Stone Virgin (35 page)

‘He would only argue and make a scene,’ she said. ‘No, I think I’d better come back with you to Venice.’

3

ON THE WAY
back they did not speak very much. Chiara seemed nervous and preoccupied. Raikes was conscious of a tension almost painful at her nearness, at what he sensed to be her availability, at the constraint which kept them apart still, almost like strangers. He knew they would make love that night, sensed that she knew it too. The sounds and sights of the journey – the steady noise of the engine, the darkening air, the blurred yellow lamps of the markers slung across the Lagoon, the mournful cries of steamers lost in the mist – had for their only function the celebration of this knowledge.

On the quay they stood hesitating for some moments. Then Chiara said she would go to a hotel she knew of, not far away, five minutes’ walk along the Mendicanti, near the Civil Hospital.

‘I could put you up,’ Raikes said, ‘I thought, you know, it might be awkward for you at a hotel, not having any luggage and so on.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘they know me there, you see. I’ve stayed there once or twice before when the same thing has happened, so they would understand about the luggage.’

‘The same thing?’

‘I mean when I have been prevented from going back home.’

‘I see, all right, yes.’

‘It would be better. Your Signora Sapori might not like it, you know, if I stayed there. She would come to only one conclusion and that would be the right one. I do not want to make your life difficult.’

‘I wouldn’t care how difficult you made my life,’ Raikes said.

‘In that case there is even more reason to be careful. The best thing is for me to go and register at the hotel, make sure of a room and so on – it is not the full season yet, but one should always make sure in Venice. Then we could have dinner together somewhere, if you like.’

‘Would you like me to come with you?’

‘To the hotel? No,
non vale la pena
, it is near. I have nothing to carry. Why don’t you wait for me? There is a bar, just here off the
fondamenta
– you can see the sign. Why don’t you have a drink there and wait for me? I will not be long, perhaps half an hour.’

Raikes agreed and they separated there on the quay. He stood and watched her fawn raincoat merge into the misty light and disappear. Suddenly he was reminded of the evening of the conference, when he had watched two figures, Lattimer’s and another’s, at the farthest limit of vision, where the lamplight dissolved in mist. He was sure now that Chiara had been the other one. Why had the two met there? He wondered about this, as he sat over his
punt-e-mes
, waiting for her. Lattimer had looked worried somehow, not as if going to a lovers’ meeting. Involuntarily his mind moved to the exhibits in Lattimer’s ‘museum’, among them those wiry, beribboned tufts. There was something not quite sane about Lattimer, something monstrous in his appetite for victory. In other times he would have collected scalps or heads, instead of works of art … They had known each other before her marriage to Litsov, hadn’t he said that, or implied it at least? There had been familiarity in his words and smile, that evening when the whisky made him boastful …

She had taken off the beret and put up her hair somehow, so that it lay on top of her head, revealing the strong neck, the delicate temples, her ears, which he could not remember seeing before. He thought she had put on eye make-up too, in this brief interval. She came through the bar serious-faced, her head held up, looking for him among other people, and he felt his heart constrict at this luminous seriousness of hers, at the thought that it was for him – at least now, this evening.

She did not want to stay for a drink so they left immediately. They had dinner at a small restaurant near the Scuola di San Marco and shared a bottle of Sicilian wine. Raikes hardly noticed what he ate, nor much of what they talked about. She too seemed in a curious way preoccupied, not vague exactly but rather excitable and disconnected in the things she said. Her eyes were very bright and she was flushed – circumstances he thought due to the wine.

Over the coffee that kind of pause descended which is not awkward exactly but results when everything has been said but the one essential thing.

‘I’d better get the bill, I suppose,’ Raikes said. He began casting those wary glances of the Englishman who wants to catch the waiter’s eye.

‘The hotel is called the Perseus,’ she said. ‘It is between the hospital and the Mendicanti church, a small hotel. My room number is twenty-six – on the second floor. If I go back there now, and allow about fifteen minutes …’

‘Yes, all right,’ he said. He was struck, as he had been before on the quayside, at the clear, definite and precise way in which she dealt with all these practical matters. It was as though she had worked everything out in advance. Women are great planners, he thought, rather uneasily. Why had they not gone together, booked a double room in the first place? No one would have been any the wiser. But of course they knew her at this hotel …

‘Go straight through,’ she said. ‘No need to ask at the Reception. Just go directly to my room.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait here for a while. I’ll have another drink.’

She smiled at him as she got up. ‘Don’t drink too much,’ she said.

These fifteen minutes passed slowly for Raikes. It was still fairly early when he left the restaurant, not much after ten. He found the hotel without any trouble; no one took particular notice of him as he crossed to the lift; the second floor corridor was deserted.

Chiara’s room was lit only dimly by the small bedside lamp. She faced him without saying anything. He took her at once into his arms and began to kiss her; the skin of her face was hot, her mouth too was hot and her lips parted under his kisses. He felt the pressure against him of her abdomen and the fronts of her thighs. After these first kisses she pressed close against him for a while, face hidden. Then, as if with some access of urgency, she panted and raised her face again, in haste, seeking his lips. No words were exchanged between them. Raikes had time for some slight feeling of surprise at this wordless burning haste of hers, after the previous cool arrangements. But at these further kisses his own excitement began to mount, her haste was communicated to him; suddenly it was as if all the desire he had ever felt was focused on this one woman in his arms. His clothes constricted him, the blood was beating in his temples, he could not distinguish her clamorous breath from his own.

Three or four staggering dance steps brought them to the bed. Here, moaning and fumbling, they undressed each other as far as impatience would allow, stripping off whatever would get in the way. He abandoned his attempts on the grey dress, removing only the flimsy garment beneath it– his own trousers still clung to his knees. As soon as he put his hand on her she cried out. She cried out again when he entered. Her body, the thighs that strongly held him, were burning with the same fever as the face. Raikes had never experienced such passion in a woman. She reached orgasm almost at once, within a few seconds, in a series of sighing shudders, not painful or violent, like a long release.

He stopped moving, surprised into patience, still rigid inside her, made forbearing somehow by the contractions of her pleasure, the sight of the flushed face that smiled at him. Very gently, in spite of murmured complaint, he withdrew, completed his own undressing and hers. Naked she was very beautiful to him, her breasts softly mounded as she lay there on her back, the nipples large and prominent, the thighs rounded and strong, displayed carelessly now, half-parted in the abandonment of her release. An emotion of great tenderness came to Raikes, contending with the urgency of his desire. He was erect still. He kissed her on the eyes and brow and mouth and slowly entered her again and heard her murmur and felt her body quicken and this time begin to move against him, heard and uttered the intimations of orgasm – his own came first with a sensation so strong that deep groans broke from him. His spasms brought her to it, she called out as if in surprise and her body convulsed violently so that he was almost thrown off, like a spent wrestler.

Afterwards they lay side by side, looking up at the ceiling, in which there was a faint but extensive tracery of cracks. He found himself telling her a good many things in the next hour or so as they lay there, the lamp still on, her body calm beside him. He tried to tell her first of all about his feelings when making love to her, and before they had started – how much he had wanted it, how even then he felt that he adored her. ‘Not just afterwards,’ he said, ‘
before
, you understand, it isn’t so common to feel adoring
before
, you know, because basically by that time you usually feel so excited … I was excited too, that is the extraordinary thing.’

He was absorbed by what had just happened, the preternatural wisdom he felt he had shown, waiting long enough for her to be able to come again. Some instinct of grace had saved him from his own importunate haste. Surely only love could produce such instincts. ‘You are the one woman in the world for me,’ he said. ‘It has never been like that before.’

Certainly it had not been like that with Margaret, who worked in the Prints Department of the Museum, who had shared an apartment with him for several months. They had got on well enough in a way, but their love-making had not been successful. ‘There was nothing in it, it was just an act, you know,’ he said. ‘She went along with it. We remained completely separate people.’ This had been symbolized perfectly by the manner of their parting. They had sorted through the books and records together, each calmly and amicably claiming his or her own. What a way to part. Raikes grew voluble at the soullessness of it. ‘It’s amazing’, he said, ‘how closely tied we are to
things
, to material objects. This division of property was the really important thing, not what we actually said to each other. That is how we convinced ourselves we were really serious about breaking up. You know, it is like “With this ring I thee wed”, only in reverse.’

She herself talked little, saying nothing of her previous life or loves. She replied to him in a slow voice, looking up at the ceiling. Twice she reached for her watch from the bedside table to look at the time. He tried to tell her about the impact on him of their first meeting, how stricken he had been, how remote and unattainable she had seemed. ‘I never thought you would look at me,’ he said.

In the joy of the contrast between this state of affairs and his present felicity he turned to her again. He touched the skin of her shoulders, tracing the form of the bones beneath; he kissed her cheek, and the side of her neck, and her breasts, feeling the nipples harden between his lips. She pressed close against him and he felt himself stiffen against her stomach. He would have moved on to her but she stayed him, sitting up herself, pulling the sheet clear so that she could look down at him. He closed his eyes under this scrutiny and after a moment felt her hands caressing him. Then she had knelt astride him, lowered herself carefully on to him. She sighed as he entered, and uttered his name.

This time they took longer, their movements were more deliberate. He saw her face above him as he moved to her rhythm, rose and fell with her, thrusting to penetrate as deeply as he could; saw her face still straining upwards as she rode him, vague, uncertain, strangely yearning, saw the green eyes closing and the face preparing for its pain. ‘I love you,’ he groaned, ‘I love you.’

Still he could not sleep. When the lamp was switched off he talked on for some time in the darkness – glad of the darkness in fact, as he had plunged into telling her about his visions, what Vittorini called the hallucinatory content, though he did not mention his visits to the doctor, describing only the things he had seen or thought he had seen, the feeling, the vertigo, the resonance of laughter, wet bodies, straight shadows, the statue amid the foliage, the two faces of the same girl.

‘That is strange,’ she said, in a tone he did not quite understand. But he was sleepy now, as if lulled by these confessions, and sleep came to him before he could ask her what she meant, what she really thought.

Somewhere towards morning she woke him, reaching for her watch to see the time. ‘I can’t sleep,’ she said, in a tone of complaint, like a child. A moment later he felt her kisses on his face and body. She was burning hot again and her skin felt dry, feverish. He was still half asleep, not properly ready, but she manoeuvred him inside her and panted and turned her head restlessly while he stiffened slowly, growing till he filled her and they both made noises of delirium. Raikes felt ecstasy approach very slowly, even reluctantly, from some infinite distance, like a wary god. When it came, however, it was cataclysmic, threatening his whole being with extinction. He fell back from it exhausted, passing instantly from this foretaste of death to the oblivion which is its simulacrum.

Almost at once – or so it seemed to him – she was shaking him awake. He thought at first that she wanted to make love again. But her tone was sharp, business-like. ‘It’s nearly half-past six,’ she said. ‘If you go now, no one will see you.’

‘Won’t there be someone on duty there?’ he said.

‘This is a small place. There is no one on duty at night. The day clerk will be here now but he is not at the desk till after seven – not till they start serving breakfast. He goes to have his coffee with the waiters.’

‘You seem to know the place.’ Raikes was prey to sudden, disagreeable suspicions. ‘Have you smuggled people out before?’ he said. She was sitting up in bed and he was aware of the beauty of her breasts.

‘I told you I have stayed here,’ she said. ‘I have tried to pay the bill at this time and there was no one there. You must hurry.’

She seemed to grow agitated now, passing a hand rapidly through her hair. ‘Please hurry,’ she said. ‘Even if someone sees you, they will only think you are going out to get a paper.’

Raikes thought this doubtful, but saw no point in saying so. ‘When can I see you?’ he said, struggling into his clothes.