Authors: Roberta Latow
Only in the Night (3 page)
He was the first out of the bath. Eliza watched him dry himself off. He looked so dark and virile. He was something rugged and rough, a man of the land, a hunter, a passionate man. One could never equate him with finesse; he was a simple man, without artifice. And that, and his animal passion for the woman he loved, was his power. Eliza was mesmerised by his body, so hard and muscular. To see him naked, as she was seeing him now, was to be reminded of his tremendous sexual stamina, the lengths he would go to give her sexual pleasure, how he cared for her when they were over the erotic edge into a world of lust and depravity where she was ready to die in his arms in sexual bliss.
She watched him lather his handsome face: the Roman nose, dark and sultry eyes under lashes long and thick, so very seductive for a man, sensual lips set in a square face above a jaw with a deep cleft in it. He always shaved before dinner and she watched him now,
scraping away the day’s beard, and marvelled that he should be hers, that they should be together in love and lust, and that no man or woman, nothing in the world, could ever change that. She raised the water-logged sponge from the bath and squeezed the water over her shoulders, never taking her eyes from the reflection of his face in the mirror. She was reminded of the many hearts he had unwillingly broken in his life: women, girls, men even, who had fallen in love or lust with him and whom he had not loved. She still saw many a head turn in his direction: women younger and more beautiful than she who wanted him, who could not understand how or why he had chosen to love her and only her. The Italians loved Eliza for loving Vittorio Carducci, for choosing one of them. Eliza and Vittorio were a Tuscan love story because of who and what they were. They embodied the romantic passion that the Italians thrived on and the English were embarrassed by and ran away from, or at best simply ignored.
She rose from the bath and he brought her a terrycloth robe and helped her on with it. ‘I will go and have a drink with some of the boys. Dinner?’ he asked.
‘Nine o’clock.’
‘Good.’ He kissed her again and suggested, ‘You look tired. Why not take a nap before dinner? You have time.’
He was right. He walked with her to their bed where she lay down and he placed an aged, lace-trimmed white linen sheet over her. They smiled at each other and he left the room.
Eliza fell into a deep dreamless sleep and when she awakened it was dark. Night had fallen, but it was
bright with a sliver of moon and a sky studded with stars. She dressed and went down to the kitchen. There she found Giacomo, Amiata the cleaner, Francesca the cook and Paolo the gardener, sitting round the table set for dinner. These were old retainers who had been here most of their lives and who kept the forty-six-roomed house in running order.
It was the custom of Eliza’s household that they all had dinner together at the long wooden table placed in front of the huge stone fireplace, unless specified differently by either Eliza or Vittorio. The evening meal at the villa never had less than the household staff and Eliza and Vittorio at table. The household had a reputation for simple hospitality and it was not unusual for other of the estate workers or a neighbour to drop in for a meal. The Montecatinis had always been known for their table. Their food, wine and generosity extended to open invitations to their Tuscan neighbours. And who knew who Vittorio might bring home?
Eliza looked in several pots, broke off a piece of bread and sat down at the table after greeting everyone. Giacomo served her a goblet of wine, Francesca sliced her a piece of salami. It was cosy, it was home. This was her family, and her life. She listened to Giacomo and the gardener discussing some work that needed doing in the conservatory and Francesca humming a song, and felt happy and content with the world. It had been another lovely day in her life.
Amanda Dix came to mind, and the tea party she had produced for the farmer’s fiancée. It made Eliza smile. She’d liked Amanda and thought it too bad they could not be friends. But then, Amanda Dix’s curiosity
might make them friends. She seemed to be the type of woman who would have to know what had brought Eliza to her downfall: marriage to a near-illiterate farmer. She sipped her wine and laughed aloud as her mind ranged back over the life she had had to live to get here tonight, drinking in her kitchen, waiting for the man she loved to come home for dinner.
Julian Forrester commanded respect in just the way his father and grandfather had, as indeed had all his ancestors living for three hundred years in the Cotswolds. They were county people. In his quiet, unassuming way Julian had power, the kind of power that gets things done, and it was that power, and the prime tracts of land that had been in the family for generations and made him an important landowner, that gained him and his family entrée into the best manor houses and stately homes within a seventy-five-mile radius of Little Barrington where he and his family lived.
The Forresters were land rich and cash poor; it was the history of their family and everyone knew it. The family did not so much work their land as conserve it. It meant their income was paltry but other equally important landowners, who had for generations been trying to buy Forrester land, had nothing but admiration and envy for the family’s ability to say no.
Everyone liked the Forresters, who were quintessential English eccentrics: they should have been aristocrats but were bourgeois; they should have been snobs but for the most part found their own company more amusing than society and crossed all class barriers in their friendships. They rode with the local
hunt, a family passion, and were a formidable sight when they went out: mother, father and five daughters. Theirs was the best pheasant shoot in the area but none of them shot. They all fished their trout streams, and they all travelled. Everyone considered them colourful rather than exotic, because they remained so very English in spite of the family’s speaking several languages and Dulcima Forrester’s having been born in Italy, the youngest daughter of the English branch of the Montecatini family.
From July to mid-September the Forresters were never in Little Barrington. They packed up and transported themselves to the Villa Montecatini, between Bagni di Lucca and Barga in Tuscany, where they lived and played with life much as they did in England. They were barefoot summers where everyone did much as they chose to and the house received a multitude of visitors and relatives. Where everyone pitched in at harvest-time or cleaned and polished the house on Dulcima’s insistence that a spring clean was better than an inventory; it gave everyone a chance to appreciate what they had.
They half-heartedly groomed the overgrown gardens and repaired the summer awnings, even though the Forresters preferred the rundown condition of the Monetcatini estate. It reeked of time and heritage and suited their streak of inverted snobbery. They rode their horses cross-country to visit their neighbours or to swim in the sea – when they chose not to swim in the lake, or the still-elegant pool installed on the eve of the first world war. There were fierce games of tennis played on clay, croquet on the lawn, and every year there was a cricket match. They made endless fun,
touring the countryside in vintage cars inherited from the family and kept in running order by a neighbour in exchange for his racing them in rallies. Money was not very important to the Forresters who in Tuscany relied more on a barter system than anything else. In fact, not one of the family had the least understanding of how to make or keep money. They were actually disinterested, thinking money something not quite vulgar but close to it.
Summer romances seemed to be always in the air. The five Forrester girls were very good-looking and popular. Boys came from England; the local lads courted them. The more prosperous and worldly young Romans, summering in their own family villas, were besotted by the blonde and incredibly unrestrained sisters. The many Tuscan cousins who adored the English branch of the family were always falling in love with them. There was never a time without one or two romances on the go for the family to tease the girls about.
Dendra Forrester’s constant summer time companion was the saddler’s son until, much to her mother’s and father’s horror, she fell in love with the heir to an Earldom and left the bosom of her family to marry well and live a more grand life. Constanza Forrester was swept off her feet by an American and one July they held a wedding at the villa before she left them for West Virginia. Eliza was in love with the farmer’s son, Vittorio, and had been since she was six years old, and Clara with his brother. The two sisters dreamed of how one day, when they were old enough, they would marry their handsome young Italians and live together happily ever after in the villa
six months of the year then bring them home to Little Barrington for the other six months. Effie Forrester declared she would never marry but have many lovers and adventures and travel as a photojournalist, which she did in fact do.
This then was Eliza’s immediate family, her legacy, and what gained the Forresters their reputation for being both solid and frivolous, interesting and amusing. Except for Effie, none of the girls was ambitious nor were they career-minded. They were really country girls: excellent horsewomen, lovers of the countryside, who thought that their lives would go on forever as they had started. They were all well read: tutors lived with the family, teaching the girls English literature and languages, Italian, French. For several summers there had even been a Greek tutor, but higher education was not a priority, any more than marriage was, which was why when the girls did fall in love and marry, it was always a shock to the family.
Vittorio’s father was a tenant farmer on the Montecatini estate, and yet the Forresters depended on him because what he made from the farm he shared with them. That was the only income that kept the Carducci family and the Villa Montecatini going. Vittorio had the run of the house as a friend of the children and their cousins, and later as the boyfriend of Eliza. It was more of a surprise
not
to see him there than it was to see him. The years rolled on. Eliza and he became inseparable and displayed their love for each other openly. It never occurred to any of the family, except Eliza, that the sweet love affair which they all enjoyed watching would not one day die a natural death by merely running its course. The
couple were after all worlds apart, with not much in common.
It therefore came as a surprise to Julian Forrester when his wife Dulcima said on the evening of Eliza’s sixteenth birthday, ‘Do you think they know love is running out for them? It will be a terrible blow for Vittorio. It always is for the one that’s left behind. I’ll not be happy to see the boy badly hurt.’
That night Vittorio and Eliza did not realise that their life together was threatened. Nor did they realise it the following summer when sex came into their lives.
Vittorio, three years older than Eliza, had been having sex since he was fourteen years old. Women as well as girls had always pursued the boy. He had a sexual aura about him that triggered lust in those who were ready and willing for an uncomplicated sexual affair. But sex for a poor farm boy in a sexually repressed society was no easy thing, especially one who was in love. Of course he wanted sex with Eliza, he had an erotic passion for her as well as love, but she was too young. He prided himself on his ability to wait for sex with her until she was old enough, ready enough, had a hunger for it. He promised himself he would be the best lover in the world for the girl he loved and wanted to make a life with.
It was his luck and one of the tragedies of his life that when he was sixteen he was hired by a beautiful lady, a famous French writer, who lived in a farmhouse several miles from the Villa Montecatini to do odd jobs for her. She seduced the boy and for several years they were secret lovers. It was she who taught him how to channel his sexual energy into becoming a quite remarkable lover. Their erotic life was adventurous
and since both had very strong libidos they were well matched in their desires and the amount of sex it took to keep them content. Through their sex life they became friends and he confided in her his passion for Eliza, their love for each other, their dreams that one day they would consummate their love and marry.
Since Eliza was fourteen years old she and Vittorio had been kissing and petting, lying naked in each other’s arms, exciting each other. They were able to set each other aflame: masturbating, coming separately and together, declaring undying love. But never did they have intercourse. As Eliza awakened sexually, she wanted to know everything about Vittorio’s sex life and was astounded to know that he had one, though he did not tell her with whom. Eliza found it more fascinating than anything else that he should have sex with a woman who had nothing to do with their lives. It actually excited her to hear him tell of the delights sex could bring, how it would be with them. By the time she returned for her seventeenth summer in Tuscany they both knew they could wait no longer, they simply had to have each other.
The family arrived from England around eleven in the morning on a very hot day in late-May. Off came Eliza’s shoes and she was out of the house looking for Vittorio. No one thought anything of it; she had been doing exactly that same thing for ten years. He and several men were working in the peach orchard when he heard her calling and saw her running down the hill through the trees towards him. Vittorio dropped the spade he was working with and broke into a run uphill towards her. They crashed into each other’s arms. It had been nearly ten months since they had seen each
other. She always wrote, he rarely, though sometimes he would call. Not a word needed to be said. They knew it was time for them to express their feelings with their bodies as they had never done before.
Their hearts were pounding as he swung her up and into his arms and began kissing her. ‘I missed you, I love you, I want you, I need you,’ she whispered huskily in his ear as tears of emotion and anguish from months of pent-up frustratration ran down her cheeks. He carried her over to where his horse stood tethered under a peach tree heavy with blossom. Placing her on the horse in front of him, he leaped into the saddle and pulled her against his chest. His arms went around her and he caressed her full breasts and pinched her nipples. He sensed the tremor that went through her body and bit into the side of her neck, sucking her flesh into his mouth. She unzipped her blue jeans and, taking his hands from her breasts, placed them over her mound of pubic hair. Then she slipped the knot and took the reins in her hands and led the horse from under the tree.
With one arm tight round her and holding her hard against him, Vittorio eased the horse into a canter and then a gallop out of the orchard, to the sound of the men he had left behind hooting and hollering joyously for the lovers.
They had a private place they liked to think of as being all their own and that was where they rode to. The lovers left their clothes strewn on the grass. Eliza climbed into his arms and, wrapping her legs tight around his waist, began kissing him: his lips, his eyes, his cheeks. She bit into his neck and licked and sucked his flesh, and in between her kisses and caresses she
begged him, ‘Vittorio, please fuck me. So many nights of imagining and yearning! I keep coming just thinking about you, about us. I’m coming now but I feel empty, alone, and always will until you take me.’
He leaned her naked back against the rough bark of their tree and placed the palm of her hand against the carved heart with their initials inscribed in it, which years ago had made it
their
tree. ‘You are my life,’ he told her, and pressed a deep and passionate kiss upon her.
Without further ceremony he raised her by the waist and impaled her on himself. She screamed with pain, shock, excitement. The thrill of feeling a man taking possession of her for the first time, ridding her of what had become burdensome virginity, was an act more violent than she had expected. It left her breathless. Only his deep kisses, the hunger for her that made him bite into her lips, and the manner in which her body submitted to his assault on her cunt, allowed her to go with the thrustings, take them for what they were. It was a matter of minutes before she experienced multiple orgasm. Her body stiffened, she felt hot and flushed as they flowed. With Vittorio she was able to drift off into a special kind of ecstasy that she had never experienced before. In his fucking he was transporting her to a place she had never been; a place that was as sublimely pleasurable as it was painful. She sensed that the pain would vanish and that there were to be unimagined pleasures in sex just waiting for her to discover them.
For Vittorio, this first sex with Eliza was a discovery. His love had sexual needs and demands to be fulfilled. He had learned from Janine about natural
eroticism, and though he was thrilled to learn that the girl he loved possessed it, he was at the same time surprised to find her such a sexual being. Eliza, though sensuous-looking, had a manner that was soft, a sweet nature, simple and never demanding. And now this discovery! He had never imagined that beneath those traits was a fiery need for sex and a man.
They lay in the grass, wrapped in each other’s arms, for nearly an hour before they spoke and then it was not with words but their bodies yet again. It was dusk before they dressed and mounted the horse to ride home. During those hours they had had sex several more times in new and thrilling ways, and Eliza began to understand that sex with Vittorio was to be better, more thrilling, with every act of submission on her part. All she had to do was give herself up to sex and the rewards would be special moments of intimacy that led to a kind of oblivion unique to sex, the erotic, and relating to a man.
The house was ablaze with lamplight. Eliza was aware that everything looked the same but nothing would ever be the same for her again. A new world had opened up for her and Vittorio. She had mixed feelings: sadness that they would be leaving something of themselves behind, their youth, their innocence, but excitement too for a future of sensations and experiences she had never thought or dreamed of. Her thoughts were broken when Vittorio asked, ‘You are happy about what happened today? You have to be happy!’
‘Yes, I am,’ she told him, and while still on the horse and leaning against his chest, turned to kiss him and prove to him that she was.
‘I’ve marked you for life now. You’re mine, and will never be anyone else’s as much as you are mine.’
