Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [103]
“All right.”
She held Chantal out to him. “Let me go and tell Fara.” He took the baby and she went out into the courtyard. Fara was heating water for Chantal’s bath. Jane tested the temperature with her elbow and found it just right. “Make bread for two people, please,” she said in Dari. Fara’s eyes widened, and Jane realized it was shocking for a woman alone to invite a man to supper. To hell with all that, she thought. She picked up the pot of water and carried it back into the house.
Ellis was sitting on the big cushion under the oil lamp, dandling Chantal on his knee, saying a rhyme in a low voice. His big hairy hands encircled her tiny pink body. She was looking up at him, gurgling happily and kicking her fat feet. Jane stopped in the doorway, transfixed by the scene, and a thought came unbidden into her mind: Ellis should have been Chantal’s father.
Is that true? she asked herself as she looked at them. Do I really wish it?
Ellis finished the rhyme and looked up at her and smiled a little sheepishly, and she thought: Yes, I really do.
They walked up the mountainside at midnight, Jane leading the way, Ellis following with his big down sleeping bag under his arm. They had bathed Chantal, eaten their meager supper of bread and curds, fed Chantal again, and settled the baby down for the night on the roof, where she was now fast asleep beside Fara, who would protect her with her life. Ellis had wanted to take Jane away from the house where she had been someone else’s wife, and Jane had felt the same, so she had said: “I know a place where we can go.”
Now she turned off the mountain path and led Ellis across the sloping, stony ground to her secret retreat, the concealed ledge where she had sun-bathed naked and oiled her tummy before Chantal was born. She found it easily in the moonlight. She looked down into the village, where the embers of cooking fires glowed in the courtyards and a few lamps still flickered behind glassless windows. She could just about make out the shape of her house. In a few hours, as soon as day began to break, she would be able to see the sleeping forms of Chantal and Fara on the roof. She would be glad: this was the first time she had left Chantal at night.
She turned around. Ellis had completely unzipped the sleeping bag and was spreading it on the ground like a blanket. Jane felt awkward and uncomfortable. The surge of warmth and lust which had overcome her in the house, when she watched him saying a nursery rhyme to her baby, had gone. All her old feelings had returned, momentarily: the urge to touch him, her love of the way he smiled when he felt self-conscious, the need to feel his big hands on her skin, the obsessive wish to see him naked. A few weeks before Chantal was born she had lost her desire for sex, and it had not come back until that moment. But that mood had been dissipated, bit by bit, in the succeeding hours, as they had made clumsy practical arrangements to be alone, for all the world like a pair of teenagers trying to get away from their parents for a petting session.
“Come and sit down,” Ellis said.
She sat beside him on the sleeping bag. They both looked down at the darkened village. They were not touching. There was a moment of strained silence. “Nobody else has ever been here,” Jane remarked, just for something to say.
“What did you use it for?”
“Oh, I just used to lie in the sun and think about nothing,” she said.
Then she thought, Oh, what the hell, and she said: “No, that’s not quite true, I used to masturbate.”
He laughed, then put his arm around her and hugged her. “I’m glad you still haven’t learned to mince your words,” he said.
She turned her face to him. He kissed her mouth softly. He likes me for my faults, she thought: my tactlessness and my quick temper and my cursing, my willfulness and my being opinionated. “You don’t want to change me,” she said.
“Oh, Jane, I’ve missed you.” He closed his eyes and spoke in a murmur.