Risk

6

Thanks to telephones, consul, bank, and friends, I flew back to England the following evening, but not before I had collected further unforgettable memories of Miss Hilary Margaret Pinlock.

She asked me my measurements, descended to the local boutiques, and returned with new clothes.

She lent me her bathroom, inspected me cleaned and dressed, and decided to go shopping for a razor. I protested. She went. It was as easy to stop Miss Pinlock as an avalanche.

With some relief I scratched the twelve days’ scruffy dark stubble off my face, one glance in the looking glass having persuaded me that I was not going to look better in a beard. The twelve days of indoor life had left me thin and pale, with grey hollows in cheeks and eye sockets which I didn’t remember having before. Nothing that a little freedom wouldn’t fix.

On her second expedition she had also bought bread, cheese and fruit, explaining that she was there on a package holiday, and that the hotel didn’t cater for random visitors.

‘I’ll go down to dinner at seven as usual,’ she said. ‘You can eat here.’

Throughout all her remarks and actions ran the positive decision-making of one accustomed to command.

‘Are you a children’s nurse?’ I asked curiously.

‘No,’ she said, unsmiling. ‘A headmistress.’

‘Oh.’

The smile came, briefly. ‘Of a girls-only comprehensive, in Surrey.’

With a touch of sardonic humour she watched me reassess her in the light of that revelation. Not a do-gooding bossy spinster, but a fulfilled career woman of undoubted power.

‘Yes. Well...’ she shrugged. ‘If you give me the numbers, I’ll ask the switchboard for your calls.’

‘And I need a bedroom,’ I said.

‘Your friends might return and ask about strangers needing bedrooms,’ she said.

It had occurred to me too. ‘Yes, but...’ I said.

She pointed to one of the twin beds. ‘You can sleep there. I am here alone. The friend who was coming with me had to cry off at the last minute.’

‘But...’ I stopped.

She waited calmly.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

When she returned from dinner she brought with her a piece of news and a bottle of wine.

‘Your friend from the boat was downstairs in the lobby, asking everyone who speaks English if they saw a crazy young man come ashore today. Everyone said no. He looks extremely worried.’

‘Probably thinks I drowned.’

The boat had gone from the bay. He must have reached another mooring and returned to Cala St Galdana by road. I wondered how long and how thoroughly he would persevere in his search: the more he feared whoever he was working for, the less he would give up.

The evening air was chilly. Miss Pinlock shut the glass door against the night sky and expertly opened her bottle of Marqués de Riscal.

‘Tell me about your journey,’ she said, handing me a glass.

I told her the beginning and the end, and not much of the middle.

‘Extraordinary,’ she said.

‘When I get home I’ll have a go at finding out what it was all about...’

She looked at me gravely. ‘It may not be over.’

She had an uncomfortable habit of putting my worst fears into speech.

We drank the excellent wine and she told me a little of her busy life.

‘I enjoy it,’ she said positively.

‘Yes, I see that.’

There was a pause. She looked carefully at the wine in her glass.

She said, ‘Will you go to bed with me?’

I suppose I sat in an ungentlemanly heap with my mouth open. I closed it, conscious of the insult it conveyed.

When I’d got over the first shock, she looked up. Her face was calm and businesslike as before, but also suddenly there was vulnerability and self-consciousness. A blush started on her neck, and spread painfully upwards.

She was between forty-two and forty-six, I guessed. She had dark brown wavy hair, going grey, cut with shape but not much style. A broad, lined forehead, large nose, mouth turning down naturally at the corners, and small chin. Behind her glasses her eyes were brown and looked small, probably the effect of the lenses. Wrinkles grew where wrinkles grow; and there was no glow to her skin. A face of character, but not sexually attractive, at least not to me.

‘Why?’ I said, which was a pretty stupid question.

She blushed a little deeper and shook her head.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘it isn’t as simple as that. I can’t... I mean, one can’t just sort of switch that sort of thing on and off, like a tap.’

We sat in awkward silence. She put down her glass, and said, ‘I’m sorry. It was a ridiculous thing to say. Please try and forget it.’

‘You said it because it was in your mind. So... well... you must have meant it.’

She half-smiled, ruefully. ‘It’s been in my mind, now and again, for a long time. You will find it extraordinary, but I have never... so to speak, slept with a man.’

‘In this permissive age?’ I said.

‘There you are, you see. You find it hard to believe. But I’ve never been pretty, even as a child. And also I’ve always been, well... able to do things. Learn. Teach. Organise. Administrate. All the unfeminine things. All my life people have relied on me, because I was capable. I’ve always had health and energy, and I’ve enjoyed getting on, being given senior posts, and five years ago, being offered a headship. In most ways my life has been absorbing and gratifyingly successful.’

‘But?’ I suggested.

She nodded. ‘But. I was never interested in boys when I was in my teens, and then I thought them callow, and at university I worked all hours to get a First, and after that I’ve always taught in girls’ schools because frankly it is usually a man who’s given the headship in a mixed school, and I’ve never fancied the role of male-ego-massager in second place. Nothing I’ve ever been or done has been geared to romance.’

‘So why now?’

‘I hope you won’t be angry, but it is mostly curiosity, and the pursuit of knowledge.’

I wasn’t angry. Just astounded.

Her blush had subsided as fast as it had risen. She was back on surer ground.

‘For some time I’ve thought I ought to have had the experience. Of sexual intercourse, that is. It didn’t come my way when I was young, but I didn’t expect it, you see. I think now that I should have tried to find a man, but then, when I was at college, I was half-scared of it, and I didn’t have any great urge, and I was engrossed in my work. Afterwards for years it didn’t bother me, until I was thirty or so, and of course by that time all the men one meets are married, and in any case, teaching among women, one rarely meets any men, except officials, and so on. I go to many official functions, of course, but people tend not to ask unmarried women to private social occasions.’

‘What changed your mind?’ I asked, fascinated.

‘Oh, having to cope with highly-sexed young girls. The modern lot are so clued-up. So brash and outspoken. I like them. But I have to arrange their sex-education lessons, and in my time I’ve even taught them, from text books. I feel it would be a great deal better if I knew... what the sex act felt like. I feel at a disadvantage with many of the older girls, particularly as this last term I had to advise a pregnant fourteen-year-old. Fourteen! She knows more than I do. How can I advise her?’

‘Catholic priests don’t have this problem,’ I commented.

‘Catholic priests may be respected for virginity, but school-mistresses are not.’ She paused, hesitating, and went on. ‘To be honest, I also find myself at a disadvantage with the married members of my staff. Some of them have a tendency to patronize me, even unconsciously. I don’t like it. I would be able to cope with it perfectly, though, if I actually knew what they know.’

‘Am I,’ I said slowly, ‘the first man you have asked?’

‘Oh yes.’ She smiled slightly and drank some wine. ‘There are practically no men one can ask. Especially if one is a headmistress, and widely known. I certainly wouldn’t jeopardize my job.’

‘I can see that it would be difficult,’ I said, thinking about it.

‘So of course holidays are the only possibility,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on archaeological cruises to Greece, and all that sort of thing, and I’ve seen other couples join up, but it never happened to me. And then I’ve heard that some lonely women throw themselves at ski-instructors and waiters and men who perform for money, but somehow that isn’t what I want. I mean, I don’t want to despise myself. I want knowledge without guilt or shame.’

‘The dream of Eden,’ I said.

‘What? Oh, yes.’

‘What about your friend?’ I said, pointing to the second bed.

She smiled twistedly. ‘No friend, just an excuse for having come alone.’

‘Friends being death to the pursuit of knowledge?’

‘Exactly.’

We drank some more wine.

‘I’ve been here since last Saturday,’ she said. ‘I always take a complete break straight after the end of term, and then go back refreshed for the new work.’

‘A perfect system,’ I said absently. ‘Why didn’t you... er... throw me back, when the men in the dinghy came after me?’

‘If you mean, did I immediately see you as a... possible... then no, of course not. I was fascinated, in a way. I’d never seen anyone in such terror, before. I watched you from quite a long way out. Swimming, and looking back. It wasn’t until you reached the concrete step, though, and I saw your face clearly, that I realised that you were being hunted. It would take a certain mentality to point the hounds at an exhausted quarry gone to ground, and I don’t have it.’

‘And thank God for that,’ I said.

I stood up, and opened the glass door, and went out onto the balcony. The cool night was clear, with bright stars over the ageless Mediterranean. Waves rippled softly round the edges of the bay, and the gentle moonlight shone on the wide empty expanse where the boat had been anchored.

It was the weirdest of debts. She had saved me from recapture. I certainly owed her my wholeness of mind, if not life itself. If the only payment she wanted was something I didn’t much want to give, then that was simply too bad. One extreme favour, I thought sardonically, deserved another.

I went in, and sat down. Drank some wine with a dry mouth.

‘We’ll try, if you like,’ I said.

She sat very still. I had a swift impression that now I’d agreed she was hastily retreating: that the half-fear of her student days was definitely still there.

‘You don’t have to,’ she said.

‘No. I want to.’ Heaven forgive all liars.

She said, as if speaking to herself, and not to me: ‘I’ll never have another chance.’

The voice of longing teetering on the brink of the leap in the dark. Her strength of mind, I saw, would carry her through. I admired her. I determined to make Hilary Pinlock’s leap something that at least she wouldn’t regret: if I could.

‘First of all,’ I said, ‘we’ll switch off the lights and sit by the window for a while, and talk about it.’

We sat facing each other in dim reflected moonlight, and I asked her some fairly medical questions, to which she gave straightforward replies.

‘What if you get pregnant?’ I said.

‘I’d solve that later.’

‘You want to go ahead?’

She took a deep breath. ‘If you do.’

If I can, I thought.

‘Then I think the best thing to do first would be to get undressed,’ I said. ‘Do you have a nightdress? And could you lend me a dressing gown?’

I reflected, as I put on her blue candlewick in the privacy of the bathroom, that deep physical tiredness was a rotten basis for the matter in hand. I yawned. I wanted above all to go to sleep.

When I went out she was sitting by the window in a long cotton nightgown which had a frill round the neckline, but was not, of course, transparent.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll sit on the bed.’

She stood up. The nightgown accentuated her height and thinness, and revealed long narrow feet. I pulled back the bed-clothes, sat on the white sheet, and held my hand out towards her. She came, gripped my hand, and sat beside me.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Now, if at any point you want to stop, you’ve only got to say so.’

She nodded.

‘Lie down, then,’ I said, ‘and imagine you are twenty.’

‘Why?’

‘Because this is not a brain matter. It’s about the stimulation of nerve endings. About feeling, not thinking. If you think all the time of who you are, you may find it inhibiting. Age doesn’t exist in the dark. If you imagine you are twenty, you will be twenty, and you’ll find it liberating.’

‘You’re a most unusual man.’

‘Oh sure,’ I said. ‘And you’re a most unusual woman. So lie down.’

She gave a small unexpected chuckle, and did as I said.

‘Take off your glasses,’ I said, and she put them without comment on the bedside table. In the dim light her eyes looked larger, as I’d guessed, and her big nose smaller, and her determined mouth softer. I leaned over and kissed her lips, and if it was basically a nephew-to-aunt gesture it brought a smile to her face and a grin to my own.

It was the strangest love-making, but it did work. I looked back afterwards to the moment when she first took pleasure in the sensation of my stroking her skin; the ripple of surprise when she felt with her hands the size of an erect man; the passion with which she finally responded; and the stunning release into gasping incredulity.

‘Is that,’ she said, out of breath, ‘is that what every woman feels?’

I knew she had reached a most satisfactory climax. ‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘On good days.’

‘Oh my goodness,’ she said in a sort of exultation. ‘So now I know.’