Flying Finish

Chapter Six

You couldn’t say it was reasonable, it was just electric. I found out between one heartbeat and the next what all the poets throughout the ages had been going on about. I understood at last why Roman Anthony threw away his honour for Egyptian Cleopatra, why Trojan Paris caused a ten years war abducting Greek Helen, why Leander drowned on one of his risky nightly swims across the Dardanelles to see Hero. The distance from home, the mystery, the unknownness, were a part of it: one couldn’t feel like that for the girl next door. But that didn’t explain why it hadn’t happened before: why it should be this girl, this one alone who fizzed in my blood.

I stood on the cool stone airport floor and felt as if I’d been struck by lightning: the world had tilted, the air was crackling, the grey February day blazed with light, and all because of a perfectly ordinary girl who sold souvenirs to tourists.

The same thing, fantastically, had happened to her as well. Perhaps it had to be mutual, to happen at all. I don’t know. But I watched the brightness grow in her eyes, the excitement and gaiety in her manner, and I knew that against all probability it was for me. Girls were seldom moved to any emotion by my brown haired tidy unobtrusive self, and since I rarely set out to make an impression on them, I even more rarely did so. Even the ones who wanted to marry my title were apt to yawn in my face. Which made Gabriella’s instant reaction doubly devastating.

‘For God’s sake,’ said Patrick in amusement, when she didn’t answer a twice repeated question, ‘will you two stop gawping at each other?’

‘Gabriella,’ I said.

‘Si?’

‘Gabriella...’

Patrick laughed. ‘You’re not going to get far like that.’

‘Parla francese?’ she said anxiously.

Patrick translated. ‘Do you speak French.’

‘Yes.’ I laughed with relief. ‘Yes, more or less.’

‘E bene,’ she sighed smiling. ‘E molto molto bene.’

Perhaps because we were unburdened by having to observe any French proprieties and because we both knew already that we would need it later on, we began right away using the intimate form tu instead of vous, for ‘you’. Patrick raised his eyebrows and laughed again and said in three languages that we were nuts.

I was nuts, there was no getting away from it. Patrick endured the whole afternoon sitting at a table in the snack bar drinking coffee and telling me about Gabriella and her family. We could see her from where we sat, moving quietly about behind her long counter, selling trinkets to departing travellers. She was made of curves, which after all the flat hips, flat stomachs, and more or less flat chests of the skinny debs at home, was as warming as a night-watchman’s fire on a snowy night. Her oval pale olive-skinned face reminded me of mediaeval Italian paintings, a type of bone structure which must have persisted through centuries, and her expression, except when she smiled, was so wholly calm as to be almost unfriendly.

It struck me after a while, when I had watched her make two or three self-conscious customers nervous by her detached manner, that selling wasn’t really suited to her character, and I said so, idly, to Patrick.

‘I agree,’ he said dryly. ‘But there are few places better for a smuggler to work than an airport.’

‘A... smuggler? I don’t believe it.’ I was aghast.

Patrick enjoyed his effect. ‘Smuggler,’ he nodded. ‘Definitely.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘So am I,’ he added smiling.

I looked down at my coffee, very disturbed. ‘Neither of you is the type.’

‘You’re wrong, Henry. I’m only one of many who brings... er... goods... in to Gabriella.’

‘What,’ I said slowly, fearing the answer, ‘are the goods?’

He put his hand into his jacket pocket, pulled out a flat bottle about five inches high, and handed it to me. A printed chemist’s label on the front said ‘Two hundred aspirin tablets B.P.’, and the brown glass bottle was filled to the brim with them. I unscrewed the top, pulled out the twist of cotton wool, and shook a few out on to my hand.

‘Don’t take one,’ said Patrick, still smiling. ‘It wouldn’t do you any good at all.’

‘They’re not aspirins.’ I tipped them back into the bottle and screwed on the cap.

‘No.’

‘Then what?’

‘Birth control pills,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Italy is a Roman Catholic country,’ he observed. ‘You can’t buy these pills here. But that doesn’t stop women wanting to avoid being in a constant state of baby production, does it? And the pills are marvellous for them, they can take them without the devoutest husbands knowing anything about it.’

‘Good God,’ I said.

‘My brother’s wife collects them at home from her friends and so on, and when she has a bottle full I bring it to Gabriella and she passes them on at this end. I know for a fact that at least four other pilots do the same, not to mention a whole fleet of air hostesses, and she admitted to me once that a day seldom goes by without some supplies flying in.’

‘Do you... well... sell... them to Gabriella?’

He was quite shocked, which pleased me. ‘Of course not. She doesn’t sell them, either. They are a gift, a service if you like, from the women of one country to the women of another. My sister-in-law and her friends are really keen on it, they don’t see why any woman in the world should have to risk having a child if she doesn’t want one.’

‘I’ve never thought about it,’ I said, fingering the bottle.

‘You’ve never had a sister who’s borne six children in six years and collapsed into a shattering nervous break-down when she started the seventh.’

‘Gabriella’s sister?’

He nodded. ‘That’s why she got some pills, in the first place. And the demand just grew and grew.’

I gave him back the bottle and he put it in his pocket. ‘Well?’ he said, with a hint of challenge.

‘She must be quite a girl,’ I said, ‘to do something like this.’

His curving mouth curved wider. ‘If she smuggled the Crown Jewels you’d forgive her. Confess it.’

‘Whatever she did,’ I said slowly.

The amusement died right out of his face and he looked at me soberly. ‘I’ve heard of this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never seen it happen before. And you didn’t even need to speak to each other. In fact, it’s just damn lucky you can speak to each other...’

Three times during the afternoon I made sure of that. She would get into trouble, she said, if she just talked to me when she should be working, so I bought presents, separately, for my father, mother and sister, taking a long time over each choice. Each time she spoke and looked at me in a kaleidoscopic mixture of excitement, caution and surprise, as if she too found falling helplessly in love with a complete stranger an overwhelming and almost frightening business.

‘I like that one.’

‘It costs six thousand lire.’

‘That is too dear.’

‘This one is cheaper.’

‘Show me some others.’

We began like that, like school-day text books, in careful stilted French, but by the end of the afternoon, when she locked the display cases and left with Patrick and me through the employees’ entrance, we could talk with some ease. I perhaps knew most French of the three of us, then Gabriella, then Patrick; but his Italian was excellent, so between us everything could in one language or another be understood.

We left the airport in a taxi, and as soon as we were on the move Patrick gave her the aspirin bottle. She thanked him with a flashing smile and asked him if they were all the same sort. He nodded, and explained they’d come from some R.A.F. wives whose husbands were away on a three months overseas course.

From her large shoulder-sling bag of black leather she produced some of the bright striped wrapping paper from her airport gift shop and a large packet of sweets. The sweets and the aspirin bottle were expertly whisked into a ball shaped parcel with four corners sticking up on top like leaves on a pineapple, and a scrap of sticky tape secured them.

The taxi stopped outside a dilapidated narrow terrace house in a poor looking street. Gabriella climbed out of the taxi, but Patrick waved me back into my seat.

‘She doesn’t live here,’ he said. ‘She’s just delivering the sweets.’

She was already talking to a tired looking young woman whose black dress accentuated the pallor of her skin, and whose varicose veins were the worst I had seen, like great dark blue knobbed worms networking just under the surface of her legs. Round her clung two small children with two or three more behind in the doorway, but she had a flat stomach in her skimpy dress and no baby in her arms. The look she gave Gabriella and her pretty present were all the reward that anyone would need. The children knew that there were sweets in the parcel. They were jumping up trying to reach it as their mother held it above their heads, and as we left she went indoors with them, and she was laughing.

‘Now,’ said Patrick, turning away from the window, ‘we had better show Henry Milan.’

It was getting dark and was still cold, but not for us. I wouldn’t have noticed if it had been raining ice. They began by marching me slowly around the Piazza del Duomo to see the great gothic cathedral and the Palazzo Reale, and along the high glass arcade into the Piazza della Scala to gaze at the opera house, which Gabriella solemnly told me was the second largest theatre in Europe, and could hold three thousand six hundred people.

‘Where is the largest?’ said Patrick.

‘In Naples,’ she said smiling. ‘It is ours too.’

‘I suppose Milan has the biggest cathedral, then,’ he teased her.

‘No,’ she laughed, showing an unsuspected dimple, ‘Rome.’

‘An extravagant nation, the Italians.’

‘We were ruling the world while you were still painting yourselves blue.’

‘Hey, hey,’ said Patrick.

‘Leonardo da Vinci lived in Milan,’ she said.

‘Italy is undoubtedly the most beautiful country in the world and Milan is its pearl.’

‘Patrick, you are a great idiot,’ she said affectionately. But she was proud indeed of her native city, and before dinner that evening I learned that nearly a million and a half people lived there and that there were dozens of museums, and music and art schools, and that it was the best manufacturing town in the country, and the richest, and its factories made textiles and paper and railway engines and cars. And, in fact, aeroplanes.

We ate in a quiet warmly lit little restaurant which looked disconcertingly like Italian restaurants in London but smelled quite different, spicy and fragrant. I hardly noticed what I ate: Gabriella chose some sort of veal for us all, and it tasted fine, like everything else that evening. We drank two bottles of red local wine which fizzed slightly on the tongue, and unending little gold cups of black coffee. I knew even then that it was because we were all speaking a language not our own that I felt liberated from my usual self. It was so much easier to be uninhibited away from everything which had planted the inhibitions: another sky, another culture, a time out of time. But that only made the way simpler, it didn’t make the object less real. It meant I didn’t have chains on my tongue; but what I had said wasn’t said loosely, it was still rooted in some unchanging inner core. On that one evening in Milan I learned what it was like to be gay deep into the spirit, and if for nothing else I would thank Gabriella for that all my life.

We talked for hours: not profoundly, I dare say, but companionably: at first about the things we had done and seen that day, then of ourselves, our childhood. Then of Fellini’s films, and a little about travel, and then, in ever widening ripples, of religion, and our own hopes, and the state the world was in. There wasn’t an ounce of natural reforming zeal among the three of us, as perhaps there ought to have been when so much needed reforming; but faith didn’t move mountains any more, it got bogged down by committees, Patrick said, and the saints of the past would be smeared as psychological misfits today.

‘Could you imagine the modern French army allowing itself to be inspired and led into battle by a girl who saw visions?’ he said. ‘You could not.’

It was true. You could not.

‘Psychology,’ Patrick said, with wine and candle light in his yellow eyes, ‘is the death of courage.’

‘I don’t understand,’ protested Gabriella.

‘Not for girls,’ he said. ‘For men. It is now not considered sensible to take physical risks unless you can’t avoid them. Ye gods, there’s no quicker way to ruin a nation than to teach its young men it’s foolish to take risks. Or worse than foolish, they would have you believe.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘Ask Henry. He’ll cheerfully go out and risk his neck on a racehorse any day of the week. Ask him why.’

‘Why?’ she said, half-serious, half-laughing, the glints of light in her dark eyes outpointing the stars.

‘I like it,’ I said. ‘It’s fun.’

Patrick shook his red head. ‘You look out, pal, you mustn’t go around admitting that sort of thing these days. You’ve got to say you do it only for the money, or you’ll be labelled as a masochistic guilt complex before you can say... er... masochistic guilt complex.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said, laughing.

‘Yeah, damn it, and it’s not funny. It’s deadly serious. The knockers have had so much success that now it’s fashionable to say you’re a coward. You may not be one, mind, but you’ve got to say so, just to prove you’re normal. Historically, it’s fantastic. What other nation ever went around saying on television and in the press and at parties and things that cowardice is normal and courage is disgusting? Nearly all nations used to have elaborate tests for young men to prove they were brave. Now in England they are taught to settle down and want security. But bravery is built in somewhere in human nature and you can’t stamp it out any more than the sex urge. So if you outlaw ordinary bravery it bursts out somewhere else, and I reckon that’s what the increase in crime is due to. If you make enjoying danger seem perverted, I don’t see how you can complain if it becomes so.’

This was too much for his French; he said it to me in hot English, and repeated it, when Gabriella protested, in cooler Italian.

‘But,’ she said wonderingly, ‘I do not like a man to say he is a coward. Who wants that? A man is for hunting and for defending, for keeping his wife safe.’

‘Back to the caves?’ I said.

‘Our instincts are still the same,’ agreed Patrick. ‘Basically good.’

‘And a man is for loving,’ Gabriella said.

‘Yes, indeed,’ I agreed with enthusiasm.

‘If you like to risk your neck, I like that. If you risk it for me, I like it better.’

‘You mustn’t say so,’ said Patrick smiling. ‘There’s probably some vile explanation for that too.’

We all laughed, and some fresh coffee came, and the talk drifted away to what girls in Italy wanted of life as opposed to what they could have. Gabriella said the gap was narrowing fast, and that she was content, particularly as she was an orphan and had no parental pressure to deal with. We discussed for some time the pros and cons of having parents after adolescence, and all maintained that what we had was best: Gabriella her liberty, Patrick a widowed mother who spoiled him undemandingly, and I, free board and lodging. Patrick looked at me sharply when I said that, and opened his mouth to blow the gaff.

‘Don’t tell her,’ I said in English. ‘Please don’t.’

‘She would like you even more.’

‘No.’

He hesitated, but to my relief he left it, and when Gabriella asked, told her we had been arguing as to who should pay the bill. We shared it between us, but we didn’t leave for some time after that. We talked, I remember, about loyalty: at first about personal loyalty, and then political.

Gabriella said that Milan had many communists, and she thought that for a Roman Catholic to be a communist was like an Arab saying he wanted to be ruled by Israel.

‘I wonder who they would be loyal to, if Russia invaded Italy?’ Patrick said.

‘That’s a big if,’ I said smiling. ‘Pretty impossible with Germany, Austria and Switzerland in between, not to mention the Alps.’

Gabriella shook her head. ‘Communists begin at Trieste.’

I was startled and amused at the same time, hearing an echo of my die-hard father. ‘Wogs begin at Calais.’

‘Of course they do,’ Patrick said thoughtfully. ‘On your doorstep.’

‘But cheer up,’ she said laughing. ‘Yugoslavia also has mountains, and the Russians will not be arriving that way either.’

‘They won’t invade any more countries with armies,’ I agreed mildly. ‘Only with money and technicians. Italian and French and British communists can rely on never having to choose which side to shoot at.’

‘And can go on undermining their native land with a clear conscience,’ Patrick nodded smiling.

‘Let’s not worry about it,’ I said, watching the moving shadows where Gabriella’s smooth hair fell across her cheek. ‘Not tonight,’

‘It will never touch us, anyway,’ Patrick agreed. ‘And if we stay here much longer Gabriella’s sister will lock us out.’

Reluctantly we went out into the cold street. When we had gone ten paces Patrick exclaimed that he had left his overnight bag behind, and went back for it, striding quickly.

I turned to Gabriella, and she to me. The street lights were reflected in her welcoming eyes, and the solemn mouth trembled on the edge of that transfiguring smile. There wasn’t any need to say anything. We both knew. Although I stood with my body barely brushing hers and put my hands very gently on her arms just below the shoulders, she rocked as if I’d pushed her. It was the same for me. I felt physically shaken by a force so primitive and volcanic as to be frightening. How could just touching a girl, I thought confusedly, just touching a girl I’d been longing to touch all afternoon and all evening, sweep one headlong into such an uncivilised turbulence. And on a main street in Milan, where one could do nothing about it.

She let her head fall forward against my shoulder, and we were still standing like that, with my cheek on her hair, when Patrick came back with his bag. Without a word, smiling resignedly, he pulled her round, tucked her arm into his, and said briefly, ‘Come on. You’ll get run in if you stay here much longer like that.’ She looked at him blindly for a moment, and then laughed shakily. ‘I don’t understand why this has happened,’ she said.

‘Struck by the Gods,’ said Patrick ironically. ‘Or chemistry. Take your pick.’

‘It isn’t sensible.’

‘You can say that again.’

He began to walk down the road, pulling her with him. My feet unstuck themselves from the pavement and re-attached themselves to my watery legs and I caught them up. Gabriella put her other arm through mine, and we strolled the mile and a half to where her sister lived, gradually losing the heavy awareness of passion and talking normally and laughing, and finally ending up on her doorstep in a fit of giggles.

Lisabetta, Gabriella’s sister, was ten years older and a good deal fatter, though she had the same smooth olive skin and the same shaped fine dark eyes. Her husband, Giulio, a softly flabby man approaching forty with a black moustache, bags under his eyes, and less hair than he’d once had, lumbered ungracefully out of his arm-chair when we went into his sitting room and gave us a moderately enthusiastic welcome.

Neither he nor Lisabetta spoke English or French so while the two girls made yet more coffee, and Patrick talked to Giulio, I looked around with some interest at Gabriella’s home. Her sister had a comfortable four bedroomed flat in a huge recently built tower, and all the furnishings and fabrics were uncompromisingly modern. The floors were some sort of reconstituted stone heated from underneath and without carpet or rugs, and there were blinds, not curtains, to cover the windows. I thought the total effect rather stark, but reflected idly that Milan in mid-summer must be an oven, and the flat had been planned for the heat.

Several children came and went, all indistinguishable to my eyes. Seven of them, there should be, I remembered. Four boys, three girls, Patrick had said. Although it was nearly midnight, none of them seemed to have gone to bed. They had all been waiting to see Patrick and tumbled about him like puppies.

When Lisabetta had poured the coffee and one of the children had handed it round Giulio asked Patrick a question, looking at me.

‘He wants to know what your job is,’ Patrick said.

‘Tell him I look after the horses.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Nothing else.’

Giulio was unimpressed. He asked another question.

Smiling faintly, Patrick said, ‘He wants to know how much you earn?’

‘My pay for a single trip to Milan is about one fifth of yours.’

‘He won’t like that.’

‘Nor do I.’

He laughed. When he translated Giulio scowled.

Patrick and I slept in a room which normally belonged to two of the boys, now doubling with the other two. Gabriella shared a third bedroom with the two elder girls, while the smallest was in with her parents. There were toys all over the place in our room, and small shoes kicked off and clothes dumped in heaps, and the unchanged sheets on the boys’ beds were wrinkled like elephant skins from their restless little bodies. Patrick had from long globe trotting habit come equipped with pyjamas, slippers, washing things, and a clean shirt for the morning. I eyed this splendour with some envy, and slept in my underpants.

‘Why,’ said Patrick in the dark, ‘won’t you tell them you have a title?’

‘It isn’t important.’

‘It would be to Giulio.’

‘That’s the best reason for not telling him.’

‘I don’t see why you’re so keen to keep it a secret.’

‘Well, you try telling everyone you’re an earl’s son, and see what happens.’

‘I’d love it. Everyone would be bowing and scraping in all directions. Priorities galore. Instant service. A welcome on every mat.’

‘And you’d never be sure if anyone liked you for yourself.’

‘Of course you would.’

‘How many head grooms have you brought here before?’ I asked mildly.

He drew in a breath audibly and didn’t answer.

‘Would you have offered me this bed if Timmie had kept his big mouth shut?’

He was silent.

I said, ‘Remind me to kick your teeth in in the morning.’

But the morning, I found, was a long way off. I simply couldn’t sleep. Gabriella’s bed was a foot away from me on the far side of the wall, and I lay and sweated for her with a desire I hadn’t dreamed possible. My body literally ached. Cold controlled Henry Grey, I thought helplessly. Grey by name and grey by nature. Cold controlled Henry Grey lying in a child’s bed in a foreign city biting his arm to stop himself crying out. You could laugh at such hunger: ridicule it away. I tried that, but it didn’t work. It stayed with me hour after wretched hour, all the way to the dawn, and I would have been much happier if I’d been able to go to sleep and dream about her instead.

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.

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

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, 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.’

‘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.’

We went back to her sister’s and slept soundly on each side of the wall. Early in the morning, in her dressing-gown, with tousled hair and dreaming eyes, she made coffee for Patrick and me before we set off for the airport.

‘You’ll come back?’ she said almost casually, pouring my cup.

‘As soon as I can.’

She knew I meant it. She kissed me good-bye without clinging, and Patrick also. ‘For bringing him,’ she said.

In the taxi on the way to the airport Patrick said, ‘Why don’t you just stay here with her? You easily could.’

I didn’t answer him until we were turning into the airport road.

‘Would you? Stay, I mean.’

‘No. But then, I need to keep my job.’

‘So do I. For different reasons, perhaps. But I need to keep it just the same.’

‘It’s none of my business,’ he said, ‘but I’m glad.’

We loaded the Italian mares and flew them to snowy England without another hitch. I soothed them on their way and thought about Gabriella, who seemed to have established herself as a warming knot somewhere under my diaphragm.

I thought about her with love and without even the conventional sort of anxiety, for as she had said with a giggle, it would be a poor smuggler who couldn’t swallow her own contraband.