Intellectual Orchid sat, time and space assuaged, waiting with passport checked, ticket ready, suitcase crouched at her feet and the small blue plastic bag with white lettering, symbol of air travel delivered to docile journeyers of space, limp-empty upon her knees.

On the white table-cloth, breeze ruffled, the small lamp of plastic pink with spray of rufous roses, a bowl of orchids and a bottle of Green Spot stood waiting while she refused the Australian oysters fresh from Sydney, the Danish caviare, the Hongkong quail. At other tables, couples and families ate and waited drank and sat; laughed, a mute facial contraction enclosed in’ noise, hemmed within the jangle of the great harsh noisy bell of light and engine drone. The stertorous wind of airplanes winking red-green lights annihilated their laughter’s trilling, left the sky dark as sleep and as enormously empty.

She heard, not listening, within the tongueless clamour the loudspeaker’s prayer, intoning, informing, imploring, ordering, beginning with a gargle and ending with a bray. Those whose time had come to go rose with their blue bag clutched, abandoning the breeze-smooth veranda, marching across a polished floor reverberating all the lights, while the tables quivered, the glasses shook as jelly, the lights twinkled and as a bell the air rang and rang.

‘Good evening,’ Luke shouted into her ear.

She raised a face unsurprised.

‘You have seen me before.’ He cried his name, lips close to her ear above the sea roar, her ear a sea shell listening to the sea. He stood above her, entire to the surge within him which thrust aside the self he usually was, as one casts cobwebs on an evening walk under the web-wound mangosteen trees; discovering this nameless thing beyond what he saw or heard or desired until then, which is not lust nor longing, but a whole-bodied enchantment, a flagrant miracle happening once for ever, and never more in time or space.

Knew it then, unworded, unacknowledged, and sat down.

Round them like a wild beast, trapped and futile, roaring its obstinate belly roar, the snore and rave of the airplanes went on.

Upon them beat the jarring light, beating their faces and the table-cloth under their hands. Livid, with dark lips and eyes of liquescent marble, they saw each other unsighted. Hidden beneath the clamour they were safe from words, from knowledge, since in the din no word could be heard and what is not said is not.

And she – at first detached as at play at the Happy World – was caught within his dazzled hope distilling hopelessness, an anguished fascination already fossilizing her in his memory. Slowly, as the sly ocean sifts a persistent breeze beneath the crazy noise and the bombastic whinny of the airplanes, while the loudspeaker brayed, and, nearly squalid, with an overlay of neon as powder, passengers obediently trailed past with small blue bags, she discovered that woman is more than head and eyes, ears and hands, body breeding or not, woman is also focus, fulcrum, pivot of need, and want of man, in his longing and necessity transfigured, revealed as Venus rising, born from the cold and noisy belly of the sea, Beauty bared in the unfingered wind of dawn.