‘You couldn’t have taken me if I gave myself to you.’
‘But that’s it. You would do that for me. You would surrender yourself to me and what I’d be doing would be just using you, using you for release, just for selfish release.’
‘Foul desire.’
‘Is it? Is it? Oh, God! This flesh! This bloody, carnal business.’
She smiled and slipped off the bed so that she was kneeling with him.
‘Come here, my angel.’
‘There is nothing angelic about how I am feeling. Don’t laugh!’
‘Hubert,’ she breathed into his neck, ‘You are an extraordinary man. You alone are sane when the world has gone mad. When all about us, people are sinking into barbarity, you—on the eve of battle—’
‘Don’t. Don’t remind me. I can hold back if I can forget that that is to come.’
‘You are the most decorous of men.’
Now he laughed.
‘Decorous! Good God, Anstace, I am trying to seduce you.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re confessing. You’re confessing that you are a man and Man is a hybrid thing: earth and sky, beast and spirit, saint and sinner. I know this although I know nothing of what we are going to do.’
Her voice was little more than a whisper as she rested her forehead on his shoulder. Her hands were on his shoulders and her body had sunk back away from his. He then took her by the shoulders and held her at arms’ length so she had to lift her face to his.
‘Would you do this for me?’
‘For both of us.’
‘Anstace, I shall not be a brute but I have no experience. I have never … even when the other men went upstairs to their whores, I’d stay in the tavern. I could drink and joke and flirt but I couldn’t do anything to those wretched women. The girls’ eyes were either dead or hard and all the false coquetry was loathsome.’
‘Well, there has been no coquetry so far in your address to me.’
She held his gaze until he realised she was laughing at him again, refusing to allow anything weighty or serious to complicate their union. It was the gentlest, kindest thing she could for him. He knew it. He pulled her to him and kissed her, pressing his mouth against hers in his new, licensed ardour.
Hubert clambered to his feet, whilst still clasping Anstance to him and then half fell, with her, onto the bed. He began to fumble with the buttons to his flies while the weight of his body trapped her beneath him.
‘Stop,’ she said, with the same gentle mockery in her voice.
‘It’s alright,’ he mumbled while his lips and tongue worked across her cheek and neck. ‘I know … enough to know … that this … this is what happens … it won’t hurt … this is what…’
‘No, I won’t have you make love to me in your uniform.’ She pushed him and the sharper note in her voice arrested him enough for her to roll quickly from beneath him to the other side of the bed. She would have laughed at his discomfiture but the flush to his face, the brightness to his eye warned her that this would not do. He had been honest and true; he had told her of the animal urgency his body was subjecting him to. She had to honour that as she had promised herself she would. But she would not do so on any terms. She would not let the language of predation taint what she was doing. She would not let him ‘take’ her. She would not surrender to any passion. She would not be used. There had to be another way.
‘I want you to undress. I want to see you completely. And then I will.’
‘Anstace?’
‘Clothing is too complicated.’
‘Anstace!’
‘This loving is strange enough without tangling it up in clothing.’
‘Then we’ll undress together, at the same time. You on that side of the bed and me on this. I’ll start.’
The paraffin lamp which Anstace had lit was still burning brightly on the chest. While the corners of the bedroom were in shadow, the bed and the man and woman facing each other across it were fully illumined. Bashfulness was banished. They began by holding each other’s gaze, not wavering, not allowing their eyes to stray anywhere else as their blind fingers worked the buttons and clasps which held their clothing in place.
‘I never thought undressing could be so serious a business,’ she said, and immediately they both laughed. However fevered, the gaiety she had thrown over Hubert’s urgency allowed them to play.
When Anstace looked up, having had to drop her gaze to seek out and release the clasp to her skirt, Hubert raised a quizzical eyebrow. She shrugged in response and pulled an exaggerated expression of apology: women’s clothing was always far more fussy than a man’s.
He had been undressing more slowly so that he would not have shed his clothes before she was ready to take off her last garment and now he was left standing in front of her, in the combinations he had to wear beneath his uniform. Her eyes were drawn to the bulge at his groin and now it was her turn to raise a questioning eyebrow.
Hubert held up his hand. Obediently, she stopped taking off her own clothes and watched him. He started unbuttoning the combinations at the neck and worked down the length of his body. When he had loosed them to just below his navel, he shrugged his shoulders free and pulled his arms clear. He was well-made.
She had seen Classical statues. She was acquainted with the male nude in marble. She had seen heavily muscled men contorted in oils on canvas. She had never seen a young man, half-naked. She had never seen hair across a man’s chest or the line of it running to his navel and then fanning out again across the flat of his stomach. She had seen penises in art but she did not recognise the thick rod pointing up from his groin, twitching beneath his cotton undergarment. She did not move nor shift her gaze as Hubert continued to unbutton himself. His penis sprang free and pointed at her, swaying, as he pulled one leg and then the other clear of clothing. He stood straight, letting his arms fall loosely at his sides. He faced her, waiting for her to reveal herself to him but everything now, for him, was concentrated on his own sexual function and the pulsing need for release. It was only with an enormous self-will that he avoided grasping himself.
She removed her bodice and then her drawers as quickly as she could. Her own body glowed with excitement but it was not transformed in the way that his was. She did not feel primed in the way that he was. The words he had used, ‘urgency’ and ‘agony’, now meant more to her for she could see, there, not four feet from her, the physical manifestation of it. How strange, she thought, to have a body so blatantly articulate.
Hubert pulled back the counterpane and blankets and lay down on the bed. He made no attempt to cover himself or hide his rigid, swollen part. He faced her, propping himself up on his elbow. The space beside him was hers.
She lay next to him, echoing his position. For a moment they did not touch. They looked into each other’s eyes but there was barely any recognition. Their corporeal selves had assumed so dominant a role. Then he lifted his hand and touched her aureole, circling it gently until the nipple hardened. He drew his fingernail across the tip. Sensation rippled from it and when he touched her other breast in the same way, she felt a loosening surge deep in her centre. He was presenting himself to her with a sprinter’s baton and now she grasped him, taking it as she would have in a race. His reaction was immediate. As her fingers closed around him, he threw himself onto his back and then thrust himself forward, from the hips. She did not relax her grip but held him as he released, from the top of his voice, a primaeval bellow. Instinctively she let him ride her grip. He reared upward and back, jabbing up and back three or four times and then found release. She held him until the last of the precious seed oozed from the fat tip of his penis. Spent, it softened in her grasp and he fell back as if exhausted, his eyes closed, his mouth open. His chest, hatched so beautifully with light hair, rose and fell as his breathing eased and the ecstasy passed.
‘Good God,’ he whispered and smiled at her.
His own, basic need satiated, he could now discover hers. He shifted their p
osition so she, now, lay on her back. Lying on his side, he took his own weight while caressing her breasts. He let his tongue play over her nipples, taking each one in turn very gently between his teeth before sucking gently. He heard her grunt and felt her legs move against his. Following her example, he moved his hand down to between her legs and let his fingers find the thick lips, moist and loose. Immediately, his penis began to stir again, acquiring fresh rigidity as his blood pumped through it.
‘This now,’ he whispered, ‘is love.’
His body was rising in answer to hers. She too was wakening in response to his arousal. He lay over her, his chest pressing now on her breasts. She felt the hardness of muscle against her own soft, pliable body. She let her hands run over his back to the arching at the base of his spine and she closed her legs around him, trapping his hand between her legs while his fingers gently stroked and massaged her. And then the washing, washing, washing of pleasure at his touch. She could feel the strong length of his resurgence pressed between their two bodies. It thrilled her. She eased herself away from him and they slipped into a slow consummation of their love; hands and lips explored each other’s body, caressing, stroking, kissing every sensitivity into exquisite arousal.
There was no penetration, no assault. There had been no taking. Their lovemaking had been a giving, each to the other equally.
They lay united for a long time. It was only when their sweat cooled and they began to feel the chill of the night that he reached down to pull the bedclothes over them, tucking her in against him. Before sleep took him, he knew it was better to be celibate than a progenitor when the world was so tormented. But this lovemaking, with no risk of conception, had engulfed them in a loveliness beyond dreaming. He rejoiced in his heart and slept. Anstace lay awake, marveling at the face close to hers, now in utter repose. She stroked his cheeks but it did not wake him. She felt the roughness from the new growth of beard. He would shave in the morning but the hair would grow back and, for her, this was a more significant sign of his potency than the swollen organ he had displayed, which had burst into life and then wilted. It was his hair which entranced her.
Days later, when Hubert had returned to his company, when the dreariness of the war had again overtaken them and separated them, when she was back in England, she took the train to Saffron Walden. The rhythm of the wheels and the slight swaying of the rattling carriage lulled her into a half-dream. She could see Hubert’s face, instead of her own reflection, behind the carriage panes, super-imposed on the flat East Anglian landscape. If she closed her eyes, she could picture him that morning, his body stretched on the bed, as he lay on his back, his head turned to rest on the crook of his arm. She had drawn the sheet back to look at him in the dawn-light. He stirred but did not wake.
She had studied his body: the squareness of his chest; the heaviness of shoulder and the thickness of his upper arms. There was strength there. His fine, straight legs were spread with the abandonment of a sleeping child. His penis, soft now, was dormant in its nest of hair.
Living maleness, she thought, is epitomized by hair; but not the hair which graces a man’s body. It is the hair which grows with irrepressible vitality on his cheeks, which, though shaved off each day, grows back thicker and stronger.
She had stopped him shaving that morning. She had wanted to keep his face that day, she said, as it had been for her during the night, knowing that, on their journey back to the Front, she would still be able to touch his cheeks and feel the rasp of his new beard against her fingers.
Toward the end of that journey, when they had stopped to refuel, she had heard, like distant thunder on the air, the sound of a bombardment in progress. She did not think at first that Hubert had also heard it for such sounds would be too familiar to register with him. But when he had stowed the empty fuel can in the boot and was sitting beside her, she saw the tears running down his shadowed cheeks. She took off her gloves and wiped them while he sat, motionless, staring ahead. She turned his face and held it between her two hands so that her palms and fingers experienced his rough beard and the wet tears. He would not meet her eyes. Already, she realised, he was beginning to separate himself from her. When she spoke to him, it was only to utter his name, not to call him back to her or arrest his journey in any way but simply to define him.
‘Hubert.’
The train to Saffron Walden rattled on. She unbuttoned her gloves and eased them off, finger by finger. She rubbed her hands on the coarse tapestry with which the carriage-seat was upholstered and she felt again the caress of him. She longed to comfort him. She grieved for how difficult it was for men to live without hurting.
New Year’s Day, 1918
Geoffrey had known within two weeks that he would never fully recover from solitary confinement. Something in him had been broken, irreparably.
He had believed, at first, that he might benefit from the solitude. He would not have to associate with the other prisoners, whom he imagined would be an unattractive mixture of petty felons and hardened criminals, weasly or vicious. He would relish the time to process all that he had experienced over the past two years — more surely than many men would be exposed to in a lifetime. He would come to an understanding of who he now was. The prison routines were not intrusive or arduous and, although the conditions in his cell were grim, they were no worse than those he had endured in France and, of course, he was in absolutely no danger here in Ipswich gaol. Solitude was a privilege denied to so many. He should relish it and use it to achieve a degree of self-understanding.
He had been told that all ‘conshies’, however long their sentence, began their imprisonment with solitary confinement. He had the impression that this was a legacy of those model Victorian prisons where isolation had been deemed improving, the assumption being that the men so incarcerated would be more likely to see the error of their ways without the distraction of company. He saw no reason to challenge the theory. After all, the monastic tradition had long celebrated periods of withdrawal and extreme asceticism for those who sought greater spiritual insight. He was an intelligent man who had proved himself to be resourceful and (why pretend otherwise?) physically brave. There was no reason why he could not turn this enforced solitude, however confining, to his own advantage.
He began by acquainting himself with his cell. It measured approximately six feet by thirteen. The four walls, with its rough bed and hard chair, both clamped to the floor, the wooden stool and his slops bucket would be his companions.
He decided the cell was a sort of palimpsest, on which past prisoners had left their mark over the decades. In places, although defacing the walls was a punishable offence, there remained evidence of old scratchings which were still legible. In the corner, to the right of the door, at knee-height, the letters – ALD were discernible. Had there been a ‘Gerald’ or even an ‘Ethelbald’ — an east Anglian throw-back to the time of Alfred — who had spent time here and left his mark which repeated coats of distemper had failed to obliterate? It amused Geoffrey, at first, to work out the sequence in which the walls had been over-painted; there were slight variations in the colour of the distemper to enable him to read the history. ALD had left his mark before the slightly greenish wash had been applied but after the thicker, greyish application.
No prisoner was allowed a mattress for the first month of their confinement. As a result, Geoffrey found that he could never sleep deeply. Even attempts to wear himself out with a programme of rudimentary exercises, such as he could remember from school gymnastics, compatible to his confinement, were insufficient to tire him out. When the light was switched off and he lay on the hard bed-board, the discomfort blocked deep sleep. Then, the lethargy which began to creep over him, through the daylight hours, prevented him from ever expending enough energy to make him really tired. In time, he acquired the haunted listlessness of the insomniac.
His cell, like all the solitary cells, was below ground. Its window, set just beneath the ceiling, opened at ground level. This was alw
ays left open, hinged at its base. When taken into the exercise yard for the hour he was released from his cell, Geoffrey had tried to orientate himself in case he was able to identify his cell. It was impossible; there were too many barred windows running at the base of the walls, separated from the yard by a deep gulley. Besides, he had no reason to suppose that his cell even opened onto this yard.
No direct sunlight ever penetrated the cell. Even if it had stretched down far enough into the courtyard, the dust and grime which besmirched the glass would have repelled any rays. All he could see was a square of light which gradually changed in tone depending upon the course of the day or the density of cloud. Even in bad weather, the rain never splattered the glass. Geoffrey found he was spending hours staring up at the filthy space.
Once a couple of squabbling sparrows had fluttered down to the window ledge. He still had some of his daily bread ration left and, after a number of futile attempts, balancing on the stool, he had managed to throw a few lumps over the top of the glass to land outside it. He repeated this each day and, in time, the sparrows began to scavenge around his window regularly. A warder, peering through the spyhole, had caught him once standing on the stool and that had resulted in a spell on bread and water, by way of punishment. After that, he could not even summon sufficient defiance to court the sparrows again.
His warders’ refusal to allow him reading material or pen and paper had come as a shock. He thought, initially, he would even be proof against this deprivation. Why should he not be able to manage his thoughts and harness his memory productively? Mankind had not always been literate. There was a rich oral tradition of storytelling, dating back to the Saxons and Norsemen, which he could emulate. It would not be surprising if there were men in cells like his, in this very prison, who could neither read nor write. They would know how to cope without the opportunity to decipher and create letters.
He persevered. He tried to fashion a telling of his time in France, crafting phrases and committing them to memory, then adding another string and then another. He set himself the challenge of learning as much as he could before his hour’s exercise so that, while circling the yard in line with the other ‘solitaries’ he could mouth his tale and imagine he was passing it on to these other men. He knew he needed an audience. He knew, within days, that he craved company.
That They Might Lovely Be Page 28