The Underside
Page 31
It did not bear thinking of. And he could not think any further about what it all meant. He lay in the dark with his mind worn blank.
And then he heard a sound. For a second or two he was at a loss to account for it, though he knew it was coming from Elizabeth. Then he realised. She was weeping. But it was no noisy and desperate weeping. It was a quiet weeping more terrible than any rending sobs.
And she wept on and on. He could not believe that anyone could sustain such an agony of spirit for so long. But the thin wail of utter misery continued and continued.
Till at last he reached a hand backwards and found her. The wailing hardly changed then. But it did change. It took on a tiny different note that told him that his hand on her side had been felt and was affecting her.
He rolled over under the thick layers of the blankets. He put his arm round her. His hand came in contact with her bosom through the soft material of her nightdress.
‘My dear,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t cry. Don’t cry like that. My darling. My love.’
And then he began to do what he had vowed to himself little more than an hour earlier that he would never do. He began to make love to her. He had said to himself then that it would be a traitorous act against his new country, and now he let compassion allow him to make that betrayal.
For many minutes she did not respond. Yet neither did she in any way repulse him. He knew that she wanted him to continue and he continued. And then eventually she did begin to respond. And soon they were kissing and caressing each other in the way they had made love so many scores of times in their married life together.
And then … And then … Then, little by little, but surely and certainly as letters written in black ink on a white page, she began to go on from the caresses there had always been between them to new caresses. Carefully, feeling her way under the dark of the blankets, she went further, to little new things and to greater ones. Step by step, each step felt out, explored and made safe in the enfolding darkness, she went on until at last the two of them were sharing and exchanging devices of love as daring and as poundingly all-consuming as any that he had shared with Lisa or with Mulatto Mary in the most untrammelled moments of their comings-together. Gone under the covering darkness was the commercial harlot that Elizabeth had tried to be with such pathetic lack of success. Gone. Vanished as if she had never been. And in the darkness there had come instead, from deep deep down, the woman who could.
Thoughts tumbled through his head, more dream visions than coherent ideas. His painting, his picture of the haggish Brocken revels, came there, complete as it would one day be. And there came vision memories of that day at the Derby, almost as if they too were a painting but a painting in time lasting all one long day, the wild and out-of-the-world mingling of the fine and the foul, the upwards striving and the mire beneath joined in one. And he saw, too, suddenly the girl-boy imp of Greenwich, that once inexplicable child who had seemed to delight in the mud she had plunged into head first. And Lisa he saw, last and almost strangest of all. But not the Lisa he had first known, the Lisa of the underside. No, instead he saw the Lisa of not so many days ago, tapping with the stretched fingers of either hand on the sides of her head and saying over and over again ‘It’s here. Here whenever I want it.’
But soon anything even as faintly seizable as these mind-pictures vanished amid the swirling, whirling, deep-plunging, light-spinning, colour-roaring charges that stormed through him and through him. Soon there was the mighty peak and the depths it rested on.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was on the last day of January, in the evening after they had had dinner and while they were installed on either side of the familiar fire, with outside a boisterous tugging wind sending the street-lamps rattling and flinging from time to time sharp scatters of hailstones against the fragile skin of the windows, that Elizabeth spoke to him.
She looked up from the newest textbook of hygiene that had arrived that day, glanced at the clock which showed just nine, turned to the door as if to make sure that neither of the maids was likely to come in and then softly pronounced his name.
‘Godfrey.’
He lowered the newspaper he had been half-reading while his thoughts were on his swiftly progressing underpainting for ‘The Revels on the Brocken’. Then, seeing her, his heart contracted suddenly, awesomely. He knew what she was going to say.
‘Yes, my dearest one? Yes?’
‘Godfrey, you know.’
‘Yes. Yes, I do know. We are going to have a child, my darling. Isn’t that it? It is that, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Yes, it is, my darling one. You and I are going to have a child. The child of our love.’
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © H. R. F. Keating 1974
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