Only in the Night (5 page)

‘Is something wrong, Eliza?’

She chose not to answer his question but to tell him, ‘You know I love you more than life itself? You do know that, Vittorio?’

‘Yes, and you know that’s how I feel about you. What’s this about, Eliza? You’re frightening me.’

The tears were cascading down her cheeks now. He reached over and took her blouse that had, even in those few minutes, dried somewhat in the baking sun. He helped her into it and began doing up the buttons. ‘Janine le Donneur came to the house and asked to see my parents and me. She told us everything, spared us very few details.’

‘You mustn’t believe anything she says. Anyway I’m through with her.’

‘But I
do
believe everything she said. And I know you are through with her and that she is suffering as I want never to suffer at the hands of a man, not ever, Vittorio.’

‘I will never leave you.’

‘How do you know that? You left her and broke her heart.’

‘You don’t understand, it was sexual with no commitment, no love, involved. There were no promises
and she always knew that I loved you. Men can do that, have a sexual life with someone and never let it touch anything else in their lives. That’s the way we were. It was convenient.’

‘All those years, all that sex, and you had no feelings for her? You’re right, I don’t understand.’

Eliza was crying again. She felt as if her whole world was collapsing around her. Nothing made any sense to her, not her and Vittorio nor a beautiful woman shunned. And, worse, she could not get a picture of Vittorio in flagrant sex with Janine out of her mind.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, telling her, ‘Stop this, I’m no monster. Of course in time I grew to have feelings for her, if I hadn’t I would never have stayed. Life is a matter of choices. Once you and I had fucked, whatever was going on with Janine died. It would have been an act of betrayal to you both and to myself had I carried on having sex with her. Why can’t you see? She just doesn’t want to let me go, and I won’t go back to her, so she is driving us apart.’

‘I love you, Vittorio, and these last weeks have been the happiest, the most thrilling, we have ever shared but this awful scene I have been put through by that woman has opened my eyes. We need some time apart to look at ourselves and how we can find a way to be together in love the way we want to be. She pointed out that we have nothing in common and I know nothing of the world, any more than you do. We have nothing but our youth in common. I’m going back to England the day after tomorrow.’

Vittorio felt ill. His voice was broken when he told Eliza, ‘I’ll go right now and talk to your father.’

‘It is I who asked my father to take us home to England. My father and mother are concerned about us. They love you very much and have said not one word against you. But Poppy said he thought we owed it to each other to spend a year apart and see other people. Normalise our life and see what we want to do with it. I hate the idea, Vittorio, but maybe it will protect us from hurting each other as we have hurt Janine.’

‘You’re speaking like a child.’

‘No, I’m speaking like a woman in love.’

All those sensible ideas she had just uttered had been interspersed with sobs and Eliza still could not tear herself away from Vittorio. The young lovers were beaten though they hardly understood why. And, despite despair at their plight, their intense attraction towards one another remained strong. Almost without realising it, they were peeling off their clothes again. Eliza was soon writhing with sexual delight at the sensations she was experiencing as Vittorio sucked on her nipples and beat himself into her to a rhythm so perfectly tuned to keep her coming in a series of orgasms that they left her breathless and exhausted.

They remained together for the rest of the day but never spoke of Janine again. They were home in time for dinner. That evening a long table had been set under the trees in the kitchen garden and sitting at it was the family and the girls’ various boyfriends, several neighbours and two of the farm workers. As they’d expected, Dulcima and Julian Forrester received
Vittorio as they had always received him in their house and it was a jolly and delicious meal that lasted late into the night.

When Dulcima and Julian left the table to retire to their room, she told her husband, ‘Vittorio and Eliza seemed very happy, but did you see the sadness in their eyes? It was almost too much for me to bear. Julian, our Eliza will not have the easy time in life our other girls will. Thank God we gave her these years here in Tuscany, I pray that they will sustain her.’

The following day Eliza and Vittorio saddled up the horses early in the morning. Eliza raided the kitchen to put together a picnic for them and they rode several miles from the house to a wood where Vittorio had many years ago built them a marvellous tree house. It was there they kept their treasures, all the bits and pieces from their childhood. It was furnished with table and chairs and a bed, all made by Vittorio out of branches, wood from slender trees he had felled, and willow reeds. On the floor was a red carpet; on the bed a colourful patchwork quilt. There were candles of all sorts and sizes and even gingham curtains at the windows which were odd-shaped and askew.

They spent the day in their tree house lost in sex, trying new depravities they had never experienced before which Eliza found thrilling if not a little frightening. But she was a young woman possessed, wanting to be dominated sexually by Vittorio, wanting to go to the edge of life itself in lust with him. It was a strange day for them, a day of pure eroticism that had to it an edge of base lewdness
that Eliza thought, with utter indifference, she might die in. It was a desperate sort of day where like people condemned they confessed undying love for each other for ever, no matter what was to happen to them.

Chapter 3

The Forresters were not worriers, they believed in getting on with things. Effie was working and living the way she wanted to live; Dendra was getting on with living in a grand house in Derbyshire, being groomed to be a Countess; Constanza was in West Virginia getting on with America; and Clara, who was much more demanding of her life and the men who wanted to be a part of it than her sister Eliza, was getting on with finding a replacement for Alessandro. She, unlike Eliza, had always known that her Italian lover was just a summer romance. Because the Forrester girls had been so close and happy in their home life, they remained in contact by telephone or occasionally post. What that meant to Eliza, who was getting on, albeit very slowly and not very happily, with discovering life anew without Vittorio, was that though the family was there for her, it was at a distance. That created in her a sense of deep aloneness, an isolation she had never known before she had parted from Vittorio. It seeped into her psyche, took her over.

Other than that, life went on as it always had for Eliza in Little Barrington. Her friends, whom she had known all her life, were there for her to ride, walk the woods and fish with, and help to organise the
Forrester shoot. Often she accompanied her father on official business. They had always been close but on this return from Tuscany Eliza and Julian Forrester seemed to be seeing more of each other, talking about the world and how it turned. The one thing they did not talk about was what had happened in Tuscany and how she had left Vittorio behind.

If Eliza didn’t realise that she had changed, her family and friends did. Upon her return they saw that she had changed. She was, though it was almost imperceptible, somehow more sensually attractive, and now looked at men in a different light, less as a child, more as a woman. She seemed drawn to them, and as a result seemed to bloom in their presence, yet she made no overt moves on them. If anything she was less flirtatious than she used to be, even a little aloof. Men who had been once amused by her pretty and childish flirtatiousness were no longer amused by it; they were more interested in her budding sexuality. They sensed that she had been had by a man since that virginal bloom, that puppyish look she had had only months before, had vanished. Here was a young woman who had discovered sex and would never run away from it again. Yet she puzzled the young men who tried to date her. It was not that she showed disinterest, more that she showed an indifference which made them all the more keen to be accepted by her.

As the months passed, Eliza realised that she was seeing the world, people, places, things, differently now that Vittorio was no longer the centre of things. She still wanted, tremendously, her happiness with him and could not really understand why he and the simple life he’d offered her in her beloved Tuscany was not
enough to ensure a full and rich life. That both shocked and pained her. Her desire to have Vittorio as the centre of her world remained, even with all the questions as to whether it was right for them. There was not a day that passed when she didn’t want him sexually, nor when she didn’t remember how good it felt being in love with her best friend. He had awakened her to the beauty and excitement, the thrill and bliss of a sexual life, and she missed it desperately and wanted it badly. To be riven by a man who could incite lust without boundaries in her, and one whom she could excite by her sexuality, give pleasure to as Vittorio had taught her to, was what she yearned for but did nothing about finding. And so her sexual frustration kept building, and her love for Vittorio breaking down. And in her confusion it was inevitable that, almost unknowingly, she should slowly be relegating him to the back of her mind.

Eliza was not wholly to blame for that. Vittorio’s months of silence had much to do with it. She kept waiting for him to do something, to sweep her away from Little Barrington and into his arms for ever. Every day that didn’t happen was a blow to her, evidence that he couldn’t or wouldn’t make the effort to do whatever it took for them to be together. A Forrester cousin, having returned from Tuscany with news from the Villa Montecatini, reported that Vittorio was well and sends the family his best regards. That he was being seen often with a famous French writer, an attractive older woman, which had taken everyone by surprise. When Eliza received the note brought to her from Vittorio by the cousin, she read: ‘Nothing about my love for you will ever change.’ There had been no more than that, another crushing blow.

It was those mixed signals she received from Vittorio – his professing love for her and being seen with Janine – that finally drove Eliza into the arms of another man. The very idea of his having a sexual life with his older woman again crazed her with jealousy. She found it nearly impossible to think of anything but their erotic trysts; all those marvellous sexual experiences she and Vittorio had had, were now going on between Janine and Vittorio. Eliza’s sexual fantasies took flight and nearly made her wild with lust and frustration. In the silence of her room she would often cry and wish she had never discovered sexual ecstasy, and moments later that was all she wanted. It was better than love. That and separation were too painful.

John Hope-Quintin came to hunting quite late in life, but when he did find his sport he took to it with a passion. So much so that he bought a house in Coln St Aldwyn, kept a stable, and swiftly became a presence in the Hathrop Hunt and the neighbourhood. Mr John Hope-Quintin was much sought after in society, a tall, handsome, urbane surgeon of some renown, a forty-three-year-old bachelor, well born and well connected, with a reputation as a ladies’ man.

It was known that he had a penchant for young nubile maidens who invariably succumbed to his charming, suave and very flirtatious manner, but that the women he dated were beautiful, sophisticated, intelligent and usually titled. Married women adored his gallant manner, his roguish sexual reputation. He was one of the few really eligible catches because he sat well not only on a horse but in so many different social circles, the perfect spare man at any dinner table.

He had always admired the Forrester girls. In the field it was a joy to ride with them. Excellent hunters who rode well, they were pretty, fiercely independent, sexy, and played with him the way a cat does with a mouse. John found Dulcima and Julian agreeable and enjoyed their eccentricities, the way they were able to be in and out of society at the same time, but he did rather despise their preference for being bourgeois. He had had Effie several times in his house in Coln St Aldwyn after they made a pact to keep their sexual encounters a secret, for the sake of both their reputations. She had been seventeen at the time. They parted friends, agreeing that they were not made for each other. Ever since John had had a secret fantasy: to seduce, one at a time, all five Forrester girls and their mother as well. But a fantasy it would remain because none of them except Effie had taken his passes as serious, or if they had they found him too experienced and therefore too dangerous. They were actually quite unsophisticated, innocent and conventional young women. His fantasy was marginally revived when one day he saw Eliza.

Shortly after she returned from Tuscany, John met her and Dulcima in Burford at The Bay Tree where they were having lunch. In the few minutes he sat down to have a chat with them before he went on to his table and the lady waiting there for him, he recognised a change in Eliza. There was a scent of sexuality about her; she looked ripe, ready for plucking. There was more to entice him: she looked at him as she had never looked at him before, with undisguised interest. She was relating to him as a woman who has had a man and saw him as a potential second.

Several days later they had occasion to meet again. The sexual attraction was evident to them both. Eliza felt excited, full of life and hope for the first time since she and Vittorio had parted. This older man, experienced in life and women, was taking a keen interest in her. He made her laugh and the twinkle in his sexy blue eyes promised much. There were several other women hovering around them, as keen for him as he was for Eliza. It was a boost to her ego, the way he was charming to them but made advances to her. They were horse people, talking horses and riding, and when one of them spoke of the enchantment of riding through the Forresters’ wood, John seized the moment and asked if one day he might be granted that privilege?

Two days later they were doing just that. It was a day of dazzling light, crisp but not cold. They rode over a carpet of brightly coloured leaves under a canopy of trees where the sun’s rays filtered down at steep angles, lending enchantment to the place. They enjoyed the company of small animals and several deer, and saw pheasant in abundance that scuttled in front of their horses and flew up into the trees. The acres of forest at one point thinned out at the top of a ridge where they rode over nearly a mile of ancient Roman road. The land sloped steeply to either side to valleys far below, with streams and bright green meadows where flocks of sheep were grazing.

They said very little to each other because the ride and the views occupied them. Most of the time they rode side by side, occasionally glancing over to acknowledge their joy at being together, with a smile. This was only the second man Eliza had felt sexually
attracted to, and it felt different. Though not exactly a stranger, he was someone she had no history with as she did with Vittorio. It was on that ride that she realised that sex for her was a matter of trust. With Vittorio she could submit to everything sexual because she trusted him with her life.

The stolen glances on that ride? In every one of them she was taking the measure of John Hope-Quintin for sex, working out how far she could trust him.

He, an experienced seducer of women, used to them falling at his feet, knew exactly what Eliza was doing and was flattered that she should have chosen him.

They rode for nearly two hours and in that time experienced something between them that finally exploded into a
coup de foudre.
They were struck like a thunderbolt with love for each other. There was no rhyme or reason to it and it quite stunned them, so much so that they said nothing of it to each other but simply wallowed in their own delight that such a thing might have happened to them.

The Roman road continued into a wood and then was lost among the trees. Riding on for another half an hour to a small clearing, they came upon a shack with a veranda all around it, set under an overhang of stone tiles, the same as on the roof.

‘It was the woodsman’s cottage, built at the turn of the century. We can light a fire and have tea here, if you like?’ Eliza suggested.

‘I’d like that very much,’ he said.

The door was unlocked, and as soon as they entered it felt to John as if he had stepped back in time and into another world. It was a two-room shack. There was one very large room with a massive stone fireplace
at one end, wooden floors covered with worn and torn carpets and animal skins. Broken-down sofas and rustic furniture obviously cut from the woods and roughly put together by some woodsman generations ago were scattered throughout. There were mounted animal trophies on the walls and faded framed photographs of shoots, from Victorian and Edwardian times right down to the present day. The second room was a small bedroom with a large brass bed in it and a chest of drawers.

All day John had been enchanted. Now, as he was building a fire, he realised he was besotted by a very unusual girl, such as he had never met before. She was a beautiful, budding young woman, passive, childish, a very natural creature, and at the same time sexy. She was exciting because of her openness, her sensual ripeness, a hunger to be sexually taken over by him. With barely a word, hardly a gesture, she had made those things clear to him.

The fire flared up and the logs caught almost at once. For some time he stared into the fire, enjoying this state of being in love. He was feeling relaxed, at ease with life and his condition, one which he had experienced several times before. He was a man who liked the anticipation of taking a young girl and exciting her lust, introducing her to all the facets of sexual experience, teaching her how to enhance his own sexuality.

He felt her step up to him and lean against his back, place her arms around his waist and press her cheek against the rough tweed of his jacket. He covered her hands with his. She broke the silence when she asked, ‘Was the ride everything you expected it to be?’

He turned around to face her and told her, ‘I think you know it was, and so are you.’

Colour came to Eliza’s cheeks and she lowered her eyes, somehow afraid to look into his. With a crooked index finger, he raised her chin and demanded, ‘Look at me.’ She obeyed, and delighted him with the edge of nervousness and at the same time the lusty fire that showed in them. ‘Are you afraid of me?’ he asked in a husky voice, an edge of surprise in it for her benefit.

‘Yes,’ she told him.

‘Why?’

‘Because they say you’re a devil with women.’

‘And you are afraid that I will be a devil with you!’

‘Not so much afraid, as I don’t want you to be.’

‘Ah, then you assume we are going to be together?’

‘You’re playing games with me, John, and you mustn’t do that. I have only been with one man in my life and he loved me and did not know how to play games, in love or in sex.’

‘Ah, sex! Then you know how much I want you, admit how much you want sex with me. That, my dear girl, is the first and most important thing for you and me. Not that you had puppy love and sex with some immature young boy. And, just for the record, I have wanted you in that way ever since I saw you in The Bay Tree. Frankly, I’ve been thinking of little else.’

What exciting words and sentiments these were for Eliza. Her heart was racing along with her mind. This handsome older man, who could have his choice of women, wanted her for sex, for love. They were still in their riding jackets. He worked on opening the buttons of hers and sensed the shiver of excitement
she experienced at such a simple act. He liked that, enough to lean forward and place a light, sweet kiss upon her lips. She caressed his face with her hands and he was surprised that that little gesture should mean so much to him. He slipped her jacket from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. He raised the thick turtleneck black jumper up over her head and saw her naked breasts for the first time. The nimbus circling her long nipples was dark against her fair flesh and already puckered from the sexual excitement she was experiencing. There was a flush of pink on her chest. She had had a light, sweet involuntary orgasm. It delighted him to learn that she had no control over her lust.