I feel sure that if I concentrate upon maintaining the briskness of my unbreakable pace for just a little while longer, then it will be perfectly safe to assume that she will not be able to—cannot, dear Milly—catch up to me. And it was exceedingly unlike her, you know—to call out in the street in so very brazen a fashion. In the manner of a raggedy hoyden, or else some low sort of costermonger. I did of course, though, discern the reverberation—the edge, shall we call it, which immediately made that voice of hers so very brittle at its rim while still it was hanging in the air, and rather shockingly. It was, of course, a uniquely female edge, and therefore to be avoided. I have heard it before. Within the just barely controlled and staccato stab of it, there loiters the palpable undertone of crazing—it is overwrought, it is insistent, it is less than rational and it verges upon the shrill. Worse, it augurs an agenda which I have not the slightest inclination to even so much as acknowledge, and certainly not in any way to indulge. And naturally I am aware of precisely its trigger: that single jagged and racing glimpse that she had of me just yesterday afternoon, snug in my den and enjoying a series of cheering libations with my enchanting wife, shortly prior to that good lady attending to one of my more unpredictable needs, which she alone has the instinct to understand. So despite the gnawing jaws of the green-eyed monster that no doubt Milly still winces away from, she is not to know that her arbitrary timing rescued her by merely minutes from a spectacle that would have left her emotions quite thoroughly eviscerated—ripped into bloody ribbons.
For all that these women, at the very outset of a liaison, will with an ill-worn and starkly artificial aplomb and suavity protest their complete indifference to the existence of one’s married state (this being particularly true should they too happen to be, if only in name, bound by the bonds), each eventually will come to rue it. Or else at that threshold they might easily begin by being notably and conspiratorially silent on the matter of their willing duplicity (though never could they dream of couching it in any such terms: their projection of all their spurious clarity is always so very tiresomely opaque). But something then will happen to them, do you see. One never quite knows when—but very surely, something will happen to them. At some indeterminate moment along this convivial and carnal path, they will of a sudden be speared by a latterday conscience. Then—redly flustered, choked by a guilt that is newly aroused from the hitherto convenience of the deadness of its torpor, together with who knows what other entirely useless, petty and smothering emotions—they will shamefacedly retire from the cut and thrust of so much joyous jousting. Or else, conceivably, they might grow tired of the intimacy, as generally I do myself—when the hot surge of blood, the frisson of anticipation cools to the weary expectancy of no more than the usual. On rare occasions, such ennui will be felt simultaneously, which makes the severance both sweet and immediate. While then others still, and much more dangerously, will fall in love. This, of course—although they are blind to it, for rose petals now are covering their eyelids—is not the kiss of balm but a virulent form of corrosive that will bubblingly nibble, eat at avidly and then burningly devour the very warm and lustrously golden thing that had given it life. For suddenly, in the seething crimson cauldron of their newly boiling minds, all else one does, thinks, plans or enjoys when not in the company of this newly wide-eyed and stricken inamorata becomes of quite paramount and pointed concern. Questions that are barbed and tumble too quickly come to be the awful replacement for not just mere idle conversation but also the erotic tattle of sexual affection, the giggled and whispered litany of innuendo, ever present in a prolonged and titillating dalliance. These women are flushed of countenance—though no longer from the impact of union, the heat of the hurly-burly. Now they are, is what they will say, “at one with you.” But what they truly are is a damned bloody nuisance, to put it most plainly. Because I have seen it—oh yes, I have seen it all before. First a woman will fall in love, and then very soon after she will fall apart.
It is my current intention to speak to the man Obi in the woodyard, whose body and soul, should such people run to the latter, are now my exclusive property—I feel I might sooner than anticipated have need of the fruits of his thuggish demeanor—and so it is irritating and tedious that now I have been compelled to swiftly turn a corner that has taken me along this particular road whose name I can never recall, and then in a sweeping arc well away from the Lane. For next I shall have to effect a further circuit in order to engineer a return, though not before I judge it to be perfectly safe to do so. Tiresome, yes it is—but very necessary, you see: for I heard it, in just that single calling out of my name. A warning siren of bombing to come. I could before its note had faded foretell her fevered questing, to which I would find myself thoroughly disinclined to render any response whatever, even were it to be slow, and condescending. For why, please, should I justify the pleasure, even delight, which I continue to take in my spouse’s company? Is this now to be a criminal thing? Am I again expected to stand trial in the face of yet one more so feeble a prosecutor? I think not. For Fiona, she is a quite splendid woman. I have always thought it. I know it to be true. This requires neither apology nor explanation. Did I not select her above all others to be my very own? To mother my little Amanda? Indeed—indeed I did. She cares for me, you know. I go further: she loves me very deeply, and still she continues to maintain that love on so pure, so very clean and elevated a level. She has never been mired by my peccadilloes: more, she embraces them as just another part of me. For would I be the man I am, were I without them? Of course not. And the man who stands before her is he whom she adores. Any woman … any woman who ever has so very foolishly attempted to curb me, to mold me, to tame me, to change me, to lure me away from my beloved Fiona … well that woman should have been possessed of at least the base intelligence to realize that within no time at all, she would be out in the cold. And after the warmth, the smolder, the radiance of all of me … that is cold indeed. Milly, then—dear though she remains to me—will, I observe with quite earnest regret, have to be watched, yes, and really quite closely. And at the very first odor of anything approaching censure, possessiveness or interrogation, I shall have to act decisively: one simply cannot tolerate any of all that sort of thing—and she, in common with all the others, must be made instantly aware. One sometimes has to ask oneself, you know: what, actually, do these women imagine themselves to be …?
There was one. Just one other. During the course of my entire life on earth there has for me existed just this one other woman, and I had seen in an apalling instant that she alone possessed the power to quite utterly devastate me: Mrs. John Somerset, yes of course it was. So well do I recall the midnight banquet that was Anna, where I so very greedily feasted. Although recollection … no, that’s really not it at all: far too small a word—completely ridiculous in context of the might of this, for here is no mere miscellany of misted and unreliable memory, erratically spliced into rapidly jerked out and semi-lost imagery. For I carry Anna within me always—it is as if she were an organ, one of the most vital, which must never be diseased. And the lancing of my eyes at that almost quite literally shattering first encounter left me with penetrating wounds that I welcomed, that I prayed would never heal over: the loss of blood in passion is quite the perfect paradox, for it is as the most invigorating transfusion. And much later … when it had become our easy pleasure to entwine so hotly in the swamp of all we had, to feel its familiar sticky warmth ooze just tenderly between us … I had asked her whether she had known a mutuality—whether she too had been irrevocably licked by the scorching of the devil’s own torch: set alight by so contrarily white a flame at just that same and sizzling fraction of a moment. She smiled like a leopard, touched my lips with the softness of that one so cool and elegant finger, shook loose from its ribbons the deluge, the waves of her lustrous and sweet-smelling hair … and then she said to me, simply, “Jonty.” For this is what she called me: Jonty. I asked not why. Though I knew that no one before had ever don
e so, or else I should not have cared for it.
“That is hardly an answer, Anna my darling.”
“It is answer enough.”
“It is none at all.”
“It is all I have.”
“I cannot believe you.”
“Then … you cannot.”
“It is all you are willing to give.”
“It is all I am willing to give.”
“Why so covetous?”
“It is only you I covet, Jonty.”
“I you have. I am yours.”
“And I.”
“And you …?”
“And I.”
“I love you, Anna. I love you, my darling.”
“You do. You do, Jonty. Oh, you do.”
“Anna … who are you?”
“I am me. Though only when I am with you.”
“You touch my heart. You are my heart.”
“I can feel us, Jonty. Beating.”
The bliss of all that, it continues to overwhelm me. Though prior to such sacred wonder, of course there had to be established the business arrangement—the enabler—with my goddess’s husband, John Somerset. Who, true to his word, had contacted me so very soon, following that singular and ineradicable dinner at Henley: it might even, you know, have been the very next morning when the telephone rang. Would I care, he wondered, to accompany him upriver on his boat? On so fine a day? The very briefest of trips? An opportunity to be alone, did I see. I told him that of course I should be delighted. Little of the journey was immediately remarkable. John, I recall, seemed at enormous pains to make it quite perfectly clear to me that currently we were on board the smaller of his boats: his other craft, he explained at unnecessary length, required a reasonably sizeable crew, and on this occasion he did so want to have me all to himself. The sun was glancing through the lowered boughs of trees, and danced in spangles quite prettily on the water: I rather feel that we were drinking champagne.
“You might have to consider acquiring one of your own, you know Jonathan.”
“A boat, do you mean? I don’t really think so, John. I struggle really to see myself as a sailor. My father, he was very keen, of course. Lifelong passion, you might say. Kindled at Cambridge. I’m ashamed to say that I sold it, you know. His old boat. Quite soon after we came to live here.”
“Oh yes well of course he was quite a feature on the river. A very familiar sight, your father, of course he was. What a shame that you got rid of his boat—trim little thing, might even have been in the market for her myself. Not that I’m any sort of a sailor, believe me. Not in, well—any proper sort of a sense. But in this town, you know, it’s rather the thing. Almost like running a motor car, many ways. Gets you about. And then there’s the Regatta, of course. Quite an event. Bit out of it, if you haven’t got a boat. Always welcome aboard one of mine, of course. But there’s nothing to it really, as regards actually steering the thing. I mean to say—look at me now: barely a finger at the wheel, and happily chatting away to you. It’s not actually akin to being the skipper of an ocean-going liner, you know. Quite funny that, now I think of it. That’s what I was going to christen this old tub, when I got her: Queen Mary. Might have been amusing. Didn’t in the end.”
“I see. So what is she called? So sorry—I failed to observe. Do forgive me.”
“No forgiveness required, Jonathan old man. You are, after all, an irredeemable landlubber, it pains me to say. Anna. She’s called Anna. Obvious reasons. Oh yes and talking of Anna, she did so greatly enjoy meeting you, by the way. Said to pass on her regards whenever next I saw you. So do kindly consider them duly passed on, would you?”
I smiled. I almost certainly did smile. But from the very first mention of her name, my mind had been alive with the giddy possibilities.
“So anyway, John … what do you, um …? I mean to say—quite what sort of thing is it that you have in mind?”
“Ah yes—directly to the point. Good, Jonathan—very good. I like that in a fellow. Decisiveness. Determination. No time-wasting. Jolly good.”
“I am pleased you approve. And so …?”
“Yes well—when I said ‘business’—it’s actually been on my mind, this—I can quite see now that I might have instilled in your mind, oh … quite the wrong impression. It’s not at all, my line, the sort of business whereby one, I don’t know—goes in to the office, sort of thing. It’s not all about attaché cases and boardroom meetings, if you see what I’m saying. We do however dress like businessmen—that’s quite vital. Gives off the right sort of air, you know. When I say ‘we’—I am referring to my son and myself. Adam, whom you’ve not yet met, of course. But soon you will, I very much hope. Useful lad. Knows the ropes. These days, better than I do, I have to say. So if you do feel inclined to join us in our little enterprise—and I needn’t say, I hope Jonathan, how fervently I wish it—then it is he who will, um—fill you in, I think they say. Explain the finer points, as it were.”
“These being the finer points of …?”
“Oh dear—you really must forgive me, Jonathan. I rather seem to be waffling on and on, while not actually conveying to you so much as an atom of information. Well you see, in a nutshell—what we do is we … evaluate. Things. Objets d’art. Paintings. Jewelry. Curios. This sort of thing. And then we … acquire them.”
“Then I really do think you have quite the wrong man, John. I know nothing of this.”
“No no—well I didn’t expect you would, of course. Few do. Whole point, actually. You see—in Berkshire, Oxfordshire … Home Counties generally, I suppose … there are quite a lot of elderly people, you know. Living alone. Well not even elderly, some of them. War, you know: scars of war. And often they find themselves, due to various unfortunate circumstances, temporarily embarrassed, so to speak. Financially, you see. So we do perform rather a valuable service, on the whole. Adam, he gets delivered all over the counties these handbills, and the interested parties, well … they’ll get in touch with us, you see. He has a very good eye. Not really too sure how he gathered all of his knowledge. Bit of a mystery. Didn’t get it from me, anyway. Nor Anna, I have to say.”
He went on talking. I missed a good deal of whatever came next because once again he had uttered the word: Anna. And so I bulged with the swollen vastness of so very lustful an imagination. By the end of this little voyage, however, all was reasonably clear to me. Two fine-looking, perfectly attired and well-spoken gentlemen would, by appointment, come calling. One—and that would be me—affects to appraise whatever item is being optimistically touted for sale (almost invariably, according to John, a gewgaw, some little gaudy trinket of neither interest nor value) while Adam on some or other pretext quickly and quietly investigates all the other rooms in the house. And I was told that it is a rare occasion when some or other treasure fails to be unearthed. Sometimes, the entire house contents are as an undiscovered museum. And so a deliberately exaggerated price will be offered and delightedly accepted for the initial piece of dross, while far smaller sums are then tantalizingly dangled over this or that picture or item of furniture—simply because, it would be explained to the householder (whose taste for cash by now has been thoroughly aroused)—it would be a shame, you see, what with the price of petrol being what it is, to motor all the way back with an empty van when the shop can always do with the ballast of ordinariness such as this just in order to fill in the gaps, so to say. There is no shop, of course. Each piece upon which Adam’s expert eye would alight will always be a spectacular gem, which then is sold on to the appropriate West End dealer who, in turn, will be asking no questions. The profits—and John was rather surprisingly frank about this—are quite beyond credence. He recalled with particular glee the Hepplewhite commode bought for thirty shillings and sold in Bond Street for fourteen hundred guineas; all examples pale, however, before the drawing that was not actually paid for at all because it was found in the drawer of a Regency keyhole desk. The desk sold on for a hundred pounds—reasonable, John explained, for a
n item that had cost him just twenty-five shillings, this to include a black japanned davenport with original brasses. The drawing though—this went on to realize more than four thousand pounds, for it was a Raphael.
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