Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

She had kissed me good-night in the passage outside her door, lightly, gaily, with Patrick and Lisabetta and about six children approvingly looking on. And she had stopped and retreated right there because it was the same as in the street outside the restaurant; even the lightest touch could start an earthquake. There just wasn’t room for an earthquake in that crowded flat.

Patrick lent me his razor without a word, when we got up.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘You were quite right. I would not have offered to take you with me if the Welshman hadn’t said.’

‘I know.’ I put on my shirt and buttoned the cuffs.

‘All the same I still wouldn’t have asked you if I hadn’t thought you looked all right.’

I turned towards him, surprised.

‘What you need, Henry, is a bit more self-confidence. Why ever shouldn’t people like you for yourself? Gabriella obviously does. So do I.’

‘People often don’t.’ I pulled on my socks.

‘You probably don’t give them half a chance.’ With which devastatingly accurate shot he went out of the door, shrugging his arms into his authoritative Captain’s uniform.

Subdued by the raw steely morning, the three of us went back to the airport. Gabriella had dark shadows under her eyes and wouldn’t look at me, though I could think of nothing I had done to offend her. She spoke only to Patrick, and in Italian, and he, smiling briefly, answered her in the same language. When we arrived at the airport, she asked me, hurriedly, not to come and talk to her at the gift counter, and almost ran away from me without saying good-bye. I didn’t try to stop her. It would be hours before we got the horses loaded, and regardless of what she asked, I intended to see her again before I left.

I hung around the airport all the morning with Conker and Timmie, and about twelve Patrick came and found me and with a wide grin said I was in luck, traffic at Gatwick was restricted because of deep snow, and unessential freight flights were suspended for another day[209].

‘You’d better telephone the studs again, and tell them we are taking the mares to England tomorrow at eight,’ he said. ‘Weather permitting.[210]’

Gabriella received the news with such a flash of delight that my spirits rose to the ionosphere. I hesitated over the next question, but she made it easy for me.

‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked gravely, studying my face.

‘I didn’t sleep at all.’

She sighed, almost blushing. ‘Nor did I.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said tentatively, ‘if we spent the evening together, we could sleep tonight.’

‘Henry!’ She was laughing. ‘Where?’

Where proved more difficult than I had imagined, as she would not consider a hotel, as we must not sleep there, but go back to her sister’s before midnight. One must not be shameless, she said. She could not stay out all night. We ended up, of all unlikely places[211], inside the D.C.4, lying in a cosy nest hollowed in a heap of blankets stacked in the luggage bay alongside the galley.

There, where no one would ever find us, and with a good deal of the laughter of total happiness, we spent the whole of the evening in the age-old way: and were pleased and perhaps relieved to find that we suited each other perfectly.

Lying quietly cradled in my arms, she told me hesitantly that she had had a lover before, which I knew anyway by then, but that it was odd making love anywhere except in bed. She felt the flutter in my chest and lifted her head up to peer at my face in the dim reflected moonlight.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she said.

‘It so happens that I have never made love in bed.’

‘Where then?’

‘In the grass.’

‘Henry! Is that the custom in England?’

‘Only at the end of parties in the summer.’

She smiled and put her head down contentedly again, and I stroked her hair and thought how wholesome she was, and how dreadful in comparison seemed the half-drunk nymphs taken casually down the deb-dance garden path. I would never do that again, I thought. Never again.

‘I was ashamed, this morning,’ she said, ‘of wanting this so much. Ashamed of what I had been thinking all night.’

‘There is no shame in it.’

‘Lust is one of the seven deadly sins.’

‘Love is a virtue.’

‘They get very mixed up. Are we this evening being virtuous or sinful?’ She didn’t sound too worried about it.

‘Doing what comes naturally.[212]’

‘Then it’s probably sinful.’

She twisted in my arms, turning so that her face was close to mine. Her eyes caught a sheen in the soft near-darkness. Her teeth rubbed gently against the bare skin on the point of my shoulder. ‘You taste of salt,’ she said.

I moved my hand over her stomach and felt the deep muscles there contract. Nothing, I thought, shaken by an echoing ripple right down my spine, nothing was so impossibly potent as being wanted in return. I kissed her, and she gave a long soft murmuring sigh which ended oddly in a laugh.

‘Sin,’ she said, with a smile in her voice, ‘is O.K.’