Flint and Roses (46 page)

‘Presently.'

‘Now, Faith—please.'

I got up, walked across the room to him and sat down carefully on the edge of the sofa, arranging my voluminous skirts so that no part of them touched him, although his breath was already in my nostrils, filling me with the devasting awareness of a hard, tough-fibred chest behind his shirt-frill, red blood beneath, a powerful, beautiful male body wanting mine.

‘All right,' he said. ‘I'll be honest. It suits me that way, in any case. I could have been happy with you, Faith, couldn't I? I know it. It's what I should have had—would have had. I cheated myself of it. And that's not the whole of it. I reckon I could live with that. I did live with it, until that night in Bournemouth last year. I wanted you that night, but I thought it would pass. It hasn't. I want you, Faith—in every way a man could want you—badly. And I've got one life, that's all, and so have you.'

‘And do you expect to get me?'

‘Yes,' he said, a sudden flash of excitement, of victory in his face. ‘I think so—I think I do. Faith, you're shaking—'

‘Yes—delirium, I expect. Hold me.'

And although I couldn't really believe I had spoken that last command—'Hold me'—I heard it; he heard it, obeyed it, his arms instantly around me, his mouth and his hands possessing as much of me as my cumbersome garments permitted.

‘Not here, Nicholas.'

‘Upstairs, then? I have to take you now, before you change your mind.'

‘Darling—that's not romantic.'

‘No, I daresay. But, once it's done, it's done, and there's no going back. Once I've got you—when I
know
I've got you—then I'll be romantic.'

He carried me up the narrow stairs, no tender gesture of gallantry but a rough lifting from the ground because it was quicker that way, and I was as conscious as he was of the need for haste. He was not gentle, nor did I require it, for it was urgency: alone in those first moments that nailed us together, the need for possession, the need even to punish one another, my whole body burning, wanting him quickly, quickly, so that my petticoats were an irritation to be torn away, his shirt an encumbrance that his hands and mine disposed of together. And it seemed right that his hard, heavy body, emerging from its elegant social wrappings, should crush me and hurt me, too intent on the conclusion of his desire, the simple act of claiming me—since that was what we were about—to think of giving me pleasure. We were as adversaries, bent on taking and devouring the whole of one another, grasping and clutching and biting, a fierce penetration that I answered just as fiercely, until whatever it was inside me that had obscured the source of rapture was invaded, split asunder, and it poured over me, wave upon wave of it, terrifying me and thrilling me at the same time, leaving me docile and bemused and irrevocably possessed.

We lay for a while in silence, recovering, easing ourselves apart, and, when it seemed to me that his breathing had slowed and deepened into sleep; I got up and went to the window, needing, I think, to be a yard or so away from him to experiment with the sensation of shame. Yet, taking a deep breath, waiting for it to start, nothing happened to me with which I could not cope.

I knew, in this cooler moment, the enormity of the social and moral crime I had committed, for which I, as a woman, would be required to pay a far higher price than Nicholas. Discovery for him, would mean no more perhaps than a personal explanation with his wife and with his father, a certain winking and sniggering among the crowd when he entered the Piece Hall. ‘The young devil, he got the Ashburn woman, did he? Good luck to him!', since it was well known that a man took his pleasures where he could find them, and a woman who surrendered was no better than a whore in any case.

But for me the retribution would be terrible and complete, a total casting-out which would oblige even my mother and Prudence to treat me as a stranger, if they wished to retain their own reputations. But—although I did not wish to lose them, had no idea how to face life without them—I had done nothing I could find it in my own heart to regret, had done nothing, certainly, that I would not be prepared to do again. And, having decided that much. I could see no purpose in self-torment.

I am no longer sure if I thought of Giles in that solitary quarter of an hour; it simply seems to me now that I must have done so, for I could hardly have been so calm had I not realized that my feelings for him had been so different that they could still exist, quite independently, alongside my love for Nicholas, which had always been there. I sought no excuses, no justifications. That was simply the way of it. And, if there was a price to pay, then, because I was a Law Valley woman who understood about the settlement of debts, I would pay it.

‘Are you awake?' I murmured, and he crossed the room in two strides, his arms coming tight around me.

‘Aye—awake and watching you. You'll be thinking about your husband, I expect, and maybe I've been thinking about my wife. And I've got this to say to you, Faith Aycliffe. I reckon you must love me a fair amount or you'd not have let me near you in the first place, and whatever it costs me—whatever it costs you—I've no mind to let you go. Don't whine to me now, and say you didn't mean it to go this far, for I won't take it. It's happened. I've got you and I'll keep you—one way or another—that's one thing you can be sure of.'

‘And when did you ever see me whining, Nicholas Barforth?'

‘Never,' he said. One hand going gently now into my hair, finding my cheek and the nape of my neck. ‘I never did.'

‘No—just as I've never seen you romantic.'

He pressed his mouth against my forehead, and I felt his lips curve into their slow smile. ‘Yes—well I did promise that, didn't I? Come back to bed then, Faith. What we did just then was need—I expect you know that. So we'll go back to bed now, I reckon, and make love.'

It was enough, at least for Nicholas, in those early days to know that his physical possession of me was beyond dispute, to rejoice in his complete mastery of my body's needs; and if he did not precisely wish to see me in a state of abject slavery—and I am not altogether certain of that—he desired, most assuredly, to increase those needs,
did
increase them, so that my body, quite separately from my heart, was famished and painful without him.

I lived through fevered days that should have terrified me and did not, content to take what I could, as if I stood somehow at the very rim of the world, some outer threshold, where I must clutch each moment as it came and live it intensely, to the limits of myself.

And having no experience of the stage-management of adultery, I was surprised how often we could be together.

His horse in the Old Swan yard would cause no comment, and, should anyone look for him in the bar-room and not find him there, there was the Piece Hall across the way, Mr. Rawnsley's Bank, the offices of Jonas Agbrigg, who handled the legal complexities of the Barforths—no reason at all to suppose he had taken the brisk, ten-minute stroll to my kitchen door, conveniently screened by a high-walled yard, with no neighbours to bother us. And if he should be seen in Millergate, coming to me or leaving me, what of it? It was a busy, commercial thoroughfare, containing not only the millinery and the bakery he would hardly patronize, but the premises of the architect, Mr. Outhwaite, who dealt with all repairs and extensions at Lawcroft and Tarn Edge, the saddlery, the importer of cigars and fine wines, where no one would be astonished to see him.

I could not be certain we were safe. I rather thought that we were not. But that first breathless August, that first mellowing of the year into September, my eyes were too dazzled for caution, my mind lulled, not by recklessness, but by the perilous, languorous philosophy of the opium-eater who, knowing perfectly well that he may die of his addiction, does not even want to resist it.

To begin with he came only in the evening, having purchased the discretion of my Mrs. Marworth, who, being too afraid of him to betray us in any case, and wordly enough to rather enjoy this kind of thing, would admit him through her kitchen and then prepare herself to tell anyone else who called that I was not at home. But he required, I think, some further commitment, some act of rashness on my part, and was soon urging me to folly.

‘We have a house in Scarborough, Faith. My parents never go there now, and I will confess to you that Blaize has used it, and that I have used it—I'm being honest, you see, like you said. I've done this before, except that I haven't, because it's different now, if you see what I mean? We could stay the whole night together, Faith—two whole nights. I've never made love to you in the morning. Of course you can get away. Yes, yes you can—you can if you want to.'

‘But I can't go to Scarborough, Nicholas. I've never travelled alone.'

‘You can. You've travelled all over Europe with your mother, who is the most feather-headed female imaginable. If you got her from here to Naples and back again, then you can find your way to Scarborough. Mrs. Marworth can go as far as Leeds with you, which will take care of chance meetings on the platform in Cullingford, and I'll have someone meet you at the other end.
Do
it, Faith. The couple who keep the house open for us won't even remember your face—I'll pay them to forget it.
Do
it. It's October now. Nobody we know goes to Scarborough at this season. You've got a friend, somewhere, haven't you, that you can say you're visiting?'

And so I went to Scarborough, arriving in a state of extreme nervous exhaustion, convinced that every tree I had passed
en route
concealed a prying Cullingford face, that the spare Mr. Collins who had been sent to meet me in a closed carriage, and his comfortable wife waiting to give me tea, were spies in Georgiana's or Aunt Hannah's pay. But the house, set high on the cliff-top, was surrounded by trees in full, burnished, Autumn leaf, its garden offering a view of the little grey town climbing downwards to the bay, the castle a stern sentinel above it, the streets empty, it seemed, of anything but the fresh October wind, the stirring of salt-dried foliage, the tang of sea-spray.

‘This is the first property my father bought outside Cullingford.' Nicholas told me. ‘His first attempt at being alone with my mother.' And for three miraculous days we were alone together, three rain-washed days; grey-tinted mornings which found us still in the same bed, no hurry, no sudden, chilly departures, a slow and lovely reaching out for one another in the moment of waking, free to enjoy this new-found luxury of making love in the uncertain, marine daylight which revealed to me, more exactly than any candleflame, the complex pattern of bone and muscle beneath his skin, the tight-clenching of his jaw in the moment of pleasure, the harsh hands and limbs of conquest, allowing me no quarter, and then the warmth of him afterwards, the cherishing.

‘Dear God, Faith! It gets better every time. Doesn't it?'

‘Yes, it does.'

‘Then tell me—tell me what it does to you.'

‘It consumes me—and then it makes me dream about the next time.'

‘Now that's what I like to hear. Give me half an hour, will you, and then we'll see about that dream—'

There were three, blustery afternoons, my hair tangled with sea-wind, walking together through a mist beaded with raindrops, losing ourselves in the grey sweep of sea and sky, laughing as we took shelter from the suddenly slanting rain, running back along the cliff path, giddy with freedom and laughter, to doze on the sofa before a busy tea-time fire.

There were three evenings that could go on forever, until we chose to end them, and which led us warmly, gently, to love and sleep and the new morning. It was the best time, the special time, so good that there was bitterness at its ending, for those three perfect days had shown us too clearly how all the days of our lives could have been, and we were no longer satisfied.

He startled me badly a few days later by striding into my house in the middle of the afternoon.

‘Nicholas! Good heavens!—anyone could have been here.'

‘Mrs. Marworth said not, and I've told her to say you're not at home to anybody else. I was thinking of you. I was there, in Millergate, at the saddler's, and I thought why the devil shouldn't I see you? Why the devil shouldn't I? Give me a kiss, Faith—I've got all of five minutes.'

And so it continued.

‘Faith—are you there? I'm just up from the Piece Hall, and I was thinking of you. Come here—closer than that—ten minutes, that's all.'

Until one day, at the perilous hour of tea-time, he strode into my drawing-room, his arms lifting me roughly from the ground.

‘I was thinking of you—badly. And why the devil not? I've got half an hour, Faith. Come to bed.'

‘Nicholas.'

‘Yes, in the afternoon. Scandalous—your Mrs. Marworth thinks so too, I expect, but she's ready to stand in your doorway and say you're gone to Leeds, should anyone want to know.'

And I went upstairs, laughing, and locked my door, undressed myself slowly as he lay on my bed, allowing him time to see how the late autumn sunshine, slanting through the chinks in my curtains, dappled my bare skin. I was, I think, half shocked, half excited—since no decent woman made love in the daytime except in Scarborough—and perhaps that in itself was exciting, for, leaning over him, pouring myself against him, I was full of a wicked, tantalizing playfulness that became at its conclusion the purring content of a slumbrously stretching cat.

I watched him dress, loving him, adoring the hardness, the darkness of him, a body that would take on weight perhaps in middle life, as his father's was beginning to do, but which now was wide at the shoulder, narrow in the hips, his stomach taut and flat, beautiful. And sitting down at the bedside, his hands finding me beneath the covers, he said. ‘Why don't you stay here, in bed, until I come back tonight?'