cressida never fooled herself, or anyone else for that matter. That was why she wouldn’t marry him. She wanted him more than she loved him. Together they had sexual passion, and liked each other enormously, were very good friends. Not enough. That magic ingredient that Cressida was looking for was simply not there for her in Sami, as it was not there for her in several other men in her life. Sami no longer minded. He knew what he and Cressida meant to each other, and had learned to live with the limitations of their relationship. She never gave all of herself to anyone.

‘You’re giving up a lot, Cressida.’

‘I’m getting a lot, Sami.’

They walked down several steps to the club dining-room where the tables circled a dance floor and the musicians were playing romantic Cole Porter tunes. There were few people on the dance floor, many of the tables now empty. Sami took Cressida’s glass from her hand and placed it on a table with his. He led her on to the floor just as a female singer stepped to the microphone and the lights dimmed. Sami took Cressida in his arms. He saw the swell of a naked breast as she raised her arm to place it around him. Holding her close, he caressed her neck and ran his fingers down the bare skin between her breasts, nearly to her waist and up again. Slipping his hand under her dress, Sami caressed her breast. He rolled her nipple between his fingers, squeezed delicately on it to excite her, knowing how much she enjoyed the sensation. He heard her stifle a sigh and cupped the breast in his hand
to feel the weight, the firmness. Then, removing his hand, he adjusted the fabric of the plunging neckline by taking it between his fingers, straightening the edge of the immaculately tailored neckline. ‘You look incredibly sexy in your dress. It’s lovely,’ he told her.

Cressida gazed into Sami’s eyes, and leaned a little more into his body. How dangerous to have caressed her with so many people about even if it was in light no brighter than a soft glow from the bandstand, candles on the tables. Dangerous but exciting. But that was Sami. She rubbed her cheek against his and whispered in his ear, ‘You have to know that my brilliant day did not begin on my arrival here in New Cobham but in the early hours of the morning in bed with you. When you woke me up with a kiss and caressing hands …’

And with that Cressida raised one of his hands and, opening it, placed the palm across her lips and licked it sexily with the point of her tongue. Releasing it, she continued, ‘And a delicious orgasm.’ Then she did that sexy thing she always did when she laughed: raised her chin, delivering a throaty, teasing chuckle, and added, ‘And another orgasm, and another. What a lovely day I’m having, and to think it’s not over yet.’

For a second Sami had to close his eyes to try to dispel the image he had of them together, in flagrant sexual coupling. ‘What did you have in mind to finish off your day?’ After asking, he looked at his watch. ‘Bearing in mind you only have about twelve minutes left of it.’

He meant no sexual innuendo in his question. They needed time to recover, not from too much sex but the sexual depravity they had been able to goad each other into earlier in the day and the preceding night. The lengths each could drive the other to for the sheer excitement of outrageous sexual oblivion were considerable. It was trust more than love that allowed them adventurous sex with no bounds to hold them in check. A trust they shared with no other partners. They had both learned depravity from the same master: Carlos Marias Arriva. But desolate sex for Cressida as well as Sami had its place, its time. It held no grip on their lives. They kept it always in proportion to other things. They were two people who had priorities and the strength of character to work at them.

‘Not so,’ answered Cressida. ‘I’m counting this day from dawn to dawn, and I have nothing in mind. I’m happy to take whatever comes and enjoy it.’

‘I’m glad to hear that even though I won’t be here to see it.’ And Sami pulled her tight up against him. She saw disappointment in his eyes, felt his urgency to hold her, possess her. She had experienced that innumerable times with Sami. It was always just before they were to part from each other. She was neither surprised nor sad, merely sorry
that he would not be there with her to see the dawn light rise over Amiable Bay.

‘You’re here because you couldn’t say no to me. You really did just fly in to have a dance with me.’

‘Right on both counts.’

‘You are quite mad, Sami, you could have said no.’ And she placed her lips upon his in a kiss filled with gratitude and affection, but a sensuous and loving kiss as well.

‘If I could have, I would have,’ he told her.

She sensed his sexuality was still ripe for her when he returned a very different kiss to her lips. They had forgotten where they were and the many eyes upon them; an audience that rarely, if ever, saw such behaviour played out in public. Cressida smiled at Sami, hesitated for a moment to collect her feelings and then told him, ‘Thanks, dear Sami, for always wanting me. I suppose you have a taxi waiting. How soon must you go?’

‘Bags of time. At a guess, several more Cole Porter songs, two or three more frozen daiquiris. I might even make dawn with you if it comes early enough.’

‘I could do with another drink now,’ she told him.

‘I’ll go along with that.’ Together they walked from the dance floor holding hands. ‘Give me real time,’ she asked. ‘You know, minutes, hours?’

‘I have to board my chartered flight three hours and forty minutes after I landed.’ He looked at his watch. ‘An hour and a half, maybe a little bit more.’

They never had another dance together. At the bar they were swept up by Victoria’s handsome husband whose charm always gathered people to him, in this case ensuring that the pool of admirers around him and Victoria, Sami and Cressida, grew ever larger. People appeared to be fascinated by Cressida and her Chinese escort, astonished that the young girl who had vanished from their lives should return a glamorous architect, so very far removed from the world they lived in. Others, those who didn’t like surprises or change, scandals such as the unexpected departure of Carol Vine from their midst or one of their own prodigal daughters flaunting an oriental lover, were wary of Byron Vine’s daughter. They were a community who boasted several internationally famous names from the theatre, music and literary worlds, men of medicine, celebrated icons in retreat from their fame. The town and its inhabitants respected them, took pride in having them in proximity, and treated them as neighbours, nothing more. Now Cressida was one of the incomers, their latest acquisition. They didn’t quite know how to take her. And acceptance, that was
something else. They were a very discriminating and closed community.

Sami and Cressida eased themselves away from the people at the bar as subtly as they could. ‘I’ve had a great time,’ he told her. ‘It may have been short but I’m glad I came, and I’m happy to have been here for you. Nice people. Hope the dragon lady hasn’t poisoned many of them towards you.’

They walked through the door into the night. A mist had rolled in from the ocean though the air was still unusually warm for April. But not warm enough. Cressida shivered. Sami removed his dinner jacket and placed it around her shoulders. He turned from her, placed two fingers in his mouth and blew. The loud, shrill whistle cut through the silent night. Sami raised his arm to hail the taxi. He and Cressida watched the headlights flash on and the vehicle roll towards them. ‘I’ll come to the airport with you,’ she offered.

‘Not a good idea. Neither of us is good at goodbyes, especially dramatic ones where the plane with its sole passenger taxis away from the lover to be swallowed up by the mist and darkness of the night.’ He was making light of leaving her by teasing, giving her one of those big 1950s black and white movie endings. She playfully punched him on the arm and they both began to laugh. But for one fleeting moment Cressida wondered if his joking was prophetic. Was it finally over for them? She didn’t like the idea and it prompted her to ask, ‘Must you really make this flight?’

‘Have to. It’s the only way I can connect with my flight to Hong Kong, and I can’t miss that.’ He hesitated and then suggested, ‘You can still come with me?’ It was his hope, his desire, to have her for his own, as lover, wife, colleague, that made him issue the last-minute invitation.

Sami was rushing off to the excitement of the exotic Far Eastern city for the laying of the foundation stone of what was purported to be one of the finest architectural skyscrapers of the century. This commission was for the clients, a bank, and Sami and his firm, their stab at posterity. For one fleeting moment Cressida was envious, frightened of giving up the competitive world of mega-money architecture she had been a part of, albeit many rungs below Sami Chow on the success ladder. She was more a rising star with a lot of hype and some genuine and well-deserved praise to her credit. She wanted less of the former and more of the latter. Some would say she had had more than her ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ and glossy magazine covers, but not Cressida. For her there had to be more.

Twenty-four hours ago the world that Sami was now rushing to had been hers. She felt a tremendous urge to say, ‘Hong Kong here I come.’ It passed. She had been there, done that, had had one relatively great
success – and none of it had been enough for her, any more than Sami was. When fate took its turn and she was given the opportunity to design and execute her architectural dreams as both patron and architect, she knew she could make history. An architect’s fantasy come true. Tempting to say yes to Sami about Hong Kong, but she had made her choice. She saw her success, her happiness, to date as minor league. The accolades that were bound to come with her secret plans for monument-building in New Cobham were something far more important. And love, that deep and abiding love that can bring a special kind of happiness, that all her life had seemed to elude her? Who was to know? Maybe here she would find that too.

She heard herself saying to Sami, after placing a tender kiss on his lips, ‘My destiny is here. I feel as if I have lived my whole life merely to return here.’

The taxi drew up to them and the driver stepped out and opened the door. ‘First to town, to drop the lady off at the inn,’ Sami told the driver.

‘No, wait.’ Cressida looked up at the sky. A dramatic moon, very nearly full and silvery, kept appearing and disappearing behind billowy clouds, its beams shining through the low-lying mists swirling in from the bay and the ocean beyond. She found the night dramatic, full of mystery and intrigue. It seemed to be drawing Cressida further into its spells, as if beckoning her. She had the strange sensation of wanting to be swallowed whole by this night, to be transported into the unknown. She turned to the driver and asked, ‘Do we have time to go by way of Amiable Bay?’

He looked at his watch. ‘Plenty of time.’