Caught in the Light (2 page)

"Shall we keep it that way, then?"

"Yes." She smiled faintly for the first time. It warmed her eyes. There was a sudden sense of exuberance, of joy, on a short leash. "Who are you?"

'Ian Jarrett."

"A photographer."

"Right. Here for the winter light."

"And you're wondering what I'm here for."

"No. Unless you want me to."

"I told you to be impolite."

"But just how impolite? That's the question."

"A question for you to answer, not me."

"You can at least tell me what brings you here."

"I'm not sure. Boredom. Desperation. The need to get away. The need to think."

My breakfast arrived. She watched me sip some coffee. Then she reached across the table, tore an end off my croissant and ate it, slowly and studiously.

"Hungry?"

"I think I must be."

"Have it all."

"You never can, in my experience."

"Nor mine."

"But there are always new experiences."

"So there are."

"Tell me, Ian, what's the worst thing you've ever done?"

"I killed somebody once." Hearing myself say what I never normally volunteered was more of a shock to me than it seemed to be to her. "Hit a pedestrian late one night about five years ago while I was driving home."

"An accident?"

"Oh yes. And I was sober, too. But I still killed them."

"Of course." She nodded. "It doesn't make any difference to them, does it? The fact that you didn't mean to do it."

"You talk as if you know the feeling."

"I do. When I was a child I goaded a schoolfriend into walking out onto a frozen canal. The ice broke. She fell through and drowned. An accident. But she stayed dead."

"That must have been worse. At least I didn't know the pedestrian I hit."

"I never told anyone I'd encouraged her to do it. Never a soul. Till now."

"Why tell me?"

"Because .. ." She hesitated, searching my face, it seemed, for some kind of reassurance. "Because I want us to do anything we want. And nothing we don't."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I am." She looked straight at me, unblinkingly direct. "Are you?"

"Anything and nothing?"

"Exactly."

"Whatever that means?"

"Whatever."

That was the last moment when I could have laughed it off and put up some kind of social smokescreen. But then the moment passed. And all I did was nod slowly in agreement and return the frankness of her gaze.

"Staying in Vienna long?"

"Long enough."

She smiled, more broadly than before. "That makes two of us, then."

"I thought I might go out to Schonbrunn this morning. Take some pictures of the palace and the park. Why don't you come with me?"

"I shouldn't. For all kinds of reasons."

"But you will?"

"Oh, I expect so, don't you?"

"I'm not sure I know what to expect."

"Neither am I." She drained her cup and replaced it in the saucer with exaggerated care. "Isn't that why we're going?"

I don't know why I thought of Schonbrunn. I hadn't really been intending to go there that morning. But it was bound to be quiet so far from the centre on a freezing-cold weekday. We both needed time, before the next step caught up with us.

And it was quiet. The palace floated silently in its snow-covered park like some vast yellow ghost, so remote from the dusty, tourist-choked clamour I remembered that my visit with Faith could almost have lain in the future rather than in the past.

"They say Franz Josef preferred it here to the Hofburg," I said as we walked out slowly behind the palace through the snow-blanked gardens towards the Neptune Fountain and the colonnade of the Gloriette on the hilltop beyond. "He kept his mistress in a villa near by."

"You obviously know Vienna better than I do," said Marian. "Who's Franz Josef?"

"You must have heard of him. The famous Austrian Emperor. The old fellow with the walrus moustache and the chestful of medals."

"You've lost me. But I'm no historian."

"Neither am I."

"No. You're a photographer. So shouldn't you be taking photographs?"

"Later. Just at the moment I don't seem able to concentrate."

"Why not?"

"Why do you think?"

"You need to be alone. Is that it?"

"Maybe I need to be. But I don't want to be."

"Sorry if I'm distracting you from your work."

"You're not sorry."

We stopped there, beneath Neptune and his frozen fountain, and turned to look at each other. Until that moment, we hadn't so much as touched. "What's happening?" Marian murmured.

"Something that's never happened to me before."

"Nor me."

We were breathless now, expectant yet apprehensive. Then we were kissing: her lips against mine, her tongue, her nose and cheek, the butterfly flicker of her eyelashes, the warmth of her breath, the leather of her glove cool against my neck.

She broke away and stared at me, as if terrified, then headed along the path that led round the fountain and up to the glade of fir trees beyond, glancing back to see me following, moving faster, almost running.

I caught up as she entered the screen of trees behind the nearest of Neptune's Tritons. We kissed again. Snowflakes shaken from the branches around us dampened her face as she arched back across the parapet, yielding or still resisting, there was no way to be sure. But there was no way to stop, either.

"Let's go back to my hotel," Marian whispered. "Now."

"Where are you staying?"

"The Imperial."

"The best, so they tell me."

"Come and find out."

"Talk to me about something," she said, staring into my eyes as the taxi sped us back through the city. "Anything." "I can't think of anything."

"Tell me about your work."

"I just take pictures."

"Is there one photographer you particularly admire?"

"None living."

"Dead, then?"

"Roger Fenton, maybe."

"Why?"

"He was the very first war photographer. In the Crimea. He had to work it all out from first principles, but he still managed to come close to something like art. And his landscapes .. . But you don't want to hear this."

"I don't want to think, either. Keep talking. Was he successful, this Fenton?"

"Very."

"Healthy, wealthy and wise?"

"Hard to say. He was the most famous photographer of his generation. But he gave it all up when he was still a relatively young man. Sold his equipment and negatives. Packed it in."

"Why?"

"Nobody knows."

"But you have a theory?"

"For what it's worth."

"Go on."

"I think he realized he'd done his best work. That it was only going to be downhill from there. So, he quit."

"That must have taken a lot of courage."

"Or despair."

"Or temptation," she countered.

"What was there to tempt him?"

"The unknown." She twined her fingers in mine. "The place you most want to go. For all the risks attached."

Marian had a suite on the first floor of the hotel: an opulently furnished pair of rooms looking down onto the street through high, thick-curtained windows. The door closed solidly behind us and she turned a switch to lower the shutters, filtering and thinning the grey winter light. It was warm and silent. The imminence of passion of heat and flesh and broken taboos hung almost tangibly in the air.

"This must be expensive," I said.

She shrugged. "My husband's paying. He likes me to spend his money."

"Won't we pay, too in the end?"

"Maybe. But first.. ."

"Yes?"

"We can have what we'll pay for. And make sure it's worth the price."

She took off her coat and gloves. We kissed slowly and linger-ingly, knowing this time that we wouldn't stop. The madness of it was part of the pleasure. I didn't know her and she didn't know me. But nothing was going to be held back. Already, I sensed it was going to be better than it had ever been before, her desire fitting mine like the skintight leather she'd just peeled from her fingers.

And it came so close. As close to perfection as I could dream of it being. Morning drifted into afternoon as we surrendered to each other, at first with clumsy eagerness, then in subtle variations on a theme that always had the same savoured ending. So much released and discovered, about the mind as well as the body. What we were capable of. What we couldn't have admitted to any but the strangers we were even then ceasing to be. Each climax found and surpassed a new limit. By the end there were no inhibitions left. We'd been shocked into a drained and exhausted tenderness.

"You can't photograph that, can you, Ian?" she said as we lay on the bed, still warm from the heat of all we'd done. "You can't capture it in any picture."

"I wouldn't want to."

"Then what do you want?"

"You've already found that out."

"Tell me anyway."

"I want you."

"Well, you've got me now."

"But I can't keep you."

"That's lucky for you, isn't it? You can fuck me and forget me. Most men would envy you."

"I'm not most men."

"I noticed."

"And I'm not very good at forgetting."

"Well... you have to have some weakness, I suppose."

I refused to laugh. "What's yours?"

"Strangely enough ..." She smiled. "The same."

It wasn't the first time I'd been unfaithful to my wife. It wasn't even the second. But, still, I'd never known or done anything like it before. The intensity of the experience was bewildering. Already the question wasn't whether it would be repeated, but whether I could even bear the thought of it not being repeated.

I stayed at the Imperial that night, returning to the Europa only briefly to pick up a change of clothes. We dined in the hotel's grand luxe restaurant. Marian wore a black dress that looked as if it had been made for her by a top designer, but no jewellery and very little make-up. My mind's eye kept flashing back to just a few hours before. I tasted her rather than the wine and relished the recency of the memory.

"What are we going to dolan I don't mean tonight. I mean ..."

"Eventually."

"Yes."

"I don't know. You have a husband. I have a wife. And a daughter."

"You didn't mention her before."

"She's fourteen. It's not as if..."

"I have no children."

"The truth is, Marian, we hardly know the first thing about each other."

"But you've realized already, haven't you?"

"What?"

"That what we do know is all that matters."

"I know I've never felt like this before. Never felt so much so soon."

"Neither have I."

"What is it?"

"It's a chance in a million."

"Then we should make the most of it."

"And to hell with the consequences?"

"Just now, consequences don't seem to matter."

"Liberating, isn't it?"

"It could get to be a habit."

"Yes. I know exactly what you mean. A habit you can't kick."

"For the moment, I don't even want to try."

We went back to her suite long before we'd eaten or drunk enough to slake our appetites. The chambermaid had pulled the mirror-panelled doors across between the two rooms. We watched our reflections in them as I unzipped her dress and slid the flimsy layers of silk from her body and pulled her down onto the thick-piled carpet, in the lamplight's glow. The sustained urgency of our lovemaking was alarming me now. Already, it was certain my life had changed. But what had it changed to? As Marian had unwittingly predicted, the temptation to find out was irresistible. But it was also frightening.

We fell into bed and a pit of slumber. I woke from it as if I'd only had my eyes closed for a few minutes, though it must by then have been the early hours of the morning. Marian was still asleep, but mumbling to herself, breathing heavily and tossing her head on the pillow, as if trying to throw off some stifling weight.

"I won't let you do this, Jose," I heard her say. "I won't let you." A moment's silence, then, in a louder voice, "You can't stop me. I'll show you what Suddenly she was awake. She jerked up in the bed, coughing and panting and throwing out her arms. "Oh ... Oh God .. ."

"Take it easy," I said. "You must have had a nightmare."

"I'm OK." She fell back against the pillow and began to breathe more easily. "God, I'm sorry. I don't know .. . what happened."

"You were talking in your sleep. Is Jose your husband?"

"I named him?"

"You did."

"Just goes to show .. . you can't get away from some people ... as easily as you think. Yes, Jose is my husband. He'd be touched to know, I'm sure, that he was in my thoughts."

"Are you afraid of him?"

"Why should I be?"

"It sounded as if ..."

"He means nothing to me. Not a thing. And he knows that. There's no reason for me to be afraid of him."

"But you were dreaming about him."

"Some sort of automatic guilt mechanism, I expect."

"It doesn't seem to have kicked in in my case."

"It will. And when it does I probably won't see you for dust."

"You're wrong."

"Am I?" She'd reached out for me in the dark and was teasing me now, with her fingers as well as her words. "Prove it."

"I can't. Not yet. But I will."

"All right. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, there's something you can do for my guilt problem."

"What?"

"Take my mind off it." She pulled me closer. "Any way you like."

Early next morning, while Marian was in the bath, I left the hotel and went across to the Cafe Schwarzenberg on the other side of the road for hot black coffee and a cold-dawn's-light appraisal of what had happened and what was going to happen. Her husband meant nothing to her, she'd said. But was that true? More to the point, did she mean nothing to him! I'd detected fear in her voice, for all her denials. And I was a threat to him now, whether he knew it or not. Just what was I getting myself into?

Then there was Faith. Our marriage had been running on empty ever since the accident had thrown my affair with Nicole in her face. I still suspected she'd only patched it together then for Amy's sake. But Amy was away at boarding school now. And that had largely been Faith's decision, one that could have been intended to pave the way for a separation. But at a time of her choosing, not mine, and certainly not to make things easier for me. If I tried to turn this into something more than a five-night stand, Faith and I were going to have to acknowledge that we no longer loved each other. And it wasn't going to be easy.