It all began by sheer mischance.
Though what is mischance? At each moment there’s another throw of the dice, another turn of the wheel, and your fate is changed. There was, I believed, a bountiful Providence that supplies our every need – though my faith in that was to be badly shaken.
This was a very low period of my life. I felt I had little left to live for and often roamed the streets of the suburb I lived in at night, unwilling to go back to my lonely rooms and spend more hours of regret and thwarted hopes.
On one of my wanderings I came upon an invitingly open door. Curiosity beckoned me and I stopped to investigate it further: as if I were a burglar. The door opened easily and I stepped inside.
What wasn’t so easy was getting out again. For I discovered that I’d stumbled on a violent rape in progress. Which was why the door was open – and why I had to leave in a hurry.
But I’d been spotted by the offender, who seized the opportunity to slink away, but not before he’d had a good look at my face.
The girl – twenty at most – screamed piercingly, and the sound he knew would immediately summon help. The offender shot a hideous ‘I’ll-remember-you-mate!’ grin at me and vanished.
So now I had both the police and the would-be rapist after me.
There followed a fevered race through back-yards, gardens, embankments ... before I took refuge by the river.
I knew it wouldn’t be long before they caught up with me. Possibly with dogs (I fancied I could hear baying in the distance, beyond the pounding of my heart). So I waded out into the reeds, obscurely remembering that water deadens scent. I’d wondered what it felt like to be a burglar; now I knew just how a fugitive feels.
So this was where Janice found me. Her flat-bottomed punt was hauled up on the bank nearby, and she came along the tow-path swinging a bag jauntily and was climbing into the boat when she spotted me.
Most women would have been scared, but she scarcely broke stride; was she used to this kind of dusk encounter?
If I were to describe Janice now, knowing her as I do, I’d say she was totally debauched. At the time, however, she was my saviour, my one hope – and in the dark of the river-bank she seemed like a goddess: that tall, that beautiful, that powerful.
Perhaps she took pity on me when I explained my plight, or perhaps there was another motive. At that moment it didn’t occur to me to wonder, and when she gestured to me, I scrambled into the boat happily enough.
She laughed then: a deep, resonant chuckle of satisfaction and contentment deep in her throat. As if something had pleasured her. And picking up a pole lying in the punt, set off across the river. As if she did it every day, as perhaps she did: she was expert enough at it.
And onto her island.
It was a tiny one – just a slip of verdant land, with a billow of trees in full leaf that loomed up out of the darkness like a fortress. And concealed cunningly somewhere within all that foliage, scarcely visible from either bank, I realised later, was her single-storey, dilapidated habitation.
And this began an adventure (if I can call it that – it had its horrendous side) that was even stranger than the one I’d fled from.
At first I was fascinated and relieved. Relieved at having (as I saw it) escaped; fascinated by this broad-hipped, beautiful woman with the long mane of silvery hair, who was nearly 60, as I discovered, for she was never inhibited about age, but who had preserved a kind of inherent beauty and attractiveness well past the time when many become withered hags. And with such energy and drive! Growing most of her own produce in a little plot on her land and only visiting the shops for milk and bread and other necessities, she thought herself almost self-sufficient.
So she took me in, dried me off, and warmed me – for the river-water in early summer was chilling – comforted my fears, and put me, almost tenderly, to bed in what she called her ‘Studio’.
I awoke to bird-song, shifting sun filtering wantonly through chestnut leaves and the delicious smell of coffee brewing. Then Janice appeared in the doorway – fresh in a blue house-coat – bringing me breakfast.
I was again in a panic about my folly of the preceding night. (Were they still after me?) But Janice, sitting on the edge of my improvised bed – a few cushions on the floor over which she’d draped some exquisitely worked hanging, all in gorgeous reds and purples – and feeding me with warmed croissants and hot coffee, calmed my fears. I don’t know when I have felt so cared for, so protected, so warm and safe.
And this hardly changed during the days that followed, which then – while I scarcely noticed – changed into weeks as May became June and the days lengthened. Yet ...
It was an amazing house she lived in – we lived in. It was almost as if she had built it herself out of bits and pieces picked up at random; but it seemed to suit her perfectly: untidy, large, ramshackle, yet infinitely welcoming; with great windows allowing glimpses of the river-bank opposite.
I wanted for nothing, it seemed. The house was filled with music, for a start. Those soft melodies and shifting harmonies seemed all around us, wherever we were, acting as a sweet accompaniment to our talk. And we spent so much time together.
At first I believed she needed company – though later I realised she was happy to be alone, so long as I was close at hand. But I wondered if she was childless? ... a widow? ... a dumped wife?
She had a family of sorts, I gradually found out, as I tried (against some opposition) to make sense of her strange life: two grown-up children, Becka and Simon – though she was sparing with information about them and not to be drawn about the existence of any partner. A whisk of her hand dismissed the lot, whenever I probed too closely – and she was totally incurious about me.
But I still didn’t twig.
Then there were the feasts! She’d serve up succulent dishes, herby and full of flavour, many of them of a Middle-Eastern taste with cous-cous and cardamoms and spices. Though how she did it in those primitive surroundings I have no idea. I never pried; I just took what was offered and enjoyed it. Yet ...
She was sunny and equable, too; I only saw a harder side to her when I suggested leaving. For I did have a wife, I told her, who would be worried about me.
This was a blatant lie – and she must have known it. I had a wife, it’s true, but she wasn’t at home, and wouldn’t be missing me and I had no wish at all to return to her cold embraces, nor she to mine. And there was no work to go back to. In a sense I suppose I was ‘testing the waters’– feeling out the boundaries of my island home and seeing how far they could be pushed.
I found out quickly enough. She would go quite icy and forbidding if I took that line. The warmth of her presence would be withdrawn. She would never scold me, or scream, or make a scene, and she was never peevish either – such weapons were not in her normal armoury. She would simply withdraw into an arctic coldness: doors would be significantly bolted; all music ceased; meals became the plainest of fares ... I had been ostracised.
But there were other times; for her dalliance was by no means confined to music and food.
Perhaps her solitude had made her careless or she was quite without natural modesty ... however it was, she would wander round the house from room to room without a stitch on, seemingly unaware of this.
Soon after I arrived – one soft balmy evening – she came to my Studio as I was getting ready for bed. The dinner had been wonderful: a dish of heady spiciness, with saffron, that great aphrodisiac, and good wine. Soft music was still playing in the background. It was almost dark. She was in a silk night-robe, I remember, and shimmered in the dusk of the room. But it wasn’t love she was after!
Without a word she grasped my hand and drew me out – and into her bedroom. There, she positively threw herself on me. No romantic frills, no whispered endearments, just naked greed. Her body was still lithe and supple: but this was little short of rape.
From then on she swept me into her room every night, engaging me in obscure practices I had never imagined. The original Calypso – the nymph that dallied with Odysseus, detaining him on his homeward journey – had had two children by him, I remembered; if Janice had been younger, what a host of little demons we would have engendered in those hot nights! For she was incontinent and quite insatiable.
Still I stayed on ... not her partner but her bondsman in dissolution and debauchery.
For I was still scared of the police. Once, in fact, I had to go into hiding, while two PC Plods searched the place desultorily – perhaps for me? But they left, bored and empty-handed, though casting lascivious glances behind them, I imagined.
There came a moment, however, when I decided that enough was enough. I had to get back to civilisation – to normality. I knew there was nothing to go back to: I’d lost my wife and my job – what more was there to lose? And yet ... in spite of my fears ... I had to drag myself out of this cloying, do-nothing island.
She cosseted me, she cuddled me, she coddled me with sounds and scents and flavours and sex ... Yet it was not my senses that were being indulged, I realised, but hers.
I’d called her ‘My Calypso’ with great fondness at first. Perhaps a better term would have been ‘succubus’: that demon who was popularly supposed to force herself on men and fornicate with them in their sleep.
There came that terrible night.
I started it, I think. I’d used the word ‘gratification’ – ‘purely for your gratification’, I said (remembering the night of the would-be rape, and that girl’s agonised screams).
For once Janice lost all restraint. Instead of ice she became flame and fury. She stormed about her tin-pot house, flinging herself at doors and windows; locking them, barring them – even straddling the front door in cruciform fashion, with scarcely a stitch on, forbidding me to push past her nakedness – her dark pubic patch blazing defiance.
I found a side door, though, barged full tilt at it with my shoulder, so it gave in a splinter of wood and a rasp of metal: I was outside.
The moon was down, but I found my way somehow to the boat, pushed it off and was climbing in when she appeared behind me – her mane flying about her, housecoat gaping, a naked fury in a blaze of anger: shrieking, shrieking.
As I pushed off into the tide, which rose and swelled for me, she made a grab for the stern, lost her footing and slipped – a turmoil of legs and arms – helter-skelter into the river. And was washed away, washed away ... the water flowed perilously fast there. Who would have guessed she couldn’t swim – my Calypso, living as she did on an island?
I never saw her again.
Nor was I ever prosecuted by the police or threatened by the rapist.
But did Odysseus ever recover from the experience of his enchanted isle and the embraces of his ruttish, insatiable Calypso?
