She’d knock on his door, her entire body humming with expectation. He opened it so quickly, he must surely have been standing next to it; his whole face lighting up as he wrapped his arms around her and said, “I missed you. I want to hear everything you’ve been doing and thinking since I last saw you.”
They would take long walks through London and have dinner afterward at a restaurant. Or Dorothy might buy cold meat and salad and they’d picnic in their room; alone in infinite time, full of a sense of their liberating difference in relation to a convention-bound world. She experienced a keen pure happiness that was surely absolution? They talked about everything and nothing, their conversation made luminous by a bottle of wine. Bertie said his imagination was in a fertile state, and new ideas were blooming in his mind. He felt he was developing a new creative life.
“You have an astonishing capacity for happiness,” he told her one evening.
“Well, if I do, it’s your fault. You make me astonishingly happy.”
“You make me happy, too. You keep me alive and vigorous and save me from stagnation.”
After dinner, she lay shyly beside him on the narrow single bed, wearing nothing but her underclothes, with her hair loose about her shoulders.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Nothing, really.”
“A shadow just crossed your features. All your thoughts show on your face, you know.”
He said the sight of her made him wish he could paint. At the very least, he’d like to record every detail of her in poetry. He compared the curves of her torso to the stem of a plant, or to a cresting wave in the ocean. In the whorls of her ears he saw shapes like seashells. Her hips, unclothed, had the rolling outlines of hills. He told her that her skin was the softest he’d known. She felt remodeled by him; no longer a misfit, large boned and awkward. To him she was a poem, as enchanting as any heroine in literature.
Under his gaze, her body felt different: alert, vibrant, eager; coming alive beneath his touch as if from a long sleep. She felt glorified by him, realizing for the first time that her body could be a source of pleasure to another person.
Still, she hadn’t given herself to him completely; she was stumbling at this final step. It was partly about betraying Jane, but also about her own fears. She was petrified of surrendering wholly to another person, especially someone as powerful and certain of everything as Bertie. She would be consumed by him. At times, lying in Bertie’s arms, she couldn’t tell where he ended and she began; her edges blurred into his. It was blissful, but terrifying.
She also knew that to bring an unwanted child into the world—with all the scandal that would ensue, not to mention the physical danger of childbirth—would be the end of her.
She and Benjamin hadn’t done more than hold hands and kiss. After some initial attempts at persuasion, he had accepted her reluctance to go further. But Bertie was less respectful of her hesitation. “It would be good for you to make love,” he said. He could drop from poetic heights to crassness with startling speed. “Few of us are mentally or physically healthy and whole without it.”
* * *
WHEN BERTIE WENT home to Jane, it was a relief in part. Dorothy needed time alone to absorb every word that had passed between them; every expression and gesture, and every caress.
She also needed to return to herself, a process of restoration that could only be achieved in solitude and silence. In Bertie’s company, she felt dislocated from a deep, essential layer of her personality. His need for constant stimulation and entertainment created pressure to provide answering signals. It shut off her inner life. She couldn’t simply be; she found herself in a loud confusion, acting a role. She suspected she would feel like this with any man, but the strain was undoubtedly magnified by Bertie’s force of personality, and by his desire to possess her completely.
After seeing him, she needed to spend time alone in her room. She lay on her bed in her old striped flannelette dressing gown, the dusty smell of the counterpane in her nostrils. She sometimes thought that this small room was the only place she truly belonged.
There was no sound inside the house; its substantial walls kept the boarders separate and sheltered. She could hear the familiar dull roar of traffic from Euston Road; the chiming of St. Pancras clock. Outside her window, sunlight gleamed along the leads sloping down to her parapet. The room was half in shadow, half in brilliant light. The battered chest of drawers and the tiny wardrobe in the corner stood in gloom. Streams of light fell through the long low window, settling in lakes on the warm grainy yellow wallpaper and the shabby carpet.
Hovering in empty space, she could feel her untouched inmost self unfurl and expand, free and strong, full of a marvelous quiet sense of life at firsthand. It was a blissful state for which she had no words; something that was always there waiting, if she could but reach it. It was anathema to all Bertie stood for. His mantra: work for progress rendered him oblivious to the reality that existed, all the time, in the deep silence at the heart of things.
Dorothy was beginning to realize that one’s inmost self was lost and not found through close relationships.
Whenever she was alone, she found herself traveling backward in time, toward the beginning of memory.
She was standing immobile in bright sunlight, on a narrow gravel pathway between two banks of massed sweet williams. She looked at the dense clusters of flowers, very large and permanent amongst the tapered leaves: hot pink and crimson-centered, or scarlet and white-centered. She didn’t know how old she was, but the blazing heads of the flowers were almost level with her face. She could feel the sun warming her hair. Everything was still and silent, except for a couple of large bees swaying heavily and drunkenly across the path in front of her, going from bank to bank. Their bodies seemed bulky and cumbersome; they hummed loudly as they went. A confusion of heady smells reached her from the flowers; deepest amongst them an odd but not unpleasant smell, pungent and spicy, like warmed cloves.
It was her first moment of intense awareness; seeing sublime things all around her. She had no memory of entering or leaving the garden; only flowers and bees in the sunlight … It was an unending summer’s day, in a garden she would never return to. She couldn’t remember the house, or any of the other details of the landscape. But what had lasted through the years was the sense of how extraordinary it was that anything at all existed; the continuing wonder of there being such a thing as life.
* * *
THERE WAS A letter from Bertie on the hall table. She ran to pick it up, cupping the envelope in both hands as she carried it up to her room, as though she was nursing a live creature that might escape.
She sat on her pillow to read it. Bertie’s writing was an exuberant scrawl, full of loops, dashes, and exclamation marks that looked as though they were about to fly off the page.
In some ways, a letter from him was even better than being with him because it could be savored at her own pace, yet she could feel his presence in the room with her while she read it, making things shine. It was like a sudden sharpening of all her senses, until everything reached a blinding pitch and she felt she must explode if it grew any more acute.
His letters were wonderful, terrible, searing. They were illustrated by sketches of two puppies, Dora and Little Bertie, in a basket or on a rug, in a variety of loving poses: eating, playing, cuddling, sleeping. Bertie called them his “picshuas.”
My darling girl,
I’ve only been home a few hours and I keep turning round to tell you things, but you’re not there! My love … what a shock it is! I feel empty without you, it’s as though part of myself has been cut away. I can’t get by without you because there is no one as loving, as sweet, as beautiful, as pillowy, and delectable as my Dora.
You are the woman of my life. I love you like I’ve never loved before; I surrender myself to you. I’m bored and cross when you aren’t with me … I want to be able to talk to you, to hear your voice, to know your innermost thoughts.
I wish more than anything on earth that you were next to me now. I want to kiss your toes; I want to kiss the softness of your belly. I’m greedy for your thighs and your stomach and the base of your throat. I don’t know how I’ll manage until I can get to London; I want to feel you in my arms again …
Write back to me as soon as you can. I’m lost without you.
Your very loving Bertie.
* * *
JANE INVITED DOROTHY to stay for the weekend, welcoming her at the door in her old cheery manner: “Hello, Dora dear. It’s such ages since we saw you, I hardly recognize you anymore.”
Dorothy had tried not to run from the station with her heavy bag. She realized that in the moments before knocking on their front door, she had forgotten to breathe. She was so short of air, it was hard to speak. She felt giddy, audacious, slightly disembodied.
Jane held her by both shoulders, examining her face carefully. “You’ve put on some flesh, and it suits you,” she said quietly. “I can’t see a trace of your old pallor and fatigue. You’re positively blooming.”
Dorothy’s grey hat suddenly felt hot on her head. Jane’s words were like an accusation. Her stomach was churning; she could hardly meet Jane’s gaze as she mumbled thank you. She was aware of the change in her looks. Her hair shone, her skin glowed, and her eyes sparkled. It made her feel odd, as though her new attractiveness was borrowed from someone else; she did not own it. It brought an attention she was unused to. People on the street stared—the women with curiosity and suspicion, the men with open approval.
Bertie was in the drawing room. There was a brief silence as his eyes met Dorothy’s, like a sharply indrawn breath. They said hello carefully, their eyes skidding away from each other.
“Come and sit down,” Jane said, piloting her to a chair by the window. “Let’s tuck in; you must be hungry after your journey. I baked a cake this morning, but there are sandwiches if you’d prefer.”
Dorothy looked at her with increasing unease. In London, Jane had seemed a great distance away. It was as though she’d receded or become two-dimensional; a figure viewed through a frosted screen. To see her in person, fresh and graceful and simply dressed, was almost shocking. To realize anew that she was real and substantial; that blood and feelings thrummed through her. She was capable of hurting Dorothy, and being hurt by her.
There was an expression behind Jane’s eyes that didn’t match her polished manner. She seemed to be acting the whole time; as though she feared if the chatter stopped even briefly, the ground would shudder and crack at their feet, catapulting them into an open abyss. Yet she behaved as she always had toward Dorothy. If she suspected that Dorothy was the cause of Bertie’s frequent absences from home, she was a consummate actress, giving no indication. She poured tea and passed it around. She cut sturdy wedges of Dundee cake and offered the plate to Dorothy. The familiarity of the afternoon tea ritual only heightened the surrounding awkwardness, as Jane kept up a steady stream of questions about her family and work.
Jane was wearing a pair of long tortoiseshell earrings that Dorothy hadn’t seen before. They accentuated the fairness of her soft mass of hair, and the slenderness of her neck.
“Those are frightfully pretty earrings,” Dorothy said.
Jane’s face lit up; she raised a hand to touch one of them. “Do you think so? I’m glad you like them; Bertie brought them in London for me.”
Jealous anger ripped through Dorothy, sour and corrosive. She looked at Bertie, but he was busily brushing a cake crumb from his knee and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
She sipped her tea and struggled to eat her cake, which clung stubbornly to the roof of her mouth. She was almost incapable of making the required bright small talk; it was too difficult to articulate the clever sayings that were part of an unspoken contract between the Wellses and their guests. She hadn’t seen Bertie for over a week, and she had missed him fiercely. It was bittersweet to be near him, but unable to touch him, or allow her feelings for him to show. Forced into constraint and polite distance, achingly conscious of being a disappointing guest, Dorothy watched him and Jane together. Bertie was alternately very kind and very irritable with Jane.
* * *
THERE WERE GUESTS for dinner: a retired colonel and his wife, who lived nearby. The table, set with Venetian glasses, fine silver and cutlery, and great bowls of pink and saffron azaleas, looked festive beneath a gently shaded light.
Dorothy listened to Bertie holding forth, much as he had on her first evening with the Wellses. That evening seemed a great distance away, as though it had happened to another person.
“I’m worried about the international situation,” he said. He was wearing a soft collared shirt, a blue-grey bow tie, and a flannel blazer of the same shade. Its color made his eyes intensely blue and bright. “I’m convinced we are closer than ever to conflict with Germany. What’s more, India is in a state of flux. It’s only a matter of time before something blows up there, with desperate consequences for our empire.” His eyes roved from person to person, capturing and holding theirs as he kept command of the conversation.
The colonel nodded gravely, sucking at his mustache. “The fact is, half the government are asleep.”
“Exactly! Snoring comfortably in their beds beside their pampered wives…”
Dorothy tried in vain to fasten her attention to the problems of the outside world. Her body felt like a weighted sack on the chair, too warm, jittery with desire. She shifted her weight, recoiling from the lamb cutlet on her plate. She wasn’t hungry for food.
She thought, I know what he looks like when he wakes up in the morning; I know the texture and smell of his skin and the firm muscles of his back, the touch of his lips on mine. She hoped none of her thoughts or feelings were visible to the others.
Glancing across the condemned dinner table, she met the watchful eyes of Jane.
Afterward, Dorothy found herself briefly alone with Bertie in the sitting room. The delicate scent of Jane’s bunches of flowers mingled with the pungent odor of the large wood fire burning in the hearth. It was heady, intoxicating.
Bertie took her in his arms at once. “God, I missed you,” he muttered into her hair. “You look absurdly pretty tonight. I shan’t sleep knowing you’re only down the passage. Shall I creep into your room when Jane’s asleep?”
He kissed her hard.
She pushed him away, glancing nervously at the door. “Don’t be stupid. We can’t, not under Jane’s nose.”
Bertie’s face was flushed; his eyes gleamed in the dimness. Dorothy wondered if she looked as heedlessly lascivious.
“Do you think she suspects anything?” she asked in a low voice.
He shook his head. “She’s given no sign of anything being wrong, but don’t withdraw from her, it would only hurt and confuse her. Go and find her in her study tomorrow, spend time with her.”
“I feel horribly uncomfortable. What would we talk about?”
He caught her hand, stroking her palm softly with his thumb. He was breathing rapidly. “What do women talk about when we’re not around? I’ve often wondered…”
* * *
AFTER BREAKFAST THE next morning, Dorothy knocked on the door of Jane’s study. Hearing no reply, she tentatively pushed it open. The room was empty.
It was a pretty, feminine space, decorated with softly tied bunches of flowers and a prodigious collection of cut and colored cut glass ornaments. Dorothy sat do
wn at her friend’s desk, taking in the large brass inkstand, the blotting pad and solid-looking brass clock. She picked up the red-handled fountain pen and set it down again. She ran her hands over a tidy pile of household accounts. So this was what it felt like to be in Jane’s shoes.
Her eye fell on the wastepaper basket, which held a single crumpled piece of paper. Overcome with curiosity, she fished it out, opening and smoothing it on the desk’s well-worn surface. It was closely written, in Jane’s small, neat hand.
She hesitated. What right had she to invade her friend’s inmost thoughts? What if Jane came in and found her? Jumpy and guilty, soaked through and sick with it, yet unable to stop herself, Dorothy began to read.
I feel tonight, so tired of playing wiv’ making the place comfy, and as if there was only one dear rest place in the world, and that were in the arms of you.
There is the only place I shall ever find in this world where one has sometimes peace from the silly wasteful muddle of one’s life. Think! I am thinking continually of the disappointing news of it. The high bright ambitions one begins with, the dismal concessions, the growth, like a clogging hard crust over one of home and furniture and a lot of clothes and books and gardens, a load dragging me down. If I set out to make a comfortable home for you to live in and do work in, I merely succeed in continuing a place where you are bored to death. I make love to you and have you as my friend to the exclusion of plenty of people who would be infinitely more satisfying to you. Well, dear, I don’t think I ought to send such a letter. It’s only a mood you know … I have been letting myself go in a foolish fashion. It’s alright you know, really, only I’ve had so much of my own society now, I am naturally sick of such a person as I am. How you can ever stand it.
Dorothy could not go on. She crunched the letter up in her hands, sickened by her own culpability. If she gave Bertie up right now, an entire lifetime of devoutness and self-control would not atone for the injury she had inflicted on her oldest friend. Beneath the buoyancy and competence, Jane carried a toxic weight of self-doubt and bitterness and secret pain. And whether she knew it or not, Dorothy was adding to her suffering. (And how could she not know, in the deepest fibers of her being?)
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