Hold Back the Night (3 page)

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She opened her eyes to an unfamiliar sloped ceiling directly above her, where a small gable window was frosted by the curve of a white snowdrift. For a moment of confusion she remembered nothing of what had happened and could not imagine where she was. But then she heard the sound of breathing near her, steady and almost inaudible, and smelled a clean tang that was purely male, and saw the long outline of a man's body at the edges of her vision. And she knew.

She remained perfectly still, only shifting her eyes to see the man who stood tall beside the bed where she lay. Her pulse stopped and then started again, beating faster than before. The sight of him confirmed what she had known in her innermost heart at first sight of those dark eyes, even before his name had been spoken aloud.

It was Sander.

He was standing above her, his head bent towards her, frowning directly at her face in such a way that she could see him well although the scant light in the room came only from the small window. It took an effort of will to remind herself that he could not see her too.

Sander blind. Why had he lied, that time she had phoned? Why had he led her to believe the operation had been a success? Oh, God. He was blind, and all the old guilt came flooding back to Domini, displacing the hatred she had felt for him during the intervening years.

Instinctively she knew they were alone in the room. Her subconscious mind formed an impression of the strange surroundings, an impression composed of orderly space and gloom and dingy wallpaper, but for Domini the enormity of being face-to-face with the man who had fathered her child prevented her from assimilating more.

He was the same and yet not the same. The virile physique was still there, a little leaner perhaps, but unchanged in other ways. There was still that powerful structure of chest and shoulder created by the demands of working in stone, the constant pitting of muscle against marble. The rough textures of him were the same ... the hard-hewn jaw, the granite cheekbones, the strong bridge of his nose. The impact of him was the same, the intense sexuality that had once caused Domini to respond with such ardent abandon, like the unbridled child of nature she had been brought up to be.

And the eyes, they too were the same but for their sightlessness: the brows and the thick lashes so utterly black, the pupils so dark they were almost black too. And yet in other moments those eyes would seem totally silver, like a black fabric shot with metallic thread that caught the light only at certain times, or like the mercury in a thermometer, elusive unless turned in exactly the right way.

All those things were unchanged, and yet he was different. His brow was cruelly creased and there were harsh new lines chiselled alongside the edges of his nose. In his mouth, the mouth that had once crushed hers in passion and rage, there was a hardness and bitterness, an inward-turning anger that had not been there before. It was the face of a man who had suffered and was still suffering, a man who had not come to terms with his blindness and perhaps never would.

Did he still hate her for what she had done to him, just as she had spent years hating him for what he had done to her? Oh, God, to think he was still blind...

He moved his head now, a fractional move that sent splinters of that uncapturable silver shooting through the darkness for one brief moment. 'You've come to,' he said with the perspicacity of a sightless person whose other senses had been honed to a knife-edge sharpness. And when she didn't answer at once for the clamour of her senses, he added in a dry voice, 'I may be blind but I'm not deaf. You've been holding your breath, and you just let it go ... '

'You're blind,' choked Domini. 'Blind. Oh, God, I didn't know... I swear, I didn't know

Sander's expression closed in upon itself, shutting out pity. 'That shouldn't matter to you one way or another,' he clipped discouragingly. 'It's not contagious.'

Then, as if remembering with effort that Domini had just recovered from a fainting spell, he added brusquely but politely, in the voice of a total stranger, 'How are you feeling now?'

Why did his voice sound different? Why were his words so impersonal? Why had he not called her by name? Then, with a flood of realization followed by an even greater flood of relief, Domini understood that he could not possibly know who she was.

Of course he sounded different, and so did she. In Paris, four years before, they had spoken nothing but French ... Sander as fluent as she after the many years he had lived and worked on the Left Bank.

And her name, the name his sister had used in the introduction, would mean nothing to him. Of course! There was no earthly reason why Sander would connect Domini Greey, a New Yorker with no trace of a French accent, with the headstrong young girl he had known in Paris. When her father had disowned her, he had told her angrily never to use his name again, and she had not.

Domini was her true name, and so was Greey. Didi had merely been her father's fond childhood nickname for her, one she had not been able to shrug off for much of her life because of the many famous likenesses her father had painted during Domini's growing years, that happy period the art critics still referred to as the Didi Years. And although Domini had grown up as a member of her father's household, loved and accepted and using the name Le Basque, she had never had a real right to it. Her father had not married her mother.

Sander could not possibly know who she was, and moreover Domini needed no introspection to decide that she didn't want him to know. There had been too much hate between them; too many hurtful things had been said. And if Sander was still blind, he must very surely blame her to some extent for his condition, just as she had blamed herself at the time.

'Surely you haven't fainted again,' Sander said with a heavy touch of sarcasm, and Domini realized that she was taking an inordinately long time to answer the question he had put about the state of her health.

'I'm .. .fine,' she said, pulling herself to a sitting position so that the blanket fell away to her waist. With a small sense of unease she noted that someone had removed her heavy sweater and replaced it with a man's shirt. Domini never wore a brassiere.

As if he had seen, Sander said, 'Your clothes are on a chair. Perhaps you'll want the sweater; it's cooler up here than in the gallery. You were bundled up like an Eskimo ... cable-stitch sweater and a fur lining in your coat. My sister says you look young and healthy, so we thought perhaps it might be a case of overheating.'

Which didn't tell Domini who had removed her sweater, although she had a good guess. Not that it mattered. He had mapped the territory long ago, mapped it and claimed it with a vehemence the mere memory of which sent a tingle running through her core, caused her skin to grow heated and her heart to grow chilled. How could she ever have been naive enough to think she could handle a man like Sander?

But maturity had given her some poise and common sense after all. Sander's sightlessness, tragedy though it was, made it easier for Domini to prevaricate, although her voice was still jerky in the aftermath of traumatic shock. 'Overheated . . . yes, I suppose that's it.' She paused, fighting to control her words and her overwrought emotions. 'I didn't feel too hot, but I must have been. I ... I can't think of another thing that might have caused it. I've never fainted before in my life.'

'You're not pregnant?'

Because that brought back memories, her voice was shaky. 'No,' she said.

'Or anaemic?'

'No.'

'Well, we'll soon find out. Several women share a loft nearby, and one of them is a nurse. When you fainted, Miranda closed the shop and ran down the street to see if she happened to be off duty. They should be back very soon.'

Domini licked her lips and was glad that Sander could not see the uncharacteristic sign of stress. 'If your sister ran off, how did I .. .get up here?'

'I carried you to my bedroom,' he said coolly. 'Is that what you're so nervous about ... being in a blind man's bed? Then relax, I'm not as dangerous as you seem to think. I've never forced a woman in my life.'

Suddenly it was too much for Domini. Hit by the bitter irony of it all, she started to laugh and laugh and laugh. And she didn't stop until Sander reached down to the bed, seized her arms forcefully, and slapped her full on the face.

Domini lay tremulous as a leaf in Sander's bed, face still stinging from the sharp impact of his hand, arms still hurting where his fingers had dug so deeply into the flesh. But those physical things were not the cause of her present distress. This time she knew his rough behaviour had been necessary; she knew she had been hysterical.

Nor was she even conscious of her physical state, beyond a sensation of weakness so extreme that she felt she could not move a muscle. Moments after the slap that had restored Domini to some kind of rationality, Sander's sister, Miranda, had materialized in the doorway, bringing with her an attractive young off-duty nurse. Miranda had clicked on the light and started to lecture Sander at once.

'Sander, how could you!'

Miranda's teeth had been practically chattering with anxiety and anger, all of it directed towards Sander. 'You should never have brought her upstairs! I nearly died of fright when I realized what you'd done! What if you'd fallen on the way? Think of that torn stair carpet! What if you'd missed the broken floorboard in the hall? It's practically rotting through! I ask you, Sander, what if!'

'Then there'd be two patients.' Sander's voice had been clipped, irritable. He had swerved on his heel and left the room at once, moving with a certainty that suggested Miranda should not be quite so anxious for his safety in these familiar surroundings.

The nurse had done little more than look Domini over to ascertain that her state was not critical. Domini had been given an injunction to see her doctor, and over her objections Miranda had procured the number and promised to make a phone call, setting up an appointment for the following day if possible. The nurse had administered a tranquillizer and a stern order that Domini was to stay exactly where she was for the next few hours.

'But my Christmas shopping,' Domini had protested feebly.

'You'll stay there for the afternoon,' the nurse had said with professional firmness. 'At least until you have to pick your daughter up. Didn't someone say she's in day care?'

'I'll wake you up later,' Miranda had offered. Domini had acceded because to object would have taken more strength than she was capable of; shock had taken its toll. And then Miranda and the nurse had departed, clicking off the light and closing the door softly behind them.

With all now silent, Domini at last began to think over the improbable chain of circumstances that had culminated in the day's events. It was all so incredible ... or was it? 'There is no coincidence as great as that of life itself,' someone had once said. Her father perhaps?

The day's happenings, Domini realized, were not the result of pure coincidence. Sander was a New Yorker by birth, and it was natural enough that upon returning to this country he would move in with his widowed sister. In any case, it would not have been extraordinary for him to gravitate to SoHo, just as Domini herself had done.

SoHo was among other things an artists' colony, as was its more famous namesake in London. In the nineteenth century it had been built as a manufacturing and warehousing district, with stunning cast-iron architecture to be found in such abundance and variety nowhere else in the world. The innovative cast-iron construction permitted huge fluted pillars, marvellous exterior ornamentation, immense windows that admitted floods of sunlight, and enormously high ceilings. When Greenwich Village attics had become too expensive and the area too much of a tourist trap, artists, photographers, and artisans had begun to discover the huge lofts and low rents of SoHo ... the name not a copy of its British counterpart, but an acronym meaning simply South of Houston Street. Galleries and good restaurants had followed, and the revitalized district was now an exciting, energetic melange of art and industry, where twine factories and fantastic food emporiums existed side by side with jazz lofts and theatre workshops. Loft rents were no longer so low, as Domini well knew. But there were still pockets of poverty and low rental in SoHo, and the district continued to draw artists as honey draws flies.

No, there was no particular astonishment to be found in Sander's presence in the SoHo art colony. Had he been living there all along, only a few blocks away from Domini and the daughter he did not know he had fathered?

Even the carving of the unicorn ... that, too, Domini realized, had been no far-fetched accident of random chance. Sander had seen the famous painting in the Louvre; she knew that for a fact because he had told her so. At the time something in his words had conveyed the impression that he might have studied it with care. Perhaps he had memorized it with some subconscious part of his mind. He must have done, if he could remember the unicorn well enough to carve a fair copy four years later, even in the dark void of his sightless world. Perhaps he could see it in his mind, as she could see it in hers, just by closing her eyes.

She closed them now, shutting out the gloomy wallpaper and the dingy panes of the attic window. Was it really only such a few years since she had been a forthright, fearless eighteen-year-old ready to conquer life? In terms of maturity, it might have been a decade ago. Sander had called her unreal at the time, and with hindsight Domini now knew it had been an apt description. What an odd mixture she must have been then, so knowledgeable in many ways and so naive in others. How much she had known of the world, and yet how little! Still, with the unconventional and extraordinary childhood she had had, how could it have been otherwise?

Usually Domini tried not to dwell on the past, because to do so was to feel a great sadness for the lost simplicity of her childhood, the essence of joy that life and Sander had destroyed. But drifting in a strange bed, in a strange house, with a strange weakness assailing her limbs, the past seemed very close, very real. In her mind she could see old scenes like pages turning in a memory book ...