The Gift of Shame (29 page)

Carla’s flaring eyes fixed on Helen in a way that caused her stomach to clench. ‘We are privileged to be the first to see Qito’s latest
oeuvre
– a work he has told me he considers among his best to date and, of course, inspired by the lovely Helen.’

The words, while sounding like compliments, carried, to Helen, a sub-text of threat in which she found a curious satisfaction.

‘And here it is,’ said Carla, dramatically throwing back the cover to reveal the canvas.

For a moment there was a stunned silence. Glowing out of the canvas was a riot of colour which momentarily stunned the senses and obscured the central figure of a woman, eyes wild and threatening as if proclaiming herself to be a creature of this world but somehow above it, challenging onlookers to gaze anywhere but at her eyes. The power Qito had created from colours and canvas was astonishing. This feral woman was both beautiful and terrifying.

‘Great God!’ cried Jeffrey into the silence. ‘She is beautiful!’

Startled that Jeffrey should have spoken of her as if in the third person, Helen looked to see that he was transfixed by her image in precisely the same manner she had resented when he had, earlier, looked on Carla. There was a message in this but, for the moment, she found it difficult to decode from her own internal tumult.

As cries of congratulation and applause broke out, Helen turned back to see that Carla had come to stand directly before her. ‘Congratulations,’ Carla smiled as she leant forward and cupped Helen’s chin in her hand to place an open-mouthed kiss on her lips. Leaning back, Carla looked directly into Helen’s startled eyes. ‘Any woman that can inspire Qito as you did deserves our thanks, but should also remember that those who play with the gods play a dangerous game. The world may see a creative work of genius wrought from paints and canvas but I see a tribute of love from my man to another woman. Such aspiration has a terrible price.’ So saying, Carla released her hold on Helen’s chin and turned away to join the small group, Jeffrey among them, about the easel.

Qito came to Helen’s side. ‘Did I do you justice?’ he asked.

Astonished to find tears welling, Helen turned to him and put her arms about his neck. ‘Carla hates me,’ she blurted into his ear.

‘Nonsense! That is simply a measure of how much she loves you,’ Qito murmured back into her ear.

‘I don’t understand that,’ Helen told him as she straightened from him.

‘You will,’ he promised.

Carla’s voice rang out. ‘Let’s now enjoy our buffet supper!’ she was saying.

As Qito, caught up in a flurry of congratulations, was
carried
towards the buffet table, Helen was left standing alone floundering in a quandary of confusion, to which Qito’s image of her only added. Jeffrey had unequivocally declared his love yet Carla’s kiss still burned on her lips reviving memories of how totally she had surrendered to her in the scene with Tsai. She had earlier that day been tempted to dominate the willing Martinez and yet had melted into submission before Jeffrey. This flood of confusing signals left her feeling uncertain as to who or what she really was. When she told Qito she didn’t understand, she had, she now realised, been voicing an uncertainty which went far beyond a simple response to her present dilemma. Remembering Qito’s last words: ‘You will,’ she fervently hoped she might.

Jeffrey’s voice, close in her ear, startled her from her own internal debate. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said and, taking her arm, led her from the dining room onto the deck.

The warm, balmy air, stirring only lethargically in the night’s breeze, calmed her as they paced the deck to come to look out over the swell of the ocean, silvered in the moonlight.

‘The canvas is extraordinary,’ Jeffrey was saying. ‘Incredibly lyrical – totally unlike anything Qito has done before.’

With Jeffrey’s words fluttering about her ears with the irrelevance of a moth about a flame, Helen found far more urgent topics to discuss. ‘Do you really love me?’ she asked. ‘After all that I’ve done can you forgive me?’

‘What
did
you do?’ asked Jeffrey lightly. ‘React impetuously to what Annabel told you? I can forgive that. I even find it a little flattering.’

‘Flattering?’

‘Yes. After all, it does show your feelings for me run deeper than just a passing affair.’

Surprised to hear that he hadn’t yet appreciated that, Helen
mused
: ‘I thought I’d already adequately demonstrated that …’

As he turned to her, she rejoiced to see his eyes lit with pleasure. ‘I had hoped so,’ he said as he reached out to embrace her.

Nestling against his chest, Helen had never felt more safe in her life. Out of grief she had stumbled on a rocky, sometimes shocking road, but now felt she had come safely home to harbour. Raising her head she invited a kiss, which Jeffrey greedily accepted. Afterwards, they stayed close in each other’s arms and allowed their mutual pleasure the silence it deserved until Jeffrey spoke – his voice so soft and quiet that she had to strain to hear him above the soughing sea sounds around them.

‘When I was very small,’ he whispered ‘my parents took me on holiday with them to the Lake District. I can’t remember a single thing about it except, on the drive back to London, they stopped off at a pub. I stayed in the back of the car half asleep until my mother came out to bring me a drink – probably orange juice or Coke, I don’t remember – but the one thing I do remember is the sandwich she gave me. It was delicious. Cheese – no pickle – but that taste stayed on my palate for years. Even after college, even when my father died, I still remembered that sandwich.’

When Jeffrey broke off Helen looked at him and saw that he was deeply moved. She waited, sure he was about to confess something extremely important.

‘It was the cheese, you see? Strong and tangy. It was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted and I spent years trying to rediscover it. I must have tried almost every cheese there was in the world but the closest I ever came to it was a mature Cheddar. I searched every cheesemonger in London and everywhere I went trying to find that elusive something. I got close,
but
never quite found “it”. There was something missing, you see? Something about that sandwich I had yet to identify.’

Jeffrey paused again while Helen listened, willing him to come to the point and desperately hoping that when he did she would understand why the telling of this anecdote was so important to him.

‘Then one day – quite by accident – I found it! There, singing on my palate, was the taste I had remembered since I was four years old. Do you know what it was that I had been missing all those years?’

Helen remained silent as Jeffrey went on. ‘A slice of onion!’ Jeffrey cried triumphantly. ‘For years I had tried all those variations of cheese and eaten onions but it had never occurred to me to put them together into the same sandwich. You see? Two very ordinary elements, under my nose for years, yet only when they came together did I realise they constituted something I had searched high and low to find. It was magical. I was four years old again, half asleep in the back of my father’s car. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Bewildered, Helen shook her head.

‘I’m saying that you can spend your life looking for something – a smile, a light in someone’s eyes, a voice or accent, and, somehow, although it may be close to what you are searching for, it isn’t exactly what you want. Then, one day, someone comes along who just happens to mix two ordinary enough elements to make a dream come true. Now do you understand what I’m trying to say?’

‘I think you’re saying that I’m the onion in your cheese sandwich …?’

‘Exactly!’ cried Jeffrey triumphantly. ‘You are beautiful, intelligent and charming – but I’ve known all those qualities in other women. You bring something else – something elusive but not frightening or dauntingly other-worldly. Something
unique
that I can cherish. I saw it tonight, defined for me by Qito’s canvas. Seeing you through his eyes I have no doubts. I love you,’ he added simply. ‘Is that enough?’

Renewing their kiss, Helen felt suddenly appalled at ever having mistrusted him, but equally there arose in her a furious need to be purged of this new guilt. ‘Jeffrey, there are things I have to tell you …’

Smiling, Jeffrey nuzzled her face. ‘And you are going to,’ he murmured. ‘But I haven’t forgotten you asked me not to disappoint you.’

Her loins suddenly in convulsion, Helen wondered at the shift Jeffrey could effect in her emotions. With barely a change of tone or even inflection he had wrenched her from the warm glow of affectionate embrace into quivering submission. Involuntarily, her arms had dropped from his, her back straightened and, as she looked into his still-warm eyes, she felt herself heating. She cursed her quavering voice as she spoke. ‘You don’t know every stupid thing I did.’

‘Do I need to know?’ he asked with quiet firmness.

‘
I
need you to know,’ she answered.

Nodding, Jeffrey moved away a pace before turning back to her. ‘Do you love me?’ he asked.

Helen nodded.

‘Do you believe I love you?’ he insisted.

Her throat, constricted with rising excitement, would only permit her to nod in reply.

‘Bare your breasts,’ he said in a voice so low that it was almost lost in the quiet sigh of the sea breeze.

Excitedly mute, she reached one quivering hand to her right shoulder to pull down the laced top while raising an elbow and awkwardly freeing it. Her eyes, blurred but firm, remained on his while she repeated the movement to her left side, then, her arms freed, she drew the blouse down, flinching as this
tight
bodice top flicked against her engorged nipples. Drawing back her shoulders to make better display of herself, she stood in silent challenge.

There was a tiny dull clink of metal as Jeffrey came forward and caught up her wrists. Glancing down she saw a handcuff clicking about one wrist and only then raised her eyes to his, half expecting that he would now turn her and so pinion her wrists behind her. As always, Jeffrey was to surprise her. Instead, she found herself facing the ship’s rail and looking out at the silvered sea glistening under a huge tropical moon.

With one swift movement Jeffrey had hooked the other cuff about her wrists with the ship’s rail in between. Tethered, she could not fully straighten and, as if following some natural law, found herself most comfortable by leaning slightly forward and resting her forearms on the varnished wooden rail. It was a posture which a distant observer might think of as simply relaxed but, to her just then, was the most exquisite form of bondage she could imagine.

When Jeffrey moved behind her she found she could no longer comfortably turn her head to watch him. When he came to embrace her, pressing himself hard against her, she gasped with urgent need of him to take her there and then. When his hands closed round her to cup her breasts and tease her raging nipples she gasped out her demands in the coarsest words she could summon.

‘Not quite yet,’ Jeffrey muttered through teeth clenched tight with excitement. ‘You don’t get off that lightly!’

Her heart racing, her breathing so deep it caused her bared torso to convulse, she cried out in frustration as his hands sought out the hem of the full skirt and drew it with agonising slowness up her thighs to be finally tucked into the waistband of the skirt, leaving her naked from the waist down. ‘Please!’
she
begged as her libido threatened to go into overload. ‘For pity’s sake take me!’

Jeffrey’s voice was close and insistent in her ear. ‘Have no fear,’ he murmured, ‘you are going to be ravished, and much more besides – but at a time, and by persons, of my choosing.’

‘No!’ she screamed. ‘I want
you! Now!
’

His chuckle all but sent her into instant spasm. ‘Do you really think you’re in any position to make demands?’ he asked, his hands caressing her as, her questing loins finding him pressing hard against her, she again sobbed out her need.

‘All pleasure must be paid for. Pleasure past and pleasure to come both carry incredibly high price tags – and I would hate to
disappoint
you.’

Abruptly, Jeffrey stepped back from his tight embrace and her heated sex struck chill even against the sultry night air. Her mouth was already open – readying yet another plea – when his bare hand struck firmly against her exposed buttocks. The sting of the blow stayed in the one small area for only a moment before its heat flooded through her hungry body and all but consumed her. ‘Yes!’ she cried out across the empty ocean.

In answer his hand came down again – three more times in rapid succession – before he spoke. ‘Tell me about your lover on the beach. Was he beautiful?’

Helen tried to force her mind to think – to concentrate – on what she might say, how best to say it, but she was in such confusion that only the truth seemed to have any validity. ‘Yes!’ she yelled defiantly.

Three sharp stinging slaps of his hand followed in quick succession and she rejoiced that the currency of her guilt was now established.

‘Tell me everything,’ Jeffrey insisted into her ear.

‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘He would appear – just be there – at night …’ She broke off as she received three more rapid slaps. Her breath now difficult to control, she went on. ‘He was brutal, we never made love – we just screwed!’

The slaps this time stung as her already roused flesh became more sensitive with each successive blow.

‘He was huge – his cock was enormous …’

Slap – slap – slap.

‘He would tease me with it. Hold back and then plunge so deep he would hurt me.’

Jeffrey’s hand rose and fell and he was forced to put his free hand out to grip her tightly as her body sought to escape the implacable rise and fall of his hand.

Recovering, grateful when he left his hand resting on her inflamed flesh and drew away the heated pain, she gasped: ‘Then he would make me wait. Make me beg. I loved it! I loved his savage pain!’

This outburst earnt her six blows and it took her a moment to recover before inviting more of his punishment. ‘But when he came he would pull out. He would never come in me – never let me feel everything!’