Her Name Will Be Faith (17 page)

"Attempted rape. He didn't get very far."

"It says you knocked him out."

"With a little help from my friends."

"Oh, Jo..."

"I'll tell you all about it when we meet."

"When?"

"I could make Thursday."

There was a moment's pause, and
she could hear him riffling the pages
of his diary. "You got it. Ah… I could arrange some
time off."

"Yes," she said. "I would like
that."

So here she was, Jo thought; Josephine Donnelly, would-be
adulteress. It
was the oddest feeling of
her life, to be sitting across this now so familiar
table, gazing into those now so familiar eyes,
knowing that they were
both doing nothing more than going through the
formalities. But she had been doing this all week, existing on a cloud much
higher than seven, hardly aware of what she was doing as she had been waiting
for this moment. Fortunately, Ed had put her preoccupation down to her
'ordeal', as he called it. So did most other people. Neal and Meg had called to
say
goodbye, as they were off to Eleuthera.
They had looked forward to seeing
her
there in a couple of weeks. "A good lie in the sun will put that horrible
experience behind you," Meg had trilled, every
word redolent with
outrage.
Eleuthera? Eleuthera was a million miles away right this minute.

There were no banalities, about `how're you doing?' or
'I wondered if you were going to call'. They were two people who were thinking
with a single mind.

He paid the check and they walked along the sidewalk together.
Their hands brushed, and once or twice they exchanged a quick squeeze of the
fingers. Nobody appeared to notice, although they both had the feeling that
anyone could look at them and tell they were on their way to bed.

In the elevator, he said,
"I'm afraid I've started stripping the wallpaper."

"Good for you. What color have you chosen?"

"It's an off-white, really."

"Sensible."

She waited while he unlocked the door, trying to
control the pounding
of her heart. She had
not felt like this since the first night of her honeymoon.
But then, she
hadn't felt like this then, either.

"Voila! It really is a mess."

She gazed at the half bare walls, the piles of loose
paper, the layer of dust...

He closed the door, slipped the chain into place.
"I'll get it straight, eventually. And the bedroom's clean as a
whistle."

She turned, and was in his arms, pressing herself
against him as they kissed: "My darling girl," he said. "I'm
going to say something stupid."

"Then don't say it. Don't say
anything at all." She released him,
opened
the bedroom door, and went in, terribly conscious that she was leading here
where she should perhaps have waited to be led. But it was her nature, and she
couldn't risk any weakening of her resolve.

The door closed again, and he was in the room with
her. Facing away
from him, and carefully
avoiding looking in the mirror, she reached
behind her and unzipped her
dress. She wore no slip in the summer, but
for
that reason always a bra. She shrugged her shoulders and the dress
slid
down to her thighs. She stepped out of it, reached behind her again, and
touched his hands. "May I?" he asked.

"Yes," she told him, and
waited, as the clip was released, and he
carried
the brassiere forward with his hands as they moved round, under
her armpits, to hold and caress her breasts. She
gave a little shiver, but it was pure ecstasy at the gentle loving of his touch
– the last two pairs
of hands to touch her there had been vicious.

She let him hold her for several
seconds; then reached down to slide
her pants past her hips. He let her go, and she stepped
out of them,
drew a long breath, and
turned to face him. If the family habitually skinny-dipped when in Eleuthera,
it was a very long time since any man
other
than her husband had looked at her naked – in a bedroom. Suddenly
she
was afraid he would be disappointed in this slightly overweight wife and
mother. But his eyes told her she had nothing to worry about.

He was undressing himself, and he was perfection, the
hard muscles
gleaned from years on the grid
only slightly softened by age, the glowing
desire at once beautiful and reassuring. Then it was natural to be taken
in his arms and held close, to feel
his fingers sliding over her buttocks, to
reach down herself to hold and caress, and then to lie beneath him,
feeling
him from her mouth to her toes. She had no thought of orgasm,
just an immense contentment as she felt him questing.

Second later he was filling her,
and her senses were soaring. She loved,
and
was loved. And she was in love, she realized… for the second time in her life.

"There." Eisener had assumed his favorite
position, on the flight deck between the two pilots, and now he pointed.

Mark followed the direction of his finger and gave a
low whistle. The
big bird was flying
through empty skies, as usual, and over a calm ocean,
but she was a very
long way away from home; Mark had already called
Pedra Luma in the Cape Verdes, the group of islands that lie six
hundred
miles off the westernmost bulge of Africa and which were now
less than a hundred miles east of the aircraft, and asked for permission to
land for the night and refuel, before returning to Key West.

The reason for the extended flight had been an unusual
phenomenon
which had manifested itself over
the past week; the pressure over the
Cape Verde Islands had dropped much
lower than usual for the time of year, and the result had been a much greater
accumulation of cloud than
usual. This had
first shown up on satellite, and Eisener had determined to take a closer look.
Now they gazed at an apparently unbroken carpet
of white, lying right
over the horizon even at 20,000 feet.

"That thing must stretch clear back to
Africa," remarked Bob Landry, the co-pilot.

"Yeah," Eisener said. "Where are we,
Mark?"

"Eighty miles due west of Praia, capital of the
Cape Verdes. They're expecting us, but all the islands are under that
lot."

"It's big," Eisener agreed. "What do
you make of it?"

Mark didn't know what to reply. He had never seen
anything like it in
his life. He had called
New York just before leaving Key West, to discuss
the satellite picture with Richard… but Richard
had been in no mood
to talk about hurricanes. Even Richard. Because the
clown had gone and fallen in love, with that married chick he'd been trying to seduce
in his
apartment when he'd been interrupted.
Fooling around with married
women caused nothing but trouble, in Mark's
opinion.

While here could be what they
had all been waiting for, all of their lives.
"There's no trace of any circulation," Landry remarked.

"No," Eisener said.
"But by golly, if that mass should start to
circulate..."

"Yeah," Mark muttered. "Jesus Christ,
if..."

"Let's take a closer look," Eisener decided.

"That is it," J. Calthrop White declared.
"Kill it, Kiley."

Kiley twisted his fingers together. "It's getting
quite good audience support, JC..."

"You mean half a dozen telephone calls."

"Well, people don't usually telephone after the weather
report..."

"Yes, they do. And the people who are telephoning
are the same who
were watching the weather
program anyway. That program has
had not the slightest effect on our
ratings."

"That's true, JC, but there could be something
any day. According to Connors..."

"That asshole? Bringing him up here is the
biggest mistake you ever
made, Kiley. And at
seventy-five grand a year… Jesus Christ! He's
made us the laughing stock
of the networks with his warnings that this could be the year of the big storm,
or at least of exceptional activity. All because it's hot? For Chrissake, it's
too damned hot for hurricanes, that's what it is. How many have we had so
far?"

"Well," Kiley said, "the last was named
Eric..."

"So that makes five. Just
five, in six weeks since the start of the season.
And every one has gone flatter
than one of my wife's pancakes in less
than
a week."

"Yeah. Connors says he can't understand it."

"He couldn't understand a tornado in his back
yard."

"Well… there's this big system out in the Cape
Verde Islands..."

"The Cape Verdes? Holy shit! That's four thousand
goddamned miles away. And it's been there for damn near a month, just sitting.
That isn't
going anywhere, Kiley. It's pure
convection. We want programs which
are
going to boost our ratings. That's damned important right now. Having
the
capital isn't enough to convince those goddamned Limeys we can run a network.
They want proven results. And bids for that franchise need to be in the first
of next month."

Kiley nodded. "How's the financing going,
JC?"

"Goddamned Irish shit," JC said. "Still
saying it can't be done at such short notice… and in the summer. What the hell
has the time of year to do with it? You know something, Kiley, it's because
that asshole of a
son of his wants to spend
the whole goddamned summer racing. And now
Mike tells me he's packing it
in as well and going to the Bahamas for at
least
a fortnight. Says he does it every year and can't change his plans
now. Nothing to worry about, he says; my partner,
Cal Palmer, is handling
everything.
For Chrissake, Cal Palmer. That bid has to be in August
One." White brooded for several seconds, then
raised his head. "Now
you listen to me, Kiley..." He wagged
his gold pencil. "You kill those goddamned chats. And I want you to get
this straight: Connors' contract will not be renewed next spring. You got
that?"

"I've got it, JC," Kiley said, unhappily.

"Saturday," Babs said happily. "Oh,
Saturday. It's just incredible that
another
whole year should have rolled by. But you know what, Jo, honey,
every
fifteenth of July I feel kind of reborn. How I love that place."

Jo watched the children playing in
the pool. School had broken up a
week before, to her great relief. Owen Michael's
stomachache had
developed into an almost
nightly feature during the exams, and she had
worried
herself sick — when she had been in the mood to be worried. But,
as Dr Glenville had prophesied, with the ending of
the pressure it had
just disappeared.

"When Big Mike retires… heck, it's only in a
couple of years," Babs
reflected.
"I reckon we're going to move down there, permanently."

Jo turned her head in surprise. "Not sell
Pinewoods?"

"Well, I don't think we will.
I mean, Michael will take over as head
of the firm. So why shouldn't you take this place? You
don't want to
spend the rest of your life
in a New York apartment."

"Um," Jo said. She had realized that Babs,
and no doubt Big Mike as well, had interpreted her almost euphoric happiness of
the past month as
meaning she and Michael had
at last patched up their differences;
fortunately
Michael, absorbed with getting
Esmeralda
ready for the big
race, which started this weekend as well, had not
noticed any difference
in her demeanor at all. He had hardly been home
long enough to do so, anyway.

She still had no idea what to do
about it. She had now been to Richard's
apartment five times, had met him for lunch on nine
occasions, had called
him at least three
times a week or been called by him. Most of the calls had been made from the
privacy of her study at home, but sufficient had
been from the office to cause a certain amount of gossip. She was
dipping
her hand into the fire without caring if it was burnt.

Simply because she was in love. But even through the
euphoria she understood that she could not live the rest of her life as a lie
— any more
than she could give up the
children. Because that was what would happen
if Michael found out. So maybe nowadays there was no guilty party, in
the
eyes of the law; there was still the discretion of the judge as to who was the
more fitted to bring up the children — a husband who, if his true
love was a boat, could yet provide them with the
loving family background
of
grandparents and aunts and uncles, or an adulterous mother who
would
have to bring them up in a tiny Manhattan apartment… all she would be able to
afford on her salary from
Profiles.