Dark Places (10 page)

Women
,
you fools
, I wanted to cry.
You are all the same
,
you are all just flesh
,
easier or harder to win
,
fatter or thinner
,
passionate or cool: but you are all just the same
,
just flesh
,
no ribbons and silks make any difference.

But they would not have believed. ‘Oh, yellow is not my colour at all!' Norah exclaimed once when I pointed to something fanciful in a window. ‘There are women who can wear yellow, Albion, but I am not one of them.' She was proud of that, thought herself very special in being unable to wear yellow. ‘I am terribly sensitive to colours, Albion. Yellow really pains me. I hope you do not think me eccentric.' I could tell by her simper that she was proud of herself for being so sensitive, and so unusual.

To please her, because I had found that a pleased woman is a greater pleasure to be with than an unpleased one, I put away my yellow cravat with the black clock-pattern, which I had always liked, and let her know that I would no longer trouble her by wearing it.

‘Oh, Albion,' Norah exclaimed and clasped her hands, ‘how kind of you to humour my whim, I am a silly weak woman, I know, and you are truly kind to indulge me.' Her eyes met mine as she said this, met them rather insistently, and there was a particular sort of flavour to the smile she gave me, and a certain quality of leaning near to me as she spoke. I recognised that, in the language of our sub-group of the species, she was telling me,
If you want me
,
I am yours.

Nine

I GAVE SOME THOUGHT to the where and when of my proposal, for I could easily imagine how such an event could be made ridiculous. That intimate moment could be interrupted by others coming in, who would guess what was happening, and put their fingers to their lips, and tiptoe out ostentatiously, and they would cock their eyebrows at me enquiringly later. And what if I had misread the signals, and she turned me down? Out-of-doors was the only possibility.

The weather co-operated, so we were able to stroll in the Gardens, where the colours of the autumn leaves made as good a pretext as any. We walked sedately along a path, making a little conversation about the various wonders of Nature before us. Norah seemed to know all the right things to say of a tree full of dying leaves, and kept up a steady stream of remarks about
the blaze of colour
and so on.

A certain tension was between us—like any normal man, I was a little anxious, and Norah was no fool in these respects, and knew what was coming. It seemed to me that other couples nudged each other when they saw us, and smirked knowingly, as if a sign hung around my neck: I AM ABOUT TO PROPOSE.

As the shadows lengthened, and the other couples hastened away to warm rooms and games of rummy, I became aware that Norah was allowing hospitable pauses to occur between her effusions. But like a swimmer dithering on the edge of a cold pond, I could not quite make myself plunge into any of her pauses. Somehow, now was never quite the right moment, there would be a better opening shortly. At the end of this path, I promised myself, I will speak. When we get to that palm tree. When those people down there have gone.

‘Are you cold, Norah?' I asked solicitously, and hoped she might allow herself to shiver—she was flimsily dressed, and the breeze was cold now—and say, ‘Oh, yes, Albion, let us go and have a cup of tea somewhere!' But she did not: in spite of the gooseflesh I could see on her arms, she said airily, ‘Oh no, Albion, I am not someone who feels the cold, and it is so pleasant here.' She turned away on the last words—had she said, ‘Pleasant here with you'? If she had, what better invitation could a man possibly have? Then again, perhaps she had not, and a man did not want to get it wrong.

So we continued to pace along, and Norah's ingenuity in thinking of yet another word for
blaze
and yet another word for
splendid
was remarkable. I agreed about how wonderful it all was, but I was made fearful by a sudden consciousness of the mystery of this other person called Norah. My palms prickled, my boots were made of lead, my collar strangled me: I could not give birth to the words I had prepared. While I continued to go
Hmmm
and
Indeed
at regular intervals I was safe, but when the words stopped it would no longer be Albion Gidley Singer, man about town, taking a stroll with one of the young ladies of his circle, a young lady in mauve by the name of Norah. It would be merely me, myself, penetrating the amnion of another's otherness, and staring in the face the possibility of rebuff.

Suddenly a large yellow dog, smooth-haired and all muscle, bounded out of a bush and straight over to me. It leapt up, and before I could act it had wrapped its forelegs around my thigh, panting and slavering and pumping itself against me. I flapped and shouted at it, but the more I flapped and shouted the more excited it became, glancing up with a roguish look and humping away all the harder. ‘Whatever is it doing, Albion, whatever is the matter with that dog?' Norah kept asking. ‘It is terribly friendly, it seems to know you, Albion, does it belong to a friend of yours?' Finally, as well as wishing to throttle the dog, I also wished to throttle her and her comments. It crossed my mind that this woman was either more stupid than could be believed, or more knowing than any man could credit. Could it be possible that she was laughing at me?

Even after the loathsome dog had been whistled off by its master, who could not resist a suggestive remark about what a shine the dog had taken to me, Norah could not leave the subject alone. Was I generally good with animals? And had I had a dog when I was a boy, and was I good with horses too? And what about budgies? So that weeks had to pass before I felt equal to another stroll with Norah, when I could at last utter the by now rather over-rehearsed and stale words which led to her becoming flesh of my flesh.

‘The fact is, there are women and there are men,' I said, sure of my ground there. ‘And I wish you to be my wife.' Norah did not titter for once, but touched my skin, the palm of my hand, with her own, and tilted her face up to me. When she watched my mouth, as it shaped the authoritative words it knew, she did not doubt: she filled me with her belief in me. My hands moved, my lips opened and closed, sounds came out of my mouth, muscles in my face were put into operation one by one so that my face was made to smile. Her small hand in mine steadied my giddy hollowness. My mouth forgot its facts in the blaze of fire between our palms. ‘Oh Albion,' she whispered, and it was done.

At the other weddings I had been to, I had noticed that getting married was more than getting the words right and not tripping on the marble step. In even the best-planned wedding, there was the possibility that a moment would occur in which the rules dropped away from a man, a moment in which he might be called on for spontaneous action. I had watched Prentiss, for example: his hands had trembled so much as he lifted the veil that his bride had had to help him, and their kiss had been like a promise of a lifetime of coming to the rescue.

Or there was Mallory, poor boob: he had actually dropped the ring tinkling on the floor. Everything had to wait while he scrabbled around for it; but then he rose to the moment, and held up the ring between thumb and forefinger for everyone to see, grinning all over his blushing face with silly triumph, like a boy with a marble, and a ripple of good-fellowship had gone around the church. Mallory had been able, in that moment of mortification, to draw on some reserve of self and make the moment his own. When he was dead and buried, people would still be smiling at the way Mallory had held up the ring.

On the morning of the wedding I woke with my heart shaking the walls of its chest. If I were to drop the ring, or fumble the veil, or fart audibly as Simpson had done, I knew I would be lost: I was no extemporiser. If anything of that sort happened to me, I knew I would simply be exposed. Everyone would know that I was just a husk that had learned a few tricks.

Mother certainly seemed to be on the verge of seeing through me. ‘Why, Albion,' she smiled at breakfast when I dropped the jam pot, and knocked over the milk jug with my elbow, ‘I think you must have a little touch of bridegroom's nerves, my dear,' and she smiled warmly into my face, and laid a hand over mine, and waited for me to lay bare my fears.

But I was a grown man in charge of a household and a business, not a little boy about to break down and pour out his troubles to his Mamma. ‘Thanks, Mother,' I said, and decided against any more breakfast. ‘But I think I am all right. If you have finished, I will ring for Manning and go up, I think.'

Mother shed a few tears at the wedding, and Kristabel supplied her with a lacy hanky. My sister looked surprised when she caught the bouquet, and clutched it ungraciously, as if catching it had simply been a reflex action, as well it might have been, for she had always been more interested in ball games than in marriage. Norah tittered and blushed prettily: women seemed to know instinctively what sort of thing was expected of them. But after the champagne she grasped my elbow in a bold way and cried, ‘Oh Albion, I am silly with happiness!' I did not titter: it does not become a man, much less a bridegroom, to titter. But I was glad of my moustache to hide behind.

We were married in the rain and my bride's hair smelled of orange water and rain when I deflowered her. Her pleasure in me was so great she writhed and arched beneath me like a hooked fish. ‘Albion! Ah!' she cried, and I heard amazement in her voice, and the lust of every woman, for she had been hollow and now she was filled with my bursting passion.

Tears are the ultimate smile: Norah shed them on her wedding-night, ah, such tears, and as fast as I licked them off her face she produced more. I would have liked to say, ‘Norah, how well your tears become you!' but, modest maid as she was, she covered her face with her hands, or turned away from me, so I had to grasp her wrists and force her arms down to her sides, and then I could approach my face to hers, and feel her tears cool on my own cheek, feel them salt on my tongue.

How I loved the feel of her arching away under me! How I loved to hear her hiss when I seized her delicate throat in my hands, and bent her backwards over herself, so her breasts became flat and her ribs tensed with strain! I grasped her like a stick across my knees and longed to snap her in two, such was my pleasure in her fragility, and the wire-sharp tension that filled her body in passion.

My own body rang with joy then, hearing her cry out with the pleasure of that pain, trying to whisper because she was a lady on her wedding-night: ‘Albion! Please, Albion!' My love for her at that moment was a sickness that could have no relief: my passion was a fever that could not break, although if I had been able to forget myself enough to tear those arms out of their sockets, I might have felt some relief from what pressed against my being like a flood against a wall.

I shot my pulsing seed into her receptacle and lay panting and weeping beside her, feeling my own tears run into my moustache and be lost there. I was at my hollowest then, drained into the Norah-person beside me, and I wept at my emptiness. Life was not in my hands, there was nothing in my hands, it was this woman who had it all, now that she had been filled with my being. ‘I am nothing, Norah,' I said, in a voice thick with tears, and felt her listening. ‘I am a dry husk, an empty shell.' Around me and in my head the voids were beginning to spin and hum and I was full of nothing but fear: my being was whirling in great blasts of the wind of nothingness. ‘I am nothing, Norah,' I said. ‘My soul is all alone,' and I was seized with the panic of my emptiness and aloneness.

There was no way I could stop being alone except by a warm touch on my spirit, and I turned to the woman who was full of me, the woman I had filled from my own store of need and fear, and tried to warm myself at her flesh. ‘Oh Norah,' I whispered through tears. ‘Norah!' I could not find the words for my anguish of soul, and could only hold her against me and say, ‘I am here, I am here,' to stop my soul sinking into blackness.

She lay, a minx ashamed. She did not speak, but wept. ‘It is the pleasure,' I told her. ‘You are a minx, and wanton, for all your titters and laces.' I laughed when she said, ‘No, no!' and pushed at me with the palms of her hands. The tears ran down those cheeks of hers and into her mouth.

But Norah was a woman, and women's tears did not seem to well up from any dark and hissing void. Norah was a woman and an animal, and lived only at the level of her greedy flesh. ‘Oh no, Albion,' she said, ‘enough!' and she pushed at me with her palms, and thrust me away from her as I tried to comfort myself against her, thinking that I wanted to fill her again, not seeing that in my agony of emptiness I needed her to fill me. ‘No, Albion, no!' she said, and I licked the salt tears off my moustache and swallowed them.

It was myself I loathed then, for my weakness, that she had seen and rejected. ‘It will not happen again, Norah,' I said with dignity, tasting the salt on my lips, and I let her think that I meant I would not fill her again for the moment. ‘Thank you, Albion,' she whispered, and I heard her sigh with pleasure, and curl into the bed, filled, replete, powerful, while I felt myself beginning to spin away into the panting fear again.

I felt my being shredding apart, and I seized my wife, because she was going to join me in fear if I had to suffer, and I shook her shoulders until she was gasping and trying to say ‘Albion,' through teeth that rattled together, and her fear at last met mine, and I forced my way into her fear, and at last we were joined: she was weeping and fearful as I was, and my fear was divided by being shared with her. ‘You are afraid,' I whispered into her ear as I thrust into her. ‘You are afraid, afraid, afraid,' I felt her fear greasy under my palms on her skin and I could reject her then, roll away, thrust her away from me, and hear her sob and gasp beside me, and I felt no fear now myself, and could sleep at last. ‘Flesh of my flesh,' I said just before I slept. ‘You are my wife, flesh of my flesh.' Her tears soothed me like a lullaby into warm sleep.