Perhaps I know now where Julian is, although I wish I did not. The framework of his house etches itself in my mind as if in a sketch by Durer. I fly beyond, become a bird. I sniff at the dusty porticos of the black door through which I have so often passed, wearing my widow's weaves of deprivation. The beach is but fretted with few figures now. I gaze upon them, seen and unseen: the hypocrites and lecteurs, the taught and the untaught.
I spoke with a tradesman once at the back entrance, which offended Julian's mother muchly. He was a large man, bluff and quiet in his coming, of able limbs. I could not help myself but envisaged the weight and hang of him in his maleness. So should a man be, strong with authority in his loins.
Preachers have spoken to me, though not of sin for they knew me not as one of sin in my demureness. I minded them not, save for their eyes. Their eyes were funerals. They knew not the coaxed workings of my hips, the magical emergence of the male rod moving in my moon, a stammering of muffled breaths, the moonlight sheened upon my offered orb.
Ah, the gurglings of sperm that I drew from the stem, my sobs a metronome of lust, smack-slap of testicles beneath my bulb. The seepings on my sheet no maid dare speak of when she changed the linen. I had spilt milk, I said. I kept a glass ever by my bed, the cool milk thick with cream. My eyes are mirrors on and on. None see within them save in Perdition. In its retreat, its reluctance, its withdrawing, the penis would spill its last tears on my thighs. I warmed to them, reached back and touched the trickling pearls that stained my stocking tops with dissolution.
Should I know shame or delight in this? I knew it not as a matter for performances of thought nor mental gestures. Let none who do not care despair-let none.
My thighs burnish the air that swirls beneath my skirt. Eyes escort me and I know again their seeking. I hear the laughter of the lolling girls under the arches beneath the promenade, sucking the sweets of summer from their fingers. Perhaps I would take one-command her to ascend. Sensing my superiority, she would surely do so. An urge comes upon me sometimes to fondle a suaveness of hips, to feel the know of knowing as I in my maidenhood was felt, to brush with fervent touch the pubic moss of secrecy. Yet she must be virgin as was I, the better to be urged, persuaded, conquered-and left then virgin even as was I.
Between the fruitful pouting of my lovelips-the lips as tight as a forlorn nun's prayer-I succoured no insurgence of sperm until Julian was upon me, dark in the night though pale in his stirrings. His fingers have sought not my rosette in our bumpings. I have urged his hand there and felt it withdrawn, uncertain, dismayed, fretful perhaps of his own ignorance. I have spoken not. I do not answer his occasional crudities. He knows not the purities of sin, the immaculacy of silence broken only by the imperative murmurs of pleasure, the imperceptible sighs of indulgence.
Shall I enter as one who laughs, not knowing what she laughs at? The square faces me, endeavours to enfold the yawning sea but cannot. The house is seen, tall in its terracing. I am watched perhaps by servants who have long put away the tea things and have oiled the lamps for evening. Once when my mother was absent, my father read passages from Brantome to us. I knew the lives of gallant ladies. I was permitted to laugh. It was but a parable of strange observances and bodily concordances, my paternal aunt said. The English came too crisp to it in translation, my other aunt observed. I studied French the closer thereafter but could never find the words that like bright butterflies had been all about me in my father's reading.
Perhaps it was an indiscretion, for my mother returned and the book was put away to be replaced by Household Words. The mansions of my mind became thereafter many. I polished all within and laid my favourite thoughts in coloured boxes, there to be conserved. Long have I tinted them with other words, with dreams, observances. Such diaries as I kept hidden beneath the corner of my bed were muted by symbols. Thus: “the curtains fluttered” was the raising of my dress. “The moon rose high” conveyed my offering. “The tap water was warm” evoked my memories of sperm, deep bubbling in my bottom. “Milk was churned” I used also to this purpose. Knowing my naiveties, I blush-I-conquered, riven, put to the pestle's pounding, saddled in silence to the needles clicking that sounded as but an overture below.
Having no doorkey now, I ring. Julian would not let me have one.
“It is not proper so, Laura, unless a woman has a servant who may carry it. One of the maids is ever here to admit you.”
The door opens. I am regarded. Julian wears a pearl grey suit such as seems proper to him at this hour. I sense a perspiration beneath. Distasteful.
“You may not enter, Laura. All is done. You have walked too far alone, too long.”
He has said this before. Has he said this before? I am not deprived who have not.
“She is here again. Why is she here?” His mother appears. “Your possessions are at the station. You have not proven yourself. Immorality was ever rife in you.” Her body appears to me as but a support, a backcloth, for the two large blancmanges that of occasion wobble faintly under her corsage.
“I was elsewhere. Am I to be peered at through a microscope?”
I intended to add that it would be a black-lacquered one with brass-rimmed lenses, but it seemed not to matter. The tall thin entomologist approaches. The dead butterfly quivers. It mattered not to me what I had done for I counted it not a particular adventure. The episode had not had the ornateness that I wished. The actors had been paltry. I pass between Julian and his mother-between the blancmanges and his rather hard, pointed shoulder. Perhaps, as it occurs to me, I had become brazen, but such things apparel the outerness and not the innerness of one. The staircase within the hall regards me sombrely. They are no longer the stairs I wish to climb nor ever were. I recall no moments of salvation above, no luring of my hesitant, no desirous fumbling such as might have stirred me with pleasure. In the aboveness here I have ever been beyond the immediate moment and not in the moment, passing so rapidly from one moment to another-as one might float through empty windowpanes-that I have known no satisfaction in the moment.
“There is a dryness here,” I remark.
“There is dust, yes. It is never got rid of.” Julian is at my side. I feel the beseeching of a hound in his glance. He would stay me if he could.
“You have struck matches, Julian, but found not the tinder.”
It amuses me so to speak. As if to assuage him, I lay a mist of sadness among my words, though trailed so lightly that he does not notice it.
“I shall leave now. This woman may remain.”
“I am not of your kind! How dare you speak of me thus!” The floorboards creak beneath her heavy step.
“That is true-that you are not of my kind.” I turn, move in my moving. The openness of the door enchants. I am upon the world.
If the trees could come to me now, called from the lanes and the pastures, dragging their roots like long sloppy skirts, I could hide among them. I would peep from between them even as I peep upon myself through memories of myself.
I am told that all do so, though I am not sure of it. Someday when passing people perhaps I shall ask them, enquire of it. I shall ask only those who are well clothed and not pursed of mouth nor pompous in their stances. Their memories shall invest me with the promises of their pasts that I may compare them with my own.
There are cockles to be had along the promenade. I shall dine in London. Father once took me there. I remember the hotel, close upon Southampton Row- how vast and high the bed, the tassels trembling. The guardian at the door bowed to me as if I were a princess. Father had pressed half a sovereign in his hand. I will conserve one in my purse. One should return to one's beginnings-the light falling at morning across the waiting steps, the scuttling of the maids' brushes along the lintels, the cry of an owl at night announcing a dark outerness to the closed dark house.