Free The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson Page A

there be reprisals? He couldn’t tell. Probably it would have been wiser to hold his tongue. Probably he should have stood there like some dumb animal and breathed the air.
    He stared bleakly at the skylight, a square of blotchy white and grey. It was dismal weather. But still, those moments he had spent outside—the smell of rain-soaked grass, the touch of the raw spring breeze on the back of his hands—had cruelly reminded him of everything he had lost. He thought of Brigitte, and the pain was oddly sharp, abdominal. He thought of how little sex they’d had recently, and that saddened him, though he knew it happened to other couples too, especially when they were working hard and always tired. He remembered how it had been at the beginning, on their first holiday together, in Elba. They had stayed in a small, family-run hotel in the back-streets of Portoferrio. Their room had a high ceiling and a milky, pale-green marble floor. There was an old-fashioned double bed, with a metal headboard and a counterpane made of a satiny pink material. Above the bed was a painting of a gypsy woman with her white blouse pulled down off her shoulders and her chin raised in defiance. Brigitte said the place reminded her of her mad spinster Aunt Cecile’s apartment in Marseille. He watched her unfasten the dark-green shutters and lean on the windowsill, looking out over the town, the strong, slender muscles showing in the back of her calves. . . . Later, while they were making love, a gap had opened in the middle of the bed. It wasn’t a double bed at all, he realised, but two single beds that had been pushed together. The china lamp on the bedside table swayed, then disappeared from view. Amazingly, it didn’t break. A woman’s voice downstairs kept shouting, Mario? Ma-rio? Afterwards, they found themselves between the two beds, on the floor, the counterpane still underneath them. They could have been lying in a hammock. Twenty to eight on a June evening, the clatter of knives and forks in the restaurant below, the waspy rasp of a passing motorino, and Brigitte murmuring, Where am I?
    Of course she knew, really. But the sex had been so abandoned, so all-consuming, that they had, for a short time at least, been lost to themselves. When they returned, they returned to a room they didn’t recognise, a town they didn’t know, which was a shock because they had worked so hard that year, rehearsing, performing, rehearsing again, there had been time for nothing else, and now, suddenly, they were away somewhere, alone together, and their removal, that fact in itself, was almost impossible to believe, a cause for wonder. She lay beneath him on the counterpane, her hands reaching above her head, as if in surrender, the palms facing upwards, the fingers curled. He could see the shadowy hollows under her arms, which she always shaved, and her pointed, almost nonexistent breasts, with nipples that were so sensitive that he could sometimes make her come just by touching them. Her body, though slight, concealed huge energy, an energy she would summon in performance. There had been a night in São Paulo once when he had watched her from the wings of the theatre, and his heart had lifted inside his chest and then stayed there, as if suspended, because she was doing things that he had never imagined she might do, not the steps so much, though they were faultless, but the feeling that informed the steps, and, at the end, bouquets flew out of the darkness in their dozens, the stage was ankle-deep in flowers suddenly, flowers he had never seen before and could not have named. . . . When she walked into the wings towards him, the look of amazement and disbelief must still have been on his face because she said, I know, I don’t know what it was — j’avais des ailes . And then she laughed and said, I was flying, and he held her in his arms and felt her body against his, the muscles taut, heat bursting through her skin, and then someone behind