Bread and Chocolate. Philippa Gregory

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СКАЧАТЬ swiftly from the lecture room, across the bright sunlit deck and down the shady corridor to his cabin. He shut the door behind him and lay on his bunk, his hand over his eyes. For no reason at all that he could think of, he felt seasick for the first time in his life.

      After that she was everywhere, as if scenting victory over him. When he talked quietly after dinner to a pleasant table of people about the writing of Homer, with a tiny black Greek coffee before him and a glass of Metaxa at his elbow, she appeared from nowhere bearing a huge frothing glass adorned with little paper umbrellas and streamers.

      ‘Try this,’ she ordered, plonking it down before him. ‘I got the barman to make it up for you special. I call it the Sexy Rexy. He says you’ll have ten per cent of every one he sells. I cut you in on the deal. Don’t thank me! Just tell me if you like it?’

      He would have demurred but she could overcome any protestation. She could overcome any refusal. He began to fear that nothing could stop her. He drank the drink she ordered for him, she brought him another. He surrendered the after-dinner conversation he was enjoying, she dominated the table.

      ‘Now we’re having fun,’ she declared and arranged the party into a circle so that they could play charades. He slipped away before he had to hear more than: ‘Now then! Sounds like snog’, and leaned over the stern rail and watched the small sliver of moon on the edge of the sky and the white wake vanishing into the blackness of the wine-dark sea.

      

      He went to his cabin early, he did not dare to accept an invitation to join a table and talk with them for fear that she would see him and come waddling in, shouting encouragement, and telling people about her trip to Egypt when the lecturer had been such a laff. He took a large glass of brandy with him and sat on his narrow bed and drank it, looking mournfully out of the dark porthole where the islands he loved so much, slept in the darkness of night and forgotten history.

      He was starting to get undressed when he heard her unmistakable shriek of laughter at the head of the corridor, and he sank back on his bunk, gritting his teeth at the very presence of her on the far side of his door, weaving her way, probably drunk, to her own cabin just two doors down.

      ‘Bet you I dare!’ she cried to her companions.

      Shrill giggles alerted him that she was not with the helpless George who normally escorted her everywhere, but with her new friends, two women travelling alone, who had mistaken loudness for confidence, and were eager to hear of her adventures in Egypt and her equally profound knowledge of Indian art.

      ‘Bet you think I don’t dare!’ she cried again to shrill squeals of delighted alarm, only this time even louder, right outside his cabin.

      Ignoring the disturbance, he pulled down his trousers and started to step into his cotton pyjamas. His horror when he saw the door knob turn was total. The door opened and she entered in one smooth movement and slammed it shut behind her with a noise as loud as one of Zeus’s thunderbolts. She was inside his cabin and he was a man surprised, with one leg in a pyjama trouser and one leg still out, his nakedness open to her frank scrutiny.

      ‘They dared me!’ she said, out of breath. ‘So I did.’

      She seemed to think that was explanation enough. ‘But now I’m here…’ She swayed towards him, staggering slightly from the rocking of the ship, her clumsiness exaggerated by the three Sexy Rexys she had drunk. ‘Now I’m here – how about a bit of a giggle? Or a bit of a nibble, as you offered? You naughty man! You naughty naughty man!’

      She came towards him, as unstoppable as an oil tanker. He shrank back, the narrow cabin bed offering no refuge. Still she came on. He thought wildly of the several hours that it took for a ship to stop at sea, as she surged forwards and fastened her bright wide mouth on his and thrust a cold hand down into the tangle of his clenched pyjamas.

      She pulled him out like a bookmark. ‘Whassamatter?’ she asked. ‘You want a little warming up?’

      She kissed him again, more insistently, her gin-sweet tongue pressing against his closed lips. ‘Come on,’ she urged him. ‘Let’s have a little fun. Let’s have a laff.’ She reared back and gazed at him unblinkingly. ‘If you’re worried about George, he’s out for the count. Nobody knows I’m here.’ She had quite forgotten her bosom pals of the corridor; but he could imagine them, only too vividly, listening to all of this at the door of his cabin, daring each other to bend and peep through the keyhole.

      He tried to rise to his feet but his pyjama trousers, one leg on, one leg off, entangled him and he fell back on his single bunk. ‘I must ask you to leave,’ he said and knew himself to be pompous and powerless.

      ‘Oh, give us a kiss.’ Once again she insistently fumbled down the front of his trousers. ‘Come on. Warm you up! Cheer you up. Show a girl a good time! Come on!’

      He found the strength in his irritation to push her away, and at last got his second foot down the second trouser leg. He pulled the trousers up, tied the cord, and confronted her with more authority. ‘You must go,’ he said. ‘You should never have come in. I did not invite you. Your presence here is a mistake.’

      ‘Whassamatter? You some kind of pansy?’ she asked, lurching back from him and bumping against the door. He could not now throw the door open, she was clinging to the door knob for support. ‘You some kind of faggot? You some kind of queer? You some kind of Oedipussy? Is that why you’re so keen on him?’

      ‘Get out,’ he said coldly. ‘Get out and I don’t want to see you again.’

      Roughly he pushed her aside so that he could pull open the door. As soon as it opened her two companions tumbled in as if they were enacting some ghastly farce. He stood, glacial and irritated, as they picked themselves up and got themselves out of his cabin. Only when they were all gone, like reprimanded fourth formers, did he sink to his little bunk bed and put his head in his hands and shake from the horror of it, and from the shame of her questing hand, and from the cruelty of her accusations.

      

      They were at Paxi the next day, an unspoiled Greek island, some few miles from the mainland. There could be nothing here to attract her: a tiny harbour, a boat trip to the Blue Caves, a few quayside bars. Nothing more. He could assume she would stay with the cruise ship, drinking cocktails and looking at the enchanting view of pale rocks and rustling olive groves and complaining of boredom.

      ‘Paxi is principally interesting for the legend that this is where the River Styx flows,’ he said as dryly as he could. She was in the back row with George in attendance. She was silent for once. He imagined that a blinding hangover from three Sexy Rexys was suppressing her usual morning vitality.

      ‘The River Styx flows from this mortal world into the underworld, as you know. The only way to the underworld is to be ferried across it by the boatman Charon. It is, as you can imagine, a one-way journey.’ He waited for the usual gentle murmur of laughter.

      None came. He had lost his audience for this cruise. They were so accustomed to her interpolations of crude jokes that they had lost the taste for mild academic wit. And he had lost his sense of timing. He was no longer confident before them. He was continually waiting for some noisy demand from her table for a joke or for something to cheer them all up. He could hardly hold the floor when he was certain that in a moment, she would be bellowing: ‘After all, what I say is: you’re a long time dead!’

      ‘Our ship is too big to enter the narrow harbour of Paxi,’ he said when he had left a moment for them to laugh, and they had not laughed. ‘So we will take СКАЧАТЬ