I thought the scream would wake Nigel. It didn’t. I walked slowly toward her door, listening for another cry. It didn’t come, and I stayed with my ear to her door for a few minutes, but she seemed to be sleeping again. I went back to my fireside chair and sat down.
An hour later there were more moans. Then, a few minutes after that, her door opened and she appeared. She was wearing a shapeless robe the color of an army helmet. Her feet were bare.
“I can’t sleep, Evan,” she said. “I’ve been dreaming like a small child with indigestion. I must look frightful.”
Her hair was snarled and her face drawn, but she looked remarkably fine in spite of this. I told her so, and she told me I lied superbly but she knew better. She went away and came back with her face washed and her hair combed and looked even better.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you?”
I said she wasn’t, that I’d run out of things to read and had made all the necessary plans. She wanted to know about these, and I explained that I intended to go to Kabul by going to Kabul, which struck her as good sense all around. She drew up a chair and sat beside me near the fire. It wasn’t doing very well. She studied it for a few moments, then rearranged a few coals with the poker. Flames leaped almost instantly.
“When I do that,” I said, “nothing happens.”
“You want practice. Tell me about her, Evan.”
“Phaedra?”
“Yes. You must love her very much.”
“I did.”
“And don’t you now?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Were you lovers for very long?”
“We weren’t lovers at all,” I said. She looked at me oddly, and I went on to explain the particular relationship Phaedra and I had shared. She found this revelation quite extraordinary. Then her face went positively gray.
“A virgin,” she said. “And her first time must have been-”
“Yes. In Afghanistan.”
“That’s absolutely horrid. Defloration is dreadful under the best conditions, isn’t it? My own first time-” she colored very slightly, then suddenly grinned. “Hear the girl go on and on! And see her blush with echoes of the old Victorianism. I don’t really suppose you suspected I was a virgin, and it would be shameful if I were, wouldn’t it? Yet one feels reluctant to abandon that little charade unless one is married. Do you know that I’ve never even discussed my affairs with Nigel?”
“That’s not surprising.”
“Then the surprise is that there’s no surprise, because it is absurd, don’t you think? We’re closer than the average sister and brother, and I’m sure he knows I’ve had lovers, and neither of us has any moral objection to that sort of thing, God knows, and still I couldn’t possibly discuss it with him. We sort of assume that I’m intact, and if I married we’d assume that I weren’t. I don’t want to be, actually.”
“Intact? Or married?”
“Either. You’ve never married, have you, Evan?”
“No.”
She looked into the fire. “Of course men marry later. I’m getting on to thirty, though, and one does feel one is missing something by not having children, and one can’t very well have them without being married. I suppose one could, but-”
“I have two,” I said. And then I found myself telling her about Todor and Jano, my two magnificent sons who live in the Macedonian hills with their mother, Annalya. I have seen Todor once; I bounced him upon my knee at the time that Jano was conceived. (Not the precise time, that would have been indecent, but that week.) I have not yet seen Jano, except in a charcoal sketch which some IMRO patriots smuggled out of Yugoslavia and mailed to me. Todor looks like me. Jano thus far just looks like a baby.
“How remarkable,” Julia said.
“Not really. Most babies-”
“No, no. That you compartmentalize your life the way you do.”
I had never thought of it that way. The fire had died down again, and Julia crossed her arms over her breasts and gripped each elbow with the opposite hand. She had clutched herself thus in the bedroom on Old Compton Street, but there the chill had been emotional.
“It’s so damned cold,” she said. “I ought to be in bed but I can’t sleep. When will you go to Kabul?”
I turned. “I don’t know. As soon as I can. A day or two, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“Depending on visas and-”
She stood up abruptly. “Could we make love, do you think?”
“Uh-”
“I hate being so awkward about it, but there’s so little time.” She was facing away from me. I looked at the khaki robe and imagined the body beneath it. “This ought to be romantic, and instead it’s a damp morning with a dying fire and a memory of nightmares and death.”
“Julia.”
She turned to face me. “And I feel neither passionate nor in love, which is an awful thing to admit at such a moment, and I look a fright-”
“You’re beautiful.”
“-and perhaps it’s obscene to use sex as therapy, but I do want to be in bed and I don’t want to be alone, and I’m not saying this at all well, I know that. When I close my eyes I see that wretched man’s finger. I never actually saw it, I rushed through there without looking at him, but with my eyes closed I see it dismembered and flapping about on the floor like a bisected angle-worm. I shouldn’t talk about this, it’s as romantic as a stomach pump-”
I took her arm. “Be still,” I said.
“Evan-”
I kissed her lips. She said, “I wish we were on a hill in Macedonia. In a little hut in the middle of nowhere eating charred lamb and drinking whatever they drink. I wish-”
“Don’t talk.”
“I wish I were ten years younger. Children take this sort of thing so much more casually. I wish I were either more or less emancipated. I-”
“Be quiet.”
“All right.”
Her room was small and dark, her bed narrow. We kissed with more love than passion. I felt the warmth of her flesh through her robe. I touched the belt of the robe and she stiffened. “Oh, damn,” she said. “You mustn’t look.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh it’s so bloody unromantic. If you laugh I shan’t blame you, but I’ll never forgive you.” With a defiant flourish she opened the robe. Beneath it she was wearing a one-piece suit of red flannel underwear. I didn’t laugh. I just asked if the outfit had a drop seat.
“Damn you,” she said.
I told her she would look pretty whatever she wore. She said it was bad enough that I was seeing her like this but that she couldn’t let me watch her remove the garment. I turned around and got out of my clothes. By the time I had finished she was in bed beneath a mountain of quilts and blankets. I joined her, and we huddled together for warmth and love.
I held her close. She pressed her face to my throat while my hands stroked the smooth taut skin of her back and bottom. This, I knew, was what mattered – the warmth, the closeness. Whether or not we consummated the morning’s entertainment was immaterial. There was no urgency to it, and might not be, and it hardly mattered.
“I won’t be able to bear you a bonnie English bastard,” she whispered. “I take the pill.”
“Good.”
“Wouldn’t you care for an English bastard?”
“You talk too much.”
“Silence me with a kiss.”
And it was slow and thoughtful, a sweet sharing with little love and less passion and worlds of warmth and tenderness. Kisses both long and slow, and bits of whispered nonsense, and the comfortable touching of secret flesh.
A little at a time the world went away. The horror of Old Compton Street, the ice-eyed man in the chair, the wire wound round his finger, the sound of the cleaver parting flesh and bone. And the long knife, and his blenched face, and the knife going in and out and in again. All of this faded slowly, as did all the burden of time and place.
Until, in the manner of a surprise guest, passion came.
I touched and kissed her, and her breathing deepened and she clutched me with sweet urgency. A pulse pounded in my temples. She beamed, wide-eyed, and said, “How nice!” and closed her eyes and sighed. I kissed her. I felt her firm little breasts against my chest and her legs, the muscles now taut, against my own. I touched the moist warmth of her loins. She opened for me, and I rolled hungrily atop her, and she said, “Yes, yes,” and we kissed again, and-
And a querulous voice said, “Julia! Evan! Where in hell is everyone?”
A few moments later, when our hearts started again, she whispered that it was Nigel. I knew this. She added that he was awake and in the kitchen. I knew that, too.
“We can’t,” she added.
Again she had put words to the obvious. Our mutual desire was like a tree that had spent a hundred years growing only to be cut down in its prime in an instant. I was still lying on top of her, and I ached with want for her, but-
He called our names again.
“Maybe he’ll go back to sleep,” I suggested.
“No. He sleeps like the dead, but once he’s up he’s up. Oh, it’s light out.”
“Wonderful.”
“Damn,” she said. I rolled reluctantly off her. We looked soulfully at each other. It occurs to me now that it was the sort of moment at which we might both have started laughing. This did not happen. For some reason neither of us could appreciate the basic humor of the situation.
“He mustn’t know about us,” she said.
“Shall I hide under the bed?”
“No, don’t be silly. Oh, hell. Let me think. He won’t come in now, not while he thinks I’m sleeping, but how on earth can you get from here to the kitchen without going through the door? Evan, I can’t even think-”
We heard him stumbling around in the kitchen. He had given off calling us, evidently having decided that his sister was sleeping and that I had gone off somewhere. Julia jabbed a finger into my shoulder, then pointed at the window.
“There’s an alley leading to the street behind,” she whispered. “You could go through it and come round in front again. Say you’d gone for a walk.”
“Without any clothes on?”
“Put them on first, silly head.” I wondered why that hadn’t occurred to me. I climbed over Julia, trying to touch her as little as possible, and sat on the edge of the bed putting clothes on. I couldn’t find my undershorts. They were obviously there somewhere, but I couldn’t find them.
“We’ll get them later,” Julia assured me. “When he’s gone. There’s a matinee today and an evening performance as well. We’ll have some time together, Evan.”
I was tying a shoe. I turned to ask a wordless question, and she grinned impishly. “Time to finish what we’ve started,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll never forgive Nigel for this, but you will forgive me, won’t you, darling?”