“Wait,” he said, catching her hand and kissing her fingers. He climbed off her and went to the desk.
Crossing the study, Conny saw all at once how thin he was. Frail. His shoulder blades protruded, and she could count each vertebra. His skin gleamed like molten wax.
“I want to give you something,” he said, sitting down in her uncle’s high-backed chair. He searched the drawers till he found paper, then took Professor Carlisle’s ivory pen. He ran his fingers through his hair, closed his eyes for a moment, then began writing. “Something more than my exhaustion, anyway.”
Conny pushed herself up a bit and watched him. William Heath had written a novel, which he had sent off to a publisher, and he had shown her some of his poetry, published in The English Review. He was self-conscious about it, though, as if writing was the wrong thing for him or that he was inadequate to the challenge.
It amazed her, after a time, how natural became the sight of him naked behind the huge oaken desk, intently scribbling away—absurd and comic, yes, scandalous, and a little frightening, absolutely. But while he wrote, Conny imagined herself like this every night watching him as an after-play of their lovemaking.
“I love you, William.”
He hesitated just before he looked up. “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
He seemed to think about it. “Good,” he nodded, “Good” and continued writing.
Conny slid a hand between her thighs, toyed with her hair, then pressed her fingers into the moistness. The pressure began rising again. It was like a child’s fear of doing something forbidden and expecting to be caught: a nagging fascination, a warning impossible to heed. She moved on the divan, leather tugging at her, the air cool across her skin. The sound of the pen scritching across the paper, his breathing, the sensation of her own lungs filling and emptying, all seemed enveloped in the stillness outside the room, as if they had separated from existence and were drifting in a non-place, without time. If I open the door, there will be nothing—
The experience came like panic. Conny closed her eyes and held her breath against an almost excruciating urge to escape. Her muscles tightened in preparation, ready to send her running. She did not move, held in place by an intense curiosity to know what came next. And next. And next. Pressure built intolerable to endure or ignore. Her legs stretched out. Her back arched of its own will. Then her folded in on itself, spent and wet. When she opened her eyes, he was squatting before her, a few sheets of paper in his hand. Everything is changed. She touched his knee. He offered the pages.
“I love you,” he said.
June, 1920
He jerked his finger away and Conny laughed, grabbing for it. “Come on, ninny! It won’t hurt!”
“It’s macabre,” he objected, waving at the bottle of ink and candle on the floor of her room and the needle in her hand. “Your uncle is already furious about this.”
“What does that have to do with anything? Uncle Francis would be furious with anyone taking his favorite niece from him.”
“And you want to compound it with this superstitious nonsense?”
“I don’t intend to tell him, William.” She snatched at his hand again and caught his wrist. He tugged, but she held it firmly. “What am I going to say? ‘Oh, Uncle, I know you’re displeased that I’m marrying a writer, but it’s all right. We’re signing the certificate with our blood, so everything will work out.’”
“I think it’s silly.”
“As silly as the wedding itself?”
“Well—”
“Come on, open your fist. This will only take a second. Didn’t you ever do this with your friends when you were a boy? Blood brothers and all?”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t have any friends.”
She squeezed his wrist. “Open.”
His hand unfolded, and she shifted her grip to hold his index finger stiffly. She waved the needle through the candle flame again, then jabbed into his fingertip in the center of the faint whorls. He almost pulled free, but Conny held on. Blood beaded, and she brought the finger over the open inkwell. She pressed both sides of the wound to bring more blood and let it drip into the ink.
“Not so much!” he complained.
Conny dabbed his finger with a ball of cotton soaked in gin and released him. “Ninny,” she said playfully, a smile in her voice, then stabbed her own finger and added her blood to the bottle. She sucked at the tiny puncture while she took a piece of straw she had plucked from a broom and stirred the mixture.
“I don’t see what this is supposed to accomplish,” William said.
Conny capped the bottle. “What do you mean you didn’t have any friends?”
He looked at her with the sour expression he gave to unpleasant topics: a reproachful look that embarrassed her that she had even asked the question.
“I was never strong,” he said. “And people mistook my asthma for tuberculosis. I seldom got to play with others.”
Conny thought, I could have figured that out for myself. She said, “So who is this Geoffrey you’ve asked to be your best man?”
His expression relaxed. “College. We roomed together for one term.” His voice sounded instantly lighter.
“What’s he like?”
“Different than me. You’ll see. I think you’ll like him.”
April 1921
Conny entered the small chapel on her uncle’s arm. A few of her friends smiled at her over the backs of the dark pews. They, and a couple of Uncle Francis’ colleagues, comprised the entire guest list. William had no family, and, evidently, no friends. Conny’s cousin Janet waited, diminutive bouquet in hand, opposite William and the man beside him, Geoffrey.
He had arrived that morning and this was Conny’s first look at him. As she drew nearer, she stared, shocked. A deep reddish-purple scar trailed across the left side of his face from the bridge of his obviously-broken nose to the hinge of his heavy jaw. William was taller, but Geoffrey possessed a robustness that more than compensated.
She jerked her attention back to William just before she reached her place.
The parson cleared his throat and proceeded through the ceremony. He ended by having them sign their certificate. The parson held out his pen. William hesitated, then pulled a pen from his pocket—the ivory one Conny had talked her uncle out of—and signed. He handed the pen to Conny. She scrawled her signature and returned the pen to William, who tucked it in his jacket pocket. Conny’s cousin took the parson’s pen and signed in one of the spaces for witness. Geoffrey bent over the parchment.
“Ah!” he shook the pen, tried again, then dropped it, empty. “Pardon me,” he said and snatched the ivory pen from William’s pocket. Deftly, he uncapped it and signed on the second line for witness.
Conny felt a brief, giddy vertigo. She blinked at Geoffrey, who frowned for a moment, then gave the pen to William. William looked around as if startled, then laughed.
“That’s it, then,” he said.
They followed the parson to the parlor, where his housekeeper set out scones and punch.
“I’m sorry for arriving so late,” Geoffrey said. “No excuse. I just lost track of time.”
“Geoffrey almost ended up expelled for tardiness,” William said with a wry grin. “Never could keep an eye on the clock.”
“Don’t like them much,” Geoffrey admitted.
“Still, you made it,” Conny said. “I’m glad you did. I haven’t met any of William’s friends.”
“He doesn’t have any but me.” Geoffrey frowned in the silence. “Now he’s got you,” he added softly. He ducked his head. “Excuse me.”
Conny watched him move away. He managed with a kind of artless grace to pass by people at the exact moment they were turned away from him.
“What does he do?” she asked.
“Lately? I don’t know. He’s been a miner. Worked on the docks in Liverpool. Barge hand on the Thames.”
“I meant his profession.”
“He doesn’t
have one, really. He could never decide.”
“How did he get his injury?”
“Um—a misunderstanding.”
William said no more. Geoffrey had disappeared. She did not see him again until she climbed into the taxi her uncle had rented them. Then he was there, leaning in through the window.
“Luck,” he said, clasping William’s hand. He looked at Conny. “I’m pleased he found you.”
Conny moved quickly and kissed Geoffrey, first on the scar, then on the mouth. He looked startled. Then his face relaxed into a grin.
May, 1922
Conny watched morning sunlight dapple the walls and furniture, filtered through the thin curtains that shifted across the windows, and thought how it even seemed to get into her dreams, the same color and lucidity. She sat up.
The other half of the bed was neat, unslept in. Conny stared around her and wondered who had woken her. Who was touching me? Her nerves rippled pleasantly. She bent over herself, hands between her thighs, and tried to remember what she had dreamed. Men and women with no faces, standing around her, hands outstretched, moving—Gone. She pushed the damp sheets back.
She found William in the next room, the dining room-turned-study. Books piled everywhere. He sat at the long table, still dressed from the night before, jacket draped over the back of his chair. He rubbed his forehead absently, staring at the pages spread before him, the ivory pen in his hand. Conny hesitated. Since his last bout of illness he wrote seldom, little besides reviews of other people’s books and the letters he drafted for her almost every night. Judging from the pages stacked by his elbow and the sensations she woke from, he must have been writing those letters all night.
He looked up. “Oh. Good morning.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
He shook his head.
“What are you writing?”
“Dreck, by the look of it. I thought I’d solved a problem with the new novel, but—” He tossed the pen atop the sheets.
Novel? “Then maybe I should let you work. I thought I’d go out. Do you want me to bring you anything back?”
“No.” He flashed a smile, then picked up his pen again.
Conny dressed, grabbed her bag, and hurried out of the apartment.
The streets of Newport, this near the waterfront, were relatively empty in the mornings. Everyone was either down at the docks or farther in. This thin slice of shops and cafes remained quiet till nearly noon. Conny was grateful for the solitude. She strode along the narrow avenues that twisted through the district until the sensations pulling at her ebbed. When they seemed at a safe distance, she stopped in a small café and ordered coffee.
It’s never happened with anything but the letters before—
They joked about the letters, pretending that their influence was purely suggestive—what was that delicious word from the psychoanalysts?—psychosomatic. Conny’s reactions came from her own imagination while he wrote. He did them after lovemaking, or had, until illness stole his energy and all he could do was write about making love. He had missed several days during the worst of it. Afterward, when he wrote, scribbling earnestly to her with the ivory pen, she responded. Perhaps it was imagination, as he said. Perhaps he even believed it. She no longer did. Especially not now. She was disinclined to question it too closely—sometimes it seemed like the only thing they had together.
The waiter brought her coffee. She looked down the cobbled street, her attention caught by workmen walking along, heads bowed, caps pulled low on their foreheads. As Conny watched them go by, one of them looked her way. A heavy line staggered over half his face.
Conny stood abruptly. Coffee sloshed onto the table. She fished two-pence out of her bag, dropped it, and hurried after the workmen. When she got to the corner they were gone. She continued down the canyon-like avenue, but she saw no one.
Most of the shops were still closed. Conny framed her eyes to peer through the dusty windows. Through one she noticed, among the assorted bric-a-brac, an attractive oak chest with brass trim. When she looked up she saw the shopkeeper, smiling at her. She pointed to the box and he nodded, motioning her to the door.
A musty, decayed odor escaped the box when she opened it. Shreds of felt still clung to the inside. “How much?”
“Oh—two pounds.”
She surprised him by not haggling. Instead she counted out the notes and laid them in his hand. She lifted the chest. It was only a little larger than what comfortably fit in her arms.
When she stepped from the shop, Geoffrey was standing there, hands tucked in his pockets.
“I thought I saw you,” she said.
He touched two fingers to the bill of his cap, then came forward and took the chest from her. He tucked it under one arm.
“I’ll carry this home for you,” he said.
They stopped in another café, not far from the apartment.
“After he recovered he wanted to leave London,” she said. “I suppose he blamed it for making him sick.”
“Hmm. Well, that’s as good a reason as any, I suppose.”
“It hasn’t helped much.”
“He still isn’t selling? How are you getting by?”
“He writes reviews. My uncle sends money. We have friends—I have friends. One or two seem to find it romantic to help an aspiring writer. William almost never goes out.”
“He never was one for socializing.” He nodded at the chest. “What are you going to use that for?”
“Oh—memories.”
Geoffrey smiled. It eased the severity of his scar.
“William said you got that because of a misunderstanding.”
“Did he now? Interesting way of putting it.”
“Was he wrong?”
“To tell you? No, I suppose not.”
“No, I mean—”
“Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.”
Conny drank her coffee to cover her disappointment. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve got a job working dockside.” He lifted his cup to his mouth. His hands were wide and heavy. Conny imagined them holding and lifting, easily, as though born to it. She imagined them palms out, calloused, flat against her face, her breasts, her thighs—
“I really ought to get back,” she said, looking away.
Without a word he picked up the chest and followed her.
“Would you like to come up?” she asked when they arrived home. “I’m sure Will—”
“No. I have to get to work.” He handed the chest to her, touched his cap and walked off.
William was asleep on the sofa. Conny carried the chest into the bedroom. She took the letters from the suitcase where she kept them and transferred the pages into the box. Two stacks fit side by side as if the container had been made for them.
She locked the chest and slid it under the bed. Listening to William’s labored breathing from the next room, Conny sat by the window, chewing on a thumbnail, thinking about Geoffrey’s hands.
July, 1926
“Don’t you want to come?”
William looked up from the desk and shook his head. “I need to work.”
In the two hours since he had sat down he had done nothing but stare at an empty sheet of paper, one finger rubbing along the hairline at his temple. Conny felt the stir of unease. She had not told William about the party invitation from Brian, the man who owned this house and the car they—she—had been using for weeks now. William knew only that they were invited to a party.
“Then I’ll stay,” she said, half hoping he would say “Yes, please stay,” half afraid that he would.
“Don’t. You want to go. There’s no point in both of us suffering through this.”
Despite his open shirt and the cool breeze coming off the Channel, his skin glowed with a fine sheen of sweat. He slouched in his chair. A typewriter—a gift from Brian’s wife, who was in Paris this month—sat before him like a model of some improbable temple. Beside it lay sheets of handwri
tten manuscript, the ivory pen on top of them.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded.
“It could be a late evening.”
He shrugged and picked up the pen.
She kissed him quickly on the head, hurried downstairs and out to the car. She had not thought too directly about tonight’s party. Brian had given her directions to a house down the coast road east of Brighton and had somehow made it clear that while certainly William was invited, he would prefer her to come by herself.
Her body told her the moment William touched nib to paper. The villa was two miles away. Halfway there she considered pulling over, but she kept driving.
A mass of cars filled the grounds in front of the house. She could hear the jazz band even before she turned off the engine. She sat in the car for several minutes, pressed against the door, waiting for the rush of passion to pass, imagining the sound of his pen, the faint susurrus of William’s breath. Tonight’s work, she decided, would be very good and as unsalable as the rest. He wrote it all for her anyway—he said so, but he did not mean it the way it really was. Conny leaned her head back and closed her eyes, bringing the tension between her legs into completion. If anyone walked by they would hear her small sounds and politely veer off to leave the lovers alone. But, she wondered, if they did not go away, if instead they indulged a voyeuristic impulse and came to see, they would find her alone, lying on her side, legs parted, face bright with pleasure.
Just me and his work—
She never asked if he received anything from the connection. They never talked about it anymore; he seemed antagonistic toward the subject. They coupled so seldom that it always surprised her when he pressed against her and explored. She made it as convenient as possible for him, opened herself, shifted at the slightest hint of where he wanted to touch her. She had learned all his wordless signals and more often than not paid no attention to her own pleasure. Afterward, every time, he went to his desk, naked, and wrote another letter for her. Some of them covered less than half a sheet; others went on for three or four. She woke in the mornings to find them beside her on the bed, William asleep in the next room, captive to his exhaustion. The letters went directly into the chest.
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