CHAPTER ONE

 

 

The sound of the silver trumpet from a pharaoh’s tomb, buried in the earth three thousand years, which after playing shatters and is heard no more. The sound of clapping hands, to gain the ear of the god. Reverberations of the dragon-gong to summon the Son of Heaven from his slumber.

Attend! And listen well! Here is our theme.

Uncertain things which will not stay in place are pinned by ritual to the temple floor.

Here is the One and here are the Many.

The Many become the One, the One the Many.

Eidolos is One and Eidolon the Many.

Riddle and ritual are ear-marked for the purpose of unfolding the inner nature. Truth resides with the inner man. The rational day-to-day puts out the light and buries the embers in a deep and hidden tomb. The smaller self is the sepulchre in which the spirit sleeps. Our task is resurrection and completion. This we do, or die.

Death is slow and takes a lifetime. Life is gained only through many lives.

Riddle and ritual, these are our two keys.

– These are the thoughts of our dear friend Apple, Apple of the Valley, Appeles, who is possessed of more than a single being. You will soon be meeting him – and others also, friends on earth and in the Other Place.

The Other Place is way beyond our world, but whether it is a physical or a mental or even a spiritual phenomenon I can hardly tell. To you, it will not matter. Treat the whole exercise as a positive fiction, that is all I ask. Think of it however as a story with a meaning and not as an idle tale to make the hours pass more quickly.

If necessary, class it as a novel, and read on. But not a conventional novel, rather an exploration. We shall adhere to the novelistic form, but with something extra added. There will be realism thickly interlarded with fantasy in the hope that both will invigorate each other. Either on its own is very dull and fails to catch the breath of life, the living wind with which we seek to fill our sails. The obvious facts of life are not for us, nor are the vain imaginings. Reality – yes! Imagination – yes! But we shall bear in mind the considerable difference between realism and reality and between fantasy and the fantastic: something more than a matter of mere terms.

Art can attempt to reach beyond the rational norm. Debate has its limitations. Scientific enquiry is too dry and much too circumspect. Imagination can be a potent tool.

A treatise will not suit our present purpose. This must have the look and feel of action and of life. Some ideas are better left unsaid. Some it is impossible to say. Remember Wittgenstein’s dictum that if a man knew the answer to the riddle of the universe he would be unable to formulate what he knew and saw. Language is just not up to it and will not accommodate the transcendent. Semi-parable is the only way.

We have to take a journey through time and space, beyond the usual journey from life to death, birth into non-being, the length of a human life.

(Do not be afraid of little words with large meanings. The longer the word, the more specific it is.)

The journey is daunting, both intellectually and imaginatively. Faint-heart will fail and never reach the goal; faint-mind will fall, gagging and agog at the huge vista.

This is for the bold and the aspiring who possess imagination and temerity, not for the dull and limited and grey. Your age and your experience do not count. Beauty and ugliness are irrelevant here. Knowledge will drag at your ankle like an iron ball – best leave it at the starting-place, discarded. Your strengths and weaknesses are of very little account. Possessions will fail you, vanishing into the air. Your weapons, of whatever kind, will not protect you from the danger that lies ahead.

Danger there will be. We shall not hug the coastline of our known world as did the ancient traveller who feared the deep; but like our more immediate ancestors we shall accept the challenge of the unknown seas, trusting to ourselves, to fortitude, to luck, not knowing when or where we shall find land.

This is a journey inward, a parable.

"Where do we start? From what place do we begin?"

"From a merely philosophical position…"

The ‘merely’ is deceptive. Our philosophical position is paramount. On it depends the outcome. Better by far if we begin in ignorance, for then we shall not find what we expect. In your beginning is your end, and that is a trap we must avoid at all costs.

Let us start from the simplest, the most stark. Even from the simplistic. This is our first step…

Naming of names, flowing from natural human curiosity. Putting places in their place, creating maps. Names of places. Where to go, from here to there. Grid-systems, with names upon them. Latitude, longitude; meridians; date lines. Continents, planets, stars. Star-systems. Galaxies.

How can anything be, beyond all that? A thing without a name? But even ‘thing’ is a name. Even ‘ – ’ or ‘ ? ’ constitute some sort of label, a mere sign denoting, however, something, a presence (another name!) waiting for its name to be revealed.

But really beyond all that? Beyond names and places, a namelessness existing nowhere?

(Modern physics postulates that the space-time continuum is complete, a rounded, self-sealed entity it is not possible to go beyond, there being no beyond. You only move in a circle, and come back! And while I have no argument with this conception, since it serves my purpose well, I have to point to the positive aspects of that attribute or quality known as ‘imagination’ that obviously cannot be taken into account by the scientist, although freely available to those of us who wish to use it. The goddess Imagination is not bound; her empire has no limit and no end. More human than her consort Science, she is also more profound. Less fettered, she can go wherever she pleases. I see them as a pair, Lord Science and Lady Imagination, happily cohabiting, hardly ever opposed.)

"It is not," we say. But ‘it’ is a name. And ‘is’ denotes existence – negated by ‘not’ which however has all the characteristics of a quality, something appertaining to something. Even our negatives must, absolutely must, be positives. This is what and how we are.

Beyond the confines of creation: what?

Creation is not held inside another creation. This is all there is. (Yet we fondly remember the Lady Imagination! We dare not let her consort have the last word.) Go to Albert Einstein for relief. Knock upon his door, tap upon his windows. Call out in loud voices "Let us in, O Master! Make us see!"

This understood, or even only half an understanding, is sufficient as a place for us to begin from, even bearing firmly in mind (how can we bear a nothing in our mind which is itself nothing, an abstraction?) that our names and maps are rafts in the further and much wider sea of nothing. (But how can nothing be larger or smaller – hah!) We flounder, and we sink, laughing out loud, it is true, really amused by the futility of the exercise, but still sinking.

Speech is positive. Names and place-names are a plus. Let us cling to our rafts; let them support us and stay the time of drowning. But never forget how desperate they are.

– This by way of introduction, and apology.

I begin with a nothing and tell you quite plainly that I cannot point to the island on any existing map. It is of course imaginary, and nothing. The name I have given it is a purely imaginary one. However, recall that all negatives are positive, and not only double negatives either. Think of it as a creation inside creation. Let Our Lady Imagination have her turn.

Or think of it as mystical. Mystical! Oh wondrous word that hides so much in nothing, last refuge of the charlatan and the merely muddled! And of the Seer – let us not forget the Seer – who looks beyond the Maya-web of space and time.

You set out from the mainland – Poole, or Portsmouth, or Plymouth, or some small place along the Channel shore – and turning the head of your vessel to the south, begin your journey.

You have a name (imaginary, of course). And you are a person, also imaginary. But the magic wand is waved and questions, for the moment, stilled. The willing suspension of disbelief is all that is required of you, a genuflection in the direction of Our Lady Imagination’s shimmering shrine.

* * * * * * *

You could just make out the island from the mainland but come the slightest whisper of heat haze or of mist and it disappeared.

All you could really see were the tops of its hills with a glimmer of green slopes on a sunny day.

Imagine a stumpy troll sitting cross legged in a pool cooling himself on a summer afternoon. His drooping head is sunk between his shoulders. He is either sulking or half asleep or drunk.

This was how the island looked from the shore, like the rear view of our imaginary troll.

He had sat down here millennia ago in an age when such as he had roamed the earth, had fallen into a trance or magic slumber and never moved again. The age of myths had passed while he still slept, his brethren gone. He himself had turned to enduring stone. Now sea birds flew about his shaggy head and nested in his pitted limestone back.

The island was a geological anomaly. The cliffs faced the mainland whose coastline here was low lying. To make a landing you had to pass around either flank of our petrified giant troll, on past his massive thighs and knees and into harbour near his bushy groin.

The island’s vital statistics: fifteen miles from east to west, ten from north to south. The main area of population was around the harbour where there was a large and busy town. Inland were several small villages pleasantly dotted upon our giant’s sloping belly.

Driving along the coast road, Cosimo stopped. The island, on his left, was framed by the window on the passenger’s side. Leaning forward on the steering wheel, he lowered his head to obtain a clearer view. The sight of that notable seascape rang a mental bell. Surely he had been here once before? He leant across and wound the window down.

It was a warm day and a pleasant cooling sea breeze brushed his face, redolent with the perfume of privet blossom which he adored.

It was as though he were observing the island through the viewing aperture on a camera.

Bourne – that was what they called it. Bourne. The last time he had been there, a festival was in progress. Or was he thinking of somewhere else?

Some decisions make themselves with little help from us, requiring only our willing compliance. So that when Cosimo had driven on a few miles further and had reached the ferry terminal, he parked the car and boarded the boat. In five minutes they were away, bumping across the sparkling waves toward the island.

Standing on deck, he wondered what he was doing. He was supposed to be going to Mawning, not much further along the coast, to attend a seminar. But that seemed unimportant, a boring way to spend a lovely day.

Even so, it was quite out of character for him to suddenly change plan like this and he was puzzled why he had done so. ‘Siren voices’ was the phrase that flashed across his mind, and it seemed particularly apt.

A board with a yellow paper attached to it caught his eye.

BOURNE FESTIVAL

17-20 JULY

THE REGULAR GANG

GREEK THINGS

RUSSIAN ROULETTE

& many others

Cosimo glanced at the date on his watch. Today was Wednesday the 15th; that meant the festival was due to begin the day after tomorrow. The ferry was full, so the crowds must have started to arrive already.

The names on the announcement apparently referred to rock bands, or pop bands, or whatever. He had never heard of them.

A curious coincidence. He had been here before at festival time. He spoke to the steward who told him that it was a four-yearly event, apparently viewed with misgiving by the older inhabitants of Bourne who had even attempted to put a stop to it, without success. The local bigwig, a foreign woman who had bought up half the island, (he laughingly called her ‘Queen’ something or other, Cosimo couldn’t catch the name) was too rich and powerful for the opponents of the event. She wanted to hold it on an annual basis, but they had managed to knock that idea on the head.

"In actual fact, the good lady is due to arrive later today. We hear she’s almost bankrupt and has decided to come here to get away from the people whose money she’s lost. We don’t usually see her from one year to the next. Lives abroad somewhere. She’ll be arriving by yacht of course, even though she’s broke. There’s some sort of welcome been arranged for her, mostly by her own people on the island, a sort of pageant, I’m told. The wife’s been doing some sowing for them – she’s a dressmaker, you know. She’s going to sail up the estuary in a barge, apparently. The Queen, that is, not the wife! I ask you! No wonder they call her the Queen! Still, up to now we’ve done fairly well by her. And the festival certainly brings a lot of money into the island, as well as a lot of mayhem. This boat is usually almost empty. But look at it now! Packed to the gunnels!"

As indeed it was.

The steward seemed to take a shine to Cosimo, they being probably the two oldest people on the boat. Most of the rest were youngsters, many of them dressed in a peculiar loose white cheesecloth costume, flowing dresses for the girls and very short tunics for the lads. The sort of thing you saw on ancient Greek statues, Cosimo thought. You might have imagined they were making a film here. Some of the boys looked almost indecent.

"Eidolese," whispered the steward – as much as he could whisper above the noise.

"What’s that?"

"Some sort of cult, one of these New Age things. They reckon it actually started on Bourne, back in the old days. But I find that difficult to believe."

The steward went off to attempt to sort out a fracas among a few of his well-oiled passengers.

The island was closer now. Its humped back rose sheer out of the sea, a huge rampart of pitted limestone dwarfing the crowded ferry and causing a bit of a hush among the raucous passengers, as though they felt its power. The ferry made straight for its backbone and then turned off to the left and swept around its imposing flanks, never too near the wall of rock to be dangerous, but near enough to make them all feel slightly uneasy.

"It’s the scenic route," laughed the steward. "Skipper likes to give people a thrill."

Somewhere near the top of the imposing sweep of limestone was a structure that looked like a Cyclops’ eye, staring out over the water toward the mainland as though longing to be reunited.

"Oh that," said the steward, evidently a local man. "That’s the terrace that was built by the old lord of the isle, well over a hundred years ago now. Go up and have a look if you get the chance. There’s a terrific view over the water. They reckon you can see three or four counties from there."

It was an odd thing to say, when Cosimo thought about it. The sort of remark people made before our species took to the air. From the time when you had to ascend a mountain or a cliff to appreciate the wider view. Now all you needed was to go up in a plane and you could see half the country on a cloudless day.

The steward seemed a singular old cove, his country accent and his appearance caught in a time warp. When Cosimo looked at it more closely, this vessel was also anachronistic: it must surely be pre-war.

These thoughts reinforced a peculiar impression that had come to dominate his imagination since he first saw the island: of going backward in some curious way.

The eastern flank of Bourne was now slowly revealing itself. More cliffs, but diminishing in scale the further you crept along past the giant troll’s ancient thigh. From this angle it had the appearance of a weathered volcanic crater worn away on three sides, or of a broken tooth with one still proud edge.

"There’s the old castle and the manor house."

The steward had crept unseen and unheard to his side.

He followed the man’s pointing finger and saw what looked like a medieval tower with a large rambling structure of more recent date or dates added to it, having obviously been built piecemeal over the centuries. These buildings dominated the higher slopes on this side of the island.

"Defensive," said the steward. "It’s easier to reach the harbour from here. The currents on the other side are wicked. From up there they could keep an eye on all the comings and goings from the mainland."

"Crave!" shouted a voice almost in Cosimo’s left ear. "Come and look at this."

Cosimo turned and saw one of the young men in cheesecloth. A girl detached herself from the rest and came to join the group at the rail. She was young, absolutely blond, and beautiful. Everything about her seemed golden: hair, skin, even her eyes.

Cosimo looked obliquely at the pair of them. The boy was an exotic creature, tall and well-built with amazingly blue eyes, like new sparkling marbles before they become scratched and dulled with constant dropping and knocking. He was of uncertain race, with the bodily strength of the negro and the facial characteristics of the east, mixed together with something of the west. A magnificent hybrid. His thick, black, waved and curling hair was tied with a brightly beaded string at the nape of his neck. He placed one naked, brown and gently muscled arm about the girl’s shoulders as she nestled against him: the universal gesture of protection, affection and possession on his part and willing submission on hers.

They gazed upward together at the castle, profile by profile.

‘Stunning!’ thought Cosimo, feeling very old and worn and drab.

"That’s where she lives."

Cosimo turned reluctantly to the steward again. "She?"

"Sudja. The Queen of the Isle. Proud owner of all she surveys. Up there in the old manor. Sir Ramsey would turn in his grave if he could see it. A foreigner, in his house!"

He was chuckling in a disconcerting fashion. There was something evil in his mockery. He glanced quickly at Cosimo with a knowing eye, then beyond him to the brilliant couple entwined against the rail. "Love!" he sighed, sounding more human now.

"Sudja? That’s a curious name."

Curious, and familiar. He imagined he had heard it somewhere before. But then everything, as in a state of fever, seemed resonant to him today.

"Like I said. Foreign."

Cosimo could not be certain whether ‘foreign’ denoted non-British or non-Bourne.

He returned to the puzzle of his previous visit here. How could he have possibly forgotten this unusual island? This very scenic journey by water?

If the festival took place every four years, he must have been here four or eight years ago. He seemed to remember getting horribly drunk and having sex – with someone. Or had there been more than one? But who? What had he been doing four or eight years ago?

It was no good. His brain just was not functioning properly today. He was excited, restless, ready for something to happen. He felt envious of the young couple standing next to him, shining with vitality, radiating ardour.

The steward was bearing down upon him again, ageing, cynical, frayed at the edges, just like himself. An insult to this splendid day of rejuvenation, greedily sucking and slurping the transforming lifeblood like a bare-fanged, grinning vampire. He felt like chucking the old fool overboard.

But that, he realised, would be tantamount to drowning himself.

Within the half hour they had disembarked at Melton, the harbour town. It was thronged with people who had come to the island for the festival, even though it would not be starting officially until Friday.

He sensed that they had not been drawn here solely by the promise of the music but also by some additional and irresistible element. To call it fascination would not be too strong, judging by his own attraction to Bourne.

His eyes followed the beautiful young couple from the ferry until they had been entirely swallowed up and lost among the crowd. He watched them disappear with considerable regret. He wondered if he were turning sentimental in his middle years. Or was it just the ache of his youth’s missed opportunities confronting him here, painfully surfacing from his inner depths? It seemed to happen more and more since he had taken early retirement and not for the first time he wondered whether it had been a sensible decision.

The Eidolese (was that the word the steward had used?) seemed particularly frisky now that they again trod solid ground. With the light behind them, the girls’ bodies were unsettlingly obvious beneath their flimsy costumes. And some of them were very, very nice.

The island air was making him feel quite randy.

The sense of unreality that had accompanied him here seemed now to intensify, notwithstanding the bright light of the cloudless midday sky. There was something very nearly otherworldly about the scene, although he knew it was an absurd word to use. These people, he would have almost liked to think, had come from the past and the future as well as from the present.

It was an odd thought, but it stuck.

The houses and streets, the movement and chatter of the crowd, the seascape, the sky, were like a smoky incense billowing at the altar of the world, an invocation to the unseen god.

Cosimo raised his head and took a good long sniff of this purified and ceremonial air. Privet blossom! And there was the flowering bush itself, an unclipped hedge that had been allowed to run riot and had gratefully adorned itself with starry white pinpoints of cautious and virginal bridal flowers in anticipation of its erotic nuptials.

The scent that always made him think of water, sunlight-reflecting water on a summer’s day, flashing and dazzling.

"The pub’s up this way," called a familiar voice.

He turned, and there was the steward from the ferry, nautical cap at an angle, smiling.

He pointed toward a bustling street market. "Up there. Dog and Bull it’s called. Best pint of bitter in Melton. None of that filthy lager."

"Too early for me," said Cosimo in the chummiest tones he could muster, feeling anything but friendly toward this odious man.

"Never too early," remarked the steward, tipping his cap and passing onward to his beery goal. "Have a good time!"

‘What harm has he done me?’ thought Cosimo. Yet still he did not like him. One of those things.

As an afterthought, the man came back and held out his hand. Startled, Cosimo imagined he wanted a tip.

"Michael Gleizes," the old bloke said. "Just in case we meet again."

"Oh, right," replied Cosimo in some confusion, shaking the proffered hand. "Cosimo Merrill."

"Eh?" Michael screwed up his face in the interrogative grimace that usually followed Cosimo’s announcement of his first name.

"Cos-i-mo," he repeated, sounding all three syllables with equal emphasis.

"Gotcha!" (He obviously hadn’t.) "Perhaps I’ll see you around. Don’t forget. It’s called the Dog and Bull."

And off he went.

Cosimo returned to his quiet contemplation of the festive scene that was Melton.

A repeating festival is like a single event stretched out over centuries, so that the celebration of the Olympic Games in some sense connects the modern world with the spirit of that more ancient ceremony. In a similar way the Bourne Festival was a coming together not restricted to the here and now. It was also a lot older than anyone could remember. Much older, for instance, than the Olympic Games which were probably themselves a continuation of a prehistoric festival. Taking something, and giving something back.

A fluid celebration, all-embracing. But of course the coming together of these people could be celebrated only at a certain time and in a certain place, now and on Bourne, despite their diverse origins. So from the start they were involved in a lovely paradox. Life in the here and now demands the most appalling restriction of the imagination. Life in the there and then is unimpeded enjoyment.

Cosimo again recalled that at the previous festival, which seemed to have taken place a very long time ago and of which he had only a vague remembrance, he had got horribly drunk. And this drunkenness, he felt sure, had included no small degree of sexual frenzy. He thought he could hardly now withstand a repeat performance of the experience given the corpulent state of his advanced middle age.

He had taken a taxi across the island up to the heights facing the mainland and his present perambulation of these gently undulating, grassy clifftops (whose fall, however, was sheer from the pleasant sward to the treacherous rocks below) was winding him badly.

The warm island was thronged with crowds of people. Even complete strangers, brought suddenly face to face in a narrow passageway, had the feeling they might once have known each other long ago and in a place far distant from here – might even have loved each other, brought up children together; have declined, side by side, into extreme old age. There was a melting, joining aroma in the atmosphere, the scent of oneness, the scent of the flowering privet.

The fluidity was astounding. Cosimo, an unselfconscious smile upon his lips, paused to watch a group of young people (Eidolese, like those on the ferry over here) chasing each other about the grassy slopes, colliding into passers-by, wrestling on the yielding ground. Their scanty Greek costumes hung becomingly about their barely pubescent limbs. With nothing underneath, no poor sop to modesty. And, looking down in premature despair at his own over-fed person, he was astonished to find himself similarly attired and – what was more astounding – of an age with those frolicking boys.

He hardly gave the change a second thought, so natural did it seem, just as in a dream we accept the most absurd reversals at face value.

One of the lads jumped on him and rolled him to the ground; and as he laughed and struggled to throw off his boisterous companion, he found his limbs (how long since this had happened!) responding to his more active wishes without pause or preparation. He was once more young, deliciously immature!

Everything sparkled and sang. The sky was suddenly more bright and of a more intense blue than he had ever known it to be, the air more fresh. His whole body tingled with excitement and anticipation.

The island magic had enveloped him at last. The magic of the petrified, ancient troll.

From this point on, you must not be surprised at anything you see or hear. Imagine you have entered a parallel universe where anything is possible. Think of Cosimo as one of the masks you must assume, a temporary and fascinating new persona. Try to live the part from moment to moment and from day to day. And if the action should require another mask or a developing succession of extended transformations, then move with the times and with these shifting tides. I can promise a wonderful journey, on water and on land and in the air, through the four dimensions. Remember that we are under the protection of Our Lady Imagination.

As for Cosimo himself, he had no awareness of having changed from one mode of experience to another. The island was under the influence of a powerful entity capable of infinite variability. Capable also of seamlessly covering its tracks.

Cosimo was once again assailed by the overpowering scent of privet blossom as he slipped into another and different world; another and different world from the first, but situated in the same island setting, Bourne One changing as it were into Bourne Two, past, present and unfolding future mixed like water into water.

Following the scent he descended a flight of white marble stairs that led to an arbour beside a vast shelf of balustraded rock overlooking the shot-silk blue and silver of a calm sea.

In the distance the shore of the mainland glimmered, seeming to tremble in the heat convected upward from the rockface below him and looking like some lost and fabulous land. But here was the fable, here and now, on Bourne. That stretch of intervening water represented a larger difference and a longer separation than he would ever have thought possible. Over there was the everyday, the dull, the unfulfilled, grey lives passing from birth to death in a grey mist. Here there was rejuvenation, a fresh start; and endless possibility. Renewal and excitement. Here, he felt alive and capable of any transformation.

He rested his arms on the marble balustrade, and it was as if he were kneeling in prayer in a pew at church. Not that he had attended church for many years; but that was how this seascape made him feel, this island, everything here.

He glanced at himself in a tall sheet of polished bronze that stood at the foot of the stairs (had it been there a moment ago, before his sudden wish to view himself?) and his reflection revealed that he had changed again, from a boy of ten or eleven into a broad shouldered youth who had come of age. It was a rebirth and a re-living, purified of the gross elements of his previous upbringing.

He felt literally full of himself, in a manner his older being had almost entirely forgotten. He could feel each muscle in his body, and every bone seemed individually to vibrate with awareness of itself and its function as part of the whole. This – this ecstatic state of health, youth and vitality – was the nearest to immortality any living being ever attained. Being half his mature weight, self-sustained aerial flight did not seem impossible. He could not help but laugh madly aloud at the thought, with visions of great Cosimo-dirigibles in his mind.

His laughter echoed along the marble terrace and whispered about the grey rock of the cliffs above. From the wisteria covered arbour a smiling face looked out, a dear face from the past, well known and well beloved. His heart seemed to expand, as though to burst.

"Vivienne!"

He could only breathlessly speak her name.

"Cosimo!"

She too was reduced to a mere exchange of names. Like Tristan meeting Isolda in Wagner’s opera.

It occurred to him, as he spoke and she responded, that it was a miracle that she should recognise the forty-five year old man (he had been around that age when he knew her) in the youth of twenty-one he had miraculously become. But then again she had apparently remained unaged by the decade or so that had passed since their last meeting: seemed in fact bloomingly younger, like him.

And as he watched, the years seemed to fall away from her, flake by flake, so insubstantial their imprint, and so flimsy their surface scratchings.

Now that she recognised him she was totally unfazed, recovering from the initial shock in the blink of an eyelid. Her old assurance was intact, her voice as calm and melodious as ever.

"I had a feeling that you would re-surface here," she said. "It’s the sort of occasion that always appealed to you. Ambiguity is your natural element."

It was just like her not to state the obvious. Stating the obvious was not her style. There was no ‘How nice to see you once again!’ Not a hint of ‘Fancy meeting you here!’ No question of ‘How are you? You’re looking well.’ She had never been that sort of woman. Nothing ordinary. Nothing commonplace. That had been her main attraction for him.

It was as if they had never parted, their sad and reluctant goodbyes obliterated from both their memories.

He responded in kind, taking his cue from her own refreshing nonchalance, with: "There’s plenty of that in this place. A positive flood of temporal anomaly. Have you noticed?"

"I’ve noticed that you seem to have grown younger. But then I suspect that everybody does that here, and without the least loss of psychological sophistication. Old heads on young bodies: that’s the sort of dream-fulfilling miracle we all desire. Everyone says, when he or she is a long way past it: ‘If only I knew then what I know now.’ Well, the island brings that about, it seems. The island and the forthcoming festival. But I’m not sure that it is morally good for us."

"Freedom is the best moral good there is – I think!"

"There’s your ambiguity again."

"One must see things in perspective, if that’s what you mean."

She sighed somewhat maternally as if thinking ‘Strange child!’ and placed her hands upon his shoulders and looked into his eyes, eyes now young, blue and sparkling. She slid her fingertips across his firm cheeks. "If only I had known you when you were this age," she said wistfully; and kissed him.

"Vivienne…" he responded, his hands upon her waist. The scent of the privet blossom seemed suddenly to become more intense, near to being unbearable, and he remembered something he had forgotten long ago, something he had been trying to remember all that day. Sunlight on water, lapping and flashing. The white blossom of the privet. The time of year…

It broke through into consciousness like the smashing of a vase to reveal the precious object hidden inside, a votive item of the purest gold consecrated by a love as fine that these years had left untarnished and undimmed.

"The pool!" he exclaimed, grabbing the lost memory, holding it fast at last in his hand. It was extraordinary how effective an aid to memory the sense of smell could be, though sometimes so maddeningly elusive. "Do you remember the pool in the woods with the privet blossom floating on the surface? It was like summer snow or floral foam, weirdly and romantically beautiful, as indeed were you. It must have been August, your uncle’s estate in Kent. The fallen blossom bobbed up and down as we swam and got plastered on our drying bodies. Why, it was more than – "

She placed her index finger across his lips to silence him. She looked at him from under her thick eyelashes, golden fringes to her wide grey eyes. "Don’t mention the years, it would be unlucky to do so, would break the spell. Time is of no importance here. Yes, of course I remember the pool. It was beautiful. The whole thing was beautiful, more like a dream than reality. And out of time, Cosimo, an anomaly." Then she smiled at her own sentimentality, or what sounded to her ears like sentimentality. "Here I am talking like a romantic schoolgirl! But you always made me feel like that, you know. Did you know?"

The intensity piled up around them, almost a physical sensation. They would not have been surprised to see the air change colour and take on a purple tinge. And perhaps it did because this place seemed to respond to one’s emotions.

"Did I know?" he repeated. "I think I did. But I hid it from myself. It was a period when I kept everything – down." As he said the last word he made a pushing movement towards the earth with both outstretched and down-turned palms.

"You certainly kept me down," she responded with a regretful smile.

He smiled too. "Who’s being ambiguous now?"

It was as if they were talking about people they had once known and forgotten but who they now recalled, friends of them both. But not themselves. Too distant to be themselves, too far off.

They both laughed, perhaps out of embarrassment. But the memory of that pool and that time and place lingered like an evocative symbol of all that was worthy and all that was gone.

Yet that was surely the whole point and meaning of the island: a Proustian re-creation; emotion recollected in tranquillity; having the cake that you had already consumed; reliving the life you had once led. What had happened did not need repeating because it was still, in every detail, there. Vivienne and Cosimo understood this and were satisfied. Their second youth did not need to repeat what they had done in their first, which was not past but now. So what was there, now, to do? The simple answer was: nothing. The essence of the island, the spirit of the festival, was being, not doing; celebration, not enactment.

Yet even as he witnessed these thoughts, what Vivienne called Cosimo’s ‘ambiguity’ thrust its certainly ugly head forward into the rosy view, like a devil’s mask peering through the wisteria amid the lingering smell of privet blossom. Through its thick peasant lips and broken teeth it complained: "Airy-fairy Cosimo-Cosima! The island, dear boy, is all illusion and the forthcoming festival shall be a celebration of the nothing that dwells in the central place of the cosmos. Come from nothing, built around emptiness, our pretend goals are screens to shield us from the cold winds of annihilation that sweep us into our vacant futures. That precious petal-covered pool of yours is the round zero, the circled orifice into which all your prime aspirations – so soon to end in resounding failure – are sucked, and where they all vanish."

With that the demon also vanished as though he were one among the illusions to which he referred.

Vivienne stared at Cosimo. "Why so suddenly serious?"

"It’s all too good to be true!" he almost wailed. Then, mischievously: "Or perhaps we should say, all too true to be good."

Continuing their perambulations side by side (indeed hand in hand) along the cliffs, tending always downhill, silent for minutes on end with no sense of deprivation, they came eventually to a dead-looking, partially silted estuary pervaded by an air of desolation and ennui. "But these adjectives, as applied to nature," Cosimo noted, "are of course subjective and refer only to the inner landscape that we carry with us and which overlays the outer one. The outside world is the pure unadorned noun."

A sluggish river that had long ago (a million years? or more?) eaten its way down through the obdurate cliff now spread and idled on its journey to the wider element. Some ancient stone pillars with a vague Egyptian air of Karnakian decay lounged and leaned just above the long sandbank where a rotting flat-bottomed boat lay beached and holed.

Vivienne seated herself on the grass with her back to a broken tree-stump and looked out over the still waters. Cosimo sat at her feet and observed her profile (what beautiful curves! what elegant lines!) and when she looked at him felt suddenly breathless. She looked away again and was so still she might have been a painting. He would have liked to touch her, to embrace her – but no, he corrected himself, that was not it, not that at all. He was more than happy to mutely worship, his adoration more effective and satisfying than sex, for the moment at least – and what a perfect moment it was, a time out of time, a little window of eternity, blending with the eternal element that brooded over this island like a vast hen over an equally vast egg.

When he was a boy, his father had said to him: "You must not put women on a pedestal." (But the old man had done exactly that himself.) Yet that was only half the story. Sex and idolatry were not opposed but paradoxically in league. To take what you needed as soon as you felt hungry (when nourishment was freely available) was to close the gates upon a more complete experience, like playing the piano with only the right hand and omitting the rest of the score. One could also feed upon the imagination, which could hardly ever, unlike the senses, be satiated. It was a supremely difficult art, true, but this was its shining glory. And just look at her hair, with its heavy natural waves: one could meditate upon it for half an hour at a stretch. And the head was only the beginning: far fairer regions awaited his perusal. And as for the whole – it was a rising sun in the darkened chasm of matter, illuminating everything.

This was to mention her appearance only. Add to that her self, mind, thought-processes, all the lovely inner intricacies and passing emotions, her words, her voice: it was too much for a single lifetime. That was the point: we always had too much time and not nearly enough. For the child a day was eternity; when it grew up the days flashed past in something approaching a blur. When one reached one’s fifties not only the days but the seasons and then the years themselves took on this speeded-up appearance. And after this life, this Cosimo-life, would other lives, one upon the other, rush him to the end of time and into the Nirvana-nothingness succeeding the end of the cosmos?

As if reading the flow of his thought, Vivienne turned her face toward him again and said: "The island is an island in the river of time, but it seems not to move with the water. If only one could spend one’s whole life here, one could see everything, witness all that time has to offer. That would be a wonderful series of experiences and, who knows, might provide us with the key to eventually escape from time altogether, once we had seen and done everything."

She spoke in a somewhat dreamy manner as if she had, to her own surprise, only now found the words with which at last to articulate what she had so long felt but had been unable to say. Whatever her manner and however dreamy, her speech was precise, her pronunciation beautifully modulated. This was another aspect of her which he had always so much admired.

"So you do not subscribe to the theory that only renunciation can lead us to the light?" He was smiling as he said this, guessing her answer.

She forestalled him with: "It is not so simple as that. Conscious renunciation leads only to renunciation. If you want renunciation (few people really do, most want more) you have only to renounce. If you want more – and I take it that the majority does – you must look for more. Renunciation certainly enters the equation but only as a means, not a goal. When you see the larger picture, your desire for the smaller drops away by itself with no conscious direction (which is what renunciation entails) by the will. I believe that to be the only way."

This was her existential position but as he listened he felt that she was really referring to him and to herself, to their shared past however brief, to their unexpected present coming together again, perhaps even to some possible future.

Loud shouts and acclamations from the estuary that echoed off the water and the adjacent cliffs interrupted these philosophical lucubrations. A large felucca-like vessel had just turned the promontory and was being hurrahed from the shore. From a scene of lonely desolation and decay, the further shore of the river suddenly filled with crowds of people who streamed across the rusty iron bridge that spanned a narrow waist of meeting rock upstream.

Several people stood on the deck of the felucca but the seated figure in the stern was the one they all turned to. The small jetty being close, the sail was lowered and the oars came out. The seated figure slowly rose. It was a woman of inconsiderable height but with all of majesty inherent in her bearing. The crowd audibly gasped as if in expectation of some miracle yet to be performed. The small figure was adorned with jewels and the flash of them echoed across to Vivienne and Cosimo. The people massed on the shore instinctively bowed to this quintessence of regality. The hurrahs died on their lips and hardly anyone dared to speak. There was the scent of power in the air and it cowed them all.

The sun had now begun to set into a sky and sea all red and green. An unnerving and steady wind arose, as if to presage rain, although there was no sign of it yet. The torches that were brought onto the jetty made a roaring noise. And the bearers of these torches, tall young men with the serious mien of adherents of an exclusive sect, held the brands at arms’ length to avoid the sparks. After the warmth of the day and because all were so lightly garbed, the breeze spoilt the effect of the woman’s disembarkation which should have been impressive but grew disorganised amid the awkward flap of the sail and the growing swell.

There was talk too in this changed atmosphere, guarded whispering with many glances around, of the disgrace she had incurred abroad and how only her power and influence had saved her from retribution. Failed or disappearing funds, they muttered, disreputable selling schemes backed by questionable business associates. But if she was under a cloud, she gave no sign. She managed to look severe, even frightening, with not the least loss of dignity. One instinctively felt that she could still deliver a very powerful sting. Above all this, and above these troubles which momentarily afflicted her without much affecting her outlook, she moved untouched and untouchable, and God help him who doubted her intact and unused venom. Some thought of her as a witch; to many others she was little short of an incarnate goddess. What no one questioned was her ability to rule and lead by dint of her own powerful personality and nothing else. This constituted her everything. Without this (but who or what would be able to divest her of it?) she would be one among many, anyone.

As soon as her small foot touched earth the crowd by the jetty gasped and sank to its knees. She stood there motionless for several long moments, her robe drawn about her, and watched them all in silence, missing nothing. The young men of her cult bowed low, holding their sputtering, crackling brands at arms’ length, with graceful movements.

She felt the island’s creative movement deep inside her, like an underwater clock ticking its way backward and forward through time, wherever and whenever she might wish. She knew that she stood upon her only native soil, her proper place though not where she was born. Queen Sudja had again come home to renew herself, as she did every four or five years, answering the equivalent of the migrating urge of birds.

Of course, she was no real queen, had no throne or lands, and was queen of her own followers only. But she knew there was a land, more real than reality, of which she was truly the rightful heir; and this island was the closest approximation to it that she had ever found. The air said it, the cliffs declared it, the surrounding sea and sky sang it. Not only a place but a life, a being. The whole of life, all that was, is, and shall be. She could not name it nor usefully speak of it – and what was the point in saying what everyone knew but none thought worth the mention? Here it was, more mysteriously here than anywhere. This was its hub, though its spokes radiated to the end of space and time.

Sudja walked along the decaying estuary path (once, fittingly, a royal road) preceded by the torch-bearing acolytes. She loved her ‘boys’ as she called them, loved them figuratively and, on a fairly frequent basis, literally and vigorously, and it gave her immense aesthetic satisfaction to see their youthful bodies swaying languorously along the road before her. The sense of achieved balance was as happy as that of a strictly symmetrical building facade. She and they were one unit, made doubly so in this place where everything tended toward a mental and physical syncretism.

In her the spirit of the past resided, the tribal spirit which we have so nearly lost and which all modern thinkers denigrate; the spirit of the race (unholy word!) now outcast and abandoned or only allowed in the context of the now virtually completely obliterated primitive world. Sudja would have none of this contemptuous dismissal and she embraced this being completely, herself its own most vital embodiment.

Here on Bourne, she and it both came into their own.

Vivienne and Cosimo, having crossed the rusty iron bridge that spanned the estuary, stood beside the ancient causeway to get a closer look at the woman they had watched from the cliffs. As she drew level with them Vivienne felt Cosimo, pushed close to her by the jostling crowd, suddenly stiffen. At the same time she saw the face of Sudja in the light of the flares – the intense dark eyes, the great mane of black hair, the tiny (almost deformed) stature, the huge breasts and comely thighs. And as she looked at this powerful woman she saw Sudja's dark eyes cloud over with puzzlement and then widen in saucer-like recognition. Her thick mouth, almost chinless, fell open. She stopped and stared. Vivienne thought she was staring at herself and then realised it was Cosimo whom she recognised.

Vivienne heard Cosimo whisper "Maksude…"

Sudja-Maksude made straight towards them with a look of incredulity on her face. Her voice sounded as if she were a perpetual smoker of Gitanes. "Cosimo! Darlink! Fancy seeing you here!"

It sounded incongruous, this meeting of old chums as if at Ascot or a Mansion House dinner, here on this mad island and in this Bronze Age setting – the wind-blown torches, the half-naked acolytes, the religious fervour of the crowds.

The people drew closer as if emboldened by the Queen's recognition of one of their anonymous number. Who was this man? And the woman with him? The acolytes grew heavy-handed and cleared a space in which Sudja, Cosimo and Vivienne stood like the three points of a triangle enclosed within a circle of people.

Cosimo introduced Vivienne but Sudja ignored her completely and she had to make her way after them as best she could as the Queen went off arm in arm with her darlink. The crowd fell away in front of them and closed behind them and Vivienne was soon separated from the other two.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

Vivienne was considerably irritated by Sudja’s rudeness, but a lifetime of putting other women’s backs up had inured her to the resultant bitchiness which she usually managed to ignore. She had long ago ceased to ask herself why her character had this effect upon her sisters, nor did she really care any more. Their problem, let them deal with it.

She was however disconcerted to find that Cosimo, her old-new love, had been so suddenly snatched away from her again. But not to worry. It was a small island and she would catch up with him later.

There was sufficient magic here to keep her from brooding on any passing imperfection. The air itself was like a potent and beneficent drug, stilling all anxiety, coaxing out the mind’s affirmative attributes.

Vivienne stopped to admire an exquisitely executed statue of a nude youth that stood in a crumbling brick niche by the side of the path in a little dell or grove in these interesting woods into which the roadway had so suddenly plunged itself as if feeling the need for greater secrecy and intimacy. The statue had to be Greek and she was sure she had seen a similar piece of marble elsewhere. It was a wonderful almost translucent white and very highly polished and the youth portrayed in stone was elegant and sinuously curved. The face was beautiful and the head crowned with a wreath of leaves. It seemed to be looking down at her with an enigmatic smile as if to say "How many have stood where you now stand, how many have worshipped and then passed on."

And these imaginary words contained a resonance that took on many of the qualities of actual human speech in an uncanny mimicry.

It seemed to her also that the words were spoken in an ancient and now forgotten tongue which she had somehow the ability to understand. The language was older than Latin or Greek; it had been in use before the time of the pharaohs; perhaps it had been the means of communication in the sparsely inhabited caves of this earth at our first beginning.

Absurd, of course.

So engrossed was she in contemplation of this beautiful and apparently speaking statue that she heard the noisy tumult of Sudja and her crowd of devotees and followers fade away further and further into the distance without regret. Good riddance!

Only when it was completely silent did she feel satisfied that the bond between her and the delicate youth was complete. She stared intently at the stone face, the stone body. She was waiting for something. The whole of nature seemed poised in expectation. Everything within her and around her was keyed up and ready. For what?

The evening was cool and rapidly darkening but she felt no sense of panic. There was a delightful breeze from the sea, smelling of privet blossom and vast expanses of clean ocean. The sculpture seemed to take to itself the last of the light above the darkening trees making them seem yet more dark as it glowed in a private circle of radiance.

A hand slipped into hers. Someone whispered "Vivienne."

For a moment she froze, not with fear but with excitement, although she would have been hard put to differentiate between the two emotions.

The voice called her backward and forward, past and future intermingled. The light from the statue increased in intensity, dazzled her, streaming out as from the sunward mouth of a dark tunnel, she still in the shadows. At the same time the air became misty as though a heavy dew were falling. The formerly immobile statue stepped neatly, lightly down from its niche and stood before her.

Its every movement was exquisitely refined and possessed of a beautiful and potent delicacy such as she had never before witnessed, a subtle quintessence of the utmost virility – a quality she would have thought impossible until now. It was as if it had been schooled in the amorous arts for a thousand years.

A shimmering luminosity seemed to proceed from a point just behind it, the creature itself a slim dark outline. Its hand was in hers as at the beginning of this strange sequence. It had seemingly been in two places at once but had now regained its unified form.

The hand that rested lightly palm to palm against her hand was warm, smooth as silk, no labourer’s hand but a hand made for the gentler arts of peace and love. It slowly tightened its grip with a sensuous swelling pressure.

Something passed from it to her, a surge of improbable power; the rising and falling wave of a quality she readily recognised to be passion, moving through them both at one and the same time, lifting them with its motion.

The creature stood close, craving human contact, willing her to let go of any tension she might feel, to become fluid. It was masculine, hairless, of middle height, slimly built and small boned. It looked at her with huge dark eyes possessed of a wide-awake luminosity which were simultaneously and paradoxically dreamy, deep, far away, as if it were both here and distant. If it had seemed alien before, it was now all human as it smiled at her with the heart-stopping sweetness of a child whose interest is suddenly engaged. Her guard was down but she was cautious enough to watch him-it with the utmost attention, feeling that this unknown equation could go off at any tangent at any moment. A change into something (not someone) far less agreeable seemed quite possible.

"She has returned?" it asked, the question almost an accusation. Its voice, alarmingly, sounded like her own voice. Even more alarming was the fact that it spoke without moving its lips, the voice seeming to come from within her own head. Sensing her unease, it again smiled its transfiguring smile and sidled up closer.

"Who has returned?" she asked.

"The witch. Sudja," it snapped.

She affirmed the fact, this time without moving her own lips, and saw that he could read her thoughts.

Vivienne was not to know that the creature’s hatred for Sudja stemmed from the clash of their corresponding territorial ambitions. He thought of the island as his, and she had appropriated to herself some of his most sacred places. The grove where they now stood belonged to the Queen. For all his considerable power he was unable to afflict her in a manner befitting his malice. He was Other and she was human.

"You must not be afraid of me," it said. "We are old friends."

She knew it meant what it said and that it spoke the truth. All our loves are one love, from the first to the last. We seek the one imago throughout our lives and it haunts us from incarnation to incarnation.

Now it began to glow with, and to radiate, love, like a drawn fire; intense white flame lapped its limbs and enveloped her too in its painless burning. A slow procession of familiar revenants passed across the inward screen of her mind, turned to her, smiled, recalled their varied histories. Former lovers, those she had loved but who had not loved her in return (and these were doubly vivid), men she had known for years and some she had seen only once in passing – they were all there. And all of them were him-it that now stood beside her.

He turned to her with a wicked-compassionate lifting of the eyebrows (and she could see them all there, in his eyes) and said, "I see that you remember me."

Now came more distant memories, from the time before her birth, and held her spellbound. Then other memories came too, memories of what was to come, as if she stood in the central place and was able to review the passage of her whole life and of previous lives from outside the magnetic influence of the charmed circle that was subject to the influence of time, as if she were beyond the Maya-web of the woven cosmos, the spider’s creation whose spinning ended where it had started and then began again. (The circling creation of modern physics.)

It was as if she stood at the centre of the jewelled web, each cosmos a diamond dewdrop and herself the glittering Maya-spider, omniscient and ten thousand-eyed.

He could see that he had her in thrall and he was as much in love with her as she with him. These mortal females were irresistible and half the time were not aware what was happening to them. What, for them, occurred in the brain as a result of fantasy was, for him, real. So that when the happy thought flitted through her mind, momentarily, like the flash of car headlights on a dark road, of doing such with him and perhaps attempting… For him it was a real and present ecstasy to which he might surrender himself for an eternity of very satisfying love-making. She was the cue and not the event itself. He could take her momentary emotions and roll them out flat like pastry on a board and make them take whatever form he fancied.

He began to dream, and she was incorporated into his sensuous reverie.

The two of them stood by an alien shore lit by two greenish-pinkish moons. Her dress was of pink satin made garish by the weird illumination. She was no more than sixteen, eager for experience but also frightened of it. Experience threatened in the aggressive figure that moved stealthily closer to her. Her whole body was tingling with excitement and fear, like pins and needles in some very unaccustomed places.

She remembered the pink dress and vividly recalled the dance to which she had worn it; and how she had afterwards been initiated into the infinite secrets of love by a seasoned and accomplished campaigner who made no assault upon her virginity but revealed to her instead the many pleasures that lay slumbering within her own physical being which he was able to awaken with his hands and lips.

The creature knew all this and made no attempt to hide his knowledge from her but used it for her greater gratification.

"And how would you like me to appear to you?" asked the slim nude youth with eyes that seemed lit by a bulb inside his skull. His voice was unbearably sexy and made her wet.

She did not need to answer in words, thought was sufficient. He had changed into an exact semblance of the young Cosimo, but many times more handsome than Cosimo had ever been and with all the slight irregularities ironed out. Nor was he as gentlemanly as Cosimo had invariably been. She could feel that he had no respect for her and would be unrestrained by any social nicety. And she liked that. The creature’s eyes were larger and more dewily lustrous than Cosimo’s, the physique more accentuated, the member ("Oh dear!" she thought) much larger, meatier. "But I never…" she began.

"You did not need to," he replied, stepping closer and placing his large cool hands at the small of her back to draw her nearer. She was surprised, looking down at herself, to find her waist much smaller than she could ever remember it, her hips more large. And her breasts were indecently huge! Was it at his desire or was it the result of her own wishful thinking?

Cosimo, although recognisably himself, had grown more lusciously meaty. He stood with the weight of his body resting upon one leg and the curves of his thighs were unimaginably delightful to the eye. His chest had swollen and his muscled breasts rose and fell with his heavy breathing as he stared at her in a decidedly lupine fashion, his eyes intensely piercing. She shivered with anticipatory pleasure.

Some parts of her own body (but she was doubtful to what extent it was hers) had also suddenly become much bigger while other parts had shrunk to a fashionable slimline style. She hardly knew who or where she was, but it seemed good to be able to let go, to swim in this new warm sea in which it was impossible to drown. How on earth do I look to others, she wondered, what impression do I make? If only she could find a mirror.

Cosimo, or the Cosimo-like creature, wheeled out a full length mirror so that she might inspect her new and lovelier self. It was a large Victorian mahogany-framed pier-glass and as it came towards her she thought of Aubrey Beardsley and enormous powder-puffs and men in pierrot costume. The casters on the mirror squeaked! She looked into it, as if looking into some secret room, and saw that she was indeed very lovely – more than that, stunning! And yet she retained all those features which made her recognisably herself, only as she had been long ago, not like herself of yesterday.

"It’s beautiful, quite beautiful," she gasped, as if standing before a work of art in a gallery, an artist’s creation.

"This is your real self, Vivienne, not someone else’s puppet. This is how you appear to me. My vision is clear since I have no expectations and no prejudices."

The voice and the form were Cosimo’s but she knew it was not really him, whatever that ‘really’ consisted of. What were we apart from the timbre of our voices, the distinctive way we walked, our posture, all those little accidents of nature, time and the genepool? This was Cosimo as much as the other Cosimo, an exact but beautified replication, and she asked for nothing more. Well, perhaps one thing more…

…And there they were, swimming together through the clear warm water of a softly moving river, stroke for stroke under the hazy light of the two soft moons.

His hugely muscled arms and great paw-like hands gave him the appearance, and no doubt the reality also, of limitless strength and power; but his smiling face with its perfect teeth was reassuring, and he stopped from time to time to plant his curving lips upon hers in a long and watery kiss.

They hardly needed to make the effort to swim, the water upheld them like a second and doubly buoyant Dead Sea. They ceased swimming altogether now and embraced and how he squeezed and squeezed himself into her and with what breath-taking softness in the strength. The face next to hers was glowing with happy smiles; they were like two sea-creatures making love, sportive sexy dolphins. And his hands! He seemed to have several hands and several arms and touched her everywhere and stroked her all over.

And then she realised that there was not one Cosimo but two. Even as she bent down to take the deliciously shaped member into her mouth another member was still inside her and another Cosimo (could there be three?) held her breasts from behind and squeezed them as she licked and sucked. And was she standing, crouching, or lying down, or all three actions at once and as one? And there were more, crowding around her, murmuring hoarse love-words, feeling, probing, stroking. It was an orgy of two, but enlarged inexplicably and delightfully to a writhing and happy crowd of intimates.

Now there were many many replications of the one couple (but every replication contained the awareness of the original) and they floated on the water or swam together underwater or lay beside soft glimmering pools of scented water or under trees or – goodness! – flew through the air without wings making love in a hundred different ways in a hundred different places and each of the women was Vivienne and each of the men was the beautified and heavily muscled Cosimo and together they loved and twisted and touched in one universal flame of desire (watch out Barbara Cartload, here we come!) that sugar-candied up into the darkening sky in a hundred divergent flames of the one blaze until, beginning slowly and in a low key the pressure began to mount and the frenzy grew higher and larger…

…The water now was positively pounding against the shore, throwing up huge and arching acres of wave-foam and the great surge thrashed the sea wall ceaselessly like massed battalions of aquatic stallions rearing up their great white beating forelegs until – there it came, the unimaginable and roaring Great Wave, huge and roaring, white and roaring, green and roaring, battering and beating all before it into quivering submission as it ascended to a terrific and awesome height and finally, after a terrifying and nerve-jangling hesitation, fell upon them like Armageddon and over them like Juggernaut and all her senses failed and dissolved under its hissing onslaught.

The light changed by numerous slow gradations from the blinding whiteness of the apotheosis, through many pastel and rainbow-coloured hues (how refreshingly one melted into another) until it reached the relative stability of the familiar twilight scene from which they had begun their amazing journey.

Vivienne lay on the dampening grass at the foot of the dilapidated brickwork niche that held the statue of the nude youth. There he stood, white and immobile, cold and seemingly dead, just mere stone after all. Beautifully carved with exquisite workmanship, but mere stone after all.

‘No I didn’t dream it,’ she thought, stilling her first reaction which was one of disbelief. ‘It really happened.’

She got up and stood before the statue, recalling with delight all that had taken place.

"You do not fool me," she said. "And I will not believe it was a dream, as I am sure you would like me to think. There is a reality, a different reality, in this island and in you. I find it infinitely exciting, and I want to know more about it."

No response. The blind eyes of the statue continued to stare out above and beyond her.

"Just tell me who you are," she continued, with the merest hint of desperation in her voice. "A name is not much but is the very least that human lovers are given." (Why did she qualify the noun with ‘human’?) "Without a name I will be unable to remember you or call you once more to me."

Even as she spoke she could feel her memory fading and her sense of the unreality, the absurdity of the thing, increasing. It even started to appear slightly comic in a cynical sort of way. Talking to a statue? Had she gone mad?

The wind slowly whipped along the nearby vegetation, like a miniature dust storm drawing a line with one pointed finger. She could hear the leaves of the dark trees rustling and the sound was like "Eye-doe-lon. Eidolon. Eidolon…" Accent on the second syllable, though sometimes it can be the first; never the last. The name changeable like its strange owner.

"Eidolon," she repeated with satisfaction, having pinned him down.

Once more he stood beside her. His face was unsmiling as he told her "Say nothing to the witch."

"Which witch?" she asked, and giggled. It was the old panto joke.

"Sudja," he hissed, snake-like, coiled, discreetly venomous. "Your friend Cosimo, your beloved, is even now telling her secrets that she will try to use against me. Deny everything. Hide from her all that took place this evening. If she finds out what has happened she will do something very nasty to you. Believe nothing she says. Do not drop your guard in her presence. I have warned you, now I must go."

Vivienne was not to know that this was all bravado and pure paranoid ranting, not to mention unadulterated malice. It was also, as we shall see later, something of an infection from his human simulacrum and partial dwelling-place, Tom Atmos, a builder who lived in Melton and who was blithely unaware of this most potent parasite within him and of his own host nature.

He smiled with that heart-melting sweetness he seemed able to turn on and off at will. "Thank you, Vivienne, for your company. We shall without doubt meet again soon. Goodbye for now."

The sun had disappeared behind the thick line of trees that bounded her visible horizon. She felt concern for her own safety. Talk of the witch disturbed her even while it seemed quite ridiculous. The wind made furtive noises in the undergrowth. She drew her thin dress closer about the neck. She glanced up at the statue but there was nothing to appeal to there. She felt that Eidolon was now far away. In this she was wrong. She thought that she could never know who or what he was. This too would come to pass.

The road was a white blur along which she stumbled. The evening star hung glittering before her, as if to show her the way and beckon her on, bright as a diamond in a jeweller’s lighted window. Other stars came slowly out and soon a half moon rose. Some strange bird cried in the darkness away to her left and was answered by another from deep within the wood.

The road grew wider and rose to a ridge of high ground from which she could see lights burning below and hear sounds of laughter and singing. As she descended the slope she saw a sizeable village with a large building at the further end of the central street. Most of the noise seemed to come from this building whose large double doors hung open. It stood among fields and a partially cleared wood that swept right down to its back and brushed its leaves against the eaves. She could see what appeared to be a flickering fire inside the building (actually a rather dusty and antiquated disco light display!) and dark figures moved between the flames and the open door, stooping and stamping in what looked very much like some ritual dance.

She made her way slowly up the village street, uncertain what to expect, her mind still full of her wonderful experiences. But these were soon to fade and be swallowed up in disbelief and denial.

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

Sudja took Cosimo’s arm and hurried on with him ahead of the rest, leaving poor Vivienne far behind.

"My friend…" expostulated Cosimo.

"She comes, she comes," cried his impetuous companion, dragging him bodily forward. She was surprisingly strong for such a short woman. "I cannot believe I see you here. It is a miraculous co-in…, co-in…"

"Coincidence?" he suggested, looking backward in an attempt to remonstrate with the tardy Vivienne.

"Coincidence. I have been e-mailing you at your company for a week. They say you were un-ob…, un-ob…"

It was like trying to converse with someone with a stutter.

"Unobtainable?" he said.

She screamed with laughter. "Yes! Where you been, you naughty boy? You are having the romance?" Then, more darkly and with something of a pout. "With that woman?" (Meaning poor lost Vivienne.)

"No, we met here quite by chance. This has been a day of strange reunions."

‘None so strange as this one,’ he thought, glancing at his companion and suddenly realising who it was the steward had been referring to, ‘Sudja’ being the affectionate diminutive of Maksude.

What else did he know or remember about her? Almost nothing, and their present breakneck speed through the undergrowth was no aid to memory. And yet an outline was beginning to form, although the pieces were very slow in coming together.

When had they last met? It was surely many years ago. Somewhere in eastern Europe. – Vienna? Prague? Budapest?

In his mind’s eye he could see a bridge in the form of a bow or the well-shaped top lip of an open mouth high above a river gorge. It was a special place. Did it receive its distinction from itself or from something important that had happened to him there? Death entered the unique equation, but hadn’t that been a long time ago, when Rome was in the ascendant? Or before the Romans, in the time of the tribes? Sudja had definite tribal associations, moved beyond the inclusive laws of empire. She was the law, and on the hoof too! And yet she had let so many people down, her own people. He had heard many rumours of her financial misdealings (yes, it was coming back, the mist clearing that had obscured his memory) and had expected her to be contrite. Not a bit of it! She seemed to be enjoying life as never before.

He realised that he had slipped back into the mythological mode that had encompassed him ever since his arrival on Bourne. He seemed to be wavering to and fro between the real and the ideal worlds that came and went as they saw fit, quite beyond his control.

They emerged from the shrubbery onto a street, a real street with houses and electric lighting. It was like suddenly waking up from a dream landscape and finding yourself in the old familiar room.

The boys with the torches came hurrying and stumbling after them, dishevelled and chilled.

"Put those stupid things out!" barked Sudja, indicating the torches.

The boys gratefully quenched them in the earth.

"You can go up to the hall and change," she said, like some glorified stage-manager. "Before you freeze to death."

She turned back to Cosimo, asking "How did you like my pageant?"

"Very effective," he enthused, somewhat falsely. "Had me fooled, for one."

She smiled. "It is my home-coming, you see. Back to my island after being away for so long. I like to make the big splash for my people."

The ‘my people’ was a tad regal, but he let it pass. Perhaps she had begun to have delusions of grandeur; and yet she didn’t seem the sort to take herself too seriously. There was an edge of parody, of self-mockery about her that he found most refreshing.

They walked up the street arm in arm until they came to the hall outside which a Rolls sat purring, waiting, liveried chauffeur at the wheel.

A deputation of three burly men who looked very like ‘minders’ came forward to meet her, but she waved them away.

"Come," she said to Cosimo. "We go to my house."

"But Vivienne…" said Cosimo, looking around him helplessly.

"My people will look after her," she coaxed indulgently. "She will be all right. I will get them to go and search for her if she does not appear soon. There is to be a party in the hall. She can eat and drink and dance. And we will come back later and find her, after you and me have the little chat. I will give the instructions."

She spoke with one of the minders. He listened carefully and then nodded respectfully. Then he went toward the Rolls and held the door open. She got in and sat there looking at Cosimo patiently.

He scoured the street with anxious eyes for any sign of Vivienne, then shrugged and got in beside Sudja.

She patted his hand. "Trust me, my friend." Then to the driver: "Up to the house."

And off they glided, in perfect luxury. Cosimo was thinking how much Vivienne would have enjoyed this. She was a woman who delighted in all the trappings of success. Where on earth could she have got to?

When he saw the tower outlined against the delicately tinted pastels of the twilight sky he realised that they were proceeding to the house which he had seen from the ferry.

"Oh, so you live there?" he said, astonished at her opulence.

"Well, darling, I do not live there often, once in the blue moon. But now I will set up my house here for a while, until things get quieter and my credit gets better."

She shot him an amused, questioning glance.

The car scrunched to a halt on the gravelled drive in front of the house. Another burly minder stepped forward to open the door. Security seemed fairly tight. Perhaps she was afraid one of her creditors might come after her with murderous intentions.

They went in and he was offered and partook of refreshment, but she was obviously uninclined to linger over the hospitality for she quickly got up and asked him to follow her.

From the hall they descended three flights of concrete steps and Cosimo wondered what was in the cellar. Had she incarcerated some mad relative down here? He began to wonder what he had let himself in for and his apprehensions were considerably increased when they came to a massive steel door.

Underground bunker, or what? Visions of Hitler’s last mad days in Berlin flashed through his mind. She hurried onward, no time for talk, and to Cosimo it felt like being unwillingly dragged into the Queen’s own private nightmare. He was too polite to resist. He seemed to recall that it was best to go along with her impulsive onward thrust. Not that there seemed much chance of resisting it.

How did he know all this when he could remember barely anything about the woman? If only she would be still for a moment he could check his temporarily exhausted memory-bank which was at present flashing fitfully with hints of some promise.

She opened the heavy steel door leading presumably to the vaults or crypt or whatever by the simple expedient of placing her palm against the glass of a glowing scanning device set into the wall.

As the door swung slowly open a rush of cool air shivered over them like the passing of an unseen spirit. Then came the curiously exciting smell of electronic gadgetry accompanied by humming and ticking sounds and the small quick bleeps of muted alarms; printers clackety-clacking and rachetting; subdued buzzing. The place was alive beyond any human inhabitants. Screens flashed and untidy rows of men in shirt-sleeves muttered into telephones or shouted to each other across the room – until they saw Sudja and were instantly quietened.

She was wearing her regal countenance once more and paused dramatically in the doorway like a diva when she first appears onstage.

Cosimo stared with surprise and nearly gave a low whistle of appreciation. "Very impressive. I thought the island was a forgotten paradise, not the hub of your business empire."

She leant back and laughed. "A forgotten paradise? This dump! What are you thinking of Cosimo? The island spirit has seduced you into seeing what is not there. It’s always fun to mix business with pleasure, darlink. The fun’s above." She flashed her dark eyes toward the roof. "And the business, she is down here, well hidden."

Those same lustrous dark brown eyes glowed with pleasure as she watched the financial activities of her minions.

"But this is not the hub, Cosimo," she chided him playfully. "No one place is the hub. That would make me too vulnerable. There are many rooms like this in various locations across the continent. Across the whole globe."

She opened her arms and spread them wide in a gesture of libidinous possession, the purple varnish on her long nails flashing. "There is a hub however, and it is moi."

She laughed loudly (but was there bitterness in that laughter? He certainly thought he caught a trace of that quality. Or perhaps, more alarmingly, it was megalomania) and all the people in the room looked toward them and smiled with their mistress. Cosimo wondered if it was genuine pleasure that he read on these faces. It had rather the look of something paid for, of deference, even obsequiousness of a debased and pecuniary hue. He didn’t much like it, but he had no intention of making his feelings plain, not to this dictator-spirit.

She was the sort of person who combined extreme lasciviousness with extreme coldness, a type neither unusual nor as paradoxical as one would imagine. Absence of real caring leads to promiscuity. Forget the tart with the heart of gold and recognise her sister with the heart of steel.

Sudja was the complete, the perfect egotist. She seemed to inhabit a world uninfluenced by any other persons, a Sudja-world thronged with Sudja-clones. Inevitably this made her lonely – if perfect egotists can feel lonely. It seemed to her rather simple mentality (she was cunning but far from complex) that the only way to avoid this inner abandonment was to surround herself with people, especially lovers. Not any old bunch of lovers either. All her lovers were good-looking, healthy, young – and on the make. This last attribute was the most essential since it guaranteed their constant efforts toward gratifying her lust.

The one common and indispensable quality shared by her eager catamites was their absolute dependence on her personal, given-or-withheld goodwill. Yes, Your Majesty. No, Your Majesty. Let me lay down and allow you to walk all over me, Your Majesty. And be grateful for the bruise of your metal-tipped heels upon my flesh, Your Majesty. Her boys were all Pavlovian puppy-dogs and licked the hand that beat them.

As with all dictators, so it was with Sudja. The inevitable result of this fawning attitude was that she was horribly ill-advised and often hopelessly ill-informed. She reacted so badly to adverse news that people told her only what she wanted to hear. It was this fact and no other which brought about what she usually referred to as the recent ‘downturn’ in her financial fortunes.

To those unfortunates who had entrusted their money to her safekeeping it looked more like an unmitigated collapse. The irony was that when in possession of all the relevant information she was an absolute wizard with money. Newspapers across the globe delighted to interview her and regale their readers with the legendary story of how she had made so many billions in so many weeks. She had not only enormous financial capability and insight but in addition something near to perfect intuition.

She felt the mysterious movements of the money markets deep down in some hidden part of her psyche, and this before they had made themselves known to mere human observers, even those with the keenest senses. Her intuition was in fact nothing else but a fanatically exact reading of existing circumstances. For this she needed accurate and up-to-date information. Because of her volcanic temper she had of late been in receipt of only half the necessary statistics, the good half, the half that helped create a happy atmosphere within and around her. The result was a nose-dive, pure and simple. To give her her due, she had worked all this out for herself over the last few sobering months even though she would admit her fault to no one but the other inner Sudja who was her secret and constant companion.

This was where Cosimo came in. In her eyes he had always been possessed of a more than usually fearless spirit. Plus (and it was a very big plus indeed) a perfection of tact. Cosimo’s strong point (his own very significant business successes pointed it up) was the ability to remain still and silent at times of crisis when other lesser men would have been kicking and screaming and thrashing about in all directions. This concentration was legendary in the boardrooms of the western world and in many to the east. Cosimo found that a crisis enabled him to think very clearly. At times of intense emotional stress he had been able to formulate some of his best organisational coups.

The natural urge is to join in and kick and scream with the rest. This is the philosophy of the pack and herd, the synchronisation of the ant and bee. Cosimo acted as a counter-agent to this active drive. He neither despised nor denigrated it. He just did not suffer from the common contagion.

It is difficult to ascertain what were the origins of this reflex. Certainly his immediate family had a reputation for imperturbability and this had presumably rubbed off on him. Whatever the cause, he was a central seed of stillness in stormy weather, like a corporational Christ stilling the boardroom waters. His influence became an opposite contagion to that of unrest and invariably calmed the twittering company.

Like the whole of life, this process took place in the realm of appearances. While appearing calm Cosimo was as infected by the general unrest as everyone else. He differed in his reaction alone. He stilled while they jigged. He carefully and narrowly observed (amazing even himself at times) while they generally emoted. Sudja had observed all this and valued Cosimo’s gift extremely highly. She realised – again we must emphasise that although supremely egotistical she was additionally extremely astute – how valuable a commodity it was, while he himself took it for granted. Could she have refined and distilled and bottled this quality she would have taken a daily dose. But her spirit was entirely different, fire to his apparent ice.

"This is amazing, Maksude," Cosimo observed, indicating the underground hive whose worker-bees had returned to their screens and telephones, having acknowledged and been excited by the arrival of their queen.

"Thank you, darlink. You know I must always have the latest gadgets."

"You seem to be doing well as usual."

She pouted. "You refer to my little bit of recent trouble? Nothink to worry about. Sudja, she look after herself and her boys. My empire is safe, and you must not believe all what you hear."

"Obviously," he replied.

Sudja gave him a sharp look, thinking he was speaking ironically.

He looked straight back into her eyes (what a handsome guy he was! she thought, suppressing a bosomy sigh) and she was reassured. She took his arm. Queen and consort, they proceeded across what Cosimo thought of as the dealing-floor, greeted by all the smiling, edgy men who worked there, and made their way towards Sudja’s private office. Not a woman in sight, apart from a few elderly skivvies. Sudja tolerated no competition.

She was not an immediately attractive woman, not the type to turn heads in the street. But then Sudja was rarely in a street in the ordinary sense of walking down or up it. Far too common, darlink. What were cars for, after all?

People of average stature dwarfed her. ‘The best surprises come always in the smallest packages’ was a favourite saying of hers, making a virtue of necessity. Her physique was voluptuous, with large shapely breasts. The rear view was pretty stunning also. Her waist was small, legs beautifully turned even though shorter than most male fantasies allow. Her skin colour was a lovely toned brown except in the most intimate parts. Eyes dark and large with thick, black upcurving lashes. Not only were her attributes exceptionally fine. More importantly, she knew how to use and display them to the very best advantage. This she did with an open abandon that only the more repressed found repulsive.

Another of her treasured adages was ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it’. The more effeminate, not to say outrightly gay, of her followers – they were not few, rather the majority, most of them ‘muscle Marys’ – would fold up with enjoyment when she drew forth this well-thumbed mantra.

These boys loved her dearly. To them she was star as well as queen and they relished her at her most outrageous and made her worse than she was by their obvious appreciation. She could do nothing wrong in their eyes. She loved them in return. But a hundred failed and frustrating experiments had made her regretfully wise. They could not satisfy, or only rarely and on an irregular and unpredictable basis, her very basic needs.

For this purpose she retained a harem of more conventionally manly lads, ‘the other camp’ as they were always called, as for instance in the often-heard comment "Oh, she’s in the other camp, love. Don’t waste your time with her." There was bickering, of course. The ‘other camp’ (that is to say, confusingly, those that were not ‘camp’ at all) sometimes overstepped the dividing-line between the two persuasions and like lost sheep went straying into previously ungrazed pastures. "But they always come back to their Sudja," she would say with a twinkle. "She gives them what they really want." As indeed she did. One of the remarkable things about the Queen was that she had not an ounce of sexual prudery in her whole body. Why should she? She had seen and done it all from a very early age.

She now began to exercise her charm on Cosimo. But she realised he was a much harder nut to crack than the paid help. She adjusted her demeanour accordingly. Not without some slight irritation for she was totally unused to having to take a tactful approach. However, she tried. And Cosimo saw that she tried, and was touched. Touched more than metaphorically for she sat almost in his lap as she squeezed up beside him on an enormous sofa in her office.

"I had an idea I would find you on the island," she said, positively stroking him.

"Did you? I am surprised to hear that since I hardly knew I was coming here myself. And you are the second person to say that to me today. Everyone but myself seems to have anticipated my actions. Very odd."

Cosimo tried to make room between himself and the Queen. But so soon as he made space she shuffled toward him to block the gap with one of her most shapely thighs. She stared right into his eyes, barely blinking, as though to hypnotise him.

"Oh, I knew you wouldn’t miss the festivo, darlink. You enjoyed it so much last time."

It was amazing how she seemed to know more about him than he knew himself. He had only a very hazy recollection of the last time. In fact all his apprehensions were hazy on this extremely unusual day. He seriously wondered if he were suffering from some sort of amnesia.

He made more space. "I really should find Vivienne. She must have wandered off into the woods. But why she should do that I cannot imagine. Where could she have got to? She will think me awfully rude."

Again the stroking hands with the purple nail varnish attempted to calm and soothe him. At the mention of the other woman (all women under eighty were the ‘other woman’ to her) her eyes glowed momentarily. Then she doused their obvious fire with one of her wall-to-wall smiles.

She kissed him – just like that! He was totally unused to such lack of inhibition. And yet he liked it and her sexual attraction was not lost on him, nor was the way she effectively used it to disarm people.

"Cosimo, you are so silly. She is a grown women. She can look after herself. My boys they will dance with her and make her happy." She clapped her hands in great high spirits. "They love to dance, my boys. And if there are no woman – they dance with each other!"

Her loud laughter crackled his eardrums, momentarily stunning him like a blow to the side of the head.

"Well, perhaps you’re right. But I mustn’t stay too long. I must find somewhere to sleep for the night. I have made no arrangements. Are there any good hotels nearby?"

She gave another of her brain-piercing laughs. "Hotels? You are so funny, Cosimo!" She doubled up over his lap. "You don’t need an hotel. Besides, there ain’t none on this part of the island. You will have to go back down into Melton to find something suitable for a man of your wealth and position."

"Well that can easily be arranged. No hotels hereabouts, you say? I can hardly believe it."

Poor Cosimo was a helpless child of civilisation and the idea of a lack of hotel rooms filled him with something very near to panic.

She was reassuring, mothering. "You will stay here, with Momma Sudja. There is masses of room." She waved her arm in a grand sweep but all Cosimo could see was her admittedly large office.

"Oh well, in that case…What about Vivienne? Can she stay too?"

After a short intake of breath, as if to steel herself for the inevitable, she smiled again.

"Yes, of course. We will find her a nice suite all to herself," she said, like an old-fashioned seaside landlady who will tolerate no ‘goings-on’ under her roof.

Cosimo regarded her with some degree of disbelief but said nothing.

"So, now we have sorted that all out, I must have a talk with you about somethink else. I want you to help Sudja. And Sudja, she will help you."

"I will help in any way I can, since you have been so kind to me and my friend."

She gave an irritated sigh. "Never mind your friend, Cosimo. I talk about somethink more important." She came straight to the point. "How you like to work for Sudja?" She gazed brightly straight into his eyes.

Cripes! he thought. How the hell do I get out of this? He looked lovingly back at her, the whirring cogs inside his brain calculating the permutations.

He took her hand and moved closer. Turning the tables on her, using her very own tactics. They were in an almost passionate clinch. One of her boys, desiring a word with her, was at that very moment bowing silently out of the room and just as silently closing the door behind him, thinking he had interrupted an intimate moment between the two of them.

"Darling," said Cosimo, trying not to smile. "I don’t know what you have heard, and it is a long time since we last met. But I am still a very wealthy man. My sons, although very young, run the company now. They are excellent boys and they need room to manoeuvre. I have not worked in earnest for the past couple of years. All my dependants are provided for. Were I to spend lavishly from now to my dying day there would still be a great fortune left when I passed on. All that is behind me, Maksude. I have a different, much more pleasant life now. I read, I travel, I think. I have a lot to think about. I begin to see things I never saw before, some very wonderful things. The universe expands and grows more mysteriously meaningful the deeper I look into it."

He omitted to mention how he sometimes felt bored to tears.

Sudja, of course, had no time for such aristocratic niceties. She had always thought of him as an aristocrat but he was nothing of the sort. He had come up from very humble beginnings.

She attacked again. She was tireless. "No, darlink, I do not mean you work for me from five to nine."

"You mean nine to five?"

"Whatever!" she snapped irritably. Then, cooing again, "No, my sweet man, I do not want a work-sheep." She meant a work-horse. "I want you to do it for your Sudja, as big favour for me. In a – a – advisory capacity. Yes, advisory capacity. We just sit and talk, like now. Sometimes at big table with other people. But not every day. We have meetings, talk a bit, then you go home. You see, Cosimo –"

She looked repentantly and sadly at her hands. "Sudja she is in some difficulty right now. She need the help of her great friend Cosimo. She do not ask for herself only, but for her boys and her people and all the little people who now hate her so much because they think she did a very bad thing and robber them – all those poor working people – of their savings."

She was really over-doing the ethnic speech bit. She sniffed. "As if I, Sudja, would do such!"

Well no, thought Cosimo, not knowingly, you would not do it knowingly. Because despite her somewhat undemocratic, not to say totalitarian, ways, she was certainly not mean-minded. She had warmth and generosity in abundance and was well known for her charitable giving. ‘Big-hearted’ was an apt phrase. Although like many big-hearted people she did a great deal of wrong through not thinking about the consequences of her actions.

He girded his loins for diplomacy. Another fault of these large-emotioned types was that they expected equally dramatic gestures from others. He was un-inclined to become a member of her fawning entourage.

He took her purple-varnished claws into his own hands, squeezed them, then looked straight into her eyes with as gooey an expression as he knew how. "Maksude," he said softly, out-playing her at her own manipulative game. "I would love to help. But there is something you do not know – that very few people are aware of."

"What is that, darlink?" she asked innocently, staring back at him with a hint of rapture in her expression.

He steeled himself for a big lie. "I am afraid, my darling, that I am not well."

It caused him some pain to force back the smile his lips were aching for. His stomach began to clutch in preparation for a fit of heavy laughter. But a moment later, seeing the instant sympathy that clouded her face, he felt guilty and realised at last just how vulnerable she was to emotional blackmail. He took her in his arms as though she were his daughter – or so he told himself.

It was his more noble part that added (and it was a complete after-thought and a great surprise to himself, he had not at all expected it) – "So I will be able to be of assistance to you in a very limited capacity only."

Which was as good as blurting out ‘Yes!’

She brushed this aside. "Oh darlink, whatever is wrong with you?"

He looked sheepish and held his hand to his heart.

For a few seconds she stared at him, wide-eyed with dismay. He felt really, really stupid. "Oh the heart! The heart!" she wailed like some over-dramatic operatic diva. And fell into his arms tearfully.

He placed his right hand upon her head and recalled how they had once before sat together like this. Had it been on Bourne or abroad? He could remember comforting her when she had been in pain, real emotional pain. Something to do with an abusive husband.

Whatever her other qualities and attractions, she had the most beautiful hair, tight curls and waves. The hair a wonderful rich black with amazing highlights and great body and texture. He touched it lightly with his palm and enjoyed the feel of it. Like some dreadful old perv, he thought to himself. And indeed he was a bit fetishistic about hair – and fur. It was her crowning glory he had to admit, even though that was a corny sentiment.

"It’s not as bad as it sounds," he coaxed. "I will help you all I can with your company problems. Just so long as it does not prove too tiring."

Perhaps she saw through his ruse and was humouring him. She was quite capable of that.

"Of course, darlink. We will treat you with the kid gloves. I would not ask, but I know no one else with your great experience in business. You are the master, the genius. Everyone says so. It was for this purpose I wished to see you. I say to myself that Cosimo is the one dear friend who can help poor Sudja. You see I did not forget you like you forget me."

Cosimo was not immune to her flattery nor to the hint of emotional blackmail contained in her last remark. He lapped up the flattery and was abashed by the accusation.

"My dear, business is common sense. The more of it you have, the more successful you are. Don’t be fooled by management training courses and all that crap. Only businesses which have got too big for their boots go in for that malarkey. A small team at the top with one man in control; as little ‘management’ as possible; a properly organised workforce that knows what it’s doing, really knows what it’s doing – and you’re there. The trouble with your company, Maksude –"

She almost purred. She had him netted. She nestled up to him, her big, clever man.

The intimate moment did not last very long. Sudja’s seething brain and active purpose soon had her jumping to her feet with a shriek, having remembered something terribly important that had to be attended to that very minute. Cosimo couldn’t help noticing that everything she did or had a mind to do was of the utmost urgency – and that probably included a trip to the loo.

Since he was now one of the team Cosimo wandered out into the dealing room and started chatting to the lads. They were an incredibly nice bunch and made him feel at home straightaway. The atmosphere of business, of having something to do that couldn’t be put off until tomorrow, was like an aphrodisiac.

The guy in charge, Eric, once the situation had been explained to him and once he had got the O.K. from Sudja on the blower, was only too happy to show Cosimo around and to explain how things worked.

Cosimo made mental notes and, experienced manager that he was, could already see that there were too many staff for the job and that some of their duties were confusingly overlapping. He dared not take notes for fear of putting their backs up but his hands were itching for paper and pen and he had to shove them deep into his trouser pockets to keep them out of harm’s way.

Another worrying feature that struck him immediately was that Sudja’s business interests in many cases covered a similar range of territory as his own – or (mental adjustment!) that of his sons. He would have to tread carefully. He would, of course, favour his sons’ interests above those of all others. Blood being thicker than…

It was a bit naughty, and if Sudja had any sense the thought would have struck her too. But there was no reason why affairs couldn’t proceed in a civilised manner.

But oh! the joy of being useful once again! He felt like a two-year-old with a brand new shiny toy. Now he realised how unsatisfactory life had been these past couple of years and how he had missed his job. And now here came Sudja like the good fairy in the story, waved her wand, and granted his most hidden and deepest wish.

When she returned, as suddenly as she had departed, with a swish and a bang and a scream, Cosimo was deep in conversation with Eric.

"You two boys are getting on like a house in flames!" she shouted, grabbing them both in her arms.

Cosimo beamed. "Indeed. Eric was just telling me that they work in shifts down here."

"Of course! My empire she never sleep. When the sun goes down in England it rises somewhere else. And wherever it rises or sets, there Sudja has her business. New York, Tokyo, London, Paris –wherever!"

"Well, now that I am on the team, you must give me a full list of all your concerns."

"Of course, darlink! But first we must have the contract. Always we start with the contract – no?"

He agreed and was aware that the thought had not even crossed his mind, so eager was he to get going.

"But first we must go down to the hall and see if your lady-friend has turned up and find out what the boys are doing. Coming, darlink?"

She held out her arm and waving goodbye to the worker bees scurrying about the hive, off they went.