They then joined under the bedclothes in a flow of kissing and caressing, their passion forgiving them for the interruption, for being sensible. She went into his arms, enjoying the muscularity of his body, her breasts firm against his chest, her nipples sensitive to the light hair of his chest, her pearls excitingly hard between them.
She could feel that he was hard and moistening against her body and that they were moving inexorably to his entering her and she wanted it fiercely.
But he held back, tantalisingly, delightfully, returning in a natural way to a whispered, loving conversation, their hands moving about each other’s body, arousing and coming to know. She sensed it was also his way to keep his passion from bursting too soon.
‘And what changed your mind about me?’ he asked, softly. ‘How did I finally after all this time, find favour with you?’
‘The last glass of champagne,’ she said, into his ear. ‘No, I’m wrong, it was the cognac.’ She lay there thinking, I must be honest. ‘It was your toast to Aristide Briand, at lunch — I knew then you would be on my side.’ This was, perhaps, closer to the truth. As a quick answer. ‘And that you would be by my side, one day soon,’ she said with an easy boldness.
She whisperingly asked him if this was the bed that Briand had slept in. He whisperingly replied that he had asked for just that bed, and yes, this was the bed that Briand slept in. They were playfully joined in their jesting.
He then revealed to her, with a hint of self-congratulation, that he’d arranged the caricature with Kelen before the luncheon.
She became nervously tight. She lay there, dismayed. She pulled slightly away from him, ‘You didn’t!’
She remained in his arms, but unresponsively. The amorousness of their joining and the mood had fled to the corner of the room.
‘Edith?’ He was startled.
Whether now to leave this bed; or whether to laugh and pretend to amusement. To then pretend the night away in the interests of a makeshift harmony, in the interests of a makeshift love? No. It would not be in the interest of their love to begin with a sham. She would not pretend laughter, she did not want to misuse urbanity, she would not put down her disquiet. She was never again going to pretend to laughter. She did not want to be swindled any more by the connivances men and women used with each other. And she with herself.
‘What are you doing! For Heaven’s sake, where are you going, Edith?’ he said, as she pulled away out of his embrace and left the bed.
She got out of bed, holding her breasts with her cupped hands to take them from his gaze, and stood in front of her underwear which was lying on the dressing bench.
He sat up in bed with surprise. ‘What has offended you?’ He seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Edith — what is it? What have I said?’
‘I don’t like secret dealings and slyness.’ She paused in her ineffectual efforts to dress. She decided to remove the caricature from the wall. She might even tear it up. She did not have any idea how she could graciously leave the hotel. Down in the lift, down the foyer stairs, past the staff. Out into the night. She was, frankly, defeated by it all.
‘Secret dealings? The caricature? I thought it was a tribute to you, to us — it was a gift to you. I thought you’d like to have a Kelen caricature.’
A gift had to pass many tests before it got into her life. He would have to learn that. ‘You got together and planned a bawdy joke!’
‘I asked him to draw us and to send it over during the lunch. I gave him a bottle of champagne this afternoon in payment. Where’s the offence?’
‘The offence is that you asked him to draw that before we went to the luncheon! Before anything had been said, agreed, or pledged. You told him to draw us going to bed! You told him what you intended to happen intimately between us before any intimate agreement had been arrived at. You said all this to Kelen. A third party. A stranger.’
‘Hold up.’ He came from the bed and took her in his arms. ‘Hold up. Hold your horses, Edith.’
He was still erect and she thought him long and big. She did not remove her hands from her breasts. Ambrose had always described his own as ‘a Cupid’s cock’. She would definitely say that Robert’s was long. She’d been taught in art classes by Julian Ashton that Christ was given small male parts in statuary as a way of showing his renunciation of carnality. Robert showed no signs of such renunciation.
‘You’d already decided the whole outcome for yourself,’ she said, trying to keep to her grievance.
Her attempts at dressing were not getting very far. She supposed she could sleep on the floor of the room. Or huddled in the armchair.
He said, ‘I didn’t tell him what to draw. I simply wanted a memento of the luncheon because I felt it was going to be important — for us. I asked him if he would mind doing us a caricature. I didn’t ask him to draw the bed and so on. I sensed that things had changed between us and that we were destined to, well, find each other now.’
‘You didn’t ask him to draw the bed and so on?’
‘No.’
‘The subject theme was his idea? The bed?’
‘Entirely. I asked simply that he make us, make you, a drawing to celebrate the occasion. Nothing more.’
She stared at his face to be sure he was being truthful and she saw in his eyes the fear of losing her and of losing the night.
He said that he had been surprised by the bawdiness of it.
‘That’s all right, then,’ she said, going to his arms, relieved that her grievance had evaporated. ‘I will accept crassness from a court jester like Kelen,’ she managed to say, feeling that it sounded adult enough, while her behaviour now seemed less than adult, and then she added laughing, ‘but I will not accept crassness from a wooing lover.’
He took her back into his arms and they kissed, naked, standing in the room at the Hôtel des Bergues. Their skins felt so right against each other. She was aware he was wet and hard.
‘I’m a nervous pony,’ she said, ‘forgive me.’
‘I am wooing you,’ he said, ‘and I ask you to marry me.’
He’d said it.
Without hesitation, she said, ‘And I’m happy to be wooed, although — strictly speaking — shouldn’t wooing precede the proposal?’ Her voice was breathless.
‘I have wooed you for years, and I think you knew it.’
‘I think I knew that I would eventually know it.’
‘What is your reply?’
‘Yes is my reply. Yes, I will marry you.’
‘Thank you, dear Edith.’
They kissed and then returned to the bed and she closed with him freely and fully, again marvelling how patient the sensual mood of the evening had been with her antics, how readily forgiving, how eager it was to return from its temporary banishment, how eagerly it flowed over them and covered them with its heated urgings. She went into his arms and opened herself, freely and fully.
She had never felt a man so hard and so penetrating nor herself so wet and yielding. It was so rigid at its core, yet, in its fullness, so compliant and smooth to her flesh, the elasticity of solids, filling her tightly and then untightening her. The pleasure was mostly in the urgent ardour of their first physical enfolding and his deep penetration of her, more than any completeness of the act.
They rocked together for some time and then with regret she felt him withdraw from her at the peaking of his excitation and then experienced the corporeal excitement of his hot fluid throbbing out onto her belly and she smelled its earthy odour.
They lay in silence, glued by it, sealed together.
She used the sheet to wipe them both.
Then in whispers they returned to each other and to the room. They whispered that their relationship was ‘ratified’, and went on together to weave it into a joke. They talked intimately, close together, and warm in the bed.
He said: Within the limitations of my talents and my writing, I am committed to truthful explanation of the world. I am willing to respect your calling, your not tel
ling me things and I will not ask. If you will respect me seeking what I have to seek, the explanation of things.
She said: If I commit myself to you I commit myself to your career insofar as I am honestly able to aid it without injury to my own.
He said: And I to yours.
She said: And could you never be my full and perfect confidant?
He said: I would not want to take from you that which I could not apply to my work. I would happily be your confidant on all the matters of your soul but, perhaps, I cannot be your confidant in matters of state. If you wish, I can be your full and perfect confidant on matters of the heart and soul.
Yes, be the confidant of my heart and soul.
And you, mine.
She said then something that she had to say. ‘Will you take me regardless of what I have to reveal to you of myself?’ Yet knowing, as she asked, that no one could give that undertaking, and fearing that she would not have the courage to tell, that some of her had become untellable. But he said, ‘Yes, if you will accept me regardless of what I have to reveal.’ She thought fleetingly of Ambrose’s revelations but said, with faith, ‘Yes, I will accept you.’ And would he read her poems? He was happily surprised. ‘Yes, I will even read your poems.’
She asked him to prevent her becoming a zealot. He said that maybe it was a time when we might need to be zealots. She said, no, zealots could not negotiate, zealots could not see with clarity. He said, what if we have to deal with zealots? She said that a non-zealot could always defeat a zealot in the end. He said only if the non-zealot was well armed and cunning.
They said to each other that together they would think and write, make sense of the world together, make the peace together, and have adventures together.
They coupled again and this time she gained full pleasure. She realised how physical love with Ambrose had become in the last period when they’d been together much more a touching, an easing, sometimes a kindness, but not so much a releasing, and rarely with passion.
Before they finally slept, she began to tell him a story which she prayed she would remember and get right.
There is an Austrian story, she told him, about a blind beggar who was walking through the country led by a little boy. The blind beggar complained that he was thirsty. The little boy said, ‘Uncle, we are in the country. Perhaps I can get you a glass of milk.’
The blind beggar said, ‘Milk. I have never tasted milk and I am blind. I have never seen milk. What is it like?’
‘Milk is white.’
‘What is white?’
‘Uncle,’ said the little boy, ‘there is a goose over there in the field. The goose is white.’
‘What is a goose?’
‘A goose,’ said the little boy, ‘is a bird with a crooked neck.’
‘Oh,’ said the beggar, ‘but what is crooked?’
Then the little boy crooked his arm and said, ‘Uncle, take your hand and run it along my arm. That is crooked.’
The beggar ran his hand along the boy’s arm and said, ‘Now I understand. Now I know what milk is.’
She felt strongly compelled to tell the story to him. Since she’d heard it the story had returned to her from time to time, resonated with her. She told Robert how it charmed her with its twisted meaning. We desire to know, she said, we go much of the time in blindness, we use strange logics in our striving for assurance, we so readily accept any meaning which brings to us a coherence, an order to our mess of mind.
You told it well. It is a good parable. It sounded, he murmured, dropping towards sleep, much like the business of reporting the world. She felt his body twitching, and heard his night noises, as he drifted towards sleep, his mind leaving the waking world.
She did not sleep at once. She felt his warm fluid between her legs and realised that during the second time he hadn’t withdrawn. She was unperturbed. Their mutual, unspoken romantic delinquency enchanted her.
It was 1930 and she had a new lover, and, she was sure, was also in love, sleeping in the Hôtel des Bergues and now, maybe, even a woman of the world. But for all the pleasure of the romantic delinquency she knew they were not ready yet for that, she would grit her teeth and go to her Swiss doctor. She was helping to make the future of the world. She had not lost money on the stock exchange like so many others. Most of her stocks had been wiped out but she had made money from her Firestone shares. She had put her earnings from her mother’s money into the League International School. Since coming to Geneva, she had refashioned herself much to her own satisfaction. She smiled as she recalled Jeanne and she changing their handwriting, learning a new calligraphy, entirely different from that she had been taught at school. Jeanne believed that how you wrote not only had an impression on those who read it, but on you, the person who wrote that way. If you changed your handwriting you would change yourself. She had pointed out to Jeanne that if you set about to change your handwriting, you had already set about changing yourself and, therefore, could not be sure that it was the handwriting that was doing the changing. When she had first come to the League she had been decent and proficient, but somehow unadorned. She felt now more accomplished. Australia taught me civitas, but it would not give me the wherewithal to become accomplished. I had to find that and do that for myself.
If she were scared, it was because she was sometimes too aware of the million of unseen, unruly things going on about her in the world and within her, in the inner world, beyond her consciousness not only in the way the Freudians meant, but in another way — the unruly world which could not yet be confined to a statistical size. Sometimes her heart became aghast at the realisation of the million of unseen and unruly things yet, at other times, these unmeasured and disordered things caused her heart to beat with the exhilarated anticipation that these things could be harnessed to give a pattern of meaning and to serve order. Another realisation then stole into her mind. If Robert were no longer a correspondent, she could talk to him of the secrets of the League and her fears there: though if he were now a novelist he would be interested perhaps, not in the secrets of the League but in the secrets of her heart. Would he steal those secrets from her, as Ambrose had stolen League secrets? She lay there and appreciated, in a nervous way, the symmetry of her life.
She decided that she was not afraid of giving the secrets of her heart to Robert for his books, and those secrets would come to inform the spirit of the world.
In Robert’s arms, Edith began to weep from the fear of the million unseen and unruly things, over which she had no supervision. She wept also for the trembling chance that the world now had to become safe and just, and she for the trembling chance she had to love and be loved, and she entreated the million unseen and unruly things to help her become wise and brilliant and loved. Then she willed for Ambrose to find peace within himself and to be healed.
Robert came awake at her crying and said, ‘It’s all right, Edith, it is all right — we can be true to each other, and true to our callings — it can happen.’ He was partly right in thinking that was what was making her weep; she was crying about that too.
She would tell him in the morning about the million unruly and unseen things going on in mysterious ways, about which she was crying. She suspected that he already knew about these things and knew the feeling that they engendered, and maybe that he also knew ways of calming the beating of her heart and the discord and clatter of her mind, which at times felt like a thousand birds taking flight from a lake.
In the morning they would order a grand breakfast to their room and celebrate the start of their decade, and she would not be intimidated by the waiters of the Bergues. After the breakfast they would go down, not by the lift, but by the elegant wide stairs which she had liked the look of, and they would step out into the Saturday sunlight of Geneva in their evening clothes, without qualm, emboldened by love. It had been her farewell to Bohemia. The magnificent two-backed beast of passion was to become the magnificent two-headed animal of marriage. She would also be stepping from the h
otel into the nineteen-thirties. Her debut.
Tramcar terminus Palais des Nations
Edith had never in her life before needed to talk to a doctor about procreative matters. Although she’d studied science at university, as Robert had reminded her at least fifty times, she was still reluctant to interrogate and unveil her body. She supposed that despite all her study, what she desired from her body was grace and health, not physiological understanding. Preferably, this grace and health should be present without her having to do too much about it. In fact, not having to think too much about it was, to her mind, the essence of grace. It should be effortless grace — apart, that is, from hygiene and cosmetic care of the body. Fitness was another thing one shouldn’t have to worry about too much.
After the grand night of passion at the Bergues — her ‘farewell to Bohemia’, as she described it in a letter to Caroline — she was happily convinced that she would fall pregnant. Her body seemed to say to her that she had conceived. She’d even confirmed confidentially with Nancy Williams that she could keep her job if she had a child and married.
‘Depends which comes first,’ Williams had said with amusement.
Edith had laughed with a private pride, pleased that all this was happening to her.
Williams had said, ‘Just make sure they’re in the right order and you’ll have your position, and you’ll get special leave.’
But she hadn’t conceived. Her body hadn’t been bringing her news, although it may have been talking things over with her.
She was also inexplicably resistant to the notion of birth control. Robert’s withdrawing was not giving either of them the sentiment of intimacy. She wanted to feel his fluid inside her. She wanted them to bodily close together without impediment. However, in conversation with Robert, it was commonsensically agreed that she shouldn’t fall pregnant. So for this reason and to improve the pleasure of their physical love, she made an appointment with her Swiss doctor to get the question fixed up once and for all, and also, she reluctantly conceded, in the interests of scientific self-knowledge. She did not want to appear to be a blockhead about all of this.
Grand Days Page 54