‘I think,’ she said, and now she was probably dead-level honest, ‘you may have something I’ve always wanted. That fineness I mentioned.’
‘What about your husband? A good man. Isn’t that something better than whatever this “fineness” may be?’
She bared her wide-spaced teeth in what was a mirthless smile, and he found himself responding to it, while repelled. ‘Oh yes, we know all that! The good — the virtuous — they’re what we admire — depend on to shore us up against our own shortcomings — with loving affection.’
She fell silent after that, and looked down along his wrist, his thigh.
‘The other,’ she said, ‘needn’t be lust, need it?’
Half burnt half chilled beside the leaping fire, he discovered himself, to his amazement and only transitory repugnance, lusting after Marcia’s female forms.
They stood up simultaneously. If they had hoped to escape by withdrawing from the heat of the fire, the diminishing circles of warmth inside the room brought them closer together.
Her body was a revelation of strength in softness.
‘What about Greg?’ It was his conscience letting out a last gasp.
‘He won’t wake this side of daylight.’ She sounded ominously certain.
She led him through a frozen house from which the servants had already dispersed, either to its fringes or its outhouses. They bumped against each other, slightly and at first silently, then in more vigorous, noisy collusion, the little Maltese terrier staggering sleepily behind them, trailing the plume of his tail.
When the sky had started greening she switched on the lamp to verify the time. They were by then a shambles of sheet and flesh, the Maltese dog exposing in his sleep a pink belly and tufted pizzle.
Switching back to green darkness she said, ‘I was right, Eddie.’
‘About what?’ Considering his own respect for the old man her husband, he was not too willing to allow Marcia Lushington the benefit of knowing her own mind.
‘The fineness.’
‘Oh, stuff!’
He started extricating himself from what he had begun to see as a trap, a sticky one at that.
‘Perhaps I’m wrong after all,’ she murmured and heaved. ‘Perhaps all men are the same. The same crudeness. Blaming you for what they’ve had.’
‘It isn’t that,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t understand. Or would be too shocked if I tried to explain.’
She was hesitating in the dark.
‘Why? We didn’t do anything perverse, did we? I can’t bear perversion of any kind.’
Bumping and shivering, he started putting on his clothes. Once the Maltese terrier whimpered.
‘Eddie?’ Again she switched on the light. ‘Men can be so brutal. And you are not. That’s why I’m attracted to you. I don’t believe you’d ever hurt me by refusing what I have to offer.’
Heaped amongst the blankets, the crisscrossed sheets, and punch-drunk pillows, her mound of quaking female flesh appeared on the verge of sculpturing itself into the classic monument to woman’s betrayal by callous man. What he looked like, half-dressed in underpants, shirt-tails, and socks with holes in the heels, it gave him goose-flesh to imagine.
‘Even if you haven’t quite the delicacy I’d hoped for, perhaps we could comfort each other,’ she blurted through naked lips, ‘in lots of undemanding ways.’
He buckled his belt, which to some extent increased his masculine assurance, but it was not to his masculine self that Marcia was making her appeal. He was won over by a voice wooing him back into childhood, the pervasive warmth of a no longer sexual, but protective body, cajoling him into morning embraces in a bed disarrayed by a male, reviving memories of toast, chilblains, rising bread, scented plums, cats curled on sheets of mountain violets, hibiscus trumpets furling into sticky phalluses in Sydney gardens, his mother whom he should have loved but didn’t, the girl Marian he should have married but from whom he had escaped, from the ivied prison of a tennis court, leaving her to bear the children who were her right and fate, the seed of some socially acceptable, decent, boring man.
He was drawn back to Marcia by the bright colours of retrospect, the more sombre tones of remorse. He lowered his face into the tumult of her breasts.
‘There,’ she murmured, comforting, ‘I knew! My darling! My darling!’
She was ready to accept him back into her body; she would have liked to imprison him in her womb, and he might have been prepared to go along with it if they hadn’t heard the rushing of a cistern in the distance.
‘I better go,’ he mumbled.
‘Oh, no! It’s only his bladder. I know his form. Poor old darling! You don’t live with someone half a lifetime without getting wise to every movement of the clockwork.’
The little dog whinged, and dug a deeper nest in the blankets in which to finish his normal sleep.
‘Eddie?’
He resisted her warmth reaching out through the dark to repossess him. He withdrew into the outer cold, not through any access of virtue, rather from disgust for his use of Lushington’s wife in an attempt to establish his own masculine identity. Marcia apart, or even Marcia considered, women were probably honester than men, unless the latter were sustained by an innocent strength such as Greg Lushington and Judge Twyborn enjoyed.
As Eddie let himself out into the night the images of Eadie his mother and Joan Golson joined forces with that of Marcia Lushington, who had, incredibly, become his mistress! The trio of women might have been shot sky high on the trampoline of feminine deceit if it hadn’t been for the emergence of Eudoxia Vatatzes at Eddie Twyborn’s side.
Eddie went stumbling down the hill through the increasing green of the false dawn, the light from an outhouse window, and the scented breath of ruminating cows. In his own experience, in whichever sexual role he had been playing, self-searching had never led more than briefly to self-acceptance. He suspected that salvation most likely lay in the natural phenomena surrounding those unable to rise to the spiritual heights of a religious faith: in his present situation the shabby hills, their contours practically breathing as the light embraced them, stars fulfilled by their logical dowsing, the river never so supple as at daybreak, as dappled as the trout it camouflaged, the whole ambience finally united by the harsh but healing epiphany of cockcrow.
Scattering a convocation of rabbits, he went in through the hedge of winter-blasted hawthorns, into the mean cottage in which physical exhaustion persuaded him it was his good fortune to be living. He lay down smiling, and slept, under the dusty army blankets, in the grey room.
That noon, while enjoying the luxury of a solitary Sunday frowst, after the minimum of cold mutton with mustard pickle, and the dwindling warmth of a brew of tea, he heard a sound of hooves and the metal of a horse’s bridle. He looked out and saw, not his mistress of last night, but Mrs Lushington his employer’s wife tethering her hack to the rail outside the feed room.
It was startling in these circumstances and at this hour of day. He heard himself muttering. He took up the pot to pour another cup of tea, by now tepid and repulsive, but found himself instead draining the pot to its dregs through the spout.
Fortified, if ashamed, he went out to the encounter with this stranger already knocking at the door.
‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ she began what sounded a prepared speech. ‘Usually on Sunday, after lunch, I go for a ride, otherwise Ham gets out of hand. As I was passing this way I thought I’d look in — see how they’re treating you — whether they’ve made you comfortable.’