together the attractions of the prim and the wanton that it is not known whether she is either or both together on Sundays or fine days and so she is sought.
I have finished with my ruminations, my preachings and my parables. My eyes are rimmed but delicately with kohl. I need no further endeavours. I have chosen a gown so close to white that it seems not to hesitate upon the colour, displaying its blue ribbons, its frilled corsage, its gatherings. I have worn it twice before and that three years beyond. The hem holds memories of sperm. In its wickedness.
My uncle arrives with his companion. She is in her later twenties, tallish and elegant. Having surveyed one another we exchange eyes and survey ourselves thus, mirror to mirror. I mark her memories who have not known them. She can scarcely know mine.
“You have not accommodated yourself in the hotel, uncle?”
“There is time, my dear. We might take liqueurs in your suite, perhaps.”
The meal is done. I know too well the liqueur he intends. It is of the singular and not plural variety. The cheeks of my bottom tighten, are guarded. Dangers of revelation attend me in his presence. My tongue shall not uncurl. The lift rumbles and trundles, taking us to my abode. With then the bringing of Chartreuse and Benedictine the lady sits upon his lap. A smile I take to be inviting suggests my involvement in equal measure. Her head turns, regards the intervening doors where Charlotte lately stood.
“It is a nice bed. Really it is too late to make arrangements other. Other than. Do you not think?” she asks.
His hand invests her thigh but is afraid to travel. I have but to smile and he will gather up her skirt. Perhaps I am to be ravaged and made prisoner of them both-the farewells made upon the steps at morn. The departures empty of promise.
“I must write to father.”
I rise, approach the escritoire. Its rims are rimmed with gold. Ornate. It attracts me. I have neither of them in my vision yet feel their sudden stillness. My letter writes itself in my uncle's mind ere I have taken up the pen.
“Of course, my accommodation-how stupid,” he exclaims, “It is late for you now to write.”
I turn. She glides from his knees like a leaf from a log. There is a limpness in her stature, an incomprehension. My uncle stands in turn.
“I shall write when you have said goodnight. Will that not be better?”
“Indeed, Laura, for you may say that I have just departed.”
“That you have just departed, yes.”
Our separations are formal. I close the doors. Does my mother knit and father fret? That my uncle is well furnished and appurtenanced with virility I do not doubt. His woman will feel the functioning tonight-the two-backed beast of Rabelais will thresh. Even so, in some small, dark and secret room I might have yielded, my hand to my mouth, biting my teeth into the slim fruits of my fingers. Unspeaking. Did he do it to you, say it yes! I would not say, I would not say. My bottom bulbs warm to the brown-carved door. In the dancing, if there be dancing. Yes.
“Would it please you to know that I have been taken?”
Thus did I ask my aunt, my paternal aunt-for she was in many ways the safer of the two-a week before my marriage. The words came from me as slowly as a plum splits, yet is sudden.
“Rumpled and ridden?” Her laugh was like the two last notes, the high notes played on the piano, one following quick upon the other. “Were you then taken to the summerhouse?” she asked. I shook my head, she seeing only the reflection of my head and shoulders in my mirror. I chewed upon a hairpin, its indifference. “It is best so, for the gardeners lurk there. They have had many sights to see in the past of which you have been innocent. Have you been ridden fore or aft?”
I moved my hips. Again her laugh. “Then you are virgin still-'tis good. Better to have known the thick shaft's burning there. Your bottom is the fuller for it, yet in its tightness it encloses secrets. Have no shame on it for the male fruit so inserted is ever fruitful though unproductive save of yearnings for its further approaches.”
“You will not tell?”
It was my last naivete', yet it threaded not my voice. I spoke as one who had received, discarded, and is yet ready to accommodate again.
“Had I done so, my pet, at the first falling of the strap, how cold the house would have become. Now with your going shall be winter.”
I turned and kissed her. I had said nothing of the strap and yet she knew. “I may return yet, dear aunt.”
“Of course you shall and must, yet think not of your comings and goings overmuch but of acceptances, receipts of pleasure. Raise your skirts and let me see you.”
I did so and stood-turned slowly. She patted my bottom, my thighs, all about. A murmur of admiration escaped her.
“How smooth and creamy your skin has become through it. I would have seen you squeal and squall, threshing your hips in love's surrender, yet it was not to be. One lives in part on memories of things unknown, unseen. So must it be, for the unseen is often the better envisaged thereby, is enlivened, made articulate, perpetually alive. Take not a yearling now, for you have known the lion's breath at your ears.”
My eyes were questions marks, as she perceived.
“Ask not. The answers lie within you, not outside. Questions are as moths. Their wings get burned.”
A knock disturbs my memories. I upon the door upon Charlotte.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I am not as others are nor yet as others would become. The light that falls upon most others leaves them but opaque. People should have a certain translucency, a yielding to the light. Had it not been for the presence of Charlotte, whom I both knew and knew not, I might have fled home and donned again my old attires, sucked the brown ribbons on a brown, brown dress, and awaited the benedictions of the strap. I would sponge Perdita down- the marble of her cold yet knowing to my hands. Father would take his longbow into the paddock, as oftimes he did, and the arrows would sing again, fleeting towards some distant target, or the hesitant hare.
He would never shoot to kill a living creature. His pride was in missing them by a hair's breadth. “How that hare's feet scampered!” he would chuckle, and then sharpen his small broadheads anew while I stood and watched, fearful of and yet fascinated by their tiny leaf-shape, the glittering of their sharp edges and their points. The nocking-point on his bowstring sometimes frayed and I would bind it for him with two rings of red thread so that the nock of the arrow could be placed exactly between them. Often enough he would shoot at a round straw target that a manservant would bring out and place upon a sort of easel. Father would then stand very straight as he drew the string, his three fingers around it ever quivering back and forth until it seemed that the strength of the bow must overcome him. But then at last, when I often thought almost all at breaking point, the arrow would be loosed, rising in a long loping curve and so swiftly until it met and buried its head in the centre of the target. Thus did Mr. Ford, the Champion Archer of England shoot, averred my father, and thus would he also shoot, though at a rather lesser distance, but I have noticed that men often try to copy one another in such matters.
What happens to the past-each moment like a photographic likeness-has often given me much to think on.
“It enters into the enclosures of the present,” father would say, and in my understanding of his words was yet no understanding. My thoughts would tumble all about like small monkeys who can find no other mischief to perform. I would run between the past and the present- sometimes would turn about and with the future flirt.
“That is as well,” he said when I told him of this, “for all doors and frameworks and lattices are forever open, so you may go back and forth, hither and yonder at will like the darting swallows that never descend but ever seek the insects in the air.”
Then it came to me that the poor insects which were soon to be swallowed were at once in the past, the present, and the future, for the birds-so quickly do they wheel and twist and turn-and all in the same space which each occupied with no interval between except for those in my mind. This I also told father, who smiled and kissed me and said, “When you know of it, do not speak of it or it is gone.”
So was my mind wrapt in mystery as now, as now, as now, though I wished my mind to be still as a pond is
