EUPHORIA INAMORATA

CHAPTER 1 - PAUL

                            1969

He woke abruptly and with such immediate clarity of mind it was as if he had never slept, as if the night’s buzzing thoughts had halted only for the shortest breathing-space But in that moment the sup had lifted over Nantucket Sound, squeezing its rays through the half-drawn shutters filling white-painted bedroom with fierce summer sun.

Instantly his heart was hammering Flinging back the covers, he reached for the watch lying next to his battered Leica on the bedside table.

Six forty-six Six forty-six

Breathing out, he flopped back onto the pillow nothing and no one stirred in this house before nine. It was Aunt Cora-Beth’s invariable rule, even at Christmas or Thanks giving or when, as now, there were special guests staying She would hardly change that simply because it was his birthday, even his sixteenth and the most important in his short, sequestered life. The day when, by her own promise, he would become a man..

Nevertheless, as he lay still, the sheet tangled about his lean frame, he strained his ears for sounds of activity from his aunt’s room along the landing or Diana’s next door.

He heard none, only the softest murmur of wind in the pitch pine and the scrub oak in the dunes that kept the house from the worst of the winter north-easterlies, the shrill echoes, tot of gull and plover and term. Sounds as Familiar, as unremarked, as the salt tang hanging on the faintest breeze.

Old admonitions of his aunt’s echoed through his mind Patience, Paul – that’s the best lesson a young man can learn in his dealings with the female sex. I know you young fellows, it only takes a thought to get you ready and then you want to shoot off as quick as you can. Well, a woman ‘t like that. She needs to be stroked and soothed and brought to readiness in her own good time. If every man was caught to do that, as I intend to teach you, there’d be less unhappiness in the world... Was that, he wondered, why she had let Diana see him naked earlier that week?

Alone in the house, when his tutors had gone and Joseph and Louisa had returned to their garage apartment, their domestic tanks done, he and his aunt often stripped and swam, costumeless, in the big glass-rood pool at the rear It was a warm, intimate place, the going chill of the marbled surround cancelled by the card wooden vaulting that looped low overhead, like then an upturned boat or the stomach of some vast whale both appropriate similes since a rich whaling captain od built it as a conservatory a century and a half before

But Paul’s thoughts had been focused exclusively on the present when, finishing a light lunch at the poolside, his aunt suggested that Diana join them immediately in the water

The girl gave him a quizzical glance across the small oak dining table, a look hall wary, half amused.

Will young Angel Face be safe? She asked his aunt He recognized the remark as humorous, though the joke eluded him, and Cora-Beth's face darkened. 'We don't," she said briskly, 'have worries of that kind around here. As well you know, Diana."

The girl laughed infectiously, but in a way that com- pounded the elusive joke so that Paul felt excluded, as Cora-Beth never excluded him, and self-conscious as a result. Or perhaps his consciousness was more of the girl.

She had been at the house almost a week by then, an encounter group friend from Cora-Beth's excursions to the West Coast. For as long as he remembered he had seen his aunt naked almost every day, as she had seen him, and he accepted her beauty as a fact of life. But Cora-Beth was almost forty now; Diana was half that, tall, long-legged and blonde, with the sheen of youth in her scrubbed, Californian face. He had never seen a girl so close to his own age unclothed before and was frankly curious. And yet to have his curiosity acknowledged and mocked, as her laughter seemed to do, was strangely disconcerting.

As she bent, smiling, to draw her tee-shirt over her head, he turned away deliberately, busying himself unbuttoning his shirt and shrugging down his jeans until he heard the crisp splash of her dive. Then he watched her move swiftly away down the pool, cleaving the water as sleekly as the seals he photographed off the sand bars at the end of the estate shoreline. Cora-Beth's playful caught him unawares.

'Come on, Paul. Don't dawdle now!' She was stepping out of her own pants. Grinning, Paul kicked off his sneakers and beat her into the pool in a smooth double dive. Clear and body-hot, the water enfolded him like a liquid glove. Surfacing, he struck o towards Diana, overtaking her as he began to relish his own speed and power. Immediately, to his delight, they were racing, East Coast against West, Atlantic-trained against Pacific. For two lengths they were neck and neck. Then he drew ahead, stroke by stroke, until she was lost to view He swirled to a halt in the shallow end, standing up, gasping, to look back. There was no sign of her. Cora-Beth was ploughing a sedate width at the opposite end.

Puzzled, he hoisted himself out of the water, flopping down on the tiled side and dangling his feet. Instantly something brushed his toes underwater. A pale, sinuous shape rippled below him and Diana burst to the surface, tossing a swathe of damp-darkened hair from her face in the same movement and gasping with laughter. 'Hey, you're good!"

Just practice.' His satisfied grin made nonsense of his modesty the girl smiled and closed her eyes to shake more droplets from her hair. She was standing no more than an arm's length in front of him, hip-deep in the shimmering water. Rivulets trickled down her broad shoulders, funnelled into the steep valley between her breasts.

They high, round breasts, smaller and firmer than Cora-Beth's. He had never seen such smooth, taut flesh. It had a lustre all its own, a glow of vitality that was more than the pale honey tan that covered her body, more than mere prettiness, too, for in features alone Cora-Beth was the more striking. It drew him in a way and with a strength he had never felt before.

'Have you seen enough?" Her matter-of-fact tone sounded like a reproof, but when he switched his gaze to her eyes she regarded him with amusement.

'I didn't mean to stare.'

She continued to look at him, her expression growing

thoughtful. How long have you lived here with Cora-Beth, Paul?' 'Since my folks died-when I was seven or eight, I guess."

She nodded, as though digesting this, and he saw how

her nipples were tiny pink buds hardly bigger than his own.

You don't have many friends your own age, do you?' she said at last.

He shrugged. The thought had rarely occurred to him. He had his camera and the seashore, tutors to talk to in the day, Aunt Cora in the evenings, and Joseph and Louisa, when they were around. Once or twice a year Uncle Bernard brought his two boys from his new marriage in the South, but they struck him as a sullen pair, bored by the isolation of the estate, too intent upon their own business or private jokes they never shared.

'It doesn't bother me,' he said. To his surprise, laughter bubbled into the girl's throat 'Not a lot bothers you, does it?' she grinned.

He looked at her, then glanced down where her gaze had fallen. Though he had been only dimly aware of it, his penis had risen from his lap, thick and broad-capped, almost to its full stiffness.

'Oh,' he said, 'that happens all the time." 'I'll bet it does!' Diana laughed so shrilly he stared at her.

Her pale blue eyes shone with a brightness and a questioning he did not recognize 'Cora-Beth never talked to you about things like that? she queried

He had no idea what she meant, but the fault, he sensed, was his rather than hers. Seeing the confusion in his face, she laughed again, dismissively, shaking her head so that the damp curtain of her hair slapped against her checks. You know you're cute,' she said, and smiled such a broad, dazzling smile he felt the shock of it in the pit of his stomach.