In which the Earth moves
Primavera, Primavera …’ I moaned her name in the moonlight which flooded down upon us from the belvedere. She leaned over me, kissing my chest, gently biting my nipples, responding to my touch and moving her self against my hands.
‘Where have you come from?’ I asked, drawing her down upon me, and throwing the quilt to one side so that I could wallow again in the perfection of her body, in her firm, full, big-nippled breasts, in the amazing narrowness of her waist, in the round curve of her hips, in the flatness of her belly, in the thick nest of wiry blonde hair at her centre, shining and sparkling as she moved in the moonbeam.
‘I’ve always been here,’ she said, and she kissed me with her lips of velvet, as I had never been kissed before. ‘I think we’ve both been moving towards each other, all our lives. I believe in destiny. You’re part of mine, I’m part of yours. We were set on a course towards each other.’
‘And will we go on together, Springtime and Oz?’
‘Who knows? That’s the thing about destiny; you believe in it and let it take you where it will. Right now we’re together, and it’s always the now that counts.’
I rolled over with Springtime in my arms, burying my face in her. As I flicked my tongue in and out of her navel, she gasped and arched her back. ‘I want you now. I need you now. Come into me now.’
I placed a finger across her lips. ‘Time enough,’ I said, although she could see that I was more than ready. I bent and kissed the inside of her thighs as she spread them wide, licking my way towards her. She moaned again. ‘Now, Oz, now.’
‘Yes, Primavera, yes!’ I covered her and she took me into herself with a supple movement, the sweetest embrace I had ever known. We lay entwined, barely moving. Her tongue was in my mouth again, her fingers wound through my crinkly hair. She pulled my head back and looked at me with smouldering eyes. ‘This is right!’ she hissed. Then her eyelids flickered and she began to shudder, gripping me tight, inside, tighter than I had ever imagined. Her fingers dug into my back, and she cried out, once, twice, again, again. And then I realised that two voices were calling out and that one of them was mine. I was lost. As I thrust into her and held myself there, we were washed by wave upon wave of sensation, by a feeling that every nerve-ending in our bodies was being bathed in soothing oil. It went on and on until I thought it would never stop, but finally the crest was reached and we started back down the slope towards the world, a world which I knew now, for certain, would never be the same again.
She lay there, eyes closed, with a sheen of sweat on her face. I licked it off; she tasted salty and sublime on my tongue. I felt myself start to subside, but she held me inside her. ‘No, don’t go,’ she sighed. ‘I want to keep you there for ever.’
‘That’s all right with me,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of a better place to be. Primavera … stop me if you think I’m being daft, but … Primavera Phillips, you are the most beautiful, wonderful woman I have ever met, and I love you. You’re the dream I’ve had all my life, and now you’re here.
‘I know we’ve still to see our first sun come up together, but say you’ll stay with me.’
She touched my cheek with her soft, strong hand. ‘I’ll stay with you for now, Osbert Blackstone. But you’re crazy; you don’t know me. You never really know another person. Some people, many people, maybe most people don’t even know themselves.’
I smiled, filled up to the brim with more happiness than I had ever imagined I could hold. ‘I know myself, lover. And whatever you say I know you too. I want you now, and for all the tomorrows I’ve got coming.’
We lay there, in each other’s arms, together. I closed my eyes, as she began to move over my body, sliding, animalistic. Suddenly I felt her nails dig deep into my chest. I don’t mind being submissive on the odd occasion, but I’ve never been too good at masochism.
‘Oww!’ I yelled with the pain …
… and suddenly I was wide awake, staring into Wallace’s accusatory reptilian eye. His claws were digging sharply into my pecs as he balanced himself upon me.
‘Get off me, you green bastard,’ I hissed, picking him up, carefully to avoid ripping more flesh, and placing him gently on the floor. I had forgotten that the settee was one of Wallace’s favourite night-spots. I lay there, under my lonely blanket, in my bulging boxers, and tried to go back to my dream. But it was no use. Instead, I lay there, listening to the sleep sounds of Primavera Phillips, comparing them with those of Jan, my other night visitor. I decided that they were much the same, except that I hadn’t noticed Prim farting yet.
‘Two people are truly together,’my Dad told me once, when he was giving me my degree course in the meaning of life, ‘only when they can fart freely and as loud as they please in each other’s company.’ I remember looking at him, appalled, quite certain that my Mother had never farted in her life.
I chuckled in the dark, quietly, lest I disturb Prim’s melodious sleep.
‘… at this moment in time, absolutely out of the question.’ She had said, but with a delicious smile that told me she was in no way offended that I had put the proposition to her. And so we had retired, she to the bed, and me to the instrument called my sofa-bed. I can never decide whether it is an instrument of torture or of music. Some nights it’s both as your toes and knuckles hit the sharp-cornered metal frame or as the springs dig into you, singing out tunelessly as you twist and turn, trying to negotiate the pathway to sleep’s dark gate.
I rolled over on to my side and the full spring orchestra played. The twang even startled Wallace. I heard Prim start from her sleep, and saw her silhouette as she sat up.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘This thing can be bloody noisy.’ I bounced on the machine to show what had wakened her. ‘I’ll try to lie still.’
‘No, it’s okay. I had a good kip during the day, remember. What time is it?’
‘Around five, I think.’
‘Ow. D’you want to swop over? You take the bed and I’ll have the sofa?’
‘Thanks, but it’s okay,’ I said to her. I paused. ‘Hey, now we’re awake how about you telling me your life story. Let me into all your secrets. After that, how would it be if we get up and go for a walk up Arthur’s Seat, to watch the sun come up behind Berwick Law?’
There was silence as she weighed my latest proposition. ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘You know, Oz, my love …’ Her tone may have been bantering, but my heart jumped as she said the word. ‘… I reckon that if I stripped everything away from you, right at your core I’d find a hopeless romantic … just like me. Yes, let’s go for that walk.
‘But first, the unexpurgated adventures of Primavera Phillips. If you think you’re ready.’
Twenty minutes later, there was nothing I didn’t know about her. She had been born in Auchterarder to her oddball parents thirty years before. Her mother — when she wasn’t reading Barbara Taylor Bradford — had been a social worker, but was now a moderately successful writer of children’s books. Her father’s modelmaking had evolved from a cabinetmaking and furniture design business. She and her sister Dawn, who was five years younger, had been educated solidly at local authority schools, until they had been old enough to escape from their home village.
Prim had trained as a nurse in Glasgow, and had worked in Edinburgh Royal, before joining the dedicated staff of St Columba’s Hospice. ‘If you’d been there a few years earlier, you’d have nursed my Mum,’ I said, when she told me. ‘That’s a vocation, and no mistake.’
‘Yes, I thought it was, but it wore off after four years. I found that was I drinking too much; worse than that, I was drinking too much on my own, at home. I was narky, too, all the time. I wasn’t me, any more.’ I sensed her looking at me in the dark, suddenly, strangely intense. ‘Never forget that, Oz. I always have to be me!’