Acts of Love (7 page)

‘When we were together on that beach when he gave me to you, I had no chance. He had been priming me to want more, always more, sexually. And I did. I had already been longing to know what it would be like to be made love to by you. I succumbed to that Ahmad Salah Ali charm, the exotic life you led. I was tantalised by the erotic world you played in. Jason saw to it that I knew a great deal about your fame as lover and
libertine. He teased me with you, until I could barely look at you without desire. Every time you touched me, or kissed me, no matter how innocently, the perfume of your skin excited me. It had not occurred to me that you had both planned it, were driving me to a fever-pitch to have sex with you, until the moment he rolled me over into your arms. And then it didn’t matter, because I was at last where I wanted to be. Although, as those waves rolled over us, I was for an instant frightened to be made love to by two men at the same time.

‘Later on, just how far would such lust as ours take us, was the question that niggled in the back of my mind. But I loved Jason unconditionally. For that very reason I was so happy in our unusual arrangement. Another factor? I knew instinctively that my life was safe in yours and Jason’s hands. It was so easy to give myself up to you and a
ménage à trois
. It made the three of us so happy, so much closer, and that was what we all yearned for. It was at first frightening when you and Jason reached down to the dark side of my nature and brought it into the light. But the rewards, ah, yes, the rewards. I revelled in my own sexual lust for the first time in my life. Not yours, Ahmad, not Jason’s, but my own, and I loved myself for it as I had never done before.’

Here Arianne stopped and drank from her glass. She could see the excitement in his eyes, could sense his erotic thoughts. He had been her devil in sex. And they loved each other for it. It was what still bound them together. That and their mutual love for Jason.

Ahmad raised his glass and drank, plucked a small white peach from the champagne flute and fed it to her across the table. The flesh tasted sweet, quintessentially peachy. A waiter arrived to refill their glasses, and on his heels two more to serve them Eggs Benedict, of which they were both so fond, and a platter of tiny sausages and strips of bacon done to a crisp. A silver salver draped in a white damask napkin edged in lace proffered hot brioche and croissants. Crystal bowls of apricot and strawberry preserve and golden honey were placed on the table.

It all happened at just the right time, giving them a chance to recover from Arianne’s confession. The hot black coffee was poured and after a waiter had added hot milk to it and three teaspoons of sugar to Ahmad’s cup, they at last retreated to leave their charges to their morning feast. Ahmad studied Arianne’s
face for several seconds. She had always retained that cool, natural beauty. It still had a sweetness to it, and innocence. Who in that dining room would ever guess the fire and passion, the depths to which she could go in her sexual lust? Her hunger to experience all things erotic? That she could hold two debauched and depraved libertines in check with her sexual acumen, her will to please them and herself?

He chose a sausage and found it spicy and delicious. Before he raised his fork he smiled at her. With a slight gesture, a movement of his head that indicated wonderment, he broke the silence, ‘How is it we never had this conversation before?’

Arianne, who had been admiring the succulent breakfast laid out for her, picked up a fork and looked at him. She sighed. Ahmad and she gazed across the table at each other, both aware that quite unexpectedly some deep emotional problems had surfaced and sorted themselves out. ‘We didn’t because we couldn’t. We weren’t ready.’

‘Ready truly to let go of Jason?’

‘Maybe,’ she answered, surprised that the thought should suddenly no longer give her any pain.

‘Dead is dead, Arianne.’

‘I tell that to myself a lot, Ahmad.’

‘Telling is one thing, believing is another. Believe, dear heart. Believe it.’

‘I’m trying. And I am getting better at it.’

‘Good.’

Ahmad wanted to say more, but thought better of it. Instead he gave her one of his warm and endearing smiles – the sort that made women comfortable, made them feel loved and admired by the handsome charmer who seduced them with no more than that, or with a certain look, full of yearning for them. He buttered the corner of a croissant, broke it off, stood up, went to Arianne and fed it to her. He kissed her affectionately on the lips, and squeezed her shoulder. Several women in the room, having seen the kiss, watched with envy as he returned to his seat to drape the napkin over his knees. Hovering waiters fluttered even more around the table.

Breakfast was delicious, but also fun. Ahmad amused her with tales of his life, and gossip about people whom she had met
through him. He was an intelligent and witty man, good company. The love and affection of a man, a happy sexual life: she had been depriving herself of these things far too long. It was only here with Ahmad over breakfast that she realised how much she had stopped living, how empty and lonely her life had been without Jason and him there. Twenty-four hours ago she could not see that. The longer breakfast went on the further she seemed to be drifting from her years of mourning. Although she had thought her time of grieving had come to an end months after Jason’s death, she could now see that it had not. The world without Jason was coming back into focus for her in Claridge’s dining room on a Sunday morning in November.

Even as she and Ahmad walked from the dining room and through the hotel she sensed subtle changes in herself. It was as if for the first time in years she was seeing things with her own eyes, not through Jason’s. She felt as if she were suddenly stepping back in time, to the time before meeting him had changed her life, before she had become obsessed with being the woman in the centre of a sexual love-triangle. It was a strange sensation, looking at a world without them in it. They were there, firmly set in the background of her life, and yet they were the past. It seemed doubly strange because Ahmad was right there on her arm, and Jason somehow still very much alive for them in spirit if not in body.

On the doorstep to Number 12, Three Kings Yard, Ahmad took both her hands in his and kissed them in turn. He gazed into her eyes, then lowered his lips to her hands and repeated his kisses. Then he touched her cheek with the back of his hand, traced her lips with the pad of a finger. A most poignant goodbye. ‘
A tout à l’heure
.’ A smile, he turned away from her and was gone.

‘See you sometime’, she paraphrased for herself. The perfect goodbye for them, she thought. And suddenly life was an adventure again as it had not been since Jason’s death. How different her life might have been these last years had he not so abruptly vanished, had there been a body to bury after the accident, something tangible to mourn.

She sighed and placed the key in the lock of her new home, entered the hall and enjoyed the warmth and comfort of being
whole again and in her own surroundings. She felt very safe. She lit a fire and after removing her jacket lay down on the deep, comfortable sofa in front of it. She drew over herself an ivory-coloured cashmere car-rug lined in a dark shirred beaver and relived some of the hours she had just spent with Ahmad. But not many. More emotionally drained than she realised, her eyelids heavy, she fell into a sleep too deep for dreaming.

Chapter 5

Arianne’s life, her character, her basic personality with all its needs and desires, and their fluctuations, did not change because she had moved house. Nor because she had suddenly become aware that she was still living in the shadows of in-loveness with Jason. Only the circumstances of her life had changed.

It was the same Arianne who awakened in the pretty four-poster bed on Monday morning. For so many years, her thoughts upon awakening had been of Jason. Her obsessive love for him had been the adrenaline of her life. She had bathed and was having coffee in the kitchen thinking of nothing more than the various routes by which she could walk to work from Three Kings Yard to Christie’s on King Street in St James’s, when she realised something was missing. Jason. The realisation that he had receded from the forefront of her mind appalled her. She gasped.

Arianne covered her face with her hands, closed her eyes and tried to conjure him up. For a moment, she became frightened because it was difficult, very difficult. That had never happened before. He was there, but less vividly. She began to cry because she understood she was letting him go. Ever since his death, she had been able, by sheer will, to keep him alive as her companion, pretending to herself that he was more absent than dead, even though she accepted that he was, in truth, the ghost she chose to share her life with rather than any living, flesh-and-blood man.

Tears stained her cheeks and she wiped them away. She tried to control her emotions, the sobbing. It took some time. She sat there in the kitchen looking through the window at the ivy-covered brick wall. He was gone, never to return, gone. She understood that now he was the past. From this time onwards they would only ever be a love that had been. Her memories. Her entire body trembled with one last deep sigh. And then she could
feel her sadness seeping away. For some minutes, she sat on the high chair next to the chopping-block, quite dry-eyed now, and calm, still staring at the ivy-covered wall.

She roused herself to make a fresh cup of coffee and brought it up to the bedroom. She drank it while arranging her things in the drawers of the painted green, French eighteenth-century dressing-table, the last of her belongings from Belsize Park to be put away. Arianne looked through the bedroom window on to Three Kings Yard to check the weather before she dressed. Cars were being shunted back and forth; someone was entering one of the commercial properties in the yard; and there was Ida walking through the arch to a courtyard beyond. One of her gentleman’s flats, thought Arianne, and smiled. The yard in Mayfair was a chic address, and looked frightfully smart, but was somehow homey, cosy even. She felt happy.

The sun was out when she locked the front door and left the yard. The route she had chosen today was down Davies Street to Berkeley Square, then from there to Piccadilly as far as Fortnum & Mason’s, and from there down King Street to Christie’s. What a joy it was to walk through Mayfair to work. No having to ride the buses. No being trapped with strangers in the traffic going into the West End. She sensed a new spring in her step. Her eyes were feasting on every sight, her ears listening to every sound: London coming alive for another day.

Christie’s was an exciting place to work, a crossroads of humanity and works of art, some high, some low. People in droves, from all over the world, passed through the portals of the famous auction house. Buying and selling. Looking and dreaming. It was a place of treasures found and treasures lost. A sort of art stock market that fluctuated, made and broke records and fortunes. A barometer of the art world. The world’s furniture and paintings and books,
objets d’art
, were on view to be sold to the highest bidder, by the third stroke of the wooden mallet. The famous formula could still electrify a saleroom tense with expectation: ‘Going, going’, a bang of the hammer, ‘gone’. A place where discriminating buyers and sellers met, collectors and dealers, scholars and critics, along with the Mr and Mrs Joe Public domiciled anywhere from New York to Timbuctoo, from Tokyo to Manchester, who were into the commodity of ‘art’ to
embellish their egos and often their homes too.

For Arianne that part of Christie’s had always been exciting, but something she really did not quite know how to deal with. She was part of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ Christie’s. It was there that she felt more comfortable. She was very good at her job as a researcher in the rare books, manuscripts and antique maps department. It suited her temperament. And she was emerging as an authority on travel books of the eighteenth, century, more especially those covering the Ottoman Empire. It was a solitary sort of job most of the time, except when she was reporting her findings to an associate or a client.

It had been Ahmad’s collection and passion for rare books, and his great-grandfather’s library in Cairo that had inspired her to do something with her own knowledge and love of rare books. She had always had an interest in them. Like her father, she had collected all sorts of books printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had been a hobby that the good doctor and his little girl had shared. She had grown up with books and a father, instead of a mother and father. It had been a tremendous blow to her when, after Jason’s death, she had had to sell her library to cover some of Jason’s business debts. That experience had driven from her the desire ever to collect anything again.

Arianne enjoyed her job, for the books, for the book collectors, and the colleagues in her department. People were somehow different when involved with books, and most especially rare books. It was difficult to explain why, but Arianne thought it had something to do with their being a work of art that was simultaneously tactile, visual and cerebral. They were a written record of the past, history, that was made to come alive in the present. Moreover, once Arianne had stepped into her tiny work area at Christie’s, she left all else behind. It was escape into a refined and protected world where she could lose herself. That too suited Arianne and her character.

Several days after she had moved into Three Kings Yard, Arianne became aware of how much time she had on her hands without Jason in the forefront of her thoughts. It was a strange sensation, being suddenly aware again of the time and freedom that had always been there since Jason’s death. She was enjoying
her aloneness, the aloneness that came with letting Jason go along with the
ménage à trois
whose continued presence she had willed as a secondary ghost to haunt her life. In the days that followed she would have the occasional twitch of guilt because she was feeling so happy without them, but that soon passed, never to return.

On the Thursday of that first week in her new home, a colleague at work asked her out to dinner and was pleasantly surprised when she accepted. On the Saturday she agreed to have lunch at the Ritz with a bookseller from New York. And now it was Sunday and she was once again in a state of British Rail nirvana on the train to Chipping Wynchwood to visit Chessington Park and Artemis.

Bright sunshine and a nip in the air, the scent of autumn, as she stepped on to the station platform. Several people: an elderly pair, three young boys looking scruffy, two attractive young girls, a middle-aged man with a very heavy piece of luggage, a couple, attractive and well dressed, arms around each other, emerged from the railway carriages to rush down the platform to the exit and the waiting station-master. Arianne was the last to hand in her ticket. This time he was smiling. She greeted him with, ‘What a glorious morning, Mr Pike.’

‘Certainly is,’ he confirmed. ‘Could you spare me a minute, Miss?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Follow me then, Miss. I’ve something to show you.’

They walked through the station-house into the small rose garden he tended so lovingly. Prepared now for winter, it was far from attractive. In the midst of the small walled-in garden bloomed what must be the last rose of summer. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Full-blown and white, its petals without a blemish of rust, it had a fragile, serene beauty.

‘I was hoping you would come this week, Miss. Lady Camilla Palmer is at her peak. She’ll go over soon. Covered her every night so old Mr Frost wouldn’t get her. I reckon she heard you remarking last week as how you misses my roses, so she decided to bloom for you.’

‘She is truly lovely, Mr Pike.’ Arianne bent down to take in the heavy scent of the rose.

* * *

When Arianne stepped from the taxi on to the gravel courtyard of Chessington House she had pinned on to the lapel of her belted tweed jacket the rose called Lady Camilla Palmer. The taxi was just pulling away when she saw Ben Johnson and his uncle emerge from the house. Arianne liked the warmth in the smile Ben Johnson gave her as he and his uncle greeted her. She liked too the way he admired her rose.

Smiling back, she offered, ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ looking from him to the rose and back again into his eyes. For a second their gaze locked. And with that gaze there passed between them that invisible something that can happen between two people. A spark of life that can inspire instant liking. A flicker that, duly fanned, could flare up into a friendship.

‘The last garden rose of summer?’ asked Sir Anson.

Sir Anson Belleville’s words broke her gaze, but not before she registered the beauty lurking in the dark blue eyes of Ben Johnson. Sensuous, maybe, under that twinkle of charm, and the kindness she saw in them. Deep, mysterious sapphires, she thought, before she forgot about Ben Johnson’s eyes and answered ‘Yes’. Impulsively she removed the flower from her jacket and, holding it in the palm of her hand, offered it to Sir Anson, for him to catch the scent. ‘A perfume not to be missed, Sir Anson.’

Lowering his head to take in the sweet odour of rose, he corrected her, ‘Anson, just Anson will do, Arianne. It’s no breach of good manners to call me Anson. I have, after all, known your stepfather and mother for years, and your mother even before that. What a perfect rose.’

There was something about the way he delivered that hitherto-unknown piece of information, that made Arianne curious. What was the present relationship between Artemis and Sir Anson Bathurst Belleville? She offered the rose to Ben for a sniff of its perfume and smiled at him.

Something enigmatic about Arianne Honey, thought Ben Johnson as he placed a hand under hers and another at her wrist. He guided her open palm as it proffered the rose to his face. Looking over it at her, he was once more, as in the dining room the week before, attracted to the natural, serene beauty she possessed. That and her vulnerable femininity. He sensed a
certain stability of character, which meant a great deal to him. More durable, he concluded, but otherwise not unlike the rose she was offering him. But what kind of woman really stirred beneath that lovely façade? His curiosity was aroused.

He nearly intoned ‘A rose by any other name …’, but suppressed the predictable Shakespeare. He was not looking to play Romeo to her Juliet. His smile broadened and he told her, ‘The last rose of summer. What a lucky lady you are to have been given such a jewel.’ The two men then walked on.

At the front door, Arianne felt inclined to turn round to watch them circle the fountain and go down the drive. There was something about Ben Johnson, something beyond the sexiness she saw in his eyes. Perhaps a hint of pathos in them? She heard the two men’s laughter, and watched Ben dash a few steps in front of his uncle and turn around to face him while continuing to walk backwards down the drive. He was quite animated and waved his arms about several times, presumably to make a further point to his uncle. Not for the first time did she admire the apparent closeness between the two men. She saw Ben use his fingers to comb back his light brown hair. It was straight, worn slightly on the long side. It helped preserve in him an appealing boyishness. She noted that he was an attractive man.

Still walking backwards he suddenly broke into some fancy footwork, dancing like a boxer and punching the air, ducking and diving before some imaginary opponent. His antics made Arianne aware of how good a body he had. He moved like an athlete: the same wide shoulders and strong torso, narrow hips. He stopped and when his uncle caught up the few paces that had separated them he turned around and fell into step with the older man. Still talking, he placed an arm through his uncle’s and they proceeded towards the garages. Arianne caught herself admiring the rear view of Ben Johnson. Most especially his round, firm bottom in the tight-fitting jeans. Ben’s jacket fitted closely around his narrow waist: it was of chocolate-coloured glove-leather, aged and well worn. There was something rakish about the white silk scarf slung casually over one shoulder, like those that men usually wear with a velvet-collared, black cashmere coat to evenings at the opera. The slanted heels of his black cowboy boots looked well used.

It came as something of a surprise to her to find herself taking so much notice of Ben Johnson. And then, without any sadness, she thought of Jason, and his many pairs of cowboy boots. But Jason and his boots seemed a long time ago. A far-off memory. Arianne rang the bell to Artemis’s flat.

On the train returning to London that evening, Arianne did not abandon herself to the mental limbo characteristic of most of her journeys. Instead she stared into the darkness and watched the occasional light flashing from some window in the distance. She recalled her day at Chessington Park. Artemis had been at her best. She was as oblivious as ever of her daughter’s arrival; but she had obviously taken pains to see that Arianne was included in her day.

Artemis had invited three men to lunch and an afternoon of bridge. Nothing unusual about that. Artemis was that
femme fatale
sort of woman who has little time for other women. She did have one or two ‘best girlfriends’, but they were women like herself, who even in their old age spent more time with men than women. She had explained to Arianne that it was a casual, country Sunday-lunch party in the flat: cook would be producing a succulent rib of beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, candied carrots, creamed spinach, and a crême brulée for pudding. No starter, because they would have champagne and bite-size smoked salmon sandwiches first in the drawing room. And if Arianne was bored while they played bridge after lunch, Artemis had arranged for her to ride Chattanooga, a white hunter, or find something to amuse herself with.