Daniel Martin (49 page)

At twenty-five past three he walked back to the linhay at the top edge of the wood. Nancy stood from behind it as he came near, in a short-sleeved yellow shirt, a dark green skirt and wellingtons, her milking ‘clompers’. She had a brown cardigan over her arm, and her cheeks were a high pink, perhaps because there was a redness about the mouth that was not natural indeed, rather startlingly unnatural. Not that he felt like criticizing it. To his eyes she looked frighteningly aloof and adult, two years older at least.

They didn’t kiss, they had a little argument, standing six feet apart. She’d only been five minutes late, she’d come along the top; if only he hadn’t wandered off. In the end, when she lowered her head and turned away, as if she wished she hadn’t come, he went behind her.

I’m not really angry, Nancy. Now you’ve come.

After a moment, she reached out a hand, and he took it. They began to walk away from the farm, to the north. He smelt eau-de-cologne. Their fingers enlaced. After twenty yards she pushed her shoulder against his, and he put his arm round her, while she slipped hers round his waist. Then they stopped and kissed, and it was all right. The lipstick wasn’t lipstick after all, but cochineal stolen from her mother’s pantry.

She led him on, entwined, to her ‘real secret place’, which was out of the wood and through a patch of high bracken and gorse at the top of the farm combe, legally one of its fields, though it was too steep for the plough, useless land. A large flat-topped limestone rock stood there, the ‘Pulpit’, isolated in the sea of bracken. Its downhill side was slightly convex, there was a small platform of flatter earth in front of it. Daniel and she stood there, chest-deep in the fronds. Her elder sisters had brought her there when she was little, they used to clear a place in the terns. They did the same, squashing the stems sideways with their feet, treading the stiff ends flat, till there was a close green-walled room again, six by four. She dropped her cardigan and knelt. He sank facing her and they kissed properly, erect on their knees, clasped in a blasphemous imitation of that morning’s kneeling church. Then Nancy spread out her cardigan and lay on it, sideways, He lay beside her and found her cochineal-stained mouth. After while he moved his right knee on top of her legs. She sank back wards, so that he had to move a little more; then she gave a twist of pain, and they had to sit up, lift the cardigan and press flat an obstinate stump of bracken. But she let him resume his previous position, half on top of her. She became passive, just lay there, let him kiss her cheeks and her eyes and under the chin; then active began to teach him eyelash kisses, ‘cowpecks’, lizard kisses, teasing flicks of her tongue against his cheek. And the sun, the heat, the bracken-flies, a buzzard mewing somewhere out of sight, the cool shadowy depths between the still upright bracken stems around them; all beautiful, except the swollen agony of his penis pressed against her thigh. It threatened to burst, he could feel its wetness, he didn’t know what to do. Suddenly he twisted away and sat up and prayed for continence.

“What’s wrong?’

He shook his head. She sat up beside him.

‘Danny?’

He shook his head again. (For some mysterious reason, he didn’t mind ‘Danny’ from her.)

‘Danny, tell me what’s wrong?’

He leant forward. ‘Nothing. Just leave me alone a minute.’ He said, ‘Please.’

She turned back on her elbow, away from him. There was a fraught silence.

‘I don’t think you really love me at all.’

‘Yes I do.’

‘All you think of is…’

‘What?’

‘You know.’

‘I can’t help it. I do try.’

Another silence.

‘Is it when you kiss me?’ He nodded. ‘We’d better not kiss any more then.’

‘It’s just…’

More silence.

He said nothing. ‘It’s the same for us. Only we don’t make such a fuss about it.’

He couldn’t find the words to say that it couldn’t be the same for girls. At least they could hide what they felt.

‘Please don’t be angry.’

‘I just want to kiss. That’s all.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m only sixteen.’

She spoke as if she were two years younger, instead of two months older, than him.

‘I honestly can’t help it.’

He felt better, safely detumescent, but now he couldn’t look at her. They waited, like strangers. Then she spoke in a low voice.

‘At least you don’t show off about it. I s’pose that’s something.’

The tone was resentful, but he recognized that it held some sort of forgiveness and some consoling information. Other boys had the same problem, it seemed.

Did he…?

‘He was horrid.’ She suddenly added, with a tiny touch of venom, ‘Disgusting.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘I won’t tell anyone.’

But she avoided his eyes, still leaning on her elbow and half turned away, and shook her head.

‘Is that why you sent him packing?’

‘Perhaps.’

He also leant back on his elbow, his back to hers.

‘I’d never do anything like that. I love you.’

‘You don’t know what it was.’

‘I can guess.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She said, ‘And anyway. He doesn’t know any better. He doesn’t go to boarding-school.’

He’d never understand girls. Not in a thousand years. The silence grew unendurable.

‘Nancy?’

‘Yes’

‘I wish you wouldn’t be angry with me.’ For a few moments she said nothing, but then he felt her turn and pull his shoulder gently round. She stared a moment into his eyes, then leant forward impulsively and quickly kissed his cheek, then leant away again. But he reached a hand behind her back and pulled her to him. Once more they lay side by side. Sonata form. da capo, though she pressed less against him and he did not try climb on top of her again. After a while they lay with their faces a few inches apart, staring into each other’s eyes, the tiff surmounted; the mystery of love, of liking, gender, this strange new closeness outside family, past, other friends. He let his hand rest on her waist and once again felt bare skin; cautiously let the hand edge round the bare skin to her back. She closed her eyes. He ran a finger down the spine furrow, over the vertebrae. She gave a little squirm, but her eyes stayed closed. He began to smooth upwards under the shirt. The underside of his forearm on her skin, the curved smallness of her back. He touched a thin strap. She opened her eyes; spoke like a village girl.

‘You’re worse than Bill.’

But she was pressing a smile out of her mouth; her eyes had depths.

‘Your skin’s so smooth.’

He ran his hand along the strap towards where her arm lay down her side. She let it creep underneath, then pressed down.

‘Please.’

‘You said you’d be good.’

‘I am being good.

‘No you’re not.’

‘Please.’

‘It’s wicked.’

‘Nancy.’

‘I don’t want you to.’

‘Just let me feel.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want to.’

‘You’ll go all funny again.’

‘No I won’t. Please.’

She stared at him a long moment more, then she said, ‘Close your eyes.’

He felt her push his arm from underneath her shirt as she sat up a little. There was a brief movement, then she was back by his side. opened his eyes again, but now hers were closed. He explored her side beneath the shirt to the strap again, touched its loosened end, then down in front, the curve of flesh beneath the now lax cotton cup. Again it was like a dream; quite literally, like ten thousand past daydreams. His fingers touched the infinitely secret, the so often imagined, the so seemingly unattainable: a stiffened nipple. She lay absolutely still. He covered the small breast with his hand, felt its silky smoothness, softness, roundness, firmness.

‘Please let me see it.’

‘You said just feel.’

‘If only I could just see it.’

He ran his hand backwards and forwards over the breast, then down to where the other, pressed against the ground, curved out as well.

‘Please, Nancy. I won’t do anything. I won’t be rough.’

‘Do you love me?’

‘You know I do.’

‘You promise. Just look.’

‘Honestly. I swear.’

She hesitated a moment more, then all in one movement half sat, pulled up the shirt as if she was going to take it off, but stopped at the armpits, then lay back with her head turned away, her hands still holding the sides of the shirt up, the breasts bare: a gesture and offering so naive, so innocent that it was quite sexless. But the breasts were charming, irresistible in their plumpness, their pink-brown excited tips, their invitation. The stomach, its navel, the naked waist; a little rim of pinching white lisle that peeped above the green skirt. He put his hand out. The shirt jerked. ‘You promised!’

‘I want to kiss them.’

A moment, then the shirt was allowed cautiously up again. He touched the nipples with tight-pressed lips. But almost at once she pulled the shirt right down and sat up.

‘That’s enough.’

‘Oh please. Nancy? I wasn’t rough.’

‘It makes me shy.’

She reached behind to do up the straps of the brassiere But he sat up as well and drew her back against him, slipped his hands beneath the shirt, appled the budding curves again. She made small struggle, tried to pull his hands away, then acquiesced. After a moment her head came round, and they kissed. He was tumid of course, the same old agony but somehow it seemed endurable after that early near-disaster. He felt drowned in happiness, which was only partly sexual; to have so many fears so comprehensively killed, to know that back at school the days of stupid lies and false boasts were over… he had kissed a girl and touched her tits. Daniel sensed dimly, at long last, what all the filth and crudity was about; and how inadequate it was, how it left out of account the emotion, the softness, the wanting to please, not wanting to hurt; how girls were not just jam-rags and protuberances, revolting blood and masturbated semen, taboo and fetish; but all you weren’t and much, much nicer, softer, more mysterious.

How long they would have sat like this, his fondling, more kisses, whispers… there was a distant cry, from far below, the farm. They froze.

‘Naan. Naan?’

Mrs Reed wailing for her.

Nancy clasped her hand to her mouth and leant away; began to do herself up.

‘Oh lawky, it’s mum.’

They heard the voice cry again, half a mile away down beyond the beech-wood; the voice of the righteous and deceived, accusing their wickedness. It was all blurred then, beastly; hasty agreement that he would stay out of sight for another quarter of an hour, you could see the Pulpit Rock from the meadow opposite the farm. Mrs Reed might be there looking back, two heads would catastrophe; what Nancy should say, what pretend; a frantic licking of her handkerchief and rubbing the last of the cochineal from her lips (and his), a frantic last kiss… then she was creeping away, her head bent low, through the bracken towards the edge of the beech-hanger.

So endeth the first lesson.

It very nearly, as he learnt in hurried whispers the next day ended all. Her mother had given her ‘such a funny look’ when she arrived home. Bill Hannacott had called, it seemed, and was now gone away again looking for her. She had no right ‘gallivanting off’ on her own all afternoon without telling them where she was going. Nancy had had to sacrifice a pawn: telling her mother she had gone off on her own just because Bill might come over. Which had led to a cross-examination under that heading, but finally a more sympathetic one, since Mrs Reed (it was revealed later that evening) had never liked this threatened liaison with chapel (though the Hannacotts had good land and farmed well). If Nancy didn’t want him coming courting, very well; but tell the lad out so plain, and her mother first. It seemed on the face of it a killing of two birds with one stone, since Bill had returned in due course, not seen Nancy (who’d hidden upstairs in her bedroom) and had been firmly dealt with by Mrs Reed. That left one weak flank, however.

‘Didn’t she ask why you didn’t like him any more?’

Nancy gave him a mock-prim little stare. ‘Said he was always trying to kiss me. Said I didn’t like boys like that.’ Then she looked demurely down and bit her lips. They had to turn away from each other to choke their giggles. Deception was fun again.

All this during harvesting. The weather reverted to good, they had it all done, the cutting part of it, by late on the Saturday. But they had no meetings. Though Daniel could see nothing changed in Mrs Reed, Nancy insisted that she was ‘on the sniff’. They had to be extra careful so extra careful that he did not see her one single evening on his way home. She had promised to be by the kilns on the Wednesday, and he had passed a miserable half-hour waiting or her. But she hadn’t come. Mrs Reed had felt tired and Nancy had had to help get the supper ready. She was so contrite the next day, so frightened that he would be angry, that he forgave her at once. But the frustration grew intolerably.