A Rage to Live (31 page)

* * *

Kane was not a happy man. She wasn’t coming. For two hours, he had been waiting, looking at his watch, walking the beach with an eye always on the shack. No sign of her. How could she do it, stand him up like that? What did it mean? Why wasn’t she here? For the last hour or so he’d kept asking himself, what did it matter? A great lay, a special lady, but she was playing with him and no woman played with his emotions. His women fitted into his scheme of things, had to be pawns in
his
game, an intricate part of
his
life. But not her, not Cressida.

She broke into his house, she broke into his life, and crazily he liked her for that, had maybe even fallen in love with her for her audacity. There was something about the way she loved him? Oh, yes, he was convinced she loved him. And she loved him differently from any other woman he had ever known. Her love for him was something inherent in her. He hardly remembered her as a child, and yet she told him she had loved him even then.

He was measuring her lateness. Every quarter hour he would tell himself, ‘If she does not appear within the next fifteen minutes, she won’t come.’ He was driving himself into a frenzy watching those quarter hours pass. It never occurred to him that she might not love him, only that she was playing with him. She had planned it all, this torture of him. All games. The break-in at the house, keeping her identity from him. But the sex … she wasn’t playing with that. Of that he was certain.

The sun was low in the sky but not yet setting. That would come in another hour or so and then he would have to light the lamps. Kane looked round his one-room shack made of driftwood. He had brought in an aged hippy from Big Sur who was a master at building handmade houses. From the ocean or the dirt track leading to it, the house looked no more than a huge pile of driftwood the ocean had washed up on to the shore.

The doors stood open wide and he gazed out at the Atlantic. It was rough, the waves were crashing on to the shore with a sound like thunder, but the sky was still a bright blue and cloudless. The sun was losing some of its heat. She wasn’t going to come. Kane felt not just restless with disappointment but as if he was losing something vital to his life. He had always been a bad loser.

He distracted himself by laying a fire in the fireplace, checking the half dozen surfing rods standing in their rack against the wall. That was why he had built the shack, surf fishing, and as a place to bring his one night stands, the two-hour fucks, the ladies he kept for sex but whom he didn’t want in his life. The shack was his secret hideaway from everyone but Mrs Tweedie who cleaned it and kept it stocked with food. It hadn’t been easy sneaking the food hamper she had prepared
and groceries she had bought into the car past Valentina.

Valentina was now at the beach house. She had arrived the night before when he was with Cressida at the New Cobham Inn. He put the latest unpalatable scene of jealous rage behind him. He didn’t care about that, or about Valentina and her threats and screaming. He cared only that Cressida had let him down. He looked around the shack. He had made an effort here to woo Cressida further into romance and love. That wasn’t unusual. He had made even greater efforts to seduce other women. But somehow the effort made here seemed more important. Cressida had wormed her way into his heart. Who could explain that? Can love be explained?

He kept a cello and a violin in the shack. It wasn’t always the odd fuck and surf fishing he used the shack for. Often when in residence in New Cobham, he would take a ride to the shack in Truro merely to open it up, sit by the ocean and play the cello or the violin. He played for his pleasure and no one else’s. He took the violin and placed it under his chin, but never picked up the bow. The instrument held no interest for him today.

He left the shack to go and look for her. An irrational decision. He climbed down a dune to the track that cut through the dunes from the main road to his shack. It never occurred to him to take his car. No more than fifty yards down the track a cloud of dust was whirling towards him. It could be no one else. Cressida was coming.

He couldn’t move. The relief he felt made him light-headed for a moment. Then it was gone, along with the tremendous anxiety he’d been suffering. He felt winded, as if he had been punched hard in the stomach. He would never forgive her for doing this to him. He remained where he was as if mesmerised by the little open red car and Cressida. He felt bewitched by her physical beauty, her sensuality. He watched her open the small door and swing her long legs from the car and set them down on the sandy track. She was dressed in a long denim shirt that hung to just above her knees, a small red and white check scarf tied fetchingly round her throat, a red suede belt round her waist.

‘Hi.’

How bouncy, how silly, she sounded, this woman who had put him through such hell. She reached into the car to retrieve a shawl, a shoulder bag. He watched her and waited for an excuse. There was none forthcoming and his anger mounted.

She walked directly to him. Cressida saw the anger in his eyes, how he was straining not to say anything. She slipped an arm round his waist and turned him round and together they walked down the track towards the ocean. He had still not said a word, had made no gesture of welcome to her.

Kane wanted to scream at her, ‘I’ve been waiting two hours for you. You are a bitch, a cunt, and you’re playing with me.’ He felt violent enough to smash her across the face.

‘This place, Kane, it’s fantastic. How absolutely wonderful it is here. This is some shack. I adore it. You
are
clever.’ She turned to gaze from the ocean and the shack to Kane, and dropped her things on the sand and threw her arms round him. She went to kiss him but he stopped her. Grabbing her by the arms in a vice-like grip, he pushed her away from him. She squirmed with pain, so deep and hard did he press his fingers into her flesh.

‘Marry me. Marry me right away. I don’t think I can live without you. I’m in love with you. I’ll not suffer ever again the pain I’ve been feeling these last two hours waiting for you. Marry me. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for you. You do love me, I know that. More than you have ever loved any other man. That’s true, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she answered.

‘I
knew
it. Or you could not be as you are with me sexually. Then you will marry me?’

‘You don’t know anything about me, Kane. I’m not going to marry a man to become a Valentina or a Nancy in his life.’

He ignored her words and pressed on. ‘Marry me.’

‘Let’s both of us think about it. It’s a great idea but needs some thought.’

‘Then you do love me enough to marry me?’

‘Yes. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to do it.’

Kane raised Cressida up off the ground by the waist and swung her round and round in a circle several times. He covered her face with kisses and cradled her in his arms and carried her into the shack.

Chapter 24

It would be untrue not to admit that Cressida felt much the same urgency as Kane did to make sexual contact. It was a passionate need. Who is to know how the mind works? Cressida felt as sexually violent as Kane did. They never even thought to pick up her things from the sand. In the house they were naked within seconds, biting into each other’s flesh, kissing with devouring mouths.

At the far end of the shack there was a large bed: a headboard and four fat columns of which no two were the same. Weathered pillars from old New England houses. With Cressida still in his arms, Kane crawled to the centre of the bed and laid her against the pillows. He tied her wrists to the posts and in a frenzy of kissing and caressing her, raised her bottom from the bed and placed her legs high up on his shoulders and thrust mightily into her. He was merciless in his rage to live again inside her. He pummelled her with penis. His fucking was savage, full of rage and passion, an endless assault of sexual intercourse to take possession of her. Kane’s objective: to wrench from her orgasms and submission. That was all he cared about, all they both cared about. She was his willing accomplice.

That was only their beginning. Only when it was dark, in the dead of night, when the stars were out, the moon shining, and he was asleep wrapped round Cressida, did she understand how much violence there was between them. It was not just his. That shocked Cressida.

When he awakened, it began again. Another sexual attack filled with turbulent emotion, relentless satisfaction. The next time they awakened all violence was spent and affection, love, drifted slowly to the surface from their souls.

‘I’m famished,’ he told her. ‘I planned this wonderful seductive afternoon and a glorious dinner for us. I meant to woo you, I don’t know what happened.’

Cressida kissed him tenderly on the lips. He lit the oil lamps and found terrycloth robes for them. Together they stood for some minutes looking at the moon, listening to the silence and the beat of the waves on the beach. Kane rebuilt the fire and it burst into flame while Cressida set the table he had placed in front of it.

‘You missed the sunset. I did so want you to see the sunset here.’ They ate. They drank an exquisite claret and then lay down and went to sleep again. When next they awakened it was with the sun. They walked along the beach and retrieved Cressida’s things from the sand where she had dropped them the afternoon before. Breakfast was hot black coffee and home made bran muffins, drenched in butter and honey.

‘I have to go, Kane. There’s so much going on at the house.’

‘Tonight. Here. Only this time, don’t be late. We
will
marry,’ he told her. And he kissed her somewhat puffy, bruised lips.

‘We are too old not to be practical, Kane. You’re not free.’

‘Of course I’m free.’

‘Nancy? Valentina? Only two days ago you told me they were a part of your life. What do you expect to do with them?’

‘We’ll keep them. They’ve learned their place in my life, they can adjust once again.’

Cressida was appalled by his attitude to the women. ‘You can’t do that! It’s too humiliating for them, and not very nice for me. Shunt them aside while I walk in as your wife? I couldn’t live like that. No, that’s not quite right. I don’t intend to live like that is more correct. And I’m not sure I want to marry a man who does.’

‘Then I’ll send them away. I will make them understand that a new life is beginning for me and it will not include them. Is that what you want?’

‘Just like that?’ Cressida snapped her fingers. ‘You are through with them, so you will abandon them?’ She had a flashback to the misery she’d felt when he so ruthlessly paid her off and abandoned her. How she, an eighteen-year-old girl, was made to feel love, sexual passion, only to be cast out and made to feel no better than a prostitute when he was through with her. That feeling of desperation, the loss of self – esteem, worthlessness, they had been burnt out of her mind and her psyche for so many years. To have them back even for a second and only in memory was to make her feel ill. Sick for herself and for those women.

Cressida backed away from Kane. She had been jolted, brought back to her senses. ‘I have to go.’

‘Five o’clock this evening then, Cressida, here at the shack.’ He was so insensitive to what he was saying, what he was planning, that he could not see how upset she was with him.

She wanted to say something but the words simply would not come. A monster, a devil, and she hadn’t seen it, been too blinded by love. Now, mercifully, she
was
able to see it. How can you love a monster? How can you make excuses for lovelessness and unkindness? Because
of the illusion that obsessional love helps create? There was too much for Cressida to contemplate here, with the object of her dreams offering to make them come true while at the same time revealing his utter selfishness, his lack of regard for anyone but himself.

Cressida felt crazy, mixed up in her mind and emotions over Kane, the monster she did want to marry and probably would. It was madness to think that he would change, that their love was enough to change him. Could they have a happy and fulfilling life together? She had to get away from him and the memory of how he had treated her, how he was treating Valentina and Nancy.

Where was love, his, theirs, that the two women should live with him in the manner they did? She gazed intently into Kane’s face. He was leaning into the car very close to her. The charisma, the handsomeness, the intelligence, the sensuality, it was all there. And yet it was just a body. Where was the soul?

She switched on the ignition and the little open-topped car burst into life. Cressida put the MG into reverse. He stood back and she turned in her seat to look over her shoulder as she backed down the sand track between the dunes.

Her life was fast coming together. Everything she’d ever wanted was here and hers for the taking. Some of it too late. The last of Cressida’s illusions gone. Without her illusions, what then? She sped through the traffic towards New Cobham, weaving in and out of the cars she passed, a woman, careful but in a hurry to put Truro behind her.

She swung off the lane and through Hollihocks’ gates. She waved to the young policeman sitting in the police car just inside the gate, to several other people she passed, and pulled the car up outside the front door of the house. The rocking chairs were back in place on the porch. She had planned to go directly to her room to bathe and change, but she stopped in the front hall.

The house was silent, no one was about. The ladders were gone, no workmen, no tool boxes. All had been swept away. It looked just as she remembered it all those years ago. The settee up on the landing, the hall table with the Ming vase, the silver salver next to it. She looked to the left into the vast drawing-room. The draperies were hung. The same draperies, the same comfortable furniture, the Queen Anne tables, the grand piano. It was beautiful. It was the Vine house, Hollihocks. She could almost hear laughter. See Rosemary in a silk chiffon printed dress, looking elegant, exuding charm, being flirtatious, seducing everyone round her.

Cressida looked up the stairs to the landing. It was so vivid the picture she conjured: Byron playing chess with her brothers. All gone. They were all gone. Yet the house was alive and well and begging for
life again. Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes. She bit her lip. She heard a cough, a whisper. Before she turned round Cressida wiped away the tears.

Standing in the dining-room was a crowd of people. They had quietly filed in from the pantry. The staff and the helpers had all assembled. Their smiles were welcoming. Mrs Cosgrove wiped a tear away with the corner of her apron, Mrs Timms looked proud, the gardener coughed. Cressida walked towards the group applauding them. ‘Thank you, thank you. It’s wonderful. I never dreamt you could get it to look like this again.’

‘Only the downstairs, ma’am.’ That was Betsy the cleaner. ‘Worked until midnight, but it was worth it to see your face, Miss Vine. Now we have to keep going and tackle the upstairs.’

‘Yes, but you must all come to the party, take time out for that.’

The Clam Shack didn’t let Cressida down. They were on and off site with vans and staff of their own, arranging food and much more, coloured paper lanterns strung up on the dock included. At lunchtime she took sandwiches to the beach and a thermos of hot coffee and watched men constructing bonfires to be lit for the party.

The party. Kane. She had forgotten all about him. Just as she had forgotten to tell him about the party. She would not go back to the shack in Truro, not this evening or any evening. Cressida was done with Truro, but was she done with Kane? The dream, the illusion, was it quite dead? Who was to know? If they loved each other enough, they might marry. He had to be told about the party, though.

Cressida walked along the beach towards Kane’s house. It would be her first return there since the night she had broken in. The day was hot, the heat of a perfect late-spring New England day. The tide was out. Cressida waded across the inlet rather than walk all around it as she had that night. The house appeared and she felt strangely excited to be there again. She could hear him as she walked up the outside staircase from the beach and into his drawing-room. He was on the upper level playing the piano. He hadn’t heard her. She listened for several minutes and then called to him. The music stopped and he rose from the piano bench. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Well, that’s not much of a welcome.’

He rushed down the stairs to greet her with a kiss, to caress her face. ‘Five o’clock. We said five o’clock.’ Then he whispered in her ear, ‘In Truro.’

‘Why are you whispering?’

‘You’d better go, darling, I’m practising and you are too much of a distraction.’ And taking her by the arm he hurried her towards the terrace. Again he whispered, ‘Valentina is here.’

Cressida removed his hand from her arm. ‘So what, Kane? Does that make this house out of bounds for me?’

‘We have Truro.’

‘I think I’m confused here. Do you think I’m going to go sneaking around, playing a back street mistress? This is the woman you asked to marry you only a few hours ago. You do remember that?’

‘Of course. We’ll talk about it in Truro.’

‘No. We won’t. I came here to tell you I won’t be going to Truro.’

‘What’s Truro?’

They both looked up. It was Valentina. ‘Who is this woman, Kane? And what is Truro?’ Her accent was still thickly Russian.

Valentina made a grand entrance down the stairs. She was exotic and dramatically beautiful wearing nothing but a sheer floral-printed cotton sarong, a glamorous turban wrapped around her head, many strands of beads, pearls, amber, jet, and coral, around her neck. Everything about her proclaimed glamour and excitement.

‘This is nothing to do with you, Valentina,’ Kane told her.

‘Oh? Your whore from last night, I presume?’ You could actually see the rage building in Valentina. The storm of words about to burst upon them. Cressida was quick to prevent them.

‘No. I am the woman he wants to marry. Now we have that straight, I’m here to invite you, Kane, and any house guests you might have, to a party. You’re Valentina. I am Cressida. I live in a house down the beach.’ Then she addressed Kane exclusively. ‘I am no back street masochist to be played with, Kane, not even for love. Most especially not for love. Now you work that out with Valentina. Any time after eight, down at the boathouse.’

‘Am I missing something?’

A pretty woman lugging a large suitcase had appeared on the terrace. One of those skeletal thin, society lady types. ‘I’m off,’ announced Cressida.

‘Well, here I am. Surprise! Oh, Valentina, I didn’t expect you to be here.’

‘Obviously. Well, I
am
here and I’m staying on.’

Cressida did not have to be told. As she hurriedly passed the woman she said, ‘You’re Nancy, I presume? I have just come to invite this household to a party, they know the details.’ And she was off down the stairs leading to the beach.

Cressida half ran from Kane’s house, finding it quite unbelievable that she should have been involved in such an embarrassing situation. She was furious with Kane. She had never imagined he could be so devious. He had said nothing to her at the shack of Valentina’s being in New Cobham. And now Nancy too. Clearly there was no place for
her in his life, and he was fooling them both if he thought there was.

Several minutes later he caught up with her. She darted away from him. He caught her this time by the arm and held her firmly in his grip. ‘Why couldn’t you just have left it to me and met me in Truro?’ He was clearly furious with her.

‘Because I’m giving a party and I forgot all about it when I was with you this morning. When I’m with you I forget things, You take me over and I forget about everything except being with you. Well, that won’t happen again. You never told me they were here. You’d better sort them out.’

‘I don’t want to lose you. You will marry me? I’ll deal with them I promise.’

‘I’ll see you at the party. This is no time to talk about any other commitments than you already have.’

Cressida wrenched her arm from him and walked away. He kept pace with her. ‘And you have none? There have been no men in your life? None to get rid of?’

‘No. There are wonderful men in my life and none that I will ever get rid of. But then, I have a close and loving, honourable relationship with them.’

‘Are you calling me dishonourable?’

‘I’m not calling you anything.’

They had come to the inlet. Cressida hiked up her dress and tied it round her waist.

‘That’s very sexy. It drives me crazy. Bend over. That’s how I like my women. Always sexually available, ready.’

‘I know,’ said Cressida, and eased herself cautiously into the current. She was in only up to the calves of her legs when she turned to look at him. The handsome smile, the erotic light in his eyes, they were the final things to provoke her.

‘The very first man who seduced me told me how sexy it was for a man to know there was a woman out there without knickers, just a cunt ready for him. I swore to him I would never wear any. I never have. He was right, it does excite men. Sluttish but very sexy.