Sofia

Closing the garden gate behind me, I shaded my eyes and stopped for a second to admire the hazy August garden and the single-story house behind it. Red brick walls half obscured in vines, white shutters spread open around each window.

Hot. Time to get this suit off and have a shower. Or better a swim.

I walked up the gravel path and was almost inside when I heard a splash from around the back of the house. It sounded like my wife, Anabelle, had the same idea as me. Or maybe Sofia, my wife's cousin, who was staying with us.

I decided to head around to see who it was and veered off the path onto the lawn to head around the side of the house. As I came around the corner a movement caught my eye from inside a half open window. Without thinking I turned my head to look -- and stopped dead.

Stretched out against white bedsheets was a young woman. For a second it was just an impression of pale nakedness, long limbs and black hair spread out halo-like around Sofia's beautiful, angular face. Half a second later I saw that one hand was between her thighs, that her body was arched up off the bed, that her eyes were closed and her face a spasm of pleasure. It was a moment of exquisite beauty, embodied art, hot as fuck. And then she opened her eyes and looked right at me.

In a fraction of a second her face went from ecstasy, to frozen, to utter panic. She grabbed at the sheet she was lying on and struggled to cover herself with it. Her motion kicked me out of my trance and I swung my head away and hurried on away from the window without looking back at her.

I hurried, blushing, and cursing myself inside around the corner of the house and out from its shade. There was the shimmering blue of the pool and peeking at me sideways over the edge, my wife's face, rested on her arms.

She smiled. She has a gentle, conspiratorial smile that starts in the middle of her face and spreads outwards so slowly that sometimes it feels like you're watching her in slow motion. I think I fell in love with it long before I really knew the woman behind it.

I walked to the edge of the pool, and lowered myself in a kind of awkward half press-up to kiss her, which made her laugh.

"Welcome home, love. You going to join me? You look hot!"

"Hot like deeply attractive or like a pig that someone's dressed in a suit and stuff in a sauna for eight hours?"

She looked serious. "Both, you know nothing gets me going like an overheated farmyard animal. Get in here little piggy so I can make you squeal." She elongated the vowels in squeal into an ecstatic moan.

"Sick. And to think I got married because I thought I'd finally found a lady."

"Now that's rude. And I lie. We both know you got married because you finally found a woman who could pretend to be a lady, but wasn't."

There's some truth to this. I'd first met Anabelle five years before. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I met Anabelle first and second five years before, since we encountered each other on two independent occasions in the course of one day, and the Anabelles I encountered at those meetings were so different from each other that they seemed to stretch the definitions of identify.

I kissed her again, more slowly. "My love, you don't pretend. You just live it so completely that the rules that they amateurs have to keep to don't apply any more."

I placed an index finger iin the water, against her skin, between her breasts. And traced a line upwards, feeling the contrast of her silky her wet skin and the hard mandible below. Her amber eyes looked up at mine unblinkingly, but as I stroked further up -- more gently and even more slowly -- over her upturned throat, she swallowed and I felt the catch in her breath and sensed the acceleration of her heart beat.

"I'll get changed", I said, and went into the house.

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I stopped in the kitchen to pour myself a glass of iced water. I remember it felt almost shockingly cold in my throat. I took off my jacket and plunged my whole face under the tap, feeling alive and awake after the grogginess that hat accumulated on the drive.

The image of Sofia on her bed felt like it had been permanently seared onto my retinas. Its shadow was superimposed on top of everything around me. And when I closed my eyes under the tap I could see in minute detail the ripple of some small muscle in her back as she'd writhed in ecstasy in the split second before she'd seen me by the window.

The sound of someone entering the room made me re-surface from the tap and the fantasy. Sofia. She was dressed now in a white cotton dress, loose, and with narrow straps that left her shoulders bare, but it fell all the way down to her angles. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen, one hand in the other, looking at me. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, her discomfort palpable.

I was at a loss for what to say. After a moment's silence I blurted out somewhat uselessly, "Sofia, hi!" And then found myself floundering with no idea how to go on. My voice rung out loudly and as painfully artificial as listening back to a voice message.

But it didn't matter because she burst out volcanically, almost spitting with fury: "You watched me! Why did you watch me like that? In my own room! Toby, you should not have done that." And then she burst into tears.

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Sofia was the daughter of Anabelle's uncle Jack, a big man with thin receding hair, thick glasses, a successful businessman, who I had never saw without either a cigar or a glass of whisky in his hand. Jack's wife had married a very glamorous Russian, Sofia's mother, who'd been a mildly unsuccessful singer and a mildly successful model. They'd both died the previous October in a car crash, the details surrounding the event remained hazy, but Jack had been driving the Jaguar when it crashed. The autopsy report confirmed that he'd had a cigar in his mouth and whisky in his blood.

I'm not all that sure that either of them were the world's greatest parents. He'd been kindly in a gruff old-fashioned way and she never lacked for presents and pocket money, she'd been frequently absent and -- it was rumoured -- serially unfaithful to Jack. And I'm not sure either of them took that much of an interest in what was going on in her head. But I'm not sure that makes much odds when it comes to a blow like that.

Sofia been starting her second year at Oxford, studying English Literature and Russian when it happened. She'd been informed of the death by the police and had gone straight down to Hampshire to identify the bodies. At the funeral she had been very pale, very quiet and hadn't shed one tear. She seemed totally numb, dead inside, in shock probably. The contrast with the vivacious girl I remembered from before was stark. She'd returned to Oxford that evening, saying she couldn't afford to afford to stay away longer in term time.

Anabelle had been cut up by the whole thing too, mainly on Sofia's behalf. She'd always had a soft spot for Jack, who'd been good to her when she was growing up, but she was very protective of Sofia, having -- as she told me -- dandled her on her knee when Sofia was a baby and Anabelle was a characteristically broody ten-year-old.

Anabelle had called Sofia regularly over the weeks and months that followed and had visited her several times in Oxford. She'd been as persistent as only Anabelle can be in prising open Sofia's armour and getting her to talk about how she was feeling. And though Anabelle had inherited plenty of money and the house in Hampshire, they'd agreed that she'd come and spend the summer with us.

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I have some of that stereotypical English awkwardness when it comes to displays of emotion from people who I'm not close to. Sofia had been with us for a few weeks now, and we got on very well. We'd played a few games of tennis together, exchanged book recommendations and discussed them, and had had two blistering and thoroughly enjoyable rows about politics. But most of the time we spent together we were with Anabelle as well; my connection to her was, fundamentally, through Anabelle. And I'd never seen her cry.

I stood there gawkily, looking at her crying across the expanse of the kitchen.

"Sofia, I'm so sorry. I really didn't mean to. It was an accident. I was walking around the side of the house and I turned and saw."

I did feel awful. Seeing her crying like that I started to cross the room, feeling instictively that I should put an arm round her. But half way across I realised that, in the circumstances, my charging across and putting my hands on her risked profound misinterpretation. I came to a halt a pace or so away from where she stood in the doorway, and stood gawkily, my arms feeling extraordinarily long by my sides, like some kind of besuited chimp or bonobo.

"Turned and saw? You were staring, you bastard! Why were you creeping past my room? Why the fuck were you staring at me like that, you pervert!" And she stepped forward and raised her hand as if she was about to slap me across the face.

Of course, I'm describing at length something which in reality was all very compressed. Words can only flow onto the page one at a time, but reality is a flood of happenings, and never more so than in an intense emotional exchange. Also, as someone who has studied psychology and neuroscience in a fair amount of depth, I'm keenly aware that our brains are continuously transmuting the raw material of our experiences in the service of creating a narrative that makes sense of them. Much truth is inevitably lost along the way, though perhaps it's also how truth is able to come into the world at all.

All that really just serves to say that I'm not sure that I can do justice to the scene, am not sure I can remember everything I felt, and am not certain that I'm not jumping onto certain feelings and amplifying them to suit a story I've created to make sense of what occurred. Anyway, when she started speaking I'm pretty sure that I was feeling some mixture of shame and pity, but by the time she stepped forward my awareness of those feelings had been obliterated by an upsurge of indignant rage.

Without thinking I grabbed her by the wrist. I brought myself forward into her space, making myself bigger in all those automatic ways -- like some disgusting drunk gearing up for a bar fight. A fight with this little thing.

"Why was I walking in my own garden? Why the fuck were you getting yourself off with the curtains open, you stupid slut?"

Perhaps I should have prefaced this story, by saying that I have a quick temper. Perhaps that's an understatement. I'm not actually an aggressive man, despite my few years in the military. Far from it. But if you flick a match too close to me, there's a risk I'll explode; a loud bang, a few moments of picturesque effects, then I'm generally done. Like a kamuro firework. Unfortunately, the debris can take a while to clear up.

I knew even as I was speaking that this was way too far. You can't call a twenty year old orphan who's a guest in your house a stupid slut. It's not on. Out of order. Beyond the pale. And, mark this young man, this applies even if she has been a little bitch.

Her body froze up and she let out a half gasp. I was a worm and worse, and I knew it. I felt my soul crumple, I actually closed my eyes, scrunching up my eyes and forehead. It was a moment of introversion so deep that it was almost like blacking out.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself looking into her eyes, which I realised for the first time were an icy grey. I could feel the fudding of my pulse in my chest and temples, was uncomfortably conscious of the proximity of our bodies. We were so close and I swear I never looked anywhere but into her eyes. But somehow my memory of that moment contains a complete image of her, from her pale, bare feet, the undulations of the soft fabric that covered her, the outline of her nipples against the white material, the dark black mole on the left side of her neck, the richness of her thick hair, the nakedness of her slim back exposed by the plunging cut of the dress.

At length I heard myself say, "Sofia, I'm so sorry. Please forget what I said -- I didn't mean it."

"Please let go of my wrist." She spoke in a whisper and her face was deathly solemn. For a second I didn't understand her. And then I realised my thumb and index finger still enveloped her slim wrist. I released it and both our hands dropped. Nothing happened for another moment, and then she reached up and lightly placed her hand where my chest met my right shoulder. She held it there a moment, her fingers making the slightest stroking movement. And then she quickly pulled it back, turned away from me and hurried back along the corridor to her room.