Despite their kindness, Blake’s parents — the kind who know, but don’t want to know, what their almost-twenty-year-old son is up to — had stood stiffly when he said it was late and that he was going to walk Jane back. Jane sensed that it isn’t because they don’t like her or feel some degree of sympathy for what she’s been through, but because, despite all that, they still disapprove. When Jane and Blake reach the pool of light under the lamp of the inn Jane pulls out her key and Blake says, “My cousin Max died last summer. That’s why I’m not at uni.” He scuffs the toe of his boot. “We’d taken ketamine with some girls at a rave and he was fucked up and stepped onto the road without looking. I’m not saying they do, but I feel like my parents blame me.”
Jane touches the thatch of hair that’s fallen over his eye and moves it gently to the side. “I’m sorry.”
“When do you have to go back to London?” Blake stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets and looks across the road, and Jane realizes that even though she’s told him the truth about her name, about Lily, there’s still the whole lie about her work at Inglewood between them.
“Probably in a day or two.”
He nods and turns his attention to the moth twitching around the globe light and then he takes a few steps toward the picnic table and kicks its struts with his boot. On his second kick he shouts, “Fuck!” so loud Jane thinks it will wake the elderly couple whose window is on the front of the inn just below hers.
Without meaning to, Jane starts counting like she did after that last fight with Ben: one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three.
“Fuck. Sorry.” Blake comes close and butts his head lightly against her shoulder. “Don’t be angry.”
Because she isn’t angry, and because she wants to, Jane takes Blake’s hand and leads him upstairs to her room. Once there, she pulls his sweater up and over his head and pushes him gently down on the bed. She knows she shouldn’t keep him, knows that there are other ways to find or feel tenderness and she knows, too, that Paula is probably sitting in the rust-coloured wingback near the door, waiting, like any parent would, for her child to come home.
26
Out of the kind of idleness common to her weekday afternoons, Charlotte Chester once began what she referred to in her diary as a “catalogue of touch.” Jane read about it the summer she started compiling the Chester archives. It began, Charlotte had written, with a paper cut.
Charlotte and Celia were in the front parlour of the new house beside the museum making a collage for Edmund. Fumbling with the shears, Celia asked her mother to help her cut out the duck she’d found illustrated in a periodical. She wanted to affix a top hat to it on the paper they were using for pasting. Distractedly flopping the publication onto her lap, Charlotte had grazed the side of her finger. She made a small sound, inspected the incision and put the affected knuckle in her mouth. Celia, six at the time, promptly plopped down off her chair, approached her mother and, reaching for the wound, kissed it. The hours that day had passed dully, but suddenly, in that instant, Charlotte felt keenly aware, could parse two separate sensations: the sting of her finger and the wet press of her daughter’s lips. It had been a long time since she’d been so acutely in her body. Edmund had been absent, travelling back and forth to the mill or up late at night tending to urgent matters with the museum — yesterday a theft, last week the delayed shipping of an expected exhibit of fossils. Hers had become a life of the mind: books as lived experience, ideas for charitable projects she did not begin, a tedium that wore a circle around her children, whose play she supervised without passion.
“Does it still hurt?” Celia stood at Charlotte’s knee, a look of uncertainty clouding her face.
“No, darling, it just tickles.”
That night, the sheets from her husband’s factory settled coolly in the place where Edmund ought to have been, Charlotte decided to consume herself for one whole day with the sense of touch. She would make it an experiment, would do as she had seen the members of Edmund’s societies do: form through careful and sustained observation a hypothesis about the various modes and expressions of her subject. The effort would require a notebook, which she could easily steal from Edmund’s study, and the kind of attenuation she knew she could not steal, the kind she had started to lack.
In the end, Charlotte wrote, the catalogue was a disappointment. She’d noted the unexpected warmth of the keys taken from the maid, the cool brass of the library doorknob, the viscous quality of the honey clumped by Thomas into his younger brother’s hair after a row at lunch. There was the constant swish of her skirts against her stockings, the side of her hand inching across a letter to her mother, the repeated smoothing of the raw silk of her dress. And then, almost miraculously, the bell of a purple foxglove lifted from where it had fallen to the carpet, her finger slipping gently into the satin of its cup.
A year later, in Scarborough, when she joined Norvill for two weeks on the pretense of visiting a distant cousin, she repeated this practice with him. They would wake in his bed and she would set to memory the rough pads of his fingers stroking her cheek, his lips nibbling her chin, even the way the soft of her stomach nestled against the taut plane of his. His house was modest, perched halfway up a cliff that banistered the sea, let to him by an acquaintance of George’s who owned a fleet of fishing vessels. On the days when Norvill had to slip into the city to advise on the survey work he was overseeing, Charlotte occupied herself with the brace of the coastal wind, the grit of the sand she’d bring back in her skirts from the beach, the slick ribbon of seaweed she once touched lightly to her tongue. It was easy, from that distance, to see that her children were cloying. To love them less for how they leaned into her, tugged at her even from across the country. It was not the same with Edmund, whom, on those aimless afternoons window-shopping along winding village streets, she loved more. When the clerk in the jewellery shop on M— Street showed her an impossibly small ammonite fossil that had been set into a ring, she realized with a pang that it was Edmund she would like to receive it from, not Norvill.
It was not that Edmund had disappointed her or that his touch was not pleasurable. She knew any number of women in her circle who did not have things as well as she. Charlotte could see the strain in their faces, the flinch at the card table or on stairwells when their husbands leaned close or moved to guide them by the arm. Once, at an exhibition in London, Edmund dared to take Charlotte into the gallery where the painted nudes had been hung, even though none of the other women had gone. She admired him in his ease, playing subtly at being aroused, and wondered why exactly she felt so removed from him.
Afterward, in the carriage, when he ran his hand over her bodice, pulled at the ribbon streaming down from her collar, she realized it was the children who were the cause — that giving birth to them had necessitated a transfer of love, and her body had become affiliated in new directions. In their house she was constantly pulled at, once slapped by Thomas when she refused him a sweet, exhausted by the demands and piddling violences, and even by the rare and precious hours of cradling that Celia still sometimes permitted. Norvill, as much as she had come to love him, represented an escape from such needling, although he was starting to create problems of his own. The two of them had become less careful than they were in the beginning; and once, even after she had asked him to remove himself, he had stayed inside, pushing deeper until he was finished.