But it is hardly a fault to have lived my life, and still to live it, without knowing pain. And dormancy, memory, clairvoyance, what more could I want? My dormancy is my hive, my honeypot, my sleeping castle, the golden stall in which the white bull lies quite alive and dreaming. For me the still air is thicker than leaves, and if memory gives me back the grape-tasting game and bursting sun, clairvoyance returns to me in a different way my wife, my last mistress, the little golden sheep who over her shoulder turns small bulging eyes in my direction. But not Hugh. He is gone for good. And Hugh is the man who died for love, not me.
And yet every man is vulnerable, no man is safe. If my world has flowered, still flowers, nonetheless it stands to reason that even the best of men and the most quiet and agreeable of lovers may earn his share of disapproval. There are those who in fact would like nothing better than to fill my large funnel-shaped white thighs with the fish hooks of their disapproval. There are those who would deny me all my nights in Fiona’s bed if they could, would strip me of silken dressing gown and fling me into some greasy whitetiled pit of naked sex-offenders. For some, love itself is a crime.
I realize all this. I could hardly have lived so long among the roses without feeling the thorns, could hardly have enjoyed so much in privacy without seeing the scowls of the crowd. But it will take a dark mind to strip my vines, to destroy the last shreds of my tapestry, to choke off my song. It will take a lot to destroy Hugh’s photographs or to gut the many bedrooms of the sleeping castle. I am a match, I hope, for the hatred of conventional enemies wherever they are.
THE SUN WAS SETTING, SINKING TO ITS PREDESTINED DEATH, and to the four of us, or at least to me, that enormous smoldering sun lay on the horizon like a dissolving orange suffused with blood. The tide was low, the smooth black oval stones beneath us were warm to the flesh, we could hear the distant sounds of the three girls playing with the dog behind the funeral cypresses. Fiona, wearing a pale lemon-colored bra and pale lemon-colored briefs for the beach, and I in my magenta trunks as sparse and thick and elastic as an athletic supporter, and Hugh in his long-sleeved cotton shirt and loose gray trunks like undershorts, and Catherine dressed in her faded madras halter and swimming skirt and shorts — together we sat with legs outstretched, soles of our feet touching or nearly touching, a four-pointed human starfish resting together in the last livid light of the day.
No one moved. Without calculation, almost without consciousness, Fiona lay propped on her elbows and with her head back, her eyes closed, her tense lips gently smiling. Even Catherine appeared to be sunk in a kind of worried slumber, aware somehow of the thick orange light on her knees. Prone bodies, silence hanging on the children’s voices and scattered barking of their old black dog, the empty wine bottles turning to gold. All of us felt the inertia, suspension, tranquility, though I found myself tapping out a silent expectant rhythm with one of my big toes while Hugh’s narrow black eyes were alert, unresting, I noticed, and to me revealed only too clearly his private thoughts. But the small black oval stones we lay on were for us much better than sand. Our beach, as we called it, was a glassy volcanic bed that made us draw closer together to touch toes, to dream. With one hand I was carelessly crushing a few thin navy-blue sea shells, making a small pile of crushed shell on my naked navel. And yet it was the sun, the sun alone that filled all our thoughts and was turning the exposed skin of all four bodies the same deepening color. The lower the sun fell the more it glowed.
I felt someone’s foot recoil from mine and then return. Even the tiny black ringlets in Hugh’s beard were turning orange. I could hear the powdery shells collecting in the well of my belly and I realized that all four of us were together on a black volcanic beach in the hour when fiercely illumined goats stand still and huddle and the moon prepares to pour its milk on the fire.
“Cyril. We don’t have to go back yet, do we?”
I glanced at Fiona, heard the matter-of-fact whisper and saw that her expression had not changed, that her lips had not moved. But rolling onto one hip, propping myself on one elbow, brushing away crushed shells with a hasty stroke of one hand, I saw also that there was movement in the curve of her throat and that the sun had saturated one of her broad white shoulders. And before I could answer, Fiona giggled. My sensible, stately, impatient, clear-bodied wife giggled, as if in a dream a small bird had alighted on her belly. Giggled for no reason apparently, she whose every impulsive gesture was informed with its own hidden sense, and at the sound Hugh became suddenly rigid, Catherine opened her eyes. I knew what to do.
In silence, while the sun flushed us most deeply and unrecognizably with orange light, I got to my knees beside Fiona, who did not move, and with a flick of my hand untied the silken strings of her pale lemon-colored halter, those thin silken cords knotted in a bow behind her bent neck and curving back, and then with a few more skillful movements removed altogether Fiona’s little lemon-colored bra. Then I folded this the briefest of all Fiona’s half-dozen bathing bras, stuck it for safekeeping inside one of my empty shoes, and flowed back slowly into my former position on the hot rocks.
Understandably perhaps, for the first few moments Catherine and even Hugh could not bear to look. I myself hardly dared to look. But then I heard a sound like a finger scratching inside Hugh’s throat and our three heads turned furtively, shyly, violently or calmly in my wife’s direction. And Fiona’s eyes, I saw, were open. We said nothing, Fiona was looking straight at the sun and smiling. But had she wanted me to expose her breasts, I wondered, for Hugh’s sake or mine? Or was the exposure purely my own idea and something that entered her consciousness and gave her pleasure only after I had touched her, untied the strings? I could not know. But I knew immediately that it was a good idea.
Fiona’s breasts were not large. Yet in the sun’s lurid effulgence they glistened, grew tight while the two nipples turned to liquid rings, bands, so that to me Fiona’s two firm breasts suddenly became the bursting irises of a young white owl’s wide-open eyes, and when in the next moment she giggled again, again apparently without reason, those bright naked eyes, breasts, recorded the little spasms of pleasure that, otherwise unseen, were traveling down Fiona’s chest and neck and arms.
“Baby, can’t we just stay like this forever?”
We heard the words, we watched the very motion of Fiona’s speech in her lips and breasts. In mouth and breasts my wife was singing, and despite the possibility of another unexpected giggle, which no doubt would be accompanied by another small eruption of rolling or bouncing in the lovely breasts as well as a slight twisting in the slope of the shoulders, despite all this or perhaps because of it the preciousness of what Fiona said maintained the silence, prevented the rest of us from talking. I could see the thin white edge of Fiona’s teeth between the slightly parted lips, the voice was soft and clear, the naked orange breasts were unimaginably free, her eyes were partially open. Even in the silence she was singing, and the rest of us were listening, watching.