She threw the dress over the back of the chair and struggled out of her girdle.
“Hey!” he said. “A real one! I’ve seen them in the ads but I never got that far in real life, I’ve always wondered how they worked. Can I look at it?”
She handed it over to him. He sat up in bed to examine it, stretching it all of its three ways and flexing the bones. “God, how medieval,” he said. “How can you stand it? Do you have to wear one all the time?” He spoke of it as though it was some kind of unpleasant but necessary surgical appliance: a brace or a truss.
“No,” she said. She was standing in her slip, wondering what to do next. She refused, somewhat prudishly she supposed, to undress the rest of the way with the lights on; but he seemed to be having such a good time at the moment that she didn’t want to interrupt. On the other hand the room was cold and she was beginning to shiver.
She walked doggedly towards the bed, gritting her teeth. It was an assignment that was going to take a lot of perseverance. If she had had any sleeves on she would have rolled them up. “Move over,” she said.
Duncan flung away the girdle and pulled himself back into the bedclothes like a turtle into its shell. “Oh no,” he said, “I’m not letting you into this bed until you go in there and peel that junk off your face. Fornication may be all very well in its way, but if I’m going to come out looking like a piece of flowered wallpaper I reject it.”
She saw his point.
When she returned, scraped more or less clean, she snapped off the light and slithered into bed beside him. There was a pause.
“I guess now I’m supposed to crush you in my manly arms,” Duncan said out of the darkness.
She slid her hand beneath his cool back.
He groped for her head, snuffling against her neck. “You smell funny,” he said.
Half an hour later Duncan said, “It’s no use. I must be incorruptible. I’m going to have a cigarette.” He got up, stumbled the few steps across the room in the dark, located his clothes and rummaged around in them till he had found the pack, and returned. She could see parts of his face now and the china seashell gleaming in the light of the burning cigarette. He was sitting propped against the iron scrollwork at the head of the bed.
“I don’t exactly know what’s wrong,” he said. “Partly I don’t like not being able to see your face; but it would probably be worse if I could. But it’s not just that, I feel like some kind of little stunted creature crawling over the surface of a huge mass of flesh. Not that you’re fat,” he added, “you aren’t. There’s just altogether too much flesh around here. It’s suffocating.” He threw back the covers on his side of the bed. “That’s better,” he said. He rested the arm with the cigarette across his face.
Marian knelt beside him in the bed, holding the sheet around her like a shawl. She could barely trace the outlines of his long white body, flesh-white against bed-white, faintly luminous in the blue light from the street. Somebody in the next room flushed a toilet; the gurgling of the water in the pipes swirled through the air of the room and died away with a sound between a sigh and a hiss.
She clenched her hands on the sheet. She was tense with impatience and with another emotion that she recognized as the cold energy of terror. At this moment to evoke something, some response, even though she could not predict the thing that might emerge from beneath that seemingly passive surface, the blank white formless thing lying insubstantial in the darkness before her, shifting as her eyes shifted trying to see, that appeared to have no temperature, no odour, no thickness and no sound, was the most important thing she could ever have done, could ever do, and she couldn’t do it. The knowledge was an icy desolation worse than fear. No effort of will could be worth anything here. She could not will herself to reach out and touch him again. She could not will herself to move away.
The glow of the cigarette vanished; there was the hard china click of the ashtray being set down on the floor. She could sense that he was smiling in the darkness, but with what expression, sarcasm, malevolence, or even kindness, she could not guess.
“Lie down,” he said.
She sank back, still with the sheet clutched around her and her knees drawn up.
He put his arm around her. “No,” he said, “you have to unbend. Assuming the foetal position won’t be any help at all, god knows I’ve tried it long enough.” He stroked her with his hand, gently, straightening her out, almost as though he was ironing her.
“It isn’t something you can dispense, you know,” he said. “You have to let me take my own time.”
He edged over, closer to her now. She could feel his breath against the side of her neck, sharp and cool, and then his face pressing against her, nudging into her flesh, cool; like the muzzle of an animal, curious, and only slightly friendly.
29
They were sitting in a grimy coffee shop around the corner from the hotel. Duncan was counting the rest of his money to see what they could afford to have for breakfast. Marian had undone the buttons of her coat, but was holding it together at the neck. She didn’t want any of the other people to see her red dress: it belonged too obviously to the evening before. She had put Ainsley’s earrings in her pocket.
Between them on the green arborite-surfaced table was an assortment of dirty plates and cups and crumbs and splashes and smears of grease, remnants of the courageous breakfasters who had pioneered earlier into the morning when the arborite surface was innocent as a wilderness, untouched by the knife and fork of man, and had left behind them the random clutter of rejected or abandoned articles typical of such light travellers. They knew they would never pass that way again. Marian looked at their waste-strewn trail with distaste, but she was trying to be casual about breakfast. She didn’t want her stomach to make a scene. I’ll just have coffee and toast, maybe with jelly; surely there will be no objections to that, she thought.
A waitress with harassed hair appeared and began to clear the table. She flapped a dog-eared menu down in front of each of them. Marian opened hers and looked at the column headed “Breakfast Suggestions.”
Last night everything had seemed resolved, even the imagined face of Peter with its hunting eyes absorbed into some white revelation. It had been simple clarity rather than joy, but it had been submerged in sleep; and waking to the sound of water sighing in the pipes and loud corridor voices, she could not remember what it was. She had lain quietly, trying to concentrate on it, on what it might possibly have been, gazing at the ceiling, which was blotched with distracting watermarks; but it was no use. Then Duncan’s head had emerged from beneath the pillow where he had placed it during the night for safe-keeping. He stared at her for a moment as though he didn’t have the least idea who she was or what he was doing in that room. Then “Let’s get out of here,” he said. She had leaned over and kissed him on the mouth, but after she had drawn back he had merely licked his lips, and as though reminded by the action said “I’m hungry. Let’s go for breakfast. You look awful,” he had added.
“You’re not exactly the picture of health yourself,” she replied. His eyes were heavily circled and his hair looked like a raven’s nest. They got out of bed and she examined her own face briefly in the yellowed wavery glass of the bathroom mirror. Her skin was drawn and white and strangely dry. It was the truth: she did look awful.
She had not wanted to put those particular clothes back on but she had no choice. They dressed in silence, awkward in the narrow space of the room whose shabbiness was even more evident in the grey daylight, and furtively descended the stairs.
She looked at him now as he sat hunched over across the table from her, muffled again in his clothes. He had lit a cigarette and his eyes were watching the smoke. The eyes were closed to her, remote. The imprint left on her mind by the long famished body that had seemed in the darkness to consist of nothing but sharp crags and angles, the memory of its painfully defined almost skeletal ribcage, a pattern of ridges like a washboard, was fading as rapidly as any other transient impression on a soft surface. Whatever decision she had made had been forgotten, if indeed she had ever decided anything. It could have been an illusion, like the blue light on their skins. Something had been accomplished in his life though, she thought with a sense of weary competence; that was a small comfort; but for her nothing was permanent or finished. Peter was there, he hadn’t vanished; he was as real as the crumbs on the table, and she would have to act accordingly. She would have to go back. She had missed the morning bus but she could get the afternoon one, after talking to Peter, explaining. Or rather avoiding explanation. There was no real reason to explain because explanations involved causes and effects and this event had been neither. It had come from nowhere and it led nowhere, it was outside the chain. Suddenly it occurred to her that
