Moonshine. Victoria Clayton

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СКАЧАТЬ mean there are wild goats here? How romantic! We might be in Ancient Greece. Apart from the weather.’

      ‘Those are the Maumturk Mountains.’ Kit pointed to our left. ‘And beyond them in the distance a group called the Twelve Bens.’

      All around us were sombre mountains, water running down them in rills. At their feet the ground fell to the road in tracts of undulating green dotted with rocks and clumps of spiky grass.

      ‘That’s cotton grass,’ said Kit. ‘It means the ground’s boggy. Thousands of years ago prehistoric man lived by slashing and burning the woodland that covered these parts. Eventually a layer of carbon formed that stopped the land from draining and thus the bog was created. When the woodland was all destroyed, the people who lived here could only get wood by digging up ancient trees from beneath the peat layers. Hence bog oak. A useful lesson for today.’

      ‘I’ve seen furniture made from black bog oak but I’d no idea how it was formed.’

      ‘So, during the game of tennis that so effectively demolished your defences, what was it, exactly, that you suspected? Are you unique among girls, do you think, in finding incompetence more disarming than proficiency?’

      ‘I thought you were the expert on female psychology.’

      ‘What was troubling you? Besides a sense of what you persist in seeing as impending moral collapse on your own part?’

      ‘Don’t you ever forget anything?’

      ‘Not when it’s a story.’ Kit slowed to let a ewe and her lamb, their underbellies brown with mud, cross the road. ‘Agents have to carry details in their heads. They’re the long stop for major authorial blunders.’

      ‘All right. Something made me think that he might be losing the game on purpose; that he was a much better player than he’d pretended. Then, in the excitement that followed, I didn’t think anything more about it. But weeks later the suspicion resurfaced when I was returning some gumboots I’d borrowed to the downstairs cloakroom at Ladyfield. The walls are hung with old school photographs, mostly of Dickie at Harrow: the usual rows of blazered, boatered boys, plus photographs of Dickie in the First Eleven and the Second Fifteen. I’d never bothered to look at them properly but something must have registered subliminally because I spotted at once a photograph of Westminster School’s Senior Tennis Team and guess who was sitting in the middle of the front row holding a large silver cup?’ I waited politely for Kit to finish laughing before adding, ‘Given that Burgo may not have played for a long time, is it possible for anyone’s game to deteriorate so drastically?’

      ‘I shouldn’t think so. You either have good hand – eye co-ordination or not. Besides, Burgo had been keeping his athletic prowess honed playing polo, hadn’t he?’

      ‘My goodness, I hope your authors deserve you.’

      ‘Did you take him properly to task?’

      ‘No. I tried to forget about it. I suppose I didn’t want to discover anything that made me trust him less. I wanted so badly to see him as perfect … and perfectly irresistible. In order to justify what we were doing I had to make myself believe he was the love of my life. And that I was of his.’

      ‘And despite everything you still believe that.’

      I did not answer. I was no longer capable of interpreting my own feelings.

      ‘We’ve only ten miles to go until Kilmuree,’ said Kit. ‘Just tell me a little about the good times and I’ll pretend the tale’s been nicely rounded off. A sort of happy ever after that fades into oblivion. That’s what we all want from a story. Physical consummation isn’t enough. It wouldn’t be enough for Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy to climb between the sheets and indulge in erotic acts before going their separate ways. Or for Mr Rochester to take Jane Eyre through the Kama Sutra. The climax of a narrative is actually the moment when two people reveal themselves to each other by declaring a deeply felt, highly significant attachment.’

      ‘It’s strange that we get such vicarious pleasure from imagining other, wholly fictitious people falling in love. Is it just because we identify with one of them?’

      ‘I don’t see myself as Burgo Latimer. A public man, an orator, a manipulator of minds. Sorry if that sounds slanderous. Of course I’m jealous. In my mind he’s as fantastical a being as the Minotaur. He’s made you unhappy and left you to defend yourself.’

      ‘I quite agree with you about happy endings. We want to leave them suspended in blissful communion. We don’t want to be told afterwards how Jane and Mr Rochester remodelled Thornfield Hall in the style of William Burges. Or that Lady Catherine de Bourgh was catty about Elizabeth’s taste in bedding begonias.’

      ‘And I also want to know what happened to the lovely, feckless Jasmine. I realize her relationship with Teddy is a leitmotif of textbook adultery that runs parallel with your own love affair. Your audience is eager in anticipation.’

      

      After Burgo and I became lovers, after those ten, perhaps fifteen minutes of intense physical pleasure, we lay in each other’s arms waiting for our hearts to slow and for our minds to begin working.

      Then I said, ‘Dickie’s coming back any minute.’

      ‘I asked him to ring Simon for me, to tell him to bring the car round in half an hour. But he must have done that by now.’ There was a brief silence, during which I tried to calm my breathing and focus my eyes. Burgo said, ‘I’d better go.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘I’ll always remember the way you look now.’ He kissed me. ‘All my life.’

      We pulled our clothes on quickly, not speaking. I was terribly afraid now that someone would catch us in a state of undress, though only minutes before I would not have cared if the combined teams of the Ladyfield Lawn Tennis Club and the Tideswell Tigers had crowded into the China House to cheer us on.

      ‘Goodbye, Roberta.’ Burgo lifted my hand to kiss it.

      ‘Goodbye.’

      I watched him walk to the door and cross the little garden. I tried to tidy myself and the daybed. He must have met Dickie on the way. I did my best to enthuse about the new silk for the daybed to please Dickie but I don’t suppose I made much sense. I was trying to decide exactly what had happened, how it had happened and what the consequences would be. And I could not suppress a thrill of happiness. I wanted to grin with pleasure. Walking back through the garden I had forborne, with difficulty, to skip.

      Dickie had politely pretended not to notice anything but had taken me into the cool, deserted drawing room and asked if I wouldn’t like a little rest after my heroic performance on court. Through the window I could see the back of Burgo’s head above the group that thronged about him on the lawn. When I insisted that I had to get back to Cutham Dickie had made me drink several cups of strong black coffee before conducting me to my car. Tipsy septuagenarians were packing their cars with tennis equipment and driving unsteadily away with two wheels in Dickie’s penstemon border. I was astonished that the world managed to go on in its ordinary insipid way.

      I had flown through the countryside on a super-powered cloud, survived dinner somehow, washed up and gone upstairs at the first possible moment so that I could be alone. Naturally after drinking so much coffee I had lain awake for hours, reliving the excitement of being in Burgo’s СКАЧАТЬ