This Other Eden (31 page)

Chapter
Nineteen

Sexual situations

Rendezvous
.

In the end it was not Max
who found Rosalie but, as before, she who found him. Gossip travels fast in the
country and on Max’s fourth day back in Ireland, Rosalie’s grandparents heard
word that a rich, mad American was driving from village to village, asking
about an old couple called Ruth and Sean who had great taste in vegetables.
They of course guessed who it must be and sent word to Rosalie.

She
found him in a bed and breakfast in County Cork.

‘Will
you get up now, Mr Kennedy?’ (for such was the name Max was travelling under)
‘It’s half past eight already and there’s a young person to see you.’

The
voice of his landlady brought Max struggling to consciousness and it was a
struggle, for this was a big hangover. He conducted his usual morning reconnaissance,
moving his tongue about to see what he had slept in. Crisp, fresh, linen. Not
bad, he thought. A sheet, that sounded hopeful. Then a worrying idea occurred
to him. Maybe it was a shroud. No, it couldn’t be a shroud, he was face down,
they don’t bag you up, face down, surely, not in a Catholic country. No, Max
decided, he definitely wasn’t dead, although he felt as if he
had
died
and was now being unceremoniously dug up. He tried to recall where he was, and
more importantly where he had been. A linen sheet, that must mean a bed. Slowly
it all began to come back to him. The fiddler and the bloke with the weird drum
that you hit with both ends of the same stick… the singing, his spirited
rendition of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ … the eight pints of Murphy’s and eight
Paddy chasers. That’s right, he was in Cork, and he was looking for a beautiful
girl.

‘What
in the name of goodness have you come back for! Shouting about my granny and granddad
all over the bloody county? I ought to shoot you where you sleep, that I
should, you stupid American bastard.’

That
beautiful soft lilt. Music, even on a hangover. He’d found her.

Rosalie
walked into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. The landlady had been
slightly scandalised about letting her go up, but short of physically
restraining Rosalie there was not a lot she could do. Max turned over under the
quilt to face her as Rosalie drew back the curtains. The light was blinding.

‘Please,
you’ll rupture my pupils,’ Max protested, grabbing for a pair of shades.
Rosalie threw open the windows.

‘Jesus,
the stink of booze in here is disgusting.’ She stared down at him with a
pitying expression.

‘You
still mad at me then?’ Max inquired.

‘Of
course I’m still mad at you. Gracious, you make me think you’ve saved me from
the cops and then it turns out you’ve completely messed it up. Wouldn’t any
girl be angry?’

But
despite herself Rosalie could not restrain a smile. He did look cute, she
thought, lying there in bed, blinking behind his shades like a startled rabbit.
The fact that she had so far escaped prison had rather softened Rosalie’s
attitude to Max’s disastrous attempt to help her elude the Garda. He had
tried,
after all.

‘My
God, the state of it,’ she continued. ‘Can it think? Can it talk?’

Max
found her tone a little patronising and felt the need to assert himself.

‘Excuse
me, but it takes more than eight pints of stout and eight Paddy’s Scotches to
leave me without the use of my faculties.’

He had
said the wrong thing. The process of European

Federation
had quickened the already relentless pace of cultural conformity, and Rosalie
was big on maintaining Irish icons.

‘Paddy’s
is not a Scotch, you ignorant philistine. Paddy’s is an Irish. Scotch is Scotch
and Irish is Irish, and if you can’t tell the difference then you should stick
to whatever foul designer poisons they call drinks in Hollywood.’

‘Well,
pardon me and six Hail Marys.’

Max lit
a cigarette. One of the smaller ironies of the complete degradation of the
environment had been the revival in the fortunes of the tobacco companies. It
was extremely difficult for health experts to get over-concerned about the
long-term prospect of lung cancer when the mere fact of breathing was giving
people respiratory disorders. Besides which, lung cancer held few fears for anyone
with even a modest income, since a new lung could be bought virtually for the
price of installation. The development of ‘zipper surgery’ plus the fact of
millions upon millions of people starving around the world had meant that the
price of ‘dual organs’, i.e. those of which the body is supplied with two, had
dropped to a pittance. Solo items had, of course, maintained their price. It is
difficult to persuade even a desperate person to part with their heart. A human
kidney, however, could often be obtained more cheaply than properly force-fed
duck liver.

‘You’ve
no idea how revolting that cigarette smells, mixed up with the foul fug you
seem to produce naturally.’

‘Listen,
it’s morning, I’ve been on the booze. If I smelt good it would be weird.’

Rosalie
decided to let it go.

‘I
asked you why you were here.’

‘Well,
it’s partly social, you know? I thought we were starting to have fun.’

Rosalie
let this go. ‘And the other part?’ she inquired.

‘It’s
kind of connected with what we were talking about before,’ said Max.

‘I’ve
told you,’ Rosalie snapped, ‘I wouldn’t get involved in your stupid pal’s
stupid film script if you were to
—‘

‘Nathan
is dead,’ Max interrupted, rather expecting the drama of the situation to pull
Rosalie up somewhat.

‘Who’s
Nathan?’ Rosalie replied, putting paid to the drama.

‘He’s
my stupid pal. The one who hid under the table at your granny’s place.’

‘Oh,’
said Rosalie. ‘Well, what’s that got to do with me?’

It was
not that Rosalie was a callous person, but she had seen many things die and she
could scarcely even remember what the film writer had looked like.

‘Just
before he was killed, he pitched a screenplay concept to Plastic Tolstoy. I
think Tolstoy had him killed because of what that concept was.’

‘I
heard that films was a cut-throat business,’ said Rosalie drily.

‘Nathan
was going to base his story on the idea that it is the Claustrosphere
Corporation who secretly funds Mother Earth.’

During
the previous few days, Max had often wondered how Rosalie would take this idea.
He had feared that she would laugh right in his face. Had she done so, he had
planned to take her through his reasoning, explaining how Nathan had died, how
only Tolstoy could possibly have arranged it, how only Tolstoy had heard
Nathan’s idea, how Tolstoy had been the object of the final, furious thoughts
in Nathan’s life. But Rosalie was not laughing. She was thinking. A bell was
ringing somewhere far away in her memory. A bell which she did not wish to
answer.

‘Sounds
awful stupid to me,’ she said, but hesitatingly. ‘I wouldn’t pay to see a thick
film like that.’

Max
could see that he had hit a nerve.

‘What’s
so stupid, Rosalie? Nobody knows who backs you. It’s been thirty, even forty
years. You’d think somebody would have taken credit by now, wouldn’t you?’

Pick
up.

Rosalie was remembering a
night five years previously. A night she had spent with Jurgen Thor.

She was
twenty and had joined Natura two years before that, after failing to turn up
for her first lecture at Trinity College. It was not long before her qualities
of courage and intelligence were noticed, and she had been discreetly recruited
into Mother Earth. There followed a gruelling eighteen months of training,
towards the end of which she had met the great man.

She and
fifteen other trainee combat activists were attending a secret political
briefing at which Jurgen Thor was speaking and he picked her up, it was as
simple as that. There were seven young women in the group. Thor had chosen her
and she had let him. She hated to admit it, but her role in it had been that
passive. The moment Thor entered the room he was clearly deciding which of the
girls he was going to screw and he had picked her. All women know when they’re
being eyed up and Jurgen Thor made virtually no attempt to cover it. As the
world’s premier environmentalist he was often accused of wearing his heart on
his sleeve. Anyone who had ever met him knew that it was another organ
altogether.

Rosalie
was rather irritated by this casual, arrogant sexuality and when, after the
briefing, one of Thor’s aides told her that the boss would like to see her,
every instinct said she should tell him to stuff it. But she didn’t. She was
completely thrilled. Jurgen Thor was the Green God. The man to whom all
environmentalists looked for leadership and inspiration. The one person with
the authority to face down the world’s leaders and get things done. Ever since
she was a girl Rosalie had admired Jurgen Thor above all people. She had also,
like millions of other women, wondered what it would be like to make love to
him. She still wondered. He was the strongest, most handsome man she had ever
seen, and even though he came on like sleaze, he still had more sex going for
him than a brothel on Watership Down. Rosalie did not normally fancy big men,
but Jurgen Thor was not just big, he was magnificent.

And so,
when her weekend leave came up, instead of going home to Ireland to see her
grandparents as she ought to have done, Rosalie flew with Thor in a Natura
helicopter to his magnificent home in the Swiss Alps. A home perched on a cliff
so high it actually still had snow and ice upon it, despite the disappearance
of such stuff elsewhere in the mountains.

Icy
passion.

The stairway down from the
rooftop heli-pad led straight into Jurgen Thor’s bedroom, where a bottle of
schnapps was warming over a candle. Rosalie was utterly knocked out. It was a
room of such splendid sexiness, just being in it could have dropped the
knickers on a concrete nun. The room occupied the entire top floor of the house
and every wall was glass. For 360 degrees all that could be seen was mountain
range. The huge snowy white bed stood dead in the centre of the room, and from
there it was possible to make love on top of the world.

‘I do
not bring many women here, yes?’ Jurgen Thor had said. ‘This place is very
special to me.’

‘I’m
not surprised,’ Rosalie had replied, looking about in awe.

Jurgen
was an expert. He enfolded Rosalie in his arms and seemed almost to kiss her
clothes off. At least, she could not remember him unbuttoning her blouse, taking
off her shoes or undoing her trousers and yet there she was, lying on that huge
bed in her underwear as Jurgen Thor knelt beside her, looking down and smiling.
Even on his knees he towered above her.

‘Jurgen,
you’ll take it easy, won’t you?… I’m new to this.’

‘It is
perhaps … the first time?’ Jurgen inquired gently. Rosalie did not reply,
and Jurgen knew that it was.

‘There
is no need for the worrying, please,’ he assured her calmly. ‘For me there is
only pleasure in the pleasure of the woman. I make love to make women happy.
That is the only reason I do it.’

He
meant it too. Nothing feeds a man’s soul the way a woman can feed his soul by
telling him that he just made her eyes roll and her loins melt. Jurgen
understood that the greatest thrills could be found, not in losing oneself, but
in inducing abandon in another. To take a woman to the peak of pleasure, to see
her forsake her control. To see her hovering between ecstasy and despair. To
hear her
plead.
That was sex. Domination by breathless consent was what
turned Jurgen on. To be the catalyst, whereby a strong woman or a nervous girl
or indeed, as in Rosalie’s case, both, surrendered her body to his passionate
manipulation. Here lay the route of his relentless sex drive. He was a sensual imperialist.
Any fool could bend another to their will by force or payment, but to make a
woman beg you to do as you please, to have her offer herself up that you might
take her and keep her as long as you wished, now that was worth going to bed
for.

Jurgen took
especial care with Rosalie. A virgin’s sigh was tribute of the highest order.
No better proof could be found of a man’s sexual and spiritual power. To
overcome her pain and bring her to a celebration of her abandonment, that,
truly, was a triumph of lasting splendour. For she would always remember that
first sigh, and all other men would be measured against it. In a way, whoever
could do that for a woman would own a part of her for life.

Such
was the logic of love to a control freak. Jurgen tolerated no moment of abandon
in himself. He could not bear for a woman to begin to work
her
wiles
upon him. Should she start to stroke or touch his body beyond the simple return
of his kiss, he would clasp her tight until again it was he who was charting
the course of their passion.