The Gift of Shame (21 page)

Not at all sure that his statement had any validity, Helen felt curiously shy as she unwound the sarong and, not for
the
first time, stood naked before him. Qito came forward and, humming an unfamiliar tune through closed teeth, set about coating her body with the sunscreen. As he worked, he talked. ‘After we get you protected we can walk up to the spring. Fantastic! You’ll love it as I do. God is a wonderful set decorator.’

Helen stood submissively as Qito, the infuriatingly repetitive tune endlessly repeated, liberally coated her body, actually going on his knees before her to stroke the oil into her legs. ‘You’ll have to do this every morning and, again, after you swim,’ he told her.

Filled with a sudden sense of the absurdity of the situation, Helen felt brave enough to quip, ‘Aren’t you going to do it for me, then?’

‘No time,’ said Qito as he stood up and looked critically at her to seek out any spots he might have missed. ‘You trimmed your pubic hair and shaved your armpits,’ he told her, as if noticing for the first time.

‘I usually do,’ she told him.

‘Ridiculous habit,’ muttered Qito. ‘Hair is grown for a purpose and you’re supposed to be my wild creature of the forest.’ With a deep sigh he turned away to return the sunscreen to the tent.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you up to the spring and afterwards I’ll make us some lunch. After lunch I like to sleep a little and then this afternoon we’ll start work. That suit you?’

Helen shrugged. ‘I could cook if you like,’ she offered.

Qito let out an exasperated gasp. ‘Women can’t cook!’ he told her and then turned away, obviously expecting her to follow.

Helen picked up the discarded sarong and was about to wind it about herself when Qito, already some yards off, called back, ‘You don’t need that. There’s nobody here but us. Come on.’

Unwilling to so immediately assume the status of naked savage, but neither wishing to dispute with Qito – already out of sight in the trackless bush – she compromised, and, bunching the strip of material in her hand, started after him.

Qito may have been thirty years older than her but his legs seemed to carry him up the hillside with the ability of a mountain goat. Helen found her heart and lungs protesting as she ground up after him, so it was with some relief that she saw him halt at the top of a rise.

Puffing up to stand beside him, Helen looked down into a rocky depression. From half way up a sheer rock face came a shimmering but sparse column of water which, sparkling in the sunlight, looked like so many diamonds. The sun’s heat seemed focused on the water and, before it struck the smooth, saucer-like depression in the rock beneath, it almost completely petered out so that what fell was no more than a mist which drifted airily away on the breeze. It was magical. A fairy-tale place where legends could be played out.

‘Isn’t it wondrous?’ asked Qito.

‘Fabulous,’ breathed Helen.

‘Imagine how long that water must have been falling. It must have taken millions of years for that drizzle to have worn away the rocks. It’s inspiring,’ he told her. ‘Civilisations, worlds even, have been created and lost while that steady drip waited for our eyes to find it.’

Looking to Qito’s absorbed profile, his eyes fired with delight, she felt a surge of privilege. This
was
a truly magical place – the kind she might have wanted to share with a lover, and for one passing moment she all but promoted Qito into that role.

‘Is this where you mean to paint me?’ she asked.

‘Down there!’ cried Qito. ‘Exactly where the water strikes the ground. I mean that you should look as if the water had carved you out of the rocks.’

His enthused tone fired her so that she could see what the finished picture might be. Suddenly everything – the flight to Guadeloupe, the yacht and being stranded on the island with Qito – made sense. The chain of events which had brought her here, ragged and unplanned, now seemed like an intricately stitched tapestry. In that moment there was no other world and, it was almost possible to imagine, no other people. In such a place, she decided, anything was possible.

It was Qito who broke the mood. ‘Let’s go and eat,’ he said, and started back down the path they had so recently created through the coarse undergrowth. Helen hesitated and gave one more lingering look into the magical dell. No matter what was to come, she decided, it was going to be worth it.

While Qito monopolised the cooking range Helen wandered through the thin screen of shrubbery to the gently lapping water’s edge. Tiny fish were being driven up onto the beach with every eddy. Looking further out into the translucent waters of the lagoon she saw the flash of other bodies as they teemed, seemingly fighting for sea room, in their crowded world. Impulsively she waded knee deep into the water and laughed out loud when she saw how her legs appeared to bend in the mirrored clarity. Fish eagerly approached her intrusive legs and she yelped with delight as they fearlessly nudged against her in the hope she might present them with a meal.

Lifting her eyes to look beyond the white water breaking on the reef, she saw an endless placidity and imagined this to be a friendly place that had opened its arms in welcome and granted her peace.

A half-heard yell from Qito brought her wading back from the busy ocean to find him already greedily scooping up forkfuls of a creamy pasta and drinking deep into a glass of blood-red wine. She felt an intense sadness for the workers
who
, she imagined, sweated in the dark noisy factories to produce durable goods which had been brought to a paradise they would never see.

Qito indicated her plate set down on a table. The sauce was delicious – tangy enough to soften her conscience at enjoying the rich creamy indulgence. Qito, who seemed to wolf his food, was almost finished. She had barely had time to savour hers, and compliment him on it, before he was on his feet, stretching, belching delicately, and turning to go into the tent. ‘I’ll sleep for an hour then we’ll make a start,’ he told her.

Grateful not to have been invited to join his siesta Helen, after eating, walked down to the water’s edge to sluice the plates and watch the fish excitedly nudge at the dregs of the meal. She idly wondered how they might react to this new taste sensation before having a pang of conscience about how it might also damage their digestive systems.

‘The hell with it!’ she called to them. ‘A short happy life is better than a long miserable one! That’s my motto.’ Consoling herself with the thought that these creatures had never known a wet, grey city landscape she paused for a moment and looked towards the shrubs that screened the campsite. She was overwhelmed with a sudden stabbing need for a lover to magically appear beside her and throw her to the sand. With a guilty start she realised that this lover had no face. At that moment she would have allowed herself to be taken by anyone – including Qito who, anyway, would give her no choice.

For some reason this thought inflamed her. Going to the folding table, so immaculate with its clipped-on, pristine white linen cover, she poured more of the heavy red wine and drank it down in one huge gulp. With her head buzzing with alcohol she turned away and found a sensuously curved palm tree. She lay there, her back against the sharply ridged trunk, while letting the fingers of one hand seek out her sex.

Opening her thighs slightly, so not to disturb her evenly balanced body, she sought out her hardened and aroused bud. Moistened and ready, her fingers gently stroked the apex of her pleasure, dispatching waves of toe-curling energy to the furthest ends of her body.

Giving way totally, she felt the warm tropical air blanketing her as she rocked herself harder and faster into an unconscious riot of emotion, leading to her heavily breathed, choked words. ‘Hurt me!’ she gasped. ‘Hurt me, take me! Hurt me!’ she told the palm as she ground her naked back into the tearing ridges of the tree bark.

At the moment of orgasm there was only one thought in her head. ‘Jeffrey!’ she called into the still warm air, and then collapsed as all the energy flooded out of her.

Levering herself from the tree, aware that she had all but rubbed her back raw, she lay on the mattress-like texture of the sand and felt totally miserable.

‘Why did you have to be married?’ she asked the gritty sand.

13

STANDING BENEATH THE
drifting mist of water Helen had time and space to think. Posing, she decided, was a mindless task, but the thoughts that crowded in to fill the unengaged space in her head were unsettling.

She marvelled at the pandemonium of events which had brought her to be standing naked on an uninhabited island in the company of a man whose name had, less than a week ago, been but a legend.

With only the occasional screech of an outraged bird to break the all-pervading silence, her mind was free to retrace the steps that had brought her here.

Carla. Astonishing that she had shared intimacy with yet another legend and done so without remorse or shame. The yacht, although a magnificent experience in itself, had become no more than, as her mother would have said, an ‘extravagant’ means of transportation peopled by beings from another world in which she remained an alien.

In boarding the jet which had brought her from Paris she had been taking flight in more senses than one. She had been fleeing from Jeffrey. A man with whom, in the intimacy of a bed, she had exposed her body, and, even more intimately, her inner fears, more totally than to any other living being. That he had harboured significant secrets while presuming to delve even deeper into her own life, had shattered her. It wasn’t the fact of his being married that bothered her so much. After all, she had no such expectations of him, but that he, in the face
of
her confessions, should not have found time to mention it, appalled her, and told her that he was not the man she had thought him to be.

The incident with the flight crew had been sheer vengeance. As that thought entered her head she wondered why she didn’t think of the intimacy with Carla in the same light, before realising that there was a very great difference. What she had done with the pilots had been of her choice, while Carla, while not coercive, had
imposed
intimacy on her.

The same was true of Jeffrey. He had come into her life like a whirlwind and, gathering her up like a latter-day Dorothy, had taken her down the yellow brick road which had led, not to Oz, but to disappointment. She had wanted Jeffrey to be the all-knowing Wizard able to grant her every wish, but instead she found him to be the Tin Man who had no heart. Of even less comfort to her was the suspicion that she had cast herself in the role of the Scarecrow – all outward appearance and no substance – a victim but now resolved to be a victim no more.

‘The light’s going. Let’s call it a day.’ Qito’s voice echoed dully about the glade and was heard by Helen with enormous relief. Her arms, which she had been holding above her head, throbbed with relief when she lowered them and, for a moment, she was back in Jeffrey’s penthouse recovering from his bondage of her in the conservatory.

Hoping for a glimpse at his progress Helen was disappointed to see him hastily lower a canvas flap to cover the painting. Anticipating her protest he told her she could only see it when it was complete.

Her offer to help him carry the canvas back to the camp was dismissed. ‘No need,’ he told her. ‘There’s no one else on the island.’

‘It might rain.’

‘Not likely and, in any case, the cover is waterproof. Moving a wet oil is likely to do more damage than leaving it where it is.’ Helen saw that Qito looked drawn and tired as he turned and started leading the way through the flowering shrubs to the beach.

‘Shall I help with the evening meal?’ she asked.

‘No. I can’t stand people watching me work – whether it’s painting or cooking. You go have a swim or something. I’ll call you when it’s ready.’

Standing on the beach watching the sun redden and start its seemingly headlong plunge over the horizon, Helen felt a sense of acute isolation as she realised the immensity of the ocean at her feet and her own insignificant occupancy of this tiny speck of earth. Had it not been for Qito she would, at that moment, have thought herself totally forgotten by the teeming outside world. She sought refuge from her thoughts by wading hip-deep into the warm tropical water and then, plunging head first, sought to swim herself into a state of exhaustion.

Tiring quickly from her initial exertions, she turned on her back and gazed upward into the even greater immensity of a sky which was already starting to light up its stars. Lazily she swam and floated until, feeling more relaxed, she was overjoyed to hear Qito’s voice calling her to come to the table.

Qito had lit and strung four oil lamps from a rope suspended between the trees, while on the table lay dishes of food which stingingly reminded her she was famished.

Qito had magicked a dish of an exotic fish under a thick piquant sauce accompanied by pasta and a salad which, as she ate, filled her with a reassuring sense of well-being. ‘This is delicious,’ she told him. ‘Where did you learn to cook like this?’

‘Only when you’ve known real hunger,’ he told her, ‘do you learn to appreciate food.’

Looking at the famed face in the light of the lamps Helen remembered Carla talking about finding someone even hungrier than she had been and, with a pang of envy, she saw that the bond that had been forged between the two of them was close to unbreakable. Idly, she played with the idea of scouring the attics of London to find herself a similar cause deserving of devotion but then decided, with her luck, she would devote twenty or thirty years to a no-hoper and, in any case, thirty years was a long time to wait for posterity to catch up.

Helen ate silently for some moments, aware that Qito, having wolfed down his food, was now enjoying his third or fourth glass of wine and was watching her closely. She hoped his mind wasn’t speculating on anything sexual and she was startled when he seemed to have tuned into the thought.

‘Is it too boring?’ he asked her.

‘Posing?’ she asked. ‘Not boring, but I had no idea how tiring it could be.’