Since he had caressed me, Ludi’s physical presence overcame me like a blast of scent; the smell of his freshly ironed shirt sleeve, as he leaned across me at the table, made me forget what I was saying to Mrs. Koch; the pulse beating beneath the warm look of the skin on his neck where there was no beard held my eyes; the contact of his bare leg against mine in the car almost choked me as something opened up inside my body, pressing against my heart and opening, opening. When somebody spoke to him my heart pounded slowly, as if the significance of talking to him was something they could not understand as I did. When Matthew called Master Ludi! Master Lu-di! across the garden, I smiled alone with warm pleasure. And I began to watch anxiously every young woman who knew the Kochs and who came to the house or was visited or merely met with in the village. I began to be terribly afraid that someone else might feel Ludi’s presence as suffocatingly as I did. I ran over names anxiously in my mind. I even began to worry about the things he wore. I noticed that he had two pairs of hand-knitted socks, and remembered that Mrs. Koch had told me that the one piece of knitting she would never attempt was the knitting of socks. I went to the trouble of planning and rehearsing a whole dialogue in my mind that would lead up naturally to the name of the giver of the socks. When I put it into practice, Mrs. Koch’s innocent digressions led the conversation away from instead of toward the subject of the socks, and I was left with the question unanswered and suddenly more urgent than ever. Ludi was putting water in the car. I went straight out to him. I walked round the car once and then stopped.
“Ludi, who made those socks for you?”
“What socks?”
I faltered—“You know. Your mother’s darning them, a sort of light blue pair, and some gray ones.”
“Why, what’s wrong with them? Mrs. Plaskett made them for old Plaskett and they were too big. What’s wrong about them?”
But to my dismay I found that the sense of security is something that is constantly in danger in love. A day later, when Ludi was clearing out an ottoman full of old clothes, he came upon a pullover that he had evidently believed lost. He came into the kitchen, holding it up. “Look what’s here. …”
Mrs. Koch left the tap running. “Maud’s pull-over! But where was it?”—Then it reminded her, she rubbed her wet hands reproachfully down her apron—“Ludi, you should have gone over there, you know. They would so like to have seen you. You really should. …”
“No harm came to it.” Ludi was holding the pull-over up to the light, carefully. “Not even a moth. I told you that stuff was jolly good, Mother. Look, it’s been in that ottoman mixed up with a lot of rubbish for months, and there’s not even a pinhole.” Now they went on to argue about the name of the insecticide that had been used to spray the ottoman, and the pull-over was forgotten. Later I said, as if I had just remembered: “What did you do with that pullover you found, Ludi?”—It was discovered that it was lost all over again, because he’d put it down in the kitchen and left it there. Then Matthew found it in the linen basket.
“How all the old ladies look after you,” I said. “Everyone seems to contribute to your wardrobe.”
“She’s not an old lady.”
“But your mother said, ‘Maud’s pull-over.’ ”
He gave a little grunt, half-amusement, half-chary. “Maud Harmel made it for a bet. She was wild about horses, never did anything but ride all day. I used to kid her, and she bet me she could do anything I’d name that any woman could do — you know, at home, the kind of thing most women do—. So I said, just like that, make a pull-over — and forgot about it. Anyway, she made it and this is it. But didn’t you meet the Harmels from Munster—? Oh, no, of course you couldn’t — I was forgetting we haven’t been over to see them this time. …”
My heart always sank a little at the casualness with which he remembered or forgot the facts of my presence, sometimes not remembering how long I had been staying with them, and vague about the places I had seen and things I had done during the first part of my stay. By contrast, I was almost ashamed of the minuteness of detail with which I remembered everything pertaining to him. Now I was so downcast by the small fact of Ludi’s not knowing whether or not I had met a certain group of their friends, that my interest in the maker of the pull-over was eclipsed.
I was too young to want that which I loved to be human. Even in the attraction of Ludi’s body, I wanted the ideal rather than the real. My idea of love had come to me through the symbols, the kiss, the vow, the clasped hands, and this child’s belief was bewildered even while it enjoyed the realities of heat, membrane, touch and taste. Though tears of ecstasy came to my eyes while I waited for Ludi to touch my breasts and look upon them, naked, the thought that he might want to see the rest of my body filled me with shame. I felt he could not know of the little triangle of springy hair that showed up against my white groins with their pale blue veins. I was terrified that if he saw me, he might be repulsed. I would lie in the bath looking down at myself with distaste, wishing I might be like the women in the romantic paintings I had seen, whose dimpled stomachs simply gave way to the encroaching curve of thighs.
The one time Ludi ever embarrassed me was when I was lying on the beach with my arms above my head and he asked me, tenderly, as one asks a child why she has scratched her knees, why I shaved my armpits. The blood of acute embarrassment fanned over me. That he knew that I grew hair under my arms! I said, muffled: “Everybody does it.”
“Women are silly. They’re very attractive, those little soft tufts of hair. But of course you shave it, and make it coarse, like an old man’s beard.”
I was so astonished at this view that I sat up, curious. And it became one of those intimate conversations that make people feel a delicious surrender of inconsequential confidence, very exciting to someone who discovers for the first time this special kind of talk that is released by physical intimacy.
Sometimes when we found ourselves unexpectedly alone but certain to be rejoined by the life of the household at any moment (even the appearance of one of the cats, stalking silently in about its own business, made me start) we would stand together kissing as if at a leave-taking, and he would flatten his hands down my back into the notch of my waist and then cup them round my buttocks. At once I would flinch away, almost crossly put myself out of the way of his hands. But he was not offended. Here in the sweet closeness of intimacy the ten years between us opened up a gulf. I lowered my eyelids, mouth pulled accusingly. But he looked at me gently, with a short catch and release of the breath, smiling comfortingly at me, only wishing to take care not to offend. Clinging to his hard, fast-beating chest, he knew that with my eyes shut tight I could not take that ten-years’ dark jump in one leap. With gentle, sensuous selfishness, he only wished to enjoy me as far as I was ready to go, and sometimes, indeed, after a still, absorbed minute of passion when he knew nothing, he would come to himself quite abruptly simply to prevent me from following a blind instinct of desire which later I would not understand and might even disgust me.