Grand Days (65 page)

‘Do I have to tell you my sins in reply?'

She hadn't thought too much about that. If his vices were as off-course as Ambrose's had been, maybe she should know before the wedding day. But she couldn't conceive of breaking it off now, regardless of what he told her. Not even, she decided, if he admitted to Ambrose's vice, although she considered that unthinkable. At least if it were that, she would be experienced in dealing with it. ‘I can't conceive of anything which you could tell me which would cause me to reconsider,' she said, wondering whether that was true. How much about the world did she still not know? ‘I did make enquiries — we have observed each other's conduct over a few years.' Yet this too was a foolish thing to say. People had observed her and Ambrose when they'd been together and suspected nothing. Or had they suspected? Bartou had talked of eunuchs. Obviously there'd been talk of
something
fishy. She was again startled at how she must have looked to others after having been Ambrose's escort for so long. ‘I withdraw that statement,' she said, wanting to be at her intelligent best with Robert, ‘at least the part about having observed each other. I realise that what we see of other people in public is not the full story.'

‘Quite.'

‘What I am about to say concerns Ambrose, inescapably. It is therefore in strictest confidence.'

His interest was clearly aroused yet he was struggling with a question of propriety. ‘I'm not at all sure we need to do this confessing. I already know that when you awaken in the morning you like to discuss your night of sleep as if you have been on a long journey. I know that you once shaved Eric Drummond although I still find that difficult to believe.'

She smiled at him, seeing that he was implying that they not pursue it. Should she take the dispensation? ‘As for the matter of sleep,' she said, ‘I consider that if someone has been absent for eight hours in an interesting place, it should be talked about. As for my confessions, you, as a writer, should be curious.'

‘But I write mysteries.'

‘With serious intentions.'

Or did writers make our secrets more frightening?

He didn't comment.

‘From you,' she said, ‘I ask only that you tell me that which you consider could affect our love or marriage.'

‘Why don't you apply that test to your own confessions?'

Should she say that she was also using her confessions to discover what sort of person he was? Was he someone like Florence who might recoil from her? She also wanted to
share
her experiences, to be able to scrutinise them with another human being, and to be told by another human being that what she had done to herself was not contemptible or ruinous. To have someone else answer Florence's question about what she might have done to her womanhood.

‘I am applying that test,' she said, allowing fear to trickle through her.

‘Then I await this revelation with wonder,' he said, rather cockily.

Did he think that her life had been such that she could not shock him? That she was a person who could not possibly have led a life within which bizarre experience occurred? She gazed at him speculatively and nervously. Or did he want her to be the sort of woman who'd led a correct and suitable life? He had not expected a virgin, she knew that. Or did he? ‘You were not disappointed that I wasn't virginal?'

‘I would've thought less of you if you had been. I would have then found myself with an inappropriate person, a person who would have been an unsuitable match to my own misspent life. We are both people of our times. We are both
voyageurs
.'

‘Yes, we are.' That was right. That was how she saw them both.

She then told him of Ambrose's predilection and how she had happily indulged him in it and how she had enjoyed the perversity of it and she told a little about the Molly Club.

He listened without speaking but he widened his eyes theatrically and put on a small accepting smile, all intended to reassure her that he was not recoiling. ‘I have never had an inclination to dress as a woman — that is my first reaction to your confession,' he said, ‘but I did have a friend who preferred men. My second reaction is that if I were to find such an inclination in myself, I have the right companion.'

She considered whether the second part of his answer constituted a foreshadowing of something but decided that it did not. ‘I don't think that Ambrose really wants men. He wants to be a womanly man among women,' she said. Robert had not said anything about what it had meant about her womanhood. ‘You do not think that my having indulged in this degrades me as a woman?'

He seemed to consider this. ‘To me, it makes you a woman who has seen something of the world. Who knows about
the deviance of human beings. I've heard of this club but have never been there. You must take me there.' He seemed openly curious.

‘Maybe.'

Now for the harder part. Jerome.

Before she could begin, he added some more information, perhaps trying to show that he was also knowledgeable about this part of life. ‘I know of Follett. I hadn't quite connected him with the club. I know him in another role.'

‘How?' She asked as a conversational courtesy, overriding her impatience to get her story told.

‘As a patron of the arts. He gives money to the Museum of Geneva and makes other such gestures. Some say he spies for one or other of the non-member governments. We live in a nest of spies.'

‘I suppose so.' She would eventually have to tell that she had also been the lover of a spy. She wondered whether Ambrose and Follett were spying confederates. She stored that away for another time.

‘Is there more?' he asked.

‘There is a further confession,' she said. She wanted to be quickly and absolutely reassured that he was not recoiling or would not recoil at some other time in the future. She fervently hoped that he would be able to so convince her.

She told of what she'd done in Paris with Jerome, an unknown Negro man. As she told it, she remembered Ambrose's reaction. He had never been able to joke about it, but nor had she ever known quite what he saw that night. It was the one thing which he had never turned into banter. She realised as she told of that night that it was not only about a lasciviousness in her nature but also about a man who was black. That was something she had not really ever been able to think about. It
was a psychological nerve centre. The blackness and her subordination. And nor could she focus on it, nor deal with it. But if she could not explain it, she could at least tell it.

She tried to tell it with lascivious detail.

‘I remember it as being very rigid, yet it was not hard, and it was hot and became wet quickly, not only from the wetness of my mouth.'

‘In the room
Artiste?
' His voice told her that he was responding well to her telling, but his question was a way of maintaining his balance in the conversation.

‘Yes.'

‘Where were the others?'

‘Ambrose came looking for me. He came to the door of the room
Artiste
but I don't know what he saw.'

‘You think he saw you?'

‘I don't know what he saw.'

She sat silently, not wanting to prejudice or falsify his responses by making insecure requests for assurance.

‘He didn't say anything?'

She tried to give out a nervous giggle. ‘He said: “
Adieu, belle vamp australienne
.”'

‘I really meant Ambrose — what did he say?'

‘About this? Nothing.'

‘It is true that I am amazed,' he said. ‘Truly amazed.'

She chilled and rushed to say, ‘As difficult as it may be to understand, at the time it did not feel unnatural that this should happen.'

‘I think I can understand the urgings towards the exotic.' She watched as he found things to do with his hands. He blew his nose.

It was Jerome's blackness that unsettled him as it had allured her. Then he looked back to her eyes and said, ‘We shouldn't
regret our experiences.' She did not regret them at all. He had gone to a platitude.

It was not a fully personal response. But he had not exploded, flared, or shattered. She still needed more assurance. It was a different Robert Dole she was meeting. Not the Robert Dole who had told her to go read Erasmus and to consider the unconsidered particulars of life. He was being something of a man of the world but he was not quite a man of repose who could take with nonchalance all that the world could parade before him.

She said, ‘It was such wayward conduct. It was going out of bounds but I was exhilarated.'

He sat pondering it all. She watched his face.

She became apprehensive again and rushed to say, ‘I am not
that sort of person
. But I am a woman who has done that thing. That's all. Done it with a stranger.'

She wanted to make it absolutely clear to him. ‘I am the sort of woman who has done that with a black man.'

He did not hesitate in his reply. ‘It's all right, Edith. Nothing in your “confession” causes me to shrink from you. For me, colour does matter dreadfully even if I believe that we must sometimes pretend, anyhow, that it doesn't matter.'

‘Do you fear it?'

‘I can never really get around it to the person. It is so …' he struggled for his words, ‘it is a very visible difference. It demands that I see the person as different.'

‘But we mustn't let it affect judgements?'

‘No. To pretend that it doesn't matter to us is an honourable pretence.'

‘So, in my confession, it is that which bothers you?'

‘It astounds me. But he was a musician. It was jazz music. It was Paris. But I am astounded that you could overcome so much
in yourself to be able to do that. It is the leap in conduct which astounds and impresses me.'

It was honest of him to admit to being astounded. She could see that he was not going to be disgusted. ‘Yes, it was Paris. He was a musician. It was the only time in my life that anything remotely like that has happened.'

He said quietly, his composure returning, ‘There is another thing about it.'

‘Yes?'

‘I found your description and the way you enjoyed it, I found that exciting me. And perhaps sometime,' he smiled handsomely, ‘perhaps you will do it for me?'

She was now reassured. She smiled assent and compliance. ‘It will come to happen and you must know now that my body is for you only. For you in whatever way will arouse pleasure in you.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Thank you for hearing me and for accepting what you heard.'

He said, ‘I have been with other women. But I have never loved before, properly.' He paused, as if about to tell her some appalling secret, as if it were hard for him to say. He coughed and said, ‘I have only truly been with one other woman, in a loving way. Back in England when I was young.'

She realised then that in these matters she might be more experienced than he. In panic she sensed that this was not good for a man.

She had rarely been
more experienced
than others in anything. She didn't want to overwhelm him with her knowingness. ‘I have had only one lover, really — Ambrose,' she said, ‘and as you see, he was not fully of ease as a man. I really am something of an innocent.' She wanted him to feel secure.

‘Experienced enough.'

She glanced at him to be sure in what tone he had said that. It was affectionate.

‘I think we are both experienced enough,' she said.

‘But I do have a confession,' he said. He began his confession in return. ‘On leave during the War some unusual things happened. I have, for instance, been in the same room as my friend while we were with women. Paid women.'

‘You were each with women? In the same room?' This interested her.

She asked whether they had done it because of the lack of another room.

‘We did it because it seemed appealing to drunken soldiers.'

‘You found it appealing?'

‘Oh yes, very.'

‘You liked the noises? The sounds of it?'

‘Yes.'

‘You watched your friend and the woman?'

‘Yes.'

‘You liked seeing your friend enter the woman?'

‘Yes, I did.'

Tentatively, she queried whether he wanted to repeat the experience.

‘Not involving you,' he laughed. ‘Some of the bizarre things of life come to us when we are wandering lost. There is no one more lost than a soldier on leave in a strange city. When we aren't lost, these out of character experiences don't occur.'

She saw that he might be right. But she struggled to say that she felt the experiences she'd had represented another part of her which was also her true self. But she could see that all the selves within one could not be fully lived out, were not all compatible.

‘I was not out of character,' she said. ‘It was me.'

He grinned. ‘Then nor was I “out of character”.'

Their conversation became a low, happy collusion, and they questioned their way back over their experiences openly but carefully. They delighted in the cautious liberty of their conversation. It was a different liberty to that which she'd had with Ambrose. With Ambrose life had always to be fitted to banter. With him, matters which could not be made into humour could not be talked of. With Robert, an erotic precision of wording and feeling mattered most.

As they talked, she marvelled that two people who'd known each other for so long could have combusted into love and found a new, vivid awareness of each other.

Negotiated positions were often disappointing: less shining than the hoped-for outcome, less shining than the preliminary rhetoric of hopes and dreams which came before negotiations began. But their love was a negotiated position which didn't fail the shining vision of either of the negotiators.