The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  He stood letting it all pour into him, the miracle that had happened.

  And then at last, reluctantly, he turned and entered the church. But it was time. Time for the ceremony that the whole teeming noisome city had been hushed and beautified to bear witness to.

  He advanced along the wide aisle, its parqueted floor serene in front of him. He took his place in the front pew on the right-hand side. And soon the organ in the gallery behind began to play the Wedding March.

  Tears blinked up into his eyes. Those absurd and familiar strains. He had expected to feel like laughing at them. But, no, what was this he was feeling? This fullness in the throat and welling-up in the eyes? It could be only joy, pure joy.

  The jolly booming organ notes were a barque bearing him along on the great tide of ordinary human destiny, ordinary yet extraordinary. He was about to be married, to join himself to another, to take part with her in the whole onward striving of humankind. He would become a father, the father of sons and daughters, each to grow up in his or her turn, to marry, to have children of their own. He was making an affirmation for solidity. He was placing himself at the beginning of a whole spreading network, sure and true, growing down from beneath him, from beneath himself and Elizabeth. The roots of society. Ridiculous in this rollicking triumphant music to feel so much. Ridiculous, but so.

  Then for an instant a tiny sinister mocking trickle ran through his mind across the path of the great swelling stream. Reject it all, it said.

  Could he? Could he cut and run for it even now? There was still time before Elizabeth came into the church to slip through the narrow door leading to the vestry which the Rector had pointed out the day before when he had gone over the ceremony, to slip through and out down the narrow flight of stone steps into Maddox Street.

  And then what? Lisa? No, not Lisa. She too was married.

  Had she too then experienced this extraordinary happening? No doubt she had, though hardly on such a scale. What was it? Twenty baskets of flowers from Jobstick’s for the church? And Lady Augusta taking firm charge of the trousseau, ordering on the grand scale. What was that list Elizabeth had ruefully shown him? One dozen nightdresses, one dozen chemises, one dozen pairs of longcloth drawers, four longcloth petticoats, one dress petticoat and four flannel petticoats, six patent Merino vests, six dozen pocket handker—

  Behind him he heard a general muted gasp. Elizabeth. She must have just entered the church. Too late now to run. And of course he had had no desire to. He was embarked. The great tide was bearing him along and he was riding and riding on it.

  She was advancing down the aisle towards him. A triumphant figure in white satin frothed over with lace like the spume from seas carved through and ridden over. Framing her face, so serious, so handsome, was more lace. In her hand were flowers, a bouquet of something small, white and chaste. And, surely, there were snowflakes on her too. In her hair. On her shoulders. Sparkling in the moment before they melted with more brilliance, a cleaner purity, than any jewels.

  She was on the arm of Sir Charles, wonderfully correct in his morning-dress, cradling in his other arm his tall grey hat. Was it the one he had worn at the Derby? Or another bought for the occasion? Behind them he could see the two young bridesmaids, distant cousins drummed up by Lady Augusta.

  Godfrey smiled down towards the triumphant sailing snowsparkling figure.

  Oh yes, he was blessed. He felt it in every corner of himself. That this woman should be coming to join herself in matrimony to him. Coming with all her gifts. Her courage. Her steadfastness. Her grey clear penetrating gaze. Her beauty, because she had a grave beauty that set at naught to his mind all the carved perfection of the most pointed-out pinnacles of Society.

  The procession advanced. When Elizabeth came level with his pew he stepped out and went up with her to the steps of the altar.

  The Bishop of Stanmore, all rosy benignity, frocked in authority, began to pronounce the words of the service.

  ‘… to join together this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony …’

  ‘… satisfy man’s carnal lusts and appetites like brute beasts that have no understanding, but reverently, discreetly …’

  Well, he supposed that he had satisfied his lust. Had it been like a brute beast? Best not to think at all what it had been like. And when it came to himself and Elizabeth? ‘Discreetly, advisedly, soberly’? Not the moment to confront that now.

  Think instead of the guests. Of Lady Augusta, podgy and marvellously magnificent in a crinoline of vibrating heliotrope with trimmings of rich black lace and a hat that would not be outmatched anywhere this year. Of Adelaide Watkyn, who had sworn that the news of the marriage would prostrate her for ever and whom he had yet glimpsed in a high state of agitation in a pew not far from the front. Of Lady Emmeline Otway, on his side, prudishly contriving he felt sure to be here without once considering the final purpose of the ceremony. Of all his other far-off cousins and family friends who had appeared from country houses and parsonages, from nearby Hertfordshire, from East Anglia in their dozens, from Wales, from Scotland. Of all the numerous Bosworth connections bulking out Elizabeth’s side, only Miss Josephine Marcham in retreat from the raw air missing from among them. They had all come to confirm and celebrate this moment, to put the seal of the world on it as the puff-sleeved Bishop was even at this instant putting on the seal of the Church.

  ‘Godfrey, wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her, in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?’

  Forsaking all other. Yes. Yes. ‘I will.’

  And a moment or two later came Elizabeth’s ‘I will’, sweetly and heart-dancingly with that touch of American in it. And stated as firmly and steadfastly as his own had been.

  He listened and half-listened as the service continued. The Bishop’s deep voice. The murmurous chanting of the psalm ‘Blessed are all they that fear the Lord and walk in his ways’, the Our Father, responses. And then he and Elizabeth sat in the low chairs that had been placed behind them and the Bishop preached.

  Ought I not to pay full attention to this, to remember it, he asked himself. Are they not after all words of wisdom? But he felt he had no need of instruction. He knew the purpose of it all. It was the solemn admitting into the world of trust and order of two people. He was here with Elizabeth declaring himself at one with the whole great upward-striving process.

  He had decided on it, and he had embraced it. Now it was done. He was fixed in a place in the world on top. And there he would stay.

  The organ pealing again. A hymn sung with sudden vigour by the whole glittering congregation, all joined in an onrush of good feeling towards Elizabeth and himself.

  And then the two of them were going through that vestry door arm in arm together to sign the register. And then it was signed, with her looking up at him for an instant to smile when she had written, rather round-handed and formally, the words ‘Elizabeth Jane Mann’. And then they were making their way back through the church and out into the street where the snow had ceased to fall though the world was still as white as ever. And John the coachman, proud as a turkey, was lording it over his four glossy bays each wearing, as if, dammit, they knew just why, a white rosette in its harness. And the church bells were ringing for them, high and clear in the silence of the great snow-bound city.

  And the wedding breakfast at Brook Street was every bit as tremendous an affair as Lady Augusta had declared it would be. The presents were all there on an immensely long sidetable strewn with rose-buds. There was the jewellery in its velvet-lined cases, there was the china in all its profusion of entrée dishes and gravy-boats, dining plates and dessert plates, there were the tea services and the coffee services, there were the decanters and the wine-glasses, there were the leatherbound volumes, of Scott, of Shakespeare, of Longfellow, there were the pen-holder set
s and the blotting-books and the platewarmers, there were the worked footstools and the ornately framed mirrors, the vases and the paperweights, there were three clocks, no fewer, each under a heavy glass dome, and there was the silver, the candelabras and the centre-pieces, the fruit dishes, the sweet dishes and the vegetable dishes, the salvers and the wine-coolers.

  And they ate. They ate enormously. Of soups and entrees, of fowls, of game, of lobsters and oysters, of mayonnaises and salads, of jellies and creams and tipsy-cake. And there was champagne by the bottle and dozens of bottles. And toasts. And speeches. And the cutting of a huge wedding-cake, white almost as the snow outside.

  And then came the moment for the bridal pair to leave for the honeymoon in Switzerland and John with the carriage at the door again, still turkeycock proud and noticeably redder in the face for the shadow celebrations that had begun in the servants’ hall below. And the two of them got in, and white satin slippers were thrown and the horses went off at a rousing pace towards the Charing Cross Station and the Chatham and Dover Railway.

  And it was over. They were married, married in church by a bishop, surrounded by a gathering of their relatives, friends and acquaintances representative of the great world of order of which they had been now confirmed for ever as honorary and life citizens.

  It was as their train approached Dover, with only the Channel crossing and all its crowded bustle and possible unpleasantness in the way of sickness between them and the room in the hotel at Calais where they would spend the first night of their married life, that Godfrey began to concern himself actively about the precise events of that coming night.

  Elizabeth was no ignorant girl, with nothing whatsoever told her before her marriage day of what took place between man and woman beyond perhaps one hasty maternal recommendation to endure some mysterious experience. She had undergone the selfsame instruction given to the future medical men of America. She must know in full detail the physiological events that took place. And yet, for all that she had seen plenty of the results of unfettered sexuality in her work and read in Blue Book and Report of the activities of prostitutes, she was surely as untaught as the most secluded clergyman’s daughter in the essential of the matter. What could she know of the emotions that the act of intercourse roused up?

  For a Captain Harnett or the like this would of course present no problem. For them women seemed to exist to provide objects, willing or unwilling, for their desires. And that was that. The object needed no thinking about, once secured. And there was no problem either for the sort of young girls he had seen down in Shadwell or Whitechapel, the sort that Lisa had told him she had been. The close proximity of a shared communal bed, the instinctive promptings of the night, and it would be done. Without ceremony.

  But for Elizabeth, as with all those carefully brought-up young girls whose virginity had been not so much a thing prized as a thing so sacred it was not even to be spoken of, the beginning of sexual relations was an hour fraught with complexities. No doubt when it came down to the cruel fact for many of them, even for most of them, it would be a matter of un-understood pain and scrabbling humiliation under the heavy covers of a dark strange bed. And then in the nights that followed there would be a gradual realisation of what the whole intimate relationship was. And then there would be either a lucky coming to a modus vivendi, a shared giving and taking, or continuing eyes-shut misery.

  And he himself wished for Elizabeth, he thought as the thudding train brought their private compartment moment by moment nearer Dover, surely an equal hand-in-hand partnership on that exploration into the luxuriant green and glossyleaved jungle whose outer border lay in the respectabilities of a room in the best hotel in Calais. And he had in some ways as little notion as she of where they would go in that jungle.

  He knew too so little of his fellow-explorer. Her life history, yes. He had heard by now almost all of that. Her beliefs. Certainly he knew them. She had ignited him with their flame. But what of her life of the feelings? Some details he knew, that she disliked finding her fingers or her clothes dirty, for all that she was ruthlessly prepared to go into the dirtiest localities. He knew such minor things as that. But her deeper feelings? True, they had kissed. But always he had sensed on her part—and, to tell the truth, it had existed on his—a degree of formality. It was as if their kisses had been only a way of putting a special seal on some compact between them. They had been touchings of the lips. How far they were from those desireful plungings into each other that had marked his days with Lisa, his encounters with those others.

  How would Elizabeth accept advances of that sort? Yet would he not, sooner or later, come to make them?

  He pulled out his watch.

  Elizabeth looked at him.

  ‘We shall be in Dover in a few minutes?’ she asked. ‘Yes. In a few minutes.’

  There was still time to say those reassuring words. Perhaps only some dozen or two words were needed. Still time. If he spoke at once.

  He said nothing.

  ‘Dearest?’

  Elizabeth was leaning towards him with an evident mixture of hesitation and determination written on her face. It sent his heart actually thumping hard in the rib cage.

  ‘Yes, my dear one?’ he said.

  ‘Dear, this may be the last opportunity to say something that I feel must be said before—before tonight.’

  Irresistibly drawn, he too leant forward across the noisedrumming privacy of the compartment.

  ‘Dearest,’ Elizabeth went on, looking into his eyes, ‘I want you to know something. My dear, you must already be aware that I realise that marriage is more than the uniting of two kindred spirits. I know that it is the uniting, too, of bodies. And, oh Godfrey, I must say it: I have my fears and doubts.’

  He held out a hand across the gap between them. Elizabeth took it. Her grasp was cold.

  ‘My dear one,’ she said, in a voice he could only just catch in the steady thunder of the onward-moving train. ‘My dear, I hope that I have succeeded in tackling those fears as I would tackle any others. When some wretched girl in the rents comes to me and says she fears the birth of the illegitimate child she is carrying, I tell her as simply as I can what are the facts of the process of parturition. Godfrey, my dear one, I hope that I have been able to tell myself what are the facts of the whole relation there is to be between us tonight.’

  He looked at her with as much admiration as he had felt for her at any time.

  ‘My darling,’ he said, ‘you know that it is perhaps more than facts that arise in this?’

  ‘Yes, I do know it. Do not think that I have reduced it to a mere series of mechanical events. I know those, and have nothing to fear there. It is the feelings that must accompany those events that have seemed to be a great void of darkness.’

  In answer Godfrey could only take her cold hand with his other and hold it tightly.

  ‘But, my dear one,’ she said, ‘I have tried to cast a light into that black void. I hope that you will find it shone far enough when—when—tonight.’

  The engine at the head of the train gave a long sobbing shriek as they began to slow down for the approach to Dover.

  So when he and Elizabeth made love that night it went well. It went indeed far better than he had imagined possible. He had, for one thing, been a good deal worried by the difficulties he had expected over the breaking of her virginity. And there had proved to be none, though whether this was by chance or because she knew what was to happen and was prepared for it he did not ask. He saw afterwards that there was blood on the towel she had brought with her and placed on the bed, but at the time that barrier had been crossed as though it had not existed.

  And the other barrier, the barrier in the mind that Elizabeth had spoken of as a black void before her, that too had gone down under the almost soldier-like resolution she brought to it. And so, both that night before they fell asleep and again when the early light woke them, he had found himself making love in a spirit and with an energy that he had not be
lieved would have been possible between them for a very long time, if ever at all.

  Yet, an instantly forced-down disloyal thought told him, the paths he and Elizabeth had begun to take together into the green jungle were not at all those he had taken with such sordid and practised companions as Kitty and Lisa. It was not that exploring them with her did not set his heart pounding, did not fill his mind with uncatchable bursts of light. But the paths were, without his much being able to define how, different paths.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Nor in the two weeks that followed in the heady snow-sparkling air of the Swiss Alps that had been Elizabeth’s choice of place to spend these early married days did Godfrey succeed in explaining to himself just what ultimately was the difference between the long bedroom hours with Elizabeth and the lovemaking he had shared with other coarser women. And, in the months of home life that followed the Alpine weeks, he did not become much clearer.

  There were, he quite soon saw, physical differences. He never came with Elizabeth, ardour-filled though their embraces were, to kiss her other than on the face and on the breasts. They never coupled except with himself above or beside her. But he had—he fought away the memories—made love with whores frequently in that manner and had yet experienced feelings very different, though perhaps not less intense, than those he now experienced with Elizabeth.

  And, it was true, he never felt with Elizabeth any desire to play the tricks that with Lisa and others had added such multiplied delight to their encounters. Yet Elizabeth seemed more than happy, sometimes indeed said so with a quickly come-and-gone directness. She was right, too, he thought often. There was no question but that their love-making was joyous.