He unhooked her gown, and would have helped her take it off, but she pushed his hands away, knowing she would do it quicker herself, freeing him to undress himself. Women’s clothes were so simple these days, that there was very little for her to remove. The muslin gown; the little laced busk-bodice – no stays or corsets for the modern woman; the chemise; the gartered stockings; and then she was done.
Her body tingled, enjoying the unaccustomed sensation of air and light touching it, revelling in the freedom of nakedness. It was a release; surprisingly, wonderfully, it was even a security. She could feel herself stretching confidently, feel her skin glowing, and knew she was beautiful. Never in her life, since she was a very small child, had she been completely naked – never would she have imagined that she could stand naked before another human being – least of all a man – without suffering the deepest, most crippling embarrassment. Yet she stood watching Kirov coping with his more complicated clothing, making no attempt to cover herself, wanting him to look at her, wanting to look at him.
When he let his last garment fall, and stood before her naked, she felt a sense of wonder, almost awe, at the sight of his male body. She had never seen one before; she had known nothing of how it would look. Now she saw the great beauty of it: hard, smooth-contoured, unlike a woman’s body; long bones and wide shoulders, the muscles designed for strength and endurance. His skin was milky white except for his face and hands; and smooth, hairless except for the dark crop at the base of his smooth belly, from which his penis arched strongly, as if with a life of its own.
She looked at the miraculous delicacy of his collar-bones, the tiny, mute nipples, pale pink as a child’s, and she found him a thing of wonderful completeness, and yet curiously unfinished. Man, the bestrider of the world, the proud wielder of weapons, the subduer, when stripped naked was so vulnerable – not strong in nakedness, as she now perceived she was.
She looked into his eyes, and saw that he knew it, too. His desire for her made him weak, as it made her strong.
‘You’re beautiful,’ she said. She looked again at his penis, and it seemed as though it were a separate thing from him, possessed of a primitive force that he could not control, drawing strength from the vitality of the earth, without reference to him. She understood now how men could be governed by it, driven by those desires which before had seemed to her incomprehensible. ‘That’s beautiful too,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen a man before.’
He nodded, his eyes fixed on her; and then, in helpless appeal, he put out his hands to her, and she took them and laid down on the bed, drawing him with her. She was not the petitioner now: she had a great wealth to give him.
‘Come, then,’ she whispered.
He laid down beside her, and she felt his hands on her, and was filled with an unbearable excitement, though she hardly understood for what. He bent his head and kissed her breast, and she felt that same loosening, weakening sensation that she had known before with him, as if everything inside her were turning to liquid. He moved across her, she felt his penis hot and hard like a brand between them, and she put her arms round him to draw him closer.
Then it was – but not like anything she had known before. He entered her as though she were his home, and it was easy and good, with the goodness of something natural, something that was meant to be; like cool water after a long day’s thirst. What with Basil had been a painful intrusion, with Nikolai was lovely, ravishing to the senses, utterly satisfying: her whole body sighed with relief at being completed at last. She felt him inside her – strange! wonderful! – and only wanted more, more of him, wanted to take the whole of him inside her and keep him folded in the warm darkness under her heart for ever.
She was unaware of anything but him, the touch of him, the smell of his skin the pulse of his life around her and inside her. She moved with him, wanting always more, to be closer, to yield up her separateness absolutely and be one thing, indivisible. And the life of their bodies quickened and caught each other’s rhythm, and then they were absolutely together, no difference between them, one person. The thing was not part of them, they were part of it, carried along by it towards the place – oh, she wanted to be there, but she didn’t want this to end, her soul would step out of her body and she would die if it should end!
She had not known there could be such feeling. Then for one beat of the heart everything stopped; they were suspended out of time in a miracle of light and sensation, soundless and breathless, as though the very stuff of the universe were streaming through them. Anne opened her eyes wide, and her mouth stretched in a soundless cry of ecstasy as she felt deep inside her the double convulsion of their accomplishment.
Years, aeons later he lifted his head and looked down at her, and saw she was crying: at least, her cheeks were wet, her eyelashes spiked and dark with tears.
‘My love,’ he said tenderly.
‘How could I have known?’ she whispered. ‘How could I possibly have known?’
All the long, hot June afternoon they lay on the bed and talked. Anne found a new pleasure, the greatest pleasure she could imagine – to lie curled against her lover, her head in the hollow of his shoulder, and talk, utterly without restraint, with perfect trust and understanding. It seemed very natural – their intellectual companionship had, after all, long preceded any other relationship between them; but there was an extra dimension of intimacy now added, and the thoughts and ideas flowed more easily than ever between them, as their entwined bodies made a perfect conduit.
Their conversation ranged comfortably, circling and always coming back to what had happened between them. It seemed, at the last, all right.
‘I can’t feel guilty,’ she said. ‘Not yet, at all events.’
He stroked her hair. ‘I can’t believe you have ever been anyone else’s. When I saw you in Fontenarde’s, I thought you had changed. You seemed harder – so assured and sophisticated – very much the Madame Tchaikovsky I had heard about – and oh, my love, how that hurt! When I heard the gossip about you in Paris, I hated to think of your being spoilt, becoming a brittle-smiling society hostess. But now I see that you are still the same, my Annushka – underneath, you are the same, innocent girl I brought to Russia all those years ago. What sort of a man can you have married, to have left so little mark on you?’
She didn’t want to talk about that. ‘I didn’t know what marriage would mean. Now I see this is what it ought to be like. Is it like this for everyone – for all lovers, I mean?’ She tilted her face up enquiringly.
He smiled. ‘How would I know that? You attribute me with a vastly flattering experience, Doushka.’
‘I love it when you call me that! But there have been others, haven’t there? You’ve spent so long away – in Paris, particularly. There’ve been lots of others?’
He was touched, but wary. ‘There were others; but never anything like this.’
‘No,’ she said, with satisfaction. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you, too. This was something that was due to us, Annushka; something we ought to have had, but was denied us.’
‘It’s a moment out of time – it doesn’t count, does it? It’s outside of real life.’
He pulled her against him. ‘It’s real – it’s the most real thing of all. Don’t doubt that.’
She was silent for a while, and then, measure of her ease, her confidence, she said, ‘Tell me about them. I hear so little now. How is Irina?’
He did not immediately answer, and after a while she lifted her head to look at him. His eyes were distant; but she was not separate from him – she was where he was, looking outwards.