“Are you nervous?” he asked.
“A bit,” I lied, my eyes shifting from the carefully placed towel down to the floor. I should have been nervous, I know, but I was far too preoccupied with the practicalities of the situation, and once I get an idea in my head I find it difficult to think of anything else until I’ve resolved it. How, exactly, from this position, the bed between us, him covered up, were we going to end up with his penis depositing sperm into my uterus? I was more confused than nervous.
“Well, don’t be,” he said kindly.
My room was a bright daffodil yellow, richly augmented by the late afternoon sun stretching gloriously through the window. I’d selected it—the daffodil—when I was too young to know better and insisted that the ceiling as well as the walls should be done in the chosen color. Maud had painted it herself, directly over the Victorian wood-chip paper, which had raised swirls all over the ceiling.
When I was little I liked it because when I stared up at it from my bed and half crossed my eyes, enough to make them lazy, it was easy to lose my focus in the swirling ceiling. It would take a minute or two to get my eyes into it, to lose perspective and start to see the shapes and patterns in other dimensions. Once I’d got my eye in, it was quite impossible—without looking away first—to see the ceiling as flat again. Sometimes the swirls would be shooting away from me, and at other times they were spiraling out of the paper towards me so that if I reached up I could put my hand straight through them. I’d lie there in the light evenings or the early mornings of my childhood, moving them about and watching them dart in and out of the room.
Sex didn’t hurt, as Vivi had said it might, and it didn’t give me any pleasure, as I’d wondered it might. Instead, as I lay as still as I could under him, I watched the yellow spirals on the ceiling above me, dancing in and out like lively springs, and was astounded that this frenetic, mediocre act was what we were made for. This, apparently, was what men and women craved, not just when they wanted a child but for the act itself. After all, it’s all we’re required to do in life—by the laws of nature—to ensure the continuation of our species.
I can’t think why but at that moment I thought of a stag beetle with his shiny black armor and huge, fierce-looking antlers, as long again as his body. With such an outfit you’d assume he was a great warrior, yet his fearsome appearance is a mystery to naturalists. He doesn’t fight once in his monthlong life. He doesn’t even eat. His sole purpose is to lug his cumbersome body around in search of a mate and, once he’s mated he dies, his formidable weaponry an unnecessary encumbrance.
Arthur’s head was buried in the pillow beside me, his mouth close to my ear. I smelt his musk and listened to his strained irregular breathing and I thought of all the forces driving him to do this. His arms were on either side of me, solid in rock-hard tension, his elbows locked at right angles to give him a little height, and I could see his sinewy upper body immaculately taut, powerful. Every slender muscle had a job to do and I marveled at the force in the thrust of his bottom, even for a thin man.
At last I felt Arthur’s whole body go rigid in involuntary spasm and wondered if there was any other moment, apart from ejaculation, that so many of a man’s muscles contract at the same time. I imagined the little packages of ATP and lactic acid being busily shunted and exchanged deep within the filaments of his muscles, a powerhouse working at full capacity.
When he’d finished and withdrawn, I flipped my legs to the head of the bed and stuck my feet and bottom up on the wall above me.
“What are you doing?” he asked then, rolling off the bed.
“I’m just helping them.”
“Does it?” he said. “Help them?”
“Vivien thinks it might. It’s on her list,” I said, referring to a list of helpful hints and instructions she’d sent me, but Arthur was looking at me strangely, at my legs. “It’s not one of the things I have to do but just something I can do if I want—”
“Ouch, what happened to you?” he interrupted. “Did you have an accident?”
“Those?” I tried to sound casual. “I always have bruises,” and I tugged at the sheet to cover up the marks of Maud’s outbursts.
“Sorry.” He looked embarrassed, as if he’d just pointed out a deformity he shouldn’t have mentioned, and went into the bathroom.
I felt his sperm trickling inside me and along the inside of my thigh. I checked that he was out of the room before I felt between my legs with my fingers. I had an urge to rush to the lab upstairs, smear the glistening liquid onto a slide, drop over a coverslip and push it under the X1000 lens. I’d have liked to see them swimming.
We did it once more that day and three times the next. The rest of the time we actively ignored each other, not only aware that we had to keep our baby-making plans secret from Maud and Clive, but also, perhaps, in a subconscious effort to balance out the impossible intimacy we were to have three times a day.
I’m sitting at my lookout on the landing, staring at my toes protruding from the ends of my slippers in their thick woolen socks. Did I tell you that three months ago I had to cut the tops off my slippers, at the very end, to let my toes stick out? My feet get so swollen that they felt as if they’d been crammed into slippers two sizes too small. Every step made me wince with pain. It’s such a relief to have them out.
It’s while I’m sitting here on the window seat, trying to wiggle my toes up and down, exercising them, that I finally catch sight of Vivien, walking back up the drive. At the same time, I hear the faint whirr and chink of the bracket clock in the hall as it passes the half hour. Something inside the workings has become misaligned. It used to strike the half hour properly, with one full, rich note, but over the last few years it’s been muffled and the sound shortened, stripped of its echo; a chink, not a chime. Luckily, I can still hear it from the parts of the house I frequent, and when I do, I always check it against both of my wristwatches to make sure they’re all keeping time. Right now, they are in agreement: it’s four-thirty in the afternoon, and Vivien’s been out since five past one.
Three and a half hours since she left the house—without a word—and the light is fading, but here she comes meandering slowly up the side of the drive, close to the beech hedge. She stops awhile to bend down and fiddle with her boot, then starts off again, dusting the beech hedge casually with her hand as she goes. Where has she been? I try to imagine all the places she might have been but, to tell you the truth, I can’t even think of one. There’s something strange about the way she’s walking, a manner that I can’t quite put my finger on or explain in words. She’s running her hand along the side of the hedge as she walks, childlike, knocking off some of last year’s crumpled brown leaves that seem to cling tightly to beech right through into spring.
I hurry down the stairs, giving myself plenty of time before she reaches the house, and shut myself into the study behind the kitchen.
The study has two doors off it, one to the kitchen and one to the hall. I’ve decided that if she goes into the kitchen I’ll time my entrance to happen upon her there, and if she goes straight upstairs I can pretend I’d just decided to leave the study as she starts up the stairs. Either way I’ll be able to ask her where she’s been. I plant myself by the bookcase, equidistant from the two doors, ready to go one way or the other. Vivien goes straight upstairs. Once she passes the study door, I count her footsteps up five stairs, then open the door.