Antigua Kiss (14 page)

When she asked him about it, he said, 'It's a GMT-Master, a chronometer for navigation, and pressure proof, so they claim, to a depth of one hundred and sixty-five feet. It shows precise time simultaneously in two zones.'

As he spoke, his breath fanned her cheek and made her remember an incident she had put to the back of her mind.

It had happened before she was married. Mike had come to supper at the cottage. Afterwards, when her father had gone into the hall to answer the telephone, Mike had seized the opportunity to kiss her.

She had never minded his kisses, providing they remained gentle. She hadn't liked fiercer kisses, and she had resisted his attempts at other caresses. That night, when she had felt his hand sliding under her jersey, had struggled free, protesting that her father might come back at any moment.

Not until months later—when they were married—had she understood that her father's return had been an excuse to cover the fact that she had not wanted him to touch her in that intimate way.

Yet now, as she looked at Ash's hand as it moved briskly up and down, chafing the skin between her elbow and the sleeve of the tee-shirt he had lent her, she had an unnerving moment of self-enlightenment.

If he, now, were to slip his tanned fingers under her shirt and then upwards, over her midriff, to explore and caress her bare breasts, she would not feel the same distaste she had felt long ago, with Mike.

Indeed, merely thinking about it sent a thrilling tremor through her body. A deep blush burned from her forehead down to her throat.

'I'm much warmer now. I feel fine. Don't you think we ought to be getting back?'

She moved restively in his arms, and was thankful when he let her go.

'Maybe it would be as well if you had a check-up with my doctor,' he said, on the drive back. 'I don't mean to suggest that a black-out as brief as that is anything to worry about, but it could be a warning signal that something is slightly wrong. When did you last have a check?'

'I haven't seen a doctor for years. I've always been healthy.'

'I have a check every year.'

'Do you?' she said, in astonishment. 'But you look just about as fit as it's possible to be.'

'I am, and I want to stay that way. A charter skipper is responsible for other people's lives. He can't afford to go sick. To have a yearly check seems to me like having a car serviced or boat refitted.'

'Very well, I'll have myself checked.'

'I'll fix it for you.' He took a hand off the wheel to place his palm on her forearm. 'How are you now? Your skin feels normal.'

'I'm fine, merely very embarrassed at making such a fool of myself.

I'm not usually a highly-strung person—rather the reverse.'

'Perhaps you don't know what you are,' was his enigmatic comment.

Christie would have liked to ignore the remark, but her curiosity got the better of her. 'What do you mean?'

'A lot of people go through life being whatever is expected of them.

It's the line of least resistance; the easy way. As children they try to please their parents and teachers. They're punished if they don't. For a while, in their teens, they may fight the system, but in most cases not for very long. Then most of them revert to conforming. It's not quite as bad as it used to be. At least now it's widely accepted that early sexual attractions are rarely a solid basis for long- term partnerships.

In my observation, most people don't know themselves until they're in their late twenties, by which time it's often too late. They're trapped by their circumstances. Perhaps you're in one of those traps.'

'Not as far as I know,' she said stiffly. 'You're not, I feel sure'—with a trace of sarcasm.

She had felt there was something patronising in his reference to other people. As if he were a being apart, a natural superior to his fellows.

Ash said, 'No, but I had self-determination forced on me by my mother's death and my father's remarriage. No other woman's child could have won approval from my stepmother, and as my father was in love with her to the exclusion of all other feelings, I suppose he began to see me through her eyes, as an encumbrance.'

He took his eyes off the road to glance at her. 'I'm not complaining about it. I'd already had seven years of happy childhood with my mother. A spell of adversity didn't hurt me. It made life uncomfortable for a while, but I see now it was a good thing. Had my mother lived, undoubtedly I should now be in one of the professions in England, with a wife and children, and a small boat to sail at weekends. I should have missed my true metier; and if, at times, I felt dissatisfied I shouldn't have known it was because life had steered me away from my proper place in the world.'

'Is there only one way of life in which a person can be happy?' asked Christie. 'I should have thought there were several.'

'Maybe, but the majority of people never find even one of them. You told me the other day that Mrs Kelly had advised you to wait and see before doing your shopping here. It's the same with life. It's better to see what's available before making a commitment. What, at nineteen, did you really know about all the different kinds of men in the world, or about yourself? Not much. If your husband had lived, and your marriage had lasted, it would have been luck, not judgment.'

She could not argue with that statement. She knew she had been pressured into marriage; by Mike, by her own romanticism, by a moral code imposed on her by her father who would have been shocked and upset by the discovery that she was no longer the pure, innocent girl he had wanted his daughter to be.

Jenny had wounded him terribly by letting him know that she and Paul had been lovers long before their marriage. But Jenny had been a worry to both her parents. Christie could remember several angry scenes between Jenny and their mother in the last year of their mother's life when her sister, then a well-developed fifteen, had been out with boys on the sly.

Sometimes Christie had wondered if it had been Jenny's precocious enthusiasm for sex which had put her off it. At twelve she had still been a child, thin and coltish, dreamy and impressionable, more interested in books than boys.

Her sister had told her things which she hadn't been ready to know; earthy things which bore no relation to her ethereal idea of love.

'Your stepmother sounds a horrid person. Was your father happy with her?' she asked.

'She wasn't horrid. She had certain faults, as we all do. Hers were jealousy and possessiveness. I think she made Father extremely happy. She was twenty years his junior, very pretty and probably much less inhibited than my mother, who had been of his own generation. I suspect that Lorna gave him a much better time in bed, and he couldn't believe his luck. It's easy for a woman to enslave a man in that way, particularly a middle-aged man who feels his virility declining. Most women don't realise their power over men or, if they do, they're too shy or repressed to exert it fully.'

She wondered if he had any idea that he was talking to an extreme case of shyness and repression. An incurable case.

Seizing an opportunity to change the subject, she said, 'Is that sugar-cane in that field on the right?'

'Yes, they're starting to grow it again. Before Independence, it was the island's main crop. Then it was dropped and other crops substituted.

By 1975 it had virtually disappeared. But now it's being reintroduced.

Actually tobacco was the very first crop, then sugar, worked originally by white indentured labourers, and then by slaves brought from Africa. Five million Africans were shipped to the West Indies in the three hundred years between 1500 and 1800.'

'Five million!' Christie echoed, aghast.

'Britain was the first country to forbid the slave trade. That was in 1808, but the slaves already here weren't freed until much later. The Antiguan planters released their slaves—thirty thousand of them— in August 1834. But the French had slaves until 1848, and the Spanish didn't emancipate theirs until 1886. Not that freedom means much where there's still great poverty and minimal education. But that's past history. It's the future which is important.'

'You spoke of hoping, eventually, to have Heron's Sound as your private house. That means, presumably, that you plan to spend the rest of your life here?'

'If Antigua remains peaceful, as I think it will, yes, I do. I'm a New World man. I feel no strong links with Europe. Had I been alive in the last century, I would have emigrated to America and gone West. The idea of pioneering new country appeals to me, but all the remaining virgin territories are too damned uncomfortable.'

They had arrived at the Colony, so Christie did not utter the comment that the American West must have been uncomfortable in the early days. But she could imagine Ash there. Not as a settler, building a cabin for his family, taming the wilderness into farmland. Ash, she thought, would have ridden scout for a wagon train, or adventured alone, free and footloose.

That evening she wrote a letter resigning her job forthwith, and explaining the reasons why she was unable to give notice in the usual way.

The envelope sealed, she went to the main block to buy a stamp from the desk. There she ran into Bettina, who said, 'I hear you've been invited to Miranda's party on Christmas Day.'

'Yes. Will you be there?'

'I was at school with Miranda's younger sister. It was she who invited me to join her on a holiday here, just after my divorce. Then the job at the Colony came up, and I stayed on. I spend a lot of my free time at Miranda's place. It's gorgeous—very luxurious. Her second husband, Joss, is an American. He commutes from Miami. I don't know why they don't have a place in Palm Beach, but they seem to prefer it here.'

Her pcile sea-green eyes swept critically over the simple print sun-dress made for Christie by Margaret Kelly. Christie knew that it was unfashionable. The shoulder straps were too wide, the skirt neither full nor straight. But Margaret had made it, in Christie's size, with one of her own favourite patterns, and from a dress length she had had by her. It had been a surprise and a labour of love, and Christie appreciated it as such.

'Have you something stunning to wear?' Bettina asked. 'It will be a very smart party. People from Mill Reef will be there.'

Christie remembered Ash's reference to the rich Americans who had contributed to the restoration of Nelson's Dockyard.

'What sort of thing will you wear?' she asked.

'In the evening, a design of my own. We're invited for midday, but they have the main meal at night, when it's cooler and all the children are out of the way. Then there's dancing until the small hours.'

'I imagine Ash must mean to run us back here before that stage of the party,' said Christie. 'So the question of something special to wear for the later festivities won't arise for me.'

'No, maybe not,' Bettina agreed. 'Have you a driving licence?'

'Yes, I used to drive my father's car sometimes, but I haven't driven recently.'

'If I lent you my car, you could drive yourself back here and save Ash missing an hour of the party,' Bettina suggested.

Later in the evening, Ash telephoned Christie to tell her he had arranged for her to have a medical check in St John's early the following morning.

'After which you may have some last-minute Christmas shopping you'd like to do. Bring your bathing kit. I've booked lunch at Curtain Bluff, a hotel on a stretch of the coast which you haven't seen yet.'

Having told her what time he would fetch her, he said goodnight and rang off. Whether he had made the call from Bettina's cottage, or was somewhere else on the island, she had no means of knowing.

Later, in bed, but unable to sleep, she had a few moments of panic at the thought of the letter to England now lying in the Colony's mail-box, or perhaps already removed from it. But when she rolled over and saw John's small shape in the other bed her misgivings subsided. She felt sure she had done the right thing.

Her thoughts turned to her strange reaction to being in Ash's arms that afternoon. Not so much the first time—although that had been a disturbing experience—but the second time, when she had imagined him caressing her.

What would his kisses be like? Surely there couldn't be much difference between one man's lovemaking and another's? Clearly they varied a good deal in the preliminary stages. Some were shy and diffident like Bob Wright. Some had the aplomb of much, practice, like Ash.

But in the end, in bed, surely they must all be the same—possessed by a feverish urgency which made their mouths greedy, their hands rough until, their strange passion expended, they relaxed and were soon fast asleep.

Or might there be men who were not like that?

Christie gave a long, uneven sigh. It was a question she would rather leave forever unanswered than put it to the test and find out the answer was No.

Driving to town the next morning, she told Ash of Bettina's offer of the loan of her car.

'Certainly not,' was his response. 'You and I and John are expected to stay overnight, as is Bettina, I believe.'

He spoke as if he were not sure, yet he must know for certain. Perhaps he was being discreet.

His doctor was a youngish Antiguan who, after he had noted her medical history and was preparing to test her blood pressure, told her he had trained at one of the great teaching hospitals in London.

'Are you glad to be home?' she asked him.

'In most ways, yes. But after a long time away, there are some difficult adjustments. I miss the London bookshops. There isn't a first class bookshop here.'

His examination complete, he told her to dress. He was completing his notes when she came out of the curtained section of his surgery.

'As far as I can discover, you're in perfect health, Mrs Chapman,' he told her, with a smile. 'I think vour faint yesterday was merely the result of having been badly scared. Ash has told me something of the recent events in your life. Having lost your sister very -uddenly, it isn't surprising if you tend to be easily jpset. But that will pass.

Physically, you're in excellent shape.'