Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  “I loved you,” he said with an intensity that seared me. “Yes, I would have protected you. With or without marriage. With or without your love in return. What else could I have done? How could I not have admired a woman who would pose like that to please the man she loved. And herself. But what did you do? You sold yourself—no, not that self, but an empty husk of a woman—in a purely mercenary transaction, and based our marriage on a lie. And that is something I swear I will never forgive.”

  There being no possible rejoinder, we continued on our way in silence.

  I was exhausted when we arrived back at the hotel. I felt as bruised and sore as if the sky had pelted me with stones instead of having merely misted my cheeks and hair with that fine, gentle rain. As for my husband, my emotions bounced between implacable rage at his presumptuous remarks about Frederick one moment, and a curious and humbling sense of astonishment and regret the next.

  As we entered our suite, I stole a glance in his direction. His expression was set and remote as he helped me out of my coat with perfunctory politeness. I slipped quickly away to my bedroom, closed the door, and leaned against it, feeling dazed and bone-weary. I could hardly move, much less think. After a long time, I began to unfasten my dress and let it fall to the floor. My petticoat followed. Then, clad only in the silly, frivolous orchid-colored satin-and-lace underclothes I had selected that evening from the collection I was now obligated to wear in tribute to my owner, I sank down upon the edge of my bed. I felt too faint to go on. I wanted something—I needed something—but I couldn’t think what it was.

  A moment later I realized that I was only hungry.

  I remembered having seen a large basket of fruit on a table in the sitting room. I supposed it was safe to go back there; surely my husband would have retired to his bed long ago.

  But there he was, stretched out in a chair, his eyes closed. He had shed his wet topcoat but still wore the evening clothes in which he had dressed for the theater; his rain-soaked hair clung to his cheeks and forehead. I noticed, with a curious little pang, that his shoes were muddy.

  I started to slip past him, toward the side table. I had my eye on the largest and rosiest apple.

  My husband stirred slightly but did not open his eyes. I glanced downward. He looked so drained and pale that, had he been soaked with blood instead of merely rain, I might have supposed that he had been carried in from a battlefield, mortally wounded.

  I reached down and laid my palm upon his damp forehead. He must have been half dreaming, because, without opening his eyes, he lifted his hand, took mine gently, and brought it to his lips.

  “You don’t look well, Anthony,” I whispered. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  He stirred again, opened his eyes, and dropped my hand.

  “What are you doing here?” he said. “I thought you’d gone to bed.”

  I wondered whose hand he had pressed to his mouth in his dreams.

  “You look so wet and tired. Can I get you anything?”

  “No. I’m all right. Thank you.”

  His tone was distant and dismissive.

  I glanced across the room at the polished, gleaming apple and then back at the mud-caked patent leather of my husband’s shoes.

  “I don’t think you are all right,” I heard myself say. “You look half drowned.”

  I knelt down and took his left foot in my hands.

  “You’ll get dirty,” he murmured in faint protest.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  I slid off his left shoe and then lifted his right foot as he resigned himself, with an air of reluctant gratitude, to these ministrations.

  After I’d removed his shoes, I went to my bath chamber to wash my hands and returned with a thick towel. He did not open his eyes as I came round behind him and gently began to dry his hair.

  “What are you doing now?” he whispered.

  “I’m drying you. Why aren’t you in bed?”

  “I’ll go in a minute…. You’re no better off yourself.” He stood up wearily, took the towel from my hands, and hung it over my bare shoulders. Then, one by one, he pulled the pins from my own rain-wet hair. As it tumbled down, he toweled the dampness from it.

  “Where is your comb?” he asked.

  I brought it to him. He began to ease out my tangles.

  At last he laid down the comb and the towel.

  “That’s better, isn’t it?” he said softly. He stood so close to me that his breath moved my hair.

  A wave of weakness swept over me. Only an hour earlier I had longed to throw him off the Pont-Neuf and watch him sink beneath the waters forever; now I felt softened, and tired, and so bereft of any comfort beyond the small ones he had just given me that it was all I could do not to move into his arms.

  In spite of the warmth of the room, I shivered.

  “You’re chilled,” said my husband. “Come with me.”

  He slipped off his evening jacket and laid it over my shoulders. Then he took me by the hand and led me to his bedroom.

  “Sit down,” he said. I did, but not on the chair he had indicated. I sat upon the edge of his bed, near the headboard. He took a decanter of Cognac from the little cabinet at one side of the bed, poured hardly more than a thimbleful or two into a snifter, and handed the glass to me. Then, as if once again overcome by exhaustion, he stretched out on the opposite side of the bed and closed his eyes.

  I swirled the amber liquid slowly, inhaled the fumes, and idly surveyed my surroundings. Well within reach of my fingertips, on top of the little cabinet at the bedside, lay a small volume, open and facedown. I looked at it curiously. Except for his newspapers, and that incendiary Roman poet, all I had ever observed him reading were such things as treatises on progressive methods of crop rotation and soil reclamation, and tomes on the medicinal uses of native plants by the inhabitants of the Amazon rain forest.

  But this was a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I turned it over to see what it might tell me.

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments; love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds

  Or bends with the remover to remove.

  I laid the book down, but the familiar, once-loved words sang on in my mind. That sonnet to steadfast, immutable devotion was practically a taxonomy in its description of love as I had known it once, in my lost other life:

  O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

  That looks on tempests, and is never shaken,…

  Oh, why did the words offer me no comfort now? Why did I feel so shaken, so desolate, so robbed of every consolation. I thought of the things my husband had said. Perhaps he had imagined that he had loved me thus, before the revelation of my deception had altered the emotion into something that would never again be miscalled “love.”

  It is the star to every wandering bark

  Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

  I took a fiery sip of the brandy.

  Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

  Within his bending sickle’s compass come….

  I glanced down at my husband. His long dark lashes lay across his cheeks. Otherwise he was as pale and elegant as a sarcophagus.

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  I emptied the snifter, put out the lamps, and lay down beside him. Only a little light from the wall sconce in the passage came through the open door to fall upon the carpet.

  I moved closer to my unconscious spouse. I couldn’t have said why. All I knew was that I did not want to be alone that night and that, since in any case he was now dead to the world, he could scarcely object.

  He turned sleepily and put his arms around me. I laid my head against his shoulder and began to drift toward oblivion. His hand glided under the jacket that still covered me and came to rest against my breast. I sighed, lifted my arms to wrap them around his neck, and mo
ved closer.

  He pulled away, suddenly fully awake.

  “Fleur? Why are you still here?”

  “The brandy must have put me to sleep,” I started to lie. Then I thought better of it. “I don’t want to be alone.” What a pathetic admission!

  “But you can’t stay here.” The abruptness of my husband’s words did more to chill me than any rain had ever done. I sat up and drew his jacket more closely around me.

  “Why not?” I whispered finally. Oh, shameless me!

  “You know why,” he said. “Or, if you don’t, you ought to.”

  “I am afraid that mind reading is not one of my accomplishments,” I said after a while. “If there is something I ‘ought’ to know, but don’t, I think you ‘ought’ to tell me plainly.”

  “If you insist,” he said. He leaned up on his elbow and looked me straight in the eyes. “Nothing,” he said, each word as hard and well formed as a little hailstone, “would distress me more than to find that, in a moment of sheer folly, I had gotten you with child. I thought you understood that.”

  I felt a little pang—it was an unsettling possibility. But I reflected for a moment upon my inhospitable womb and decided there was not much danger of that. Besides, it was a very specious declaration on his part.

  “That has scarcely inhibited you in the past,” I pointed out.

  “Regrettably, no. It ought to have. I have been unbelievably thoughtless.”

  I stood up. It was too much to absorb in one night—the mistresses, the horrible insinuations about Frederick, and now the unmistakable implication that my husband intended never to take me into his arms again. I couldn’t even pretend indifference.

  “Well,” I said in a low voice, “obviously you have no qualms about scattering your seed in every brothel in London. But you won’t defile yourself with your unworthy wife, is that it?”

  My husband got up from the bed, switched on the incandescent lamp, and faced me across the rumpled counterpane.

  “You had better go,” he said. He sounded wearier than ever and dangerously taxed. “I really have nothing more to say to you. Nor have I the patience to listen to any more of your accusations and complaints. I might be tempted to say something very cruel, which you would undoubtedly take too deeply to heart and nurture in your bosom like an asp.”

  Thus dismissed, I congealed into myself and started toward the doorway. But when I reached it, a vision of my lonely room stopped me, as did the vague but unpleasant foreboding that I would very likely spend the night in sleepless and unhappy ruminations on all that had occurred in the last few hours.

  I swallowed my pride, pulled the double doors together, and turned back to my husband, who had already drawn off his tie and was now halted in the midst of unbuttoning his waistcoat. I felt a deep, if sadly mistimed, surge of pure sensual hunger for him.

  “Please, Anthony,” I said stumblingly. His face had gone frigid with annoyance, making it nearly impossible to continue. “You needn’t worry that your worst fears will be realized.” I felt my voice start to break, so I turned and leaned my forehead against the door frame. “Really, I should be so lucky,” I said with a shuddery little laugh. “It can never happen.”

  I closed my eyes and sagged against the lintel, feeling utterly drained.

  Behind me there was nothing but silence.

  Then I heard my husband move swiftly across the room.

  From behind he wrapped his arms around me, bracing me.

  “Oh, Fleur,” he said.

  Tears began to stream down my face. I was glad the room was dim.

  Finally he said, “Are you sure? Has a doctor told you that?”

  I took a deep breath and tried to wipe my cheeks surreptitiously.

  “I don’t need an expert to tell me,” I said.

  “But you can’t be certain,” said my husband gently. “Nor can I. It’s not a chance I dare to take again.”

  Still with my back to him, I closed my eyes and let the weight of his words settle on me. I felt as if I were being pushed into a coffin and my husband was preparing to close the lid.

  I wiped my cheeks again with my hand.

  Finally I turned around.

  “Please, Anthony,” I said again. “I don’t want to be alone.” It was so hard to keep my voice calm and level. “I understand your feelings, and I respect them. But there are other ways.” I paused with embarrassment, then pressed onward. “Ways of avoiding the risk.”

  I couldn’t read his face in the dim light.

  “What do you want from me, Fleur?” he said at last. He sounded as drained and hopeless as I felt.

  “Can’t we agree for one night to forget the injuries we have done to each other?” I pleaded softly. “Can’t we set aside all this hatred and bitterness for at least an hour or two?”

  I stopped to steady my voice, and then went on. “Can’t we embrace, just once, without each of us thinking only of how to extract our pound of flesh?”

  He shook his head. I could see his faint ironic smile.

  “No pound of flesh? But in that case, tonight would not count toward your ransom.” He paused. “No matter how trying it may be for you,” he added.

  “I understand that—I accept it.”

  His expression softened yet further. “It would make… an interesting change,” he said at last. “But do you really think that you are capable of it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know I am. Are you?”

  In lieu of a reply, he took my face in his hands and, bending his head to mine, kissed my mouth very softly. I opened my lips to him, and the kiss, still very slow and fragile, became a delicate adventure. When he had claimed my mouth serenely, his halcyon lips began to move down my throat, his hands over my breasts. I clung to his shoulders as the last of my strength flowed out of me like a spent wave sliding back to merge with the sea. His right hand slid under the satin at my hips; it caressed my buttocks, my belly, and finally stole between my legs. He fingered me gently, opened me.

  My breath quickened. A moan of yearning escaped me. I pressed my lips to his cheek to muffle it, but the scent and texture of his skin, so warm, with just the slightest, tantalizing trace of roughness, sharpened my longing, as he continued to cajole my body into those sweet tremors.

  Only his left arm supported me. He guided me back to the bed, slipped the last of my clothing to the floor, and freed himself from his own.

  When he was done, he lay down on his back and drew me to him. I found his lips with mine. His mouth was hungry, but gentle. There was nothing vengeful or cruel in his kisses; even now they still had the lingering tenderness that reminded me of how much he had once believed he loved me. So indolently sweet they were, so peacefully unhurried that, to my despair, tears rose to my eyes again.

  Fearing that they might spill onto his own dry cheeks, I lifted my head, then began moving my lips downward along his smooth, warm chest, letting them press against his flat belly before I moved lower still. He sighed. I took him in my mouth; his body arched.

  This was the act I had hinted at earlier; now, even as he gave himself over to it, I wondered whether, once his own desires had been quenched, mine would still be left to smolder.

  But after only a moment or two, my husband slid out from beneath me. I tried to turn toward him, but he was above me, preventing me.

  I could not help thinking, even as I succumbed, that he must wish to keep my face toward the pillows so as not to see it, to render me anonymous, to forget that it was J, his unloving and unforgivable wife, whom he might, by some slim, unfortunate twist of fate, be about to miraculously impregnate. At any other time, I would have welcomed this obliteration of my identity. Yet now, in the moment of my most complete surrender, it gave me no pleasure to think that I might have been any one in that succession of black-haired mistresses.

  He pulled me up so that I was on my hands and knees.

  Never had anyone done to me what he then proceeded to do.

  At first I thought it was a
mistake and moved my hips slightly to correct him. But calmly, almost tenderly, he persisted, and when I realized his intent, I felt a clutch of alarm and started to resist.

  He made no effort to force me. While he waited for me to become still, he leaned toward the bedside cabinet, reaching past me to open it. From within he took a small, silver-mounted crystal flacon.

  He uncapped it; the scent of laurel wafted through the air. He began to massage me slowly. The light aroma of the oil, as fragrant as the breezes blowing over a Mediterranean isle, gave me a pagan thrill. But when he had eased me completely, again he began that slow violation. Only the slight, sharp intimation of the pleasure I struggled against, which mingled inextricably with my anguish, prevented me from rising up and tearing myself away from him. But as the tantalizing, sweetly excruciating invasion continued, I could not restrain a moan.

  “Ah, have I hurt you?” he whispered. He started to pull back. “Shall I stop?”

  “Yes. No! I don’t know!” I sobbed softly, trembling, half longing to break free of him, half yearning to take him even more deeply.

  He became very still then, and began to pet my tossing head, my drenched cheeks, until a jarring ripple of pleasure melted me enough to allow him to proceed.

  And so it continued, his hands calming and quieting me, his body scalding me as I relaxed enough to admit him further and further. Then his hands came around my waist, one rising to my breasts, the other falling between my thighs, stroking and caressing, until there was no pain at all, only heat washing through me in large, luxuriant waves. I sank onto the bed as he possessed me completely; my flesh was now utterly beyond my control. I was mortified by the violence of my response. It seemed to go on forever. Then I felt him go rigid with a final thrust, as he whispered my name, my name, stealing the last of my restraint.

  He slipped free of me and collapsed upon the coverlet. I kept my face averted; I could hardly imagine what he must think of me now. But then he reached over and drew his finger along my jaw, coaxing my face toward his until I had to meet his gaze. I could not remember ever having seen in his eyes an expression of such undisguised sadness. He rolled to his side and held me close, cradling me in his arms. I surrendered to this, as well, and slept in his loose, easy embrace.