Lace (48 page)

He pushed steadily inside her and she gasped as their bodies started to move, both driven by his hard rhythmic thrusts. His hands held her breasts firmly and Pagan felt as though she were flying
as she yielded to this insistent strength. Seagulls swooped in her head, the tides sucked in and out, she felt the pull and depth of the sea, the sweet drowning of fulfillment.

Afterward they lay together on the carpet, neither wanting to leave the other’s body, neither speaking. Finally, Christopher murmured, “Fire’s gone out again. How about a
bath?” Leaving her wet robe and his clothes strewn over the living room, they slowly mounted the narrow staircase outside the kitchen. He stood her in the warm bath and soaped her all over,
his hands sliding down her body, following the soap as he explored every part of her. Then he took the hand spray that fit over the taps, and she felt the warm sting of water caressing every inch
of her body. She felt as if she were coming alive again.

Christopher hopped into the bath and they rocked together languorously in the warm scented water. Then Christopher lay back against the porcelain, and Pagan sat upon him as his hands tickled her
erect pink nipples. She could feel him high inside her, as he thrust against the core of her. She wanted him to stay there forever, joined to her. Then she felt his pent-up energy inside her. He
pulled her down to him and a wave of warm water swept over the bathroom floor as they laughed together in the hyacinth-scented steam.

He dried her in front of the bedroom fire, fondled her with Kate’s soft yellow towels. In the dim light he embraced her, wrapped his arms hungrily around her. Then he slowly pushed Pagan
backward onto the patchwork quilt and gently spread-eagled her limbs. “I want to get to know you,” he said softly. He knelt at the foot of the bed and started to stroke the sole of her
left foot. Gently, teasingly, he kissed her toes and slowly licked between each one, drawing each toe into his mouth as he stroked her legs with a butterflylike touch. Pagan swooned into
semi-awareness, conscious only of the voluptuous sensations that were flooding her body.

“My right foot’s about to march in protest,” she murmured.

“Tell it we’ve got the whole night,” Christopher said, busy tickling the back of her knee. When his fingertips, featherlight, reached up from her knee to her inner thigh, Pagan
pushed them away.

“Don’t. I’m horribly fat there, darling, it embarrasses me, don’t touch it.”

“All
women think their thighs are too fat. Shall I tell you something? Men adore plump thighs. They don’t
like
stringy, boyish muscles there. Men love that soft,
yielding flesh of your inner thigh.” He nibbled it gently. “For most men there’s nothing more eortic than slowly sliding their hand over the taut top of a nylon stocking, past the
garter belt, feeling the warm smooth flesh, then that softer warmth, that inner promise. Lace underwear feels harsh and scratchy against the voluptuous softness of a woman’s inner thigh.
Look, feel for yourself.” He grabbed Pagan’s fingertips and, with them, he gently stroked her thigh then slowly brushed her fingers over her inner leg. “There, see? Soft, baby
flesh.” He made love to each leg and then each arm, and when Pagan tried to pull him to her, he pushed her firmly back upon the quilt, saying, “Later.”

By the time his mouth had reached her navel, she was only conscious of the response of her body to his skilled touch. She made small, birdlike sighs, her pleasure became almost unbearable. She
reached out one arm to touch his shoulder and tried again to pull him to her but was firmly pushed back on the bed. She started to stroke the gray hair on his chest, but her hand was gently laid by
her side. “Please don’t interrupt my work,” he mumbled as his tongue reached her armpit. She felt as if she were about to faint from the tickling pleasure.

Then he was inside her again, and she felt as if the brass bedstead were slowly whirling up toward the ceiling. She was soaring ecstatically, about to fly through the sky. His thrusts were slow
and insistent until the moment when she gave the wild shriek of a gull as it soars to heaven; then she felt his excitement mount as he thrust fiercely into her until, with a harsh cry, he
climaxed.

They lay still and silent, warm together in the little bedroom.

P
AGAN
’
S MOTHER COULDN
’
T
believe her ears. “What do you
mean? You’re going to get married? To
whom?”
She looked at her happy, animated daughter, glowing as only physical passion can make a woman glow. Mrs. Trelawney was even more
astonished when she heard that she was about to become the mother-in-law of Sir Christopher Swann, the distinguished Director of the Anglo-American Cancer Research Institute.

Kate wasn’t so thrilled. “Are you going to tell him or
not
?” she asked Pagan in the cloakroom of La Popote, a small restaurant in Walton Street, where they were
dining.

“Not
yet
,” said Pagan.

“Is it fair?”

“I don’t care.”

“He’s so much older than you,” said Kate doubtfully, “and Pagan, he’s so big and bald. Dammit, he’s an
old
man! How can you marry an
old
man?”

“Darling, he’s forty-nine, old is ninety. He says he’s been bald since he was thirty. It’s quite sexy, you know, that shiny, hard top. If you think what it’s like
to have the back of your neck stroked, then that’s what it’s like up there, he says.” She leaned forward to peer in the mirror as she dabbed her lipstick. “And he’s
big but not
fat;
I mean, I promise you, darling, I’ve seen him as nature intended. That’s all muscle.” She screwed back her lipstick. “Do you like this new pale pink?
. . . So do I. Want to try it? . . . You must admit he looks a bit like Peter Lawford, apart from the hair, that is. And don’t you love that amused look in his eyes as if he can read your
innermost thoughts! It turns my knees to jelly.”

“I can see you’re in love with him,” said Kate, deciding that the pale pink lipstick didn’t suit her, “so it really doesn’t matter what other people
don’t see in him.”

“And there’s another thing. He is
the
most marvellous lover. Maybe it’s because he’s been doing it for so long, darling, maybe that’s one of the advantages
of old age. But all I can say is that for the last two weeks we’ve hardly been out of bed. I don’t have any
time
to think about booze. He knows so much about me now, he can keep
me out of my skull with delight for hours and hours.”

Kate was impressed. She had always wanted to know what a great lover did.

“Christopher says that he’s never yet met a woman who’s the same as another woman. He says we all like different things, we all—oh—
respond
in a different
way, and the most important thing for a man is to get a woman to tell him what exactly she likes and wants.”

“But I should die of embarrassment. If Toby asks what I like most, I always say everything.”

“Christopher says that most women say everything, darling, but it’s just being frightfully tactful. He says it’s nearly always difficult to get them to talk because
they’re so madly shy of saying what they want or else they’re afraid it’s hrrrevolting, as Maxine used to say.”

She had started to tug a comb through her hair. “It’s wonderful. It’s not that we get into seventy-nine different positions or that he can keep it up for hours, it’s just
that it’s so
intimate
. Once I got over that hurdle of false modesty and was able to shut my eyes and blush in the dark and talk to him truthfully, it was such a relief. For years
I’d been lying because I thought I was a freak, because the magic wand left me cold, and now Christopher has proved that I’m not a freak . . . I’ll tell you what he
does.”

“Careful, there’s someone else coming in. You can’t spout this filth in front of strangers.”

“I’ll tell you when we get back from our honeymoon, only in the interests of education, mind. We’re getting married in three weeks, at the chapel at Trelawney. You
will
come, won’t you? You’ll
never guess
where we’re going for our honeymoon. Indianapolis! Christopher has to lecture at something called St. Vincent’s. He says I can lie
in bed and recover while he’s earning our keep. Then, thank God, we’re going on to California and afterward back to New York. I’ll telephone you with all the filthy details when
we get back at the end of June.”

“Well, be careful what you order from room service,” said Kate.

“I’m going to stick to beer, nothing but beer, and drink it out of little wineglasses. But I’m definitely going to stop drinking when we get back.”

Only Kate and Mrs. Trelawney were present at the wedding in the sixteenth-century chapel in the hollow below the bluebell wood. Pagan wore a pink wool Chanel suit encrusted
with gold chains and gilt buttons with lions’ heads on them. With it she wore a navy silk blouse with a pussycat bow, a navy Breton straw hat and matching slingback shoes. She looks
electrically happy, as if she could hardly bear to get out of bed long enough to get married, thought Kate as Pagan strode down the aisle on her husband’s arm to the traditional triumphant
burst of Mendelssohn, played rather jerkily on the organ by Mrs. Hocken’s sister.

But by the end of September, Kate still hadn’t heard from Pagan.

It was mid-October before Pagan telephoned Kate.

“That was a long honeymoon.”

“Well, something happened, something utterly terrifying. On our first night in New York I woke up to hear odd strangled gasps. When I turned on the light, Christopher was purple and his
eyes were staring and his arms were thrashing around. So I grabbed the phone, and the doctor arrived so fast you’d have thought he was waiting in room service. He gave Christopher a
horse-size injection into his chest and I was shooed out of the way. Then they took Christopher off to the hospital in an ambulance. It was a massive heart attack. He was in the hospital for three
months—thank God we had medical insurance.”

“I can’t believe it,” Kate gasped. “Where are you?”

“I’m in Christopher’s apartment—I mean our apartment. It’s in On-slow Gardens. Can you come around, darling? We got home last night. I’ve only just unpacked
and I feel so utterly depressed. Christopher’s in bed, and I have to be so bloody cheerful all the time. It’s absolutely grim.”

Kate cancelled her luncheon appointment and drove straight to On-slow Gardens. Pagan’s big sitting room was really an avocado-coloured library with books covering the walls from floor to
ceiling. There were Persian rugs, tan leather sofas, brass lamps with blue-green glass shades, and a big bay window that looked out over the elm trees in the gardens.

“How long will it be before Christopher gets better?” Kate asked tentatively.

“Well, the doctors don’t exactly look at it that way,” Pagan said glumly, sipping from a large mug of coffee. “They treat heart failure by correcting the imbalance
between the supply and demand of the blood and by removing all the accumulated excess fluids in the patient’s body.”

“Eh? What does that
mean
?” Kate asked, completely mystified.

“It means that Christopher has to have a lot of rest—mental and physical. He isn’t allowed to work for too long. And he has to diet, because being overweight puts so much
strain on the cardiovascular system. He isn’t supposed to eat salt because he mustn’t retain fluid, and he takes diuretic pills to make him pee a lot. In and out of the loo all day.
He’s also had to give up smoking. But the really awful thing is no sex.”

“For how long?”

“Forever.”

“How awful!
But I suppose he can . . . pay attention to you.”

“No—it might excite him.”

“But the doctors can’t be serious! How does Christopher feel about it?”

“Rather selfish. He doesn’t want to die. As a matter of fact, I feel the same way.”

Now I’ll
never
find out what a really great lover does, Kate thought. It would be too unkind to ask. Oh
damn!

Kate immediately realised the danger of Pagan’s depression. “If he needs looking after, then you simply
must
stop drinking. Even beer in little wineglasses. Suppose he had an
attack when you were bombed?”

“I’ve thought about it,” said Pagan dully. “I know I’ve got to stop and I know it’s not going to be easy. I lived here with Christopher for a month before we
were married and I can’t
tell
you how unbearably fast I got hooked again. I tried to fight the yearning, but it beat me within days.” She heaved a noisy sigh. “As soon as
Christopher had left for the laboratory I used to set the alarm clock for four p.m., then grab the cooking sherry and sip until I passed out or was sick. The alarm clock always jerked me awake, and
then I’d have at least a couple of hours to pull myself together with a cold shower, eau de cologne and aspirin. It was ghastly. I only seemed to do it when I was alone, never at weekends.
Perhaps I would slink out to the kitchen for an occasional swig, but somehow the dreaded craving wasn’t too strong at weekends. Look, I want that address from you again, I’ve lost it.
That list of AA places.”

“It will be no use unless you tell Christopher. Do you want me to tell Christopher for you?”

“No. I’ll tell him as soon as he’s got over the journey. Let’s get this bloody phone call over.”

The following Thursday she went to her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, leaving Kate with Christopher and two sheets of typed emergency instructions.

“It was grim,” Pagan told her later. “Tough. No pissing about. You felt they were all desperately serious, all there for a purpose. We all had that fatal interest in common. We
met in the crypt of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, you know that church in Trafalgar Square, and we sat drinking tea and eating biscuits. They smoked a lot, after a couple of hours you’d
have thought the room was full of sea fog. There were lots more men than women and a couple of them were quite shabby—they looked as if they might be just out of prison or
something.”