The Passionate Sinner (14 page)

‘I don’t know what you mean by that?’ Merlin stood with the tray jingling in her unsteady hands.

‘The devil you don’t! And do put that tray of dishes down before the lot finds itself on the floor!’

She obeyed the order, and the reiteration that she return and sit on the couch. On its very edge, as if poised for flight should his anger become physical. ‘I—I don’t know what you mean,’ she said again. ‘I’m not out for anything a-and that’s the truth.’

‘I don’t think you know the meaning of the word, young woman. And you are a very young woman, are you not? In which case I’ll have it explained, if you don’t mind, why you have been passing yourself off as a middle-aged one!’

‘So I could keep my job—you’d have sent me away.’

‘Would I really?’

‘You know you would.’

‘Was it, then, such a remarkably wonderful job,
meisje?
But I suppose it was, in your view, as I could be taken so thoroughly for a blind fool. It must have given you many an amusing moment to see how thoroughly I was taken in, but no wonder you would never allow me to Braille your face, let alone your form. We’ll remedy that omission right now, for I have a need to know what you are like.’

‘No,’ the word broke from her and she half rose from the couch.

‘Sit down,’ he ordered, ‘and not miles away from me, but here, by me.’ He rapped the leather and Merlin gave him a petrified look. Then she flung a look at the door and estimated that she could reach it before he could ever catch her ... the next instant shock vibrated all through her, for with his acute senses he had guessed what she might do and he had reached out a long arm and had hold of her before she could jump to her feet. His clasp was uncaringly hurtful as he jerked her to where he sat and forced her down beside him; there he held her with one hand while his other found her face and almost roughly traced its contours, feeling across her temple, pausing where the tiny mole was set beside her left eye, then moving down the slender line of her cheek to her mouth. His fingertip traced the line of her lips, then moved to her shoulder, the side of her neck, where it suddenly wrapped steely fingers around that slim column.

‘What big eyes you have, little one, and a beauty mark to set them off.’

‘You’re being abominably cruel,’ she gasped. Why?’

‘Oh, don’t you think I’m justified?’

She stared into his blind eyes and her heart was a hammer beating under her breast. Oh God, did he know that her hand had held the eye-cup ... could he be remembering her in her blue nursing cape with the little chain across her throat, a small starched cap on her neatly restrained hair? His hand was around her throat right now and his thumb was against the pulse that beat there so madly.

‘Why are you so terrified?’ he drawled.

‘Because you’re being so—pitiless. I really meant you no harm.’

‘So you said before, and if I’ve become a stranger to pity where women are concerned, can you really blame me?’

He knew, thundered her heart. He had guessed, and was playing some terrible game of tiger and prey. Instinctively she sought to escape his hold on her, and instantly his other arm was around her and there was a sensual savagery to his smile as he pulled her to his chest. ‘Yes, this was how it was during the storm, eh? There are certain things that can’t be held back—the tide and the darkness, the roar of the storm, and the passion of a man.’

By passion she thought he meant uncontrollable anger, and she gave a little moan and tried again to pull away from him. ‘Stop that,’ he said, ‘and tell me a little more about yourself. Your hair, what sort of colour is it?’

‘M-my hair?’

‘Yes, this, like silk when I touch it, damn you!’

‘It’s a sort of—of brown, with streaks of gold, like a tortoiseshell cat.’

‘Really, and what about your eyes? They match your hair in colour?’

‘Yes, brown with flecks of a paler colour—amber, I suppose you would call it.’

‘Gold, and brown, like peridots, eh?More and more interesting.’

‘Oh, nothing so fanciful!’

‘How modest you are, for a girl who sounds as if she might be unusually attractive. Why the devil did you need to come to Pulau-Indah? Are the men of England even more blind than I am?’

‘I’m nothing out of the ordinary, and I wanted to travel —I told you. I—I wanted to stay here and you’d have sent me away had you known—I’m good at my work, you can’t deny that.’

‘I don’t deny it, but in playing your charade, you little fool, you must now have every adult on this island assuming you are my
nyai,
my
kasihpada,
whom I take to bed. Do I make myself crystal clear? The islanders are a simple people and they don’t complicate their sensual relationships. You live here under my roof, and you are a single girl, a
nona,
and I am a man—do you fondly suppose that a blind man hasn’t the normal feelings of other men and goes around with everything switched off, as the lights and the moon and the smiles of people are turned off for him? These people know me, and they would find it hard to believe that I had slept in this house without taking you to bed. Now has the penny dropped? Now have you got the ticket?’

Oh yes, the penny had dropped with a clang to the very bottom of her stomach, and she suddenly blushed uncontrollably, feeling as if her skin was on fire.

His
nyai,
his mistress, who pretended during the day that she was a plain and frigid spinster, but who at night let him come to her bed and make love to her.

‘But we know, you and I,’ she gasped, ‘that you’ve never —touched me. Oh, I never dreamed it was that—that you were so angry because of what people were thinking.’

‘Then what did you imagine was wrong with me?’

Her head spun and she felt faint with relief ... so that was it, a matter of propriety, and it was said that Dutch people were a very moral people. ‘Oh, does it matter?’ she asked. ‘So long as I can be your secretary.’

‘Do you honestly imagine that we can carry on as before, that I can have you under my roof and pretend to myself that you are a mature and unromantic woman, play-acting as the puritan spinster, shelved by men, and more interested in caressing the piano? That persona no longer has any relevance as far as I’m concerned ... what kind of a stick do you take me for?’

‘I’ve never taken you for a stick,
mynheer.’
Her heart had sunk ... he meant to send her away, and it would be like wrenching out her very roots from their entanglement with Paul’s being. He had never had to make love to her to make her part of him, and now that it seemed safe to assume that he was unaware of her connection with his blindness, she wanted to fight to stay here.

‘Please, don’t send me away. I have nothing much to go back to, and I’ve grown to like this island so much.’

‘I have no intention of sending you away.’

‘What?’ Merlin couldn’t believe her ears. ‘But you just said.’

‘I said that things could not resume as they were. The charade is over and now you are going to have to face the consequences of playing such a game with an adult male.’ His hand slid down her spine, finding her hair and twining it around his fist. ‘Hair to your shoulders and eyes speckled like the turtle-shell, why should I not want you?’

Merlin’s heart seemed to turn over and she couldn’t believe that she had heard him say he
wanted
her.

‘I want you!’ Now he said it almost harshly. ‘Do I make myself clear? I
want you.
I’m sick and tired of stumbling around alone, my days like night and my nights as lonely as hell. I had you in my arms during the storm’s rage, and I felt a sudden storm raging in me, sweeping away the arguments with myself that I could only be a burden on a woman, drowning out the restraints I’ve imposed on myself because I shrank from being a mere object of pity to anyone. Yes, I want your silky hair against my skin, your mouth on mine blotting out the loneliness, your slim shape close to me, alive and young and warm, so I’ll know I’m still alive and not buried in some black hole in the ground!’

‘Oh, don’t—don’t!’ Merlin sank her face against him and shuddered.

‘Mustn’t I speak of such things?’

‘It’s awful to hear you speak of—death.’

‘There are times when blindness is awfully like it, in the depths of night, reaching out to nothing but blackness. I can’t take any more of that. I want to feel a woman in my arms, tight and close in the dark, softly moaning as I— love you.’

‘But you don’t love me.’ Merlin hadn’t meant to say it, but at heart she was a romantic and it wasn’t
her
that he wanted, just someone to be there making the night a little easier for him to get through.

‘In the name of heaven, what has that sentimental nonsense to do with us?’ He spoke impatiently. ‘When a girl decides that she has no more use for the big city and prefers to live on an island where life is half a century behind the times, then she is either running away from something, or is genuinely in search of the simple, basic, even primitive ways that have gone out of fashion in the modern world. If that is the case, and you wish to stay on this island, then you have only one means of doing so— by becoming my wife.’

His wife?
Paul’s ... wife!

When she sat there speechless in the crook of his arm, he broke into a cynical smile. ‘I realise that the idea of marrying a blind man is hardly an appealing one, but I have never had much time for irregular arrangements, unlike my cousin Hendrik. I don’t imagine I would have married in the normal course of events, but you seem to have more patience than most with my kind of stumbling around, and as you so rightly said, celibacy has few rewards for the man or woman of normal feelings, and I haven’t lost my other faculties even if my eyes are useless. I have sufficient money for the two of us. I can afford you.’

Merlin winced ... he said that as if she were something he thought of buying. A toy for his pleasure!

Even so she felt elated by his proposal of marriage; she could even bear it that he had called love a lot of sentimental nonsense. It wasn’t love that he wished her to share, but the blackness of his nights when he might switch on a lamp just to know it was on and smoke a cheroot in the silence and loneliness of his bedroom.

She couldn’t deny him. She had too much warmth of heart, too much regret for her part in his tragedy, too much yearning to be part of him in whatever capacity he needed her.

‘Are you never going to speak?’ he asked. ‘Is silence your way of refusing me? Come, if you create suspense, you have to relieve it, or drive a man up the wall.’

Merlin moved in his arms with a whisper of silk and her face raised to him offered eyes and lips and the promise of passion that would reassure him that the darkness was alive and not part of the grave. ‘I’m willing to be your wife,
mynheer.’

Then, though he had demanded an answer, he seemed the one struck into silence. For moments on end the suspense was Merlin’s, and then she felt the lift of his chest as he took a deep breath. ‘Lonely like me, is that it?’

‘Often. It isn’t a good feeling.’

‘There’s an oriental word for it,
sabisha.
Appropriate for a girl in a silk kimono. Have you any notion, I wonder, what it feels like for a blind man to have you in his arms? It could be a delirium, of course.’

She gave a little laugh and reached up to touch his forehead and that jag of blond hair. ‘Don’t get too lightheaded,
mynheer.
I’m not Miss World.’

‘You are silk and a divine softness, and the scent of you—‘ His arms clenched around her and his breath swept across her face. ‘I want you until the muscles cramp in my stomach—we shall have to arrange the wedding right away!’

‘We,’ she took the plunge, ‘we don’t have to wait for that, not if you—oh, you know what I mean.’

For a powerfully beating moment his arms were like a vice around her and his body was very still, like a tiger crouching. Then he slowly relaxed his hold on her. ‘No. I believe you’re a virgin and I won’t change that until we are married.’

‘Not many men of today would take that view,’ she said, quietly, and into her eyes as she looked at him there came a dazzling glow ... what if he did love her without knowing it himself? Surely he felt more than desire for her if he compelled himself to wait until everything was legal? She hungered to believe it, for so many men took what they wanted and didn’t care a straw that the girl gave herself because nature had made her more loving than any other creature on the face of the earth. It was part of everything called woman; a built-in trick of biology, but for a man ... even for Paul, it was the pleasure drive; the immolation in sheer sensual joy. Her eyes searched his face, with its fine, hard structure of bone under the clear, tanned skin, and he answered her as if he read her mind.

‘I come of a rather strict Dutch family. I was educated at a Jesuit school, where the discipline was strict and the cane a fact of learning. There is something on the edge of terror for boys who are tutored by the celibate priests; there is ritual in it, a planting of a belief in the dark powers as well as the pure ones. There is also bred a capacity for hard work, a need to make full use of one’s brain and sinew. That’s what haunts me. The dark powers took my sight and flung me on the beach. I possess only nostalgia for what I had ... that and a discipline I must hold on to or become the complete beachcomber.’

‘You will never be that,’ she said urgently. ‘You’ll find other things to do—perhaps another book?’

‘I want to use my hands,’ he groaned. ‘I lie awake at night—it’s that hellish wakefulness in the dark of the night that gets me down. You will be there, just as soon as we are married, and I warn you there’s a tiger howling in me.’

‘Sang Harimau,’
she murmured. ‘I shall have to learn not to be afraid of you.’

‘Are you truly afraid—ah, you don’t have to answer. I’ve felt it in you, especially tonight, but physical passion is a dangerous emotion and you woke it in me after months of atrophy. I have to say it, little one, but you deserve to pay the price.’

‘I—I’m only a woman,
mynheer.
Can I help that?’