Page 36 of The Gathering Storm

‘But that won’t happen to us,’ he said indulgently. ‘Charlie was invited to go. We’ll be there on a government accreditation.’

She shook her head, and gave his arm a little shake, too, for attention. ‘You can’t trust them. Trust nobody, Shems. Say nothing but yes, no and thank you. I am so worried that you won’t come back.’

‘I’ll come back,’ he promised. She still looked troubled. ‘I promise,’ he said.

Her little face was turned up to his, and it came to him that those full, beautiful lips were wanting to be kissed. So he kissed them. Lightly, briefly, but still it was a kiss, and he knew even as he straightened that by kissing her he had changed something.

She looked up at him urgently. ‘Come home with me,’ she said.

He hesitated. There was no mistaking the message in her eyes. A sweet enchantment was here, a dream into which he could sink. Was he ready to be entangled? He felt instinctively she was someone who would take a soft but implacable hold on his soul. ‘We were going to supper.’

‘I don’t want supper,’ she said. And she seemed to have seen an answer in his face, because she slipped her hand through his arm and turned away, drawing him with her. A taxi cruised by, and he hailed it, the quicker to get home. Like a willing bee to the nectar, he hastened to his fate.

In bed, as out of it, she moved like a dancer. Her body was supple, her skin smooth and honey-coloured; her hair smelt of almonds. Her long fingers caressed him, her full soft lips were more than ready for his. He sank into her with a sensory delight he had never known before, a pleasure that was so piercing it was almost pain. And when she whispered his name in a little, broken breath – the ridiculous ‘Shems!’ – his heart convulsed with tenderness for her. ‘My love,’ he whispered back; and his climax almost turned him inside out.

Afterwards she lay on his shoulder and made patterns on his chest with her fingers. ‘Your skin is so smooth,’ she said. ‘I like that. Russian men are very hairy, like bears.’

‘Have you known a lot of men?’ he asked idly. He saw he had hurt her, and was sorry. He hadn’t meant anything by it.

‘Not like this,’ she said. ‘One sees them in the fields at harvest time.’ He kissed her contritely.

After a moment she said seriously, ‘I am not vierge, Shems. I expect you know that by now.’

‘You don’t need to tell me. I had no right to ask.’

‘But now we are lovers you should know. There was a man. I was in love – I was seventeen. He was a Romanian officer. His name was Karol. He had to go away to fight the Bolsheviks, and I could not bear to let him go without – without loving him completely. We were going to get married when he came back, so what did it matter if it was frowned upon? It was only a question of timing. But he never came back. He was shot in the neck by a revolutionary and died. And now – now after all that has happened, it seems foolish not to take happiness while one can. Don’t you think?’

‘I think,’ he said. He kissed her again to signify his agreement and, if she wanted it, absolution, and she turned so readily towards him that there was no more talking for a while.

At last she sighed – a contented sigh – and said, ‘Have you had many lovers?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘One or two encounters when I was very young. And I was in love once. But that was purely platonic. I have never had this with anyone. I have never known anyone like you.’ He asked something that he had meant to ask many times: ‘Were you a ballet dancer?’

‘Not on the stage,’ she said, ‘but in Russia all girls learn the ballet a little. I should have liked to dance professionally, but with the war coming there was no opportunity.’

‘In England, it is not considered respectable for a girl to be a ballet dancer. Girls from nice families wouldn’t do it.’

She laughed. ‘But the English are barbarians, everyone knows that.’ She kissed him, to show how much she liked barbarians. ‘In Russia, the dance is the highest calling. All the rich men have ballerinas for their mistresses. The Tsar himself had the great Kschessinska. They say he would have married her.’

‘Is that something else “everybody knows”?’ he teased.

‘In Russia,’ she said leaning over him and punctuating her words with kisses, ‘one does not care if a story is true, only that it is a good story. Kschessinska was a great dancer and very beautiful.’

‘You are very beautiful,’ he said, rolling her over and leaning above her. ‘A dark princess. My Scheherazade.’

‘And you are my beloved barbarian,’ she said, as he lowered his face to kiss her.

March and April were the busiest time, with lambing at its peak, not to mention cows calving, but Polly still kept an eye on the newspapers for the announcement of the exhibition. So far there had been nothing, and she was beginning to worry irrationally that she had missed it, that Erich had been and gone and she had lost the opportunity that had become more important to her as time passed. With James gone and Lennie not coming, she’d had no-one to think about but Erich.

She was looking through the paper in the Steward’s Room one morning when her cousin Jeremy, one of the dependants she had inherited from her father, appeared in the doorway.

‘What are you doing up so early?’ she said.

He was already dressed in his suit and tie and well-polished shoes for his job at the bank – the same bank where his father Robert had worked before he was called up. Robbie had died in a Malta war hospital in 1918 of typhoid contracted in Palestine, where he had been posted after basic training. Jeremy had been only six years old and didn’t remember his father, but the bank remembered his long service and had been glad to give Jeremy a job when the time came, and to nurture his career.

‘I wanted to talk to you, and you go out so early, it’s hard to catch you.’ He had caught from his mother Ethel a little of her manner, which was always to sound complaining.

‘You don’t have to be at work until ten, which is very nice for you, but I have work to do. Sheep don’t keep to office hours,’ she said.