'But how did you get it? I mean, you couldn't have bought it! There must be so many other, well, easier places to live.'
Yulian crossed the paved floor between piles of old slates and rusty, broken-down implements to the foot of the open wooden stairs. 'Hayloft,' he said, turning his dark eyes on her. She couldn't see those eyes, but she could feel them.
Sometimes his movements were so fluid it almost seemed as if he were sleep-walking. They were like that now as he climbed the stairs, slowly, step by deliberate step. 'There is still straw,' he said, voice languid as a deep pool.
She watched him until he passed out of sight. There was a leanness about him, a hunger. Her father thought he was soft, girlish, but Helen guessed otherwise. She saw him as an intelligent animal, as a wolf. Sort of furtive, but unobtrusive, and always there on the edge of things, just waiting for his chance…
She suddenly felt stifled and took three deep, deliberate gulps of air before following him. Going carefully up the wooden steps, she said, 'Now I remember! It was your great-grandfather's, wasn't it? The house, I mean.'
She emerged into the hayloft. Three great bales of hay, blanched with age, stood dusty and withered in a pyramid. One end of the loft stood open, where projecting gables spared it from the elements. Thin, hot beams of sunlight came slanting in from chinks in the tiles, trapping dust-motes like flies in amber, forming yellow spotlights on the floorboards.
Yulian took out a pocket knife, sliced deftly at the binding of the uppermost bale. It fell to pieces like an ancient book, and he dragged great deep armfuls down onto the boards.
A bed for a gypsy, thought Helen. Or a wanton.
She threw herself down, was conscious that her dress rode up above her knickers where she lay face down. She did nothing to adjust it. Instead she spread her legs a little, wriggled her backside and contrived to make the movement seem perfectly unconscious — which it was not.
Yulian stood still for long moments and she could feel his eyes on her, but she simply cupped her chin in her hands and stared out of the open end of the loft. From here you could see the perimeter wall, the curving drive, the copse. Yulian's shadow eclipsed several discs of sunlight and she held her breath. The straw stirred and she knew he was right behind her, like a wolf in the forest.
His floppy hat fell in the straw on her left; his sunglasses plopped down into the hat; he got down beside her on her right, his arm falling casually across her waist. Casually, yes, and light as a feather, but she could feel it like a bar of iron. He lay not quite so far forward, propping his jaw in his right hand, looking at her. His arm, lying across her like that, must feel very awkward. He was taking most of its weight and she could feel it beginning to tremble, but he didn't seem to mind. But of course he wouldn't, would he?
'Great-grandfather's, yes,' he finally answered her question. 'He lived and died here. The place came down to Georgina's mother. Her husband, my grandfather, didn't like it and so they rented it out and lived in London. When they died it fell to Georgina, but by then it was on a life-lease to the old colonel who lived here. Eventually it was his turn to go, and then Georgina came down to sell it. She brought me with her. I wasn't quite five, I think, but I liked the place and said so. I said we should live here, and Georgina thought it a good idea.'
'You really are remarkable!' she said. 'I can't remember anything about when I was five.' His arm had slid diagonally across her now, so that his fingers barely touched her thigh just below the curve of her bottom. Helen could feel an almost electric tingle in those fingers. They held no such charge, she knew, but that's how it felt.
'I remember everything almost from the moment I was born,' he told her, his voice so even it was very nearly hypnotic. Maybe it was hypnotic. 'Sometimes I even think I remember things from before my birth.'
'Well, that might explain why you're so "extraordinary",' she told him, 'but what is it makes me different?'
'Your innocence,' he at once replied, his voice a purr. 'And your desire not to be.' His hand caressed her rump now, the merest touch of electric fingers tracing the curve of her buttocks, to and fro, to and fro.
Helen sighed, put a piece of straw between her teeth, slowly turned over on to her back. Her dress rode up even more. She didn't look at Yulian but gazed wide-eyed at the sloping rows of tiles overhead. As she turned so he lifted his hand a fraction, but didn't take it away.
'My desire not to be? Not to be innocent? What makes you think that?' And she thought: because it's so obvious?
When he answered, Yulian's voice was a man's again. She hadn't noticed the slow transition, but now she did.
Thick and dark, that voice, as he said, 'I've read it. All girls of your age desire not to be innocent.'
His hand fell on her belly, lingered over her navel, slipped down and crept under the band of her knickers. She stopped him there, trapping his hand with her own. 'No, Yulian. You can't.'
'Can't?' the word came in a gulp, choking. 'Why?'
'Because you're right. I am innocent. But also because it's the wrong time.'
'Time?' he was trembling again.
She pushed him away, sighed abruptly and said, 'Oh, Yulian — I'm bleeding!'
'Bleed — ?' He rolled away from her, snatched himself to his feet. Startled, she stared at him standing there. He shivered as if in a fever.
'Bleeding, yes,' she said. 'It's perfectly natural, you know.'
There was no pallor in his face now: it was red with blood, burning like a drunkard's face, with his eyes narrow slits dark as knife slashes. 'Bleeding!' this time he managed to choke the word out whole. He reached out his arms towards her, hands hooked like claws, and for a moment she thought he would attack her. She could see his nostrils flaring, a nervous tic tugging the corner of his mouth.
For the first time she felt afraid, felt something of his strangeness. 'Yes,' she whispered. 'It happens every month…'
His eyes opened up a little. Their pupils seemed flecked with scarlet. A trick of the light. 'Ah! Ah — bleeding!' he said, as though only just understanding her meaning. 'Oh, yes…' Then he reeled, turned away, went a little unsteadily down the steps and was gone. Then Helen had heard the puppy's wild yelp of joy (it had been stopped by the steps, which it couldn't climb)
and its whining and barking fading as it followed Yulian back to the house. And finally she started to breathe again.
'Yulian!' she'd called after him then. 'Your sunglasses, your hat!' But if he heard, he didn't bother to answer.
She wasn't able to find him for the rest of the day, but then she hadn't really looked for him. And because she had her pride — and also because he had failed to seek her out — she hadn't much bothered with him for the rest of their holiday. Perhaps it had been for the best; for she had been innocent, after all. She wouldn't have known what to do, not two years ago.
But when she thought of him, she still remembered his hand burning on her flesh. And now, going back to Devon with the countryside speeding by outside the car, she found herself wondering if there was still straw in the hayloft…
George, too, had his secret thoughts about Yulian. Anne could say what she liked but she couldn't change that. He was weird, that lad, and weird in several directions. It wasn't only the creeping-Jesus aspect that irritated George, though certainly the youth's furtive ways were annoying enough. But he was sick, too. Not mental, maybe not even sick in his body, just generally sick. To look at him sometimes, to catch him unawares with a side-glance, was to look at a cockroach surprised by a switched-on light, or a jellyfish steaming away, stranded on the beach when the tide goes out. You could almost sense something seething in him. But if it wasn't mental or physical, and yet encompassed both, then what the hell was it?