Read Online Nantucket by Harrison Young - Free Book Online

down to the beach and misbehaved?”
    Andrew didn’t answer.
    â€œWell, at least come to the beach.” She took his hand and led him out of the kitchen like the first girl he’d slept with, leading him down the hall of her parents’ house one empty afternoon. In the silence he remembered what she looked like. The first girl he’d slept with, that is. He wished he hadn’t stopped touching her breasts so soon. Now he was thinking of Rosemary.
    When they got down the steps from the porch, she began to speak in a normal voice – normal in the sense of not being a whisper, but still aristo English intoxicating. “Do I need to tell you the terms of engagement?” she said. “Neither of us ever tells anyone what we’ve done.”
    â€œIs there anything particular you’d like?” Andrew said. He reminded himself that he was joking.
    â€œIf I tell you, it may not work,” said Lady Rosemary. She evidently wasn’t.
    â€œTell me why you do this then?” he said.
    â€œYou’re right. I do this whenever I can – walk around someone else’s house naked, that is. We get invited to a lot of very large houses. I do it to meet men. Sometimes it works. Now, where are those steps you mentioned that go down to the beach?”
    â€œThrough this little tunnel in the bushes.” Now he was leading her.
    â€œOh, I like this little tunnel. It is dark in here. I love darkness. The man I’m with can’t see me, and has to apprehend me with his other senses. Would you like to apprehend me a bit? I liked it when you touched me so rudely in the pantry and didn’t know who I was.”
    Andrew felt it would be a mistake to touch her again. She touched his face. One of her fingers wandered into his mouth. He reached up and gently took her hand away.
    â€œHold my hand, then,” she said. He led her through the tunnel and onto the steps, where there was a bit of a breeze, a bit of starlight.
    â€œYou’re a beautiful woman,” he found himself saying to her back as he followed her down the steps.
    â€œIf you want beauty,” she said over her shoulder, “why won’t you fuck me? I will become your fantasies.” There was a hint of sadness in her question, uninhibited as it was. A suggestion of struggle. It reminded him of Sally’s “intimacy without sex” – though perhaps the other way round. Sally who was an unexploded bomb asleep in his bed.
    â€œBecause you’re a goddess and I’m a mortal,” said Andrew in answer to Rosemary’s question. There was a point to the Greek and Latin he had studied after all. “Because your husband is a prince.”
    â€œI thought you might be a poet,” said Rosemary matter-of-factly, starting down the beach. “You certainly have a lot of poetry stuffed in your head, same as me. So you will understand. The fates played a cruel trick on me. I am beautiful, as you say. I say that without embarrassment or conceit because it is not something I achieved or earned.”
    â€œNot like your first-class honours.”
    â€œThank you for knowing about that,” she said. “Take my hand, please. At least that, as we walk.”
    Andrew did so. What a picture we make, he said to himself: naked Venus with a middle-aged investment banker in a red-and-white striped nightshirt, which billows when the breeze catches it. Well, almost middle-aged, he corrected himself. His curly black hair hadn’t retreated yet. He was fitter than he deserved to be, considering how little formal exercise he got.
    â€œI had to work hard for my first,” Rosemary was saying, “though of course the brains that made it possible were also an unearned gift. But my beauty is just…there. I eat what I like, exercise or not as I choose, wear what I feel comfortable in. Here’s an experiment I tried. I went out to lunch in London in a really ugly outfit. No jewellery.