Only in the Night (15 page)

The hospital was extraordinarily well equipped and its standard of medical treatment quite remarkable for a population as poor and in need as the one it catered to. The Egyptian doctors who worked at the hospital, and indeed the government itself, conducted a love-hate relationship with the institution: gratitude for the remarkable job being done, coupled with a sense of inadequacy that they could not fund or organise such a unique and successful project on their own. But in the hands of Eliza Flemming things began to ease slowly into a more workable, less hostile situation that kept bearing fruit and producing much-needed help. Every month a new medical specialist would arrive from Paris, London, New York, Rome or Dallas, and word would spread up and down the Nile by way of newspapers and posters and the people’s gossip. Reluctant and superstitious patients, unable to afford medical treatment in the larger of their cities, arrived for treatment most often than not traumatised with fear, and in many cases with entire families in tow who camped out close by.

Then, quite suddenly, there appeared to be a pattern of sorts in the midst of the chaos: at last things were getting done, still in a casual manner, but done nevertheless. A kind of hush that was almost ethereal hovered over the Nile Hospital and Clinic. Things were no less busy but they were a great deal less frenetic. Eliza was actually able to sit back of an evening and look at the stars, listen to the silence and take stock of what she had accomplished since her arrival in Egypt. Quite suddenly she liked who she had become just as she had liked the girl she had been when she had run wild in Tuscany with Vittorio so many lifetimes ago.

Previously unused to admiration for her accomplishments, respect for who and what she was, Eliza found it easy to accept those things from her colleagues, and most particularly from Antonio Rinaldi. In the very nearly three months they had been working together a silent bond of affection and respect for one another had developed between them, and with it an undercurrent of sexual attraction that was exciting and put an edge on their relationship. Months of wanting each other in a carnal way, and waiting, had established an understanding between them. Friends and lovers, that was what fate had deemed right for them. Theirs was to be a one-day-at-a-time romantic and sexual idyll until the days would inevitably run out for them. It was as if written in the sands or whispered on the wind.

One midnight Eliza was sitting on the small terrace of her bungalow contemplating the stars. She was dressed in a thin white cotton nightgown with shoestring straps and a wide band of white lace that covered her breasts. Her long blonde hair, freshly washed, shone like silver in the moonlight. She had
not heard him approaching so was startled when he spoke: ‘Don’t be frightened, it’s Antonio.’

Eliza made an attempt to rise from the chaise, intending to switch on a light. ‘No! The moonlight is bright enough,’ he told her, and smiled as he sat down beside her and raised her hand to kiss it.

Eliza reached out to caress his cheek with the back of her hand. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever told you how handsome and sensual a man I find you. I do, you know,’ she told him now.

‘That’s good to know. Actually I’m flattered. And look at you! I like you like this, in your nightgown. You look perfect, so delicious, and I’m ravenous.’

Eliza reached out to open the small mother of pearl buttons of his shirt. She and Antonio were gazing into each other’s eyes. There was an exchange in that gaze: of sensuality, excitement, a light and delightful sense of rightness about their lustful feelings for each other. An aura of pure pleasure, a profound sense of discovery, the adventure of being sexually alive and at the top of their lives appeared like a night mist to envelop them. Antonio caressed her shoulders and fingered the lovely white lace as he slipped out of his shoes. Eliza, having removed his shirt, was slipping the snakeskin belt from the loops of his linen trousers. Sexual tension was crackling between them like lightning in the sky. They rose from the chaise together, Antonio to remove his trousers, Eliza to raise her nightgown up and over her head and drop it on the marble tiles. Together they lay down on the chaise, on their side, facing each other.

Antonio took her in his arms and held her close as he draped one of her legs over his hip. Eliza’s breathing
quickened from the sheer excitement of his ardour for her. ‘Yes, please, yes,’ she told him, very nearly breathless as he parted the soft warm outer lips of her cunt by stroking her yearning cleft with the large and handsome knob of his penis. He found the place where he wanted so very much to enter and in one powerful, but slow and tantalisingly sexy thrust, their sexual life together began.

Antonio deliberately took Eliza for the first time in this jack-knife position because he knew that that way and from behind was how to penetrate her most completely for their greater pleasure. He remained fully rampant and pulsating inside her soft warm cunt. Antonio had mastered the art of fucking and could bring great pleasure to a woman by the ways in which he moved against her cervix, the tremendously sensitive G-spot, and other places within the vagina. He felt her come as her body naturally took over, issuing a deliciously exciting but subtle pelvic motion: small circles and at the same time exquisitely sexy contractions of her own that gripped and released his penis to a beat that was as important to them at that moment as a heartbeat. Antonio was both astounded and seduced by the degree of erotic pleasure he was deriving from her sexuality.

Eliza’s nipples were erect and her breasts looked dazzlingly raunchy: their fullness and shape, the large nimbus shining in the moonlight, as did her face, pink with the colour that multiple orgasm can bring to a woman’s complexion. Antonio was enjoying so much of Eliza: the feel and warmth of her sex, her passion, watching her wallowing in her sexuality, her obvious lust and love for penis and penetration. He kissed her
full on the lips and caressed her breasts and bit into her sensitive nipples, all the while continuing his subtle but sexy fucking. She kept coming, pent-up sexual passion flowing from her like a stream. Eliza was able to let go, to call out in a whisper laced with lust, ‘Yes, oh, yes, thank you, thank you,’ as tears of release and joy slipped from the corners of her eyes.

Antonio had a great deal of sexual stamina but this first time with Eliza, discovering how well matched they were in their lust and sexual freedom, was for him far more exciting than he had thought it would be. He could hold back no longer and now began to fuck her by entering and withdrawing in powerful but leisurely thrusts so that she might gain the maximum pleasure. By the time he was beating into her at a quickened pace Eliza was lost in orgasm, had slipped into a state of sexual ecstasy. Antonio recognised where she was and took his moment, joining her with a powerful and copious orgasm. Still on their sides and in each other’s arms they held tight, Eliza digging her nails into the flesh of Antonio’s back.

They remained lying together and dozed off until their heartbeat slowed. Both were aware that here was the beginning of what could be the happiest and most rewarding sexual life they could ever hope to expect. After some time Antonio stroked Eliza’s hair and they smiled at one another. ‘You are marvellous in your lust, Eliza.’

‘I haven’t been as I am with you for a very long time, Antonio. It was sublime. You are sublime.’

‘You do know love and commitment don’t come into this kind of lust we feel for each other? I wouldn’t want to deceive you. I want you like this and more
of this, to take you on a long and adventurous erotic journey with me, to love you as a friend, feel deep affection for you. But it’s the sex, thrilling sex that goes over the edge in its abandon, that excites me the most about us. Can you live with that? Anything else would complicate our lives out here. This has been on my mind since the first day we travelled out here. That’s why I haven’t come to your bed before this. I had to be sure what I wanted, that I could live up to it, bide by my own rules about us. Now I must know what you want for us?’

‘Take me on that erotic journey, Antonio. Let’s have each other for the sexual attraction we feel for each other, and the affection and respect. If you and I have those things for as long as it lasts, we will have more than most people have in a lifetime. That’ll do for me, if it will for you?’

There was something so genuine and forthright about Eliza’s words. It made them aware that they were not fooling themselves about what they wanted to be and not to be to each other. There was a kind of delight, a happiness that showed in their faces, but they spoke no more of it. Instead Antonio’s reply to Eliza was to kiss her breasts and to slide over her body and caress it with his before he parted her legs. He placed his face between them and with his lips and tongue teased open her most intimate lips with kisses. He took her moist, warm and satiny labia in his mouth and sucked on them, using a pointed tongue to find and excite her clitoris. He licked what tasted to him the most exquisite of elixirs – their orgasms – until his mouth was alive with the taste of sex and shared that ambrosia with Eliza in a deep and passionate kiss.
She came, once, twice more, and trembled with the sublime pleasure.

She was lost in lust again. Antonio watched her run her fingers through her hair, pull hard on it and gaze at the moon and the stars before he turned her over and arranged her on her knees.

Chapter 8

The years came and went for Eliza but time seemed somehow to be standing still. They were busy and exciting years, fulfilling years, and Eliza felt an ease, a vitality of spirit, that allowed her to live joyously once again. She seemed effervescently beautiful, subtly sensuous, in these, her mature years, strong with a quiet assertiveness that made her afraid of nothing.

It had to do with her work, how she was living, the high self-esteem so hard won, and the closer relationship that had developed between her and her children since her move to Egypt. They had made several trips to holiday with her in Upper Egypt, the Sudan and Ethiopia, had seen her working at the hospital and were amazed that their mother was running it and the clinic practically single-handed when she had never been able to make them a decent cup of cocoa. They were all, children and mother, mature enough to discuss her as the bad parent she had been, and Alexander and Olivia their father’s role in separating them from her. The three children grew to accept her as having been too young, too weak, to take them over and make them her own. The pride they took in having her for their mother now could not wipe away her serious faults, they were embedded
in their minds and hearts for ever, but they did manage to accept them as such and love her in spite of them.

There was, too, another reason for this joyous life that Eliza was living, which had to do with the
menage à trois
she was a part of with Antonio and Anwar Whabi. A three-way relationship had developed between the two men and Eliza. It had not been forced but rather evolved by the very nature of the people they were, the way they lived, and its being the right time and the right place for such an affair.

From that first time that Eliza met Anwar until they met again several months passed. But that was not to say that they had not spoken, they had many times, from Cairo and from various parts of the world for Anwar was a great traveller and smitten with Eliza. These were for the most part seductive conversations filled with wit, charm and promises of erotic nights. She had no doubt that as soon as time allowed he would be there to make good his promises. Eliza had been flattered, amused, and savoured the prospect of Anwar as a lover. Antonio had for months been telling her what a depraved and erotic young man was chasing after her.

He was candid with Eliza about the many times he had shared women and erotic games with Anwar. How much he, the provincial doctor, had learned from his friend and his free-wheeling lust for all things sexual. Antonio admitted it had changed his sexual life and that they, he and Eliza, were indebted to Anwar for that, because they were reaping the rewards now.

It was true. Antonio and Eliza’s sex life was marvellous, full of adventurous and sometimes untamed sex games that they seemed to thrive on. But so too
was their relationship outside bed. Antonio and Eliza did not live in each other’s pockets, they lived lives independent of each other. He came and went in his work and personal life as he chose, sometimes with and sometimes without Eliza. She did the same. He had his wife and family. Though they were far away, they remained a mainstay in his life. Eliza understood that he’d never promised love in the marital sense of the word to her, not that that was what she had been looking for, because he loved only one woman and was committed in marriage to her and would always remain so. What they had together was something else and just as valid and important to them at this moment of time, in this place. Though they never discussed that, or that theirs was a free love that allowed them their right to have other lovers in their lives, it was accepted and, strangely, made their own relationship more intense and complete.

There was a stable in a small oasis of date palms less than a mile from the hospital. Antonio had had it built for the two Arabian stallions he kept. Most mornings he would rise at six and ride out into the desert, returning in time to begin his day at the clinic or the hospital. If he missed a morning, as soon as the sun was low enough in the sky, and if time permitted, he took his ride at dusk. The stable keeper, who lived with his family in a Bedouin tent among the palm trees at the edge of the natural spring, the reason for building the stable there, was an experienced man with horses and their breeding. His job was to tend to the two fine Arabians and keep intruders away.

In those first months, before Eliza and Antonio had become lovers, he had never mentioned the stable or
his morning rides. It was one of the few private and very personal pleasures of his life at the hospital and he enjoyed keeping it for himself. The first Eliza learned of it was when she awakened him one morning with her lips. He rose to the occasion immediately, his eyes half closed, not from sleep but the bliss of oral sex and the sight of Eliza and the pleasure she too derived from her act. He came and Eliza did too as she drank to the last drop the essence of his sexual soul. Her heart racing she slipped on to her side and up the bed to rest her head upon his chest. He stroked her hair and told her how sublime she was, how lucky a man he was to have her as a lover.

It was then that he asked Eliza if it were possible for her to keep the following day free, and told her he wanted them to spend it together. That in itself was not unusual. Ever since they had become lovers, on the rare occasions they managed to take time together Antonio would take her on his house calls, or with his travelling clinic which could last a few days, or surprise her with a day trip to some magical place: an ancient ruin and a night of lovemaking under the stars. What was unusual now was a special lilt in his voice, and the expression of delight in his face.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘It’s a surprise.’

‘Something special, I can tell.’

‘How?’

‘Because you’re bursting to tell me, you can hardly contain yourself.’

He began to laugh and unwound himself from her arms and began to dress. ‘A hint, just a hint,’ she begged.

‘All right, one hint and that’s it. It’s a present, one that you least expect and will adore.’

‘You’ve bought me a present!’ Eliza was quite overwhelmed at that, emotional even. He had never bought her anything, she’d never expected anything or that he would ever want to give her a gift. She had learned to accept many beautiful things – embroidered caftans, antique Roman gold, amber and diamond earrings, an ivory bracelet, a huge bottle of scent, a five-pound box of Belgian white chocolates – from the courting Anwar. That was somehow expected because of his character, the way he seduced women.

‘I’ll tell you no more. Just be at the dock at six tomorrow morning to meet me. I’ll be coming back with it in the ferry.’

It was not Antonio’s habit to report his movements to Eliza but she was not surprised to hear that he would be away the night. He was away many nights and sometimes for long periods of time. Even when he was in residence there were some days, weeks even, when they didn’t spend the night having sex and slept apart.

The day’s work swallowed Eliza up and thoughts of her erotic life and lover vanished from her mind. If she had been unable to relate to her children as babies and toddlers, she’d found since her arrival at the hospital that it was the adolescents and young women in their late-teens and early-twenties with whom she had a special affinity. These poor, and for the most part uneducated, women, steeped in the traditional ways and beliefs of their ancestors and trying to survive in a modern world, found a friend and mentor of sorts in the blonde foreigner who ran the hospital and clinic.
They had a confidence in her that they had in no one else, and she had the ability to deal with them and their problems justly. Eliza was a brilliant liaison officer between the medical staff and the patients.

On this particular day she was dealing with several families, all related to one another, who had come nearly ninety miles from one of the most remote and backward villages deep in the desert. Eliza felt sick with despair when the nurses reported that every one of the women had been circumcised and three were suffering from serious infection. These beautiful women, some as young as fifteen, were all married and suffering all sorts of horrifying discomfort in their sex life for having had as young children, their labia and clitoris removed, and their vagina sewn up with only the smallest of apertures left open. Their sex lives were filled with pain and
never
any prospect of sexual satisfaction.

For Eliza, who had enjoyed men and sex from a young age, and was now enjoying her sexuality to the fullest, it seemed barbaric that a custom had been designed so that women could not enjoy or reach orgasm. Not only that, it was destroying women’s health, the very fabric of their life. She could listen to their heartbreaking stories and do much to prepare them psychologically to see the doctors, but she was very much aware of her delicate position as a foreigner in a strange land. She might help but had to know where to draw the line so as not to offend and cause them more grief by what she preached, which was of course no more female circumcision.

It was nearly midnight before she left her office at the hospital, having had her dinner on a tray there with two of the Egyptian doctors and a visiting Swedish
gynaecologist. As she lay in bed she was thinking not about the day, which had been no more or less busy than any usual day at the hospital, but of one of the doctors and how he had praised her for her humanity, the calm with which she approached their storms, and something else, something particularly poignant: he had told her that she was blessed since quite obviously she had never experienced the pain of failure. She fell asleep realising what a long road she had travelled.

It was the habit of the hospital’s ferry boat to announce its arrival by several blasts on the ship’s horn. The sound made Eliza jump. She was already on the dock sitting on one of the lounge chairs, eyes closed, drifting not in thought but rather a complete state of serene emptiness. She removed the straw hat she had placed over her face to keep it from the sun and rose from her chair to walk to the end of the pier. The ferry boat was still some distance away. She shielded her eyes with her hand but could not see Antonio.

She waited for the ferry to berth. But before it did she had her first sight of Antonio, walking from aft to the prow of the boat. He waved and she waved back and thought he looked particularly handsome, suddenly somehow larger than life. He was smiling, and the air of sensuality about him took her over. She wanted him, to be
in flagrante delicto
with him, and felt shameless to realise how very sexy she was feeling, for the sexual images that flashed through her mind. She laughed aloud at herself for her passion for all things erotic she craved to experience with this man. As the boat slipped alongside the wooden dock he was walking aft and by the time that section of the deck was
in view for Eliza, he was standing next to an Arabian mare, holding the black horse by the reins. The horse raised its head high, whinnied, and took several steps forward on first seeing Eliza.

She walked to the rail of the boat, her heart racing with excitement, and asked Antonio, ‘Surely it’s not mine? This isn’t my present? Is it? No, it can’t possibly be.’

Antonio was touched by how overwhelmed she was by his gift, how genuinely she could not believe that such a prize was to be hers. ‘No one else’s, Eliza,’ he told her.

He watched with considerable pride as she led the horse from the boat on to the dock and examined her, going over her body as only a horsewoman would. There were dozens of people on the dock, by now swarming around the mare, Eliza, and Antonio. This was not exactly the correct place to express intimately to Antonio how grateful she was, how much she loved him for presenting her with such a gift. For them it was always Doctor Rinaldi and Mrs Flemming, perfect decorum in public.

‘Where will we stable her?’ she asked Antonio.

‘Surprise number two,’ he told her.

‘And I’m surprise number three. You can’t ride a horse without a saddle.’

Eliza swung around to see Anwar standing on deck with his Sudanese servant, wearing flowing white robes and a turban and carrying a bridle and saddle of shiny black leather embellished with delicate silver work.

At last Eliza was able to throw all caution to the wind. She embraced Anwar, tears of love and gratitude brimming in her eyes, when he approached her.

Eliza, who was wearing a pair of white linen culottes and a white shirt, walked between the two men for some distance, wanting the saddled horse to get used to her. They made a happy threesome, the men refusing to tell her where they were going or what kind of a day they had in store for her. They were a good distance from the hospital before she mounted the horse and rode while the men still walked on either side of her. Then the oasis came into view and she understood that a wider world than she had been living these last few months was opening up for her. It was there when the two Arabian stallions were brought out for Antonio and Anwar that Antonio confessed here was the place he’d selfishly kept for himself when he wanted to get away from the grind of work. Eliza later learned that Anwar was no stranger to the place either; it was he who had found it and helped to get the stable built for Antonio. The two men loved, when time allowed, to ride through the desert on expeditions to various ancient sites, sometimes with a group of Cairene friends. The horse had been bought for Eliza so that she too might join them. Anwar was a sophisticated cosmopolitan Egyptian of the upper classes but he was too a man who loved the land, its simple people, and the ancient history of his country.

It was a magical day for Eliza. They rode deep into the desert over magnificent dunes with a hot dry wind in their faces and stopped for a sumptuous lunch in a black Bedouin tent, lush inside with oriental carpets and cushions, served by two cooks and the Sudanese servant whom Eliza had seen on the boat. He had arrived by one of the hospital’s Land-Rovers. They rode for a few hours in the late-afternoon and Anwar
surprised Eliza when back at the Bedouin tent he kissed her goodbye and left with the Land-Rover. He was due back in Cairo that evening.