Lie Down With Lions (24 page)

Gently, Jane encouraged him to say more. “So why did you stay?” she asked him. “Why volunteer for a second tour?”

“Because I didn’t see all of that so clearly then; because I was fighting for my country and you can’t walk away from a war; because I was a good officer, and if I had gone home my job might have been taken over by some jerk and my men would have got killed: and none of these reasons is good enough, of course, so at some point I asked myself ‘What are you going to do about it?’ I wanted . . . I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wanted to do something to redeem myself. In the sixties we would have called it a guilt trip.”

“Yes, but . . .” He looked so uncertain and vulnerable that she found it hard to ask him direct questions, but he needed to talk and she wanted to hear it, so she plowed on. “But why
this
?”

“I was in Intelligence, toward the end, and they offered me the chance to continue in the same line of work in the civilian world. They said I would be able to work undercover because I was familiar with that milieu. They knew about my radical past, you see. It seemed to me that by catching terrorists I might be able to undo some of the things I had done. So I became a counterterrorist expert. It sounds simplistic when I put it into words—but I’ve been successful, you know. The Agency doesn’t like me because I sometimes refuse a mission, such as the time they killed the President of Chile, and agents aren’t supposed to refuse missions; but I’ve been responsible for incarcerating some very nasty people, and I’m proud of myself.”

Chantal was asleep. Jane laid her in the box that was her cradle. She said to Ellis: “I suppose I ought to say that . . . that I seem to have misjudged you.”

He smiled. “Thank God for that.”

For a moment she was seized by nostalgia as she thought of the time—was it only a year and a half ago?—when she and Ellis had been happy and none of
this
had happened: no CIA, no Jean-Pierre, no Afghanistan. “You can’t wipe it out, though, can you?” she said. “Everything that has happened—your lies, my anger.”

“No.” He was sitting on the stool, studying her intently, looking up at her as she stood in front of him. He held out his arms, hesitated, then rested his hands on her hips in a gesture which might have been brotherly affection or something more. Then Chantal said: “Mumumumummmm . . .” Jane turned around and looked at her, and Ellis let his hands fall. Chantal was wide awake, waving her arms and legs in the air. Jane picked her up, and she burped immediately.

Jane turned back to face Ellis. He had folded his arms across his chest and was watching her, smiling. Suddenly she did not want him to leave. On impulse, she said: “Why don’t you have supper with me? It’s only bread and curds, though.”

“All right.”

She held Chantal out to him. “Let me go and tell Fara.” He took the baby and she went out into the courtyard. Fara was heating water for Chantal’s bath. Jane tested the temperature with her elbow and found it just right. “Make bread for two people, please,” she said in Dari. Fara’s eyes widened, and Jane realized it was shocking for a woman alone to invite a man to supper. To hell with all that, she thought. She picked up the pot of water and carried it back into the house.

Ellis was sitting on the big cushion under the oil lamp, dandling Chantal on his knee, saying a rhyme in a low voice. His big hairy hands encircled her tiny pink body. She was looking up at him, gurgling happily and kicking her fat feet. Jane stopped in the doorway, transfixed by the scene, and a thought came unbidden into her mind: Ellis should have been Chantal’s father.

Is that true? she asked herself as she looked at them. Do I really wish it?

Ellis finished the rhyme and looked up at her and smiled a little sheepishly, and she thought: Yes, I really do.

They walked up the mountainside at midnight, Jane leading the way, Ellis following with his big down sleeping bag under his arm. They had bathed Chantal, eaten their meager supper of bread and curds, fed Chantal again, and settled the baby down for the night on the roof, where she was now fast asleep beside Fara, who would protect her with her life. Ellis had wanted to take Jane away from the house where she had been someone else’s wife, and Jane had felt the same, so she had said: “I know a place where we can go.”

Now she turned off the mountain path and led Ellis across the sloping, stony ground to her secret retreat, the concealed ledge where she had sun-bathed naked and oiled her tummy before Chantal was born. She found it easily in the moonlight. She looked down into the village, where the embers of cooking fires glowed in the courtyards and a few lamps still flickered behind glassless windows. She could just about make out the shape of her house. In a few hours, as soon as day began to break, she would be able to see the sleeping forms of Chantal and Fara on the roof. She would be glad: this was the first time she had left Chantal at night.

She turned around. Ellis had completely unzipped the sleeping bag and was spreading it on the ground like a blanket. Jane felt awkward and uncomfortable. The surge of warmth and lust which had overcome her in the house, when she watched him saying a nursery rhyme to her baby, had gone. All her old feelings had returned, momentarily: the urge to touch him, her love of the way he smiled when he felt self-conscious, the need to feel his big hands on her skin, the obsessive wish to see him naked. A few weeks before Chantal was born she had lost her desire for sex, and it had not come back until that moment. But that mood had been dissipated, bit by bit, in the succeeding hours, as they had made clumsy practical arrangements to be alone, for all the world like a pair of teenagers trying to get away from their parents for a petting session.

“Come and sit down,” Ellis said.

She sat beside him on the sleeping bag. They both looked down at the darkened village. They were not touching. There was a moment of strained silence. “Nobody else has ever been here,” Jane remarked, just for something to say.

“What did you use it for?”

“Oh, I just used to lie in the sun and think about nothing,” she said.

Then she thought, Oh, what the hell, and she said: “No, that’s not quite true, I used to masturbate.”

He laughed, then put his arm around her and hugged her. “I’m glad you still haven’t learned to mince your words,” he said.

She turned her face to him. He kissed her mouth softly. He likes me for my faults, she thought: my tactlessness and my quick temper and my cursing, my willfulness and my being opinionated. “You don’t want to change me,” she said.

“Oh, Jane, I’ve missed you.” He closed his eyes and spoke in a murmur. “Most of the time I didn’t even realize that I was missing you.” He lay back, pulling her with him, so that she ended up leaning over him. She kissed his face lightly. The awkward feeling was going rapidly. She thought: Last time I kissed him he had no beard. She felt his hands move: he was unbuttoning her shirt. She was not wearing a bra—she did not have one big enough—and her breasts felt very naked. She slipped her hand inside his shirt and touched the long hairs around his nipple. She had almost forgotten what men felt like. For months her life had been full of the soft voices and smooth faces of women and babies: now suddenly she wanted to feel rough skin and hard thighs and bristly cheeks. She twined her fingers in his beard and pushed his mouth open with her tongue. His hands found her swollen breasts, she felt a pang of pleasure—and then she knew what was going to happen and was powerless to stop it, for even as she pulled abruptly away from him, she felt both her nipples spurt warm milk over his hands, and she flushed with shame and said: “Oh, God, I’m sorry, how disgusting. I can’t help it—”

He silenced her with a finger over her lips. “It’s all right,” he said. He caressed her breasts as he spoke, and they became slippery all over. “It’s normal. It always happens. It’s sexy.”

It
can’t
be sexy, she thought, but he shifted his position and brought his face to her chest and started to kiss her breasts and stroke them at the same time, and gradually she relaxed and started to enjoy the sensation. Eventually she felt another sharp pang of pleasure as they leaked again, but this time she did not mind. Ellis said: “Aaah,” and the rough surface of his tongue touched her tender nipples, and she thought: If he sucks them I’ll come.

It was as if he had read her mind. He closed his lips around one long nipple, pulled it into his mouth and sucked it while holding the other between finger and thumb, squeezing gently and rhythmically. Helplessly Jane yielded to the sensation. And as her breasts squirted milk, one into his hand and the other into his mouth, the feeling was so exquisite that she shuddered uncontrollably and moaned: “Oh God oh God oh God” until it died away and she slumped on top of him.

For a while there was nothing in her mind but what she could feel: his warm breath on her wet breasts, his beard scratching her skin, the cool night air wafting over her heated cheeks, the nylon sleeping bag and the hard ground beneath. After a while his muffled voice said: “I’m suffocating.”

She rolled off him. “Are we weird?” she said.

“Yes.”

She giggled. “Have you ever done that before?”

He hesitated, then said: “Yes.”

“What . . .” She still felt faintly embarrassed. “What does it taste like?”

“Warm and sweet. Like canned milk. Did you come?”

“Didn’t you notice?”

“I wasn’t sure. It’s hard to tell with girls, sometimes.”

She kissed him. “I came. A little one, but unmistakable. A boobinal orgasm.”

“I almost came.”

“Really?” She ran her hand down his body. He had on the thin cotton pajamalike shirt and trousers that Afghans all wore. She could feel his ribs and his hipbones: he had lost the soft underskin fat which all but the thinnest Westerners had. Her hand encountered his prick, standing upright inside the trousers, and she said: “Ahhh,” and grasped it. “It feels good,” she said.

“Also at this end.”

She wanted to give him as much pleasure as he had given her. She sat upright, untied the drawstring of his trousers and took out his prick. Stroking it gently, she bent over and kissed the end. Then the imp of mischief seized her and she said: “How many girls have you had since me?”

“Just keep doing that and I’ll tell you.”

“Okay.” She resumed stroking and kissing. He was silent. “Okay,” she said after a minute, “how many?”

“Wait, I’m still counting.”

“Bastard!” she said, and bit his prick.

“Ouch! Not many, really . . . I swear!”

“What do you do when you haven’t got a girl?”

“Take three guesses.”

She was not to be put off. “Do you do it with your hand?”

“Aw, shucks, Miz Janey, I’se bashful.”

“You do,” she said triumphantly. “What do you think about while you’re doing it?”

“Would you believe Princess Diana?”

“No.”

“Now I
am
embarrassed.”

Jane was consumed with curiosity. “You have to tell the truth.”

“Pam Ewing.”

“Who the hell is she?”

“You
have
been out of touch. She’s Bobby Ewing’s wife, on
Dallas
.”

Jane remembered the television show and the actress, and she was astonished. “You can’t be serious.”

“You asked for the truth.”

“But she’s made of plastic!”

“We’re talking
fantasy
here.”

“Can’t you fantasize a liberated woman?”

“Fantasy is no place for politics.”

“I’m shocked.” She hesitated. “How do you do it?”

“What?”

“What you do. With your hand.”

“Kind of like what you’re doing, but harder.”

“Show me.”

“I’m not just embarrassed now,” he said. “I’m mortified.”

“Please. Please show me. I’ve always wanted to see a man do that. I’ve never had the nerve to ask before—if you turn me down I may never know.” She took his hand and placed it where hers had been.

After a moment he started to move his hand slowly. He made several rather halfhearted strokes; then he sighed, closed his eyes and started to rub it in earnest.

“You’re so rough with it!” she exclaimed.

He stopped. “I can’t do this . . . unless you do it too.”

“It’s a deal,” she said eagerly. Quickly she slipped off her trousers and panties. She knelt beside him and started to stroke herself.

“Come closer,” he said. His voice sounded a little hoarse. “I can’t see you.”

He was lying flat on his back. She shuffled closer until she was kneeling upright beside his head, with the moonlight silvering her nipples and her pubic hair. He started to rub his prick again, faster this time, and he stared at her hand as if transfixed as she caressed herself.

“Oh, Jane,” he said.

She began to enjoy the familiar darts of pleasure spreading from her fingertips. She saw Ellis’s hips start to move up and down in rhythm with his hand. “I want you to come,” she said. “I want to see it shoot out.” Part of her was shocked at herself, but that part was swamped by excitement and desire.

He groaned. She looked at his face. His mouth was open and he was breathing hard. His eyes were fixed on her cunt. She stroked the lips with her middle finger. “Put your finger in,” he breathed. “I want to see your finger go inside.”

That was something she did not normally do. She pushed her fingertip inside. It felt smooth and slippery. She put it all the way in. He gasped, and because he was so excited by what she was doing, she got turned on, too. She turned her gaze back to his prick. His hips jerked faster as he fucked his hand. She moved her finger in and out of her cunt with mounting pleasure. Suddenly he arched his back, thrusting his pelvis high in the air and groaning, and a streak of white semen shot out from him. Involuntarily Jane cried, “Oh, my God!”; then as she gazed, fascinated, at the tiny hole in the end of his organ, another jet came, and another, and a fourth, spurting up into the air, gleaming in the moonlight and landing on his chest and her arm and in her hair; and then when he collapsed, she herself was racked by spasms of pleasure fired by her fast-moving finger until she, too, was exhausted.