on the threshold of the kitchen to remove his boots.
His socks were old heavy-duty ones he wore when he was working. There was a hole in one toe and he blushed furiously as he saw it. He couldn’t imagine her ever wearing anything with holes in it … ever looking less than the picture of immaculate perfection she presented now. When his sister wore jeans they looked like jeans. On this girl … And that sweater …
He felt himself go hot as into his mind slipped a mental image of his tugging it down over her shoulder to expose her flesh to the exploration of his mouth. He imagined her winding her arms around his neck, pressing herself up against him, making small excited noises of pleasure in his ear.
‘Coffee do, or would you prefer something stronger? Always supposing you’re old enough to drink it.’
Her words brought him back to reality. He swung round and then flushed as he saw the way she was looking at him. ‘Coffee will do fine,’ he told her thickly.
He watched, fascinated, as she lit herself a cigarette. He had never been able to understand why anyone should want to poison themselves with nicotine, but now, watching as she perched on the edge of the kitchen table, supporting her weight with one slender hand, arching her back so that her breasts were clearly outlined beneath her sweater, he suddenly wished that he too was a smoker; that he could go up to her and lean close to her as he lit his cigarette from hers.
‘Coffee’s over there,’ she told him, gesturing towards the filter machine but not making any attempt to help him. ‘Help yourself.’
He moved awkwardly across the kitchen, conscious of his mud-stained jeans, his holey socks, the sweat drying on his body in the warmth of the room.
‘Not much to say for yourself, have you?’ she commented mockingly. ‘Will you be working here all week?’
He nodded, his body tensing as he saw the way her nipples were pushing against the wool of her sweater.
Feverishly febrile images tormented his senses. Mentally he pictured her naked body as he had seen it earlier. Beneath her sweater she was naked now. He knew it. He ached to go over to her, to reach out and touch her, not in lust but with all the aching emotion, all the weakening need, all the unexpected reverence for the perfection of her body that he could feel tormenting him, sweeping aside all that he had previously thought he believed about sex.
Within three days they were lovers. Angelica was the one who initiated their intimacy, laughing at his hesitancy, his shyness and his inexperience, and then suddenly heart-stoppingly ceasing to laugh at him when she touched his naked body, stroking it with her fingertips, and then with her soft open mouth, doing to him unimaginable, unbearable things that made him forget his inexperience and his hesitancy as he took hold of her and possessed her, making her cry out with sharp pleasure.
By the end of the week it was as though he had known her all his life, as though she had always been a part of him. Each time, he tried to find some new way to please her, to show her how much he loved her.
She had no inhibitions, knew no boundaries, and if at first he was semi-shocked by her lack of hesitation or shyness, that shock quickly disappeared under the expert ministrations of her hands and her mouth.
One afternoon when it was unexpectedly mild she insisted on making love outside, in the wild, overgrown section of the garden out of sight of the house.
Afterwards she smiled languorously, showing her teeth like a stalking cat as she whispered to him, ‘Mm … very D.H. Lawrence, but I think I prefer doing it inside, and there are still some things we haven’t tried.’
As he held her close, wanting to prolong the intimacy they were sharing, she leaned towards him, telling him explicitly what she would like to do.
It still had the power to shock him, this almost aggressive sexuality she possessed, but he was too besotted with her to question why he should want to recoil from any evidence that this was not her first experience of sexual pleasure. He knew that she was twelve months older than he was, but he was tall and well built and could easily have passed for a youth of nineteen or twenty rather than one of seventeen.
He had been disconcerted to discover that her favourite place for making love was her father’s study. At first he had felt uncomfortable, inhibited, being there, but his desire for her and the way she touched and aroused him quickly subdued those feelings.
She had a game she liked to enact with him, a fantasy, which she played out in the study. She was, she told him, his secretary, and he was to summon her into the room and then order her to make love to him. For this fantasy she would dress up in a neatly formal little suit, but under it she would be completely naked, or sometimes she would simply wear stockings. On other occasions she was the one who was the aggressor, sitting on the desk in front of him, peeling off her clothes, stroking her hands over her own skin but forbidding him to touch her until she said that he might.
Often by the time she finally allowed him to touch her he was so aroused that he could do little other than give in to his need to possess her, so quickly that afterwards he felt cheated almost, aching for an opportunity to show her how much he loved her, to touch her with tenderness and love, to spend as long as he could savouring every aspect of her and his love for her before that final act of possession.
Sometimes when he left her he experienced the same feeling he had as a child when his father had told him about the importance of success; an empty, hollow feeling as though something wasn’t quite right … as though there was something absent … missing.
He had ten days with her before she told him she was going back to college.
‘I’ll write to you,’ she promised, and foolishly he believed her. Even more foolishly he spent so much time aching for her, yearning for her, that he failed two out of his four A levels and had to resit them.
His father’s disappointment was the hardest to bear, the feeling of having let him down, of having allowed himself to forget his main goal, and because of that he set up barriers to protect himself from making the same mistake a second time. Emotions, he warned himself, must never be allowed to take priority over ambition. He had seen what could happen when they did. He had almost ruined his entire future, and for what? A girl who had not even written him one letter, a girl who, he saw with retrospect, had simply been using him … who had never been emotionally involved with him in the way he had been with her.
To punish himself for his weakness he concentrated exclusively on his work, studying so far into the night that his mother protested. His father shook his head and said that sometimes in order to succeed sacrifices had to be made; that he was young and could afford to miss out on a few hours’ sleep … that he wished he had Saul’s chances … that, given his life again …
Saul escaped to his own room, unable to bear the look of pain and sadness he knew would be in his mother’s eyes.
This time he passed his A levels with exceptionally high grades. He had learned an extremely valuable lesson, and all the time he was at Oxford he took care to avoid getting himself into any kind of situation that would make him emotionally vulnerable.
He dated girls, even slept with one or two of them, but he always made it clear that, while physically he found them desirable, that was all he wanted, and all he had to offer.
He got the reputation of being remote and unemotional. ‘Clever as hell,’ was the way one girl described him, ‘cold as Siberia and so sexy that just looking at him makes you ache inside.’
When
