“He is weak, of course. Wear this chemise-and your boots. Your drawers are not required. Go to your room and wait. Wine will be brought. After your muffins. What a girl you are for toast and muffins. Go to your room.”
Millie is quiet. She gathers up my clothes, her hands more reverential than they were. The chemise of white batiste is short. It floats about my hips, clinging.
My room, how do I know my room, and yet I know. Along the corridor, the second door, opening upon mystery. A scent of yesterdays. Fresh linen, a white bowl on a marble stand, enclosing a white jug of pure still water. The brass rails of the bed gleam. The bedsprings tinkle to my coming. In a moment a maid enters with toast and muffins.
“Will you have white wine afterwards, Miss, or the red?”
“The white. German and not French. Do I not always have that?”
“Yes, Miss, I forgets, what with all the comings and goings. I was told to say it's half past six now you'll be ready. Ill bring the wine straightaway if I may.”
“Yes.”
My voice is distant as befits my mood. A restlessness of waiting is upon me. The curtains must be drawn-a gap left for the dust. No one will think of that save I.
The butter from the muffins runs upon my fingers- rich.
CHAPTER TWO
The wine is gone. The tang of it upon my tongue. Should I have drunk all? Does it dishonour my breath? When tigers prowled I drank liqueurs, the sheet of my bed ruffled into rivers we had swum. Burnished by moonlight I lay in my quiescence, liquid in sin.
At the first footsteps on the stairs I breathe more quietly. I know them to be his. The doorhandle rattles gently and is turned. My thoughts turn, run, and hide like children in an orchard who have taken apples.
“The sea air, do you like it?” Striding across the room he asks. He has found the gap where the curtains stir.
“It is pleasant, yes. I was born in the country.”
“You do not speak of the past here. There is only the present.”
“Yes.”
My voice is as quiet as a fallen leaf. My legs tremor. He observes me not. I have spoken gently, quietly. I await retribution. Go down, go down, into the grass, the sand, the sea. Find the roots, the fronds, the waving tips. Delicate.
“There were miracles. Once there were miracles, Laura. Men had land, they strode across it, riding the Downs in their coming, tall in the mornings, their hopes unfettered. Upon coming to the sea they knew their journeys. We are the landlocked. All beyond is possessed, reserved and taken. And in the jungles prowl the tigers bright. You know of this.”
The question mark is dropped-dropped as of old. I catch it in its falling, secrete it in the valley between my breasts. It nestles there, coils and uncoils, then it sleeps.
Am I to reply? I know not my place, my stance, and yet I know to lie here in my waiting. The strap hangs from his grasp. It is wider even than the strap I knew-the snapping bites of my perdition.
“Answer, girl, answer! Were you not taught?”
His command comes to me so suddenly that I jump. In my lying-down I jump. He turns-observes the rondeur of my knees, the thighs, my gleaming calves, the tight-lacing of my boots. I must not leave heel marks.
Do not leave heel marks on the couch, Laura.
“I have been where the tigers stir-have seen the moonlight cold upon their flanks.”
“And upon your own? Were there mirrors? Answer, girl?”
“No.”
“No?”
“There was purity,” I reply.
My voice is sullen. I betray nothing. I will tell nothing. There was a mirror on a swivel stand, placed at an angle to my bed. We seemed as ghosts within it. No, I will not tell. There were secrets. In the small nights the small kisses. Hazed by clouds, they would appear and reappear on my lips, dewdrops of touch upon my breasts. My clock would tick. I placed it under my bed and mother asked me what had become of it. Take out the ticks, silvery, small. They would run like mercury across my palm. Shuffled into an envelope, they would be stilled, forbidden to touch, to coagulate, to merge. Remember this, remember.
There is no clock here in this room, no clock. The walls are grey with light. The pattern on the wallpaper speaks of flowers too tired to grow. I wait. Will he be harsh? Closer to me moving he has moved. His gaze falls upon me, the light from his mind brushes the skin of my thighs above my stocking tops. The strap stirs against his leg. Challenges.
“Were you not angry in your beginnings?” His voice is quizzical, kind. I do not wish to cry. The penis memory moves within me still.
“It was told to me that I must not be. I received. It was done.”
The strap moves, tickles, taunts. I roll over in my waiting, my chemise ascends. Gleam-glow of flesh, my hillocks proud. In my waiting.
The door opens and the woman enters. Her hands are busy at her apron, hiding, emerging, hiding. I cannot look. Hands should be stilled. Her eyes examine me-I cannot look. I close my own. The coverlet grows warm beneath my skin. Julian with his mother somewhere speaks. A maid is sent to search the streets for me. A high wind on the promenade may have blown me hither, thither. My dress shall be found upon railings-shoes skewed upon the pebbles of the beach, kicked by boys. I shall hide beneath the small waves waiting, the seaweed wreathed about my brow. Messages will reach me from the sailors lost.
The woman's gaze is one of approbation. I feel it through my eyelids.
“Handle her well. Be certain that the heels of her boots do not scour the bedcovers. You will wear your proper bonnet tomorrow, Laura.”
She is gone, the door closes, echoing the movement of her lips.
He speaks. “Your posture pleases me not. Are you ever so slovenly?”
Am I spurned that I am not first caressed, my nether cheeks moulded by suave and certain hands, lifted and positioned? I was ever mute in my obedience, permitting disclosure, mindful of the stone nymph in the garden who knew no more modesty than to clasp her hands before her. Her buttocks were less well cleft than my own. Perhaps it was thought to be a rudeness. The marble was Italian. In secret I would frequently pass my hand about it. Mother said that I should not, for it brought strange thoughts, withered the eyelids, and destroyed one's dreams. I would have taken the nymph to my room and brought her to Perdition if I could. She was too heavy. Upon her coming two dray horses were needed to pull the cart and six men to carry it in sad sack-covering behind the house where stood the waiting lawns. There was much ado, I remember, about getting it precisely upright. At nights I wished to cover her with a cloak. Mother would not have a name for her and wished her gone, saying that she did not like Italianate things. Father said she was to be called Perdita. At this I fretted a little, yet she stood too elegant to be lost, unloved. At mornings I would gaze down from my bedroom window at the small, tight marble moon of her bottom where the rain had streaked its tears. Once on a summer eve I leaned over the sill, the window open, spurred on by the strap to Perdition while I sought in vain her averted gaze.
I would have wished then the gazing of her blind eyes in my mewing, the small hot churning of my hips, her cold lips to my own.
“Be still-be still.” The words re-echo as I kneel now in this otherness, my palms flat on the bed.
Do all men speak thus-say the same?
There are times for stillness and times for movement. My hips jerk at the first impact of the leather as they ever did. The arrows of the pain that is no pain that stings. I wilt, I suffer, yet my back remains dipped. My bulb is bulbous. Heat invades, my head hangs, my shoulders quiver. Such whimpers as escape me sound no louder than the far crying of the gulls.
“Be quiet always, child,” my grandmother would say. Her shawls had smells of mustiness that I wished not to
