‘I’m not shy,’ he said, unable to recognize her unassailable self-possession of last night.
Neither was she; undressing, she asked if he had anything: ‘You know, precautions and all that.’ He’d never seen a woman get stripped so quickly, yet without hurrying, in a casual and graceful way. It was all off before he could get a good look in and enjoy it — no fumbling with hooks and buttons that crazed him well before glimpsing the real thing. Having regarded it as inevitable, and lacking the patience not to make it so, it was partly shyness that made her undress so quickly. Now that she mentioned it, he hadn’t got any: ‘I started out with a gross, but somebody picked my pocket in a pub the other night. Everywhere was shut yesterday.’
‘I’ll cope then,’ she said. What’s the use being a nurse, he thought, if she can’t? The room was white-washed, brilliant, bare pictureless walls showing the flesh dazzle of her body plain before him. The curtains were closed and electric light on, so that it might have been two in the morning, and this seemed like the limit of sloth to him, real sin compared to the fact that he was about to make love to someone a complete stranger now that she was naked. She seemed taller, with long legs and well-shaped thighs, a tapering waist not noticed when clothed. There were faint stretch marks on her stomach from having the baby all those years ago, but her muscles were flat and the navel distinct, while her breasts were small and round, purple-ringed at the nipples. His hands went over them, shaking at the soft velvet touch as if he’d never made love before. Her arms pressed around his neck. I’ll shoot my bolt before I get there if I go on like this, so out of practice, and nervous as if I was fourteen.
He lay by her side, and they were content to kiss tenderly. The silence of the house and the day outside made him think they were in the sky, or the smack centre of a millpond ocean. How was it possible for such quiet to be in the world? Her eyes closed, and he knew she was waiting, that the time had come. But he didn’t want to move. He couldn’t shift. For some reason, for the first time in his life, the will wasn’t in him at the crucial moment. Her kisses grew harder, blinder, and the more they increased the less was he able to follow. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘come on, love.’
But he couldn’t. Or, in the deepest layers of himself, he would not. Unable to satisfy such scalding lust, they lay for some time: ‘Are you nervous of me?’ she said at last. He sat up. ‘I shouldn’t think so. I’ve never been nervous of anybody like that in my life.’
‘Maybe you don’t love me,’ she smiled.
‘Love?’ he said. That had never bothered him before.
‘Some people can’t do it unless they’re in love, been seeing each other for a while first.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Any reason gave him heart, though it was so unique and stunning he could hardly feel ashamed. Yet beneath all this, a subdued rage was ebbing away: ‘I think I’ll be off’ — standing to get dressed.
‘Why are you in such a hurry?’
‘I stopped yesterday for a drink of water. I can’t swallow the tap as well.’
She frowned, drew on her dressing-gown. ‘That would sound like folk wisdom to some. To me it sounds like the cold shoulder, as they say.’
‘Well, we’ll see. I was meaning to give that garden of yours a dig over when it stops raining. When was it last done?’
‘I can’t remember. I’ve been too busy to bother.’
‘It’s heavy for you, that sort of work. A man should do it.’ He went downstairs in his socks, put on his shoes by the still burning fire. ‘What was that woodwork you wanted done?’ he called out to the kitchen.
She laughed: ‘I thought I’d have a couple of shelves above the stove. There’s nowhere to put things.’
He went to look. ‘I’ll get some brackets and plugs. Are there any tools?’
‘Under the stairs. I had the wood cut last week, thinking I might try it myself, but I don’t suppose I really wanted to.’ She peeled potatoes, dropped them into the pot — cooking without an apron, which was something new to him, better in that she didn’t hide the goodness of herself in the paraphernalia of domesticity. He stood close behind, kissed her neck, and held his hands over her breasts.
There was less formality about it than the deliberation of walking upstairs and going into the bedroom, and stripping as if to a drill, an exhibition as if performed before all the generations of the world to prove that you were with them in their unconscious battle for survival against the ravages of nature. She turned and lay her face in his shoulder. His hands were below her waist, body pressing stiffly but without urgency. He walked her into the sitting-room. There were no fires of impotence this time; his madness was controlled, hard at the loins, and the hundreds of miles journeying during which he had almost forgotten the need for love had only made him forget it in order to overwhelm him now with an unexpected force and sweetness he’d never known before.
They lay on the floor, clothes hardly disturbed, crying out together as if they had been burnt.
5
The village, when he explored the roundabouts of it, was set in a horseshoe of the wolds. After a few weeks he seemed never to have been anything but a countryman, as if much of William Posters had, for what it was worth, been excised from his backbone. Walking alone through the bracken earth of the autumn woods on a long, purposeless, satisfying stroll (while Pat was out in her red Mini on some errand of mercy) he could watch for pheasants, squirrels, or the erratic flip among upper branches of birds tough enough not to go south at the first chill breath of October damp.
He was surprised at how much life there still was. Two squirrels in the middle of a lane fixed each other, until his appearance sped them apart. One, with a handsome grey tail and upright back, had a small red disc for an eye, after fighting the rival which had already made off. The other eye must have been uninjured, for the squirrel flitted among a confusion of trees and bushes without tearing its hide.
Apart from mistily remembered bus-rides as a child, the only times he had seen the country was from his car-screen, stopping now and again to eat sandwiches with the window open, or dashing across fifty yards of greensward to gulp down pints in some sheltering pub. Now he not only lived in it, but spoke about gardens and poaching with men in the Keaner’s Head when he sometimes called there. Words like covert, lodge, hill, grange, flew from him — and only a month ago he had been at his machine, driving a car, in bed with Nancy, bawling at the kids. Yet in those days the dominant feeling was that of not living his proper and allotted life, of being enmeshed in a totally wrong sort of existence no matter how plain and real it was said to be. The present life at least was too new to give any such feeling.
Even so, his mind was at all points of the cardiac compass, unsettled and drifting. Out of the wood, he walked along an open lane, beet fields on either side. A Land Rover was coming and he stepped aside for it. A lean-faced man of about fifty called: ‘Where are you going?’
Frank looked at the grey, non-penetrating eyes, and said nothing. The man spoke: ‘This is a private road. If you go any further you’re liable to be shot at by one of my keepers. I’d turn back if I were you.’ His head withdrew, quicker than any argument that could follow, and the car rumbled towards a distant farmhouse.