He stood by an armchair as she took off her clothes, needing minutes to come down from three-o-one with so many pearl buttons to her blouse. Her brown eyes glowed, and a faintly modest smile made her look like the whore of Babylon, apt for the moment, but something she could never otherwise be as she unclipped her pretty white brassiere and gave her tits a stroke before attending to her stockings and skirt. Had she put on her best underwear knowing how the evening would end, or did a woman like that always wear such clean and flimsy stuff?
The light was clinical, which must be what she wants, he thought, the full-length mirrors of the white wood wardrobe doors seeming to multiply the dazzle. She neither wanted to hide the slight wrinkling of her mouth nor diminish the intensity of his scar. Her figure was thin but not inelegant, and he lustfully noted her charming breasts with their delicate carmine nipples. Seeing her whole nakedness appear, though she was no Aphrodite parting the waves and coming into land, he noted how shapely her legs were now that he could see them all the way up, and robust as well, as if made for a fuller figure than she had, and which some day she might grow into. Dark ringlets turned her into a houri, out of an illustration in some fairy-tale book he had once seen.
‘I always knew you were beautiful.’ He smoothed a palm down the neat bush of pubic hair. ‘But you’re far more so with no clothes on.’
She blushed almost to her shoulders. ‘Thank you. I like looking at myself in the mirror, as I’m doing now.’
‘Do you do it often?’
‘Why not?’ She drew back the covers of the bed, and their first tentative slow-motion movements hardened him more. He had taken the precaution of being already sheathed and, by midnight, three well-blobbed specimens lay discarded around the bed.
‘Weren’t you good?’ She seemed an entirely different person to him now. ‘Don’t you think it was worth waiting for?’ Her smile was brief, faintly teasing, which he liked because it drew them even closer together. ‘I think it was, certainly,’ she went on, wanting him to agree, while he could only wonder that she saw an altered man in him as well. ‘You’d better flush those things away, though, and be careful not to spill anything.’
She was nothing if not practical, influenced no doubt by reality, which he couldn’t care less about at such a time. He bombed them into the toilet bowl, each making a satisfying splash, as if retaining their individuality to the end, then pulled the chain, but even after a ton of water one of them surfaced like a poor benighted jellyfish that didn’t want to go into that bourne from which no traveller returned. He waited for the cistern to build up, and tried again, but the same forlorn homunculus spluttered up and eased its bulbous tail out for another circuit. The head of number two peaked from under the porcelain lip to see how his brother — or sister maybe — got on. Two more attempts, but number three still wanted to survive. Herbert didn’t fancy plunging a hand in to drag the recalcitrant bleeders out and throw them from the window for fear Cecilia’s parents would think a funny bush had grown in their garden during their time away.
She knocked on the door. ‘Are you all right, darling?’
‘Yeh, fine, coming.’ Another massive flush sent the final unwilling spunk bag to its doom — or he hoped so. Maybe it would surface in the morning for a final pathetic look at the sunlight coming through the mock stained-glass window, and only then do the decent thing and drown itself. At least he wouldn’t be there to hear her comments if the bloody thing didn’t succeed.
On the way home he told himself he was in love, said it over and over on the long depressing stretch through town, not even complaining at the thought of having to be in his overalls by seven. Words, however, were not rivets to fasten his emotions into place. He loved her compliance, and the pleasure of going round the world on her body again and again on her parents’ great bed. If he saw no more of her he would surely miss such delectable copulation. It was not, on the other hand, the profound and life-long love he ought to have felt, for it didn’t have that rootish tug of the heart, the all-enveloping sinking into the depths as between him and Eileen in the old days, which memory surfaced after his flesh to flesh fucking with Cecilia as if it had been only yesterday — though when seemingly flying home he felt no reason for complaint.
On Sunday morning he saw Archie and his pansy brother Raymond out by the shallows of the Trent near Clifton, both in their waders and hoping for a bite from fish that had just about had time to congratulate themselves at escaping the peril of the weir. Raymond went off to moon by himself, and Archie complained to Bert that the pair of them hadn’t been out for a booze-up lately.
‘It’s all right for you,’ Bert told him. ‘You can see your women in the week because they’re married, but me, I’m courtin’, and I can only meet my tart on Fridays and Saturdays.’ After a genuine no-nonsense berserker laugh, he added that his backbone was turning slowly, almost without him knowing — though he would most fully by the end — into a string of shiny Wollaton Park conkers.
Archie sat on the bank to watch his float. ‘Who is she, then?’
About to blurt out the truth, honour forced Herbert into an account of how he met a young woman called Joanna on his way back from guzzling a jar or two in the Admiral Rodney at Wollaton. He described how he sat next to her on the top deck of the bus, rain peppering at the windows all the lumbering way uphill and down into town. ‘I didn’t know how it was. We just got talking.’
Archie soaked in the account, enjoying the story whether true or not — though Herbert realized he took it for gospel, because why shouldn’t he? What you said to people they believed, as he would have taken in a similar story from Archie. ‘You clicked good and proper.’
‘Yeh, we talked the hind leg off a donkey. Then we got off the bus in Slab Square, and went for a drink in the Old Salutation. Lovely, she was. Dark hair, and a nice slim figure. She towd me she worked in an office and had a room of her own at West Bridgford, in a house owned by a Polish bloke.’
Archie clapped him on the back, saying what a ram he was. ‘I’d like to meet her sometime.’
‘Fuck off!’ Bert said. ‘If you did you’d only tek her away from me. I’m keeping her to myself.’
‘No, not me, Bert. I’d never tek my mate’s girl. I don’t need to do that.’
He returned the thump on the back. ‘I know you don’t. I was only jokin’. Look, yer float’s bobbin up and down.’
Three weeks after their first session of love Cecilia told him, with much regret, that her parents would be back next day. Herbert wasn’t worried. They had fucked as much in that time as if they had been married for six months, and a rest before he melted away would be no bad thing. They smoked the usual cigarette over a mug of coffee in the kitchen after their couple of hours upstairs. ‘We’ll go on seeing each other, though?’
‘Whenever we can. You make me know who I am,’ she said, ‘and I love you for it.’
His high opinion of her changed from that moment, to something of what it had been before their bonus of a honeymoon, because he couldn’t think much of a woman who didn’t know who she was every minute of the day and night, and who put the responsibility of defining herself on to someone like him. She had a year or two’s advantage in age, so such a statement made her seem almost childish. On the other hand he knew that his juvenile denigration had to be set against the intensity and delight of a passion never to be obtained from such as Eileen, a sort who knew herself to the core and would spit in anybody’s face if they tried to tell her who she was. She also never wanted to try any position except the hydraulic up and down.
Maybe Cecilia was flattering him, and knew very well who she was, and if so that was even less tenable. She was secretly smiling because he was younger and, rarely being capable of deciding which of these states she was in, hinted that even he did not know who he was. She wasn’t to know that the only time he did was while sitting in his room to write, and he saw no reason to tell her.