Men are never more foolish or absurd than when they “make a pass.” Women especially mock them, though these same women would be mortified if no pass were made at them. I felt this absurdity keenly, and I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off, if Jo hadn’t helped me. She prepared the ground for me, so to speak, so that when Marian and I finally met Marian knew that I was interested in her. We met in the lounge of the old coaching inn in the town. The idea, which was Jo’s, was that she and Marian should be having coffee or tea on a Saturday afternoon, and I, coming into the town from the cottage, should happen upon them. It was simplicity itself, as Jo said, but it was easier for the women than for me. I was more than embarrassed. I could hardly bear to look at Marian.
Jo left. Marian stayed to have a lukewarm drink in the dark, low, almost empty bar. I presented my case. In fact, the legal analogy helped me to do so. Everything about her enchanted me, her narrowness above the waist, her voice, her accent, her language, her aloofness. Whenever I felt my courage failing I thought of her black, coarse elasticated pants slipping low when she got out of the Volvo station wagon. I thought it was important not to let things drag on for another week. I would lose momentum, perhaps lose courage altogether, and she might change her mind. She agreed to stay for dinner; in fact, she seemed to think that that had been already agreed. Jo had done her work well. Better than I had done mine. I had made no arrangements. For a minute or so I thought I might take her to the cottage, but I knew that would have been calamitous: my father, though decayed, had a strange canniness still. So dinner was only dinner. There was no working towards anything else afterwards. So you could say that Marian and I had a kind of courtship. We had the house wine; she loved that. We arranged to meet for lunch the next day. I felt I could shower Jo with treasure for all she had done for me.
I booked a room at the inn for the next day. I had an anxious night, and a desperate morning. I have searched myself to see whether I had ever spent such an anxious time, so full of yearning, so full of self-distrust, and I don’t think I have. I felt that everything depended on seducing this woman, taking her to bed. In other crises one has more or less an idea of what one is worth and what work one has done and where things might be going. But in this business of seduction I had no experience. It was the completest gamble. Everything depended on the other person. Later, when I got to know more about the ways of Marian and her friends, this anxiety of mine appeared extraordinarily foolish and pathetic. But, as I have said before, even if I had known about those ways it would not have helped.
The long night ended. The lunch came. We went afterwards to the booked room with the strange dark and musty furniture. How terrible now to embrace a stranger, just like that. Marian seemed very slightly to repel me, and I was relieved. We undressed. I undressed as though I was at the doctor’s, being examined for a rash. Jacket on a chair; then trousers, underpants and shirt, all very neatly.
Marian’s armpits were dark with silky hair.
I said, “So you don’t shave.”
“Somebody asked me not to some time ago. Some people think it’s disgusting. They make strange faces when they see it.”
“I love it.”
She allowed me to stroke it, to feel its silkiness. It overexcited me, and worked with the other pictures I had of her. I came a little before I should. She was cool. For a long time she remained on her left side, hip high, waist sunken, her right flank smooth and exercised and firm. Her left arm partly covered her small breasts. Her right arm was crooked above her head, revealing her underarm hair. On two or three fingers of the hand that covered her breasts she had rings: gifts, I thought, from previous worshippers, but I closed my mind to them now.
She said, in her cool way, looking down at me, “Aren’t you going to bugger me?”
I didn’t know what to say.
She said, “I thought that was where you were going.”
I still didn’t know what to say.
She said, “Did you go to Oxford or Cambridge?” And with a gesture of irritation reached across the bed for her bag. Easily, as though she knew where it was, she took out a tube of lip salve.
I hesitated. She passed the lip salve to me, saying, “I am not doing this for you. You do it.”
I hadn’t thought it possible for a naked, exposed woman to be so imperious.
She commanded. I obeyed. How well I did I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me.
When we were dressed again, she more or less fully, I only partly, there was a ring at the door. I remembered, too late, that in my agitation I had not put on the “occupied” light.
She seemed to grow insane. She said, “You, go to the bathroom.” She called out to the person outside to wait, and then she began pelting all my clothes into the bathroom, jacket, shoes, pelting everything she could see, as though she wished no sign of me to remain in the bedroom.
It was only a chambermaid, Spanish or Portuguese or Colombian, doing some kind of checking.
I was standing in the cramped bathroom like a man in a farce.
Yet afterwards I was more concerned with working out her behaviour. Perhaps it was some shred of shame or morality, something beyond her control. Perhaps it was because I was not one of the people who might have given the women of the estates a beer shampoo. So new rules, new manners, would apply, and perhaps even new feelings might be brought into play.
She never explained, and when I said that I hoped we could meet the next weekend when I came down from London, she said yes and then said in her half-and-half, contrary way, “Let’s see.”
I bought her a pretty piece of jewellery, something with opals. It cost a few hundred pounds. I wanted something substantial because I knew she would show it to her friends, and one of them, Jo perhaps, would tell her to take it to Trethowans, the local jewellers, to have it valued. At the same time I wanted to be fair to myself: opals are not among the more expensive stones.
She was pleased when I gave it to her on Friday evening.
She held it in her hand and considered the blue flash and sparkle, the unending miniature storm in the stone, and though her own eyes were glinting, she said, “They say that opals are unlucky.”
I had booked a room in the hotel for the weekend. The staff were Spanish and Portuguese and Colombian. Colombians, through some kind of network, had penetrated to our market town, meeting some local need beyond that of simple labour. They were Mediterranean in spirit, infinitely tolerant, and Marian and I were treated as old friends by them and the others. This did away with whatever awkwardness Marian and I might have felt about our new arrangement.
In fact, it was wonderful in the hotel. It was like being on a foreign holiday in one’s own place, being an exotic in one’s own place. Living the life of bar and dining room and bedroom, and foreign languages, just a few miles from my father’s cottage house and overgrown garden, which had for so long been for me a place of gloom, of tarnished ceilings and walls and foolish little pictures blurred below grimy glass, a place of a life lived out and now without possibility, steeped in my father’s unassuageable rages against people I had known only in his stories, never in the flesh.
I had been anxious all week about meeting Marian again. Almost as anxious as about our first meeting. I got to the hotel early. And I sat in the low-ceilinged lounge (“a wealth of exposed beams,” as the hotel brochure promised), and looked across the old market square to where, hidden round a corner, both the taxi rank and the bus station were. She was splendid when she appeared. It was the word that came to me. She was in pale primrose trousers, with the waist high up, so that her legs seemed very long. The flare on the trousers made them overwhelming. Her walk was brisk and athletic. I doubted that I had the capacity to deal with this splendour. But then it came to me, as I watched her stride towards the hotel, that the trousers were new, specially bought for this occasion. There was something like an ironing mark or a fold mark across the middle. It would have come from the shop: a garment folded and wrapped in tissue and placed in a box or a bag. I was very moved by this evidence of her care and preparation. It gave me a little comfort. At the same time it made me feel unworthy, wondering about the challenges ahead. So I was perhaps in a greater state of nerves than at the beginning.