Lewis had looked humble at this, and laughed lightly, but the next day he still offered to give her a lift, as if he had quite forgotten what she had said, and Trilby, because for some reason she could not quite yet name she felt guilty at always refusing to go with him for at least part of his journey, gave in and climbed into the car beside him, realising as she did so, her heart sinking with the knowledge that Lewis would never change. Very soon, it would not just be the occasional lift to and from the studio, or telephone calls from the office during her painting hours, but demands to meet him somewhere at lunchtime, or orders to return home quickly because he had invited sixteen people to dinner and he needed her to be there in good time.
But worse than the realisation that Lewis would never change was the acceptance of the fact that from the moment that she had met Piers, even sitting beside Lewis was torture. It was trying to keep her eyes from sparkling, trying to keep her body from tensing with excitement at the notion that she might be going to see Laura Montague’s nephew again, that made it so difficult for Trilby to sit beside her husband. Lewis was no fool. No man who employs hundreds of people can afford to be. He would, Trilby knew, notice the slightest change in her, particularly for the better. After all, and this was something they both knew, he wanted to be back in her bedroom. Any sign of returning health would be acted upon immediately.
The truth was that Piers was more than a shock to Trilby, more than a total surprise, he was a tidal sweep coming towards her, at a time when she could least do with it. She never wanted to even think that she was in love, ever again. She never wanted to be surprised by love again. Indeed in the last grim weeks she had imagined that she never, ever wanted to love again.
But that had changed the moment she met Piers. As soon as she shook his hand she knew at once that the emotions she felt were as unlike those she had felt for Lewis as was perfectly possible.
These new emotions were not a ladder down which she could thankfully escape from her father’s sad, accepting misery and her stepmother’s viperish ways. No, Piers, she realised to her astonishment, as he stood smiling diffidently down at her, was not a way out, but a ladder up to somewhere, up to some heaven that she had not yet enjoyed, to some paradise, some arcadia that she had never yet glimpsed.
Happily, since she was nevertheless determined to avoid what was happening to her, Trilby had Laura Montague and her portrait on which to concentrate. Unhappily, though, it was simply not possible to avoid the realisation that Piers too must be aware of the thunder clouds gathering, the lightning threatening, since rather than leave his aunt alone with Trilby in her studio he did not just accompany her of a morning, he stayed with them all day.
And he did not just stay to do nothing but read the newspaper and talk, he stayed to become part of their morning, going willingly to make coffee for them all, or to buy lunch. And he bought the kind of lunch that he did not just arrange on a plate, but cooked himself, telling her gaily that being a bachelor he had been forced to learn to cook as well as he liked to eat.
Meanwhile Aunt Laura, as the old so enjoy doing, sat and watched, and realising just what was unfolding around her she mentally smiled and shrugged her shoulders, because that is all an older person can do. They can smile, and watch, but there is nothing they can do about what is going on around them except perhaps sigh a little, and sometimes enjoy what is happening, while all the time hoping that the outcome will not be as cataclysmic as common sense suggests that it must be.
By the time the end of that first week arrived, London was just beginning to look a little tired, with too many pieces of paper flitting about the streets, and too many people walking too slowly and too aimlessly. Piers was due to leave for the country that morning, but having said farewell to his aunt in Trevor Square he did not head for Somerset, as Aunt Laura guessed he would not.
They both knew that he would drive straight to Trilby’s studio.
‘I am leaving for the country, but I had to see you before I left.’
Piers was still tall, and still tanned, but looking across at Trilby he felt quite the opposite. Worse than that, he felt as if he was not just pale and insignificant in every way, but perhaps actually ill. He felt trammelled by what to him now seemed like the endless mornings and afternoons of that week when he had stood where he was now standing and not said anything to her, just looked at her, longed for her, and yet said nothing. And now, when he was leaving, he had to say something, but the truth was that he did not know how, because the simple fact was that Trilby was a married woman. Trilby was forbidden ground, a person who had made a union that no man could put asunder.
Finally she made the running, saying quietly, ‘It’s all right, Piers, I do actually know why you are here!’
As soon as she finished speaking they were in each other’s arms, and they were making love as Trilby had never yet made love, so that she was nowhere near earth but transported to some other world, and neither of them said ‘We shouldn’t, we mustn’t’.
After all, they had held back for seven long days, and seven days for lovers is for ever.
Chapter Seven
‘What are we going to do?’
It was the eternal lovers’ question and it was Piers who asked it, as Trilby sat and stared at him out of large, panda eyes.
‘Nothing. We can’t do anything. I am married, and you, thank God, live in the country, in Somerset, far away from everything, most of all me.’
‘I can’t leave you, not now.’
‘You will have to,’ Trilby told him calmly. ‘You will have to leave me, you know very well you will. You’re a farmer, and I am married.’
‘I could stay another week. I can telephone to Harold, my cowman, he will hold the fort until I go back.’
Trilby shook her head and jumped to her feet and walked down the room, talking as she went. ‘Look, you have to understand, Piers. I am married to Lewis James. There is not a hope in hell that he will give me up. He is just not that kind of person. In fact he will kill me if he even suspects what I have just done, I promise you.’
‘That would be a bad thing to do,’ Piers said, flippantly, and then as Trilby looked hurt he added, ‘because it means that I would be in mourning for the rest of my life.’
‘Don’t fool yourself. I am not just any married woman, Piers. I am a very, very, very married woman. I am married to Lewis James. He can do anything. Not just because he is rich either, but because he owns – what does he call it – oh yes, he possesses the most powerful weapon on earth: newspapers. He chews up politicians for dinner, and lunch, and sometimes if he is bored for tea too. He is not a king, he is an emperor. I’m afraid we’re quite up a gum tree without a paddle!’
They both started to laugh at her ridiculously mixed metaphor, and as soon as they did they started to kiss and kissing led to more love, which was interrupted by the telephone ringing.
‘My God.’ Trilby stared at the telephone, instantly losing colour, as if the instrument was a person.
‘It’s him, isn’t it? It’s your husband?’ Piers said, lowering his voice for no reason that he could understand.
Trilby nodded silently, and then, clearing her throat several times, and switching on the wireless as she passed it, she went to the old-fashioned telephone and picked it up, humming artlessly to the music playing on the radio as she did so.
‘Hallo. Lewis. Darling. Sorry, yes, I’ll just turn down the wireless, if you could just hold on for a minute.’
Piers gazed silently at Trilby as she acted out her telephone call to Lewis, and when she replaced the receiver he stared at it for a few seconds after she had carefully put it back on its cradle. ‘I really hope that you never have cause to deceive me, Trilby,’ he murmured, and as Trilby turned and looked at him he went on, by way of explanation, ‘you’re far too good at it.’
Trilby nodded in agreement and sighed. It was true. She was good at deceiving people. It was living with Agnes. She had learned to lie at an early age, out of fear, an
d to get out of being punished, which was ridiculous because Agnes always punished her anyway. She had also learned not just to deceive but to act.
She had learned to act gratitude, and say, ‘No, of course not, I would love to go to the Victoria and Albert Museum,’ when she had already been that morning. She had learned to smile and say ‘That was delicious’ when it was quite the opposite, and to wear clothes that she loathed and pretend that they made her feel pretty when in fact they made her itch and feel frumpy. She had learned to behave as though she did not miss having a dog, that she thought the vicar’s sermon was brilliant, and to eat up pork fat which made her feel sick, because to do otherwise meant that Agnes punished her.
‘You must go,’ she told Piers. ‘Really. I know Lewis. He will suspect something, and soon. He suspects me anyway, I mean he always has. He has always been violently possessive, but now – well, now he really does have something to be suspicious about.’ She looked sombre. ‘I hate to think what he will do.’
‘Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic?’
‘No,’ Trilby said flatly, and the look in her eyes was so opaque as she said it that Piers found that he believed her. Despite the heat of the studio, the warmth of the day, and their lovemaking, he felt, of a sudden, lowered and sad.
‘You don’t know what he’s like.’
‘Tell me.’
Trilby shook her head. ‘I couldn’t, really, I couldn’t.’ Again she stared past him. ‘We must say goodbye.’
‘I can’t. I just can’t,’ Piers said simply, and clearly, because it was the truth.
‘You must.’ Trilby did not add any passion to those two words. It was not the moment to be passionate, and they both knew it. ‘And what is more you must go now.’
She reached up to kiss him briefly on the lips, realising at once that his lips were as cold as hers. They had both become chilled standing still, agonising in the darkening studio.
‘It’s not your fault, Piers. It’s my fault. I am sorry. I led you on. We should never have made love as we have done, but we have, and no more to be said about it.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘What else is there to say?’
‘Of course we should never have made love, but now that we have there is no going back, you know that. I know that.’
Trilby smiled. ‘Of course. But whoever knows it, either one or the other, must also know that you must go, and now. And I mean now.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Please. Lewis has a habit of suddenly coming back when you least expect him. And what with Mrs Montague not being here, and you being here, believe me, it will not be nice if he finds you alone with me. He has suspected me before, in the past.’
‘How do you mean, in the past? Have there been others, I mean besides me, other men, here, with you?’
Trilby shook her head, looking suddenly cross and impatient at the very idea. ‘No, no of course not. Now, please go. Please. You just don’t know what he’s like.’
‘When shall I see you again?’
‘I don’t know. Now please, just go.’
No matter how fast he drove the endless miles down to Somerset, those words of Trilby’s echoed around Piers’ head. You just don’t know what he’s like. They were ordinary, everyday grim words at the best of times, but when you had just fallen in love with someone they held a million implications, implications that made him wonder at just how courageous Trilby was being. Made him wonder, over and over again, what Lewis James was really like.
A little later, after Piers had driven off, Trilby drove herself back to the house in her Morris Minor. During the short journey, she concentrated hard on pretending to herself that none of what had just happened had actually occurred. She indoctrinated herself. She interrogated herself. She forced herself to believe her own lies.
She had not made love with someone not her husband. She had not deceived anyone. Piers was not her lover. He was just an occurrence. And what was more Piers was no longer part of her life, and would never now be so.
She had to make herself believe everything that she now told herself for many reasons, but most of all because she knew that if she did not, Lewis, attuned as he was to the slightest difference in her behaviour, would guess. Trilby thought she was brave, she imagined that she was brave, until she thought of what Lewis might do to her if he ever discovered that she had just committed adultery.
It was such a large word somehow. Adultery. It bit into the mind with all the unrelenting, narrow cruelty of the Inquisition. It had none of the soft, sly sensuousness of a word like ‘deception’ or the gaiety of a word such as ‘affair’, it was a stark, unforgiving word with dark implications. A woman taken in adultery was a slut, a betrayer, a thief of purity.
She told herself all this as she drove back to Lewis’s house with its great grand glass-canopied entrance. She told herself that she could, only an hour or two before, have been taken in adultery, that she had taken a risk beyond any imagining in allowing Piers to make love to her. A risk so great that it now seemed almost unbelievable.
As she drove slowly back to her marital home she reminded herself that she had just sinned against her marriage, against Lewis, against her upbringing, against everything that she should have held dear, if she had the remotest morality or loyalty to anyone or anything. But the real truth was that by the time she was parking the Morris in its mews garage behind the house, the repetition of these self-accusations had done no real good at all. Rather, they had served only to enhance her memories of the short period of joy she had just experienced, making it glow all the brighter, making what had passed between her and Lewis seem worse, and the secret that she nurtured about his past a thousand times more awful, and the very thought of his making love to her again a million times more degrading.
‘Your parents are coming to dinner tonight, remember?’
In the excitement of the past week Trilby had quite forgotten that she even had parents. And now that she was reminded they seemed strangely distant from her present predicament, nothing to do with her real life, something out of some previous fiction, like a story that she had once read and easily forgotten.
Indeed, since meeting Piers, if she had thought of her father and stepmother at all, it had been in the same way that she had thought of Lewis: as tall, remote figures that cast great shadows over where she had once stood through force of a whole set of circumstances that she could now only vaguely remember.
Once Piers had come into her life, stepping over the threshold into her studio, smiling, handsome, diffident, of a sudden it seemed to Trilby that she had stepped out from under the shadow of those great dark silhouettes, of father, stepmother and husband, into a paradise of warmth and sunshine.
‘Goodness, I had forgotten! Yes, of course, my parents are coming to dinner. How ridiculous to forget. Quite silly. Sorry, Lewis.’ Trilby turned on the second step of the great oak staircase and smiled absently down at Lewis. She was acting for all she was worth, acting vague, and also just a little strange, so that he would not follow her upstairs and try to make love to her, which every evening and every morning during the previous weeks she had dreaded that he might – but never more than this evening.
If Lewis followed her up the stairs and tried to make love to her he would be sure to guess that she had already enjoyed another man, if not at once, then soon, because she feared that she would be unable to conceal from him how repulsive she now found him, and from that inability might follow a confession.
Of a sudden she saw herself perhaps sobbing, perhaps white-faced and begging forgiveness, certainly, in the heat of the moment, unable to keep her deception from him.
The Woman Taken In Adultery. There must have been a thousand paintings on the subject, or at any rate hundreds, and yet as she smiled distantly back down at her husband Trilby could not remember one, certainly not one that accurately conveyed the dryness of tongue, the beating heart, the slight sweat to the palm that she was feeling at that moment.
‘Darling.
’
She could not have been acting vague and strange enough, because Lewis, she was horrified to see, not yet changed for dinner into his customary evening jacket, now came to the bottom step and held up his hand to her. He was looking, as he always did, tall, tanned, immaculate, and handsome, and yet Trilby could not have felt more repelled by him.
‘Yes, Lewis?’ She managed to smile down at him, acting out the affectionate if still slightly mad wife.
‘Trilby.’ He began again. ‘Darling, I wonder if I might come and see you now, you know?’
If Trilby could have sat down at that moment and put her head in her hands and sobbed with fear, she would have done.
‘It might be all right, Lewis. Yes.’
She saw hope in his eyes as he stepped closer to her, and she could hear him breathing a little faster, perhaps preparing himself for the excitement he imagined was about to be his, because after all, although he was much older than her, Lewis was fit and well.
‘Oh good, darling, I do so love to come and see you.’
Trilby had always wanted to tell Lewis that she hated the way that he always said ‘Can I come and see you?’ before making love, but never more than now. ‘Can I come and see you?’ was so arch somehow, and at the same time negative, reducing making love to the banality of a dull social visit, taking away every kind of spontaneity, pushing the kind of passionate encounter that she had just enjoyed into the realms of unreality. Suddenly it was as if she had never known Piers, never met him, because there was Lewis, still wanting to see her, and there was she still standing on the second step of his great, grand oak staircase, looking down at him, her husband, still his wife.
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