Only in the Night (16 page)

That night Antonio and Eliza’s lovemaking was savagely exciting, possibly more so for having seen Anwar again. He was so incredibly sexual, he set both of them on the edge of desire all the day long. They spoke about it at one point in the night and Eliza knew that Anwar was insinuating himself further into their life.

Although the calls from him remained as frequent as they had ever been, it was several weeks later before she was to see him again and that was in Cairo where she was obliged to go for a three-day meeting with the Egyptian authorities. Anwar knew of the meeting and invited her to stay at his house.

Eliza left the hospital for Cairo on the ferry and travelled from there by car to Luxor where she took the plane. En route to the city, it was not the conferences she was going to attend that were on her mind but the three days she would have with Anwar. The sexual tension between them had been building for months. That day when they rode together with Antonio it was confirmed to her that an affair with Anwar was inevitable. In the many conversations they had subsequently had, he had been blatant about what he wanted from her, explicit but never vulgar. They had revelled, both of them, in his long and clever seduction of Eliza. He had been priming her to join him in that special place where he liked to dwell: the twilight zone of sexual ecstasy.

On arrival at the airport in Cairo, Eliza was surprised and disappointed that Anwar was not there waiting for her but had instead sent his Sudanese, Ahmed, and a
driver to meet her. She was only several minutes into the city traffic before she was missing Upper Egypt and possessed by a horrible suspicion: Anwar had only been playing with her. She had not understood that and now felt a fool for the degree she had lusted after a sexual encounter with him.

In the midst of the traffic and chaos of Cairo there were pockets of sublime peace and beauty and one of these was a small stretch of green park that stretched along the bank of the Nile. Several hundred yards into this haven a pair of ornamental iron gates broke high garden walls covered in ivy and flowering vines. The house beyond was small and unpretentious by comparison to other gilded and ostentatious palaces. Its beauty was in its simplicity and serene setting. The wide veranda overlooking the Nile and surrounded by flowering gardens was where Eliza found Anwar waiting for her.

There are men in this life who possess a certain decadent beauty: sexual, charismatic, dangerous. They can be for some women an aphrodisiac, for others someone to run from. Eliza ran
to
Anwar and into his open arms. In this first passionate kiss she felt as if she were dissolving, but she was not alone. Anwar lost himself in sexual desire for Eliza. They hardly said a word as he, with his arm around her waist, walked them through the house and up the white marble staircase to his bedroom.

Eliza loved Anwar’s body: smooth, honey-coloured, muscular flesh, his sex long and with girth, his scrotum large and voluptuous. She found it impossible to keep her hands from fondling him, her lips from caressing him, her tongue from licking him. She set him on fire.
He burned to have everything sexual and erotic with Eliza and knew that he would. He raised her up in his arms and she wrapped her legs around him. In one thrust he impaled her on his sex. She called out, a shout of release, pain, pleasure. He bit into her breast as hard as he could. She screamed in pain and he licked the spot and sucked hard on her nipples as he carried her thus to the bed. With hands tight around her waist, he eased her on and off his rampant penis in thrusts so exquisite to Eliza that she came in a strong orgasm. Sexual ecstasy was hers. For hours she was lost in it; Anwar’s passion, his depravity, his joy in keeping her there, saw to that. Only several hours later, when exhausted from expending so much energy in orgasms, did she come out of her sexual reverie and realise where she had been, the various sexual acts he had drawn her into.

She was neither shocked nor displeased with herself or her lover, merely overwhelmed by the thrill of such sexuality. She had had oral, anal and vaginal sex before, had enjoyed the excitement of sexual toys and unguents that accompany adventurous sex, she had felt the light sting of a belt, but had never craved more of those things with such desperation as she now craved them.

And Anwar? He was enchanted by Eliza’s hunger for him and his sexuality, surprised by her enthusiasm for debauchery; this cool-looking, pretty blonde was a match for him in sex, as strangely he had always known she would be. He slipped into a silk robe and left the room to return a few minutes later with a bottle of champagne and a bowl of the best Beluga caviar. ‘I’ve sent all the servants away except Ahmed,’ he told
her as he fed her dollops of the delicacy by scooping the black beads on to the end of his finger and placing them in her mouth.

After several glasses of champagne and more caviar he took her in his arms and held her. They remained silent but the sexual tension was still there, for them something that spoke volumes. Anwar released Eliza and from the bedside table took a long silk chiffon scarf. He tied her wrists to the headboard of the bed while kissing her on the mouth and breasts, sucking on her nipples.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asked.

‘No. But why this when you know I’m willing to submit to anything, everything, you want?’

‘Because I don’t want you to touch me. I want you to be totally at my will, enslaved by me for sex and sex alone. That’s fair because I’m prepared to be that way for you whenever you want me to be. Strangely, I think you’re the only woman I’ve ever said that to,’ he told her, looking surprised that he should even feel that way. And once more he kissed her, only this time there was passion and a deep affection together with the lust he felt for her.

The erotic sensations Eliza experienced were overwhelming. Anwar had done well to tie her hands to the bed. Several times she wanted to run away from him and the lust he engendered in her when, with the help of beautifully carved jade objects, he penetrated her orifices and manipulated them at the same time as he was having oral sex with her.

Here was sex for Eliza at its most wild and over the top, erotic desire employed for complete and utter pleasure, to leave all else in life far in its wake. There
was on that day, and for all the days and years that were to follow in Eliza and Anwar’s affair, a mutual desire to go another step further down the erotic path they chose to walk together. Their affair was based on a common craving to spend their precious hours together in a world of sexual bliss where each of them in their own way would reach sexual nirvana.

Eliza was at once swept into Anwar’s life, which she could only term a full-time social existence. It was rich and glamorous and sometimes interesting, more often than not amusing with its clever gossip and sensual undertones. But it was a full-time job playing that game. It was the sort of life that Julian and Dulcima Forrester had always shunned and had taught their children not to appreciate or take seriously, merely to taste it as it came and for what it was worth and then drop. It was the sort of life John, her first husband, had enjoyed and would have lived if he had not been dedicated to medicine. It was a life which Eliza had only lived before for the love of her husbands, and which she actually loathed. But it was always fun and a little naughty to eat the frosting off the cup cake. And sex with Anwar was like that; the most delicious and wicked chocolate frosting imaginable. So she did tolerate, even sometimes enjoyed, his way of life when she was obliged to.

These then were the men, Antonio and Anwar, her friends and lovers, that remained in Eliza’s life for all the years she lived and worked in Egypt. It was always in the forefront of her mind that to have as uncomplicated and open-ended an affair in the freedom the three of them had chosen meant that one day it would be over. But none of them ever expected that
it would end as it did, with Eliza compelled to leave Egypt, never to return.

In her years in Egypt, she came together as a whole and complete human being, finding new dimensions and happiness in her life that in the past had eluded her. Her children were at last hers; they loved and respected her not as a mother but the woman she had become, the woman she had always been but had never found before. Having found the self she had lost when she had been an eighteen year old, naive and unworldly, she was now able to sustain the great blow that was to change her life once again: the death of her mother, and at a time when her own health was deteriorating and she must leave her lovers and beloved Egypt.

Eighteen months before Dulcima died she made a journey to Egypt with Effie and Constanza. It had always been Dulcima’s dream to see the pyramids of Giza and to take a cruise up the Nile. Arranged by Anwar, it was a marvellously extravagant holiday such as the Forresters had never taken. Being land rich and cash poor, their lifestyle had never allowed them that sort of luxury. It was a happy and most memorable holiday for them, not least because they all got on so well.

There was nothing sad about their farewell when the holiday came to its end. The Forresters were used to coming and going in and out of each other’s lives; they had never been a family for sadness or crises. Eliza returned to Upper Egypt, her work and her lovers. In the months after Dulcima’s visit there arrived as usual the marvellous letters they had always written to each other and which Eliza had shared with her lovers. Her mother wrote like a poet. Soon after her return these
letters were arriving not from Little Barrington but the Villa Montecatini. She had moved there permanently, wanting to spend the remainder of her days there. How well Eliza could understand that. She often yearned to return to Tuscany herself and found it extraordinary that she had never been back since she was eighteen years old.

Close to a year after her mother’s visit, the climate began to take its toll on Eliza’s health. It was not so much that she had anything specifically wrong with her that needed treatment, it was a matter of the years of intense heat and dust, high humidity and hard work, exposure to a variety of diseases, all of which no longer sat well with her. Finally it became a case of leaving Egypt for the sake of her health. Still she struggled on, Antonio becoming more and more concerned about her. A leave of absence? she suggested.

Distress showed in his face when, after examining her, he told her, ‘Not a solution for your lungs. Fresh clean mountain air and a different lifestyle for the rest of your days, that’s the only solution.’

‘Not now,’ she begged.

‘Before the year is out, I insist upon it.’

‘Please don’t tell Anwar, or anyone else for that matter. Let’s just carry on as normal for as long as we can while I try to find a replacement.’

Antonio laughed but there were tears in his eyes. ‘Don’t bother. You are irreplaceable. And besides, the work that we’ve done here these last seven years has been a very thorough grounding for the Egyptian doctors and nursing staff. It’s time for them to take over and run things. Who knows? In a year’s time I too might be leaving Egypt, returning on a more
permanent basis to my life and practice in Florence. It was always on the cards, you know.’ Then he pulled her into his arms and kissed her with passion, love and admiration.

In her heart Eliza knew that Antonio was telling her that if Egypt was over for her, their long-time erotic romance was over too and it was time for them both to be moving on. Quite clearly life here without her meant the end of an era for him. It had always been inevitable that one day they would part; for them love and commitment had never governed their romance or their life together. The tears in Eliza’s eyes told him what she could not find words to express: Thank you for the years you gave me, and the love. What she did manage to say was, ‘Promise me you will tell no one about my health, that I intend to leave Egypt? Let’s please keep it our secret until I’m ready to go. I would like for the time being for us to carry on as if nothing untoward is going to happen. And when it does, no fanfares.’

‘I promise.’

Several months after Eliza knew her fate, Anwar, Antonio, and she made a two-week journey by sea plane up the Nile to its source in Ethiopia. It was part hospital business and part adventurous tourism. On their return sad news awaited them: Dulcima had died in the Villa Montecatini twelve days before Eliza’s return. She had been unreachable and the funeral had been held without her. All four sisters were soon on the telephone to her assuring her that Dulcima had not suffered and had sent her love to Eliza before she died. They spoke about the funeral which was private, attended only by the villa’s staff and the four sisters,
no husbands or children. It was Dulcima’s wish. That and to be buried next to her ancestors in the family crypt on the small island on the lake half a mile from the villa.

Eliza was distraught. She retreated for a few days: riding her mare into the desert to stay in the Bedouin tent where she mourned Dulcima. Antonio was supportive and rode out to sleep with her every night. Anwar sent Ahmed to stay with her and care for her until she was ready to return to the hospital.

Though she had lost her mother and mourned her, Eliza was able to let Dulcima go. In the desert, and on the soft warm breezes, her mother’s voice seemed to whisper to her things she had taught Eliza and her sisters. ‘Be brave about letting loved ones go when the time comes, it makes it easier for them and it’s better for you.’ ‘What always makes your father and I happy is to see you girls running free, getting on with your lives, not ours. That’s a great reward for us.’

When Eliza did return to the hospital, she found several letters from her sisters, all of them loving, sweet and supportive, and a large manilla envelope containing a copy of Dulcima’s will. The house and all the property of Little Barrington had been left intact as one estate to be shared equally by Constanza, Clara, Effie and Dendra, on condition that it remain as one estate within the family. The Villa Montecatini, its contents and all property and the farm, were left to Eliza.

It had never occurred to her that such a prize would be hers. She was overwhelmed by Dulcima’s generosity, by her having left Eliza her most precious possession. At last she had a home of her own to go
to, the house and countryside she had always loved, the place where she had been happiest in love. Eliza felt quite faint to learn of it, and had to sit down. She struggled to reach a chair and very nearly toppled over, saved by a doctor who was just entering her office. He helped her.