by Sarah Waters
Then he caught her eye, and gave her a wink; and something of her old, pure affection for him flared up in her heart. When they’d finished their sandwiches he drew her to him and they lay on the rug, he on his back with his arm around her, she with her cheek in the firm, warm hollow between his shoulder and his chest. Now and then she raised herself a little to sip, awkwardly, at her drink; finally she swallowed it all in a gulp and let the empty beaker fall. He rubbed his face against her head, his rough chin plucking at her hair.
She looked into the sky. Her view of it was framed by branches, by the restless tips of trees. The branches were thick with leaves still, but the leaves were ruddy, or golden, or the greenish-yellow of army uniforms. The sky itself was perfectly cloudless: blue as the bluest skies of summer.
‘What bird is that?’ she asked, pointing.
‘That? That’s a vulture.’
She gave him a nudge. ‘What is it, really?’
He shaded his eyes. ‘It’s a kestrel. See how it hovers? It’s waiting to dive. It’s after a mouse.’
‘Poor mouse.’
‘There he goes!’ He lifted his head, the muscles in his chest and throat growing tight beneath her cheek. The bird had swooped, but now rose again with empty claws. He lay back down. ‘He’s lost it.’
‘Good.’
‘It’s only another sort of lunch. He’s entitled to his bit of lunch, isn’t he?’
‘It’s cruel.’
He laughed. ‘I’d no idea you were so tender-hearted.—Look, now he’s trying again.’
They watched the bird for a minute, marvelling together at the buoyancy of it, its graceful swoops and soars. Then Viv took off her sunglasses, to see it more clearly; and Reggie looked, not at the kestrel, but at her.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘It was like talking to a blind girl, before.’
She settled back on the rug and closed her eyes. ‘You’re used to them, of course.’
‘Ha ha.’
He was still for a moment, then reached across her and picked something up. After a second she felt a tickling on her face, and brushed her cheek, thinking a fly had settled on it. But it was him: he had a long blade of grass and was stroking her with the tip of it. She closed her eyes again and let him do it. He followed the lines of her brow and her nose, the curve above her mouth; he worked the grass across her temples.
‘You’ve changed your hair, haven’t you?’ he said.
‘I got it cut, ages ago.—You’re tickling me.’
He moved the blade of grass more firmly. ‘How’s that?’
‘That’s better.’
‘I like it.’
‘Like what?’
‘Your hair.’
‘Do you? It’s all right.’
‘It suits you…Open your eyes, Viv.’
She opened them, briefly, then screwed them up again. ‘The sun’s too bright.’
He raised his hand—held it a foot away from her face, to make a shade. ‘Open them now,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘I want to look into your eyes.’
She laughed. ‘Why?’
‘I just do.’
‘They’re the same as they were the last time you looked into them.’
‘That’s what you think. Women’s eyes are never the same. You’re like cats, the lot of you.’
He tickled her face until she did as he asked and opened her eyes again. But she opened them wide, being silly.
‘Not like that,’ he said. So she looked at him properly. ‘That’s better.’ His expression was soft. ‘You’ve got lovely eyes. You’ve got beautiful eyes. Your eyes were the first thing I noticed about you.’
‘I thought it was my legs you noticed first.’
‘Your legs, too.’
He held her gaze, then threw the blade of grass away and leant and kissed her. He did it slowly, parting her lips with his own, pushing gently into her mouth. He tasted of the ham, still; the ham and the gin and orange. She supposed she must taste of it, too. As the kiss went on, a speck of something—meat, or bread—came between their tongues, and he broke away to pick it from his mouth. But when he came back to her, he kissed her harder; and began to lean more heavily against her. He ran his hand down her body, from her cheek to her hip; then he stroked upwards again and cupped her breast. His hand was hot, and gripped her hard, almost painfully. When he drew it away and began to pluck instead at the buttons at the front of her dress, she stopped his fingers and lifted her head.
‘Someone might come, Reg.’
‘There’s nobody about,’ he said, ‘for miles!’
She looked at his hand, still tugging at the buttons. ‘Don’t. You’ll crease it.’
‘Undo it for me, then.’
‘All right. Wait.’
She looked around, conscious that anyone could be watching, hidden in the shadows of the trees. The sun was bright as a spotlight, the piece of ground they were lying on flat and quite unobscured. The only sounds, however, were those of the stream, the birds, the restless leaves. She unfastened two of the buttons on her dress; then, after a moment, two more. Reggie drew the bodice back, exposing her bra; he put his mouth to the silk of it, feeling for her nipple, drawing at her breast. She moved about under his touch. But the queer thing was, she’d wanted him more, before, in the car in the middle of Stepney; she’d wanted him more while they were standing on that bridge. He kept his mouth fixed hard to her breast, and moved his hand back down her body to her thigh. When he caught hold of her skirt and began to push it up, she stopped his fingers again, and again said, ‘Someone might see.’
He moved away, wiped his mouth. He tugged at the rug. ‘I’ll put this over us.’
‘They could still see.’
‘Jesus, Viv, I’m at that point where a troupe of girl-guides could go past and it wouldn’t put me off! I swear, I’m bursting. I’ve been bursting for you all day.’
She didn’t think he had been. For all his talk, for all his nonsense—here, and in the car—she didn’t think he had been; and she wanted it less than ever now. He pulled up the rug and tucked it around her, then put his arm beneath it and tried to reach between her legs again. But she kept her thighs closed; and when he looked at her she shook her head—let him think what he liked. She said, ‘Let me—’ and moved her own hand to the buttons of his trousers, easing them open one by one, then sliding inside.
He groaned at the feel of her bare fingers. He twitched against her palm. He said, ‘Oh, Viv. Christ, Viv.’
The seams of his underpants were taut against her wrist and made her clumsy; after a moment he reached and brought himself right out, then put his hand loosely around hers. He kept the hand there as she was doing it, and had his eyes shut tight the whole time; in the end she felt he might as well be doing it himself. The tartan rug went up and down over their fists. Two or three times she lifted her head and looked around, still anxious.
And she remembered, as she did it, other times, from years before, when he’d been in the army. They’d had to meet in hotel rooms—grubby rooms, but the grubbiness hadn’t mattered. Being together was what had mattered. Pushing against each other’s bodies, each other’s skin and muscle and breath. That was what bursting for somebody meant. It wasn’t this. It wasn’t jokes about feather beds and Lovers’ Lanes.
At the very last second he closed her hand, to make a sort of trap for the spunk. Then he lay back, flushed and sweating and laughing. She held on to him a little longer before she drew her fingers away. He raised his head, the flesh of his throat bunching up. He was worried for his trousers.
‘Got it all?’
‘I think so.’
‘Careful.’
‘I am being careful.’
‘Good girl.’
He tucked himself away, then fastened up his buttons. She looked around for a handkerchief, something like that; and finally wiped her hand on the grass.
He watched her do it, approvingly. ‘That’s good for the ground,’
he said. He was full of life now. ‘That’ll make a tree grow. That’ll make a tree, and a knickerless girl will one day come and climb it; and she’ll get in the club, by me.’ He held out his arms. ‘Come here and give me a kiss, you beautiful creature!’
The simplicity of him, she thought, was quite amazing. But it had always been his faults and frailties that she’d loved most. She’d wasted her life on his weaknesses—his apologies, his promises…She moved back into his embrace. He lit another cigarette and they lay and smoked it together, gazing up again into the trees. The kestrel had vanished; they didn’t know if it had caught its mouse or gone after another. The blue of the sky seemed to have thinned.
It was September—the end of September—and not summer: presently she gave a shiver, getting cold. He rubbed her arms, but soon they sat up, drank the last of the gin and orange, then stood and brushed down their clothes. He turned the cuffs of his trousers inside out, to shake the grass from them. He borrowed her handkerchief, and wiped her lipstick and powder from his mouth. He walked a little way off, and turned his back, and had a pee.
When he came back she said, ‘Stay here’; and she went herself to a clump of bushes, drew up her skirt, pushed down her knickers, and got into a squat. ‘Watch out for nettles!’ he called after her; but he called it vaguely, he didn’t see where she had gone and couldn’t see her once she’d stooped. She watched him bending at the car’s wing-mirror, combing his hair. She watched him rinsing out the beakers in the stream. Then she looked at her hand. The spunk on her fingers had dried as fine as pretty lace; she rubbed at it, and it became plain white flakes that drifted to the ground and were lost.
He had to be home by seven o’clock, and it was already half-past four. They strolled to the little bridge again, and stood looking down into the water. They wandered back to the ruined mill; he picked up a piece of broken glass and cut their initials into the plaster, alongside the dirty messages. RN, VP, and a heart with an arrow.
But when he’d thrown the glass away, he looked at his watch.
‘Better get going, I suppose.’
They went back to the car. She shook out the rug, and he folded it up and put it away, with the beakers, in the boot. Where the rug had been there was a square of flattened grass. It seemed a shame, in so lovely a place: she went over it, kicking the grass back up.
The car had been sitting in the sun all this time. She climbed in, and almost burnt her leg on the hot leather seat. Reggie got in beside her and gave her his handkerchief—spread it out beneath the crook of her knees, to keep her from burning.
When he had done it, he bent forward and kissed her thigh. She touched his head: the dark, oiled curls; the white scalp showing palely through. She looked at the lush green clearing again and said softly, ‘I wish we could stay here.’
He let his head drop until it was resting in her lap. ‘So do I,’ he said. The words were muffled. He twisted round, to meet her gaze. ‘You know—You know I hate it, don’t you? You know, if I could have done it differently—? All of it, I mean.’
She nodded. There was nothing to say that they hadn’t said before. He kept his head in her lap a moment longer, then kissed her thigh again and straightened up. He turned the key, and the engine rumbled into life. It seemed horribly loud, in the silence—just as the silence had seemed weird and wrong to them when they’d first arrived.
He turned the car, drove slowly back up the bumping track, and rejoined the road they’d come out on; they went past the cheese-coloured cottage without slowing down, then picked up the main road to London. The traffic was much heavier now. People were coming back, like them, from afternoons out. The speeding cars were noisy. The sun was in front of them, making them squint: every so often they’d make a turn, or pass through trees, and lose it for a minute; then it would reappear, bigger than before, pink and swollen and low in the sky.
The sun, and the warmth, and perhaps the gin that she had drunk, made Viv feel dozy. She put her head against Reggie’s shoulder and closed her eyes. He rubbed his cheek against her hair again, sometimes turning his head to kiss her. They sang together sleepily, old-fashioned songs—‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’, and ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’.
Make my bed and light the light,
I’ll arrive late tonight.
Blackbird, bye bye.
When they reached the outskirts of London, she yawned and reluctantly straightened up. She got out her compact and powdered her face, redid her lipstick. The traffic seemed worse than ever, suddenly. Reggie tried a different route, through Poplar and Shadwell, but that was bad, too. Finally they got caught in a jam at Tower Hill. She saw him looking at his watch, and said, ‘Let me out here.’ But he kept saying, ‘Just give it a second.’ He hated to give way to other drivers. ‘If that little twerp in front would just—Christ! It’s blokes like him who—’
The car moved forward. Then they got in another jam on Fleet Street, going into the Strand. He looked for a way to get out of it, but the side-streets were blocked by drivers with the same idea. He beat his fingers on the steering-wheel, saying, ‘Damn, damn.’ He looked at his watch again.
Viv sat tensely, catching his mood, shrinking down a little in her seat in case someone should spot her; but thinking of the place in the woods still, not wanting to give it up yet: the mill, the stream and bridge, the hush of it. It ain’t Piccadilly…Reggie had brushed out the car before they’d started back, getting out all the petals and bits of grass that had been shaken in from the hedges. He’d nudged at the butterfly with his fingers until it had quivered and fluttered away.
She turned her head and looked into the lighted windows of shops, at the boxes of mocked-up chocolates and fruits, at the perfume bottles and liquor bottles—the same kind of coloured water doing, probably, for Nights of Parma and Irish Malt. The car inched forward. They drew near a cinema, the Tivoli. There were people outside it, queuing for tickets, and she gazed rather wistfully across them, at the girls and their boyfriends, the husbands and wives. The cinema had coloured lights on it, and the lights seemed to shine more luridly, more luminously, for shining in the twilight rather than the dark. She saw odd little disconnected details: the glint of an earring, the gleam of a man’s hair, the sparkle of crystal in the paving-stones.
Then Reggie braked and tooted his horn. Someone had sauntered across the road in front of him and moved casually on. He threw up his hands. ‘Don’t mind me, mister, will you? Jesus Christ!’ He followed the sauntering figure with his gaze, looking disgusted; but then his face changed. The figure, in stepping on to the pavement, must have given something away. Reggie started to laugh. ‘My mistake,’ he said, nudging Viv. ‘What do you think of that? It’s not a mister, it’s a miss.’
Viv turned to look—and saw Kay, in a jacket and trousers. She was drawing a cigarette from a case and, with a stylish, idle gesture, tapping it lightly against the silver before raising it to her lips.
‘What the hell’s the matter?’ asked Reggie in amazement.
For Viv had cried out. Her stomach had contracted as if she’d been struck in it. She put up a hand to hide her face and, ducking further down in her seat, said to Reggie with awful urgency: ‘Go on. Drive on!’
He gaped at her. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Just drive on, can’t you? Please!’
‘Drive on? Have you gone barmy?’
The way ahead was still jammed with cars. Viv moved about as if tormented. She looked back, towards Fleet Street. She said desperately, ‘Go that way, can’t you?’
‘Which way?’
‘The way we came.’
‘The way we came? Are you—?’ But now she’d actually grabbed the steering-wheel. ‘Jesus!’ said Reggie, pushing her hand away. ‘All right. All right!’ He looked over his shoulder and began, laboriously, to turn the car. The car behind gave a blast of its horn. The drivers heading for Ludgate Circus gazed at him as if he were a lunatic. He worked the gears, sweating and cursing, and slowly edged the car roun
d.
Viv kept her head down; but looked back once. Kay had joined the line of people outside the cinema: she was holding a lighter to her cigarette, and the flame of it, springing up, through the twilight, lit her fingers and her face. Hush, Vivien, Viv remembered her saying. The memory was stark, after all this time—stark and terrible—the grip of her hand, the closeness of her mouth. Vivien, hush.
‘Thank God for that!’ said Reggie, when they were inching forwards again in the other direction. ‘Talk about not drawing attention to ourselves. What on earth was all that for? Are you all right?’
She didn’t answer. She’d felt the grinding of the gears, the lurching forwards and backwards of the car, in what seemed to be all her muscles and bones. She folded her arms across herself, as if to hold herself together.
‘What is it?’ asked Reggie.
‘I saw someone I knew,’ she said at last; ‘that’s all.’
‘Someone you knew? Who was it?’
‘Just someone.’
‘Just someone. Well, I expect they got a bloody good look at you and me, too. Hell, Viv.’
He went grumbling on. She didn’t listen. He stopped the car at last in some street near Blackfriars Bridge; she said she’d take a bus from there, and he didn’t argue. He pulled up in a quiet-looking spot, and drew her to him so that they could kiss; afterwards he borrowed her handkerchief again and wiped his mouth. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, too, and, ‘What a trip!’ he said—as if the afternoon had been some sort of disaster; as if he’d forgotten, already, the stream and the ruined mill, the initials on the wall. She didn’t care. The feel of his hand on her arm, of his lips against her mouth, was suddenly frightful. She wanted to get home, be on her own, away from him.