Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Eleanor’s experience of the ceremony was of a vague detachment from everything, as if she were watching somebody else getting married rather than going through the process herself. The Rev. Jeremiah Lawless married them with a sombre, almost fierce expression on his face, seemingly disapproving of the match; but afterwards he preached a beaming sermon on the beauty of new love, especially praising Burton and Eleanor for the self-evident attachment and affection they both demonstrated. Outside, as shredded paper was cast over them and the small crowd cheered thinly, Eleanor turned to look at her husband, half-expecting - irrationally - there to be some change in him, as if the fact that he was now legally her husband must magically transform him into a creature she could not help loving and respecting. But he stood winking and blinking in the sunlight, a dusting of sweat on his wide brow, and the crease in his double chin as sharp as a cut in his neck. He seemed as ludicrous as ever. The thought of him as husband seemed as preposterous after as before the sacrament.

  The wedding feast was taken in the Ogilvie Hotel. Fourteen of Burton’s Lilliputians served on the table, pulling miniature carts up and down the length like tiny drayhorses for the convenience of the diners: a wheeled gravy-boat; a silver sled containing asparagus; four of them in harness pulling an open carriage filled with potatoes. Each of the tiny people had been dressed in doll-clothes livery of scarlet and gold. They averted their tiny eyes from the full-sized people, they strained and worked in their tiny universe. Eleanor, smiling and making banal conversation, was repeatedly struck by the absurdity of the mise en scène. The shift in perspective between the human beings sitting around the table eating and the miniature Pacificans upon the tabletop gave her the uncomfortable sensation of being a giantess, of swelling and engorging every limb as if with hot air, of rising up (like Mr Harcourt Johnstone’s hot-air balloon that had floated above Marylebone Park for a fortnight the previous year) until she was a mile high.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, turning to Burton - to (she scolded herself silently to remember) her husband - ‘the Lilliputians look so charming in their uniforms.’

  ‘Blefuscans,’ said Burton, ‘my darling. These are Blefuscans, and not Lilliputians.’

  She smiled and nodded. Her husband, as he now was, had drunk three glasses of claret. She had never seen him drink alcohol before.

  The toasts; the speeches; the three-cheers and thrice-times-three; and afternoon wore into evening. Eleanor did not drink much, for she had always found the flavour of alcohol distasteful. But Burton drank glass after glass, as if he hoped to fill the barrel of his belly with fluid. Eventually Eleanor kissed her Mamma and retired to their suite at the top of the hotel. Despite everything, despite a whole day spent steeling herself internally, she was nervous. Her fingers would not stay still. The maid Burton had engaged for the occasion (not Sally, who was in Poland Street attending to Mamma) undressed her, and she went to bed with a candle to wait for her husband. When he came up he was unsteady on his feet. He appeared to be growling like a bear. Eleanor realised almost at once that this was a sort of half-awake snoring. He stripped off jacket and trousers, and fumbled for a long time with his necktie. ‘My dear?’ Eleanor called tentatively from the bed. ‘Mmm,’ he replied, the susurrus rumbling on from his throat. ‘Married now,’ he said. The tie came away like a snake, to be discarded on the floor. Burton collapsed on the bed. He lay like a dead man, his snoring more regular. Eleanor watched him for fifteen minutes, before settling under the covers and going to sleep herself.

  In the morning, Burton was abjectly apologetic, meekly enduring the miserable symptoms of his over-indulgence from the previous night. He shaded his eyes with his right hand, nibbled feebly at the breakfast that was brought in, and drank only Vichy water. The experience, the anticipation of which had (Eleanor now realised) built up layer upon layer of anxiety in her mind over the previous months previous, now seemed laughably anticlimactic. Her condescending disdain for her husband had been cemented by the non-encounter - by (she realised, understanding the phrase fully for the first time) the non-consummation. For her marriage, she could see, had not been consummated.

  ‘I really must apologise for my behaviour last night,’ Burton muttered for the sixth time.

  ‘Really,’ she snapped back at him, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. ‘Say no more about it.’

  That afternoon they caught the Channel packet for the Continent. Burton had promised her a honeymoon wherever she wanted - Rome, America, she had only to name the destination. But she had not wanted to be so far from home, to travel to some inaccessibly distant place only to be trapped there (as she could not help thinking of it) with her husband. So she had chosen Brussels, and Burton had been very pleased to agree. It would harm the business, he said, were they away longer than a week.

  That night they stayed in a Calais hotel, and although Burton stayed sober he was too embarrassed by the previous night’s debacle to press his attentions. The next day, on the coach ride through the French and Belgian countryside, Eleanor saw giant men, the Brobdingnagians, labouring in the fields. One drew a massive hundred-bladed plough through the sticky soil; another tossed a house-sized hayrick with a rake as long as Satan’s spear in Paradise Lost. ‘Why do they plough the fields in autumn?’ Burton wondered, aloud.

  ‘The new strains of winter wheat,’ replied Eleanor, with a sneer on her face at her husband’s ignorance.

  Burton, blushing, said nothing more.

  They arrived in Brussels in time for supper. During the meal, which was in conducted in silence, Burton sucked a deep breath into his chest, sat up straight, and said: ‘My dear, I hope it will be convenient for you tonight.’

  ‘Convenient?’ she replied. For a moment she really had no idea what he meant.

  Both his cheeks blushed bruise-dark. ‘Convenient for both of us, I,’ he muttered, ‘I-I should say.’

  She looked at the green bottle from which he had been drinking. ‘And this is why you have drunk nothing but water and coffee all evening?’

  He nodded, looking grave. Then he laughed, a single laugh. She did not join him, and the mirth died.

  ‘I have no wish,’ he said, ‘to force my attentions.’

  ‘And I no wish to be forced,’ she replied, fiercely. But as soon as she had said this, she felt something like regret. It was perhaps too cutting. After supper, when they retired, she kissed his beard, rather primly, and led him to the bed. Better to get it over with. He said nothing, but his breath was coming sharp and shallow in little gasps. She slipped her dress off without calling for the maid, and sat on the bed in her petticoat. He was pulling off his clothes awkwardly and throwing them aside until he stood before her in only an undershirt and silk socks. Eleanor’s apprehension seemed to have dissolved. Her only emotion was a kind of detached curiosity. Her husband’s legs were much fuller than Newsome’s had been. His belly hung down like a fold of uncooked pastry. His male organ poked out at a right angle. It had a rather different appearance than the only other she had seen: where that had been squat and short, this was lengthy and quite thin, with a reddish, purplish, knuckle-shaped knob at the end. As Burton approached the bed this organ rocked a little from side to side, and Eleanor’s detachment was enough for her to peer a little more closely, hoping to identify the gonadic organs, of which she understood there to be two, the provenance of the male spermatic material. But Burton was on top of her before she could make her observation.

  ‘My darling,’ he grunted, ‘my darling.’

  He pressed his face against her, and she was conscious of the prickliness of his beard, and then of a wetness on her chin as he kissed her. She felt the weight of his body, and the jag of his organ against her thigh. ‘My darling,’ he grunted again, and then half-coughed, as if something were caught in his throat, ‘Ah-ah-ah!’ Suddenly he was still.

  He rolled to the side and lay on his back. For several minutes Eleanor did not dare move. But then, raising herself a little, she noticed a glutinous, pale substance sticking t
o the skin of her thigh. She almost asked him ‘What is this?’, but realised suddenly that it was sperm. She could have laughed out loud at it. She had assumed, without thinking too closely about it, that ‘sperm’ would be a dry substance, like plant pollen. It had simply never occurred to her that it would emerge in fluid form.

  She lay down again beside her husband. Minutes passed. The occasion was not at all as she had expected. ‘Is that all?’ she asked, finally.

  Burton did not look at her. ‘I fear,’ he said, his voice small, ‘that I must apologise once more.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘Did your mother not explain to you . . . ?’ he said.

  She spoke quickly. ‘Yes, yes, yes, of course.’

  Burton shifted his large form, turning on his side, sending bouncy waves through the mattress until he settled. He was lying with his back to Eleanor. ‘We can try again tomorrow, perhaps,’ he mumbled.

  Eleanor waited for him to speak further, until she realised that he had fallen asleep. But she could not sleep. Was she now a wife? A wife, and no longer a virgin? It was absurd that she did not know, but no book she had read prepared her for this moment. The man had deposited his sperm upon her, so perhaps she was now deflowered. But the whole encounter had a half-finished feeling about it. She had expected the sperm to be deposited inside her organ of Venus - she touched that place now with her fingers’ ends, touching herself very gently as if afraid of waking her husband. It seemed to be buzzing, a thrilling and slightly uncomfortable sensation. Had Burton attempted to place his seed in that place and, somehow, missed ? That seemed incredible. Or was it the proper thing to do to deposit the seed on the thigh? Perhaps it was a sort of sexual etiquette; or perhaps it was some feature of human sexuality of which she was ignorant, some feature with no analogue in the animal or plant kingdoms. She touched the sticky material, touched her own organ. The sensation there was something like a kind of itch, although not exactly an itch, a warm feeling, an ache for pressure. Her finger moved in tiny circles, trying to fathom the connection between the experience she had just had and the reproductive cycle, trying to work out the anatomical connection between thigh and that place and - without warning - she felt a hot shudder pass up her body, hurrying up through her torso to her face where it emerged in a series of little gasps.

  She lay for a while, until her breathing returned to normal.

  She had not experienced such a sensation before. It unsettled her. She ought, she decided, to leave her husband’s sperm upon her skin. It might be a faux pas to wipe it away, might interfere somehow with the sexual process, although it felt clammy and unpleasant on her leg.

  The following night Burton tried again. This time he did indeed attempt to insert himself between her thighs, but he was tentative and clumsy and she could not stop herself calling out in her discomfort. It seemed impossible to her that the operation could be successful. His organ was simply too big for the space. He could no more fit it into so small a hole than he could fit it in her nostril or ear. He pulled away, anxious, apologetic, ‘I’m sorry my dear, sorry to have hurt you.’ She didn’t reply. Then he tried again, and again he deposited his sperm upon the outside of her body, this time between her legs.

  The following night he stayed late downstairs, playing cards in the smoking room with some men he had met, whilst Eleanor sat in bed reading and eventually fell asleep.

  The night after that he came to bed drunken again, and fell asleep fully dressed on the settee.

  During the day the two of them toured the sites of the old city, lunched in a fine old restaurant, and strolled in the parks. Eleanor read The Imperial Gazetteer, and dipped into Professor Alain Privat Deschanel’s Natural Philosophy. But her mind kept returning to the question of the consummation, or non-consummation, of her marriage. She came to the private conclusion that there was something malformed about her own organ of Venus. It was clearly too small to admit her husband’s member. What she had seen of Newsome and Mamma (although she did not like to dwell on the memory) suggested that a man’s member could be easily inserted into a woman. That Burton’s did not fit meant that either his member was abnormally large, or else her organ abnormally small, and she inclined towards the latter conclusion. A sort of dismal fatalism fell upon her. It was impossible. She would never consummate the marriage.

  On the final night in Brussels Burton came into the bedroom drunk, but this time did not simply fall asleep. He seemed belligerent, even costive. He blundered about the room muttering to himself. The sight of so large a man in a bad humour, and the fact that such behaviour was so unfamiliar to Eleanor, who had only ever seen Burton as bumbling and shy as a child, alarmed her very much. She reacted to her fear by becoming aggressive herself. ‘Drunk again, sir?’ she baited him. ‘I did not know I was marrying a drinking man.’

  ‘It must be tonight, madam,’ he replied, fiercely. ‘You’ll not put me off again.’

  ‘Put you off!’

  ‘You’ll act your part, Madam. I was talking to a fellow downstairs, a good sort. A brevet-major. As fine a fellow as I’ve met. I’ve been talking the matter over with him.’

  ‘Talking, sir?’ she said, outraged. ‘Talking of matters personal to you and me? How could you!’

  ‘Talking to a fellow,’ Burton said, leaning towards her and putting slurry emphasis on every other word, ‘who gave excellent advice concerning the female.’

  ‘Are our personal affairs to become a talking point for every common soldier in the British army, sir?’

  ‘He said your womanhood would be tight to begin with . . .’

  Eleanor gave a little shriek of horror.

  ‘. . . tight to begin with,’ Burton continued thickly, ‘but I must simply push past it, simply push past it.’

  ‘Tonight, sir, I am in no amorous mood,’ said Eleanor firmly.

  ‘Tonight it will happen, Madam,’ he replied fiercely, and launched himself, or collapsed, upon her. She shrieked again and struggled, slapping his face and his shoulders, but he bore down on her. ‘He said,’ he muttered to himself, as he fumbled under his own body to undo his trowsers, ‘he said that your maidenhead would be tight to begin with . . .’

  ‘Get off me, sir,’ insisted Eleanor.

  ‘. . . you’ll act . . .’

  She felt his male organ, hard as a stone, pressing between her legs, against her venereal organ. With a horrible, invasive sense of physical danger she began crying, slapping with redoubled force. The pressure grew until, suddenly, something inside, in that part of her body, burst, with a stabbing sensation of pain. She shrieked again. Burton shuffled, twitched, twitched again, and then pulled sharply back. He rolled over and lay on his back, panting.

  Eleanor shrank away, scrabbled to the far edge of the bed. She almost did not dare look down, to see what damage had been done to her body between her legs. A tart throbbing sensation suggested actual injury. She looked at her husband, fearful and angry, only to see that he was crying. What she had taken for gasps of passion were actually sobs. His face was wet with tears. He turned his face to her. ‘I’m sorry my darling,’ he said, in a maudlin-drunk voice. ‘My darling wife.’

  She steeled herself and looked down. Blood was on her thighs and had red-inked a maple-leaf shape onto the sheet beneath her. Her face flushed, her stomach tingled with horrible apprehension. What if some deep injury had been effected inside her? What if she bled on and on, bled to death? ‘I fear,’ she said, in a trembly voice. ‘You have injured me, sir.’ But Burton’s sobbing had slid imperceptibly into the snores of sleep.

  She was awake for more than an hour, resolved to call for a doctor if the bleeding did not abate. But it reduced over a quarter of an hour or so, and finally it stopped altogether. She washed herself as best she could in the porcelain bowl, using the whole of their jug of water. She would have rung the bell for more water, but did not like the thought of the hotel staff seeing the bloodstained sheets. They would surely assume some crime had been committe
d.

  Finally she returned to the bed. There was, after all, nowhere else for her to sleep. For a long time she sat looking down at her husband, fully dressed, on his back, his male member poking through the slit in his trowsers, flaccid now though crusted with her blood. It was a most distasteful image.

  She lay down, with her back to him, and tried to sleep. But images of her father occurred and reoccurred to her. Why should she think of her father at a time like this? It made no sense. Yet the churning sensation in her belly was like the one she had always felt visiting his sick bed.

  Papa had always been a gaunt man, a tall man, severe of manner. But after he fell ill his sharp features and long body became, as it were, whittled away to the bony essence within. Sitting in bed the long shallow curves of his flanks, his arms, took on a hammered, metallic aura. The illness seemed to be metamorphosing him into a creature made of white metal. He might sit, propped with woolsack pillows, for hour, turning his eyes slowly to face the light of the window, and back to rest on the form of his daughter, sitting on the bedside. A white man, tucked between white sheets in which he made hardly a bulge. Then the coughing would sweep over him, a punishing sequence of powerful coughs that crunched his face up like a piece of waste paper balled in a fist. His body would twitch, as if a muscular demon within him were punching outward against his ribs with all its force. His right hand would go to his mouth, the white cotton handkerchief clutched in it, and cough after cough would come bursting through. On the handkerchief, first a dewdrop spot of red; then a thruppenny-sized circle; then a spreading patch of scarlet. The coughing would slowly subside, and his hand would sag, exhausted, to his side, dropping the kerchief onto the sheets, where the creased cloth would roll and settle, and the fluid mixture of saliva and blood would mark the sheets. The red staining the white. And papa another painful inch closer to death.