Stephanie (2 page)

‘Which must be seldom.'

‘Let's see, did you meet her once?'

‘I saw her with you at that concert at the Sheldonian.'

‘She's a great one for music. I'm almost tone deaf, you know.'

Stephanie put out her cigarette, watched the last smoke curl up as the end was crushed in the ashtray.

‘She's your second attempt, love. Tell me about your first. Didn't you dump her in Greece?'

‘That sort of thing.' Errol was not a man to show either annoyance or embarrassment. ‘It reminds me, I must get something to take home for Polly, as it's her birthday soon. I wonder what those fellows on the beach have for sale.'

‘Oh, pretty shoddy stuff.'

‘I'm not sure. That thin little scarecrow I took photos of – he had a couple of brooches that didn't look bad.' Errol picked up a case containing two lenses. ‘I might go up to the fort first, see if I can get a telescopic view of the headland. Will you be all right for an hour?'

‘You left me to my own devices in Bombay often enough. I didn't get into trouble. Remember?'

He grinned.

She said: ‘When you smile your eyebrows peak up in a most devilish and attractive way. I wonder you haven't had three wives.'

‘I shall yet.'

‘You know what my father calls you? He hasn't met you but I suppose he knows I wouldn't fall for an ordinary bloke.'

He bent over her. ‘What does he call me?'

‘Errol Flynn.'

He studied her, without a smile this time.

‘It won't do. I never conquered Burma.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘It was a joke. You're too young to understand.'

‘Tell me.'

‘Never. It's nothing – Ah!'

She attacked him and he had to grasp her hands. They wrestled and almost upset the tea things.

‘Tell me!'

‘Help! Help!' he called, pulling himself free and retreating into the bedroom. ‘It was only a film he was in. I swear it isn't worth repeating. Stop it, woman!'

‘Explain!'

She grabbed at him again and they collapsed onto the bed. Laughing still, his eyes kindled, he pinned her back upon the bed and pulled the bathrobe vigorously off her, so that she was wriggling naked in his arms. He kissed her, and with fierce gestures grasped her flesh, pressing it, kneading it, smoothing it, inciting it. When she lay back for a moment defeated and breathless he stood up, tore off his own clothes and came back upon her and took her again with an avid relish that left the afternoon's lovemaking well away.

Later they played tennis for an hour, a game they both knew pretty well. He had all the heavy guns, but with her nimbleness of foot and long legs she was all over the court returning everything he sent across. He won the first set 6–4, but in the second, tiring, he found himself trailing 2–5. Thereupon he changed his tactics and began to play heavily sliced shots which, when they bounced, leaped away at disconcerting angles. Perhaps it was not he who beat her in the end but her own sense of fun. Seeing a lob come over and knowing it was going to break extravagantly, she would begin to laugh and so muff the return. He won 7–5. Bitterly complaining that he had cheated her, she was led away for a long cold beer and a rest in the amber light of the setting sun.

They dined late, off Goan prawn curry and chicken Basquerie and pineapples and ice cream. The warm air made the darkness more intense outside the circle of the lights.

He said: ‘Let's see, we've three more days. Tomorrow's free. Sunday morning I've ordered a taxi to take me into Old Goa. I want to photograph the ruins and the churches. It was quite a city once.'

‘I know.' She would have liked to go with him, but he had clearly not included her in the idea, so there it was.

‘You'll not be bored?'

‘Bored? When there's all this sun and this sea?'

‘Tomorrow … let's bathe first thing and then go into Panjim. Coming through, it looked a tatty little place, but I'm told there's one good eighteenth-century church, and there's a fishing village at the end of the peninsula I'd like to see – can't remember its name – Dona something. I'll get the same taxi.'

‘Sure. Fine.' She felt sun-and-sea soaked and tired and beautifully relaxed and slightly tipsy. There was no good wine, so they had drunk gin and tonics. Her normally talkative nature was lulled. Life was extravagantly good, and she was happy to drift along with him gently steering.

It was not to turn out quite to plan. Errol woke the next morning with sinus trouble and a splitting head: too much sun, he supposed, so they cancelled the trip; he spent the morning in bed, and she went on the beach alone.

From the hotel you walked past the swimming pool and the arranged deck chairs, and it was forty-odd steps to the beach. Errol was quite content with the pool, but he had humoured her in this, and they sat each day under one of the bamboo and raffia umbrellas within a few yards of the sea. She went to her usual place and spread a towel, lay on her face half in sun, half in shade.

They had been away ten days: it would be just over two weeks in all, and it had done her a power of good. Oxford had become a bit of a rat race. The crowd she went with – Tony and Bob and Fiona and Zog and the rest – all had more money than she had and a pretty well insatiable appetite for spending it. She'd had a wonderful first two years. She had found herself bright enough to keep up with the work and yet still be able to have the fun of going to parties all over the place and sitting around in endless late-night conversations. She had turned down the option of a year abroad at the end of the second year. A good many of her immediate contemporaries reading Modern Languages had been away this year, but as most of her close friends were reading other subjects she had decided to stay with them, as it were, and carry straight on. Her languages were so good already that she thought with a bit of cramming before Schools she ought to be sure of a reasonable second. Thank God the University had not yet split the second class, as she had heard they might.

And after the ‘reasonable second', supposing she got it, what then? She thought she could probably land a job as an interpreter. Her father was completely bilingual in French, and she had become the same. If the worst came to the worst, she knew that Errol would find her a job. Always supposing that before then she had not married him, or they had not split up. She was aware that either might easily happen.

It was through Zog that she had met Errol. (Zog was not his real name but everybody called him that because he was Albanian and was some not-too-distant relative of the former King.)

Zog knew Sir Peter Brune, the rich scholarly aesthete, who had an estate near Woodstock, and had got her invited along with Tony Maidment and Fiona Wilson to one of his well-known weekends. Errol Colton was a fellow guest and was alone because his wife had flu. Stephanie had seen this attractive young-middle-aged man, and had noticed his eyes kindle when he first looked at her. She was not unused to being looked at admiringly but this was a little different. His look was not a stare for he had the good manners to glance quickly away, but it was very concentrated. And when he was introduced to her he knotted his eyebrows and looked at her and spoke to her as if no one else in the room existed. Nor it seemed did anyone else at the party or in the world exist for him except her for the rest of the weekend.

And it went on. Telephone calls, flowers, letters. She hadn't the guts – or the iron will that would have been necessary – to resist him. Nor did she very much want to. He was dynamic and wickedly attractive. Also he was funny. Most of her boyfriends, of whom only two had been more than friends, were too young and too solemn for her. She had a light, quick-firing intelligence which Errol's agreeable sophistication exactly matched. Within two weeks they were lovers and they met whenever they could arrange it. (He was often out of England.) But this trip, this holiday together, was, as it were, the first public announcement.

He had not hesitated to invite her, although he said it was against ‘company rules'. He was clearly deeply smitten – ‘besotted' was his word – and could not pass up such a chance. She had accepted in the first place for the simple personal reason that she wanted to be with him, but the excitement of visiting India was a strong secondary incentive.

So it had happened, and it had been a wonderful two weeks' enjoyment without a future or a past. There was already something between them more than the sexual urge, strong though that was. They sparked each other off, sometimes with brief quarrels, but always, it seemed, the sparks were flying without real anger – and laughter at the end. A true relationship was beginning.

All the same, though she lived a free and easy life, she didn't particularly fancy herself as a home-wrecker. Errol's reassurances to the contrary still left her feeling uncomfortable. Just now and then when she was alone she thought about it.

‘Morning, miz,' said a voice. She rolled over and sat up.

It was the thin little Goan they had spoken to before. Though there were virtually no beggars on the beach, there was a persistent procession of people trying to sell you something, from bananas and soft drinks to saris and carpets, from copper and brass trinkets to jewellery and mosaics. Errol had a cheerful but immensely firm way of getting rid of them in the shortest possible time, but he had consented to look at this young man's tray and fumbled over a ring and a brooch or two before sending him on his way.

‘Sir coming?' said the young man, looking at her and then hopefully at the hotel.

‘Not this morning, Krishna.'

‘Good rings,' said Krishna, showing the jewellery of his teeth. ‘Very good, very cheap. See? Look this. Beautiful brooch.'

‘Thank you. I'm just going to swim. And I wouldn't want anything unless Mr Colton were here.'

‘Thank you. I'm just going to swim. And I wouldn't want anything unless Mr Colton were here.'

‘Sir come later?'

‘Not today, I think. Perhaps tomorrow.'

‘You like take one back for him, see? This. See this. Suit you, miz. Beautiful stone, eh?'

‘Beautiful, yes. But not today. Thank you, Krishna.'

The young man lingered in a way few of them dared to linger when Errol was around. Stephanie got up and shook the sand off her towel. Two Goan girls had come up unnoticed and were sharing a corner of her shade, squatting, whispering together and smiling at Krishna. Stephanie folded her towel and hung it on the raffia roof of the sunshade. Then she walked towards the sea. After a few yards she stopped and turned to look at the hotel. The sun wafted in her face, burned her feet; the surf was hissing as it crawled in over the sand. Krishna was walking back, starting the long trek towards his village; the girls still squatted whispering to each other.

What had she left there? A paperback, a pair of sunglasses, a cotton hat, a thin wraparound dress, a purse with a few rupees in it. If they went, they went; but she didn't think they would. The Goans were known for their honesty as well as their good manners. She plunged into the sea with a crow of delight.

A half-dozen Indian women were bathing near her still wearing their saris. What price emancipation?

When she came back twenty minutes later the girls had gone as if they had dematerialised, but her possessions were untouched. She dried her feet and looked at the blood oozing from her heel where she had caught it on a piece of half-buried driftwood. Very careless.

Her body had almost completely dried already, her hair was half dry simply from three minutes' walking back along the beach. Her heel was stinging. It was nothing, the merest cut. But this being India, did one take extra precautions? Errol had some antiseptic stuff. Worth a walk? It was nothing. And she could see if he was feeling better.

She climbed the steps to the hotel but disdained the taxis always waiting to whisk guests up to their bungalows, and negotiated the steep path, cutting corners off the conventional road. The swim had invigorated her and she felt ready to try the four-minute mile.

In the drive outside their bungalow two cars were standing, one an Ambassador, the maid-of-all-work car and taxi that proliferates throughout India, the other a sleek black Mercedes. Such a new and shiny Mercedes is as rare in India as a Rolls in a Welsh mining village. A chauffeur in a dark suit was sitting at the wheel. As she went up the steps she heard voices.

Errol was entertaining two Indian guests. One she had met in Bombay, and was a business associate of Errol's, Mr Mohamed, who had visited him at the Taj there. He was a stout bearded silent man who wore too much jewellery. The other man, clearly the owner of the car, was a different and superior type. A tall smooth man with a long neck and an oval head on which the greying hair was slicked back so smoothly that he looked more bald than he really was. He wore a suit of cream shantung silk with a black silk shirt and a cream tie, a diamond tiepin, diamond cufflinks and a black silk handkerchief. He exuded a quiet importance. He might have been the maitre d'hotel at an exclusive London restaurant, or chief adviser to some oriental dictator.

He and Errol were seated. Mr Mohamed was standing holding some documents, which were clearly under discussion.

Silence had abruptly fallen at her entry.

She said: ‘Oh, sorry. I didn't know anyone was here.'

‘Oh, come in, come in, darling. My friends called unexpectedly. Of course you know Mr Mohamed. Mr Erasmus is a colleague from Hong Kong.'

Mr Mohamed bowed from the waist. Mr Erasmus slightly inclined his head. She saw the table was spread with maps and what looked like shipping lists, and a wallet was open with some money in it.

‘Sorry,' she said again. ‘I cut my foot and thought I'd get some antiseptic for it.'

‘In there, darling; second drawer, I think.'

‘How's your head?'