Acts of Love (19 page)

He stroked her hair and it took several minutes before he recovered himself to ask her, ‘You will keep the ring?’

‘Would you be so very offended if I didn’t?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded her head. He looked delighted. She swung her legs around to dangle them over the inside of the boat now, and then hopped down on to the deck. Ahmad followed. They faced each other. ‘It’s a magnificent gift. Thank you.’

He placed his arms around her and drew her tight up against him. ‘Ahmad …’ She was about to insist, ‘No strings attached.’ But somehow she didn’t dare.

They were walking together now on the deck to the starboard side of the boat. ‘I’ve waited a long time to give Catherine’s ring to you.’

‘Oh?’ she asked, puzzled by that. ‘How long?’

‘More than two years. Since that night we tried to have sex together alone for the first time.’

‘Why didn’t you give it to me then, Ahmad?’ she asked. This was curiosity more than anything.

‘It wasn’t working for us. We were both suffering from loss. Neither of us could cope with our sexual hunger for each other without Jason. He wasn’t dead for us then.’

‘And he is now,’ she added for him. It was surprising how easily they were able to speak about Jason in the past tense, so separate now from their lives.

At that moment one of the crew called for him to assist in the rigging of the sail. Ahmad took her hands in his, raised them to his lips and, turning them over, kissed first one palm and then the other. They stared for several seconds into each other’s eyes. Another time, another place, and they would have immediately been together to assuage the sexual hunger they were feeling once more for each other. He walked away from her, and she used herself with her unusual string of pearls. He had commanded it with his eyes. She had obeyed. They were sexually obsessed with each other, always had been, and they were both grateful for it. So, at least, they kept telling each other in their tent that night.

‘Are you going to remain at Christie’s?’ he asked a few days later.

She surprised even herself when she answered, ‘No. I intend to give notice on my return to London.’

‘A sudden decision?’

‘Yes, actually. I had no idea I wanted to do that until I said it.’

‘It’s not like you to make rash decisions.’

‘No. But I want to change my life.’

‘You usually wait for someone else to do that for you. Caution, you’re new at this game.’

What Ahmad said was true, but there was a sting in the way
he said it. She surprised herself again when he asked, ‘Do you have any plans?’ and she found herself saying:

‘No.’

‘Money?’

She began to laugh. ‘Money? I have had nothing but despair and unhappiness over money since Jason’s death. Until then I never thought about money, and I was right not to. It’s a loathsome commodity. I have no idea how to handle it. It can give and take ruthlessly. I should know.’

‘Why didn’t you come to me if you were in trouble for money?’

‘I didn’t say that I was in trouble for money.’

‘But you were. Was it pride? You knew I would have come to your aid.’

He knew. All the time he had known about her husband’s bad debts, how Jason had been ruined by them. He didn’t have to spell it out. Something in his attitude did. She tried to block that out of her mind, still wanting to believe that Ahmad did not know about Jason’s financial fall.

‘I waited for you to come to me for help.’

Does a friend, a lover, not go to you with an offer of help if he knows you are bleeding to death? Does he wait for you to crawl to him? Arianne didn’t like what she was feeling about this conversation.

‘Jason would have come to me. He did come to me, many times. I saved him more often than he’d care to remember. It meant nothing to me. He was my friend, I loved him. You’re my friend, I am passionately in love with you. You’re a part of my life as Jason was. Would I have done less for you?’

She had suffered so many humiliations trying to save face for Jason. She had endured giving up, paring her life down until there was nothing more to excise. And what had he been doing? Waiting for her to go to him. Should she have? Had it been pride? What had inhibited her from seeking help from Ahmad? It was all too uncomfortable to contemplate. That was the past. Jason was dead. That part of her life was over. She would not dwell on it now.

She ignored his question. Instead she told him, ‘I’ll buy a book, sell a book. I will deal in a modest way in the rare-book world. It’s something I know. Thanks to you, I have a roof over
my head, a house that I love. I’ll live frugally – I am quite used to that. I have become quite used to taking care of myself these last years without Jason. I’m here, aren’t I? At my own instigation, no one else’s. Maybe I’m just a late starter in the game of asserting oneself.’

One could rarely read anything in Ahmad’s handsome, seductive face. It was a mask to disguise his feelings. Not this time. Arianne read it perfectly. She had surprised him. He thought he was still dealing with the Arianne of their
ménage à trois
. That was the woman he loved and wanted. Arianne was not a woman to fool herself: she knew very well that she was still that woman, still a lady who liked being taken over by a man. But time and circumstances had changed her; she was also something more now. Really, she had always been something more, and Ahmad and Jason had known that. Though they had tended to ignore the fact most of the time, had they not loved her even more because they knew she gave up herself, her very life, willingly to them? They had had control of her, because she had wanted them to have it. Her passive nature? Had they been tricked by that? She reminded herself that men can be just as foolish in love as women. That brought a smile to her lips. She tilted her head back, performed that often sexy movement of throwing one shoulder forward, and began to laugh.

She looked lovely, beautiful, serene and sexy. Happy, with laughter that had bells in it. She was enchanting, and clever. Though Ahmad tended to forget it, she still held his interest as no other woman was capable of doing. He loved her so much for managing to bring a smile to his lips and laughter to his heart. The wide, curved neckline of the white tee-shirt she was wearing slipped to show a shoulder smooth, naked and brown. She was irresistible. He caressed it and placed a fleeting kiss upon it.

She took him by the hand and led him away to the bow of the felucca. There she slipped the ruby ring from her finger and into the palm of his hand, closing his fingers over it. She held his fist in her hand, and told him, ‘Please don’t be offended. I am asking you only to keep it for me until the time comes when I feel I can ask you for it.’

‘When will that be?’

‘When I can give you what you want.’

He began to say something, but she stopped him with a finger on his lips. ‘No, please. Let’s leave it at that for now. I’m not ready for any more than what we already have together.’

That night he controlled her sexually at first with many tender acts of seduction. His mouth, his lips, his tongue searched out every erogenous area of her body and he made love to them. He made a meal of her cunt, until she could not bear a minute longer of not having him deep inside her in violent passion. He removed the pearls and dropped them into her mouth and watched her lick them. It was such a wildly sexy thing to watch, it drove him to take her breast in his mouth, suck on it in a desperate hunger for more, always more, of her. Then he took the pearls from her in a kiss. He plied her with the aphrodisiac ointments, and with silk cords around her wrists. He probed between her legs, after placing cushions beneath her, and entered her slowly – so slowly she thought she would scream, she was that desperate to be riven by him. Now all tenderness was gone; they were both past tenderness. He used his cock on her as if he were whipping her to frenzy. He had primed her for violent love-making, for rutting like beasts at the mercy of instinct. That was what they both wanted and what they both now had. He placed a silk handkerchief in her mouth to stifle the sounds of ecstasy.

They had lost themselves to lust. All caution had been cast off. They had been there before, many times, but never just the two of them, without Jason. Not a word had been said about his absence, but they did crave another man, Jason, to add to their sexual madness, to stop them from going far off the edge into a danger zone.

The following morning when they awakened they made love to each other once again with tenderness and affection. They confirmed their enthralled attraction for each other, even a new and different closeness now there for them. These days and nights on the Nile, isolated from the outside world, with their past relationship firmly in the past, had allowed them to discover each other anew.

But something had happened to them during those hours of sexual oblivion. They had at last sated their passion. There was no place to go. Just time to savour where they had been. Orgasm, the ‘little death’. They had been there
and
been there. Nothing
could be more exciting than their ‘little deaths’, but they were losing track of life in the wake of their sexual passion and dying to the world.

Both of them needed time and space to come to terms with who they really were, what they wanted, beyond a sexual life together. If anything. That was what Arianne was telling herself; what Ahmad knew, though he was telling himself nothing. His obsession lived. He was more certain than ever that he would one day have that unconditional love he secretly demanded of her. There was much to question about themselves and their relationship, but these were extremely sensitive questions that neither of them cared to express. They were too complex, a psychological minefield not to be entered casually. What they had always had together in the past, and on this trip up the Nile, thrived on spontaneity of emotion and attraction, and on Arianne’s capacity to give herself completely, to die to all else in the world when in the arms of the men she loved. Answers could kill all that – the last thing either of them wanted.

There was something manic about the next two and a half days. Nothing mattered but winning the race. The crew had worked hard and with complete attention ever since they had left Cairo. But now it was somehow different: they were ten times as quick and sharp, or so it seemed. By day they sailed, catching the slightest breeze, the best wind almost before it arrived, using the currents with alacrity, sheer genius, and until well after dark. At night the bedouin tent was no longer raised, the plank no longer put on to the bank; the men no longer slept on shore. The cooking pots came out as soon as the anchor had been dropped. The clearing-up began while the men sat around the cooking fire and the brazier from the tent. For everyone on board, including Ahmad and Arianne, even sleep itself seemed directed only at waking to resume the morning ritual and set sail once again in the dark to meet the dawn.

The
Osiris
and its crew did not have it all their way. There were other captains in that race who were masters of the Nile, men who could handle their crafts as skilfully as Abdul Wassif. The
Osiris
took the lead on the river more than once, only to lose it, and at one point to drop back not just to third but to fifth place.
The challenge only incited the crew of the
Osiris
to work harder, to miss no chance of regaining the lead. They sailed like winners. Abdul Wassif, Ahmad at his side as his second-in-command, became more aggressive towards the challengers. Together they ruthlessly manoeuvred them into less favourable spots on the Nile, coming near to crashing into them, to gain a better position and race ahead. And then when it counted Ahmad had all the competitors where he wanted them, behind the
Osiris
. Abdul Wassif navigated the Nile with its tricky currents and slipstreams, the shifting winds coming off the desert and up from the south, to pull ahead at speed and retain the lead. That was only fifteen miles downstream from Luxor and the finish. By then hundreds of people were already lining the banks of the Nile, shouting and running alongside the feluccas in the final dash to win the race, urging on the other boats, now mere dots of white sail lying far down-river without a chance.

The
Osiris
was challenged once more by the felucca that had won the race twice before. But the sight of the temple of Karnak was enough to draw from Abdul Wassif a final reserve of cunning and energy. He cut across the river, forcing the felucca,
Nefertiti
, to swerve into an area of swirling water. All was lost for the
Nefertiti
. By the time she navigated herself out of it, her best hope was a sad second place.

Two days of celebration later, the last of the feluccas crossed the finish. A final party was held. Not at the Winter Palace Hotel where Ahmad and those of the entrants who could afford it were staying, but on the opposite side of the river to Luxor, in the desert, in the Valley of the Kings. At a series of tents there, guests arrived in horse-drawn carriages or on camels, or astride beautiful Arab stallions, by caravans of donkeys, even in the odd car that was housed on that side of the Nile. As a privilege, the tombs of the Kings and Queens of ancient Egypt were opened and lit – for the Nile sailors, who were mostly from the peasant class of Egypt, and who would never usually make the journey to see wonders to which the tourists of the world flocked.

Ahmad created a huge affair for the contenders, their families and friends, and dignitaries who flew in from Cairo and Alexandria or the towns of Upper Egypt for the event. They dined on whole
lambs roasted on dozens of open fires, and a costly array of delectable dishes from the Arab cuisine:
baba-ghanoug
– baked eggplant mashed and mixed with sesame paste, flavoured with lemon and garlic and olive oil;
taameyya
(felafel) – patties of mashed fool (fava beans) with finely chopped parsley, highly seasoned and fried in deep oil, and served by the thousand rather than the hundred;
waraq anab
– rolled vine leaves stuffed with rice and meat; and
moulukhiya
– a steamed green vegetable resembling spinach, which was served in a soup of strong chicken broth and garlic. Then there were vine leaves stuffed with lentils, piled in a vast cone on huge trays. And no party such as this would have been complete without serving Egypt’s national dish:
Fool mudhammas
– fava beans cooked with spices and tomatoes (something like a chilli con carne without meat). Pigeons by the hundred were broiled over open pits. And then came the real treat – grilled shrimp, huge, succulent and delicious, from the Mediterranean, and fish from the Red Sea.