Hold Back the Night Read online

  'You're not pregnant?'

  Because that brought back memories, her voice was shaky. 'No,' she said.

  'Or anaemic?'

  'No.'

  'Well, we'll soon find out. Several women share a loft nearby, and one of them is a nurse. When you fainted, Miranda closed the shop and ran down the street to see if she happened to be off duty. They should be back very soon.'

  Domini licked her lips and was glad that Sander could not see the uncharacteristic sign of stress. 'If your sister ran off, how did I .. .get up here?'

  'I carried you to my bedroom,' he said coolly. 'Is that what you're so nervous about ... being in a blind man's bed? Then relax, I'm not as dangerous as you seem to think. I've never forced a woman in my life.'

  Suddenly it was too much for Domini. Hit by the bitter irony of it all, she started to laugh and laugh and laugh. And she didn't stop until Sander reached down to the bed, seized her arms forcefully, and slapped her full on the face.

  Chapter 2

  Domini lay tremulous as a leaf in Sander's bed, face still stinging from the sharp impact of his hand, arms still hurting where his fingers had dug so deeply into the flesh. But those physical things were not the cause of her present distress. This time she knew his rough behaviour had been necessary; she knew she had been hysterical.

  Nor was she even conscious of her physical state, beyond a sensation of weakness so extreme that she felt she could not move a muscle. Moments after the slap that had restored Domini to some kind of rationality, Sander's sister, Miranda, had materialized in the doorway, bringing with her an attractive young off-duty nurse. Miranda had clicked on the light and started to lecture Sander at once.

  'Sander, how could you!'

  Miranda's teeth had been practically chattering with anxiety and anger, all of it directed towards Sander. 'You should never have brought her upstairs! I nearly died of fright when I realized what you'd done! What if you'd fallen on the way? Think of that torn stair carpet! What if you'd missed the broken floorboard in the hall? It's practically rotting through! I ask you, Sander, what if!'

  'Then there'd be two patients.' Sander's voice had been clipped, irritable. He had swerved on his heel and left the room at once, moving with a certainty that suggested Miranda should not be quite so anxious for his safety in these familiar surroundings.

  The nurse had done little more than look Domini over to ascertain that her state was not critical. Domini had been given an injunction to see her doctor, and over her objections Miranda had procured the number and promised to make a phone call, setting up an appointment for the following day if possible. The nurse had administered a tranquillizer and a stern order that Domini was to stay exactly where she was for the next few hours.

  'But my Christmas shopping,' Domini had protested feebly.

  'You'll stay there for the afternoon,' the nurse had said with professional firmness. 'At least until you have to pick your daughter up. Didn't someone say she's in day care?'

  'I'll wake you up later,' Miranda had offered. Domini had acceded because to object would have taken more strength than she was capable of; shock had taken its toll. And then Miranda and the nurse had departed, clicking off the light and closing the door softly behind them.

  With all now silent, Domini at last began to think over the improbable chain of circumstances that had culminated in the day's events. It was all so incredible ... or was it? 'There is no coincidence as great as that of life itself,' someone had once said. Her father perhaps?

  The day's happenings, Domini realized, were not the result of pure coincidence. Sander was a New Yorker by birth, and it was natural enough that upon returning to this country he would move in with his widowed sister. In any case, it would not have been extraordinary for him to gravitate to SoHo, just as Domini herself had done.

  SoHo was among other things an artists' colony, as was its more famous namesake in London. In the nineteenth century it had been built as a manufacturing and warehousing district, with stunning cast-iron architecture to be found in such abundance and variety nowhere else in the world. The innovative cast-iron construction permitted huge fluted pillars, marvellous exterior ornamentation, immense windows that admitted floods of sunlight, and enormously high ceilings. When Greenwich Village attics had become too expensive and the area too much of a tourist trap, artists, photographers, and artisans had begun to discover the huge lofts and low rents of SoHo ... the name not a copy of its British counterpart, but an acronym meaning simply South of Houston Street. Galleries and good restaurants had followed, and the revitalized district was now an exciting, energetic melange of art and industry, where twine factories and fantastic food emporiums existed side by side with jazz lofts and theatre workshops. Loft rents were no longer so low, as Domini well knew. But there were still pockets of poverty and low rental in SoHo, and the district continued to draw artists as honey draws flies.

  No, there was no particular astonishment to be found in Sander's presence in the SoHo art colony. Had he been living there all along, only a few blocks away from Domini and the daughter he did not know he had fathered?

  Even the carving of the unicorn ... that, too, Domini realized, had been no far-fetched accident of random chance. Sander had seen the famous painting in the Louvre; she knew that for a fact because he had told her so. At the time something in his words had conveyed the impression that he might have studied it with care. Perhaps he had memorized it with some subconscious part of his mind. He must have done, if he could remember the unicorn well enough to carve a fair copy four years later, even in the dark void of his sightless world. Perhaps he could see it in his mind, as she could see it in hers, just by closing her eyes.

  She closed them now, shutting out the gloomy wallpaper and the dingy panes of the attic window. Was it really only such a few years since she had been a forthright, fearless eighteen-year-old ready to conquer life? In terms of maturity, it might have been a decade ago. Sander had called her unreal at the time, and with hindsight Domini now knew it had been an apt description. What an odd mixture she must have been then, so knowledgeable in many ways and so naive in others. How much she had known of the world, and yet how little! Still, with the unconventional and extraordinary childhood she had had, how could it have been otherwise?

  Usually Domini tried not to dwell on the past, because to do so was to feel a great sadness for the lost simplicity of her childhood, the essence of joy that life and Sander had destroyed. But drifting in a strange bed, in a strange house, with a strange weakness assailing her limbs, the past seemed very close, very real. In her mind she could see old scenes like pages turning in a memory book ...

  ❧

  The unicorn had been given to her for her third birthday. At that age Domini had not been aware that she was the daughter of a famous man. To her, Le Basque was simply Papa, the centre of a small universe bounded by great stone walls, with the soaring strength of the Pyrenees towering in the purple distance. Her world extended no farther than the huge flagged courtyard where Papa kept his special stone and where sun glittered on a spilling fountain.

  Papa's stone was a central fact of his existence. But even now, with her third birthday nearly twenty years and many tears past, Domini was not sure why it was so important to him. It was a large piece of rough stone, crudely hewn out of bedrock, far heavier than a person could lift but not so heavy that it could not be moved by one powerful man with the help of chains and crowbars. From her earliest youth Domini knew that Papa had quarried it himself, high near a mountaintop, and somehow brought it down, single-handed, to the great walled farmhouse he had bought shortly after Domini's birth ... a great bastion of a place on a high rocky pasture in the mountainous Basque-speaking district of the Pyrenees. And he was not a young man then: he had been in his fifties at the time.

  Domini was the child of Le Basque's later years and he gloried in her, lavishing her with a love that shone through every brushstroke in every canvas she graced. She found nothing odd in having no
mother, because she knew no better. Papa's models, a succession of placid dark-eyed Basque women during those years, accepted without question that they should also fulfil the double role of mistress to the great man and mother to his child. And perhaps he did not ask too much of them after all; it was a small price to pay for immortality.

  Domini's mother, Anastasia Greey, had died in childbirth. She too had been one of Le Basque's models and mistresses, but an American, chosen during the period when he had lived and worked in the United States, that long, tormented period of his life that the critics referred to as the Bitter Years. She had not been one of his more famous models; he had painted very few portraits of her. From three likenesses ... two at the farmhouse and one she had since seen in the Museum of Modern Art ... Domini knew her mother as a graceful woman with an aureole of golden hair, somewhat shallow she guessed, according to the studies. Anastasia had been painted with cynicism, not with love. Le Basque had never considered marrying her; nevertheless Domini knew her death had for some reason moved him deeply.

  As a child, Domini sometimes asked about her mother. 'She was like light and air,' Le Basque had answered one time with a deep rue ageing his eyes. 'But I had forgotten that a man needs air to breathe and light to see.'

  His cynicism of the Bitter Years, which had lasted until the time of Anastasia's death, was generally believed to have been caused by his one and only church-sanctioned union, a marriage to an American woman who had borne Le Basque's three legal children ... Domini's much older half-brothers, whom she did not know. The marriage had broken up some years prior to Domini's birth; the woman had subsequently died; the grown sons had scattered. The Bitter Years had come to a close when Le Basque, with the tiny bundle that was Domini, had left America and returned to the country of his birth.

  'Oh, God,' whispered Domini, hurting, wondering if she would ever see her father again. There were times, especially in the beginning when Tasey was tiny and money had been very scarce, when she had been sorely tried not to turn to him for help. Pride had prevented it then, although Domini had always known she would contact her father in time. But now that she knew he had sold the unicorn...

  ❧

  The child Domini, known as Didi, grew up a golden and happy creature. Hers was a free-hearted existence, her boundaries the waterfalls and rugged amphitheatres of the mountains. Her father's great rambling house was far more than a simple farmhouse: it had once been owned by a wealthy man who had extended it for use as a hunting lodge. Nevertheless it was remote from any spa or ski resort. Certainly it was a far cry from that craggy coastline, the Cote d'Argent, where silver breakers from the Atlantic marked the western boundaries of a Basque domain that stretched like a tiny kingdom from the picturesque fishing villages beloved by tourists, to the high and lonely domes of the mountains, true heartland of the Basque heritage.

  In the remote fastnesses where Domini grew up the flocks were not of tourists but of sheep. Against the sharp green of summer grasses, Basque sheepherders, accustomed to the solitude of the mountains, grazed their tangle-haired lacha sheep, prized not for wool but for milk. Rugged rimrock rose from the pasturelands, and there the craggy heights were ruled by the majestic horned isard, the agile goatlike chamois of the Pyrenees.

  Other than the isard, neighbours were scarce. The nearest village, a hamlet of tidy whitewashed houses decorated with the hearts and birds beloved by Basque peasants, was ten miles distant, too far for easy walking. Somewhat nearer lay a mountain pass that breeched the lofty Pyrenees to give access to the Spanish border; it was used by the peasants for the netting of pigeons during the annual migrations. The household servants, the simple villagers, the Basque sheepherders, peopled Domini's earliest memories; natural caves and tumbled Roman ruins were the closest sights to be seen.

  But Domini travelled beyond the wild, rocky domain of the Pyrenees in the pages of books, and later there were real travels too. Her upbringing was far from that of a simple, uneducated farm girl. There were long, memorable visits to places where great art and architecture could be seen ... Venice, Rome, Siena, Paris, New York, Florence, London, Vienna, Prague, Greece. Even in the farmhouse it was not a wholly isolated existence. At times, when Le Basque failed to seek the world, the world sought him. Often Domini met great and famous men at her father's table and heard them talk.

  Nor was she raised to be naive; in fact, the opposite was true. Her questions, from an early age, were answered freely and fully and without inhibition, especially in matters of sex, for her father had little use for social taboos.

  She thought she knew a good deal about the world, and certainly she knew many facts. She had tutors, all of them American at her father's behest, because he said she must grow up speaking all the languages of her roots. And so she grew fluent in three tongues ... English, French, and the archaic language of the Basque people, a language related to no other in the world, a language so old that its origins remain shrouded in the dim mists of prehistory; a difficult language in which counting is done by twenties, in the strange manner of the ancient Mayas. To Domini the obscure and enigmatic tongue, spoken only by Basques, became as natural to the ear as the sound of wind soughing through the mountain passes, or the bleating of ewes at lambing time, or the murmurous cooing of pigeons in a quiet dawn.

  During Domini's early years her papa was playmate as well as father. Often he deserted his easel to join in her childhood pastimes, which seemed to delight him as much as if he himself were discovering the joys of growing up all over again. Roaring with delight, he would romp in games of tag and hide-and-seek; he would roll up his trousers and wade in frigid mountain brooks; he would skip stones in still pools and watch as fascinated as any child at the interlocking ripples they created. As if rejuvenated by Domini's high young spirits, at the age of sixty he once spent half a day rolling exuberant somersaults in the pastureland beyond the farmhouse. On another occasion he lay for long minutes in the courtyard alongside his small daughter, chin like hers solemnly propped on his hands, watching with awe the progress of one single ant trying to move one overlarge crumb across a flagstone.

  He loved to dance, as all Basques do, almost more than he loved to eat. Sometimes he would don traditional peasant costume and in the courtyard fling himself into teaching Domini the vivacious and demanding jota or mascarade dances of the Basque people, his rope-sandalled feet flashing and stamping and kicking high, his powerful arms raised high above the Basque beret he wore, his scarlet sash swirling around a sturdy body clad in a white so brilliant it hurt the eye.

  Sometimes he would take her to the nearby village, where beside the quaint three-spired church the men of the mountains played pelote or jai alai, that most strenuous of games, invented by the Basques and so beloved that it was virtually a national sport. When he saw the players sweating and the hard goatskin ball slamming against the wall of the court, he would become as excited as a small boy. 'Ho!' he would cry. 'Ha! Ha, ha!' And then his feet would become restless, and perhaps if he had had one of the wicker baskets used as a racket strapped to his own arm, he would have rushed to join in the game himself. But instead he would contain his excitement and hoist Domini to his powerful shoulder to give her a better view.

  When she grew older, he taught her to drink wine from a goatskin bota such as the sheepherders used, sending a ruby stream from the leather pouch unerringly to his mouth. He would miss no drop himself and would chuckle with glee when Domini's less practised arm sent red liquid splashing over her cheek or her chin. And then, seizing the bota again and deliberately misdirecting its neck, he would send wine squirting over his own chin to dribble down on a clean shirt while Domini clapped her hands in merriment.

  He taught her also to play mus, a high-spirited variation of poker, which Le Basque insisted on playing with pebbles as the only stakes, because except for a mistress or a visitor who sometimes joined in, the other players were generally Basque peasants or perhaps an itinerant sheepherder who had no spare sous to lose. Le Basque would
trounce everyone unmercifully, and when Domini groaned in exaggerated disappointment, he would cry:

  'I give you the world's riches, Didi, and all in exchange for one single smile!'

  When Domini rewarded him as she always did with her sunniest expression, he would rumble with laughter. And while the peasants or sheepherders watched, grinning but not understanding, he would pour all his pebbles into her lap as if offering the most precious of jewels.

  To others, his behaviour might have sometimes seemed odd for a man in his declining years; but to Domini, who somersaulted or waded or danced the jota or played mus with an eagerness and enthusiasm equalling her father's, he was just Papa, her papa, friend as well as father. When she grew old enough to understand such things, she came to know that he was a man whose artist's vision made the whole world seem constantly new.

  And sometimes she saw another side of him as well. When the peasants spread their nets to trap migrating pigeons, his furrowed eyes would sometimes turn sad. He said nothing, because the Basques did such things not for sport but for food; but when Domini managed to save an occasional netted pigeon and carry it back to the farmhouse, he would allow her to keep it in the courtyard until its broken wing was mended, and he took as much interest in its progress as did his warm-hearted daughter.

  She had learned compassion from Le Basque himself, and some harder lessons too. One year during her youth, when there were sheep grazing near the farmhouse and the sheepherder was busy with lambing, Le Basque had taken little Domini to witness the phenomenon of birth. Early in the day they had seen a newborn lamb lying dead alongside its mother. With no hesitation Le Basque had borrowed a sharp knife from the sheepherder, rolled up his sleeves, and started at once to skin the small lifeless creature. When Domini cried out in horror to see the blood on her father's hands, he had paused long enough to explain.