The Passionate Sinner (7 page)

He rose to his feet as he spoke and went to the veranda rail, where he stood in a listening attitude, his brows drawn together as he took out his cheroots and lit one, taking in a deep lungful of the smoke and expelling it through taut nostrils.

‘Ramai should be back soon,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if certain facts of life strike you as harsh,
mevrouw,
but you haven’t had a lot to do with men, have you? I’m not belittling you for that, but I actually think it praiseworthy that a woman should be serene and not a hell-cat who lives only to torment other people. There is a great deal of serenity in you, but you are probably unaware of the fact. There is modesty in you as well.’

‘I’m no saint myself,
mynheer!’
Merlin flushed, half with pleasure at what he said, half with dismay. She had suspected that he was forming an image of her that his Dutch cousin could blast into fragments with a few well chosen words, and quickly she went over to him and dared to touch his forearm below the short sleeve of his shirt, lightly, tentatively, with pleading.

‘Mynheer,
what if your cousin doesn’t like me? What will you do if he paints a different picture of me from the one you have in mind? I—I like my job here—I wouldn’t like to be sent away—‘

‘My dear woman,’ he was gazing downwards to where her hand rested on his skin, ‘do you imagine that Hendrik dictates to me? I have formed my conclusions about you and he can’t alter them. You are a good secretary and we get along, eh?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Then why should Hendrik object to you? You do your work to my satisfaction, and keep me company in the evenings.’

‘Your cousin will wish to do that when he returns.’

‘Hardly.’ Paul gave a cynical smile and tipped ash from his cheroot with a long forefinger. ‘He has what is called an arrangement with a woman from the village—it often happens when men work away from their homeland, and loneliness can break the spirit of the hardest man, and Hendrik isn’t hard. He’s addicted to the tropics and cannot work elsewhere, and it is none of my business if he wishes to alleviate his loneliness and lighten his leisure with an attractive island girl, so long as her parents are satisfied that he treats her well. Are you shocked,
mevrouw?’

‘No, I’m not narrow-minded,
mynheer.’
Merlin, to put it mildly, was relieved to hear that Hendrik van Setan wasn’t the starchy sort whose back would be stiff as a board to match his principles. After all, she wasn’t deceiving Paul in a way that could hurt him and she might manage to persuade Hendrik to let the deception go on. She crossed her fingers and hoped so.

‘Are you wondering why I haven’t succumbed to the charms of a dusky island girl?’ Paul murmured, and that disconcerting blind gaze was full upon her face as if he could read her features and see her reaction to his question.

‘You strike me as a very strong-willed man,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think you’d ever give in to your own desires unless they had real meaning for you.’

‘Such as being motivated by love? Is that what you mean?’

‘Yes.’ She said it firmly, her conviction rooted in the marvellous surgeon he had been, a kind of decisive tenderness in the way he had used his skilful hands. ‘I don’t think you’ve ever had much time for empty experiences and much prefer those that enrich you.’

‘That might have been true when I had the satisfaction and enrichment of my work,
mevrouw.
Now, like a house without windows, I dominate an empty landscape and will gradually fall into ruin—then, believe me, I shall turn to the arms of consolation. Why not? I imagine the island girls are sweet-tempered and sweet to the touch. That’s all a man like me should want or need. A pliable affection from someone who will slip quietly away when the tiger feels like howling to the moon he can’t see.’

‘Do tigers howl?’ she asked, trying to speak lightly and finding it hard to manage.

‘If the thorn’s in deep enough,’ he rejoined, ‘and you’ve been long enough on the island to have heard the name the islanders have given me,
harimau
which means tiger.’

‘Sang harimau,’
she corrected him. ‘King tiger.’

His smile was brief, a trifle caustic. ‘It has something to do with a legend of theirs, that each one of us has been at some time a member of the animal kingdom and that when we take human shape certain of our former characteristics are retained. Soon after I came to Pulau-Indah I took to going into the forest at night, where I had an uncanny knack of finding my way, obviously due to increased facility to hear and sense the presence of other night creatures. Real tigers roam there, you know, and at night they’re prowling for food. The islanders first decided that I was crazy, and then very gradually they began to hint that I had an affinity with the big tawny cats and that was why I was unafraid to go where they were. The truth was I didn’t much care if one night they took me for their supper—you catch your breath with extreme sharpness,
mevrouw,
but a woman like you, you support the truth and dislike dishonesty, don’t you?’

Merlin put a hand to her throat and felt for a moment slightly choked by her own dishonesty. Feeling the withdrawal of her touch from his arm, he glanced downwards and she saw his eyebrows pull together. ‘Have I struck a wrong chord?’ he asked. ‘Have you some small guilty secret, Miss Lakeside, locked up in your heart?’

‘Haven’t we all got a few bones in the cupboard of our conscience,
mynheer!
I’m an old maid, but not necessarily a devout nun.’

‘Intriguing,’ he murmured. ‘The secrets of Ruth are always more subtle than the secrets of Jezebel. It has to do with a man, of course?’

‘That—that is always the assumption.’ she said uneasily.

‘The most logical one, unless you once robbed a piggy bank.’ Then to Merlin’s disquiet, she saw him reaching out a hand in her direction, as if sudden curiosity made him want to actually touch the object of his aroused interest. She drew away, carefully, back against the veranda rail, all too conscious that she had on a thin shirt and that although her figure was slim she had a youthful firmness and suppleness that his sensitive fingers would be aware of at once. Lon had warned her of this. That blind men could tell so much from the voice, and then came the day when they wanted to extend their research. It was perfectly natural and under normal circumstances she would have offered her face for a braille reading, though it would have touched the near peaks of exquisite agony to have let him touch her body.

‘I can hear you moving away from me,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Are you scared of being touched? I mean it quite impersonally. You mustn’t imagine that I want to take a liberty.’

‘I don’t imagine that.’ Merlin shrank into stillness, like a prudish spinster grown so out of touch with physical contact that it now took on a sinister aspect. It was better to act like that than to face the real truth, that she dreaded to be found out and yet longed to be discovered as a girl of twenty-one who could give him the sweet consolation he must hunger for in the dark depth of his days and nights. She wanted that strong brown arm to curve around her and drag her hard and fast to that tanned and sinewy body, whose skin would warmly sear her own, whose muscles would make her feel deliriously weak, whose desires would come vibrantly alive to the young female feel of her. How she longed for that ... a rage of heaven even if afterwards she had to face the hell of his anger.

He was blind, but his mind was keenly, alertly alive, and he’d guess who she was ... he’d find out, and the pleasure wouldn’t be worth the pain of his hatred.

‘You are scared out of your wits,’ he said softly. His nostrils tensed, as if he had actually caught the scent of her fear. ‘My dear woman, I haven’t been so long without a woman that I shall go berserk and ravish you the instant I get my hands on your body. I merely wished to braille you—I thought we had got to know one another well enough for that.’

It was an awful dilemma, for Merlin didn’t dare to let his hands have contact with her face or her figure; those fingers of his had been highly sensitive and aware of skin textures and bone construction before his blindness, and if he touched her now he would realise instantly that she was not what she claimed to be ... a middle-aged woman.

Then, with a shrug and a mordant little twist of his lip, he said: ‘What made you stay single—did you never wish to marry?’

So that was what he assumed, that she was a frigid prude who shrank from physical contact with a man! Well, it couldn’t be helped if he took her for that sort, but there was something very mocking in the way he thrust both hands into the pockets of his trousers, letting her know that she was safe from their marauding ... for now.

‘I—I imagine most women like to be married,’ she replied, a burning in her cheeks.

‘So you never met the right man, eh?’

She gazed into his sightless eyes and poignant on her mouth, like a frozen kiss, was the answer she could never put into words. ‘I’m not a woman that men seem to notice.’

‘It is said in this part of the world that for every man there is a soul in the shape of a woman, that until she appears the man is without his soul. Perhaps it will yet happen.’

‘No!’

‘You sound so sure—or are you basically afraid of the idea of marriage and all it entails?’

‘I’m content with what I have.’

‘An existence all on one level, Miss Lakeside? The heights can never be reached for a woman alone.’

‘Surely that goes for a man as well, if you are talking about the emotional side and not just the physical?’

‘Ja,
for a man it is also sadly true, no heights, no suspension among the stars.’

‘Are you a romantic at heart,
mynheer?’

‘If to be romantic is to know that there is something always a little out of reach, until one day it is suddenly there, tangible, touchable, visible.’

He broke off, a sigh dropping from his lips. ‘Yes, perhaps I was romantic, for I was aware of this—this strange unseen but
felt
presence in my life, waiting to take shape as a woman I could—love.’

Such unexpected words from Paul, who had always looked so aloofly sure of himself and how he meant to shape his life, taking in his own good time a cool and soignée wife who would grace his home and be intelligent in the company of his medical friends. Merlin’s eyes raced over his strong, commanding features and her gaze fell more slowly to the deep neck opening of his shirt ... he had seemed more complete than other men, with all his priorities firmly listed and little margin left for even a scribbled note that he wanted to fall in love and experience for himself all the mystery and excitement of falling for an unknown girl who might be unsuitable for a high-ranking surgeon. It had seemed a foregone conclusion that he meant to select a wife from among the smart, socially well-placed women whom he dated.

Love? Strangely enough Merlin had never been able to imagine the commanding Paul van Setan in the grip of passion, his eyes stormy, his mouth hungry, his hair unruly on a hot forehead. He had seemed not to need that kind of emotion, an inspired healer of bodies rather than a lover.

How innocent her own love had been in those days ... how warm and aware it poured through her veins right now.

Human like this, though blinded, he was even more desirable and she had to grip her hands together in case they obeyed a compulsion of their own and reached out for the firm column of his neck and those powerful shoulders across which the brown silk was taut and just a few shades darker than his tanned skin. As she watched him he raised his grey eyes to the sky and she ached that he saw only blackness and none of the blueness. ..

Blue ... she looked as well and caught her breath. The sky was darkly mottled in patches and the sun had a sulphurous look.

‘Has the daylight darkened?’ Paul demanded.

‘Yes, it has.’ For a startled moment she wondered if he could see a little.

‘I thought so! The sun has cooled against the skin, which means it isn’t direct any more but is being diffused by a thickening haze. Am I correct?’

‘Yes—does that mean?’

‘Assuredly. Can you see anything of Ramai? He should have been back by now to tell us what Lon has picked up on the radio.’

‘I can’t see him about—should I go and look for him?’

‘Ja.’
Paul struck the rail of the veranda with his fist. ‘I feel so helpless, damn it, having to rely on others to do what I would due done with more efficiency. Curse the gods for this! Curse that little bitch for what she did to me!

Merlin closed her eyes against a deep stab of pain. ‘I—I’ll go and find Ramai.’ She was about to dart away when Paul’s voice arrested her.

‘Shoes!’ he rapped at her. ‘Go and put them on before you go down to the valley in search of the boy—no, better to find Lon. Ramai has parents and a batch of siblings in the
kampong
and he may have gone first to them with possible bad news. Find Lon!’

‘Yes.’

‘And don’t worry too much. These things—blow over.’ His smile was sardonic as he turned away from her and seemed to be looking at that bruised sky. His profile might have been sculptured except for the muscle that worked in his jaw; he was a man of action who hungered to do something decisive, but he knew that being blind he could only get in the way of those who would have to set about shuttering the house and making it as secure as possible.

Merlin hastened indoors and ran upstairs on trembling legs. She felt as if the typhoon had already set up its storm in her heart, more potently filled with Paul than ever before, brimming with a love she had to keep bottled inside her. There in her room she flung open the cupboard in which she kept her clothes and quickly laced her feet into a pair of plimsolls from her nursing days. Before leaving the room curiosity made her take a look at her reflection in the mirror that stood on a carved chest ... she stared at herself as if at the face of a stranger, seeing the shadowed hollows under her cheekbones and the poignancy of her own mouth. She realised that what she felt for Paul had fined her face to these interesting contours and subtle shadings; she had a new kind of look, not exactly a prettiness, for there was a coy sweetness to being pretty, but noticeable, eye-catching, something that would induce an observer to wonder about her.