Judith Ivory

by Black Silk

  “Wait,” she said bluntly.

  Graham watched her move off, the black Druid in a straw hat. He saw the hat come off in her hand as she went through the doors. When she returned, she was carrying the case against her chest, the way schoolchildren carry their books. Graham was dismayed to note that the frivolous hat was now nowhere to be seen.

  Submit tapped the box as she set it down on the table in front of Graham. Her discomposure was working its way toward anger. If he truly wanted this thing, after all this time, he could explain now from the beginning.

  “Why in God’s name would Henry give this to you?” she asked. “I never knew him to have any such interest.” She sat down opposite Graham, preparing for a long chat with the box between them.

  He took it immediately into his lap, out of sight. “I liked your hat,” he said. “Shall we have tea?”

  “That”—Submit pointed a finger onto a grey plank of the table—“is not like him.”

  “The little case?”

  She gave him a censuring look. “What is in the little case.”

  “You told me it was his; it must be ‘like’ him.”

  “Do you know what is in there?” Without waiting for an answer, she added, “I suspect you do.”

  He gave an uncertain smile and reached for the teapot. “If you don’t mind. Since you don’t care to—” He would pretend he didn’t know, if she would let him.

  “Open it,” she said. “Please.”

  This left Graham frowning and pouring.

  The tea smelled strong to him and was much too hot for the day. But he went through the motions, giving himself an opportunity to understand her attitude. She seemed to have a very different interpretation from his as to the contents of what he held in his lap. Why would she possibly want to discuss what was in there? Then it occurred to him that time and Henry’s peculiar sense of—what? humor?—might have worked to his advantage. He glanced over the rim of his cup. She really didn’t know the significance of this box, he realized. At least a partial ignorance sat, unaware of itself, on her face. Dear, incomprehensible Henry. Graham put his cup down and slid his chair back. He opened the case below her level of vision.

  He started slightly and felt his face warm. He couldn’t decide how he should react. He began to shuffle through the heavy pages of paper. They were, all twelve of them, there. Finely detailed ink drawings, each with its naked man and woman bonded together in some contortion. Breasts, bellies, half-open mouths. Defiant penises raised like fisted arms over the terrain and shrubbery of testes and open thighs. Somehow, reviewing these pictures with the woman across from him was not something he was prepared to do. Graham closed the box and went back to the tea.

  Submit leaned on her elbows, putting her chin in her hands, and stared. She waited for this disconcerting man to explain as Henry might have; she waited for profound insight.

  When he just sat there, saying nothing, filling his cup a second time, she asked, “Why? Why would Henry think that was a good thing to leave you? You knew the other night, you knew what was there. And you must know too that he wasn’t like that.” She wanted very badly to hear this confirmed.

  Meanwhile Graham took pleasure in the indicting silence. Dirty old man, he thought, marrying such a young—and trusting—girl. He wiped his lip, then touched his forehead with his napkin. The tea, the afternoon, not to mention this particular lapful of drawings, were a warm combination.

  “He was,” Submit continued on her own, “such a straightforward man. Why would I not know he kept this sort of thing?” Graham watched her face rise up out of her hands. “Or at least suspect? I can’t, even knowing it now, put it together with him.” She waited again for Graham to offer some logical understanding. “Can you?” she asked.

  He played with the cup and saucer. “We never completely know people, I suppose.”

  “But not like this. Henry was a gentle man.”

  “Henry?” The table wobbled as Graham moved his long legs under it.

  “I—Of course, Henry.”

  Graham stated what he had always considered a simple fact. “Henry was a pompous, belligerent, domineering son of a bitch.”

  She sat back. She was finally shocked. Where lewd pictures had failed, Graham realized, he had had enormous success.

  His language, he thought. Why had he been so emphatic? “Forgive me—” But he could see it was not that. Some whole mood had changed. She had expected a shared experience, a shared viewpoint, where one simply didn’t exist.

  He gave his full attention to the teacup. Its footed base, unglazed where it had been cut from the wheel, ground in the saucer against spilled sugar. Finally, for something to do, he pinched the cup by its handle and drank it dry.

  “He could be harsh,” Submit offered, “give you a piece of his mind when he wanted to.”

  “Or the back of his hand.”

  There was another break. “I suppose you knew him differently from how I did. Under different circumstances.”

  “I suppose.”

  Nothing connected them. They did not seem to have even a piece of Henry in common.

  “The pictures. You didn’t expect them?” she asked.

  “Hardly.”

  “Why you?”

  The subject exhausted him. He told her as much by a look.

  She looked away. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make your receiving them as reprehensible as Henry’s hiding them then giving them to you.”

  “I wouldn’t be too angry with him.”

  “Well, I am. I feel so—deceived.” Her eyes fixed on him. He was overwhelmed for a moment by a brave, disconcerting intelligence, an unflinching, unshrinking scrutiny. Then she bowed her head. “And you know things you’re not saying. You know all about this in some way. Were there more? Was Henry—peculiar?”

  “Henry was decidedly peculiar.”

  “That way.”

  “What way?”

  She made a little reprimanding snort.

  “Not that I know of,” he answered.

  “Are you?”

  He frowned sharply. “Perhaps you’d better be more definite.”

  “You know. Do you go in for that sort of thing? Like it a lot?”

  “What sort of thing?”

  She turned away. “Looking. Pictures. It excites men sometimes, doesn’t it? Does it you?”

  He didn’t know what to say. A woman he had considered a prude was outmaneuvering him on the subject of dirty pictures. “That is quite the most private question I have been asked in the last few hours.”

  “But does it?” she insisted.

  Graham couldn’t understand why she would force herself through this. “It can,” he said, “and I’m not sure that’s peculiar.”

  That proved something. The young widow stood and walked to the wall. She leaned back on it. Then his frank response drew an unforeseen, reciprocal candidness. “They stir me a little,” she admitted. Self-consciously, she laughed.

  It was the nicest, strangest sound. Her laughter, unvocalized, had a soft, shudderlike quality. She laughed with her mouth closed, her smile slightly crooked, this appealingly lopsided expression faintly narrowing one eye. He didn’t think she was aware of it—it was not artifice, but when she smiled, her wise young face took on a wisdom that was worldly and strictly female: beguilingly sly.

  “You have no idea what a surprise these were,” she said. The smile faded, leaving behind the narrow, thoughtful look.

  “I can imagine.”

  She shook her head—no, he couldn’t—then raised a hip slightly and pulled back her hoops. She sat on the walltop, leaving one foot to dangle above the dirt floor.

  “Perhaps it’s normal,” Graham Wessit offered. “A husband doesn’t tell his wife everything.”

  Submit sniffed at that. “My husband was my friend.” Then she objected violently to her own statement, shaking her head. She came off her perch in one movement and strode to the far side of the patio. She put her back to him.

/>   She bent her head so low that Graham wasn’t sure if she had given up the head-shaking or not. He watched her for a while, until his own silence began to feel contemptible.

  “I was sent down from university for these,” he said finally. “Henry must have wanted me to know—oh, I don’t know what. But I’m sure it wasn’t for prurience he saved them. Quite the opposite, I imagine. One last sermon from the grave. It must have been irresistible.”

  Submit looked around. “You passed them at university?”

  “Like a bag of crumpets.”

  “And got caught?”

  “And expelled. And jailed and—more. I read humility that year and took a First.”

  He watched her face. It remained blank—perhaps the politest expression possible under the circumstances. At least the head-shaking had stopped, the self-reproaching questions, the hypothesizing. Her comment that the pictures “stirred” her was curious to him—it was curious that she would have such stirrings, more curious still that she would mention them. There was something about her…. He speculated to himself that Henry might have secretly fancied the pictures. Looking at his wife made unusual things possible for Henry. Young love. If not a penchant, at least an interest in the angles and curves of firm, green coitus.

  She had turned her back again. Her chignon was thick, the tied volume of baled hay. It made her fragile body seem to need a ballast to counter the weight. The heaviness rested against the nape of her neck. It seemed to press at her spine. Then he thought perhaps it was not the outline of spine he saw, but French hooks beneath a placket. He stared at the dress’s closure.

  She turned suddenly. Again he was confronted with her smile, its faintly crooked and intriguing friendliness, her direct eyes. And he realized that by telling his reluctant little partial truth, he had made her indebted to him: He had given the husband an upright and plausible motive for passing pornography.

  “I can’t put you with him,” he said. “You are totally unlike any woman I ever knew growing up. Of Henry’s, I mean. He liked ones who could talk you into the ground. On politics or books or finance or something. He liked ones who carried banners, in their eyes if not in their hands.”

  She laughed, a breathy sound. It was their first agreement.

  He smiled. “He was so—old,” he continued, “even when he was young, if that makes any sense.”

  “I’m old.” But she was more amused.

  “Are you?”

  Her eyes—bannerless—teased, a feminine refusal to discuss age. Or else she was saying it was unimportant. “I couldn’t comprehend it myself for a while. To like Henry so well, I mean. He was my father’s choice. But I did come to like him. Exceptionally well.” Then, as if she had bungled, she added, “I am sorry you didn’t. He was full of wit and intelligence—he was a sensitive man in many ways.”

  Graham restrained the awkwardness he felt. Her evaluations—elevations—of his former guardian at every turn seemed so wrong. There was no right way to respond: He couldn’t be honest, and he couldn’t bring himself to be polite. The impasse again widened, leaving a gap in the conversation. At length, he stood to go.

  As he did, the case slid from his lap. It crashed on the flooring, splitting its hinge and spilling its contents. Pictures scattered out across the stones like someone’s burdened, babbling conscience confessing up in graphic detail.

  Graham bent immediately, trying to gather it all up. “The stupid perversity of it,” he mumbled. “Swooning and groaning over these stupid things for all these years.”

  “I seriously doubt that he swooned and groaned.”

  “He hated the whole episode. How could he own them? Will them? Be so preposterously godlike to keep them then dump them on me—on you—with no explanation? I wonder if he looked them over periodically. That must have been goddamn sweet torment. The stupidity of it!”

  “Mr. Tate kept them for him.”

  “Oh, splendid!” Graham looked up long enough to shake a fistful of erotica at her. “Are you going to stand there and defend this—this prank, this stupid, posthumous game…this…this….” The latch wouldn’t close. He bent over it, fumbling on one knee. The thick paper stuck out in corners and folds. “There was no reason for him to involve you in this. Although you certainly take it in your stride: Nothing surprises you. Well, it surprises me! You surprise me. These weren’t the only surprising pleasures Henry obtained for his old age, were they?”

  He meant her, Submit realized. She took a step back. She felt the blood in her face rise.

  While Graham felt nothing but exasperation. He couldn’t get the case closed. He knelt there, silently cursing it, wanting with all his might to heave the thing into the sky and watch it sail beyond sight. But Submit churned by him instead, as if he’d lit a firecracker at her back. She went by him with such force, she knocked him off balance.

  He sat with a plonk. “Wonderful,” he said to her marching back.

  She left him there, sitting in his own pique on a pothole in the floor, holding the black box in his hands. He looked down at it, feeling stuck with it—stuck with its misaligned corners, its broken back, its legs and arms hanging out in wrinkles and folds. Always stuck, it seemed, with having to organize unwelcome pieces of his life that never should have been in the first place. He stood up, finally succeeding in closing the box: Henry’s generous gift.

  He set it down, only to realize a drawing remained on the ground. “Thank you very much, Henry,” he murmured as he picked it up. “You miserable old pisspot.”

  When he looked back toward the person he wanted to speak to most, she was already a third of the way to the poplars, a black, shifting dot on the vivid greensward. He cursed Henry again, then started after her.

  Chapter 14

  In the open field, her own dress was the only movement—so it was easy enough to tell he was behind her, half walking, half running, trying to catch up. Submit walked as fast as she could, hoping he would drop back once he saw there was no point in pursuing her.

  The poplars and their shade waited in the distance. She longed to be there again, yet she didn’t dare move any faster. The late afternoon sun dazzled, saturated. Her black dress churned about her. Beneath it, at the pace she was going, her legs already felt blanketed and hot. She heard the man behind her, closing the distance.

  “Lady Motmarche,” he called out. “Wait—”

  The sound of his voice only galled her. Graham Wessit was not only brutishly crude but relentlessly stupid as well.

  The top of her head began to feel warm—she wished she had her hat. She wished he’d go away. Why had he come here anyway? He was a foul-mouthed, silk-vested popinjay who hadn’t the first bit of taste, not for people or clothes. His disdain for Henry mingled for a moment with his garish sartorial affectations. The vest today, she remembered vividly, was green. A dark green velvet with the substance and texture of cut silk. She could have lived a fortnight on the vest’s buttons alone—they were bain d’or. She heard him come up behind her within a few yards. His pace slowed—a little healthy prudence at last. Then he fell in step just a few feet behind, as if they were out for a stroll.

  Submit turned on him. He drew up, startled by this preemptive stop, as she asked him with a sharp, wordless tilt of her head, What exactly did his following her out here prove?

  “I’m sorry,” Graham answered. “I didn’t mean to offend you.” Then, with a grimace of closed eyes, he actually took this back. “Well, perhaps I did. But I—I regret doing so now.” He paused. “I’m sorry. I was out of place. Everything else aside, Henry was a highly principled man. His interest in you would hardly have been—”

  Submit angled her head up at him. “Henry married me,” she pointed out. “He didn’t adopt me. His interest in me, for your future reference, was completely that of a husband.”

  He blinked. He had no more apologies, no more words.

  Good, she thought, she’d stunned him a little herself. He grimaced again, then ran his hand back over his h
ead, as if to say it was hot standing out in the middle of the sun. He did look hot. A velvet vest was heavy for summer. His coat was dark. Then she noticed something in his other hand, at the end of one dark sleeve. “Let me see that.” She held out her hand.

  Graham stared at her palm, held expectantly open. He looked at her face and dropped his eyes to where hers fell. He saw he’d carried the sketch with him from the terrace. It was creased between his fingers, readily available to keep him blundering along. His wrist and arm made an involuntary movement away from her extended hand. Then, with a long, noisy sigh, he turned his contraband over to her.

  He waited, cursing himself, the sun, his heavy clothes. He had sent all his more appropriate things to Netham. Why wasn’t he there now? he wondered. Instead, here he was, standing in a hot, open field, with a full bladder. He cursed the tea. He had drunk too much. Henry’s widow hadn’t bothered with it. He shouldn’t have; he cursed himself. While the widow, it seemed to him, remained unreasonably comfortable, cool in fact, as she studied the drawing. He was beginning to wonder about a young woman who gave such things so much careful attention. Her intrepid march into truth was beginning to hint at salacious curiosity. Then he saw, to his further disgust, that she noticed what she had missed before.

  Submit looked up at Graham Wessit’s face, then back to the face of the man in the drawing. She did this again; up again, down. The face of the man on the page was not exactly the first thing that drew one’s attention, and it was younger of course, but there was no doubt whose face the artist had drawn onto the limned, naked satyr.

  She raised a brow. “Lovely,” she said. “You should have sued him, you know.”

  Graham only laughed, a short, self-disparaging sound, then exhaled a long sigh. He slipped off his coat and began to unbutton his vest. A breeze flapped his shirt against his body, flipped his vest open to the lining. He flung his coat over a shoulder and looked around. They had come out a long way. The first of the poplars was within a dozen yards.