On Saturday afternoon Mrs. Koch had to go to a wedding. Ludi was leaving on Monday morning, and she did not want to go, but the obligation of being a very old friend of the bride’s mother was something that made an excuse out of the question for her. It was the first week in February and the first day of February heat, and when we had driven her to the MacVies’, who were to take her with them to the ceremony at a village twenty miles inland, we drove slowly back to the farm through heat without air, a heat that now burned silent and intense as the heart of a fire after it has seized crackling on all life — trees, grass, flowers. The house was preoccupied with the heat, and as I knelt on the sofa at the window, I saw, outside in the stillness, the very tops of the trees tremble slowly in anticipation of rain. For the first time we lay down together alone in the house. At once I struggled up again, as if I were fussing about the bed of an invalid. “Wait a minute, let’s get the cushion—” Ludi let his head be arranged with tugs at the cushion which turned it this way and that. Then I half lay down, but immediately got up to take off my shoes. Then I lay down beside him, moving my toes and sighing with my eyes shut. After a moment of sinking pleasure, I rose to wakefulness and opened them to see him looking at me, smiling under half-closed lids. I wondered how I looked at that angle, my cheek pushed by the pillow, and put up my hand to judge the distortion. But my hand came into contact with his jaw and I felt the wonderful shock of a burning warmth other than my own flesh; I rolled over to bury my face in the angle between his neck and the cushion.
I had a night of my own in there. The warm sweetness of the skin felt but unseen, breathing out a slight moisture from the afternoon heat, was the essence, the surrender of Ludi himself in darkness. I seemed to sink into it, it lay upon my eyelids and my lips like warm rain, and I fell through it, falling, falling as one does in the mazy stratosphere between consciousness and sleep. Then I suddenly became aware of another presence; something else came and stood beside me in the darkness. The damp, cottony smell of the cushion in its thin, soft, faded cover beneath my cheek, musty from the climate and faintly musky with the impress of the cats’ round bodies, was sharp and sad to my nostrils, like the sudden cold blow across water in a landscape waiting for rain. Tears pricked at my eyes with strange pleasure. The smell of the cushion was the distillation of the friendly house, of our lives moving about there with the animals and old Matthew, of our voices lingering about the rooms, our calls in the garden unanswered by the glitter of the sea, the whole transience of this time that seemed my life but that would set me down at some point (although it would be soon, it did not seem so) and continue, far off and spiced, after I had awoken and gone.
I stirred and lifted my head into the room again, now filled with the queer presaging yellow light of a storm taking place unheard somewhere between us and the hidden sun. But Ludi was not looking at me now. His eyes, lids tender-looking from the protection of glasses, were closed and his whole face was beautiful with the tension of inward concentration. The corner of his mouth relaxed and then pressed back white against his cheek. He tightened his arms around me but I felt that for him I was not there. And the light, deepening to the greenish gold of wine or pools far down from the sun, lay solemnly on his cheek, but he merely flickered the thin skin of one eyelid, not able to notice what it was that passed over him. He began to kiss me in this concentration and to caress me, and soon I was in it too. It held me and I kissed him and gripped him back and I felt I was trying with all the gathered distress of my body to get somewhere, to reach something. He lay on top of me and he was heavy and that was what I wanted. I wanted him to be more heavy. He could not be heavy enough. I did not know what I wanted, but that I wanted. All at once, an astonishing sensation startled me. As if I had turned my head only in time to see something whipped away, my eyes flew open—. Ludi was gone, lifted away from me; he stood in the shadowy corner by the sofa, shapeless in rumpled clothes, pressing the palms of his hands up behind his ears.
I cried sharply: “Ludi! Come back!”
I lay hysterically rigid, exactly as he had left me.
“Ludi!”
He came slowly over, almost lumbering, and stood at the foot of the sofa. “I can’t,” he said, gently.
“Ludi,” I said, not moving, “it was such a wonderful — so wonderful just now. Come back.”
He shook his head. “It’s impossible,” looking down at me.
I must have him back. I must find out. I must go back and find what I was about to feel. I felt my eyes terribly wide open, fixed on his.
He sat down on the edge of the sofa and gently bent my bare foot in his hand. At the same time I loved him desperately and I resented the lax gentleness expressed in his touch. “It’s physically impossible,” he explained, gently, reluctantly. He stood up again, smiling at me. “I must go and fix myself up. I’ll be back in a minute.”
I watched him go out, so untidy, with a curious, disturbed look at the back of his hair, and as I lay, not waiting, but simply lying, my body slowly let go. Now I became conscious of a need to move my leg to another position, and, beyond my slow, deep breathing, heard that it was raining. It must have been raining for some time because the rain had already found its rhythm. All the room was darkened with the shade cast by the rain.
Ludi came back with the air of brightness of people who have just washed their faces and combed their hair, and as he filled the doorway he seemed to be very big and heavy-shouldered and somehow not responsible for, signaling appealingly as a prisoner from, his heavy man’s frame. He lay down in the dimness beside me, quietly, hands behind his head. The warmth of his side made me sigh and smile. We lay a long while, perhaps five minutes. I was happy and sad, troubled and serene, bewildered and at rest. And I was thinking, vaguely, in snatches and dashes. And when I spoke, it was not of conscious intention, but like a sentence thrown out loud in sleep, the kind of accurate chance sum of thoughts and ideas not consciously computed in the mind.
“Ludi, have you ever slept with anyone?”
I think he knew what I was asking better than I knew myself. Ignoring the naïveté, the foolishness of the question, which he saw were not the question itself, he said, perfectly gravely, “Yes, miss, I have.”—He called me “miss” the way one flatters a little girl; it was his word of endearment for me.
A weak protest of pain flowed over me, as if the protective fluid of a blister somewhere inside me had been released. — Now when I put a finger on the spot it would be raw, unprotected by ignorance. I was silent.
Suddenly it did not seem ridiculous to him to be apologetic. He began to comfort me by excusing himself and I believe he really meant it. For the moment he really believed I had the right to complain of the ten years of life he had had while I dragged a toe in the dust of my childhood, disconsolate, waiting. He said the oldest, comforting words, that were new to me. “Always very perfunctory. It’s no good without any real feeling, any other relationship to back it. Honestly”—he was looking at me now, not seeing me properly in the dark of the rain, without his glasses, his close, bristly lashes that I secretly loved so much, showing bright as he narrowed his gaze—“It’s no good.” He put his arm under my head. I thought, he means it would be different with me. He means he loves me. I was suddenly utterly happy. I turned my head until I could rub my nose on the hairs of his forearm.