The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [211]
Even now the thought of what she had done to George gave him a momentary twinge of nausea. And George's face, as he had last seen it that hot Sunday afternoon in Peshawar, was still painfully clear in his memory. But Belinda's eluded him, and trying to recall her, Ash discovered that he could only remember that her eyes had been blue and her hair yellow; but not what she had actually looked like, or how she had spoken or moved or laughed. She seemed to have faded as an old daguerreotype will do if left too long in the sun, and considering all the emotional agonies he had suffered on her account, it was disconcerting to discover that he could remember Lily Briggs far more clearly. Though perhaps that was not so surprising for Lily had encouraged him to explore and caress every inch of her warm nakedness, while with Belinda, respect had kept his love-making strictly within bounds, and on those rare occasions when he had been permitted to take her befrilled and trimly corseted shape in his arms, his kisses could hardly have been more reverent had he been a Russian peasant kissing an ikon.
Sensuality had had no place in his affair with Belinda, while sensual pleasure had been the sole purpose of all the previous ones. With the result that, having experienced these two extremes, he had decided that he had now learned everything about women; and disliking what he knew, was cured for ever of falling in love (in the circumstances, an understandable reaction, though hardly an original one). Yet now, like many a disillusioned lover before him, he had fallen in love again. And it seemed like the first and only time: and would, he knew without any doubt, be the last.
There had been no joy in this discovery, for it was something that he would have given a great deal to avoid; and had there been any choice he would, even now, have elected to escape it, because he could see no solution that did not spell despair either for himself or Juli: or possibly for both of them. But as far as he was concerned, there was nothing he could do about it; it had been too late from the night that he had given her back his half of the little mother-of-pearl fish and had taken her into his arms, and known in the same instant that they belonged together just as surely as the two halves of the broken charm, and that it was not only Juli's luck-piece but he, Ash, who had been made whole again – and happy beyond words. He could not change that even if he would, nor could he analyse it or explain it away. It was simply there – like sight or sunlight or the air he breathed. An integral part of him…
Juli was as unlike any other woman he had ever known as a blue day in the Himalayas is unlike a grey one on Salisbury Plain. There was nothing that he could not tell her or that she would not understand, and to lose her now would be like losing his heart and his soul. And what man can live without the one, or hope for Heaven without the other?
‘I cannot give her up,’ thought Ash. ‘I cannot… I cannot!’
A night-jar flitted down the dry watercourse and came to rest on a boulder, unaware that the motionless figure within a yard of it was a man, and a foraging mongoose paused, nose a-twitch, and deciding that the human was not dangerous, crept forward to investigate. But Ash was not aware of them: he was locked away in a private world, and so lost in thought that had there been dacoits abroad that night he might never have returned to camp, because the discovery that he could not face losing Juli was merely a first step on a long and dangerous road, and it was only when he had taken it that he began to see clearly how formidable were the barriers