The Children's Book

“I think you do. You couldn’t ever take me home to your high-up family—don’t pretend to yourself, you couldn’t. We are no good to each other.”

Charles/Karl answered this by putting his arms round her, and gripping fiercely. He had not known he was going to do this. Their heads came close. He said “I want you, I need you, I need you.”

There were tears in her eyes. He wiped them away. He kissed her; they were both trembling; it was a careful, not a greedy, kiss.

“You’ll do me no good. I must be respectable.”

“Oh, my love, I know that. I do know.”

Ann came out into the sunlight, and they drew apart before she saw them. Charles/Karl said he must be going. He said “I’ll come back, if I may?”

“I can’t stop you passing by, on this road that goes nowhere—”

“I’ll come back. Soon.”

“Thank Mr. Wellwood for your book, Ann.” He rode away.

41

Herbert Methley came back to Cambridge at the beginning of the Easter Term. The Newnham Literature Society invited him to give an informal tea-time talk, in the tea-room in North Hall. He spoke about the changes that were taking place, and would take place, in women’s lives, as sensible politics prevailed. He did say that women had a right to fulfil all their needs, but he mentioned neither Free Love, nor Mr. Wells’s proposal for nurseries run by the State. He seemed, Florence thought, to be speaking particularly to her, responding to her interest, skating away from what didn’t interest her. She remembered the warm, lean grip of his hand in King’s. She considered his face and body. He was ugly, for certain. His neck was strained and muscular, round the Adam’s apple. There was too much of his mouth, but it was not slack, it was full of movement. His eyebrows danced, as he moved from pleasant to unpleasant themes. He pushed his hair back boyishly, but he was a man, not a boy. She remembered his grip, again. After the meeting, the women gathered round the writer and asked questions. Florence asked him if he thought marriage would disappear and he said he thought it would not: human beings, it appeared, needed a long- term nest and partners, like swans and some seabirds. But other creatures had developed other habits. He thought, looking round him at the students, that the idea of dress as a prison—unmanageable hats and trains, shoes you couldn’t walk on—indeed feet that were painfully crushed and broken, in China—all this might well be superseded. Young women now rode bicycles, which would have been unthinkable. He shook everyone’s hand before leaving. He held Florence’s for too long. His fingers played on hers.

Back in her room Florence paced, unsatisfied, dissatisfied. She looked out into the garden at one or two women playing badminton against a grey sky—the flimsy shuttlecock seemed to be her flimsy life. There were aspects of Newnham that were like a prison. She was near tears.

He tapped on the door. She opened it. She took in a huge breath.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I told them I was a friend of the family, a kind of uncle, and had left behind something I needed urgently—and so I found you. Let me in, and shut the door.” She let him in, and shut the door.

He said “It was you I came back for, you I had lost and found. You feel it too, I’m sure of that.”

She stood stock-still, and made a small sound, between a sob and a gasp.

He took her in his arms, and kissed her, softly, not invasively. He touched her breast, under her shirt, softly, and then less softly. He stroked her haunch and she responded, involuntarily, pressing herself against him. He was all overcoat and buttons. He stood back, undid the buttons, and shrugged off the coat. He said

“Now you canfeel what I want.”

Florence didn’t speak. If she had spoken, it would have to have been to protest, and she was not protesting.

“Buttons,” said Herbert Methley, “are a bore and a tease.”

He undid some of Florence’s buttons on her shirt. Then he pressed his face into the bodice, under the blouse. His moustache prickled. So did Florence’s skin. He did not take off her skirt, but searched for her body, with his hands, through it. Her body became independent of her mind. It rose to meet him, it pushed against him.

And then he said “I must go now. Remember, this is good, this is right, this is your right. Don’t have second thoughts, my beauty, when I’ve gone. I’ll write. I’ll think of a place where we can meet, and…”

He left her, and she stood there, unbuttoned, unsatisfied, every nerve fizzing and hot, not knowing how to imagine what she had been made to want violently. She did up the buttons and thought, this is dangerous, I won’t get any further in, I won’t answer his letter. Little currents of anonymous desire ran all over her, and contradicted her mind.

But when the letter came, amusing, tempting and urgent, Florence answered. It was mid-May, and sunny. She wanted a life of her own. So she went to lunch with Herbert Methley, unchaperoned and secretly, at a restaurant called Chez Tante Sophie, with a very curtained window in a passage in Soho. She wore a pretty green dress and a gay hat, with long ribbons. They ate whitebait, and poulet de Bresse, and crepes Suzette, and drank rather a lot of white Burgundy. They talked about literature and about the Woman Question, and the agitation for the Vote. There was a novel to be written, said Herbert Methley, about a truly free woman, who was not a commodity, and chose her own life. Something in Florence was repelled by this—it was old-fashioned, in its daring, compared to the ideas of some of the Newnham women, who were sober about real difficulties. But she was resolutely kicking over the traces, so she smiled and smiled, and made an uncharacteristic girlish squeak of pleasure when they lit the brandy over the pancakes and it flared intensely blue.

It turned out that they were to take coffee and cognac in a little private room Herbert Methley had reserved. “It will be an adventure,” he said obscurely, following Florence up a narrow, winding stair.

The private room was furnished with a couch, and low coffee tables, a silk spread with an oriental look, embroidered with feather patterns, and candles in pretty china candlesticks. It had no window on the outside world. It had a perfumed smell. It was not a room Florence would have chosen to spend time in, but there were things she had to know, and do. She unpinned her hat, and laid it aside; she accepted a large cognac; she trembled. Herbert Methley stroked her, as a man would stroke a nervous filly. He drank a large glass of cognac himself. He made a joke about adventures with buttons, and divested himself, and then Florence, of various garments. Florence wanted