At last he said gently, “Fleur, don’t ever be afraid or ashamed to show me that you want me. There are no rules here, no boundaries. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I whispered bravely, but I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking a little.
He moved closer and seemed about to cover my lips with his mouth. Quickly I moved my head. I lifted my hands and unfastened first the pearl stud that held his collar shut and then the topmost button of his shirt, baring his throat. I twined my arms around his neck and began to shower little kisses upon that long, slender throat and upon his cheeks, his eyelids, his jaw, and his earlobes. He closed his eyes and stretched his neck luxuriously the way a cat will when it is being groomed by another’s tongue.
His right knee, still clothed in fine black summer wool, moved up slowly to insert itself between my thighs and drive them gently apart. I yielded with a little sob of feigned urgency.
Instead of insisting upon taking my mouth, he now began to return the little butterfly kisses I had given him. His right hand moved back to my breast. Again his fingers began to stroke and press and pull. I twisted sinuously and made the whimpering sounds of a creature in delicious torment. His breath quickened; his touch grew rougher, more insistent.
I let out long shuddering groans and began to move my hips in sharp, inviting spasms.
“Ah,” came his low whisper of triumph, as if he had hunted me down at last.
His left hand was tangled almost cruelly in my hair, like a conqueror’s.
His right hand slid downward from my breast, over my stomach, and further still. His fingers knotted themselves in the soft mat of curls that covered my groin and pulled at them gently.
I gave a little sob and increased the rhythm of my hips.
Now his fingertips found the tiny bud of flesh whose long-ago and now unimaginable hungers had brought me finally to this, to the necessity of simulating a forgotten ecstasy.
I could sense his excitement, how he was straining to keep it in check.
He moved his finger still further, down to the gates he’d longed to break since he first saw me. He began to slide his finger inside, as if he reveled in taking possession of this most private part of myself.
It should have slipped in easily, but it didn’t.
It hurt.
In my stupendous ignorance, I had supposed that masculine lust and vanity would prevent my husband from comprehending the undisguisable message my unreceptive flesh conveyed. It had taken Frederick months to acknowledge the significance of that desert dryness.
But I’d been wrong.
With a sharp, almost angry intake of breath, my husband released me and pulled away.
He got up from the bed.
Trying to suppress my anxiety and shame, I sat up and leaned over to reach for my nightgown. My fingers found, not lace, but light wool. I came up with his jacket in my hand and held it against me protectively.
I heard my husband give one hard little gasp of disbelieving laughter as he pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the closed window. I saw him bring his right hand up in a fist.
I knew the game was up.
An electric violence, just barely kept in leash, radiated from him. I trembled, certain that he was about to smash the windowpane and would then turn upon me clutching a long shard of glass in his bloodied hand.
I couldn’t speak or cry out. I could only wait.
But he merely let his fist fall slowly against the glass and then stood there for a long, long time with his back to me.
He seemed to be fighting for control.
At last he turned around. His face was in shadow.
“Well,” I heard him say in a voice that he managed to keep entirely level, “it seems we have some things to talk about.”
I clutched his jacket against me with one arm and pressed the fingers of my other hand against my mouth. I really couldn’t believe that he would insist upon discussing a matter so delicate and so humiliating. I had expected only an outburst of anger followed by hours or even days of silence.
He walked slowly toward me, but no longer with the effortless grace that had once fascinated me. There was something tight and withholding in the set of his shoulders and his back.
I felt sick with a vague dread.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and let out a long, tremulous breath. His shoulders relaxed a little. I released my own breath slowly, almost silently.
He lifted the fingertips of his right hand—it was open, palm up, and harmless—to my chin and tipped my head up slightly so that I was forced to meet his eyes.
I thought I saw something glistening on his cheek. The night was warm; perhaps the effort of keeping such a harness on his anger had caused him to perspire.
“Fleur,” he said. And then again, “Fleur.”
He made it sound beautiful and tragic.
“Was it always like this for you?” he whispered haltingly. “I mean… with… Frederick, too?”
I hesitated for only an instant. I really didn’t want to sink any further into the quagmire of lies, but I had to answer quickly. Otherwise my reply would seem calculated. If I told him the truth, that it bad been that way at the end of our marriage but not at the beginning, I feared that he might keep probing until he found out about the baby…. I couldn’t have withstood that, to reopen that wound which had never really healed, to expose all my pain to him.
So instead I laid the capstone on my prison of lies.
“Yes,” I said, and bowed my head.
“Well,” he said again, this time with a rather strained little laugh, as if he were trying to leaven all the wretchedness that filled the room like a miasma, “we have quite a problem here, haven’t we?”
“It doesn’t have to be a problem,” I whispered desperately. “It wasn’t a problem for Frederick. He never let it interfere. We… managed.”
“But I’m not Frederick,” he said.
I swallowed painfully. If only he were. Frederick would never have subjected me to this gentle, merciless inquisition.
“Is that all you want, Fleur?” he asked after another long silence. “To… manage, as you put it?”
“What else is there to do?”
He laughed that low, exhausted little laugh again.
“I don’t know,” he said. “This is… ah… outside the realm of my experience.” He made it sound almost like a joke, as if he were trying to nudge my spirits up a little. “No wonder you seemed a bit… skittish,” he remarked. “Why didn’t you say anything? I knew something was wrong back there in Paris. But I thought you needed time to get accustomed to me. I never dreamed it was more than that.”
“I ought to have told you,” I said after another excruciatingly long silence.
“Yes,” he said. “You should have. If I had known how you felt about… these things, I would have… approached you differently.”
“Or not at all,” I said with a rather hard laugh as I slid my eyes away.
In an instant his hands were on my shoulders. He held me tightly.
“Look at me, Fleur,” he said. So I did.
“Don’t ever think that,” he said. “Do you think knowing this would have made me care for you less?”
Then, with a sudden air of self-consciousness, as if he feared his touch was unpleasant to me, he released me.
“I love you,” he said. “And I love you for trying to please me tonight. It was a mistake, and I wish you hadn’t done it, but I love you for it anyway…. I don’t know what to do, Fleur. I wish I could make you want me the way that I want you. But I’ll take your love in whatever ways you can give it. All I insist upon is that whatever happens between us be real. Do you understand what I’m asking of you?”
“Yes, I think so,” I whispered. My eyes stung.
For a second I thought he was going to put his arms around me, but he seemed to think better of it.
“Will you do that for me?” he pressed softly.
“Oh yes!” I said, only
because I knew I had no choice. I could hardly turn to him now and tell him that everything was a lie.
“I don’t think it will be easy, Fleur,” he said. He sounded exhausted now. “We’ll have to feel our way. It won’t be painless.”
“I know.”
I was used to pain; it was beginning to feel like an old friend. I could hardly imagine life without it now.
But even so, his next words ripped away one of my few remaining consolations, that little sense of comfort I had gained from falling asleep in his arms.
“I don’t want to sleep here with you tonight,” he said reluctantly, as if he hated the possibility that his words might wound me. “It’s not that I don’t love and want you. I do. But I don’t want to lie here beside you tonight, wanting you as I do, and knowing that it’s not the same for you. I’d rather go on sleeping apart, at least for a time…. You can always come to me, you know, if you feel like…” He let the sentence trail off.
“Like what?” I whispered numbly.
“If you ever feel like… making love. I’ll never turn you away. No matter what happens, I’ll wait for you. We can go as slowly as you need to.”
He was so generous, so patient. I felt overwhelmed and so unworthy that I was almost in tears. I guess he could tell, because he tried to cheer me up again.
“After all,” he said with a forced little laugh, “we have the rest of our lives.”
But that night he slept on the sofa in the sitting room.
As for me, I did not sleep at all.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After that the beauties of Greece and Italy made barely any impression on me. I knew I had made a terrible mistake; if it hadn’t been for my clumsy and foolish effort to feign passion, the severity of my limitations as a wife might have become apparent more gradually, and my husband’s disappointment would have been less sudden and shattering.
Now his subdued air only fed my despondency. His manner had never been particularly effervescent, but where it had once had the delicious tang and crackle of very dry champagne, it now became mild and flat. He tried, of course, to spare me any sense of failure and to hide his own unhappiness.
And I tried to hide mine. During the day, I made sincere attempts to fight my deepening lassitude, and to exhibit the same delight in the glories of the ancient world that I had once in Paris. But it was all false. There was no heart in anything I said or did.
I longed to be able to treat my husband with the fondness that I honestly felt for him, but I was unable to. My sense of guilt, the constant awareness of all that I was hiding, made spontaneity and warmth impossible.
Equally painful to me was my husband’s withdrawal of the simple gestures of affection, unworthy though they made me feel, that had come to mean too much to me.
For a moment or two, when the mystical loveliness of Delphi infused him with wonder and awe and penetrated even my gray indifference, he laid his arm across my shoulders and I leaned against him with a feeling of relief and joy.
The light embrace grew warmer, more reassuring. He started to draw me around toward him. But then he stopped, withdrew his arm, and moved a step or two away.
The abrupt change in his manner left me raw. But I knew he hadn’t deliberately intended to hurt me, that in fact he would have gone to almost any length to spare me pain, so as soon as he lifted his arm from my shoulders, I fanned myself with my hat and said, with a gay little laugh, “Thank you—it is awfully warm here.”
He would never know what that brittle remark had cost me, and I couldn’t resent the distance he kept thereafter, although I hated it. I respected him for having too much self-regard to subject himself to the frustration of holding a woman he could never wholly possess.
The awkwardness between us did not diminish with time. I knew my husband had expected that it must. Although he had found the path he’d so hopefully set out upon with me a far rockier one than he had supposed, he still believed that the light of love would guide our feet to a smoother road. But I knew I would never reach the golden highway— not with those paintings and Poncet’s greed hanging over my head like the Sword of Damocles.
The best I could hope for was that things would remain as they were; my husband, in his innocence, still dreamed that love and patience would transform them.
Meanwhile, the exigencies of travel thrust us together in ways that were painful to us both. Every time he took my hand to help me down from a carriage, every time we brushed too closely against each other by accident, I could feel the spark of tension between his body and mine. It kept me continually on edge.
We did not stop at Florence, which was to have been the grand culmination of our honeymoon tour.
We had intended to stay there for a fortnight.
Instead, we passed through it on a train, for in Rome my husband had abruptly proposed that we cut our travels short and return immediately to England.
I did not object. I knew that he was right. In England, everything would be easier. We would not be so constantly in each other’s company, so relentlessly pushed up against the invisible obstacles that divided us. In England there would be a thousand other demands upon his time, which would surely give us long hours of respite from each other.
So I never saw Giotto’s tower, the Gates of Paradise, or Brunelleschi’s dome. I never saw Donatello’s David or Michelangelo’s. I never saw the pagan god with the little faun who had stolen my husband’s heart. All I saw of Florence was a railway station, a sluggish river, and a few red-tiled roofs.
In England, we took up residence on my husband’s large estate, Charingworth. Here I had my own bedroom, and in it I slept alone. My husband had told me his door would always be open to me, but how could I go to his bed when I knew not only that nothing bad changed but that nothing could change?
I had thought that anything would be better than that strained honeymoon which was not a honeymoon. But England was worse. During our travels, my husband’s inevitable presence had sometimes caused me pain, but in England his frequent absences from home only deepened my loneliness. He spent a great deal of time in London; he had a house in Grosvenor Square where he sometimes stayed for days on end. The first two or three times he went there, he asked me to join him, but at that period I hoped that a little time apart might make things easier for us, so I declined. After that, he stopped asking.
Sometimes I did travel to London, just to escape for a few hours from the role I had so unwillingly assumed and which was proving to be so uncongenial. But I always went alone, and spent my time wandering restlessly through the galleries of one museum or another. I never slept in Grosvenor Square since, by train, Charingworth was less than two hours from London.
My husband never failed to treat me with the same kindness and consideration he had always shown. But I still could find no way to ameliorate his unspoken dissatisfactions. Every effort I made to appear lively and gay, every small but awkward gesture of affection, felt ghastly to me— always contrived, always calculated no matter how true the feeling behind it.
Most of the time my husband gave the appearance of having accepted the uncomfortable state of affairs with the same imperturbable calm that he exhibited in every other aspect of our life together.
Nevertheless, some question seemed to hover on his lips. And there was one on mine, as well. I often longed to ask him if he really imagined that our ailing marriage was somehow miraculously going to fix itself What was he waiting for? Surely he would not be content to live like this forever. Yet he took no action. Was he waiting for me?
And what could I do? Go to him with the truth and bring the whole sorry house of cards tumbling to the ground? I knew what would happen then—the shutters behind those clear gray eyes would come down and close me out forever,
Or I could go to him as I had in Athens, willing to try to give pleasure but incapable of receiving it, and expose myself to the same frustration and humiliation.
No. The only other justification for going to his bed woul
d be to give him a child. But that seemed as far beyond my abilities as everything else, and if by some miracle it were not, how could I love the child of this man who seemed every day to be growing more remote? It could never be the one I had lost. And if I was foolish enough to love it, what would become of it once the tissue of lies was finally ripped open? Perhaps my husband’s strict sense of honor would lead him to declare that I was unfit to raise his child and he would take it from me.
In the meantime, his generosity was unstinting. But while the allowance he provided had so far enabled me to meet Poncet’s relentless demands, those same demands forced me to exercise extreme frugality in everything else.
Once my husband, having discovered a new patch on one of my well-worn gowns, asked how I managed to dispose of all the money he gave me.
“Must I account to you for how I spend it?” I asked archly, but never had I felt so threatened.
He flushed. “Certainly not. But I have sometimes wondered….” He hesitated.
“Yes?”
“I know so little about you, Fleur.”
“You know everything about me. There is really very little to know.”
“Your early life… and your life in France.” He could not conceal his extreme discomfort; his rising color told me how much he hated to pry, yet it now seemed that he felt driven to override his scruples.
“I have told you everything.”
“It is apparent that you have already gone through a great deal of money, and it is equally apparent that you spend nothing on yourself. It has crossed my mind that perhaps you have needy dependents, whom you have been unwilling to impose as a burden upon me, and for whose well-being you have felt compelled to assume complete responsibility.”
Now I was the one who flushed.
“If that is the case, or anything like it, there is no reason to hide it from me,” he continued. “Certainly there is no necessity for you to do without in order to fulfill your obligations, whatever they may be. Everything that is mine is yours, surely you know that?”
I thought then, for one terrifying instant, that my poise would crack. I tried to speak, to protest those suspicions which cast me in so much better a light than I merited, but the words caught in my throat. My eyes burned alarmingly. I clung to the image of my grandmother. She would have been ashamed of me; she had always taught me that the last defense in an impossible situation is to present to your enemy an unyielding stone wall. At the time I had thought it was an embittered woman’s drivel; now the memory gave me the strength I needed.
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