‘Can I have one?’ she asked, as he took out his Turkish cigarette case.
‘Of course.’ His thigh pressed against hers.
His name was Francis Fitzgerald. He had wavy black hair slick with pomade, the parting down the side so straight and white it was like a perfect scar, and a long beautiful nose. Isobel, her American friend from St Vincent’s, had introduced them at a garden party in Buckinghamshire and Bettina had looked at him and felt immediately floored by his good looks – giddily and blushingly floored. She asked him if he’d ever considered crossing the Atlantic and trying his luck in Hollywood and he’d laughed and said, ‘You’ve no idea how many people have said that exact thing to me.’ And she’d understood that it was a question he was bored by, but not coming from her. ‘I have no acting talent, not like your friend, Mr Dawes.’ She tilted her head back and said, with a playful smile, ‘I’m sure you have other talents.’ She was not one given to flirting, in fact she found it vomit-inducing, but she couldn’t have this marvellous specimen dismissing her as an attached woman. Bart was someone she need only dangle in front of the eunuchs and crustaceans.
‘Why a carriage?’ she asked him now. ‘Are you trying to invoke a romantic atmosphere in order to seduce me?’
He laughed. ‘I have two answers to that question: the one I tell most women, and the truth. Which would you rather?’
‘Both.’
‘All right. It’s because I believe both in embracing modernity and preserving the past. Motorcars are our future, yes, as well as electric lights and telephones in every house and the vote for all women. But why completely dismiss the methods of the past?’
‘Is that the truthful answer?’
‘No, that’s what I say in order to impress women.’
Bettina wasn’t sure about the way Francis showed his inner workings. It was designed to flatter her ego – it was saying, You, and only you, are beyond the superficial frivolity of most other females.
‘And what is the truth?’ she said.
‘I’m scared of motorcars.’
She laughed. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. Have you ever seen a crash? They crumple like tinfoil and the poor blighter stuck inside gets smashed to bits. I saw a chap once go flying through the windscreen. He was almost decapitated. His head was hanging on by a thread.’
‘Oh my word.’
He placed a hand on her forearm. ‘I’m sorry, dear. Was that too much?’
She nudged him with her elbow. ‘I am not made out of flowers.’
‘No, I dare say you’re made out of thorns!’
She elbowed him again and he clasped a hand over his ribs as if mortally wounded.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.
‘You make me silly.’ He took her hand and lifted it to his lips, looking silkily at her. His pale blue irises just around the pupils were flecked with tiny splinters of brown – but no one would ever say that. They would say gold.
This was it. He was going to make his move. Her legs were locked shut, the bony nubs of her ankles digging into each other. Staring at his just-open mouth, she relaxed her shoulders and then her legs, leaving a small, shivery gap between the knees. He took the cigarette out of her hand and tossed it out of his window – a flurry of amber sparks streaked the rushing black. This was it. He leaned in and let his lips stop just short of hers, his breath mingling with her breath. He kissed her, very softly. She kissed back, reaching up to stroke the back of his neck, which after all was the done thing. She took his tongue in her mouth and curled her fingers through his hair. The done thing. She imagined how they must look together – marvellous. He licked the soft wet flesh of her lower lip and she let out a little moan, and immediately distrusted the sincerity of it. He trailed a fingertip down her throat and chest and traced a spiral around the cloth-muted bump of her nipple. Another moan, a handful of his oily hair, an arching of her back. This is something I’ve read in a book, she thought, or seen in a picture. I’m playing a part. The weight of his body pushed her down on the seat and he was over her, on her, slipping a hand under her dress and trying to fumble his fingers inside her underwear. The carriage went over a bump and he grabbed her to stop her slipping off the seat. He was breathing hard and she was also breathing hard, and for the life of her, she didn’t know how much of this panting was real and how much performed, and she guessed maybe it was a forty/sixty split – but then, if she was capable of roughing out percentages while his fingers were dabbing at the moistness down there, then it could hardly be that real, more like twenty/eighty, and admittedly, there was that moistness, she was wet and tingling, but if it had been Margo’s hand down there, she would not be thinking of numbers and ratios, she would not be thinking at all.
He fidgeted a finger inside her and she gasped, in shock this time, not pleasure or performed pleasure in some silly estimated ratio, in genuine shock, because things had gone quite far enough. She pushed him away and he fell to the carriage floor with a heavy thud.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he yelled.
She sat up straight and shuffled to the very end of the seat, her shoulder pushed up against the door. She put her left breast back into her dress and smoothed down her hair. Clamped her legs together.
He climbed back onto the seat and stared furiously at her.
‘Well, what the hell did you expect?’ she said.
‘You can’t do that to a man,’ he said.
‘I bloody well can!’ She let out a long breath, blinking rapidly. ‘Do you think I’m a whore, Francis?’
He moved his mouth but no words came out.
‘I’ll ask again: do you think I’m a whore?’
‘Of course not, I—’
‘Seriously, Francis, did you think you were going to take my virginity in the back of a bloody carriage? Seriously?’
‘You were leading me on!’
‘I let you kiss me. I did not sign a contract offering you my virginity. Do you think I’m a bloody idiot, to let you do that to me?’
‘You might have put a stop to it sooner.’
‘You might not have started it! Really, I feel quite irritated by you right now, Francis. You top up my drinks and flatter me because I’m so bloody different to all the other girls, so bloody interesting, but actually, your motives were very singular, very ruthless.’
He shifted around on his seat and ran a hand through his hair, wiping the grease onto his trouser leg. ‘I’m sorry. You’re right. It’s just, I thought you were the kind of girl who might like to, you know, have a bit of – I don’t know, I mean… you like to drink and smoke and I—’
She let out a harsh bark of a laugh. ‘So a woman who smokes automatically opens her legs to men? What an idiotic correlation. My mother smokes, why don’t you test that theory out on her? Go on. Drive down to Brighton in your whimsical hansom and fuck my mother in a cloud of her tobacco smoke.’
He raised his hands in surrender. ‘I’m sorry, really, I’m sorry. My judgement was poor this evening. I haven’t behaved like a gentleman.’
She scrutinised his face. It was pale and wretched and vulnerable. A child caught at the sugar bowl. She crossed a leg over a knee and leaned back. ‘Well, I haven’t exactly behaved like a lady, either. Let’s have a cigarette and forget the whole thing. A cigarette, by the way, is merely a paper tube filled with tobacco and not a symbolic guarantee of sexual intercourse. You’d do well to remember that, hotstuff.’
Francis laughed and she laughed and the tension flew out of the window. He passed her a cigarette. ‘You’re awfully fun, Bettina. I feel like I’ve wasted you tonight. Treated you like a conquest when I should have been treating you as – well, as a serious prospect. I do hope we can still be friends.’