by Angela Huth
‘What’s the matter?’
‘You’re doing that thing like when one was a child: shut your own eyes and you think no one else can see you. I can see you all right. You’ve a great little body.’
Virginia opened her eyes. Charlie was licking his lips and sniffing. His underpants stirred. His eyes were all over her body. She stepped back again.
‘Well, let’s get on with it.’ He stood up, towering over her, and took off the pants, his eyes still on her. She felt the blood surging round her face. Never in her life had she been so burning hot.
Charlie put out his hands towards her. Reluctantly, Virginia uncovered her breasts again and gave him her hands. She let her eyes rove over his face, his shoulders, his chest. But they would go no lower. She looked back at his face.
‘Come on. You’ve got to look at it some time.’ He seemed to be mocking, his promised gentleness forgotten.
Suddenly she snatched her hands away from him, ran over to the armchair, and huddled in its seat, her arms round her folded legs. She still hadn’t been able to bring herself to look lower than his navel.
‘Now come on honey, give me a chance. I’m too old to run around rooms.’
Virginia forced herself to glance at him. He stood half in a patch of light from the lamp: legs apart, hands on hips, hair still ridiculously askew, a sneering smile, the protruding stomach, a huge purple erection poised to snap her virginity for ever, and the blue angora socks.
‘What’s the matter?’ He put his head on one side, wrinkled up his nose and gave a loud burp. ‘Pardon me’.
‘Nothing really. It’s just that you’re so huge.’ Virginia cast down her eyes.
‘Sure, I’m huge. What did you expect? I’m a tall man. Things come in proportion.’
He was beginning to walk towards her, slowly. She noticed that one of his socks had slipped down a little, revealing a smooth white rim of leg where the hairs stopped. He stood before her, legs astride again, the whole of his desirous apparatus perilously close to her face, the vast cock gently bobbing up and down like a clumsy mobile. Virginia hastily scrambled to a standing position on the chair: there was no room for her to stand on the floor in front of it without Charlie touching her.
‘Please,’ she whispered, ‘just one thing. Could you take off your socks?’
Charlie looked surprised.
‘Sure, honey, anything to oblige.’ Without moving his position from the chair he raised each knee in turn, pulled off each sock, and let them fall on the floor. There they settled into two creamy blue blobs on the hideous checked carpet. ‘Tell you what else I’ll do, too.’
He suddenly marched with purpose into the bathroom, leaving Virginia’s route clear. She sped to the bed, slipped down between the sheets and huddled them round her neck. When Charlie came back he carried an aerosol tin of shaving soap.
‘Guess I don’t have the appropriate cream for this sort of operation, but if we need any help this might come in handy.’
He seemed to have pleased himself with his thoughtfulness. Putting the shaving soap on the bedside table, he banged his chest with his hand, making a loud clapping sound, and got into bed.
‘You’re a great girl, Virginia.’ Virginia felt the muscles in her body tighten, and she shivered. ‘Come on, now. We’ll take it steady. Steady as I can.’
He turned to her with a none too steady eye, and under the sheets one of his huge, soft hands began to trace the pattern of Virginia’s rib cage. He seemed to be breathing through his mouth, the breath coming in warm puffs that smelt of onion and olive and gin and whisky. In close-up his chin was pock-marked with shallow craters and there was no clear division between his eyebrows. The regularity of his features, that from a distance made him almost handsome, was lost. Virginia tried to remember the thinner, clearer version of his face in the photograph that she knew so well.
‘Have you ever thought,’ she asked, as his hand began to rise to her breast, ‘of loving me?’
The hand stopped in mid-ascent.
‘Why, now, Virginia, that’s a bit early to talk about love, isn’t it? We’ve only just met.’
‘But all those years, through our letters … We know each other so well, don’t we?’ Virginia realised she sounded a little hopeless.
‘Sure, through our letters we know each other probably better than a lot of people who’ve been married fifty years.’ His voice had a terse note of agreement. There didn’t seem much hope that he would expand into declarations of sudden love. And anyway, the hand was becoming impatient, pulling the sheet away from Virginia’s neck. Disappointment contracted within her, increasing her tension, but she relaxed her grip of the sheet and let Charlie pull it down.
He contemplated her breasts.
‘I’ve seen bigger,’ he said at last, ‘but no sweeter.’
He lowered his head very slowly towards one of them, then suddenly crashed down upon it, as if it might escape him at the last moment. The weight of his head hurt, but Virginia made no sound. She contemplated his short, bristly scalp, and remembered the carrot scalp she had been equally close to in the Welsh graveyard. If ever it was her lot to give lessons in sex education, she thought, she must remember to warn children that one of the things you could never imagine about it is the curious distastefulness of the human body in close up: the hairy dark caverns of nostrils, the ugly gash of a navel, the sticky substance of under-arm hair, the milky mess at the bottom of the eyes, the three lonely hairs on a big toe, the old-knitting look of a scrotum. Close contemplation of the most perfect specimen of humanity is disillusioning. Of a lesser specimen nothing but great love or uncaring desire can protect it from being ridiculous.
Charlie was chewing her nipple. It hurt. She moved.
‘That’s right,’ he grunted. ‘Respond, honey.’
Tentatively, Virginia put a hand on his neck, which provoked nothing but a harder chew, so she slid it down his shoulder. There her fingers came upon a bristling mole: they winced away, back to the safer regions of his upper arm, and she felt guilty.
But Charlie was through with stage one. Virginia could almost see him ticking it off in his mind. He rose from her breast, contemplated her for a moment – in which she had time to take in every gaping pore of his skin, and the whole tangle of bloody veins that laced his eyeballs – then he crashed back down upon her again. This time it was to kiss her mouth. She remembered, when he smiled, she had noticed a piece of fish paté stuck between his teeth, and hated the thought of her tongue forced to be the instrument to dislodge it. Reluctantly she opened her mouth and let his tongue lash its clumsy way about. It seemed to be filling her whole head. She would suffocate, she thought, if he didn’t stop soon. An ignominious way to die. She was just wondering, in a dizzy way, how her mother would explain such a death to the neighbours, when Charlie, faithful to some curious timing of his own, stopped the kissing.
He sat back on his haunches, panting. Sweat ran down the sides of his nose.
‘Gee, honey,’ he said, ‘you’re sure fiery.’
Virginia, revelling in the air that was able to swim freely through her nose again, felt that if she had been fiery then the average woman must be a nymphomaniac. She also felt that something was strangely wrong: that it shouldn’t be happening like this – she should be half drowned in an oblivion of love and desire. And here she was taking it all in quite coldly, marking up the moves with the same care she marked her pupils’ homework. Perhaps, though, the ecstasy came later. At the climax, as it was called in the books she’d read.
Charlie was sitting on the edge of the bed, now, his feet on the floor. He held the tin of shaving cream in one hand and was spurting it inaccurately towards his loins. It spluttered on to his thighs and stomach. He wiped these extra bits off with one careful finger, and rubbed them into the back of his other hand. He seemed to be taking a great deal of trouble with this preparation.
‘Every precaution,’ he muttered, almost to himself.
He twisted his body towards her and smiled. There
was considerably more hair on the left hand side of his chest than on the right. It was a darker shade of sand than on his legs, but paler than on his head. Virginia put up her hand to touch it, suddenly curious to know what it felt like.
Charlie reacted swiftly to the gesture. In one movement he got on top of her, forced her legs apart with an iron hand, and began to bluster his way into her. Immediately, it hurt. Virginia cried out.
‘Stop! Please.’
‘Relax, honey.’
‘Please –’
‘I said relax. It’s going in all right.’
‘It isn’t. You’re hurting.’ Virginia could feel the shaving cream oozing down her legs and doing nothing to soothe the ripping pain within her.
‘Shut up, Virginia Fly. We’re doing fine.’
‘Please, Charlie …’ It came out as a whimper. A long moan followed.
‘Look, who’s experienced at this game? You or me? I say we’re doing fine. Just relax.’ He spoke with the same voice as he had spoken to the untipped waiter. Then he began to gasp, and he lowered himself once more towards Virginia’s mouth. Terrified that he would begin to kiss her again, she turned away her head. Too elated by now to fight, Charlie sunk his teeth into her exposed neck and scrumpled up one of her breasts in his hand as if it were tissue paper.
At this point Virginia realised there was something wrong with her. Because she knew from Caroline that it was now that you began to go wild, both of you. You lost your hold, your bearings. You soared together.
Desperately, Virginia waited for her spirit, her body, her soul, her mind to unground themselves. But here she was, watching, feeling Charlie in all his clumsy wildness, bashing away at her, groaning, covering her with his sweat and rancid breath, alone in his flight: while she remained coldly conscious of nothing but the searing pain in her vagina, the clutch of bruises in her breast, the buzz in her ears and the ache in her head. Patterns of light and shade from the satin curtains, a magnified crease in the linen of the pillowcase, Charlie’s bony heel jutting out of the eiderdown – fragments of these things filled her eyes when she opened them. When she closed them she could see her virgin bedroom at home, with its dull peaceful view beyond the lattice window that no seducer had in reality stormed his way through, and she hated Charlie Oakhampton Jr. for not having managed to take her with him.
‘Oh God,’ she cried out loud.
‘Come!’ screeched Charlie, and with a final thrust and pound he gave a great shudder, and then was still. He let go of her breast, panted warm breath into her ear, and finally rolled off her. She felt his body go hot and slack against her. Her eyes were shut: he was licking saliva from his lips. Knowing she would be unseen, Virginia let her eyes trail the entire length of his body. He was quite limp now. Veiny. A streak of blood on one thigh.
‘Oh boy,’ he said, his eyes still shut, ‘we must get some sleep. The flight’s beginning to tell on me.’
He turned away from her, pulling the bedclothes over himself. Virginia was left an impossibly narrow margin of mattress. There, she would never sleep. Not that she felt one bit inclined to do so.
In a few moments Charlie began to snore, gently. Virginia slipped out of the bed without disturbing him, pulled off the eiderdown, turned off the bedside light and remembered her way through the dark to the armchair. She wrapped herself up and lay back as best she could.
She huddled there for a long time, quite awake, thinking. She realised calmly that her fantasy was over, that the bitterness of reality makes you forget that there can ever have been sweetness in anticipation. She wished Charlie had never come to England. They could have gone on writing to each other for another twelve or even twenty years, making promises to meet which never materialised, living with their imaginary pictures of each other, treating each other as a security that would never have to be put to the test of a meeting. Like that, though she wouldn’t have had her bliss, he would never have faded for her: she would have loved him in a way for ever. He would have remained fair in her mind.
It was intolerably hot in the room, dry with central heating. Virginia felt that the air smelt, too, of hot salty bodies and bad breath. She went to the window but it would not open. So she went to the bathroom and decided to take a cool bath. Dirty and sore, she felt.
She could not help looking at herself in the mirror: white face, a rash like her mother’s on her chest where Charlie had mauled her with his insensitive fingers, two bruises already appearing on her breast, a walnut-shaped red mark on her neck where his passionate teeth had dug into her; blood, for some reason, smeared on her stomach. What was it her mother had said? Oh yes. Quite dull girls have been known to radiate, having experienced love. Lucky, radiating, dull girls. Virginia smiled to herself.
Charlie tried to be nice in the morning, but it didn’t come to him easily. He apologised for having taken up most of the bed, hoped she was all right, and went on to talk about schedules. As soon as he was out of bed he put on his blue socks and loathsome underpants, and walked about like that. Virginia was past caring.
Breakfast was brought up to the room. Charlie managed to eat the full traditional American breakfast, the sight of which nauseated Virginia, who ate nothing. She sat opposite him, in the armchair she had spent the night on, ankles primly crossed, fingering the stuff of the chair’s covering. Charlie seemed not to notice her lack of spirits. He smeared a waffle with the bilious yolk of an egg, topped it with a slice of bacon and a spurt of maple syrup and ate it in his fingers like an open sandwich. Then, attempting to stop the flow of egg yolk down his chin with the back of his hand, he went to his coat – khaki-coloured, limp, at the end of his bed – and got out his wallet. He came back with it to his chair. His thumb made a yellow imprint on the mock crocodile leather. He didn’t notice. Virginia watched all his movements very carefully. They meant nothing to her. His eggy chin and upstanding hair, his bandy calf and stubbly neck no longer held the power to distress her. She wondered briefly if he was about to offer her money from the fat wad of dollars he had flourished the night before.
But Charlie took from his wallet a photograph: battered, small. He handed it over to Virginia. It was in colour, taken with a Polaroid camera. A white wooden house with a green front door, and lace curtains at the windows. On the small patch of lawn in front of the house sat a fair-haired woman with a very narrow face, and two crew-cut boys, aged about five, wearing striped shorts. Virginia studied it in silence.
‘Who are they?’ she asked at last.
‘Wife and kids.’
‘Wife and kids?’ Long silence.
‘Yeah. Wife and kids. Back home. That’s our house, see.’ He leant over and tapped the house in the photograph.
Virginia felt an extraordinary sensation within her, as if her whole stomach was being squeezed. She was aware that her lips trembled across her teeth into some sort of a smile.
‘You never told me,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well, you know. I always meant to, but I never knew how. Besides, I thought it might spoil our relationship, know what I mean?’ He noticed, dimly, Virginia’s dismayed face, and shrugged. ‘I mean, who’d want to go on writing like that to a married man? It wouldn’t be the same, somehow, would it?’
‘I’d have been pleased to know,’ said Virginia at last. ‘I’d have been pleased for you.’
‘Well, not knowing you, except like through your letters, I didn’t know that, did I? There was no guarantee. So I didn’t want to, like take the risk. Understand?’ He looked confused himself for a moment, but brightened at the thought of a joke. ‘But you know one thing, Virginia? I told Mirabelle about you, and boy was she jealous! You should have seen her.’ He smiled at the memory, his voice full of self congratulation. ‘Tantrums, the lot. But I wouldn’t give in. “No,” I said, “it’s like this, Mirabelle. I been writing to Virginia Fly for seven years and I’m damned if I’m going to stop now just because we’re married. She’s my penfriend, and I don’t want to give her up. There’s nothing in it,” I
told her, “nothing to go off your head about. We don’t have any marriage plans, Virginia and I. We’re just good penfriends,”’ He laughed. Virginia remained silent till the laugh petered out.
‘You mean, then, that for the last five years you’ve been leading me to believe …?’ Charlie was swabbing up the last of the cold egg yolk on the plate with a soggy piece of toast.
‘I haven’t knowingly led you to believe anything, honey, honest. I always told you the truth, just left some things out. Like when I said I kicked a ball around Saturday afternoons, I just left out that it was with Charlie junior and Denholm.’
‘But you told me about girl friends’ – Virginia emphasised the word carefully – ‘girls you met in all those places you travelled to on business.’
‘Sure, honey. Sure I did. That was all true. I met plenty of girls, balled a lot of them, like I said. Mirabelle and I have, like, an understanding. Now,’ – he looked at her face – ‘don’t take on so. It’s not going to make any difference to our letters, is it?’
Virginia stood up. Charlie did likewise. He put a hand on her shoulder.
‘Look here, honey. I was looking forward to telling you the news. I was looking forward to seeing you, after all these years. Honest. Now I’m here, and it’s great. We have a great thing going for us, believe me. I feel it all over.’ He balanced on one leg, scratching the other with his foot.
‘I’m afraid,’ said Virginia quietly, pushing away his hand, ‘I must go.’
‘Where’s it going to be first? The Tower?’
‘No. I’m going home.’
‘Now listen here, honey …’
‘I’m sorry, Charlie. But I don’t want to spoil your stay and I’d only be a gloomy companion.’
‘Nonsense, Virginia Fly.’ He appeared suddenly inspired. ‘You’re beautiful!’ Virginia looked straight at him. His eyes flinched from hers.
‘I’m not Charlie, and you know it. Anyhow, that’s not the point. The point is, I know I’d be no good to you in the face of these – new circumstances. And anyway I have silly old-fashioned beliefs about married men …’ She trailed off feebly.