schoolmistress at Puxty, or that she was coming to the summer school. It would go by, she thought, as other things had gone by. She made what she hoped was an invisible adjustment to her stance, as her ankles were both numb and strained.
A woman on a plinth can see over a hedge she is designed to protrude above. There in the lane behind the yew hedge, their heads bent together, were Humphry, in his royal robes and hose, his red hair artificially whitened by August, and Marian Oakeshott, in a pretty dress with forget-me-not sprigs on cream. She was brushing the white powdering from his hair off the velvet shoulders of his cloak. It was a very wifely gesture. When she had brushed it away, she patted his arm, in an even more wifely way. Rage gripped the statue, who nevertheless must remain motionless. Rather deliberately, she thought of Herbert Methley’s investigating fingers. Involuntarily she remembered the ludicrous and alarming cows. She was her own woman.
At the moonlit garden party to celebrate the success of the play, Olive stood with Humphry in a circle of admirers which included Marian Oakeshott. Everyone praised Olive’s impassivity and stillness as the statue. Mrs. Oakeshott commented intelligently on the brilliant verse-speaking of Hermione’s passionate self-defence in Act I. She was even able to quote felicities of stress. Olive was confused by this and turned gladly to Herbert Methley, who made several remarks about the character of Hermione as Woman, and spoke of how few of Shakespeare’s female characters were women, since they were mostly to be played by young boys who were better at young girls. He had always wondered how a boy could create Cleopatra. He would like to see Mrs. Wellwood undertake Cleopatra. He kissed her hand, and held on to it too long.
And so Olive found herself in a bed with Herbert Methley. It was a bed in an inn called the Smugglers’ Rest, on a bit of coast looking out at the Channel. It was a bed that sagged, and seemed likely to creak, in a bedroom with an uneven wooden floor and an ill-fitting window, with a crocheted curtain with fish on it. The inn was run by a somewhat unctuous and over-friendly fat woman, who had fed the lovers on plates of shellfish and day-old bread and butter. Methley said he took a room there from time to time when he needed to be alone for inspiration. Olive thought “be alone” meant “not be with Phoebe” since otherwise he was reasonably solitary on his smallholding. It had taken a surprising amount of fixing to be together here. Lies had had to be told. Olive had set off on the London train to see a publisher and had got off at the next stop, which was why she was rather formally dressed, with a large hat, and gloves.
It would have been better if they could have fallen impulsively into each other’s arms in a hayloft, but that was impractical, they thought, surrounded by art students and miscellaneous children. Methley had repeated, with gratifying urgency, “You must come to me, you must come, it is meant to be.” And he had his arrangements, pat, when he came to propose them, with an ease which Olive felt it better not to question. Over lunch, with a certain bitterness and jealousy he had criticised August Steyning’s “bloodless” theories of impersonal acting. Bloodless and soulless, said Herbert Methley. There is too little passion in the world for it to be removed from the stage, where it should flourish, without hindrance. Olive felt it was all embarrassing, to be sitting eating oysters, and discussing Kleist and marionettes, looking into the eyes of an intended lover. It was all too deliberate, and not spontaneous. She thought there were women who would have enjoyed this aspect of things—but she was not one. She thought about how to say she had made a mistake, and must go home, and could not frame the voice or the sentence. So she ate her strawberry tart with cream, and followed Herbert Methley up the narrow wooden stairs.
Inside the bedroom, he bent to lock the door, and lifted his hands to remove her hat. She stood awkwardly, like a statue. He said
“You are thinking you have made a mistake, and should go home. You are embarrassed to be committing adultery out of a kind of revengefulness. You feel this is all mechanical, not passionate. I can read your thoughts, you see, I know you.” Olive laughed, murmured “A palpable hit,” and relaxed a few muscles.
“I am a writer, I know what people are thinking. I put my mind into their bodies. I love your body, and you will love mine. This is—as sex always is, my dear—both ludicrously comic, and passionately important. We shall know each other, as the Bible says. What could be more amazing?”
He was taking off his clothes as he spoke, and folding them, and putting them on a chair. Olive looked sidelong at his body. It was not pale with red extremities, like Humphry’s. It was a kind of tanned yellow-brown, all over, owing to the naked sunbathing. She gave a snort of laughter. Bodies are ludicrous, she thought, he is very clever to say so.
“ ‘To teach thee, I am naked first. Why then
What need’st thou have more covering than a man …,’ ”
he said. She could not place the quotation. He undid her belt and began on her buttons.
“All the same,” she said, finding her voice, “you are right, I do think this may be a mistake, I am embarrassed.”
“Of course you do, and of course you are,” he said, removing her dress and beginning on her underwear. “But I mean to make you forget all those thoughts, soon, very soon now.”
And she plunged naked into the bed, with her hair pinned up, so that he should not scrutinise the slacknesses and scarring of her skin.
He talked a lot, during the sexual act. Humphry didn’t, Humphry was silent and manful and lordly. Methley was intimate, curled round her, she thought, like a snake, like a salamander, murmuring in her ear “Is it better like this? Is it better here—or here—? Is this not delicious …?”
Her body liked what he was doing—most of the time, and he noticed so quickly when it didn’t, he changed tack, he corrected himself. She looked at his “thing” which was narrow and brownish, unlike Humphry’s thick one. She must not think about Humphry.
“Don’t think, stop thinking,” said Herbert Methley in her ear, “now is the time to stop thinking, my dear, my darling,” and she did stop thinking, and came to a quivering climax such as she had never before known, with a full- throated cry, which she felt must be audible all over the inn.
“I told you, I know you, we fit together,” said the voice in her ear, and she saw that it could be hard to forgo a second experience like this, and yet she was, yet she was—not ashamed—embarrassed—by the difference of it all, and her own involuntary motions.
• • •
When Olive was disturbed, she wrote. She wrote as she might dream, finding the meaning, or abandoning the images, later. She wrote to get back into that other, better world. When she was back in Todefright, after
Here she was briefly foiled by her own ingenuity. How could he unwind her, if her bindings were poisonous? He did it with his magic blade, which hissed where it came into contact with the liquid, and chipped away at the bits
