The Passionate Sinner (6 page)

She bent to pick up a piece of deep pink coral, playing her fingers over the lace, closing her eyes and trying to imagine what it was like to depend on touch and smell and sound. The sound of her voice could bring his eyes to her face, but beyond that her features were a blank which he had to mask with his imagination.

As he thought of her as a lonely, unattached spinster, then he probably had a mental image of a plain, unexciting face, with grey hair drawn back from a lined brow. Her safety lay in that image he had of her, yet she was only human and couldn’t suppress a wistful smile as she thought of what Ramai had said about her skin and hair, and that an island man would soon have learned the truth by touching her.

Touched by Paul, those strong and sensitive hands fondling her skin and finding her soft to his fingers. She gave a tiny groan and felt the sweet ache of longing in her very bones. Love was as tormenting as it could be joyful. For her it held as much risk as it held rapture during those evenings alone with Paul, her fingers on the piano keys playing those songs remembered from the music sheets her mother had hoarded from the war years, while that figure in tropic whites smoked a cigar by the veranda windows, the night moths drifting in, attracted by the lamp on the piano.

Stolen days and nights, a pretender in his house, and yet someone he was coming to depend on. He didn’t say, but she sensed it. And he liked those old sentimental songs and didn’t pretend that he wanted Chopin music, or the melancholy of Beethoven. Merlin was glad about that, for she had been taught how to play by her mother and the classics weren’t in her repertoire.

‘You have a joyous touch,’ he had said to her the other evening, ‘on the piano keys.’

‘Thank you,’ she had replied, and longed to transfer that touch to his face, his shoulders, a longing to embrace him that was beyond telling.

It had to be enough, the miracle of being here on this island with him, of getting accustomed to the house where everything, every large to middling object had felt his touch. Sitting down to high table with him, eating the steaming white rice served in porcelain bowls, with subtle wine in jade-green cups. Gasping from the hot curry and hearing him laugh as he caught the sound, and when he laughed it mended some of the agony which had seemed so overwhelming. Love, how it could grip her by the throat, like the morning when he came to the den with a baby turtle in the palm of his hand. ‘Killing turtles is forbidden on this island,’ he had told her. ‘See, it has a tiny shell already.’

See ... only he couldn’t see, not the hurt or the happiness on her face as she stood and stroked a finger across that tiny shell as the small primal creature walked on his palm.

What, she wondered, did she do with the love as it built up inside her and there seemed no way to release it except by just being here ... being where Paul was and hoping with each new day that he wouldn’t find out, wouldn’t suddenly realise that she was the person he had just cause to hate.

What did she do with the hate if she suddenly found herself at the mercy of it, deadly in the blind eyes, raw and torturing in his voice, so cruel in the hands that had been so gentle with the baby turtle!

Merlin stood there silently and still and watched the light boats, with a great wing of coloured sail, going off to fish with the emblem of the snake-king painted on the prow; Naga who sat upon a thione of rubies. Island of superstition and subtle charm, the women with their babies slung in the coloured
slendeng
on a graceful shoulder. The women did most of the cultivating of the yams, rice and pineapple, pretty creatures with golden-brown skin and birdwing eyebrows above dark slanting eyes which held an allure Paul must have felt ... had he been able to see them. He had promised her that the next time the villagers held a dance at the temple he would take her to watch the bell dancers, and the men who wore formidable masks to perform in mime some of the old Indonesian legends.

How long, she asked herself, could the dream last before reality had to break the spell and drag her awake? Being here on Pulau-Indah was like a dream, but she knew how fragile was her hold on the dream and the awakening would be terrifying, not to be endured even in her thoughts. Paul, knowing her at last behind the compliant, agreeable, spinsterish mask his imagination had placed over her face ... bitterly angered by the deception ... the sleeping tiger aroused and snarling.

She turned quickly and hastened towards the rock steps, running from her thoughts in her bare feet, her raffia sandals forgotten at the foot of a palm tree. She crossed the bridge across the tea valley almost unaware and walked beneath the embracing curves of the banyan trees, brushed by sprays of wild orchids, lady-finger bananas within reach of her fingers.

Paul was standing on the veranda between the palm supports, clad in cream trousers and a brown silk shirt. He seemed unaware of her until she actually wished him good morning. He turned at the sound of her voice and as always his eyes seemed to find her face and she felt the stab of apprehension, the guilty fear that she was as visual to him as he was to her. He was always closely shaven by the other houseboy, who acted as a sort of valet to him, and his thick white-gold hair was scrupulously combed back from the powerful forehead.^ was, especially this morning, hard to believe that he wasn’t blind. In no way had he let himself go physically; his body was even harder and stronger than it had been in England, and the skin was so tanned by the island sun that his hair shone like a metallic helmet above those firmly controlled features.

A faint breeze tinkled the wind-chimes. ‘I didn’t hear you,’ he said, frowning.

‘I’m barefooted.’

‘What foolishness! Have you been down to the beach like that?’

‘I had a pair of sandals, but I mislaid them.’

‘You could collect jigger worms in your toes, or the septic spines of a sea-urchin. I thought you had more sense than to go walking about on the sands like a foolish girl!’

Her hands gripped the veranda rail at those words. ‘The sands are so white and warm, and the island people go about with bare feet.’

‘Their feet are hardened to the place, but even they get jigger worms under the skin and the things hurt when they’re extracted. Lon or one of the boys would have to extract the things if you picked them up, for you do realise that my operating days are over?’ His hands were holding a mandarin orange and suddenly his fingers tightened and the fruit was squashed and oozing juice over his skin. ‘Damnation!’ He flung the fruit across the veranda rail in the direction of the trees. ‘Each day I tell myself that I won’t let it eat into my brain like a worm, but today, as you see, the worm bit.’

Merlin watched him as he dragged a handkerchief from his pocket and dried his hands ... how strong those hands ... they could break a woman’s neck if he really let go and lost control of himself.

‘I think there’s a wind getting up.’ He raised his voice to a shout. ‘Ramai, will you come here this instant!’

The boy evidently thought the
tuan
was impatient for his breakfast, for he arrived with a laden tray and apologies that Paul waved aside. ‘Do I hear and smell a big wind?’ he demanded.

‘The palm fronds are restless,
tuan.’
Ramai put down the tray and glanced towards the left of the house, where the trees thickened and the jungle began. ‘We will know in an hour or so, if the devil starts drumming in the forest.’

‘Typhoon?’ Paul asked, his face raised as if he were testing the wind against his skin.

‘Could be,
tuan,
this time of year.’

‘Damnation.’ Paul glanced about him in a sudden lost way. ‘This is when I start feeling like a useless log—still, it might only be the threat of a storm, but go find Lon and tell him to get in radio contact with the mainland. We had better be prepared for the worst.’

‘Ja, tuan.’
The boy nodded, as if Paul could see him. ‘Your
makanpagi
on the table.
Mevrouw
will pour coffee, eh?’

‘Ja,
she will see to things. Scatter and find Lon, and if the news is bad, then get down to the village and warn your people. They know what to do better than I, but it will help if we get confirmation by radio in advance.’

The boy darted down the veranda steps and loped off in search of Lon, who for the past weeks had been assisting with the supervision of the tea valley, Paul’s cousin not being due back for a fortnight. Merlin dreaded his return ... unlike Lon he wasn’t an Indonesian who rather liked intrigue; nor was he Ramai, a boy who could be talked into playing a game of makebelieve. Paul’s cousin was Dutch like himself and he’d want to know all about her, or as much as she liked to tell him, and if anyone was going to let out to Paul that she was a girl in her twenties and not a woman in her forties, then the cousin was the most likely candidate.

‘Come, let us have breakfast,’ Paul said, and he gestured in the general direction of the table. ‘I hope we haven’t unnerved you with our talk about a typhoon? You mustn’t worry. This house is built to withstand a strong blow and the houseboys will bring back their families here, or take them down to the valley.’

‘I should think it would be safer,
mynheer.’
She lifted the coffee pot and poured for both of them, adding sugar to his cup and just a dash of thick cream. She placed the cup exactly where he could reach it without knocking it over, and felt an inward tightening of her nerves as she heard for herself the restless fluttering of the palm and casuarina leaves. She had learned since coming here that those trees were invariably planted in pairs as they represented the male and female principle, the palm towering and strong, the casuarina graceful and somehow compliant in its aspect.

‘Ja,
the valley is safe,
mevrouw,
if this should be only a big wind, but if the sea should throw a tidal wave then it isn’t so good. We stay here at the house. Do you mind?’

‘I do whatever you think is best,
mynheer.’
She served him with the delicious coconut jelly, after which there were fried oysters and rice balls. ‘It will be a new experience for me to see a typhoon.’

‘It is more to the point to say that you will hear it,
mevrouw.
At its height the big wind sounds like an express train rushing through a tunnel, a long, long tunnel that makes the noise seem endless. Are you feeling afraid? It would be perfectly natural.’

‘I’m nervous,’ she admitted, ‘but not terrified.’ It was somehow impossible to feel as frightened of the elements as she felt of Paul himself if he should suddenly change towards her, revealing the black hatred that gnawed at his heart and would go on gnawing until he could assuage it.

‘Now you know,
mevrouw,
why I wished to have a sensible woman here and not a romantic girl. Islands are not always idyllic places, such as they are made out to be in the travel brochures, and I really don’t fancy a frightened young thing on my hands if we are in for a typhoon and the winds starts ripping trees out of the ground and causing quite a bit of hell to break loose.’ He pronged oyster on to a fork and gave his twist of a smile. ‘I’m not exactly equipped to play knight errant, and that is what romantic girls expect, chivalry and the firm arm of protection. You are a woman past all that, eh?’

‘Of course,’ said Merlin, and gave him a petrified look. It was all too tragically easy to fool a blind man, to assume the serene manner of an older woman, and a more deliberate way of walking. Of having flowers about the house, and making sure the boys kept the rooms free of dust—something they had not been too scrupulous about before her arrival. Also those old songs she played for him helped a great deal to establish her as a woman long out of touch with the modern trends in popular music. She had, to put it crudely, pulled the wool over his eyes, but when his cousin returned from Holland ... oh God, she didn’t want to think about that, but if she were exposed then she could only pray that he would accept the explanation that she had wanted the job so much that she hadn’t thought it would matter if she let him believe that she was in her sensible forties. They had now been working together for several weeks and it would delay work on the book if he angrily dismissed her and sought another secretary.

She didn’t want to leave him ... that was at the heart and root of everything. Life would have no meaning at all if she couldn’t see him each day, hear his voice and do his bidding. Stolen fruit, both bitter and sweet, and which he’d choke her with if he ever learned the real truth of her identity.

‘You have gone very quiet,
mevrouw,
and the foliage of the trees is rattling all the harder. Or is it your knees knocking?’

She smiled. ‘I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t got the jitters,
mynheer,
but this is a soundly built house and I’m ready to face what the fates have in store for me.’

‘Fatalistic, eh? You believe, do you, that is what is written on your scroll will assuredly come to pass? It’s a view I find hard to swallow.’

‘Why is that,
mynheer?’

‘I don’t happen to find it terribly amusing that it was written I should come to
this,
cut off from my life’s work, unable to function at what I did best, and all because of some damned little nurse who thought I should be taught a lesson for not taking sufficient notice of her.’

‘Oh, do you really believe that?’ Merlin’s face was a picture of pain. ‘I’m sure it must have been an accident— no one—no woman would be that cruel!’

‘You weren’t there!’ he said curtly. ‘How would you know? You are a woman who has kept apart from the complexity of passions that certain other people indulge in. I once had the task of trying to restore a face at which a woman had flung a kerosene lamp ... impossible to imagine, is it not, and yet it happened. Passion can be a force motivated by the devil himself ... I wanted to destroy that woman as she destroyed my eyes, and that was one of the reasons why I came halfway across the world to live ... to try and forget. It isn’t easy. I am not Saint Paul.’