‘Come on.’ He took me by the arm. Around the corner, we were into even deeper shade.We were near the fish ponds. The garden here was yew-heavy, yew-sombre, and doggedly topiaried as if to make something of nothing much. Making, though, for a rather peculiar landscape.
We reached a door and he took a key from the ring on his belt. ‘I have the only key, as far as I know.’ In a household of this size, there’d always be a risk. ‘This little room has its own staircase.’
An impressive find. ‘What is it, this room?’ I tried to sound businesslike; had no idea how else to be. We were climbing the narrow, spiral stone staircase, him leading the way.
‘Just a room, a vacant one. Next staircase along is our doctor and his man and a couple of rooms for my men and theirs. It’s all men over here; they’re never here, they’re all off – he glanced down at me from the top step, laughed – ‘doing whatever men do.’
What do men do? This, judging from Thomas. I felt guileless. I won’t, of course, do it: come to this room. I’m merely going to look around and imagine having such a life. Being such a person.
But I was also thinking, When do we begin?
It was a room with a bed. A bedroom then, although no one’s in particular. No, not a bedroom: a room with a bed. A room not much bigger than its bed, not least because the bed was huge, incongruous in this backstairs room. It was bare, stripped of its hangings and its mattress uncovered. The room, too: any hangings from the walls were gone; there was simply the shoulder-high panelling and, above it, plaster. The fireplace was swept, and there were no candles.
‘What else is good about this room,’ Thomas was saying, ‘is that the bed’s up.’ Not dismantled, stacked away. I ran my fingertips down a post, over the ornately carved and gilded wood, but the gilt was fragile, brittle, coming away in flecks. ‘I do like this one.’ Thomas admired it. ‘It was from my mother’s old house.’
I recoiled, made a face.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.
It took him a moment, but then he did know.‘Oh, honestly, Cathy! I’d like to think my mother would be happy for me. That I’m happy. Isn’t that what you want for Harry and Charlie? That they live their lives to the full?’To my surprise, he was serious; he was looking searchingly at me, making it hard for me to avoid his gaze. I had to answer him, and properly, because he’d brought the boys into this and I didn’t want their names taken in vain. It was dizzying, being here with him and then having to think seriously of my boys.
‘What I want for both of my boys is that they’re married to the right person.’
‘And I’m not?’ He was quick, bringing me up sharp.
He was indeed married to the right person, wasn’t he. Problem was, she wasn’t. I turned to the window, tried to open the shutters.
‘And you were, weren’t you,’ he said, pleasantly disinterested, as if we were discussing the weather.‘You were married to the right person.’
I said, ‘Please don’t talk about Charles. Or the boys.’ I didn’t want anyone else brought into this room with us.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and did seem to be. ‘You’re absolutely right. And that’s my point: it’s different – this - from all that.’
This: what was it, this? A fragment of memory: his mouth on mine, and him pressed against me.
That was what it was, and I felt appalled and thrilled all at once.
I said, ‘These’ – shutters – ‘won’t open.’
‘The view’s important, is it?’ He sounded amused, reached past me to give them a shove.
‘Better not be,’ I said, glancing out, ‘because there isn’t one.’
He went to laugh but fell short, gripped my shoulders instead. ‘This isn’t nothing, you know. Not for me. This is nowhere near nothing.’ Then he did half laugh, at his own gibberish; then stopped and put his lips to mine just once. ‘This is everything, really, isn’t it,’ he said softly to my mouth, ‘when all’s said and done?’
My body was immediately in agreement. My body was his. An actual pain it was, my ache for him.
‘Supper,’ I managed: a reminder that we’d be missed, very soon.
‘You’re right,’ he said, and let me go, stood aside for me to lead the way back.
Twenty-five
You want me to say how hard it was, to cheat on my pregnant best friend. You don’t want to hear how easy it was.
The first time in that room, Thomas and I were naked. I lay back on the bed and Thomas knelt between my knees to kiss my nipples, then my navel, before moving further down. His mouth turned so wet I could hardly feel it, couldn’t feel enough of it. When he did finally push inside me, I held him by the hips, held him there, moved him there. Just there. I loved how little I needed of him.
I did need to look at him, though. To look and look and look. If anyone had asked why I did what I did, I’d have said, Look at him. Strenuous, it felt to me, my looking: a drinking down of him, which I was forever wanting to do better, harder, more. Whenever we were together, I’d be prompting him to turn, or I’d be holding him or positioning myself so that I could properly take in the sight of him. From the generous indentation on the crest of his lip, to the perfect, modest one-fingertip-sized indentation of his belly button. He’d laugh, sometimes, almost bashful, and perhaps half-heartedly dodge me, but actually he was the same: this was something we shared, that we never closed our eyes. His gaze was as bold and thorough on me as his hands. In those first few days I spent what felt like hours idling over Thomas, my eyes, fingertips and lips travelling the curves and textures of him. The striking flatness between his boyishly jutting hipbones. The springiness of the little fair hairs of his thighs. The silky skin in the fold between thigh and buttock, and the velvety skin right underneath him.
We never did have hours, though, of course, nor probably even so much as an hour. Yet each speck of time we had together sprung wide like level water. That dazzled me, that magic trick, and of course I went back and back for it.
I never worried that we’d be discovered. What we were doing had no place at Sudeley, so, while we were doing it, we were invisible. Nobody would be looking for this; nobody would see it. And as soon as we were back among others, there was indeed nothing to discover. It had happened, it had gone, we’d had what we needed of each other and, later, in company, barely glanced at each other. If Kate had confronted me, I’d probably have laughed, said, Don’t be absurd, and believed myself because it was absurd.
And we were invisible in such a big household, particularly Kate’s household: everyone so busy. Kate’s time was taken up by those in need of her, and books and prayers. Her ladies were mere girls and stayed close to her. My boys were always off romping elsewhere, relishing the riches of Sudeley Jane Grey had her nose in a book, and Mrs Ashley had her backside on a cushion. Elizabeth, though, I did fear. My first sight of her as a member of Kate’s household: she’d been alone down by the river at Chelsea. As quick-footed as she was sharp-eyed, she could often, I noticed, give Mrs Ashley the slip. For all the strenuous appearance to the contrary, she didn’t quite belong in the Sudeley household and I was forever half expecting to turn a corner and come across her.
Thomas didn’t talk much to me when we were in our little room – which I liked: he, who with everyone else seemed never to stop – and his only talk was about where he wanted to take me. Down in the kitchens, deserted at night, up on one of the wide, scrubbed tables. Down further, in the wine cellar, wedged behind the barrels, the glow from our candle bouncing around the vaults. Out in the gardens, at the beebole wall, me perched on the rim of one of the hive-sized niches. Or in the maze.
‘The maze?’
‘They’re being grown higher, that’s what I’ve heard. New style. Higher than a person.’
That foxed me. ‘You’d get lost.’
He grinned. ‘I think that’s the idea.’ Then, a little more seriously,‘With a maze like that, at Sudeley, we’d be
laughing, you and I.’
‘But quietly.’ I laid two fingertips to his lips.
‘Chapel,’ those lips said.
I took my hand away and sat up. ‘Don’t, Thomas. Please.’ Even though I knew he wasn’t serious.
He protested, wide-eyed, ‘No one’s ever there. Not like it used to be, in the old days.’Then he made it worse by adding, ‘There’s her walkway, too.’ Kate’s, he meant: the covered walkway from her apartment straight to chapel, that long, timber-built gallery.
I said, ‘Did you do it there with her?’
That stopped him. He sat up. ‘Good God, Cathy.’ And then, as if to a recalcitrant child:‘Do you want to know how – where, when – Kate and I made love?’ Made love. And past tense: no sex during pregnancy, of course. ‘Do you? Because if you do, I’ll tell you.’ He would have, too. No, I said, chastened: no, I didn’t want to know.
The second time in the room, we hadn’t yet got quite naked, either of us, when he suggested, ‘Lie on your front.’ Him, still in his voluminous linen shirt; me, stripped of my gown and my petticoat but not my woollen stockings. I went to ease down a garter, slide a stocking down, but he laid a hand over mine and indicated with an sharp inclination of his head that I should turn over. I did so, and lay with my head on my folded arms. Behind me, he rummaged in the one chest that was in the room. ‘Pillows,’ he was saying. ‘We need a pillow.’ He came up with a bolster. ‘Here.’ Under my hips. I felt absurdly exposed and turned over, sat up, gathered myself. ‘Trust me,’ he said. So, I lay back down as he wanted, and he came to one side of me and kissed my shoulders. He kissed them at the very top, in the fold made by my raised arms, then on the blades themselves: a diligent single kiss to each blade. Then he inched his lips down my spine, giving me goosebumps, and into the small of my back, where he lingered. The rasp of his stubble, the tickle of a fop of hair. Then nothing: he was gone. I lay there alone, exposed, unable to stop myself raising my lower half in blind search of him. Then he was there again, his mouth was there, but now at my stocking tops and then moving upwards. A steady, contemplative kiss to one buttock and then the other, and then, it seemed, everywhere at once.
I said, ‘Is this what you do to all your servant girls?’ ‘I’m not interested in servant girls,’ he replied.‘Never have been.’
I’d trusted him and he’d been right: being bared to him was glorious and I craved more, to be nothing more than my lower half. Then the kissing was over and there was the pressing of his thighs on mine. Carefully, he pushed inside me and immediately my rippling began. He laughed, and I was thinking, How can this – so wonderful – be wrong? And what if I die without ever feeling this again?
But, believe me, it was always just about to stop. That’s how I understood it. There did always have to be one more time, because that would be the last one. There had to be a last time, and this – this, I’d think, thank God, finally – was it.
And yet I lived with an urge to shout. It can’t stop; can’t you see?
It would be against nature, to stop it; it would be a kind of death.
At times, it seemed reasonable to do what we did. The only person it would hurt would be Kate and she didn’t know and never would.
Sometimes one of us would actually say to the other: This will stop. One day soon this will stop. Although once Thomas did say to me, ‘This – you and me – it’ll never stop.’ That, too, was unimaginable, and dreadful. Unimaginable that it would stop, and unimaginable that it wouldn’t.
The problem was that the time we spent together felt real, while everything else – the life that was supposed to be real – was sham, shadow. Our times together were like sunlight on water: diamond-bright and undeniable, but simultaneously nothing you could touch, let alone hold, and leaving no trace.
The problem, you see, was that we were getting away with it. Why, then, stop?
Only once did I come across someone as I hurried to our room; Harry, my own Harry. Alone, just standing by a yew hedge near the fish ponds, nowhere in particular, somewhere no one ever came. I turned a corner and there he was; I almost bumped into him. What on earth was he doing? Was he spying on me? If he was, he was doing it spectacularly badly. Which isn’t his style. Chances were that he hadn’t been expecting to see me and I was going to get away with it. This time, anyway: I resolved to be more careful, somehow, from now on. But what was he was doing, standing there? ‘Harry?’ I braved it and asked him, ‘What are you doing?’
Such a big boy, now: a good head taller than me. ‘Noting!’ He barely looked at me. ‘What are you doing?’
The aggression in his question had me snapping back at him, ‘Don’t talk to me like that!’ But then I did give him an answer, or of sorts: ‘Walking. Thinking.’ He didn’t seem to hear me, so keen was he to scarper. For now - for now - I remained undiscovered.
Some days Thomas and I had almost no time at all, but still we did it. Knowingly, unapologetically, quick in the pursuit of something that seemed quite separate from ourselves. I had to have him inside me every day; a missed day was a missing day, the world crumpled. My blood was different in my veins now, luxuriously silty, peppered and precious. My body was a different body and knew what it needed.
There was a sense of fit between us: not merely physical, although definitely there was that. I didn’t know how I lived the minutes when he wasn’t inside me, when there was no glittery rub of him inside me. I crammed him into me, hauled him in. My urgency shocked and delighted me.
Me, cool and calculating Catherine.
Thomas never asked me how it had been for me with Charles; he knew better than to ask, and anyway he probably knew the answer. Charles had been scared. Of scaring me. I could guess what Thomas would say to that: It would take a lot to scare you. Seriously, though: I was fourteen, and almost immediately pregnant, then damaged, then pregnant again, damaged anew. That’s how it started for Charles and me, and that’s how it stayed. We never got over it. He was a nice man. I know what Thomas would have said to that: And I’m not. And, no, he wasn’t.
Once he said, ‘I want to be a good husband to Kate, and I think I can be, but at heart I’m yours. You know that, don’t you.’
Once, and only once, he looked up at me and asked, ‘Do you love me?’
I was shocked but replied unhesitatingly, ‘Yes,’ and heard it, and believed it.
Yes.
I adore you, adore you.
This is nothing to do with anyone else.
‘Not even God?’ I goaded him once when we were getting dressed.
‘Oh, God understands,’ he replied, as breezy as you like.
And, ‘This is a sin,’ I said, once.
His response was a deliberately weary sigh. ‘And the day will come when we ask for forgiveness, and it’ll be given.’
Persuasive, confidence like that.
‘Not by Kate,’ I said.
‘We’ll make sure we never have to ask Kate,’ he said.
Kate. Oh, Kate: I loved her more than ever, I told myself. I ached to tell her what was happening. To tell her not as his wife – I didn’t want to tell her that her husband was deceiving her – but as my best friend. Once or twice I even found myself turning around guileless to confide, Kate? Guess what? It was odd to me, though, in a way, that she didn’t already know, that she couldn’t detect what was happening. I felt it of everyone – that surely they could see it on me – but especially of her. She was my best friend; she knew everything about me. And now she didn’t. She didn’t know this. Something this big in my life, she didn’t know. Well, she should have, I couldn’t help but think. If you don’t know, Kate, it’s because you’re not looking.
You could look at it this way: what Kate wanted of Thomas, she was getting. He hadn’t stopped being attentive to her. Indeed – predictably – he was more attentive than ever. He loved her, I could see. He loved their life together: what they had, and what they were looking forward to. With her, for her, he was funny, and sympathetic. That was when they were
together. But she had her own concerns, which took her from him. Her many concerns, from the state of reform to the children and staff of the household and of course – of course – her ever-progressing pregnancy.
Pregnancy. Preventing it: Thomas made something even of that, with me. Made a lot of it, keen to demonstrate his impeccable timing, his self-control; making a mess of me and then wiping me down with either my petticoat or his shirt.
Once, we didn’t make it as far as the room, but did it against that little locked door: not even locked, but pressed hard shut by the weight of us. Struggling to raise and keep raised my buckram-stiffened petticoat. Later, going up those backstairs, I remembered Catherine Howard. People had died for doing this, I recalled; they had been hunted down. Up there in our room, I stood at the window and looked over the gardens towards the parkland with just one thought in my head: Well, come and get me, if you dare. I felt that reckless, and that invincible.
Only the dead could get close. Sometimes I’d hear my mother: What on earth do you think you’re doing? But then I’d hear my reply: I’m living my life. I didn’t really know what I meant by it, but it was always what I imagined saying and I believed it passionately. And Charles? Well, what could Charles have said to me? He’d left me, hadn’t he, when he died.
To be honest, they both seemed very dead.
Twenty-six
Kate would be very pregnant, I knew, by the time of my next visit. That was how I thought of her, once I was back home: becoming very pregnant. Definitely pregnant, at around six, seven months: the bump a visible presence but not so ridiculous as to look unreal. Perfectly pregnant. That was from the outside looking on, but for Kate, too, surely, it would be the best phase, after the sickness and tiredness but before the incapacity. I was intrigued by the prospect of being able to gauge the physical change in her, to see her different. Here at last was something by which even she couldn’t remain untouched. And for her, of course, the physical changes would be more profound than anything I’d see. Someone would be keeping constant company with her: someone who’d wake perhaps moments later than her – slow to stir, a tiny sleepyhead – but then be hard to settle at bedtime and need a murmured talking-to, a steadying hand. A small, invisible person animated during conversations and comically excited by the first mouthful of every meal. More than a decade on, I still miss that intimacy. Perhaps I always will.
The Sixth Wife Page 13