Forbidden by Roberta Latow

don’t bother me as much as they used to, and you always preferred it. I can live with that.’
    ‘It isn’t much but it’s a beginning.’
    ‘I guess it is.’
    ‘I’ll call you tomorrow night.’
    ‘I may be in Geneva.’
    ‘Oh.’ He sounded hurt, disappointed.
    She quickly added, ‘For my work.’
    ‘I’ll try you, and if you’re not there I’ll try another time. Is that all right?’
    ‘Of course it is, you silly old thing. Seeing you again has made me really happy.’
    ‘Long may it last.’
    ‘Goodbye, Pete.’
    ‘Goodbye, Amy.’
    He’d called and that felt good. But why didn’t it feel better? She wanted it to. Amy had hoped that when she did hear from him she would feel that surge of excitement for a man that she wanted to feel again in her life. Not obsessive love; she had had that, been there, and it had been terrific but destructive. High on the life of another as well as oneself, there’s a great deal to be said for that, but not when it blinds you to all else in life.
    It didn’t have to be instant love and passion, overwhelming sexual desire. She had had that too, many times. She could wait for it to evolve. Maybe this time round that was what Pete was doing as well. Possibly, had she not been distracted with the Soutine and the call to Geneva, she might have felt a greater surge of sexual excitement at the sound of his voice. But Pete had had a great deal to compete with at the moment when he’d called: the art world and her work, the singular life she had created for herself.
    Bad timing, she told herself. She would come round. And then, for a fleeting moment, wondered what it would take. She thought on that and deduced there must besomething to her and Pete because he had stirred sexual feeling in her, the desire to be outrageously sexual with a man again, which had not happened for a very long time. That in itself was exciting, something to ponder on. Especially since she had truly believed she was through with sex and love.
    She was still immersed in thought when the telephone rang again. She answered it and pushed thoughts of Pete from her mind. The sale of the Soutine was uppermost now. She had suddenly made her decision as to the three people she would approach on behalf of her client, and that was her preoccupation when she heard Edward Silberzog’s assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York explaining she was calling on his behalf. He was flying in to London for a day and then on to Paris. Could he possibly meet her at her place on Monday afternoon, briefly? He would be bringing a friend along for her to meet.
    Amy was only barely listening to the young woman. Her mind was on the Soutine and the coup of dealing with this great find of a painting. She said absently, ‘Yes, thank you, goodbye,’ and jotted the date down in her diary.
    ‘Then that is a confirmed appointment, Miss Ross?’
    ‘Yes, I did say that, Penelope.’
    ‘Please, did you write it down, Miss Ross? He asked me to ask you that. It’s very important to him, you see. He’s only stopping off briefly in London to meet you.’
    ‘Yes, it’s down in my book. Look, I don’t mean to be rude but I do have to go, Penelope.’ And Amy put down thetelephone and again, almost immediately, picked up the receiver and punched in the Geneva telephone number.
    The following day, when Tillie was putting together thin sandwiches of brown bread, sparingly buttered and thick with smoked salmon topped with several screws of freshly ground black pepper, for the small basket Amy used to picnic with on air travel, and she was checking her briefcase for the fourth time to make certain she had forgotten nothing, the ship’s bell outside the front door was loudly rung.
    Amy ignored it. She was switched off from everything but the project in hand: getting to her client in Geneva. Her mind was filled with the Soutine painting of two nude reclining women, and the fact that the world believed that he had only painted one