Letters to the Lost (24 page)

He shook his head, incredulous. ‘I can promise you this . . . You are the most magical . . . the most astonishingly beautiful woman I have ever seen. Just holding you like this is setting me on fire . . . The thought of undressing you . . .’

He groaned and dropped his mouth to cover hers again, gathering her body into his as if he could absorb her into himself. She arched up to meet him, her hips bumping against him and the pressure on his erection was almost too much. Oh God, he mustn’t rush her, but she was fumbling at the buttons of his tunic, her fingers trembling. His heart swelled with protectiveness and – less nobly – annihilating want. Without letting his lips leave hers he helped her; shrugging off his tunic, then tugging at the knot of his tie.

Slowly, for pity’s sake . . . Don’t scare her . . .

She unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it back over his shoulders, stepping back to look at him. Her hands moved slowly over the planes of his bare chest; wonderingly, reverently. She touched his silver dog-tag and let the chain slide through her fingers, then moved lower, her splayed fingers spanning his ribs, her palms brushing the line of hair just beneath his navel. He stood very still, letting her touch, gritting his teeth against the longing that swamped him. When he could hold out no longer he reached for the buttons of her dress and unfastened them, forcing himself to go slow. It was like opening a parcel on Christmas day, fighting the temptation to tear off the wrappings quickly and greedily. Only when all the buttons were undone did he gently push the dress back from her shoulders so it slipped to the floor.

Christ alive. He took in the delicate, decadent peach silk underwear that had lain beneath the rather sensible dress and a moan escaped him. She hung her head, trying to cover her body with her arms. ‘It’s silly, I know . . . I shouldn’t have . . .’

He couldn’t wait any longer and couldn’t begin to form an argument in words. In answer he swept her up into his arms and lowered her gently onto the bed.

They watched the squares of sky between the blast tape on the window change from forget-me-not to lavender, and the shadows across the bed stretch and slant. For a long time they didn’t speak. Stella’s head was on his chest, his arm around her shoulders, their legs tangled together. His fingers traced lazy arcs across her back as they drifted on their own thoughts in this new landscape.

She felt perfectly at peace. The doubts of earlier had dissolved like sinister shadows when the light is switched on. The clean, warm scent of his skin – so difficult to recapture when she wasn’t with him – filled her head, and when she closed her eyes the shapes of the windowpanes turned orange and lit up the darkness. It felt like that inside her body too. A delicious languor, like nothing she had ever experienced before, spread through her, radiating outwards from somewhere deep in the centre of her. It was as if her blood had been replaced with warm honey.

Dan raised his head and kissed the curve of her shoulder.

‘You OK?’

‘Yes. Just wondering if I’ve died and gone to heaven.’

‘Me too.’ He smiled sleepily. ‘If this is what it’s like I can’t see what I was so scared of all these weeks.’ Altering his position, he propped himself up on his elbow so that he could look down into her face. ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but what’s the story with Charles?’

Stella sighed. She hadn’t had to tell him that it was her first time; it must have been obvious from her uncertainty and the way she’d tensed against the anticipated pain. She’d expected it to hurt, but it hadn’t – not really. Or at least, pain was so entwined in the rush of entirely unfamiliar sensations that she hadn’t registered it as being something separate. It was a bass note in the wild, crashing symphony he unleashed inside her.

‘I honestly don’t know.’ His hair was untidy, sticking up in all directions and she smoothed it back, loving the silken feel of it between her fingers. ‘I tried, I really did. Miss Birch told us all about the birds and the bees and made it sound very matter of fact so that I assumed it was something that just
happened
. When it didn’t I thought it must be me; that there was something I was getting wrong, or that I was trying too hard and making a fool of myself. Or that I was . . . I don’t know . . . dirty.’

‘You’re exquisite.’ His voice was husky as he bent his head and dropped a kiss on her breast. ‘Impossibly . . . distractingly . . . perfect. I can prove it to you if you need a little extra reassurance . . .’

She laughed, wriggling in delight as the hand that had cupped her breast moved downwards and she felt his erection against her thigh.

‘Can I ask you something?’ she said, suddenly remembering. ‘That rubber thing – what was it?’

‘French letter.’ He was laying a path of kisses down her ribs. ‘ To stop you having a baby.’ His mouth moved down to the sweep of her midriff. ‘I figure that’s one explanation you’d rather not have to make to Charles. Christ, you are so beautiful. I want to get to know every inch of your body . . .’

He slid further down the bed, almost disappearing beneath the sheets. She stiffened as his stubbled jaw grazed her thigh. ‘Dan! No! Not that bit—’

‘Oh yes . . . that bit’s one of my favourites . . . And I think you’ll find it could be one of your favourites too . . .’

‘Dan!’

What started out as a shriek of protest somehow became a cry of pleasure. And was quickly followed by another, and another, echoing off the hotel’s high and tastefully papered walls.

*

Later she hurried down to the bathroom at the end of the corridor and began to run water into the enormous old claw-foot bath. After five minutes, as the tiled walls were starting to blur and dissolve in a haze of steam she heard Dan’s discreet knock and let him in.

The meagre water allowance (strenuously enforced by signs printed in capital letters, placed above the taps, on the windowsill and pinned to the back of the door) seemed more plentiful with two people. It lapped at her breasts as she lay beached on Dan’s chest, and made bronzed islands of his raised knees. No sun penetrated the bathroom’s tall, opaque window, and blue dusk closed around them like a tent. From through the open window voices drifted up from the kitchens; good-natured shouting and someone whistling
The White Cliffs of Dover
. The smell of cooking reminded them that they were starving and they got out of the cooling water.

As they stole back along the corridor, wrapped in threadbare hotel towels and holding hands, an upright couple were coming towards them on their way down to dinner. He had a monocle and military bearing, she had silver hair set in Marcel waves and a green crêpe de chine evening dress. A squashed-looking fox bared its teeth and stared beadily from her shelf-like bosom. All three wore identical expressions of icy disapproval.

‘Evening sir, ma’am,’ Dan said, with impeccable American courtesy as they passed. They only just made it back to the room before collapsing with laughter.

‘We’ll probably wind up sitting at the table next to them in the dining room,’ Dan said when they’d recovered enough to speak. ‘Maybe we’d better find somewhere else to eat.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t have anything smart to wear.’ Stella went over to where Dan had left her suitcase, re-securing her towel.

Dan watched her from the bed. ‘You could have the smartest dress in England and you wouldn’t look any more beautiful than you do now.’

She gave a snort of laughter. ‘I wonder if that couple would agree?’ Opening the case on the dressing-table stool she looked at its contents. The familiar, slightly mildewed smell of the Vicarage rose from their folds; the smell of home, and sadness. She took out a flower-sprigged dress and held it up.

‘That’s pretty,’ Dan said.

‘But not nearly smart enough for the dining room. It’s from Ada, like most of my clothes. She thought it would be perfect for visiting Nancy’s mother. I didn’t think I could ask if she could lay her hands on an evening dress and some satin gloves too.’

‘Hey, it doesn’t matter.’ Dan levered himself off the bed and pushed back his damp hair, so that it stuck up even more crazily. ‘I don’t want to go out to some god-awful stuffy restaurant anyway, and have to spend hours keeping my hands off you for the sake of some watery old English stew that tastes like boiled socks.’ He went over to the telephone on the little writing desk and picked it up. As he waited for someone to answer he half-turned away, giving her the chance to stare at him properly without feeling self-conscious.

It was a pleasure, looking at him: a real, sensual, visceral pleasure, like eating a chocolate from one of those posh assortments, or holding your hands out to a fire on a freezing day. His body was hard-planed and golden and entirely beautiful. She’d always sensed in Charles a sort of shame in his own lividly pale, etiolated limbs, which he was at pains to keep hidden from her – unlike his distaste for her body, which he didn’t bother to hide. In King’s Oak Vicarage, nakedness was embarrassing, disgusting. Here it was glorious
.
Goosebumps spread over her skin and her empty stomach squeezed and knotted as her eyes travelled across his shoulders and down the elegant length of his back. The towel had slipped down onto his narrow hips, so she could just see a strip of paler skin beneath the gold.

‘Hi, this is Lieutenant Rosinski, room 43. I was wondering if we might have some dinner sent up to the room please? Sandwiches?’ He turned to Stella and gave a helpless shrug. ‘Well, I guess if sandwiches are all there is, then sandwiches will do just fine.’ From across the room his eyes held her. ‘And if you could possibly find a bottle of champagne, that would be even better.’

He put the phone down and came towards her, a slow smile spreading across his face as he gently pulled the towel off.

‘There. You’re dressed perfectly for dinner.’ He pulled her towards the bed. ‘May I show you to your table?’

18

Three days. Not even that; two and a half. Not much, out of a whole lifetime, but Stella knew that every moment would stay with her. It was a turning point, the end of one era and the start of a new one. It was the time at which she stopped being a passive being, controlled by others, and became herself.

They talked. His gentle questioning unearthed fragments of her past that she’d all but forgotten, which, when pieced together gave her a clearer picture of herself. Nancy was the person who knew her best in the world, but for the first time Stella began to see herself without the filter of Nancy’s gaze and started to feel that she existed outside the slot into which Nancy had placed her; the compartment labelled ‘safe, cautious, conventional’. With Dan she was fearless, adventurous.
Sexy.

They played cards. He taught her poker, and let her win the first few games. And then he introduced her to the idea of strip poker, and mysteriously her luck seemed to run out.

They made love. She found it almost incomprehensible how something as astonishing as sex could have existed all this time without her knowing about it. Discovering it was like being given the key to paradise. She felt lit up inside, golden and glowing. But maybe that wasn’t sex, she thought. Maybe that was love.

They explored the city. In the syrupy July warmth they walked along narrow streets between ancient, honey-coloured buildings and ducked through ornate gateways to peer into college courtyards. It was a glimpse into another world, one which would have made her feel excluded and inferior if she hadn’t been with Dan. He was a foreigner, and yet he seemed perfectly at home. With an arm draped around her shoulders and a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip he pointed out details on beautiful buildings and told her their names.
Cupola. Oriel. Pilaster
. He photographed them, and her, making her giggle and blossom under his warm, appreciative gaze.

He bought a postcard showing different views of Cambridge and scrawled a message to his father on the back.
In one of the most beautiful cities in Europe with the most beautiful girl in the world. Who said war was all bad?
In a cobbled street in the shadow of one of the city’s many churches they queued for sausage rolls in a butcher’s shop and bought strawberries from a stall in the market square. Carrying these treasures they made their way towards the river. In a hotel beside the greenish water Dan persuaded the landlord to sell him a bottle of wine, and they picnicked beneath the drooping branches of a willow, feeding each other strawberries, sucking the sweetness from their fingers and kissing the juice from their lips.

Afterwards they lay together, hidden by the acid-green curtains of leaves and dozed. Punts slid past, mostly piloted by American servicemen whose voices floated across the water. On the opposite bank was a little row of whitewashed cottages, their windows open against the hot afternoon. A woman in a red headscarf was working in the garden of one of them. Drowsily Stella watched her picking beans and dropping them into a bowl. A few moments later she carried it inside and in her mind Stella followed her, picturing a simple kitchen with a stone-flagged floor and a range, a pine table with its surface scrubbed white. She’d just added a jug of flowers – delphiniums and stocks – on a dresser, when Dan said, ‘Penny for them?’

‘Those houses over there. I was just imagining what they must be like inside.’ It was the kind of banal thought she would have felt stupid sharing with Charles. Not that he would have ever asked anyway.

‘Nancy told me that you always wanted a house.’ He was stroking her hair, picking it up and running it through his fingers. ‘She said that whenever you got the chance to have a wish – like blowing the candles out on your birthday cake or something – that was what you always wished for. A house of your own.’

‘ We didn’t have birthday cakes with candles, but we used to find all kinds of excuses to make a wish. If you saw a black cat you made a wish, and when there was a new moon. Another one was if you ever said something at exactly the same time as someone else, and whenever you crossed a bridge . . .’ She smiled, remembering. ‘Nancy always wanted something different – a box of rose and violet creams, or a particular boy to like her – but I always wished for the same thing.’