God Is an Englishman (28 page)

Everything conspired to sustain her in this uplifted mood, gay to the point of being coquettish when he urged her to recharge her glass, or try a little more of this or that. It was an altogether splendid occa sion, contriving, as by magic, to set the seal of maturity on her new status. His kindness extended to smoothing away the minor embar rassments that might, had he been less discerning, have punctured the balloon of conceit that enclosed her when she stayed his hand as he proposed a fourth glass of that delicious wine. By that time they had arrived at the savoury and her corsets, laced with the object of concealing the fact that she was not as wasp-waisted as fashion decreed, began to emit a series of danger signals in the form of flushes that touched her cheeks like the pulse of a winter fire, and were accompanied by a terrible desire to belch that had somehow to be converted into a volley of restrained hiccoughs.

In addition to this, as time went on, she became conscious of an urgent need to excuse herself for a few moments, but for the life of her could hit upon no idea how to fulfil such a simple need and wondered, unhappily, if there was a recognised formula for it on these occasions.

Apparently there was. Suddenly and mercifully he rose, saying, “I’ll go up for your shawl, and you can join me on the terrace, my dear. A meal like that calls for a good cigar.” Then, with a casualness that dispensed with the need to blush (if a blush at this stage would have been noticed) he added, “The ladies’ retiring room is through that door under the staircase,” and made her a little bow, just as if they had been playing charades at a Christmas party.

She could have hugged him then for sheer gratitude, but there were more urgent matters to attend to. She swept out of the room ahead of him and found the ladies’ room just where he had indicated, spending rather more than ten minutes closeted there, for she had trouble reaching under her petticoats and locating the bow that secured the tapes of her corsets. The relief that followed the initial tug was bliss, as though an area of her body had been denied the gross pleasures of the evening and now came scampering to join the rest of her, like a child released from lessons. She gave a half-dozen ecstatic sighs and then a whole series of hiccoughs, so unrestrained that she began to wonder if she was well on the way to being tipsy but decided that if she was it was his doing, and GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 145

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that in any event it was such a pleas ant sensation that she could understand why so many people made a habit of it. She moved over to the mirror on feet that seemed not to touch the ground and decided that the pinkness of her cheeks, far from being an embarrassment, emphasised the sparkle of her eyes and healthy glow of her complexion. There had never been a time when her reflection had not brought her satisfaction, but tonight she looked her very best and somehow, in what way she could not have said, more grown-up, at least twenty-one. She thought, gratefully, remembering his friendly reassurances just before they went down to dinner, “He really is the most amiable man in the world, and not in the least frightening, as I had begun to believe up to the moment he noticed I was snivelling and gave me this wonderful ring. In a way he’s almost as kind as the Colonel, so long as one faces up to things, and doesn’t wilt or whine, and I think I’ve learned that much about him already. He’d lose patience if he found himself married to what he would call a “twitterer,” and behave towards me as he did when he thought me a child, and took me along for no other reason than to spite Sam for killing that boy. The fantod type wouldn’t suit him at all, but I’ve never been like that, and am never likely to be!” and she winked at her reflection and swept out into the hall with her head high, carried along on a tide of claret and a resolve to put her theo ries concerning him to the test.

The moon was up, riding high above the long wooded island in the centre of the lake, and although the setting lacked the intimacy of Derwentwater it was still very beautiful, and she was sorry to be leaving it and returning to the cities again, for after nearly three months away from Seddon Moss she never wanted to see a factory stack again and told him so as they walked arm in arm along the terrace to a little gate that accessed the footpath following this part of the shore.

He said, “You’ll find no stacks where I’m taking you. It’s almost as rural as this and at least a dozen miles from London Stone. There are plenty of other houses there, of course, for they’ve started build ing a good class of property in the area, and we might look at them when I have time. The house I’ve rented is set back from a country road, connecting two main highways, and the back of it looks over farmland. The owner told me the wood is full of bluebells in the Spring.

You’ll like it well down there, Henrietta, and so shall I when I’m home.”

“Will you be away a great deal, Adam?” she asked, and rather enjoyed the pang that followed his admission that he would, for it showed she was already learning to miss him and this, she felt, was precisely how a brand new wife should feel.

“I’ll be travelling all over the country and even when I’m not I shall be at the London depot all day.” His tone became serious, “I’ve staked everything I GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 146

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possess in this venture and I mean to succeed. You don’t want to be married to a pauper, do you? You’ll be a little lonely at first, I daresay, but you’ll have a house to manage, with a staff of three I took over with the lease. A cook-housekeeper, a kitchenmaid-cum-parlourmaid, and a handyman gardener. And then you’ll drive and ride, for I mean to teach you both.”

They had reached the lake where a wall overlooking the shallows had been provided with a rustic seat. He stopped and looked down at her, with one of his quizzical smiles. “There are villages within walking distance, so I daresay you’ll attend church and enlist in the Good-Works brigade. There’s sure to be one, there always is in those kind of places. Didn’t you busy yourself making waistcoats for the heathen in Seddon Moss?”

She told him she had participated in ventures organised by curates that had been dominated by severe old ladies with very strict notions of propriety, and a nasty habit of reporting upon the behaviour of the younger set to parents. “They soon stopped complaining about me to Sam,” she said, “for he didn’t take at all kindly to that kind of thing,” and he said, genially, “In a way that old devil spoiled you. Well, I don’t intend to!” and he whirled her round and kissed her in a way that differed from any previous approach on his part, posses sively and masterfully, as though he was demonstrating his owner ship.

The kiss did not alarm her. Instead it seemed to light the fuses of a row of sky-rockets, planted by the good cheer inside her, and with the tapes of her corset trailing they had, as it were, freedom to soar, so that she found herself responding to the kiss in a way that she hoped he would attribute to the wine. Then, quite suddenly, caution caught up with her, and she dropped her hands on her lap, offering him a passive face, for she remembered that ardour was a man’s pre rogative and nothing she had ever heard or read implied the contrary. She would have been surprised had it been light enough to see his expression as he drew back, saying, with impatience, “Henrietta, you’re still afraid of me, in spite of what I said, and all that wine.”

“Why, of course I am, and why not? Nobody ever held me or kissed me that way before and that’s a fact, Adam!”

The wine must have had some effect on him. After all, he had accounted for two-thirds of a bottle, as well as a generous tot of brandy, so that her protest, for he interpreted it as such, exasperated him, reminding him of what he thought of as the absurd inadequacy of women’s education in the West. When she had come sailing out on to the terrace with head held high, and positive jauntiness in her step, the wine had seemed to have done his work for him, but now it struck him GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 147

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that the crust of that damned modesty pie they baked their women in over here was thicker than he had suspected.

She was sitting demurely, chin lowered and hands on lap, as though expecting a rebuke, possibly for drinking more than she could accom modate or, more likely, for giving rein to her instincts. More than anything else her dutiful posture told him that postponement would not help either one of them in this chancy business of adjusting to one another.

He said, taking her hand, “Listen, Henrietta, we’re man and wife now. Tell me precisely what that means to you? I’m sorry if it em barrasses you, but I have to know, for your sake as much as mine. What
does
marriage mean to you?” It was, she thought, a very odd question from a husband of a few hours, but was glad he had asked it here in the dark, before the door of their room closed on them and she had to answer in lamplight.

She said, deliberately, “Well, for one thing it surely means it’s perfectly proper for you to kiss me any way you choose. I’m not such a booby as to be ignorant of that, Adam.”

“That’s right,” he said, with a certain amount of relief, “and at first you liked being kissed. But then, because you thought it was proper for me but not for you, you didn’t.”

She had always been impressed by his powers of perception but never more so.

“If you know that is so, then why are you making me blush by asking me?”

“Because I have to hear you admit it so that I can tell you you’re wrong.

Whoever taught you that it was improper for a girl to return a kiss hasn’t the least notion of what marriage is about, even if they’ve been married for years. I can’t take pleasure in kissing you, unless you want to be kissed, and show me you do the way you did just a moment ago. That isn’t wrong between a man and woman, Hen rietta, not even if they’re unmarried, if they really care for one another.” This did astonish her, for it suggested a licence to kiss almost any man in that abandoned way but she let it pass, for the conversation promised to be very instructive indeed, and far more rewarding than discussing the topic with Sarah Hebditch.

“What else?” she said, “what else does marriage mean? I know, of course, that it almost always means babies, but I don’t believe any longer you get babies by kissing. Oh, you can laugh”—and he was laughing—“but I did believe that before I found out about Agnes and the pigman!”

“Agnes and the who?”

“The pigman,” and she recounted the story she had told the Colonel at Friar’s GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 148

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Crag. He seemed more amused than his father and said, when she had finished,

“But didn’t
anybody
give you straightforward advice about this kind of thing?

That housekeeper, Mrs. Warlow or Wotton, or whatever she was called? Or Aunt Charlotte, while I was away?”

“No,” she said resentfully, “neither one of them. I did ask Aunt Charlotte but she fobbed me off. I can’t say I was surprised about that, for after all she’s a spinster.” It occurred to her then to admit to the indeterminate conversation she had had with the Colonel but thought that could wait.

He said, “Well, I should have taken it kindly if she had made the effort but as she didn’t it’s left to me, and because you’re the person you are I suppose I’m luckier than most bridegrooms in this day and age. What I’m really trying to say is this, my dear. We’ve under taken to spend the rest of our lives together, to share the same bed and maybe raise a family, so you should get it into your pretty head here and now that love isn’t—or shouldn’t be—a male prerogative, and only a lot of fashionable taboos persuade people that it is! One other thing. Those strictures aren’t observed among the so-called heathen. In fact, most heathens I know would find them incomprehen sible. Do you believe that, Henrietta?”

“I do if you say so. You wouldn’t start telling me lies on my wed ding day, would you?” and she looked up at him mildly.

“No,” he said, laughing again, “I most certainly wouldn’t. In fact, I’m beginning to believe I should find it difficult to gammon you in any way at all, but here’s something else while I think of it. Don’t be upset if I laugh at you, because I’ve just decided that’s one of the reasons I married you. As long as you go on being as frank as you are I just have to laugh once in a while. Now where were we?”

“You were telling me about ‘taboos.’ What
is
a taboo, Adam?” In a way he was beginning to enjoy himself, although not at all in the way a man might be expected to on his wedding night. He said, “It’s a Polynesian word meaning ‘forbidden,’ and how it got into our language I can’t say, but I wish it hadn’t because it’s being sadly overworked. What I’m trying to say is really quite simple and it amounts to this. To be an experience worth having, love has to be shared, and there’s nothing shameful or shameless about it, if only because it’s as natural—well—as wading into that dinner you ate tonight because you were hungry. Damn it all, if men stopped need ing women, and women stopped needing men, everything would soon come to a full stop. Isn’t that obvious?”

“You mean by that just
any
man and
any
woman?”

“Well, say a majority. The Colonel was very much in love with my mother and she with him, and even your father must have been attracted to your mother, or GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 149

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how did she get him as far as the church? Now nothing I’ve said so far is very startling, is it? And most of it can’t even be new to you. You must have thought about it, and talked it over with other girls before you ran into me.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, eagerly, “I did that, but we’d get so far and started asking but then, well, the people we asked told us we weren’t even to think of such things.

Was that because of taboos?”