Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

‘Fullest possible information on what?’ Mary asked.

‘Today is playtime,’ Cy said. ‘Business tomorrow.’

He moved on a place. One arm on the back of Mary’s chair he bent over to kiss Mary briefly on the cheek. ‘How’s my glamorous sister-in-law today?’

‘Very well,’ Mary turned smiling. She decided to reply in kind. ‘And how’s my handsome brother-in-law?’

His lips touched her cheek. ‘Horny,’ he whispered.

She felt herself blush, wondered if George Savary could possibly have heard anything, wondered if Sunny could see from the far end of the table, decided there was nothing to worry about there, and with a smile at her bond salesman neighbour lifted her spoon to try the lobster bisque which had been set before her. She tasted nothing as she slowly spooned the soup. Her thoughts were on last Thursday evening and the strange exhilarating few moments, the memory of which made her tremble.

Sunny and Cy had come over for supper, with Jacques and Josette Picard, friends from the year she had studied at the Sorbonne. In the certainty that Cy and perhaps even Sunny would drink too much she had asked them to stay over. Looking back on it as she had done a dozen times since, she was astonished at the unexpectedness of what had happened. She was equally astonished that it seemed to have a sort of inevitability. She knew that she liked Cy but with reservations. Reservations about his bounce, his brashness, his overwhelming self-confidence. What she did like was what she and the world first saw of Cy Stevenson. A good-looking young man, a little over forty, light-hearted, competent, free with his compliments.

Last Thursday night, she remembered, he had been particularly free with his compliments to her. He had not even come on to Josette Picard as she had expected him to.

Her mind drifted, savouring that extraordinary moment. Around about midnight on the evening of the dinner party, after the Picards had left, Sunny had gone to take a shower. Fin was in a familiar slumped condition, close to sleep in the library. Mary herself was checking one of the guest bedrooms and Cy was nowhere to be seen.

She had made sure the windows were open as Sunny insisted and she was staring down at the bed wondering whether Sunny would want a lighter blanket when she was aware of someone in the room with her.

She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Hullo, Cy.’ She looked back at the bed. ‘I’m wondering whether Sunny is going to need a lighter blanket.’

‘Uhuh,’ he said, standing behind her.

‘OK, you’re not interested.’

‘That’s not strictly true,’ his voice said.

She frowned. Something had brushed the seat of her black skirt. It took one astonishing moment to realise it was the palm of his hand. She breathed in, pretending to be considering the question of the blanket, pretending to be unaware of his touch. This time the palms of both his hands brushed lightly up and down. And stayed.

They both knew there was room for her to step forward a pace. That he’d laugh and make a joke and it would be over. Instead, she pressed back slightly into his hands.

Her eyes were on the bathroom door. Behind that door Sunny was taking a shower; or was cleaning her teeth; or was just slipping on a bathrobe. She kept her eyes on the bathroom door handle as she pressed backwards.

‘That you, Cy?’ Sunny’s voice called through the bathroom door.

‘Sure, you almost finished?’

‘Just coming out,’ Sunny’s voice said. ‘Listen, you’re not going to spend half the night boozing with Fin.’

Now Cy had come forward, pressing against her. Mary seemed to stop breathing. Lust, heightened by drink and an appalling sense of guilt, flooded her. She reached back and took Cy’s hands, guiding them to her waist and then up underneath until he cupped her breast under the silk of her evening blouse. For a moment they stood together as a sharp exquisite feeling surged through her. Then the door handle turned and Cy stepped backwards.

Sunny came out of the bathroom wrapped in a robe, drying her hair with a towel. ‘It’s not good for you,’ she said to Cy. Mary looked at her helplessly. ‘It’s not good for him, this nonstop drinking. Don’t let Fin encourage him for God’s sake, Mary.’

‘Myself, I’m going to bed,’ Cy said. ‘Now.’

Sunny looked up at her sister. Then: ‘Hey, you’ve got a hot flush.’

‘I was just wondering whether you’d want a lighter blanket.’

‘No, what I really want is for you to get some air conditioning into this house. But of course, you’d consider that vulgar.’

‘If that blanket’s all right then…’ Mary murmured moving towards the door, ‘I’ll say goodnight to you both.’

Sunny stopped drying her hair and frowned. ‘I didn’t say anything to offend you, did I?’

‘No, of course not.’ The words came out much more sharply than she had intended.

‘Menopausal impatience,’ Sunny announced. ‘I think you’ve reached that time of life.’

‘Menopausal impatience.’ She turned away angrily. Catching Cy’s eye in the mirror she stopped at the door. Menopausal impatience? Could it be? ‘Goodnight, Cy,’ she said. ‘Goodnight, Sunny.’

At the luncheon, conversation with the bond salesman on her left was proving difficult. With Colonel Savary on her right it was almost impossible. He was preoccupied and remote. Every time she decided on a line of polite small-talk, the word Cy just drifted through her mind. She found she savoured it. She drank wine to complement it. At the end of lunch she smoked a small cheroot to accompany it.

Cy had remembered. And had wanted her to know that.

The lunch was protracted, the speeches were, by all except Cy himself, tedious and overlong. Beside her George Savary had reacted grudgingly to the generous compliment Cy had paid him for his courage in accepting ‘a role on a committee that’s bound to be unpopular when it charges two hundred and fifty dollars for lunch’. When she asked him if he was already regretting it he told her that at first when Helen Rose had proposed him, he had thought Cy reluctant to countersign her proposal. He realised he was an outsider, a newcomer to Meyerick County, but he had been at Yale with Helen Rose’s husband, Philip. Even as a soldier, he said, he had come to look upon the Vietnamese war as different from other wars. He intended no lack of patriotism but when young Jason Rose was blinded – he had served with the Colonel’s unit near Da Nang – he confessed he had begun to think seriously about what the US was doing there.

‘Cy says,’ Mary moved cautiously, ‘that our understanding of the Vietnamese was zero. I don’t know.’

‘I think news reporters sometimes get closer to what’s going on than the soldiers on the spot. The mystery is they don’t seem able to tell what they know.’

So he wasn’t all service stories and well-cut suits, Mary reflected. A bit huffy perhaps, but a good man. A man who, like many veterans of all ranks, had even now not stopped thinking about Vietnam even in the aftermath of victory in the Gulf.

As she talked to George Savary she could feel her brother-in-law’s eyes on her. She found, to her annoyance, that she was stuttering and slightly incoherent. She was a fifty-year-old woman, she reminded herself. There was only one legitimate reason now for her to get hot flushes.

‘You heard me mention to Cy an emergency meeting of trustees,’ Savary said, when the speeches and toasts were over. ‘I feel it’s my duty to press Cy on this. There have been some important developments in Saigon in the last few days.’

She had no wish to think about developments in Ho Chi Minh City. ‘What does Cy say?’ she asked, her eyes ranging across the tables.