Fourteen: Bimbo

CABIN Number 3 was airless and stuffy. While James Bond collected our "luggage" from among the trees, I opened the glass slats of the windows and turned down the sheets on the double bed. I should have felt embarrassed, but I didn't. I just enjoyed housekeeping for him by moonlight. Then I tried the shower and found miraculously that there was still full pressure, though farther down the line many stretches of the pipes must have melted. The top cabins were nearer to the main. I stripped off all my clothes and made them into a neat pile and went into the shower and opened a new cake of Camay ("Pamper your Guests with Pink Camay-With a scent like costly French Perfume... blended with Fine Cold Cream" I remembered, because it sounded so succulent, it said on the packet) and began to lather myself all over, gently, because of the bruises.
Through the noise of the shower, I didn't hear him come into the bathroom. But suddenly there were two more hands washing me and a naked body was up against mine and I smelled the sweat and the gunpowder and I turned and laughed up into his grimy face and then I was in his arms and our mouths met in a kiss that seemed as if it would never end while the water poured down and made us shut our eyes.
When my breath was almost exhausted, he pulled me out from under the shower and we kissed again, more slowly, while his hands wandered over my body and desire came in waves of dizziness. I simply couldn't stand it. I said, "Please, James! Please don't! Or I shall fall down. And be gentle. You're hurting me."
In the moonlit dusk of the bathroom, his eyes were only fierce slits. Now they relaxed into tenderness and laughter. "I'm sorry, Viv. It's not my fault. It's my hands. They won't stay away from you. And they ought to be washing me. I'm filthy. You'll have to do it. They won't obey me."
I laughed up at him and pulled him under the shower. "All right, then. But I shan't be gentle. The last time I washed anyone it was a pony when I was about twelve! Anyway, I can hardly see which bit of you's which!" I got hold of the soap. "Put your face down. I'll try not to put too much in your eyes."
"If you put any in, I'll-" My hands stopped the rest of the sentence and I set about scrubbing his face and hair and then moved on down his arms and chest, while he stood bowed and holding with both hands to the water pipe.
I stopped. "You'll have to do the rest."
"Certainly not. And do it properly. You never know. There might be a world war and you'd have to be a nurse. You might as well learn how to wash a man. And anyway, what the hell's this soap? I smell like Cleopatra."
"It's very good. It's got costly French perfume in it. It says so on the package. And you smell delicious. Much better than your gunpowder smell."
He laughed. "Well, get on. But hurry."
So I bent down and began and of course in a minute we were in each other's arms again under the shower and our bodies were slithery with water and soap and he turned the shower off and lifted me out of the shower cabinet and began to dry me lingeringly with the bath towel while I leaned back within his free arm and just let it happen. Then I took the towel and dried him, and then it was silly to wait any longer and he picked me up in his arms and carried me through into the bedroom and laid me down on the bed and I watched through half-closed lashes his pale shape as he went around drawing the curtains and locking up.
And then he was lying beside me.
His hands and his mouth were slow and electric, and his body in my arms was tenderly fierce.
Afterward he told me that when the moment came I screamed. I didn't know I had. I only know that a chasm of piercing sweetness suddenly opened and drowned me and that I dug my nails into his hips to make sure of taking him with me. Then he sleepily said some sweet things and kissed me once and his body slithered away and lay still and I stayed on my back and gazed up into the red darkness and listened to his breathing.

* * *

I had never before made love, full love, with my heart as well as my body. It had been sweet with Derek, cold and satisfying with Kurt. But this was something different. At last I realized what this thing could be in one's life.
I think I know why I gave myself so completely to this man, how I was capable of it with someone I had met only six hours before. Apart from the excitement of his looks, his authority, his maleness, he had come from nowhere, like the prince in the fairy tales, and he had saved me from the dragon. But for him, I would now be dead, after suffering God knows what before. He could have changed the wheel on his car and gone off, or, when danger came, he could have saved his own skin. But he had fought for my life as if it had been his own. And then, when the dragon was dead, he had taken me as his reward. In a few hours, I knew, he would be gone-without protestations of love, without apologies or excuses. And that would be the end of that-gone, finished.
All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful. That and the coinciding of nerves completely relaxed after the removal of tension and danger, the warmth of gratitude, and a woman's natural feeling for her hero. I had no regrets and no shame. There might be many consequences for me- not the least that I might now be dissatisfied with other men. But whatever my troubles were, he would never hear of them. I would not pursue him and try to repeat what there had been between us. I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road, where there would be other women, countless other women, who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn't care, or at least I told myself that I wouldn't care, because none of them would ever own him-own any larger piece of him than I now did. And for all my life I would be grateful to him, for everything. And I would remember him forever as my image of a man.
How silly could one be? What was there to dramatize about this naked male person lying beside me? He was just a professional agent who had done his job. He was trained to fire guns, to kill people. What was so wonderful about that? Brave, strong, ruthless with women-these were the qualities that went with his calling, what he was paid to be. He was only some kind of spy, a spy who had loved me. Not even loved, slept with. Why should I make him my hero, swear never to forget him? I suddenly had an impulse to wake him up and ask him: "Can you be nice? Can you be kind?"
I turned over on my side. He was asleep, breathing quietly, his head resting on his outflung left forearm, his right arm tucked under the pillow. Again the moon outside was bright. Red light filtered through the curtains, mixing the black shadows of his body with shining crimson highlights. I bent closely over him, breathing in his male-ness, longing to touch him, to run my hand down his sunburned back to where the brown became abruptly white where his summer bathing-trunks had been.
After looking long at him, I lay back. No, he was as I had thought him to be. Yes, this was a man to love.

* * *

The red curtains at the other end of the room were moving. Through half-sleeping eyes I wondered why. Outside, the wind had dropped and there was no sound. Lazily I raised my eyes to look above me. The curtains at this end of the room, above our bed, were motionless. There must be a small breeze coming off the lake. Come on! For heaven's sake go to sleep!
And then, with a sudden ripping noise high up on the opposite wall, the bits of curtain hung sideways. And a big, glittering turnip-face, pale and shiny under the moon, was looking through the glass slats!
I never knew that hair could stand up on end. I thought it was invented by writers. But I heard a scratching on the pillow round my ears and I felt the fresh night air on my scalp. "I wanted to scream, but I couldn't." "My limbs were frozen." "I couldn't move hand or foot." I thought these too were fictions. They aren't. I simply lay and stared, noting my physical sensations-even to the symptom that my eyes were so wide open that they ached. But I couldn't move a finger. I was-another phrase from books-frightened stiff, stiff as a board.
The face behind the glass window slats was grinning. Perhaps the teeth were bared, like an animal's, with effort. The moon glistened off the teeth and off the eyes and off the top of the hairless head to make a kind of child's sketch of a face.
The ghost face jerked slowly round the room, looking. It saw the white bed with the twin smudges of the heads on the pillow. It stopped looking and slowly, painfully, a hand, with shiny metal in it, came up beside the head and smashed clumsily downward through the panes of glass.
The noise was a trigger that released me. I screamed and hit sideways with my hand. It probably didn't help. The crash of glass had wakened him. I might even have spoiled his aim. But then came the double roar of guns, the solid slap of bullets into the wall above my head, another great splintering of glass, and the turnip face had gone.
"Are you all right, Viv?" His voice was urgent, desperate.
He saw that I was and didn't wait for an answer. The bed heaved and suddenly the moonlight threw a great block of light through the door. He ran so quietly that I didn't hear his feet on the concrete floor of the carport, but I could visualize him flattening himself against its wall and edging round. I just lay and stared, aghast-another literary word, but an accurate one-at the jagged remains of the window and remembered the glistening, horrible turnip head that must have been a ghost.
James Bond came back. He didn't say a word. The first thing he did was to get me a glass of water. The prosaic action, the first thing a parent does when the child has nightmares, brought back the room and its familiar shapes from the black and red cave of the ghosts and the guns. Then he fetched a bath towel and put a chair under the smashed window and climbed on it and draped the towel over the window.
I was suddenly conscious of the muscles that bunched and relaxed in his naked body and I was amused at how odd a man looks without any clothes on when he is not making love but just moving about a room doing kind of household chores. I thought that perhaps one ought to be a nudist. But perhaps only under forty. I said, "James, don't ever get fat."
He had fixed the towel as a curtain. He got down off the chair and said absent-mindedly, "No. That's right. One shouldn't get fat."
He put the chair tidily back beside the desk where it belonged and picked up his gun that he had put down on the desk. He examined the gun. He went to his small pile of clothes and took out a new clip and substituted it for the old one and came over to the bed and slipped the gun under his pillow.
Now I realized why he had lain like that, with his right hand doubled under the pillow. I guessed that he always slept like that. I thought his must be rather like a fireman's life, always waiting for a call. I thought how extraordinary it must be to have danger as your business.
He came and sat down on the edge of my side of the bed. In the filtering scraps of light his face looked drawn and sort of blasted, as if by shock. He tried to smile, but the tense muscles wouldn't let him and it was only a crooked sketch of a smile. He said, "I nearly got us both killed again. I'm sorry, Viv. I must be losing my touch. If I go on like this I'm going to catch trouble. When the car went into the lake, remember a bit of the roof and the rear window was left sticking out of the water? Well, there was obviously plenty of air trapped in that corner. I was a damned fool not to have worked that out for myself. This fellow Sluggsy only needed to knock out the rear window and swim ashore. He was hit several times. It must have been hard going for him. But he got to our cabin. We ought to be dead ducks. Don't go round the back in the morning. He's not a pretty sight." He looked at me for reassurance. "Anyway, I'm sorry, Viv. It ought never to have happened."
I scrambled off the bed and went and put my arms round him. His body was cold. I hugged him to me and kissed him. "Don't be silly, James! If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't have got into all this mess. And where would I be now if it wasn't for you? I'd not only have been a dead duck, but a roasted one too, hours ago. The trouble with you is you haven't had enough sleep. And you're cold. Come into bed with me. I'll keep you warm." I got up and pulled him to his feet.
He caught me to him. He reached down with both hands and pressed my body hard into his. He held me like that for a time, quite still, and I felt the way his body was gaining warmth from mine. Then he lifted me up and laid me softly back on the bed. And then he took me fiercely, almost cruelly, and once again there came the small scream from someone who was no longer me and then we were lying side by side and his heart was pounding wildly against my breast and I found that my right hand was clenched in his hair.
I relaxed my cramped fingers and reached down for his hand. I said, "James, what's a bimbo?"
"Why?"
"I'll tell you when you've told me."
He laughed sleepily. "It's gangster language for a whore."
"I thought it was something like that. They kept on calling me that. I suppose it must really be true."
"You don't qualify."
"Promise you don't think I'm a bimbo?"
"Promise. You're just a darling chick. I'm cow-simple about you."
"What's that mean?"
"It means crazy for a girl. Now, that's enough questions. Go to sleep." He kissed me gently and turned over on his side.
I curled up against him, fitting myself close in to his back and thighs. "This is a nice way to sleep-like spoons. Good night, James."
"Good night, darling Viv."