“Confide in me, Catherine. What else can you do?”
She said nothing. She did not move. She remained flat on her back in her own way determined to acquiesce, if that’s what I demanded, but equally determined to offer me no encouragement, no help. So I shifted, rolled onto my left side, raised myself, stared down at what I could see of Catherine’s shadowed face. Slowly but firmly I placed my free hand on Catherine’s body. All this I did, not with any interest in arousing Catherine against her will but only as a matter of course, a tactile act of comfort. The movement of my hand was personal but not exploratory. I meant to convey the sensation of the palm of my large hand, not the fingers. But apparently even this, to Catherine, was more than she wanted. Apparently she was not as determined to acquiesce as I had thought.
“Stop,” she said quietly and yet not so quietly. “I wish you’d stop.”
But too late, I thought, too late. Because suddenly I felt beneath my hand the unmistakable presence of something hard, something foreign, something distinctly different from the soft malleable flesh of Catherine’s waist. It was too late to stop.
“What,” I whispered, with hand arrested, mind leaping forward, voice giving way atypically to surprise, “what …?”
No light in Catherine’s open eyes, no sounds of confession on Catherine’s lips, no effort on Catherine’s part to dissuade me, to disengage my heavy hand from where it lay on her waist. I paused, she waited. And suspended there in the darkness between my whispered exclamation and what I now knew with reasonable certainty to be its cause, slowly I felt a single cold drop of sweat trickling its telltale passage down my naked side. But was it possible? Was my hand touching what I thought it touched? One minute I was sweating for Catherine and the next I was sliding my hand beneath the edge of Catherine’s pajama top and with my bare hand touching the band of metal which now I knew beyond a doubt was girdling her waist. And just as methodically I thrust my fingers between Catherine’s unmoving thighs until beneath the mere breath of white cotton cloth I felt the little sharp pointed teeth of that elongated narrow tear of iron wedged tightly and unmistakably between her thighs.
“Catherine, it can’t be true …”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want you to know.”
“How could he do it? How could you let him …?”
“He made me. That’s all.”
“All night long you’ve been wearing this wretched thing… ”
Bruise? Blemish? Specific source of Catherine’s pain? Her only answer was to disengage my hand at last. She did not speak, did not move, except to take hold of my hand and remove it slowly and gently from where it no longer belonged between her legs. I felt her hand, I smelled her hair, Hugh’s message could hardly have been more clear. And I understood that it was meant for me, that message, and suddenly I understood that Hugh was not at all idyling away those dark hours on the empty beach or brooding alone at the unshuttered window of his bare room above the black canal. I knew where he was. I knew exactly where to find him.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. I’ll be back.”
She made no objection. She asked for no explanation. And when I returned she would still be there, waiting in the darkness and making no effort to free herself from that iron web which Hugh had somehow brought himself to adjust to Catherine’s size and lock in place.
“I won’t be long. Trust me.”
Of course, I told myself, the wicker settee. Where else would he be if not stretched out even now in the darkness of the grape arbor? How like him to wait for me on the very piece of furniture from which I had watched Fiona resolving herself to so much unnecessary solitude. How like him to wait for darkness and then steal onto our side of the funeral cypresses and into my arbor, which was what he must have done, to usurp my place beneath the grapes he scorned, only to lie inactive, silent, within easy earshot of the plaintive voice of the very woman whose calm unhappiness was the result of what she took to be his absence, his unknown whereabouts. But all that time he had been there and must have listened to Fiona’s quiet declaration and heard all we said, quickened at the sound of Catherine’s name and writhed, as it were, at my own words that sealed the purpose of my departure. And to him it must have seemed too late to undo the damage he had done to Catherine, to all of us, no matter what he might have felt upon hearing the sad ring of Fiona’s voice. But perhaps our blue moods had meant nothing to Hugh. Perhaps they had only heightened his agonized elation over what he knew I was setting off to encounter in that dark villa of his. Love never had so fierce an antagonist, I thought, never had Fiona and I been so unfortunate.
“That you, boy?”
“You know it is.”
“Well, I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Yes,” I murmured, “I guess you have.”
From where I stood the glow of Fiona’s lamp was invisible. High overhead the night sky was packed and streaked with colonies and continents of stars that gave no light. And yet I knew where I was, had already heard and answered the voice that had spoken up suddenly inside the arbor. It was obviously the voice of a man reclining, a voice that had accosted me from behind a thick invisible wall of flat and matted leaves, a voice so close and soft-spoken and yet at the same time so screened and deeply buried that in the very instant of sound it transformed my gentle arbor into a cavern of black leaves. Hugh was lying inside that cavern and filling it with his distasteful eagerness and, I guessed, the pain of all the dark time he had spent rehearsing himself for my arrival.
“Come on in, boy. I want to talk to you.”
I felt the leaves in my hair, the leaves against the sides of my head, the leaves thick and black and suddenly meaningless against one silken shoulder. And now without answering Hugh’s pathetic effort to gain the upper hand I simply entered the arbor, noted in silence the darker elongated mass of shadow that was only Hugh deceptively at rest, and seated myself, as I had known I would, on our now cold and otherwise empty bench of stone. I crossed my heavy and loosely pajamaed legs, leaned forward, clasped together my two weathered hands, found myself regretting that this my trysting place had now become the scene of tribunal. We were alone. We would eat no grapes, drink no wine. Again I became aware of the smell of my cologne. Despite the darkness, I was sure that Hugh was dressed for the night chill in his old pea jacket. And was Hugh as conscious as I was of the scent of my cologne? And equally conscious that I, unlike himself, was dressed for love and sleep and was perfectly at home, so to speak, in the night temperature? No doubt he was. But while I felt only indifference for all my advantages, nonetheless I made no effort to subdue the formidable seriousness of my presence on this stone bench in my ruined arbor.
“Why don’t you smoke, boy? It’ll be easier for you.”
But I was resolute. I was sensible. I was silent. I let it pass. From where Hugh half lay, half sat in the darkness I heard the faint orchestrated sounds of the squeaking wicker, the dry fibrous sounds of Hugh’s suddenly uncontrollable agitation. He could not contain himself. He knew he was wrong. Even while waiting to laugh in my face he was already trying to eliminate the traces of black scum from the sound of his voice.