talked to him as he had had all those years ago, when his father had talked to him about his missed chances.
These days, though, Saul didn’t allow himself to dwell on those kinds of feelings. He blocked them off, denying them. They were not male, and they were not going to be a part of his life. He was going to be successful and do well. He was not going to have any doubts … any regrets. When he married, his wife would never have that sad, despairing look in her eyes that he sometimes saw in his mother’s.
The Howards had one child, Angelica. Saul had heard about Angelica from her mother, who, it seemed to him, appeared to adopt a very odd attitude to her daughter, one moment praising her to the skies, referring to her in such terms of glowing perfection that Saul frowned, secretly despising this wonder child, and then at other times complaining petulantly that Angelica did not love her, that she never spent any time with her, choosing to spend her holidays with her friends and their families.
Angelica was a year older than Saul. After leaving boarding-school, she had gone to an exclusive private college in Oxford, where apparently she was perfecting her languages and taking a very advanced secretarial course.
The half-term before Saul was due to sit his A levels Angelica came home.
Amy Howard was away in Miami, visiting friends. Gordon Howard was also away, on one of his business trips. Saul had gone round to the house to do the spring pruning and to dig over the formal beds which Gordon Howard had religiously filled with annuals every late spring, their precise colour patterns somehow reinforcing Saul’s awareness of the rigidity of the Howard home and the remoteness from one another of the people who lived there.
He had been working for a couple of hours before he realised that there was someone in the house, and he wouldn’t have realised it then if he hadn’t happened to turn his head and glance towards its windows just as the curtains at one of them were swished back.
The girl who stood in the window was definitely not Amy Howard. She had long dark hair that tumbled down on to her naked shoulders, and Saul felt his throat go dry with shock, and his muscles tense with something that was very definitely something else, as she stood there, stretching the suppleness of her body, apparently uncaring that he could see her.
Female nudity wasn’t completely unfamiliar to him; he had a sister, after all, and there were magazines freely available to anyone who chose to look at them, depicting the female anatomy in far more explicit detail than anything he could see now as he stood motionless, staring up at the girl moving her body as languorously as a lazy cat, her stretching movement lifting her breasts so that he could see how firm they were, how narrow her ribcage, how softly rounded her hips, how fascinatingly erotic and enticing the small patch of hair between her thighs, how long and supple her legs.
As he stood transfixed, staring at her, he knew he should look away, but he simply could not move. A raw, scorching heat seemed to spread through his body, a sharp, pulsing ache that made his face burn with embarrassment and confused his mind.
He had made forays into exploring the technicalities of sex, of course, and had thought himself well aware of what did and what did not turn him on, but this girl, with her wild, gypsyish mane of hair, her strong, lithe body, her apparent indifference to her nudity and to his observation of it, excited his senses in a way that wasn’t solely sexual.
He wanted to take hold of her, to run his hands over her skin, to close his eyes and absorb its silky texture, to breathe in the scent of her, to stroke her with his tongue, to …
He groaned out loud, aware that he was almost shivering with the intensity of what he was feeling. He closed his eyes, trying to blot out her image, trying to deny his need to reach out to her, to touch her face, to explore its delicacy, to see if the full smoothness of her lips felt as soft and silken as it looked. They reminded him of the petals of a poppy, vulnerable, rich, drawing the eye and enticing the touch, but all too easily bruised if treated too roughly.
He gave another deep shudder, his body racked by the physical torment of his desire, by the emotional impact of his reaction to her. He felt somehow awed, and humbled, his mind a jumble of conflicting sensations and needs. He had an unfamiliar urge to throw himself at her feet, to tell her she was the most perfect, the most beautiful human being he had ever seen. He wanted to hold her, to cherish her, to tell her how much she moved him and in how many ways, and he wanted also to crush her body beneath his own, to enter her and possess her and hear her cry out with the same elemental, savage urge that pulsed through him.
That he should feel this way made him both elated and ashamed.
Saul’s father was a very moral man, and, despite what Saul had observed happening in the world around him, a part of him retained his father’s earliest teachings: that women were to be cherished and revered, protected and treated with tenderness and care. It confused him now that he should experience both that tenderness and at the same time an alien and very sharp physical desire that he could only translate in his own mind as somehow pagan and dangerous.
When he opened his eyes, trying dizzily to clear his mind, she had gone. The curtains were still drawn back, fluttering slightly in the breeze.
She had, he realised, opened the window. Had she seen him … watching her? A dark red tide of guilt and embarrassment burned his skin. He turned to his work, resolutely keeping his back to the house.
Half an hour passed, longer, but he still could not relax, his muscles taut and stressed.
He heard the back door open but he dared not turn round. The grass muffled the sound of her approach, but he still knew that she was there, even before he heard the slow seduction of her voice saying, ‘Hi. You must be Saul. I’m Angelica.’
He had to turn round. He couldn’t ignore her. She was tall, but nowhere near his own height. Her body was now clothed in jeans and a dark grey baggy sweater with a neckline that left her collarbone exposed and with it the graceful, delicate curve of her shoulder and throat.
She was close enough for him to catch her scent. He could feel the heat searing his body, the ache of wanting. She smiled at him, perfectly composed, perfectly at ease.
She had long, slanting hazel eyes … cat’s eyes, and close to her mouth was just as full, just as enticing as it had seemed at a distance. Her skin was matt and smooth, her nails, when she lifted her hand to push the tumble of her hair off her face, free of lacquer and yet somehow glossy and attractive.
He had a shocking second’s vision of them lying against his skin, digging into it, the kind of vision he had never had in his life, and with the heat of embarrassment that poured through his body came a sharp sense of surprise that he who had never experienced such a thing should know so clearly and so unequivocally how it would feel to have the fierce rake of her nails against his flesh, the passionate twisting of her body beneath his own.
‘I’m just having a drink. Want one?’
The casual words focused his attention on reality, although he couldn’t quite bring himself to look directly into her eyes, just in case she was laughing at him. Instead he looked round as though somehow expecting to see the usual glass of juice materialising out of thin air. He was thirsty, he recognised, his throat raw and dry. He nodded, still unable to trust his voice.
‘Come on, then.’ She turned back towards the house, plainly expecting him to follow her.
He dug the spade into the earth and did so.
He had been inside the house before on many occasions, but this time it felt different … almost as though in some way he was
