Fortnight of Fear (3 page)

He glanced covertly sideways, first at the woman's thigh, then more boldly at her face. She was looking straight ahead, at the mirror. Her nose was classically straight, her eyes were cobalt-blue, slightly slanted, very European. Her lips were glossed with crimson. He noticed a bracelet of yellow-and-white gold, intertwined, that must have cost the equivalent of three months of his salary, including expenses, and a gold Ebel wristwatch. Her nails were long and crimson and perfect. She moved slightly sideways on her stool and he noticed the narrowness of her waist, and the full sway of her breasts. She's naked underneath that dress, he thought to himself, or practically naked. She's just too incredibly sexy to be true.

What could he say to her? Should he say anything?
Could
he say anything? He thought dutifully for a moment about Margaret, but he knew that he was only being dutiful. This woman existed on a different planet from
Margaret, she was one of a different species. She was feminine, sexual, undomesticated, elegant, and probably dangerous, too.

The barman approached him. “Can I fix you another drink, sir?”

“I – unh –”

“Oh, go ahead,” the woman smiled. “I can't bear to drink alone.”

Gil flushed, and grinned, and shrugged, and said, “All right, then. Yes.” He turned to the woman and asked, “How about you?”

“Thank you,” she acknowledged, passing her glass to the barman, although there was a curious intonation in her voice which made it sound as if she were saying thank you for something else altogether.

The barman set up the drinks. They raised their glasses to each other and said, “
Prost!
”

“Are you staying here?” Gil asked the woman. He wished his words didn't sound so tight and high-pitched.

“In Amsterdam?”

“I mean here, at the Amstel Hotel.”

“No, no,” she said. “I live by the sea, in Zandvoort. I only came here to meet a friend of mine.”

“You speak perfect English,” he told her.

“Yes,” she replied. Gil waited, expecting her to tell him what she did for a living, but she remained silent.

“I'm in transportation,” he volunteered. “Well, buses, actually.”

She focused her eyes on him narrowly but still she said nothing. Gil said, “I go back to London tomorrow. Job's over.”

“Why did you come running after me?” she asked. “You know when – this afternoon, when I was leaving the hotel. You came running after me and you stood outside the hotel and watched me go.”

Gil opened and closed his mouth. Then he lifted both
hands helplessly, and said, “I don't know. I really don't know. It was – I don't know. I just did it.”

She kept her eyes focused on him as sharply as a camera. “You desire me,” she said.

Gil didn't reply, but uncomfortably sat back on his barstool.

Without hesitation, the woman leaned forward and laid her open hand on his thigh. She was very close now. Her lips were parted and he could see the tips of her front teeth. He could smell the Bacardi on her breath. Warm, soft, even breath.

“You desire me,” she repeated.

She gave him one quick, hard squeeze, and then sat back. Her face was filled with silent triumph. Gil looked at her with a mixture of excitement and embarrassment and disbelief. She had actually reached over and touched him – not touched him,
caressed
him, this beautiful woman in the white dress, this beautiful woman whom every businessman in the bar would have given his Christmas bonus just to sit with.

“I don't even know your name,” said Gil, growing bolder.

“Is that necessary?”

“I don't really suppose it is. But I'd like to. My name's Gil Batchelor.”

“Anna.”

“Is that all, just Anna?”

“It's a palindrome,” she smiled. “That means that it's the same backwards as it is forwards. I try to live up to it.”

“Could I buy you some dinner?”

“Is
that
necessary?”

Gil took three long heartbeats to reply. “Necessary in what sense?” he asked her.

“In the sense that you feel it necessary to court me somehow. To buy me dinner; to impress me with your
taste in wine; to make witty small-talk. To tell me all those humorous anecdotes which I am sure your colleagues have heard one hundred times at least. Is all that necessary?”

Gil licked his lips. Then he said, “Maybe we should take a bottle of champagne upstairs.”

Anna smiled. “I'm not a prostitute, you know. The barman thinks I'm a prostitute, but of course prostitutes are good for business, provided they are suitably dressed and behave according to the standards expected by the hotel. If you take me up to your room now, let me tell you truthfully that you will be only the second man I have ever slept with.”

Gil gave Anna a complicated shrug with which he intended to convey the feeling that he was flattered by what she had said, but couldn't take her seriously. A woman with Anna's style and Anna's body and Anna's sexual directness had slept in the whole of her life with only one man?

Anna said, “You don't believe me.”

“I don't have to believe you, do I? That's part of the game.” Gil thought that response was quite clever and sophisticated.

But Anna reached out toward him and gently picked a single hair from the shoulder of his coat and said very quietly, “It's not a game, my love.”

She undressed in silence, close to the window, so that her body was outlined by the cold glow of the streetlights outside, but her face remained in shadow. Her dress slipped to the floor with a sigh. Underneath, she was naked except for a tiny
cache-sexe
of white embroidered cotton. Her breasts were large, almost too large for a woman with such a narrow back, and her nipples were wide and pale as sugar-frosting.

Gil watched her, unbuttoning his shirt. He could sense her smiling. She came over and buried the fingers of one
hand into the curly brown hair on his chest, and tugged at it. She kissed his cheeks, then his lips. Then she reached down and started to unfasten his belt.

Gil thought:
this is morally wrong, damn it. I'm cheating the woman who gave me my children; the woman who's waiting for me to come home tomorrow. But how often does a man run into a sexual dream like this? Supposing I tell her to get dressed and leave. I'll spend the rest of my life wondering what it could have been like
.

Anna slid her hands into the back of his trousers. Her sharp fingernails traced the line of his buttocks, and he couldn't help shivering. “Lie down on the bed,” she whispered. “Let me make love to you.”

Gil sat on the edge of the bed, and struggled out of his trousers. Then Anna pushed him gently backwards. He heard the softest plucking of elastic as she took off her cache-sexe. She climbed astride his chest, and sat in the semi-darkness smiling at him, her hair like a soft and mysterious veil. “Do you like to be kissed?” she asked him. “There are so many ways to be kissed.”

She lifted herself up, and teasingly lowered her vulva so that it kissed his lips. Her pubic hair was silky and long, and rose up in a plume. Gil kissed her, hesitantly at first, then deeper, holding her open with his fingers.

She gave a deep, soft murmur of pleasure, and ran her fingers through his hair.

They made love four times that night. Anna seemed to be insatiable. When the first slate-gray light of morning began to strain into the room, and the trams began to boom over Hogesluis again, Gil lay back in bed watching her sleep, her hair tangled on the pillow. He cupped her breast in his hand, and then ran his fingers gently all the way down the flatness of her stomach to her dark-haired sex. She was more than a dream, she was irresistible. She was everything that anybody could desire. Gil kissed her lightly on the forehead, and when she opened her eyes and
looked up at him and smiled, he knew that he was already falling in love with her.

“You have to go back to England today,” she said, softly.

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“You mean you could stay a little longer?”

Gil looked at her, but at the same time he made a conscious effort to picture Margaret, as if he were watching a movie with a split screen. He could imagine Margaret sitting on the sofa sewing and glancing at the clock every few minutes to see if it was time for him to be landing at Gatwick Airport. He could see her opening the front door and smiling and kissing him and telling him what Alan had been doing at playschool.

“Maybe another day,” Gil heard himself saying, as if there were somebody else in the room who spoke just like him.

Anna drew his head down and kissed him. Her tongue slipped in between his teeth. Then she lay back and whispered, “What about two days? I could take you to Zandvoort. We could go to my house, and then we could spend all day and all night and all the next day, making love.”

“I'm not sure that I can manage two days.”

“Call your office. Tell them you may be able to sell the good burghers of Amsterdam a few more of your buses. A day and a night and a day. You can go home on Sunday night. The plane won't be so crowded then.”

Gil hesitated, and then kissed her. “All right then. What the hell. I'll call the airline after breakfast.”

“And your wife? You have to call your wife.”

“I'll call her.”

Anna stretched out like a a beautiful sleek animal. “You are a very special gentle man, Mr Gil Batchelor,” she told him.

“Well, you're a very special lady.”

Margaret had sniffled: that had made him feel so guilty that he had nearly agreed to come back to England straight away. She missed him, everything was ready for him at home, Alan kept saying, “Where's daddy?” And
why
did he have to stay in Holland for another two days? Surely the Dutch people could telephone him, or send him a telex? And why
him
? George Kendall should have been selling those extra buses, not him.

In the end, it was her whining that gave him the strength to say, “I have to, that's all. I don't like it any more than you do, darling, believe me. I miss you too, and Alan. But it's only two more days. And then we'll all go to Brighton for the day, what about that? We'll have lunch at Wheeler's.”

He put down the phone. Anna was watching him across the room. She was sitting on a large white leather sofa, wearing only thin pajama trousers of crêpe silk. Between her bare breasts she held a heavy crystal glass of Bacardi. The coldness of the glass had made her nipples tighten. She was smiling at him in a way that he found oddly disturbing. She looked almost triumphant, as if by persuading him to lie to Margaret, she had somehow captured a little part of his soul.

Behind her, through the picture window that was framed with cheese-plants and ivy, he could see the concrete promenade, the wide gray beach, the gray overhanging clouds, and the restless horizon of the North Sea.

He came and sat down beside her. He touched her lips with his fingertip and she kissed it. His hand followed the warm heavy curve of her breast, and then he gently rolled her nipple between finger and thumb. She watched him, still smiling.

“Do you think you could ever fall in love with somebody like me?” she asked him, in a whisper.

“I don't think there is anybody like you. Only you.”

“So could you fall in love with me?”

He dared to say it. “I think I already have.”

She set her drink down on the glass and stainless steel table next to her, and knelt up on the sofa. She tugged down her pajama trousers so that she was naked. She pushed Gil on to his back, and climbed on top of him. “You like kissing me, don't you?” she murmured. He didn't answer, but lifted his head slightly, and saw her looking at him with that same disturbing smile.

The house was always silent, except when they spoke, or when they played music. Anna liked Mozart symphonies, but she always played them in another room. The walls were white and bare, the carpets were gray. The inside of the house seemed to be a continuation of the bleak coastal scenery that Gil could see through the windows. Apart from the houseplants there were no ornaments. The few pictures on the walls were lean, spare drawings of naked men and women, faceless most of them. Gil had the feeling that the house didn't actually belong to Anna, that it had been occupied by dozens of different people, none of whom had left their mark on it. It was a house of no individuality whatsoever. An anxious house, at the very end of a cul-de-sac that fronted the beach. The gray brick sidewalks were always swirled with gritty gray sand. The wind blew like a constant headache.

They made love over and over again. They went for walks on the beach, the collars of their coats raised up against the stinging sand. They ate silent meals of cold meat and bread and cold white wine. They listened to Mozart in other rooms. On the third morning Gil woke up and saw that Anna was awake already, and watching him. He reached out and stroked her hair.