What sort of gift was this? ‘I am unsure what the occasion is. I’ve never given a gift for this sort of occasion. If it is an occasion.’ She put on her thinking face. ‘It is an occasion. But the occasion doesn’t have a name.’
It was, in part, a gift to mark the miraculous resurrection of their liaison. She couldn’t quite say that. It would sound too solemn.
‘Perhaps we can find a name for it—for this occasion,’ he said, holding the box, as yet still unopened.
She moved around the apartment. ‘Perhaps we could.’
How hard some gift-giving was. To choose the gift to show a communing of spirits was hard, especially when, as in this case, the gift could either be the most remarkably appropriate gift or the most devastatingly wrong gift—that is, when the gift was audacious.
Though, if you were sure of the correctness of the gift, it was not audacity.
The gift could be a test, to see if the receiver was the person the giver wanted that person to be. Or to say that the person was the sort of person the giver wanted them to be. Affirmation.
The audaciously intimate gift was probably though the most effective—or at least the fastest—way to see if the receiver was the Right Person. If the gift were badly wrong the receiver, at least, would know they were not the Right Person for the gift. Ultimately, a truth would have been hatched from the gift which would redirect the nature of the friendship. Despite all the dishonesty surrounding the reception of a gift.
Ambrose began to unwrap the box.
She watched with her fingers crossed.
And if the audaciously intimate gift was the best test, then this would be it.
Ambrose opened the ribbons from the box and took out from the tissue the yellow silk, lace-edged, full length, feminine nightdress.
He looked at her with a small smile, she might call it a pert smile.
She smiled back with a warm, special smile which said, ‘That you is welcomed back too.’
She knew instantly, from his face, that she’d chosen just the right gift for this occasion, whatever this occasion may be called.
‘You like it?’
‘Oh yes. Oh yes, dear Edith.’
He came over and they kissed.
‘Your scandalous, depraved self is welcomed back, too,’ she said. ‘That is what I meant.’
Despite all they’d been through in the old days and all that they knew about each other, it’d still taken a lot of boldness to buy the feminine nightdress for him, to hand it to him now.
And it welcomed back something of herself as well. That Edith was coming back again, as well.
He held it full length before him, covering his dark blue lounge suit, looking down at it.
‘Try it on!’ she said, softly, urgingly. ‘Go on.’ She got the words out sounding just right, just saucy enough, just cheeky enough, just poised enough.
The words did not show any of the small remaining qualms.
It occurred to her as she watched him that perhaps he was so adept at the false response to an inappropriate gift that she was misreading him. If she’d indiscreetly misjudged him, their relationship may be forever, irrevocably embarrassed.
If he did not wish to try it on now, it would be a sign that the gift was wrong.
But Ambrose left the living room and made his way to her dressing room. By leaning back from where she sat, she could see him. He removed his jacket, tie, shirt, and then his shoes. He took off his trousers, looking around for a place to hang them, then folding them over the back of the chair. He stood there then for a moment in his socks and garters, and in his silk men’s underpants and vest.
Perusing Ambrose, as he stood momentarily there in his undergarments, she thought how starkly this sartorial underpinning rendered the male animal.
When growing up, she’d sneaked glimpses of her father and her brother dressed such as this—in this framework of Man. Somehow, it did more starkly render Man than did the naked man. The man in his undergarments was man caught between the state of animal nakedness and the presentation of that animal nakedness as the public man, before the full sartorial facade was in place. This intermediate state reminded her of drawings of man’s evolution from the ape.
This drawing of man in his undergarments should come after the drawing of man in the loincloth, holding the club. How so farcical and unready Man looked in this underpinning of garments. Probably because it was not ever meant to be seen. Yet how severe and unknowable the fully dressed Man of the next stage looked, in his silk top hat and awards and medals.
Yet it was from this underpinning, these undergarments, she mused, that a man must sense himself throughout the day, the underpants and vest and garter and socks were next to the skin, and that must be how the man felt to himself as he moved about his public life. Certainly reminded him at the beginning of every day as he put these garments on. How those fabrics and the pressures of those garments on those parts of his body must subconsciously inform the man of his primitive manness and all that went with it.
Her gift today was then an invitation, too—an invitation to Ambrose to leave that state of being man, and to go to his other self.
Ambrose turned his head and caught her watching him. He looked down at himself still in the men’s undergarments and pulled a face of displeasure.
She smiled and waved her hand which said, Get rid of it—away with it all.
She kept her fingers crossed behind her back.
He smiled at her and removed the socks and garters, the underpants and vest, and stood there, animal naked, naturally hairless.
He quickly slipped into the nightdress. Its silk fell well on his slim body, down to his ankles. The round silk straps graced his smooth shoulders. He turned in the nightdress, looking behind to see it on his body from the back, he wrapped it to his body, looking to the full-length mirror, absorbed for the moment with pleasure at the sight of himself.
And as she saw him admiring himself in the mirror she thought, oh yes, she had not misjudged.
He was still as she remembered him.
And for all its deviance, he was the way she would wish him to be with her.
She clapped. ‘Perfect—exquisite.’
He came back to her from the dressing room, parading his slim, silk-clad body with seductive grace, twirling in front of her, and then holding up the nightdress from his knees, he sat beside her, tucking the nightdress and his legs under him.
He put his arms around her neck and kissed her, a kiss of lips, a kiss of passion. She felt his tears on her cheek. ‘Thank you, Edith, for the mercy.’
‘Mercy?’ The word did not belong in their old jaunty ways.
They weren’t yet finely tuned to their old jaunty ways.
‘Saying such a fine hello to what I am.’ His voice broke a little. He quickly pulled himself back from this earnestness, back towards flippancy, as he added, ‘Rather, I should say, thank you for your rather sultry taste in silk nightdresses—expensively sultry, silk nightdresses from Milan.’
She placed her hand on his mouth. ‘You shameless hussy.’
‘I am a hussy, I truly am,’ he said, lightly, with a saucy laugh.
And his shamelessness, and his being a hussy, and his deep acceptance of the gift, unshackled her, there and then.
Unshackled her from ever being abashed by her own life or from ever being embarrassed by their friendship and its irregularities. Something was unshackled which had been missing from her conversation and her thought and her sense of self during those years he’d been gone.
She’d yearned to be shameless again.
And now was.
And she was as pleased as punch.
Both of them were now together in each other’s arms, perfect and exquisite and comfortable.
‘How did you become so?’ he asked her. He was again pensive, but lightly and affectionately so. His voice was close to having the old right ring to it.
‘You made me so,’ she said.
‘In there …’
He placed the palm of his hand on her breasts, and she shivered, aroused by his touch. ‘There was always a person who could consent to all the strangeness of my life. And more. Could do so with joy. I simply came along and said hello to that person inside you. To the hussy inside you.’
Had such a person existed in her? She rested her head on his silken breast. Or had he groomed her to be such a person, to serve him?
Whatever—of one thing she was sure as she came to rest there, there on his silken breast—this was where her head yearned to be.
Oh, yes.
She could come to rest on a man such as this, whatever it might mean about her womanhood—so be it. It was here with this sort of man that she came to rest. It was a verity. Tears came to her eyes and she looked up at him. ‘My darling, it’s here that I come to rest.’ She looked up at him. ‘In the arms of a hussy.’
In the saying of the last part, she found their voice, the frolicsome, larky, lusty voice—the voice of their old relationship.
That voice was beginning to be heard now.
She saw now that the gift of the nightdress had also been a query about their quintessence. And her quintessence.
In the old days, she’d made their ambiguity the answer. Back then, she’d hidden inside that ambiguity. That is, she’d always told herself that Ambrose, by being something other than elementary man, had allowed her a halfway staging place, a place where she could appear to have a man in her life, a place from which she would eventually pass.
Not a place towards which she had been headed.
At the time, it had looked genuinely like that. One needed to document selected minutes of one’s life so that it would be possible to look back and be reassured that one had not been as dishonest, or had not acted as badly as the memory sometimes unfairly suggested.
Now, it seemed it was not a stage at all but was, in fact, the place where she wished to go—if not wished exactly, then where she’d again found herself and beyond which she might not ever wish to go.
Or did she want to linger, still, in that ambiguity, to idle a while—a lifetime perhaps?—in an indistinct, borderline way of life, rather than in resolution?
And was resolution within the command of her will? Anyone’s command?
The nightdress was also a Question. It was not just a Gift of Resurrection, the resurrection, that is, of their bond, it was an Interrogatory Gift—with the interrogation going both ways out from the gift: towards Ambrose and towards herself, and, if the answers to the questions were appropriate and coincided, as it seemed they had, it became then a Gift of Affirmation.
That they were together in each other’s arms and that she was tranquil and that he was tranquil, and that she liked the look and the feel of him this way, there in the silk, lace-edged nightdress, that was one answer.
She suspected there were more answers. She was tumbling into the arms of the cosy answers.
‘Don’t,’ said Ambrose, placing his warm soft palm on her frowning forehead. ‘Cease.’
She smiled a perplexed smile at him. She knew he saw something of what was going through her head. ‘How can I not?’
‘You can entertain some ideas without thrashing yourself with them,’ he said. ‘Some ideas are to be royally entertained: some have to be shown the door.’
‘Shouldn’t we talk? Shouldn’t we have … an understanding?’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what happens in these modern times?’
He didn’t reply.
She said, ‘I do know what we do need—we do need a drink.’
She wasn’t quite into the cosy arms of all the answers yet.
Ambrose rose and went over to the butler’s table. ‘Scotch?’ She nodded.
‘Soda?’
‘A flick.’
He poured them both a drink. His taking charge of the drinks like that in her apartment was, she noted curiously, also part of an answer.
He said, ‘I see that your taste in Scotch is still as good as your taste in silk nightdresses from Milan.’
‘I learned both from you, darling.’
Actually, she’d learned Scotch from her father and John Latham.
Oh dear. What would these two Proper Men think of her now, here in her living room with a nancyboy? She rushed the images of their quizzical faces from her consciousness.
He came back and handed her the Scotch.
‘You know …’ she said, ‘I’ve spent more of my life in your company than in that of any other person.’
‘You were always good at a certain “statistical reality”, Edith.’
‘As you, dear, were always rather good at a certain “fantastical reality”.’
Before Ambrose could be seated, she drank down the Scotch and sighed, waiting for it to seep through her body and mind. She held out the empty glass to Ambrose who went back to the butler’s table and poured her another.
She wanted the drink to heighten and celebrate the moment, to hold it securely in place.
‘Is Robert coming back, do you think?’ he asked.
Were they now fashioning an ‘arrangement’?
She sang. ‘Husband Robert to the war has gone, his faithful harp beside him.’
‘And his Harpy left behind him?’
‘I have never, ever been a harpy. And to quote an Australian poem, “Robert’s gone a drovin’, and we don’t know where he are.” Oddly, knowing I’m still here allows him to be solo. Something like that. To be partly a bachelor-journalist again. With his newspaper men mates in dusty, distant places and in exotic belly-dancing clubs.’
‘What does it allow to you?’ Ambrose asked.
Ah.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that Robert will go from one war to another, if there is another war, or one horror spot to another—plagues, earthquakes and coups d’etat are what he lives on. He’ll visit home now and then. For clean underwear. Something like that. Once a year? Twice a year?’
Visit home?
Ambrose said, ‘What a curious man he turned out to be. Not the marrying kind, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps neither he nor I was.’
‘To repeat: what then does it mean to you, Edith?’
Yes, that was a question.
Sipping her drink, she thought.
He waited.
She replied, ‘Latitude.’
She saw that he liked the precision of her answer. She liked it as well.
‘Which is not independence?’ he said.
She again thought.
She replied, ‘No.’
She thought some more and said, ‘Latitude is not an open door to chance.’
Her answer pleased her immensely. But to her profound irritation, her clever reply curled itself, in her mind, into a question, ‘Latitude: not an open door to chance?’
Her wretched mind had added a question mark.
‘Latitude may be an open door to permutation,’ Ambrose said. ‘I look around the apartment and I see much of you. I see a little of Robert.’
‘Robert never did really touch the walls. He doesn’t alter the space he’s in. He left all that to me, the interior arrangements, the pictures, the ornaments. And what there was of him has been removed. His army photograph—his company of the Lancastershire Fusiliers. I didn’t mean for it to sound like that. No sneer meant to the Lancastershire Fusiliers. Sorry, Lancastershire Fusiliers. He still seemed to leave … deposits. As cats and foxes do. Squirtings in the corners.’
‘It was his lair, too.’
‘It was his lair, too. Robert is in that room.’ She pointed at the door to his room with her drink. ‘In what we called back home “the spare room”.’
‘Spare room?’
‘To be precise, it is now the room where either the past is stored, or the present is in abeyance. Or possibly, where the past is awaiting collection and—removal.’
She saw that she was tampering ever so slightly with her answers to make them accommodating to Ambrose while trying to present no false promises.
�
��I see you still have that wretched Kelen cartoon on the wall.’
She looked at the framed cartoon having not ‘seen’ it for some time.
It was done by the cartoonist Kelen, and given to her and to Robert on the day they had first seriously flirted in public and had later become intimate.
It showed them both standing before a double bed saying, ‘No, after you’. It was a take-off of another well-known cartoon.
She got up and went over and removed it. She opened the door of Robert’s room, and placed the framed cartoon inside, and closed the door.
Ambrose made no remark.
She came back and sat with him again, and said, ‘Do you know what I think, my dear Ambrose?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think, that you should have the second bedroom. It needs some furniture. But has a westerly aspect. I seem to recall you prefer not to rise with the sun.’
‘Have always been somewhat out of step with the sun.’
He pointed at the door of the second bedroom questioningly. ‘That’s the room?’
‘Yes.’
He stood and lightly walked across to the door of the second bedroom, opened it and looked in. ‘In the old days, you came to my apartment. Now I come to yours,’ he called to her.
‘It appears that way.’
He went into the room and then came out. He draped himself against the wall, gracefully, one bare foot on the wall, drink in hand, leaning back, his privates showing alluringly through the silk. She felt her body enliven at the sight. ‘The room’s fine. But what pray tell is that strange chaise longue.’
‘The Woodrow Wilson chair? It can be changed to fourteen different positions. Mechanically.’
‘Oh. It might have to go,’ he said. He looked at her. ‘Am I then to have the status of parlour-boarder?’
‘More than that, perhaps. More like—two gals sharing an apartment.’
‘Do these two gals share a bed on cold and comfortless nights?’
‘These two gals share a bed whenever they wish.’
‘And when the Husband returns from the Wars?’
She found something of an answer. ‘Maybe there’s room for three. One as the guest.’
‘Which the guest?’
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