“Talk, now? Montague—we are husband and wife.”
“Husbands and wives can converse on occasion, presumably?”
He might have been amused, but he disengaged her arms from his neck.
“On occasion, perhaps. But on their wedding night? Aren’t there more pressing matters—”
“Nothing is pressing now. We have the rest of our lives, after all.” He paused. “You understand the meaning of the word
know
—as it is used in the Bible?”
“But of course.” Constance smiled. “Adam knew Eve. It means … fuck. I am not a child, Montague.”
Her use of the word
fuck
seemed to annoy him. He frowned. Constance, who had been about to lay one small jeweled hand on his thigh, drew that hand back.
“And so?
Know
—very well, I understand its meaning. What difference does it make?”
“Just that I thought, before we know each other in that way, we should know each other more in others. You know very little about me, Constance, and in some ways, I know very little about you—”
“Montague, how can you say that?” Constance sat up. “Why, you know me through and through—everything that is important about me, I have either told you or you have seen for yourself. You see—look! Here I am, quite naked before my husband.”
As she said this, Constance leaned back once more, so that her black hair fanned out upon the white pillows. She folded her arms behind her head, an attitude that lifted and displayed her breasts to advantage. She waited for this pose to produce the right effect, for Stern to forget this curious desire for conversation.
The pose did not produce that effect. Stern’s face became set.
“Very well. If you choose to believe your nature is transparent to me, you must do so. It is not the case. And I thought you might want … There were certain things I wished to say to you—about myself.”
There was a silence. Constance’s heart gave a sudden skip. She looked more closely at her husband’s face. A struggle seemed to be taking place between this silence and speech, between revelation and reticence. A secret, then! She was about to be told a secret—something, she felt suddenly sure, that Stern had told no one else. What could it be? Might it concern money, some dark event from his earlier life, an event that explained the swiftness of his rise? Or might it be a woman? Attentive now, Constance held her breath.
“I have never told anyone this before,” Stern began slowly. “I shall never tell anyone again. But you are my wife now, and I would like you to know. It concerns my childhood.”
Stern then told Constance a story. It concerned his childhood, as he said, a childhood that had been loving, but one of poverty.
As a boy, he said, the devout child of devout parents, Stern had worn a yarmulke. Provided he remained within the Jewish areas of Whitechapel, this was safe; it was less safe if he ventured farther afield. There, gentile boys threw stones at Jews. Certain streets were protected; others were not.
Once, returning from an errand for his father, an errand that had taken him beyond the Jewish quarter, he was first cornered, then set upon by a group of these gentile boys. He was alone, aged nine. The boys were older, larger, stronger, and there were eight of them. He was carrying a length of worsted cloth, expensive cloth needed for a special order, cloth his father could not afford to replace. This cloth was taken from him, ripped apart with knives, then thrown in the gutter while two of the boys held him pinioned and made him watch.
When the cloth was ruined, one of the boys had a further invention. They snatched the yarmulke from his head. One boy spat on it; another urinated on it; a third had the happy idea of then stuffing it into Stern’s mouth. They told him to eat it. When Stern refused, they took turns at punching him, then kicking him. They broke his nose with a boot cap. They screamed obscenities about his mother and his sisters, kicked him again, grew bored, and then left him.
When he returned home, his mother wept. His father, who was a small man, in poor health, picked up a stick and went out into the streets to look for the boys, but he never found them. The incident seemed to weaken him. It was not long afterward that he contracted pneumonia and died. Stern’s mother was left with six children, Montague being the eldest, and no means of support. Stern, with the backing of his father’s brother, also a tailor, left school and went to work at his father’s bench. Later, when he was thirteen, he was taken on as a messenger boy at a City merchant bank, where he received five shillings a week.
“And that was how I began in business,” he said.
There was then a silence. Constance waited for her husband to continue. Surely, she thought, surely that could not be the whole story? Where was the revelation in that? Why, she could almost have guessed as much. After a while, when Stern still did not speak, she sat up, allowing the sheet to fall away from her breasts. She put her hand in his.
“I am listening,” she said. “Tell me the rest.”
“The rest?” Stern turned back to look at her, his eyes blank. “There is—no rest. That was what I wished to tell you.”
“That was all? But, Montague, I don’t understand. I knew something of that sort might have happened to you. There is prejudice, vile prejudice, and—”
“Something of that sort?” Stern rose. He stood looking down at her. Constance gave a small cry; she attempted to put her arms about his waist.
“Montague—don’t look at me like that! You misunderstand. It is a horrible story—I can see. But still, I feel there is something
more,
something you still leave out. Tell me—please tell me. I shall understand, whatever it is—”
“There is nothing more.”
“Dearest Montague, you can tell me. I am your wife. However terrible—I shall understand. Look, I shall guess. You went after these boys—you knew who they were. You bided your time and then, maybe years later, you took your revenge. Oh!” She gave a small shiver; her eyes had become very bright. “I am right—I can tell by your face. By your eyes. You did something very … bad. What was it? Did you kill one of them, Montague? When I look at you now, I think you could kill. Did you? Did you?”
Stern released her hands. He took a step backward. His expression had become so cold that Constance was silenced.
“I never knew the boys. I never saw any of them, ever again. You have an overdramatic imagination, Constance—also an overactive one. You miss the point, my dear.”
“Miss the point?” Constance was stung by his tone. “Well, no doubt I am being very stupid and slow. Today is my wedding day. I didn’t expect to be carried back to Whitechapel on my wedding night. However, if I am to be—you had better explain. Spell it out, Montague, why don’t you? What is the point?”
There was a silence. Some struggle seemed to take place within Stern.
“You look so very lovely. Your skin. Your hair. Your eyes.” Stern stopped. He looked at Constance, who began to scent victory. She lowered her eyes.
“I thought you must find me ugly. Montague, that was why I was stupid and slow, I—”
“You are not ugly. I have never seen you more beautiful.”
He laid his hand lightly against her throat. He lifted her hair away from her face. Constance thought he hesitated—Stern, who never hesitated. Then he moved away.
“I was damaged once—that is the point. My thinking was damaged and—some people would say—my heart. I wanted you to know that. If you are to understand my character—should you care to do so—it might assist you. The damage has been of great use to me, you see. I turned it to advantage long ago.”
He paused. Constance began, for the first time, to see that she might have made a serious mistake. The tone he now used was so polite it chilled her skin.
“Whenever I find myself about to commit a precipitate action, or say something I will later regret …” He paused, looking her in the eyes. “And that does happen, even on occasion to me—I remember that episode. I think of it, and I find it checks me. It prevents my being rash. It prevents my trusting others—and that is a great advantage, both in business affairs and, I see, with my wife. Goodnight, Constance.”
He opened the door to the next compartment. Constance sprang to the floor. She clasped his arm.
“Montague—what are you doing? Where are you going? I don’t understand. What are you prevented from doing? What do, you choose not to say?”
“Nothing, my dear. Go back to bed.”
“I shall know—you shall tell me! What might you have said?”
“Nothing of any importance. Forget what I said. I’m sure you will.”
“Montague—”
“My dear, I dislike to make love to you on a train—I think that is it. It has been a long journey this far, and a long journey remains ahead of us. It might be better, I think, if we were both to get some sleep.”
He closed the dividing door. Constance heard the bolt drawn across. She began to feel cold; she began to shake. Her nakedness seemed foolish. She hated it. She gave a small angry cry, then wrapped herself tight, head to foot, in her fur coat. She stood quite still, listening.
It was hard to hear any sounds above the wheel’s revolutions, but she thought she heard water run, the rustle of clothes or perhaps sheets. She stared fixedly at the band of light under Stern’s door. After some while the light went off.
Constance considered. If she were to tap on the door or call her husband’s name, she was sure he would come back to her—almost sure. She lifted a hand to rap the panels, then changed her mind and stepped back.
Plead, on her wedding night? Never!
For a while this mood of angry defiance sustained her. She paced up and down the small compartment. She considered what her husband had said; she turned it first this way, then that way. She prised his words apart, like a child taking a new toy to pieces. She reassembled the pieces. Some still did not fit; her husband’s obvious anger remained a mystery—for what had she said to provoke that?
After some half an hour she was convinced: She, Constance, had hit on the correct solution. Only half the story had been told, and the second half, the untold half, was violent—just as she had guessed! Stern had committed some act of revenge, some dark, wicked, diabolical thing, and one day, later if not sooner, she would prise that secret from him. She wanted to know it, inside out!
There it was, she felt: the mysterious source of her husband’s power. It lay in that capacity for violence which he hid from the eyes of the world. Beneath that controlled, polite, urbane exterior lay the secret husband, the predatory husband. Oh, it was dangerous to cross that man. He had the instinct for the jugular, perhaps even—yes—the capacity to kill.
This notion excited Constance. It excited her physically. Her skin prickled to be touched. Her nipples made hard points against the silk lining of her furs. She put her hand between her legs. She closed her eyes. She leaned back against the door that divided her from her husband. She rubbed one finger back and forth. A little beak of pleasure, there, just against her fingertip. It made her hot, also shivery; she could feel the blood rush about her head. To make love to a murderer, to make him spill himself and all his secrets into her, to swallow up all that hard male power—oh, the carnage, the rape and the pillage of such wicked, wicked sex. Who wanted tenderness when they could have this: a trip down a hot dark corridor, to the very darkest place? Constance moaned. She bit her lip. She wriggled and rubbed until her own little hand took her down there to that place she itched to reach. One sweet hot small moment of extinction: the
little death,
poets used to call it—or so Acland once said.
At once Constance felt calmer. All the anger and defiance had gone. She had no inclination now to tap upon her husband’s door. Let him sleep—she could wait! She had no desire for sleep either; she knew that. But Constance was used to sleeplessness, which she preferred to bad dreams—and her dreams were often bad. She whiled away the time in unpacking her overnight case. She took out her new hairbrushes with her new initials: C.S.—the same as her old! She brushed her hair. She admired her wedding nightgown. She looked at the tartan blankets upon the bed, then pulled them off and stuffed them under the bunk where she need not see them. This done, her eye was caught by the sight of her small kid handbag, which she had hung upon a hook on the back of the compartment door. It swung back and forth with the rhythms of the train. Constance considered this pendulum bag; she considered Boy’s note, which must still be inside it.
After a while, growing bored with her other diversions, she took the bag down and drew out the note. She gave a yawn. She slit open the envelope with her nail (no longer bitten—she had cured herself of that). Reproaches, she thought,
how dull,
and she unfolded her letter.
It was not so very long—just one page. Constance read it once; she read it again; she read it a third time. Then, because this letter made her feel cold, made her hands numb, made her body start to quiver and shake, she pushed the letter back in her bag, pushed the bag away, out of sight.
She would not look at it. She did not want to look at it. She pulled on her nightgown and crept between the sheets. She switched off the light. The letter pursued her into bed. It would not let her sleep.
What time was it? Past midnight. There was nothing she could do and no one she could tell.
Where were they? They stopped, sometimes. Every time they stopped, right through the night, Constance crept out of bed. She pushed back the stiff window blind and peered out. But the stations were too dark, or their signs sped by too fast. Birmingham? Manchester? Newcastle? York?
She had no idea of their route, and this frightened her. She hugged her arms tight about her chest. They were traveling north. They were in the dark. They were moving on, faster and faster, when just for once, all she wanted to do was stop.
It did not take long for the wedding guests to disperse. By three, the last of them were leaving. Only Conrad Vickers remained, but he would not stay long. Steenie found the absence of the guests disconcerting. The rest of Steenie’s family seemed to feel this transformation, too, as if the house no longer fitted them. For a while they huddled around the fire in the drawing room, trying to make conversation. Steenie felt as if all the animation in the house had departed with Constance.