Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright Read Free Book Online Page B

drives away. She looks intriguingly mysterious. I know nothing about her life beyond the hotel. But in bed she tells me that she loves me, which calms me.
    After her adventures in Sheffield, Emily was awkward in bed and then, alarmingly quickly, she became distracted as if she was having sex with a spirit, who was standing in for me. She was expecting a healing, even spiritual, epiphany, and when it happened her body was racked fiercely and she cried, and then whimpered, her pale eyes swimming into focus, as if she was trying to remember who I was. Her painful realisation that it was not the hairy littérateur – and fraud – Edgar Gaylard, ruined our last sexual encounter. Also, I thought Emily looked increasingly like Virginia Woolf. She rearranged her hair into a bun, primly, without speaking to me. I had the impression she was trying to destroy the evidence.
    Sex with Noor is gracious and unhurried as if it is a well-understood and ancient ritual. The aureoles on her breasts are dark. Lying next to her, eating pistachio nuts, some shells escaping into the bed, a sheen on our bodies, the fragrance of jasmine and almond coming on the night air through the open window on the same breeze that brings the strains of the flutes and the harsh percussion, I think that Noor believes that her role is to please – not a particularly contemporary attitude. She is what the Bible calls the tender and luxurious woman. Maybe she has a Levantine way of regarding sex, not as a Freudian purging of our demons, but as a sensual, courtly expression of being human. When I asked Noor about her life, she gave me an anodyne history; she told me how much she loved McGill and how she learned French in Montreal and studied international development. Now she kisses me:
    ‘And I love you.’
    Her parents are Christian: they left for Canada thirty years ago just before she was born. She has a brother in Toronto, something to do with electronics, and she has an apartment there and works for the Morning Star and for the CBC. Because she speaks Arabic, she has become a Middle East correspondent. That’s about it.
    We have a large jug of blood orange juice beside the bed. She doesn’t drink alcohol. Her breasts loll slightly to each side. They contain some weighty element, which responds slowly. I pour a few drops of orange juice on her dark nipples and lick them.
    ‘Taste good?’
    ‘The best.’
    ‘My nipples are tightening up.’
    ‘Is that nice?’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    I have a swig of beer. It’s brewed in the all-Christian village of Taybeh, on the road to Jericho. Noor tells me she is related to the family that owns the brewery. She says that Muslims in the surrounding villages were hostile when the brewery was first set up.
    Taybeh beer is pretty good.
    ‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘there is a belief here that some of us Palestinian Christians have red hair because of our Crusader blood?’
    ‘It could be true. Richard the Lionheart was a ginger-nut.’
    ‘A ginger-nut?’
    ‘A redhead. Six foot five, a red giant. Your ancestor, definitely.’
    ‘If he was gay, of course, it can’t be true.’
    ‘He wasn’t gay. He’s a gay icon only because he spent no time with his wife and had no children. Not officially. He did have one illegitimate child, a boy, who he recognised.’
    ‘I heard he slept with the King of France.’
    ‘In those days it was a diplomatic move to sleep in the same room as another king to demonstrate your trust. There were lots of servants in the room. And by the way, the first time anyone suggested he was gay was in 1948. In medieval times he had a reputation for being very keen to get his hands on captured women. They were part of the spoils of war.’
    She moves fluently on top of me. Her skin is lubricated by mysterious oils.
    ‘One for the road, old chap?’
    ‘Why not? Noor, just a tip, lay off the accents and stick to what you are good at.’
    ‘I think I can guess what that would be.’
     
    When she has