Dancing with the Enemy by Diane Armstrong

Author:Diane Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HQ Fiction
Published: 2022-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Xanthe

St Helier, April 2019

Before she is fully awake, Xanthe stretches out her arm to feel the other side of the bed but the crumpled sheet is cold and empty. Daniel has gone. Was the tenderness and passion of the previous night merely a dream? Did she really hear him repeat her name in a breathless way no-one had ever done before? And did she quiver in his arms as she joyously lost control and knew that for most of her life, she had been faking it?

Her searching hand touches paper. A handwritten note, hurriedly scrawled. Her head still on the pillow, she reads it. Sorry, had to go. You were sound asleep, didn’t want to wake you. I’ll pick you up at twelve. Can’t wait to see you. Then a PS: I kissed thee ere I left thee, no way but this, that after a night of love to leave you with a kiss!

She laughs aloud. So he’s poetic as well. Like her, he must have studied Othello for his HSC. It’s already ten o’clock, and over a big leisurely breakfast – thankfully unlike Hugh’s spartan meal of dried rusks and hot water she has muesli, scrambled eggs, toast and Nespresso – she reaches for her phone to google The Citadel. She has never heard of Hugh’s favourite book. The Wikipedia entry states that AJ Cronin was a doctor whose autobiographical novel The Citadel was an international bestseller when it was published in 1937. So he was a doctor too. A chain of medicos stretching across nearly a hundred years.

At last it’s twelve o’clock, and she runs outside as soon as she hears Daniel’s car pull up. He jumps out and wraps his arms around her. ‘Let’s go back to bed,’ he murmurs, nuzzling her ear.

She wonders if he’s joking, but she can feel his body harden against her, and a moment later they are running up the stairs two at a time, throwing off their clothes and falling onto the bed, all reference to Othello forgotten.

‘I couldn’t focus on the documents this morning. Couldn’t wait to get you into bed again,’ he says, gazing at her.

‘The earth moved for me too.’ She smiles. ‘And I loved your Othello paraphrase.’

‘I thought of quoting Romeo and Juliet, but I didn’t want to risk bad karma. You know how they ended up.’

‘What about A Midsummer Night’s Dream?’ she suggests

‘You want to be compared to Bottom the Weaver? Or maybe the Ass?’

They burst out laughing and fall back into bed. When they finally get up, they shower together, and he soaps her body so sensually that she feels like making love again.

As they sit at the kitchen table waiting for the coffee to percolate, she says, ‘You mentioned once that you were divorced. Someone from Melbourne?’

What she really wants to know is how long they were together, and what went wrong.

He is stirring the sugar far longer than necessary, and she waits.

Eventually he sums it up. ‘We met too young, lived together too long, and married too late.

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