Lace

by Shirley Conran

  Pagan woke up the next morning wondering, as many had before her, “What have I done?”

  Robert then concentrated all his attention on a classic, whirlwind courtship, with his benevolent father beaming in the background. He brought Pagan charming little gifts—dangling golden bell earrings, a square-cut purple amethyst as large as her thumb, a darling little pet monkey in a scarlet jacket that Pagan immediately took off the delightful little creature.

  Two months later, somewhat to her surprise, Pagan and Robert were married at the British Embassy. Robert’s father gave her a pale blue Rolls Royce as a wedding present.

  Almost immediately after the wedding reception, the marriage started heading for the rocks.

  Pagan had never been passionately interested in sex, so at first she merely thought that all Robert needed was a bit of practice. She was wrong. A couple of months after their marriage, she tentatively said, “Could you possibly wait for me?” He immediately stiffened, said he didn’t know what she meant and accused her of being frigid. Amiably, Pagan agreed that she might be. “It’s just that I haven’t been so far,” she added. Robert turned purple with rage. Quoting the Kinsey Report, he said the average man took two and a half minutes to climax, which meant that she was getting thirty seconds more than average, didn’t it?

  Pagan longed to talk to somebody about it, but she felt too shy. She dearly wished she could talk to Kate to ask if it had been the same with her. Pagan wouldn’t mind asking Kate, because she was too desperate to be embarrassed, and she thought that if Kate knew how agonised Pagan was, then Kate wouldn’t mind talking about it. But Kate hadn’t answered one of her letters.

  In fact, Kate had written a violent letter to Pagan when she heard her friend had married Robert, but Robert spotted Kate’s handwriting and fished the letter from the silver salver in the hall. Slitting it open with his forefinger, he gave a sniff as his eyes flew over the five pages of accusation in Kate’s little, neat handwriting, every letter clear and separated, with no loops on the down strokes or any sort of flourish, and pain in every line. Robert put the letter in the inside pocket of his suit and later tore it up in his office.

  That evening—wearing his pained look—he told Pagan that he’d had a short letter from Kate, saying that she hoped he could forgive her and let bygones be bygones, that she was now in love with a Twelfth Lancer called Jocelyn Ricketts and hoped soon to be a soldier’s wife. Pagan eagerly asked to be shown the letter. Robert looked in his inside pocket and said dash, he seemed to have left it at the office, he’d bring it back tomorrow evening. The following evening he said, with irritation, that he’d forgotten the damn thing, and surely Pagan realised that he had more important things to think about than a couple of scrawled lines from a woman who’d hurt him so deeply.

  Pagan never again asked to see the letter, but after a few days—although Robert had distinctly told her not to do so—she locked herself in her pale blue bathroom as soon as Robert had left for the office and booked a call to Walton Street. After a four-hour delay, her call was put through but there was no answer. All that Pagan heard was the little quiet hiccup of that old-fashioned heavy black telephone, thousands of miles away in London. She immediately booked another call and again there was a four-hour delay and again no answer; Pagan didn’t dare book another call because Robert was due home, but she telephoned again on the following morning.

  There was no reply from Walton Street.

  On the third day Pagan booked a call to Kate’s mother. This time there was only a two-hour delay and Kate’s mother answered the phone herself on the fourth ring. Oddly stiff and formal, she said that Kate was staying in Scotland with friends. Yes, perfectly well. Yes, she and Mr. Ryan were also perfectly well, thank you.

  “D’you think you could get Kate to write to me, then, or telephone?” asked Pagan.

  There was a pause. The line crackled. Then, in a rush, Mrs. Ryan said, “I don’t think Kate ever wants to hear from you again. Or Robert. Kindly leave her alone.”

  Then Mrs. Ryan carefully put down the receiver with no intention of upsetting her Kate by telling her daughter that Pagan had telephoned to beg forgiveness. What a nerve the girl had!

  By Pagan’s first wedding anniversary, the Kinsey Report had been quoted at her so much that she thought perhaps she had better check if she was frigid. So she had an affair with her tennis coach, a cheerful Italian with good legs, gentle hands and a voluptuous appetite. They weren’t in love, so for Pagan there was a strange, embarrassing, impersonal feeling about the relationship at first, but Alfonso was a skillful lover and he adored everything about women.

  Alfonso was mysteriously unavailable at siesta time (when it was too hot to play tennis) but three months later Pagan found that there was a very good reason for this—a rich Armenian widow, one of those over-scented, plump, languid women of Cairo who wore tight black dresses from Paris with too much ostentatious jewelry and had their hairdressers call every morning. Alfonso beat the hairdresser to it, and his proposal of marriage was accepted. Although he suggested to Pagan that they continue their liaison, she thought it would be too complicated, however exciting.

  After that, she had a couple of young diplomats from the British Embassy, but they weren’t at all like the tennis coach—they were tense, elaborately polite and not at all cuddly, not very different from Robert, in fact.

  Robert had now started to complain that she was not only frigid but sterile. Considering his hostility, Pagan was surprised he still wanted to make love to her. “Well, shall we have another stab at it?” he would suggest with a polite snarl, and poor Pagan was duly stabbed with what she privately called the marital chippolata, wearily wishing that Robert would stop touching her nipples as if he were turning up the volume.

  Urged by Robert, who wanted a row of little Roberts, she eventually consulted a doctor, not only to check that her fallopian tubes were unobstructed, but because after Robert had made love to her, she felt a heavy turgid pain in her lower back, as if she were having a really nasty period. This sometimes lasted for hours, during which time Pagan would be tense and tearful, drop glasses, upset cups and ashtrays; she also started to suffer from insomnia. Not knowing that these were classic symptoms of a sexually aroused and then frustrated female, Pagan would eventually get up at four in the morning and slug herself to sleep with a blissful half-pint glass of neat vodka.

  The doctor confirmed that there was no reason why she shouldn’t conceive (“Keep practicing,” he said jovially), and decided that her other physical symptoms were psychosomatic because of her concern at not being pregnant. When Pagan suggested to Robert that his potency should be checked, he puffed up with rage like an angry pigeon and flatly refused to take a sperm test on the grounds that it was undignified.

  Outwardly, Pagan seemed exactly what Robert needed. A splendid-looking woman, a charming hostess and, as such, a business asset. But once she had acquired a wardrobe of rich clothes, once she knew all the people and had been to all their parties, Pagan started to long for the woods, the trees, the cliffs and the cold gray sea of Cornwall. Increasingly, she felt oppressed by the beige dust of the lotus, by the rich, pointless life of Cairo, by her own rich, pointless life and by her rich, pointless husband. She couldn’t stand the way that Robert kowtowed to his father, who now—for some unknown reason—didn’t seem to care for Pagan. Pagan knew that Robert blamed her for their lack of children, but she didn’t realise that both he and his father also silently blamed her for not having her own money. Unfairly, his father blamed Robert for having made a bad investment decision, conveniently forgetting that the marriage had been his own idea in the first place.

  “More trouble over your bloody estate,” snarled Robert, one evening when he returned from the office. With a nod he accepted the whiskey and soda that Mohamed silently proffered on a silver salver. “My father’s spent thousands of pounds on lawyers and yet they can’t upset your bloody mother’s trusteeship!”

  He strode over to Pagan,
sitting on a flowered chintz sofa on the balcony, and spat, “The old girl’s as tough as nails. That place belongs to you and she’s got it for a song!”

  Pagan yawned, then said in an offhand voice, “Well, it doesn’t much matter, darling, does it?” She stretched both arms up and moved along the sofa so that she was directly in the breeze stirred by the overhead fan. “After all, we don’t want to live there at the moment, and it gives Mama something to do, and she’s earning her own living, you don’t have to help support her.”

  “. . . Typical of you!” yelled Robert. “Just as Father says. You’re totally careless about money . . .”

  “. . . You’re totally under your bloody father’s thumb . . .”

  “. . . At least my father doesn’t exploit me . . .”

  And so another row started. Pagan realised by now that Robert didn’t love her. She also had painful cause to know that he was a verbal bully as he repeatedly tried to grind her down with criticism.

  Robert was finishing the job that Abdullah had started—the job of wrecking Pagan’s spirit. Not only did he not love her, he really wasn’t interested in her. Robert was interested in presenting himself to the world as a wise, just man; and to do this he prevaricated endlessly. He was never guilty of anything; in Robert’s eyes Robert could do no wrong. If the facts indicated otherwise, then the facts had to be readjusted. Certainly, Robert would never be honest enough to admit to himself that he was a rotten lover and a sham, Pagan thought.

  One night, after Robert had performed his marital duty for the usual three minutes, she told him so. Robert snapped on the bedside light and sat up, glowering at her. “What exactly do you mean by saying that I’m a dishonest sham?”

  Pagan realised she’d presented him with the perfect excuse for a row, but suddenly she didn’t care.

  “I mean that you’re not only a selfish lover but you pretend not to be. That’s deceitful and dishonest, when you turn over and go to sleep knowing that I’m churning inside, but pretending that you don’t know. I loved you when we married and I didn’t want to say anything to hurt you, and as a matter of fact I thought that all you needed was a tiny bit of practice. In fact, I thought we both probably did. If you were still the same as you were then, I wouldn’t mention it, but you’ve become worse.”

  Robert grew redder.

  “At first I thought you were too tired, Robert. I thought it was the strain of your job, but then I saw that it was just old-fashioned laziness and selfishness. And there was something nastier; you didn’t want to be involved with me. If you could press a button and have me disappear after you’ve come, you’d press it.”

  Robert turned purple. “You’re the only woman who’s ever complained—and that’s because you’re impossibly demanding!”

  Pagan took a deep breath and said what she’d been rehearsing in her mind for months. “Robert, I can masturbate to a climax in five minutes. I checked it with the kitchen egg-timer. That’s how long it takes to arouse me if I’m not anxious or under pressure. Not much longer than you. But you don’t bother to find out what makes me come. I’ve hinted for a long time and now I’m happy to tell you straight, as well as show you, so that you can’t go on pretending that you don’t know.”

  “You castrating bitch!”

  “No, I’m not. It’s just that I’m not an acquiescent Betty Grable or whatever female fantasy you imagine you have in your arms, when it’s only me. You’d rather fuck an imaginary Betty Grable than a real me, because she responds in exactly the way that suits you and gives no trouble. Good old Betty disappears at the touch of a button when you don’t need her any longer, doesn’t she? I can’t compete with a myth, with an invisible, acquiescent pinup. I want reality and honesty. I want a real relationship with a real man.”

  “You’ve got a filthy whore’s mouth.”

  “You’ve got a filthy schoolboy’s mind. I expect my mother’s generation would put it more daintily—they’d say you were insensitive or didn’t understand a woman’s needs or something—but for once, Robert, I’m speaking plainly because I want there to be no doubt about what I’m saying. I don’t want you to double-think this conversation into something that suits you. I’m saying that I don’t want to be used only for sex. I want to be loved. I want intimacy and sensuality and mutual concern. Not a quick stab, thank you!”

  She thought that Robert was going to hit her, but he didn’t; he merely glowered at her and stormed off to sleep in one of the other bedrooms. For three days he wore an air of righteousness and did not speak to his wife; then he returned to her bed and behaved as if their conversation had never taken place.

  Pagan wept. She had hoped that after he’d simmered down, he might take some notice of what she had said. But he didn’t.

  And she never tried again.

  25

  THE GLASS DOORS of the sumptuously decorated penthouse suite of the Dorchester were thrown open. Although it was early June, it was a warm day for London.

  Inside the powder-blue bedroom, on the vast, rumpled, lace bedspread, the twenty-three-year-old Abdullah lay naked across a woman’s half-clothed body. He slid his hand into her crumpled white silk blouse and softly pulled out her other breast. The rosy tip quivered erect in his mouth as his lips pulled on the vulnerable flesh, harder and harder on the sensitive, delicate skin. Abruptly he released it.

  “Don’t stop, please don’t stop!”

  Delicately he ran the tip of his tongue over the little jutting peak, ran it swiftly back and forth, the nipple quivering again as his tongue softly circled around it. He gently took it in his mouth and again started to suck softly, pulling at the now deep-red areola. Abruptly, he stopped again. A little cry, a gasp. Purring, he rubbed his silky, black mustache against the nipple, slippery with his saliva; gently growling, he played delicately with it.

  “Oh, that’s unbearable, don’t stop, darling.”

  Softly he nipped it with his teeth, let go, then pounced again, surrounding the raspberry flesh with his sucking mouth. Again he darted his tongue over and around the soft, dark bud, drawing it gently, then with increased firmness between his moist lips, pulling, stretching taut the heavy cream breast, clasping it with both brown hands, sucking harder and harder, greedy and insistent.

  “Darling, I can’t stand it. I’m going to come.”

  Abruptly, he stopped and pulled his gleaming brown body away, poised above her, his hand holding her wrists to the bed as she writhed in frustration, trying to reach up to him. “You can’t touch me,” he growled softly, “you can see me, you can see what you want and you’re not allowed to touch it, you can’t have it . . . until I allow it.”

  He shifted his position, lay beside her and taking her wrists in one hand he pressed them to the pillow above her head. Then his other hand slid down her body, felt beneath the crumpled skirt, slid over the stocking top and found her warm thigh. The hand slid over to her inner, quivering warmth, and felt soft, enfolding flesh on both sides as he lightly pressed his thumb against the moist, silken hair beneath it and found her clitoris. The body beneath him writhed in ecstasy, oblivious to all but his hands and mouth.

  “Now I’m going to undress you,” he purred, “very slowly.” Abdullah always talked to his women, always softly told them what he was going to do, just before he did it. It was sometimes easier not to undress a woman completely to whom he was making love for the first time. There was then no time to recall a husband, to feel guilt as clothes were being removed, and besides, Abdullah sometimes liked the urgent feel of a half-clothed woman beneath his naked body, he liked to feel the sensuous slither of satin and silk, the fragility of lace beneath his fingers or, in a more tigerlike mood, to feel fine fabric tear beneath his hard hands.

  The woman beneath him moaned again, “How can you . . . why don’t you . . . How can you stand it?” But Abdullah had been instructed in the sexual customs of the East, and those special, subtle practices had taught that there could be no deep satisfaction for a man, one who was no lo
nger a boy, without imsak, the control of his own fierce passion.

  For an instant Prince Abdullah’s mind spun back seven years to 1947, to the cool inner courtyard of the old doctor’s house in Cairo, where surrounded by lemon trees the fountain splashed under the arched, white colonnades that surrounded the courtyards. There he had lain on a vast, cushion-strewn, silken divan to be instructed in the arts of love and the special, subtle sexual practices of Arabia. He remembered the soft feel of the plump, brown thighs of his first girl, the silken curve of her knee under his hand, the ever-fascinating undulations of her dimpled backside, the soft feel of it beneath him and her conspiratorial giggle as, unable to contain himself, he thrust into her with frenzy, then climaxed with a harsh, triumphant cry.

  Only once was he allowed to do this, by way of introduction to the girl who for the first week was to be his partner, mentor, tease, informer and judge. Gravely, over thimblesful of black coffee, the old hakim explained that regular sexual intercourse was necessary to keep a man fit and healthy, but the sexual act could either be a simple one of reproduction—no more complicated than that of a beast in a field—or it could be a subtle act of love, a discipline to be learned and practiced, in order to achieve and appreciate the most sublime gift of Allah.

  Abdullah remembered the air, heavy with sexual promise, that hung over those cool rooms, and the soft, ululating wail of Arab love songs, accompanied by the music of flutes. He remembered the odour of those rooms, a sultry mixture of cinnamon and spices, kefand coffee, warm black hair and female musk, the scent of rose and jasmine, mingling with the fragrance of vanilla that wafted in from the tubs of white oleanders that stood on the turquoise-patterned tiles of the central courtyard.

  That first week had been a week of eagerness and exasperation as he was made to practice imsak, a word that roughly translated means “to retain”: Abdullah learned that his whole aim should be to avoid losing control of his body, and that this was best and most pleasantly accomplished by concentrating his mind entirely on the woman. By the objective study and prolongation of the pleasure of his partner, a lover could stem and control his own tide until she had achieved a height of passion that left her dazed and unaware of her surroundings. Only once a day was the sixteen-year-old boy allowed to climax. By the end of the first week his body was bruised all over where plump little Fatima had sharply pinched him when she judged it necessary, but he could tell by her pouts, by the regret in her merry eyes, the sly look she gave him under her glossy lashes, that she was sorry to see him progress to the older, more experienced women in the second week. Their plump, soft hands guided him. They murmured words of suggestion and lightly scratched their sharp almond nails upon his skin when he needed correction. Always, after the evening bath, when eunuchs poured silver pails of warm scented water between his thighs, a masseuse in white robes would bend over Abdullah’s silken couch to stroke and knead, to soothe, refresh and once again stimulate every tingling muscle in his body.