Eventually we got into the bath. There was less light than in the bedroom. But touch reigned. I guessed that the shared bath represented a wish to be timidly wicked, a mode of giving way. There was a wrestling with legs, trying to fit them in as we faced each other. Splashing, leaning, trying to kiss—but it was a strain and we had to lie back. I thought of other baths shared: Alison. Of how all naked women become the same naked woman, the eternal naked woman; who could not die, who could only be celebrated as I was going, in an obscure way, to celebrate Alison in Julie; almost to mourn her as I remet and remade her.
We began to touch each other’s loins with our feet. Her toes; shy then inquisitive; the soft wet pelt, dark softness between the silk white thighs; her mysterious lust.
A long silence. I made her turn round, so that she sat against me. There was a pretence of washing, of soaping and splashing; but mostly caressing, kissing, moulding, biting. Finally she stood up and out of the bath and we dried. She undid the scarf round her hair and it fell again. Her damp, warm body, the water gurgling away, the sense that the whole village was asleep—not only in that night, but in time, ten generations unable to understand the divinity, the paradise of sex. Not a man in the world I would have changed places with; or who would not have wanted to change places with me. She put her arms round me and kissed me, as if the bath had relieved all her tenseness; then whispered, “I haven’t…”
“It’s all right.”
She went in to the bedroom and I got my coat and brought it into the bathroom and put on a contraceptive. When I came out she was lying on her side. I stood beside the bed, looking at her eyes, the eyes of her breasts, that body. I knelt to kiss it, but she twisted off the bed before I could stop her, with a little breath of laughter. There was more light, the moon must have come through a rift in the clouds. She stood over by the far window, as if waiting for me to catch her. I walked slowly towards her. Just before I got within reach, but was sure she was not going to move, she slipped sideways and pushed my arms down as I stretched to catch her. She stopped against the wall by the door. This fey game of tag was a kind of last acting of her role towards me: the uncatchable, the virgin temptress. It was too charmingly perverse, another attempt to be wicked, to really irritate; and too badly timed to really please.
Now she stood, back to the wall, her arms out, hands pressed back, as if crucified. I smiled and stole closer, but she said in a low voice, “Don’t move.”
She raised both her arms above her head, the backs of the wrists together, as if they were bound; and crossed her ankles, as if they were tied as well. Someone must have switched on a light in one of the houses behind the hotel, because a brighter, slatted light percolated the room; barred her body. She had a smile on her face.
“Who am I?”
It was a pose, a sexual guessing-game.
“The slave?”
“Cophetua.”
She covered her breasts and loins.
“Eve?”
“Now?”
She put her hands behind her back and leant against the wall; looking at me shyly from under her eyebrows. I began to be tired of all this whimsy; I put my hands on the wall beside her head, caging her in. She looked down.
“Her first love affaire.”
“Now be just you.”
“What is just me?”
I took the ends of her hair and gently pinned her head back, went closer; she moved her hands from behind her back and rested them on my hips. I inched forward until I was pressing her against the wall. She put her bare feet on top of mine. I slipped my hands round her back. And we stood like that, touching noses, staring into each other’s dark eyes, too close to focus.
“I’m going to find out.”
“Are you?”
A little smile at the corner of her mouth; the Leonardo smile again. I caught her to me and kissed her; she gave, then struggled wildly, so wildly that I half let go of her. I caught her back, but still she struggled; though it became a sex struggle, a falling across the end of the bed, rolling on top of each other, kisses begun and bite-ended, grapplings. I remembered an old Urfe law: that girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education. She seemed to want me to rape her. Her legs opened, but only for tantalizing moments, then closed as she twisted away.
In the end I threw myself back.
“Julie. Come on. For Christ’s sake.”
It must have sounded more like despair than pleasure, because she suddenly knelt beside me, her hair hanging, staring down. She caught hold of my wrists and pretended to hold me down.
“Do you want me?”
“I’m dying for you.”
Then very quickly she slipped off the bed; ran to the door. I sat up.
“Julie?”
I saw her pale figure against the faint rectangle; watching me for a moment. Her right hand reached sideways.
She spoke. The strangest voice; as hard as glass.
“There is no Julie.”
There was the sound of her alien voice and a metallic click. For a fraction of a second I thought it was a joke, she was acting again, had accidentally touched the key.
Then there was a violent cascade of events.
The door was flung wide open, the light came on, there were two black figures, two tall men in black trousers and shirts. One was the Negro and the other was “Anton.” Joe came first, so fast at me that I had no time to do anything but convulsively grip the bedspread over my loins. I tried to see Julie, her face, because I still could not accept what I knew: that she had turned the key and opened the door. Anton flung her something she caught and quickly put on—a deep-red towel bathrobe. Joe flung himself at me just as I was about to shout. His hand clapped violently across my mouth and I felt the weight of him; a whiff of shaving lotion, or hair oil. I was in no fit state to struggle. What fighting I did was mainly to try to keep the bedspread over me. Anton gripped my legs. They must have had loops of rope ready prepared, because in fifteen seconds I was tied up. Then I was gagged. I got out one stifled beginning of what I felt at Julie.
“You—”
But then I was silenced. The two men forced my arms back, so I was lying flat, straining my neck up to see Julie. She turned, tying the ends of the belt. Another figure appeared in the door: Conchis. He was dressed like the others, in black shirt and trousers. He looked at Julie, and gave a little nod of approval; touched her shoulder. She was combing her hair briefly, not looking at me. Like a woman athlete who had just won a race. Conchis came and stood over me. He looked down at me absolutely without expression. I threw all the hate I had in me at him, tried to make obscene sounds that he could understand. A flash of awareness: this was an echo of the torture room in the war; a corner room at the end of a corridor; a man lying on his back on the table; symbolically castrated.
Now Julie came to the other side of the bed. My eyes began to fill with tears of frustrated rage and humiliation. I was just able to realize that her look was not completely detached from me; there was no contempt in it, no mockery; but a strange reversion to her old self, the Lily self, the cool, aloof self that I had first known. Not as if she was an athlete now, but a woman surgeon who had just performed a difficult operation successfully. Peeling off the rubber gloves; surveying the suture. They were all the same; not gloating, not taunting, even a little anxious—relieved, efficient, yet anxious.
A team, less interested in each other, than in their difficult common purpose.