Only in the Night (7 page)

‘You suit me perfectly. We are going to be very happy together,’ he told her as he removed his jacket and dropped it on a chair then began undoing the buttons of her blouse.

They stood naked in front of the fire, just gazing at each other’s bodies for several minutes, as if they wanted to etch them and this moment in their minds for ever. For John, she was lovelier, more purely erotic, without her rather shabby, cheap clothes. Naked, she was all young firm flesh with an edge of voluptuousness to her that elicited lust. She was at the same time obviously innocent of how thrilling sexual debauchery, the depraved side of sex, could be, yet with a body and a psyche ready and waiting to be mastered by sex with him. Eliza, a giving soul, was just as ravenous to give him pleasure in sex, affection, adoration, as much as she craved to have those same things for herself. He would teach her well how to love him, groom her for a London life. The very idea was enough to make him fall in love with her that little bit more.

John carried her to his bedroom and the four-poster
bed and laid her down on the bronze silk damask coverlet. He switched on the lamp on the table next to the bed and then lay down next to her. He was no rough-and-tumble, highly sexed farmer. Here was a man who seduced Eliza with finesse, by exciting every one of the more sensitive areas of her body. In no time at all she was willingly submissive, he her sexual lord and master. And when he did penetrate her for the first time, she was as if flayed, every nerve end exposed, ready to be set alight.

They missed their dinner that evening and dined instead on lust. By morning
she
was hopelessly in love with this very sexy and exciting man,
he
more than just smitten with her. They had breakfast together in bed, served by the housekeeper, Mrs Fanshaw. Eliza was wrapped in one of John’s silk Turnbull & Asser dressing gowns, he had no more than the bed clothes to hide his nakedness. After breakfast they bathed together and he made her confess that she was in love with him. They made love in the bath and Eliza was more surprised than shocked when he turned her over and made her take a position on her knees facing him. He caressed her breasts, even more sensuous and tantalising to caress in the slippery smooth warm water with one hand while using a rather beautiful sexual object to fuck her with. He explained he wanted to watch her come, concentrate not on his pleasure but on giving sexual ecstasy to her. She was both excited and moved by his selflessness.

After her bath, Eliza went to her room where she dried her hair and dressed. She felt somehow as if she were floating on air, that she had been transposed into another life. From her room she went back to John’s
room, then to his impressive library, then the drawing room – looking for him in the vast flat. This was the first opportunity she’d had to really look at his home, absorb the things she was seeing. The many silver-framed photographs on the piano in his music room, the others on a table or a desk: beautiful woman, famous statesmen, one of Princess Margaret, several recognisable actors, many hunting scenes – the Beaufort, Belvoir, the Vale of the White Horse, and his own Hathrop.

Unable to find him anywhere in the flat, Eliza went to the kitchen where she found Mrs Fanshaw, who offered her another cup of coffee. Eliza accepted and then sat down at the large wooden table in the middle of the room and asked, ‘Where is John, Mrs Fanshaw?’

‘Oh, he’s gone off to the hospital. Mr Hope-Quintin asked me to tell you that he’s sending the car back for you to take you wherever you want to go.’

Eliza tried to cover her disappointment, but there had been so few in her life that she did not actually know how to do that. Mrs Fanshaw could not help but feel sorry for her. John Hope-Quintin was a marvellous man and she enjoyed working for him, but he was a devil with women. He seduced them to his bed and his heart, he was kind and generous to them, but for only for as long as it amused him and did not interfere with the life of work and intense pleasure he had designed for himself. Even when, as Mrs Fanshaw suspected now, he was in love, he was what she termed a natural philanderer who never could resist a pretty young face whom he would seduce behind the back of the number one girl of the moment.

There had been so many Elizas and older, more
sophisticated beauties who believed they would be the one to grab the title ‘
wife of Mr John Hope-Quintin
’. How many times had she, without being disloyal to her employer, tried to warn the women off, most especially the young girls whom he tended to ruin for life with his seductive charm? They never listened or wanted to believe that here was a man they could not change, for he was quite straight with them about one thing: he was not looking for marriage. Mrs Fanshaw asked Eliza if she could sit down and have coffee with her?

‘Oh, please do. In our houses the kitchen is the heart of the house for everyone. Not so much in Little Barrington where I live now, but at our summer house in Tuscany there is always a pot of coffee and lovely things to eat.’

Eliza suddenly thought of Vittorio and felt a pang of love for him. She still missed him. Their love felt strange because it was drifting away from her so swiftly. It felt so different from the love she was feeling for John, this strange new world he was introducing her to.

She abandoned all thoughts of the past and Vittorio when Mrs Fanshaw asked, ‘Do you have something nice planned for the next few hours? It’s only until half-past one, you know, because the car will pick Mr Hope-Quintin up at the hospital.’

A light came into Eliza’s eyes at the mere suggestion that in a matter of hours they would be together once more. It was not missed by Mrs Fanshaw. As concerned as she was for the girl, the housekeeper did know that the doctor would give her a grand time for as long as he was smitten. All she said to Eliza, as she rose from the table with her empty cup in her hand,
was, ‘You go out there and have the best time you can because good times don’t last for ever.’

Immediately after she’d said it, the housekeeper sensed that Eliza hadn’t heard, because she was struck deaf by love. More’s the pity because she is the best of them I’ve seen for a long time: no gold digger, no social aspirations, too young to think of marriage, ruminated Mrs Fanshaw.

Eliza never left the house that morning. Life outside the flat held no interest for her. All she wanted was to be enveloped by the flat and
his
things, that spoke so strongly of
him.
She discovered his enchanting garden with its sculptures and trailing ivy, its late-autumn flowers and the long flight of iron stairs that led up from the basement garden to the much larger communal Ennismore Gardens, enclosed by an iron railing. The deserted garden was open only to the few of the residents living in the several blocks of flats surrounding it who had a key to the gate. Everything Eliza looked at she could only relate to as John’s. John’s flat, John’s garden, John’s neighbours.

A pattern emerged on that first day they had together in London but Eliza was too dazzled by love to recognise it, let alone do anything about it. The car, with Eliza waiting impatiently in the back seat, picked John up at precisely half-past one. He issued instructions to Banberry to take them to Wilton’s where he had booked a table for lunch, then took the back seat to sit next to Eliza whom he thought looked prettier and more seductive than ever. His kiss was deep and passionate. He stroked her hair and was surprised at how enchanted he felt to be there with her.

‘Now then, what did you do with your morning? Where did you go?’

‘Nowhere. I just stayed at home.’

‘Weren’t you bored?’

‘No, not in the least. Quite happy and content,’ she told him, and was surprised at the look that came over his face, as if he were disappointed. She was relieved when he said no more on that subject.

Instead he whispered in her ear, ‘You look delicious today but you were sublime last night.’

A flush came over Eliza’s face. She answered him with difficulty, choked with delight and pleasure that this older, exciting, experienced lover had found her so. Flattered, she told him, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you think so.’

He opened the rabbit fur jacket and was disappointed to see that yet again she had not dressed to his liking. She had shrouded her sensuality with a beige silk dress that had seen better days. John realised that she simply did not have any dress sense. He undid three of the small white mother of pearl buttons to expose some cleavage and then, taking the navy blue and white polka dot silk square from his pocket, meticulously folded it into a narrow band and tied it round her neck to finish it in a minute bow. It suited her long slender neck and she looked instantly more enticing, even a little chic. He found her quite irresistible and kissed her again, slipped his hand into the dress and caressed a naked breast.

After lunch he took her to South Molton Street and Brown’s where he introduced her to the proprietor who was given a directive: ‘Miss Forrester is coming out in London and needs some fashion advice. I would like
you to guide us today with some things for day wear, dinner parties, the opera. And I’d be grateful if, in future, you would be available to her.’ The next stop was to Church Street and Manolo Blahnik for shoes where a similar directive was issued.

Eliza did try to resist his generosity but several turns in front of the mirrors in the shops and the look of pleasure on John’s face made it difficult to keep up her protests. She was finally defeated after she told him, ‘You know I cannot afford these clothes nor can I accept them as gifts, how could I explain them to my parents? Actually they would be offended on many counts.’

His answer was quite simple. ‘Don’t tell them, or else find a clever way to explain them. I simply cannot squire you around London dressed as you are.’

And the subject was closed.

Chapter 4

All the Forrester girls knew how to rise to an occasion, that was the way they had been brought up. Eliza rose admirably to a London life with John, and a sexual life with him that kept her on the edge of lust very nearly every waking moment they were together. He had the measure of her. She was malleable, dizzily in love with her sexuality and with him. He could mould her any way he pleased and that excited him, kept him interested, even hungry to play with his young thing. It was flattering to him that she had no ambition but to please him, add something light and frivolous to his hectic life. And he did enjoy enormously that ability of hers to rise to the occasion, whether it be in bed or enjoying food she had never tasted, seeing a play she had never heard of, an opera, a ballet, even wearing with style a dress he had bought her.

Eliza, for her part, was not so much dazzled by John’s lifestyle – elegant, cultivated, a crammed social calendar – as fascinated by it, and by how important all those things seemed to be to his happiness. In her heart she thought, as her parents did, that there was something just a little shallow and unnecessary about it all – but love can dictate to the heart. She believed she could get used to John’s life, that it might be a
valid way to live for her just as much as it was for him. She was aware, but pretended to herself that she wasn’t, of how his friends and colleagues, the endless stream of shop girls, hairdressers and beauty therapists that he instructed to groom her, viewed her: as John Hope-Quintin’s young thing, an inexperienced country girl who had fallen into a good thing.

Eliza was having great fun, she was in love with a man who was besotted with her and all she had to do was lie back and enjoy being a part of his life. She truly didn’t give a fig for what people were thinking or saying. Part of the excitement of their love affair was that they spent every weekend in the country. She lived at home and sometimes John would be invited to stay over. Otherwise he lived in his house several miles away, which she visited for sex, a meal, but never to stay the night. That had been John’s rule, not Eliza’s. She was too besotted to think about rules of propriety, too anxious not to lose Mr John Hope-Quintin. In a matter of weeks he had seduced her away from her adolescent first love. He had opened worlds for her that she had hitherto never even contemplated.

But this was no one-sided love affair. John was, for him, very much in love with the pretty girl who had flowered into a beauty in his hands. He saw his Eliza as an uncultivated country girl who enjoyed the excitement of the new and the different world to which he was introducing her. Until John, she had not been ignorant of but indifferent to a cultivated existence because nature had taken precedence. John could appreciate that, it was part of her charm. She was after all no more than a light distraction, an amusement in his life, and she was a natural libertine
in bed, something he had not come across in the many women who had in the past been able to keep him interested, except of course the rare prostitute whom he did on occasion enjoy. He had no doubt that part of the excitement of Eliza and her sexuality was her youth; that she was totally his, in her inexperience and eagerness ready to follow him down any erotic path he wanted to take her.

In a matter of a few weeks after they had met it was obvious to them both that sex had a grip on them that was binding them closer and closer together. There was one little incident which should have been a warning to Eliza, but unfortunately was not. They were returning to his London residence one afternoon, standing at his front door, John placing the key in the lock. Eliza was momentarily distracted by a young man assembling scaffolding on the house next to John’s. He was dark and handsome, without a shirt and in tight blue jeans, rough and common-looking, sexy. She suddenly felt her heart skip a beat, not for the young man but for Vittorio. What was she doing here on a doorstep in London? Her beloved Tuscany and Vittorio, was that not where her happiness lay? A shiver racked her body briefly and was gone as soon as she felt John’s arm around her waist. She was snapped back to the here and now, the reality of her life. She was after all very happy with John, very much in love, and forgot the young man on the scaffold and Vittorio in Tuscany.

However, John did not. In that moment when he turned round to usher her through the front door, he had caught her looking at the young man who to John looked no more than a common stud. He was quite shocked at how jealous of the fellow’s youth he was,
how disgusted he was that Eliza should even find him attractive enough to give him a second look. Together they walked into the building and then into his flat. They went directly to his bedroom and once in the room he helped her off with the suede coat she had had been wearing and tossed it on a chair. He shrugged out of his own black cashmere double-breasted coat and, spinning round, pulled her tight into his arms. She laughed and kissed him all over his face.

‘At the front door, you seemed a million miles away. Tell the truth. Would you rather I paid that young tough out there a hundred pounds to come and fuck you?’

‘Are you mad? What are you talking about?’ she asked, quite horrified that he should even think such a thing.

‘I saw the way you were looking at him.’

A blush rose immediately to Eliza’s face. Taking his hands in hers, she kissed them and told him, tears of emotion in her eyes, ‘I was looking at that man because he reminded me of the first and only man I loved before you. I used to think about him all the time until I met you, and then he vanished from my life, my every thought.’

John swept her off her feet and into his arms. Carrying her to the bed, he whispered huskily, ‘Prove it,’ as he urgently tore the clothes from her body.

There was a certain intensity – was it anger? Could it be deemed violence? – in John during the sex they had together that afternoon. Even when lust took them over, and during the many times they professed their love, they experienced a new thrilling, yet dangerous, kind of erotic togetherness that set them free to experience the darker side of sex. Much later, when
they were dressing to go out to dinner and Eliza was covering a bruise on her neck with small scarf, John asked her to sit next to him on the end of the bed. She obliged and when they gazed into each other’s eyes he asked her about her first love.

She hesitated for several seconds before she told him about her love for Vittorio, and her life with him in Tuscany. She told him everything, held nothing back, it never occurred to her that she should, that there could ever be a reason not to be honest and tell it as it had been, as it would always be. It was after all her history, a part of her life. In the telling she was relegating it to the past but she felt no sadness about that. There was no room for sadness in an eighteen year old who had just been transported to sexual oblivion by a man who claimed to love and adore her, who was able to reach down into the depths of her sexuality, her erotic fantasies, and bring them to the light, expunge any guilt for the lust she enjoyed in herself and in him.

John had marked her with his lust and she would remain branded his for ever. She sensed in her heart and soul that he would see to that, which Vittorio had not done. From that day on their sex life progressed into another realm of erotic bliss. Sex was unbound for them. They had set themselves free to experience everything, anything, and that sexual freedom bound them together as nothing else ever could or would. Eliza in her innocence called it love, thought of it as marriage, believed it to be for ever.

In all the time she was living in John’s flat she remained a guest. She had her room and slept in his. Otherwise her clothes, or any of her possessions, were forbidden to be left around the flat. She had been
amused when he had set down the ground rules though they in fact suited her: she was never to move anything around, not a chair or an ashtray. The kitchen and any cooking were off limits, except to make the odd cup of tea when the housekeeper was not there to do it.

She considered John too neat, too meticulous, he considered her too sloppy and slovenly, so the ground rules suited them both. In his house he was the master, she the slave. Everyone seemed to recognise that fact except John and Eliza. And by the time they did it was too late to do anything about it. How they lived suited John, and what was good for him was right for Eliza.

The Forresters loved Christmas, they made a big thing of the holiday whether it be in Tuscany or Little Barrington. This year Christmas was to be in Little Barrington and all the family and friends were expected to drift in and out of the Forrester house as it suited them except on Christmas Day. The Forrester girls and their families or partners invited friends, were expected to open presents under the tree at seven o’clock, attend church at ten and be at table for Christmas dinner at one o’clock, to hear the Queen’s Speech before pudding and raise a glass of champagne to Her Majesty. That was about the only structured day Julian and Dulcima ever demanded of their children. And every Christmas the girls all turned out from any corner of the world where they happened to be. This year would be no exception and Eliza could talk of nothing else but the fun of their all being together for the holiday.

John had what he considered more interesting invitations than the Forresters’. But as the time had drawn near when he was obliged to make his choice several unexpected problems arose, the main one being Eliza.
She had not been invited to Christmas at one of the grander stately homes of England, his first choice as to where he wanted to spend his Christmas break. Nor had she been invited to a house party in Barbados which he also intended to accept. England for Christmas Day, New Year in the Caribbean.

Eliza had expected him to stay with her and her family in Little Barrington. As far as John was concerned, it was all quite simple, straightforward even – he was quite prepared to disappoint her, but in the nicest way. Eliza would accept his decision. She was too much in love with him not to. He had only one small problem: he would have quite liked to have taken her with him for Christmas. John had grown used to Eliza on his arm, and in his bed. To sleep without her would be a wrench. The very thought of being away from her sexually for ten days irritated him. He was further agitated that she should have penetrated so far into his life that he might actually miss her.

‘Why are you so grumpy with me, John?’ she asked one morning when they were having breakfast in bed.

‘Because you keep talking about Christmas, making such a fuss about us being in Little Barrington with the family.’

‘You don’t want to come to us for Christmas?’

‘I have other plans.’

‘But you know I want to be with the family for Christmas dinner!’

‘Then you must be.’

‘I thought we were together.’

‘We are, but not joined at the hip, Eliza.’

‘It’s three weeks away. You might change your
mind,’ was her only reply, and she poured herself another cup of coffee.

John was surprised at how calmly she took her disappointment. He had expected a scene of some sort. At the very least tears. But nothing. Eliza did have a way of presenting him with the unexpected, and he liked that in her. But this morning he was somehow annoyed with her for thinking he even might change his mind and spend Christmas with the bourgeois Forresters.

John disliked complications and all day long, except for the several hours he spent in the operating theatre, had the distinct feeling that complications were somehow at work in the background of his life. That evening at dinner Eliza looked enchanting in a short, black crêpe-de-chine dress. She seemed to glow with happiness, sparkle with vivacity. He was delighted with the progress she had made in her big city life with him. A catty former girlfriend had told him, ‘You wear that young thing on your arm like an old soldier wears his medals on his chest – with too much pride and not enough thought, dear boy.’ Jane had been right. That was one of the great attractions of Eliza for John. He didn’t have to think about her, only enjoy playing with her, controlling her, moulding her to satisfy his needs.

They were at Mr Chow’s dining off a stream of tiny white plates proffering succulent tidbits – dumplings, fried seaweed, tiny lacquered spare ribs, fried wonton, sesame prawn crackers, tiny bowls of pungent sauces – that kept arriving at the table in the hands of smiling oriental waiters. It was this glorious bloom he saw in Eliza’s face that seemed to John to be something
special – and yet, enjoying it as he was, he sensed complications were taking over his very uncomplicated life. And they were not manifesting themselves just in his plans for Christmas.

Eliza had told John she had had a craving all day long for Chinese food; the day before it had been oysters, and the day before that for Indian curry. He watched her as she forked a dumpling into her mouth and could not help but smile. Life for Eliza Forrester was nothing more than eating, riding, fucking and sleeping. All of which she did very well. Never one to put herself about much in the city while John was at work, in the last two weeks she had been doing less than her usual little and more sleeping. He disliked that lazy, sleepy, unstructured side of her. He actually found the uneducated, unambitious side of her distasteful, especially so since he was an overachiever. Yet he kept quiet about that, never addressed what he saw as the flaws in her character, although he knew, when the time was right, he would have to.

Eliza asked him, ‘May I have another order of dumplings?’

‘The main courses are yet to come,’ he answered.

‘But I crave more dumplings,’ she told him a smile on her lips.

‘This is something new. You keep craving food and sleep.’

‘I know, isn’t it strange?’

‘Not so strange if you’re pregnant.’

The moment John said it, he knew he was correct. That was what was different about her looks, her behaviour. And now the complications really began.
He was both furious with her and overwhelmed that she might be carrying his child. The couple gazed into each other’s faces, trying to assess what had just been said. But the shock of such a possibility had struck them silent. Eliza was very white. John placed a hand to his forehead as if suffering a blinding headache.