Mistress of Night and Dawn (2 page)

‘I love you,’ the Engineer said.

His wife turned to him and smiled in that way that always melted his heart and, almost as if in slow motion, pulled the straps of her nightgown to the side and allowed the flimsy garment to fall to her feet. She was naked underneath. The early rays of the sun ran through her long blond tresses, crowning the strands of gold with a delicate haze.

Riven to the spot by the beauty of his wife as she stood, feet slightly apart in a pause of expectation, the Engineer held his breath, his attention locked on every single detail of her unveiled body, the indescribable shades of pink of her nipples, the trace of her rib cage beneath the white skin, the dark yellow fire of her thatch, the elegant curve of her hips, the exquisitely thin circle of her ankle and the gold chain he had always known her to wear there. Then he looked up and their eyes met and his soul plunged into the green depths of her life.

He went to her and kissed her, abandoning himself to the cushioned softness of her lips, her bare skin wrapping itself around his own. This seemed to go on for ever, time around them falling to a standstill.

Finally, she broke away. His eyes were closed.

The sun was rising over the trembling horizon behind him, growing stronger with every passing minute, its fierce rays washing over his bare back and, for a brief moment, he felt dizzy, unsure what was hotter, the slow, sharp fire travelling across his shoulders or the cauldron of her mouth as she wrapped herself around him and teased and played with him as only she knew best.

The Engineer gasped. ‘Not now. Not like this,’ he protested. ‘I want to be inside you.’ It would be the first time they would make love since the birth and he wanted to enjoy it to the full, make it unforgettable.

His wife detached herself from him and he joined her on his knees, the rough texture of the jetty’s wooden planks an unwelcome burst of reality and discomfort. He stretched out and reached her discarded nightgown and spread it out on the jetty floor and then delicately positioned her across it and parted her legs.

Her arms stretched out from her side and her body opened like a cross, preparing herself for his imminent but welcome invasion.

They were sprawled out on the wooden jetty, spent, exhausted. The sun was rising over the trembling horizon behind them, growing stronger with every passing minute, its fierce rays washing over their bodies.

‘Come on,’ she chided him, getting to her feet. ‘What are you waiting for?’

And with that she faced the end of the jetty and took flight, causing a thousand ripples to shimmer across the broken surface of the lake’s dormant waters as she dived in.

The sound of her laughter echoed through the air.

The Engineer hesitated briefly and then followed her in, the impact of his body creating a further galaxy of concentric circles to race wildly across the already rippling skin of the lake.

The cool water felt invigorating and they splashed around like wild children in a playground, enjoying the way their hot skin was bathed with relief with every successive moment that passed.

‘Catch me,’ his wife called out, swimming towards the centre of the lake.

Seeing him approach, she jumped up and plunged under the water to hide from him, prolonging the game they were playing.

By the time he reached the spot where she had submerged herself, she hadn’t returned to the surface. He realised this was the deepest part of the lake, unlike the shallow edges where they had set off from. He waited for a moment but, overcome by a rush of fear, he lowered himself fully in the waters, below the surface. It took an agonisingly long time for his eyes to adjust to the submarine murk and he had to force himself to keep them open, against all his instincts.

Spinning around in panic in an attempt to see where she might be, he could feel his lungs bursting as he attempted to hold the air inside and not be expelled. He thrashed uncontrollably, the lake around him tightening its grip like hard wool around his body.

Finally, just as he was about to launch himself upwards to the surface of the lake in a bid to take in fresh air and make a further attempt, he noticed a blurred form floating just a few arms away from him. It was her. His wife.

Fixed in time. Her eyes were wide open and pleading. Her golden hair floating like an explosion above her head, her arms beating a metronomic rhythm by her sides. He knew she could see him. He made an attempt to reach her but the weight in his chest became unbearable and felt like it would saw him in two.

He looked down. Her ankle was caught in a jungle of weeds on the floor of the lake and she was frantically trying to set it loose but her energy was visibly waning and every successive tug only appeared to tighten the plant’s hold on her leg.

He was only half-conscious by the time he reached her and was unable to summon the physical will to untangle her from the weeds in which her ankle was held captive.

He gave her a last look and he knew she understood.

As resignation engulfed him, he first thought with a sense of relief that what was happening was not the fault of the Ball, and his final one was for his daughter who was sleeping peacefully just a stone’s throw away.

Slowed by the sheer weight of the water, he struggled to raise a hand and reach her cheek in a final gesture of tenderness but he failed to do so and his fingers grazed her left nipple. Then everything grew black around him.

East of the lake, a cloud passed across the sun.

In the cabin, the child had woken up and was now crying.

They were surrounded by noises, smells, movement and light. It felt like this early part of the night was merely a prelude to even bigger and strangely wonderful events.

Siv turned to Aurelia.

‘Isn’t this magical?’ she asked her friend.

‘It’s better than magical,’ Aurelia replied, glancing around in wonder as one strange thing after another caught her attention. There was something a touch askew about the evening, as if the atmosphere they were bathed in was having an insidious effect on her mind.

The ordinarily plain stretch of grass had been transformed and was now peppered with tents, each of them brighter and more flamboyantly decorated than the last.

From close up Aurelia could see that the temporary structures that housed the fair’s attractions were made of simple canvas and steel and that the flashes of red and yellow and blue that flicked into the sky from the roofs of the big-tops like dozens of fluorescent tongues were simply fabric streamers. But from afar it appeared as though a plague of rainbow-coloured mushrooms had sprouted all over the heath overnight and she half suspected that the whole thing might disappear again just as quickly right before their eyes as if the fair had grown out of nowhere and not been placed there by design.

The toffee apples that they had purchased at the ticket gate were the size of small pumpkins and the candyfloss that she had sampled from Siv’s paper bag was so light and fluffy it could easily have blown away before she managed to get it into her mouth.

Children, their faces half lit by the fairy lights that were woven over everything, ran unsupervised between the tent poles like pixies on a rampage. Even the sounds of sausages sizzling and machinery whirring and popcorn popping seemed sharper than usual.

Once they had passed through the hedgerow that marked the funfair’s entrance, everything had been magnified, right down to the feathery touch of the gentle breeze that wafted over Aurelia’s skin and sent a pleasant shiver all the way up her spine.

Aurelia felt on edge, both elated and terribly curious. Like tiptoeing on the edge of intoxication even though she hadn’t yet had a drop to drink.

Which was not the case for Siv, who had brought along one of her father’s thin silver hip flasks, which she had filled with gin and some mixer before they left the house and had regularly refreshed herself from it on the train taking them to London.

‘When I grow up,’ Siv remarked, ‘I think I might run away with a circus.’

‘You
are
grown up,’ Aurelia replied. They would both be celebrating their eighteenth birthdays soon, just a few weeks apart.

‘I mean properly grown up, and all that,’ Siv responded, as they walked past a stall selling cheap souvenirs and glow sticks. The old woman running it hailed them as they passed, loudly advertising her wares, but they ignored her and continued towards the circular marquee where the dodgems had been set up and loud sounds of mechanical mayhem and laughter rose all the way to the plastic roof.

A gaggle of teenage boys rushed past them, running in the opposite direction, still exhilarated from their turn on the cars. The smallest of the group, who could not have been more than thirteen and wore a combination of school blazer, blue Chelsea FC football shirt, ripped jeans and heavy steel-capped working man’s boots, brushed against Siv as they passed.

‘Watch it,’ Siv shouted.

The boy froze in his steps and gave her a dirty look, struggling for the right riposte but the sight of Siv standing there, legs apart in a confrontational pose, her tight denim shorts stretched against her thick black tights, an expression of provocative rage spreading across her lips, silenced him.

Although small in size, Siv, with her blond hair cut short, oozed menace. It was as if she was itching for a fight. The boy lowered his eyes and moved on, running after his companions to escape her stern gaze.

Once again Siv and Aurelia were blanketed by the sounds of the fun fair in full flow. Laughter, shouts, muffled melodies of antediluvian pop tunes duelling between the steady thwacks emanating from the coconut shy and the hiss of flames meeting paraffin as a man juggling fire sticks stopped to refuel and gave them a theatrical flourish. Aurelia winked at him and was rewarded with a wide grin before he returned to painting the night sky with streaks of light.

‘No need to be so aggressive,’ Aurelia chided Siv, who was still glaring after the boy. Aurelia had long grown used to her friend’s bursts of temper. There was a core of revolt lurking inside Siv, her against the world; it had been present since their first years together in primary school, an anger against the status quo, the state of things, that Siv used to compensate for her size and deceptive frailty. As a result, and although Aurelia had always been taller, now by almost a full head, Siv had from that early stage assigned herself the role of protector to her friend, and would have fought to the death on her behalf had any bullies crossed their path. Which they never did, as Siv’s pugnacious reputation rapidly began to precede her.

Aurelia remembered an occasion, just under ten years ago, when she had been wrongly accused of some minor misdemeanour in class, and tiny Siv had stood up with a roar of indignation and confronted the teacher, red in the face, crying out ‘That’s not fair!’, which had landed both of them in detention. The event had cemented their friendship once and for all.

‘Can’t let these uncouth Londoners get the better of us country girls, can we?’ Siv said with a grin.

Aurelia smiled back at her but deliberately left the question unanswered, not wanting to let a spat interrupt the happy mood of the afternoon. They’d been planning this for ages, the culmination of their half-term break, and they’d mulled over at least a dozen celebratory possibilities before deciding to travel to London for the day and then spend the evening at the fun fair on Hampstead Heath.

They had promised Siv’s parents that they would arrive home by midnight. Although they were old enough to stay out as late as they liked, together they had developed a reputation for mischief and both Aurelia and Siv had long ago learned that their home lives were more pleasant when they kept their parents pacified or at least informed about the length of their intended absences.

Other girls from their class had been to the fair over the Christmas break the previous year and sung its praises but, before Aurelia had arrived, she couldn’t imagine that it would be any different to the various fairs she had on occasion visited on the south coast and nearer to home. Maybe the Ferris wheel would be larger, the carousels faster and the rides more colourful, but none of that could explain the overwhelming desire she’d had to visit the fair on the heath rather than go dancing at a string of clubs in the West End with the ID cards that Siv had borrowed from friends who had already turned eighteen. So why in her heart and the pit of her stomach could she feel that sense of excitement and repressed expectation?

They reached the dodgems pay kiosk manned by a sullen white-haired man dressed all in black and Siv purchased tokens for three rides with coins fished loose from her pocket. Then they waited for their turn to embark on the car they had picked out, metal red and gleaming, bruised steel, parked at the other end of the floor, unreachable until the current session ended.

Aurelia was lost in a daydream, the sounds of Taylor Swift’s ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ punctuating the regular rhythm of random dodgem collisions unfolding in front of her eyes.

‘Those boys are staring,’ she heard Siv say, although at first it felt as if her friend’s voice was coming from behind a padded mirror. She snapped to attention.

‘Which ones?’ she asked, distracted and quite unconcerned by the attention they might be getting.

‘Over there? Can’t you see?’

Aurelia followed Siv’s nod of the chin. Three skinny teenagers at the opposite end of the track, all wearing jeans and flannel lumberjack shirts in various combinations of colours and cleanliness, were gazing at them with undisguised hunger in their eyes.

‘Oh . . .’ Aurelia said.

‘I like the one in the middle,’ Siv pointed out. He was the scruffiest and was slouching in a rakish way. His two friends were shorter and unremarkable, both holding bottles in their hands.

‘Not my type,’ Aurelia said.

‘They’re never your type,’ Siv interjected. ‘You don’t seem to have a type.’

Aurelia knew that Siv had, on several occasions, been with men. She’d had to listen to the fascinating if excruciating details with a mixture of awe and amusement. Of course, she sometimes felt attracted to boys, but never those whom Siv chose for her and she had always shied from moving any step further than holding hands or a formal goodnight kiss on the cheek. It was a combination of shyness and the simple fact that every time she had been involved in any kind of romance things had gone awry in often embarrassing ways.