Acts of Love (23 page)

Ben was coming, his orgasm flowing into Arianne. His ardour was so great that he remained erect as he caressed her womb with his warm sperm, and kept moving in and out of her. Such bliss. And yet, while still in the act of flagrant passion, he felt her receding, drawing away from him. His seed finally spent, he relaxed on top of her, only to feel she was no longer with him. He could hardly believe it, until she opened her eyes.

They were cold and distant. He was stunned. Ben slid from her body to lie next to her on the bed. He asked her, ‘Why?’

She was calm. There were no tears. She made no apology. But there were distress and sadness in her eyes enough to make one’s heart break. ‘Why? Because of my husband.’

‘But your husband is dead.’

She shook her head, and it was over for them.

They dressed as if they were strangers. ‘Our past is not our guide, Arianne,’ he told her. ‘You and I, we mustn’t be careless. Our love is much stronger than us.’

‘Please, Ben, this is terribly awkward for me. I need to be alone, quiet and alone. I want to go to London, away from here and you, to dwell in the past.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Not for me. I just thought he was. A car, a train. Please can you arrange it for me?’

His heart went out to her. He was still too stunned to know what to do, except what she wished. Walking down the stairs with him, she could not look at him. He stopped her at the foot of the stairs and told her, ‘You’re in a cage.’

‘I thought I was free, Ben. But I’m not. Forgive me.’

‘What are you saying, Arianne? No more love for us? Do you honestly think that will work? How foolish you are. Love is
stronger than us. If you think our pasts guide us, you’re wrong. Love chooses. That’s something mere mortals have no control over. If that’s not true, then why did you tell me your husband was dead?’

‘He is dead.’

There was no one in the reception hall. The hotel was quiet. Ben left her there and looked in several rooms. No one. He returned to Arianne. ‘Look, this is crazy. It’s two-thirty in the morning. You stay here the night. You are in no condition to travel. Get a train in the morning. Get some fresh air now – walk me to my car.’

Ben unlocked the car after scraping frost from the windshield. From a lantern shone a dim light to cut the black of a starless night. He took her hand in his and told her, ‘Just remember you cabled me you loved me. I don’t think you did that lightly.’ Then he turned her around to face the hotel. ‘Try to get some sleep.’ He drove away from the hotel and did not look back.

Chapter 16

Ben could not believe what had happened to them. That he was driving away from Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons and Arianne. ‘If I had another chance,’ he asked himself, ‘what would I do differently? How could I have kept her? Should I have said, “Come back to London with me, we’ll be pals”? How could I? We didn’t start as pals: we started as lovers and we’ll end up as lovers. She cabled me, “I love you”. She does love me. She forgot that. She was upset, surely, and just got mixed up about who she is in love with. Why didn’t I suggest that to her? Tell her that I accept her husband might have been a clever man and very charming, but the way she was reacting to a new love, a new life, he must also have been a man with a compulsion to manipulate situations and control outcomes. And he was still doing it, years after he had been laid in this grave. Her husband? What if he had lived? Maybe he would have turned into an old fool. But as it is, he will always be a young, handsome hero to her. Who knows? Maybe, if he had not died, they would have been a wonderful couple. Or, maybe, a pair of old fools who just hated each other.’

There was no doubt about it, Ben wanted Jason firmly dead in her mind. In the same way that Clarissa was firmly dead in his. Not forgotten. Clarissa was etched deep in his memory; she would always be a part of his history, the good and the bad that had been their marriage. But she had nothing to do with his happiness now, his will to live and enjoy life and love again, to be a whole human being who walked upright and with dignity in the present. He suddenly loathed Jason, not because Jason had come between Arianne and himself, but because Jason had done so much damage to Arianne by the way he lived with her, treated her. He had never prepared her to be happy without him.

He thought of the beautiful Clarissa, what their life might have been had she not taken hers. Beautiful, complex, totally
mad Clarissa. When told that he was in a critical condition after surgery for appendicitis, she had refused to believe the doctors. She had made up her mind that he was dying, would be dead before she could get to him, because in her sick mind that was what she wanted. She used him, as she had always used him, for her own voracious, destructive ego, right to the end. Clarissa, his wife, who left a note addressed, ‘To whom it may concern’. It stated quite simply, ‘I cannot live without my husband.’ No more, no less, from the once-famous model who, dressed in her best Dior gown and her jewellery, coiffed and made up to perfection, went down to the garage, sealed the doors with rags and tape and then ran a hose-pipe from the exhaust into the car. After turning on the ignition, Clarissa sat in the back seat of his 1937 yellow Rolls-Royce, his newest and then favourite acquisition. There she waited peacefully for a merciful release from a life she really had no appetite for. They knew she had died peacefully because when she had been found she was beautiful and perfect, with no signs of agony on her face, and looking not unlike the store-window display mannequins fashioned after her. The press had somehow managed to get a shot of the macabre scene in the garage before her body had been removed.

It had been nearly a week before he had been well enough to be told the sad news. Weeks passed before the world’s newspapers and magazines gave up on the tragic death of one of the world’s best-loved models and her polo-playing husband. He thought about those terrible weeks now while speeding away from Arianne down the M40.

‘Such a waste,’ he said aloud. Once said, it acted as a tonic for Ben. It confirmed what he already knew in his heart: Arianne was a woman flexible in her principles, but at the same time she was quite normal, even with all the things she had going for her. ‘It’s her very normality that’s so seductive.’ And then he thought, And that normality would never allow her to waste life or love as Clarissa had. Clarissa was gone because she had nothing to live for, no resources or will without Ben. That was not Arianne.

Until Arianne, Ben’s sense of guilt over Clarissa’s suicide had made him resistant to love. Reason enough for no woman to have had a chance with him. Time, the great healer, had been slowly diminishing this sense of guilt. Meeting Arianne, a non-grasping,
non-manipulative woman with so much substance to her, pushed guilt that little bit further away; falling in love with her freed him from it for ever. Stunning realisations.

Ben pulled the car over to the verge. He left the lights burning and sat back, trying to put together what had happened in the bedroom at Le Manoir.

Arianne went back to her room and lay down on the bed. No tears. No self-pity. Nor was there embarrassment over what had happened. She was still traumatised by what she had seen, what she had done. All she could think of was that Ben was gone. Then the memories flooded back: him knocking at Artemis’s door, stepping into the hallway to throw his arms around her. His passionate kiss. How happy she had felt to see him. There had been so few words, so many right moves. How he had found her hat and her coat and sent her for her bag, and then whisked her away from Chessington Park. Alone now, she understood even more how happy she was with Ben. The chance she had had to be loved again in the present, and, indeed, to be able to love a man again.

In the car, driving through the English countryside, they had become more accustomed to being together and words came easier. She had liked so much the way he had included her in his future when he was telling her about his days away from her, his business dealings: ‘At the next wine auction, I’ll take you with me. You’ll love the château and my colleagues there will love you.’ Why was she remembering that now, when it was all over for them? She seemed unable to empty her mind of the enthusiasm in his voice when he had asked, ‘Are you committed to England – to London, to Christie’s? Or are you free?’ Free, she had promised him, but then she hadn’t known she was not.

She thought about all the places she would not watch him play polo: Deauville, Palm Beach, Los Angeles, in Argentina, and India. The house she would never occupy with him in New York that he wanted to buy for them because they both agreed that the call to go home, back to the States, was growing stronger, as it sometimes did for wandering expatriate Americans. She remembered vividly how she had laughed at him because he was so very excited about them, and full of ideas and adventures for
them. ‘Yes. Yes, yes,’ she had answered to everything he wanted. And would there ever be a more exciting moment for her again than when they had walked from that dining room, knowing they were going to make love for the first time?

The adventurous life had been there for her, offered to her by a man she could love. If only she had dared to surrender herself to him. God knows, she had wanted to, had been doing exactly that, slowly, with every kiss, every caress, surrendering inch by inch to him with every carnal embrace. Arianne placed her arm across her eyes and tried to block out her losses, tried to sleep.

Ben shook his head. It’s not possible – we’re too good, too right to be tossed away for something dead and gone for ever. For anything, period. Live or dead. He was emphatic about that, and he would do something. At last he was coming out of the shock of Arianne’s retreat from him.

It was not even six o’clock in the morning when he swung the Porsche into Hyde Park. He felt somehow ridiculous. What was he doing there? Suddenly he was in control of his life again, and knew exactly what must be done. He made a fast and dangerous U-turn and sped away from London along the M40 towards his destination, Le Manoir. But several miles later he made an equally dangerous U-turn. He knew that he had to be there for her, but he also knew instinctively that he was wrong to go chasing after her. It was one thing to be selfless and kind to her during this terrible time she was putting herself through; quite another to be forceful, aggressive, to make her see the lightness of them. His own independent spirit demanded that he let her return to London alone as she had requested, to allow her the independence to do what she chose.

Arianne did not sleep. She had merely lain there, eyes closed, her mind wandering between the past and the present. And the past was getting harder and harder to see. It kept drifting away from her memory, her marvellous life with Jason, and with Jason and Ahmad. Even that
ménage à trois
, one of the happiest experiences of her life, was so firmly set in the past, it now seemed almost like a dream. Ben, just her and Ben, not even her alone seemed to be the only present she could envisage, but she knew that had to be
a dream too. It was over, and in time what she had thrown away would be just another memory of what could have been. But for now there was no peace for her because she kept thinking about Ben and how her past had snatched him from her.

It had been light for some time. She rose from the bed and went into the pretty bathroom she and Ben had not even shared. There she washed her hands and face, and seeing in the mirror how distressed she looked gave her yet another shock, as if losing Ben had not been enough. She all but recoiled from the woman in the mirror, but then composed herself. She sat down at the dressing-table and made an effort to cover her distress by carefully applying her cosmetics. That accomplished, she hardly knew what to do next.

Memory can be a cruel master. She could not expunge the memory of Ben and herself, naked, entwined. Sitting on the edge of the bed now, she wondered how she could be so torn. Suddenly she felt a surge of courage, and at last could bring herself to ask the question: Is my heart really in two places? Even to form the question was to bring her closer to the reality of her conflict. The ringing of the telephone was a merciful momentary release from anxiety.

She had left a note at the reception desk the night before asking which was the first available train to London. Here was her morning call with the information and the message that breakfast was on the way up to her room. She could take it leisurely and still make her train.

That galvanised Arianne, but it did nothing for the sadness she felt, the pain of a love lost. A quiet breakfast, a train ride, and home. That, if nothing else, seemed to make sense.

She half expected him to knock at the bedroom door. But there was no knock.

The train was crowded, and she sat huddled against the window, feeling more isolated from people and the world than ever she did in her darkest moments after Jason’s death. She watched the countryside roll by as the train rushed forward, and she felt sick, not with self-pity, but something much worse, loneliness.

The train slowed as it approached London. There was hustle and bustle for the passengers making ready to exit and hurry on
to offices, houses and family, to people and work. And then, before she realised it, they were turtle-like inching their way into Paddington Station. The coach was nearly empty when she rose from her seat to leave and step into the crowd rushing towards the exits. What had she done? Not just to herself, but to Ben. Could she resign herself to living in the past, or what was left of it, to Ahmad in the present? She could have once, before Ben Johnson. Now?

She walked as in a daze through Paddington. People jostled her, and she kept saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ At one point she hardly knew where she was going and just let herself be carried along by the crowd, while she tried to work out her life. She stepped from the station into a blast of London air that served to slap her awake. She clasped her coat around her and stood for some minutes, amazed that she no longer felt torn between a dead love – still overpoweringly exciting, even if it had to be lived in memory alone – and the deep love and strong sexual attraction she felt for Ben.

It had been too good, the sensuality and sexual tenderness combined with animal lust and love she had had with Ben for a few moments. Those things had brought her alive erotically as she had never been before, not even with her husband, who had always dominated their lust for the erotic. At last she understood. She had found more, even more to love, to give herself to, in Ben. She had seen a glimpse of an even more exciting love than she had ever known – one that would oblige her to put her marriage into a proper perspective. And that was what had made her bolt. To live in the past with Jason, and in the present with Ahmad? That now began to seem a penance.

She walked from Paddington Station to Three Kings Yard. Calm and sanity prevailed. Her mind emptied and she felt peaceful, her naturally passive nature rising again. She also felt quite drained. It was a very exhausting thing burying at last a ghost that had nearly become a myth.

Arianne was walking down Davies Street from Oxford Street. She had just passed South Molton Street when she saw him. He was standing in front of the entrance to Three Kings Yard, the collar of his leather coat turned up against the chill wind. He was clapping his hands and stamping his feet to keep warm. Her heart
began to race. She walked faster, squinting against the sun. She raised a hand to her forehead as a visor. She must make sure it was him. He was at a considerable distance. Her eyes might deceive, but not her heart. And then he turned to look up the street. There was no mistaking him.

Ben recognised her figure at once among the pedestrians coming and going on the pavement. He didn’t hesitate. He started walking towards her. First slowly, then more rapidly. The closer they came to each other the faster they walked. Soon they were close enough to lock their gaze across the distance and people. How sad, tired and cold she looked, but also disarmingly beautiful, with that quality of fragile femininity allied to formidable maturity. The first look after their estrangement was enough to tell them they loved each other and must be together. It ensured that he stood still, if only to take her into himself and catch his breath, to calm himself amid the happiness that surged through him.

Not so Arianne. Her feet hardly felt the pavement, she was moving so urgently. Finally she could bear the distance separating them no longer. She broke into a run. He regained his composure, and waited for her to come to him. She almost fell into his arms.

‘I’ve been a fool, such a fool.’