The Passionate Sinner by Violet Winspear Page A

for not leaving him to face the typhoon in his lonely darkness.
    ‘You are welcome, mynheer,’ she replied. ‘Would you like some more coffee?’
    ‘If you please, my geisha.’

CHAPTER FIVE
    As the afternoon waned the winds had reached such force that Paul estimated they must be tearing across the ocean and the island at the rate of fifty to sixty miles an hour, and they still hadn’t reached the peak of their intensity. The ocean swell would be terrific, he told Merlin, the sea rising to meet the rain-drenched skies in a kind of cauldron that a gigantic ladle would be stirring round and round in an anti-clockwise motion.
    ‘Do you think we might be in the eye of the storm?’ she asked him.
    ‘The devil’s eye,’ he drawled, cheroot smoke pluming from his lips. ‘If so it will come like a clap of doom and there will be no time for goodbye or regret. Put another record on the gramophone, mevrouw. Let us stay as cheerful as possible, and those old recordings help to drown out some of the noise.’
    He had found the ancient wind-up machine in the den, along with a box of equally old-fashioned records and they had passed some of the time playing them. He had also brought a bottle and a pair of glasses from that trip to the den; bang wine, he had said, which he was saving for the moment when he felt it would be most needed. He had smiled and explained that bang wine was a slang term for champagne used by the islanders, and upon this occasion more than appropriate.
    Merlin sorted through the records and found an oldie with a sentimental title Goodnight, My Love, That, too, was appropriate, and as she wound up the gramophone she watched Paul in his bamboo long-chair, his large frame at ease but always a listening tension to the way he held his head. He was waiting, listening with ears far more acute than hers, to the signal for the opening of that long necked bottle with the gold foil around the cork. It was a good champagne, a powerful one, and she knew that he meant to blot out for her that moment, should it come, when the typhoon would rush down on them and sweep them into eternity. She knew it could happen, and the courage she had found to face it was rooted in Paul ... he was all and everything to her, so passionately at the centre of her being that she wanted nothing more than to live and die with him. The elemental forces all around them had brought that passion fully alive in her, and though it could never be released in a physical sense, at least she was free to love him with her eyes, with graceful movements of her body as she moved about the room, or knelt just beyond his hand as she listened to the music from another, more romantic time, when people had been unafraid to be sweet in their loving The honeyed words of the old song filled the room, and the lids of Paul’s eyes had a weight to them that Merlin wanted to touch with her fingertip, feeling the flutter of those gold lashes, bending forward with her heart on her lips to press kisses to where the pain had scorched away his sunlight.
    Champagne to blot out the pain that might be waiting like a beast beyond those walls, and the yearning to give herself had to be kept in chains ... right up to the possible end the masquerade had to be played out that she was an old maid, grown passionless with the years. Only confusion, anger, could be her reward if she approached him right now and let him discover that her body was young and her heart was eager, and that it didn’t matter to her that his eyes were blind. He was a man, and a lonely one, and he might take what she offered, but there would be no real joy in it. He’d be scornful of what was flung at his head, unasked for. He was still so very proud ... still at heart a man who wanted to do his own choosing.
    ‘How very sentimental people used to be,’ he murmured. ‘I’d give a lot to see that tired old moon descending—you know, the trouble with being blind is that a man begins to live on memories;