Free Turning Back the Sun by Colin Thubron Page B

else. For a while her gaze would drain him and her body would cling, as if they might complete one another. Then she would say, “Don”t talk. Just loveme,” and close her eyes. She wanted him both as lover and friend, but the two could not, in the end, overlap. The man who entered her had to be a stranger.
    Once, watching her writhe in his arms as if in some private trance, he said bemusedly, “I might as well be a stud.”
    Her eyes opened in distress. “No … no. It”s not important.”
    “What isn”t?”
    “Sex.” She looked shy, as if she had just focused him. “I”ve never really wanted sex.”
    He drew back from her, astonished. He”d believed her more erotic than him. She”d had affairs since she was sixteen.
    She said, “I”ve only wanted male companionship, in the end. That”s why I went wild as a girl. I just wanted to be held.”
    She shot him a depleted smile. Suddenly, staring down at her, he imagined all the men in whose carnal energies she had looked for love—including, perhaps, his own—and felt sick with pity.
    But she saw his expression and started to laugh. “Don”t look like that. Christ! I was using them too. I wasn”t so badly treated, except by Ivar.”
    “I wanted to ask about that.”
    So they sat up against the pillows in one another”s arms, and talked about Ivar. She tilted her head a little away, as if freeing herself to judge or remember, but her words came in bursts of self-contempt.
    “I should have known it”d be no good. He and his army friends had been picking girls up at the club for nearly a year, and I thought I had his measure.” She still sounded angry. “Then, out of nowhere, I fell in love with him. It”s the only time it”s happened to me like that. He”d been trying to get me for months, and one morning I just woke up knowing, “I love him.” “ She gave a disdainful laugh. “But it wasn”t for long. Three months, I think.”
    Rayner thought he could guess Ivar”s allure for women: the malleable face, quite sensual in its softness, which could deploy expressions by remote control and was, in its way, perfectly sincere.
    Zoë said, “But he”s cold at heart, Ivar. Dead. He doesn”t want a woman, he wants a servant. There”s something in him … something … not there at all. So he humiliates you. You go mad for him and he stays utterly sane.”
    “Why were you so hurt?”
    She said, “Just that he didn”t care.” Her look of depletion returned. Her fingers kneaded his. “He treated love as a kind of … eccentricity. Women don”t really exist for him, you know. Not as people. He thinks he likes intelligent women, but he doesn”t. He doesn”t like stupid ones either. Poor Felicie.”
    Rayner felt a stab of jealousy. He turned and lifted Zoë against him. Her body had turned cool with the night.
    “I don”t want to feel that ever again,” she said, as if guessing his sadness. “You”re better than he is.”
    She closed her mouth over his to stop it talking, and for long minutes Rayner gave up thinking as he moved with the rhythm of the soft, schizophrenic body under his. Only later, as she clung to him with what might have been gratitude, and sighed a little, did he remember the man he couldn”t be for her, and his jealousy returned. In exchange for her deep, helpless commitment, he knew, he would have given up all that he elicited in respect and affection. Like Ivar, he thought uneasily, he wanted to own her.
    The weather held until their last day. Then the haze which had lain all week over the lake bloomed malignantly to suffocate the sky, and the sun disappeared. It felt like the stifling prelude to a storm—which never came. Without the sun, time vanished. Rayner swam withclosed eyes where the shore steepened under canopies of trees. His slow breaststrokes parted a flotsam of rotted coconut husks and palm leaves. He thought about Ivar: how most people must seem mad to him. Zoë had simmered under his calm for a while, then