The Lying Days (11 page)

Since he had caressed me, Ludi's physical presence overcame me like a blast of scent; the smell of his freshly ironed shirt sleeve, as he leaned across me at the table, made me forget what I was saying to Mrs. Koch; the pulse beating beneath the warm look of the skin on his neck where there was no beard held my eyes; the contact of his bare leg against mine in the car almost choked me as something opened up inside my body, pressing against my heart and opening, opening. When somebody spoke to him my heart pounded slowly, as if the significance of talking to him was something they could not understand as I did. When Matthew called Master Ludi! Master Lu-di! across the garden, I smiled alone with warm pleasure. And I began to watch anxiously every young woman who knew the Kochs and who came to the house or was visited or merely met with in the village. I began to be terribly afraid that someone else might feel Ludi's presence as suffocatingly as I did. I ran over names anxiously in my mind. I even began to worry about the things he wore. I noticed that he had two pairs of hand-knitted socks, and remembered that Mrs. Koch had told me that the one piece of knitting she would never attempt was the knitting of socks. I went to the trouble of planning and rehearsing a whole dialogue in my mind that would lead up naturally to the name of the giver of the socks. When I put it into practice, Mrs. Koch's innocent digressions led the conversation away from instead of toward the subject of the socks, and I was left with the question unanswered and suddenly more urgent than ever. Ludi was putting water in the car. I went
straight out to him. I walked round the car once and then stopped.

“Ludi, who made those socks for you?”

“What socks?”

I faltered—“You know. Your mother's darning them, a sort of light blue pair, and some gray ones.”

“Why, what's wrong with them? Mrs. Plaskett made them for old Plaskett and they were too big. What's wrong about them?”

But to my dismay I found that the sense of security is something that is constantly in danger in love. A day later, when Ludi was clearing out an ottoman full of old clothes, he came upon a pullover that he had evidently believed lost. He came into the kitchen, holding it up. “Look what's here. …”

Mrs. Koch left the tap running. “Maud's pull-over! But where was it?”—Then it reminded her, she rubbed her wet hands reproachfully down her apron—“Ludi, you should have gone over there, you know. They would so like to have seen you. You really should. …”

“No harm came to it.” Ludi was holding the pull-over up to the light, carefully. “Not even a moth. I told you that stuff was jolly good, Mother. Look, it's been in that ottoman mixed up with a lot of rubbish for months, and there's not even a pinhole.” Now they went on to argue about the name of the insecticide that had been used to spray the ottoman, and the pull-over was forgotten. Later I said, as if I had just remembered: “What did you do with that pullover you found, Ludi?”—It was discovered that it was lost all over again, because he'd put it down in the kitchen and left it there. Then Matthew found it in the linen basket.

“How all the old ladies look after you,” I said. “Everyone seems to contribute to your wardrobe.”

“She's not an old lady.”

“But your mother said, ‘Maud's pull-over.' ”

He gave a little grunt, half-amusement, half-chary. “Maud Harmel made it for a bet. She was wild about horses, never did anything but ride all day. I used to kid her, and she bet me she could do anything I'd name that any woman could do—you know, at home, the kind of thing most women do—. So I said, just like that, make a pull-over—and forgot about it. Anyway, she made it and this is
it. But didn't you meet the Harmels from Munster—? Oh, no, of course you couldn't—I was forgetting we haven't been over to see them this time. …”

My heart always sank a little at the casualness with which he remembered or forgot the facts of my presence, sometimes not remembering how long I had been staying with them, and vague about the places I had seen and things I had done during the first part of my stay. By contrast, I was almost ashamed of the minuteness of detail with which I remembered everything pertaining to him. Now I was so downcast by the small fact of Ludi's not knowing whether or not I had met a certain group of their friends, that my interest in the maker of the pull-over was eclipsed.

I was too young to want that which I loved to be human. Even in the attraction of Ludi's body, I wanted the ideal rather than the real. My idea of love had come to me through the symbols, the kiss, the vow, the clasped hands, and this child's belief was bewildered even while it enjoyed the realities of heat, membrane, touch and taste. Though tears of ecstasy came to my eyes while I waited for Ludi to touch my breasts and look upon them, naked, the thought that he might want to see the rest of my body filled me with shame. I felt he could not know of the little triangle of springy hair that showed up against my white groins with their pale blue veins. I was terrified that if he saw me, he might be repulsed. I would lie in the bath looking down at myself with distaste, wishing I might be like the women in the romantic paintings I had seen, whose dimpled stomachs simply gave way to the encroaching curve of thighs.

The one time Ludi ever embarrassed me was when I was lying on the beach with my arms above my head and he asked me, tenderly, as one asks a child why she has scratched her knees, why I shaved my armpits. The blood of acute embarrassment fanned over me. That he knew that I grew hair under my arms! I said, muffled: “Everybody does it.”

“Women are silly. They're very attractive, those little soft tufts of hair. But of course you shave it, and make it coarse, like an old man's beard.”

I was so astonished at this view that I sat up, curious. And it
became one of those intimate conversations that make people feel a delicious surrender of inconsequential confidence, very exciting to someone who discovers for the first time this special kind of talk that is released by physical intimacy.

Sometimes when we found ourselves unexpectedly alone but certain to be rejoined by the life of the household at any moment (even the appearance of one of the cats, stalking silently in about its own business, made me start) we would stand together kissing as if at a leave-taking, and he would flatten his hands down my back into the notch of my waist and then cup them round my buttocks. At once I would flinch away, almost crossly put myself out of the way of his hands. But he was not offended. Here in the sweet closeness of intimacy the ten years between us opened up a gulf. I lowered my eyelids, mouth pulled accusingly. But he looked at me gently, with a short catch and release of the breath, smiling comfortingly at me, only wishing to take care not to offend. Clinging to his hard, fast-beating chest, he knew that with my eyes shut tight I could not take that ten-years' dark jump in one leap. With gentle, sensuous selfishness, he only wished to enjoy me as far as I was ready to go, and sometimes, indeed, after a still, absorbed minute of passion when he knew nothing, he would come to himself quite abruptly simply to prevent me from following a blind instinct of desire which later I would not understand and might even disgust me.

On Saturday afternoon Mrs. Koch had to go to a wedding. Ludi was leaving on Monday morning, and she did not want to go, but the obligation of being a very old friend of the bride's mother was something that made an excuse out of the question for her. It was the first week in February and the first day of February heat, and when we had driven her to the MacVies', who were to take her with them to the ceremony at a village twenty miles inland, we drove slowly back to the farm through heat without air, a heat that now burned silent and intense as the heart of a fire after it has seized crackling on all life—trees, grass, flowers. The house was preoccupied with the heat, and as I knelt on the sofa at the window, I saw, outside in the stillness, the very tops of the trees tremble slowly in anticipation of rain. For the first time we lay down together alone in the house. At once I struggled up again, as if I were fussing about
the bed of an invalid. “Wait a minute, let's get the cushion—” Ludi let his head be arranged with tugs at the cushion which turned it this way and that. Then I half lay down, but immediately got up to take off my shoes. Then I lay down beside him, moving my toes and sighing with my eyes shut. After a moment of sinking pleasure, I rose to wakefulness and opened them to see him looking at me, smiling under half-closed lids. I wondered how I looked at that angle, my cheek pushed by the pillow, and put up my hand to judge the distortion. But my hand came into contact with his jaw and I felt the wonderful shock of a burning warmth other than my own flesh; I rolled over to bury my face in the angle between his neck and the cushion.

I had a night of my own in there. The warm sweetness of the skin felt but unseen, breathing out a slight moisture from the afternoon heat, was the essence, the surrender of Ludi himself in darkness. I seemed to sink into it, it lay upon my eyelids and my lips like warm rain, and I fell through it, falling, falling as one does in the mazy stratosphere between consciousness and sleep. Then I suddenly became aware of another presence; something else came and stood beside me in the darkness. The damp, cottony smell of the cushion in its thin, soft, faded cover beneath my cheek, musty from the climate and faintly musky with the impress of the cats' round bodies, was sharp and sad to my nostrils, like the sudden cold blow across water in a landscape waiting for rain. Tears pricked at my eyes with strange pleasure. The smell of the cushion was the distillation of the friendly house, of our lives moving about there with the animals and old Matthew, of our voices lingering about the rooms, our calls in the garden unanswered by the glitter of the sea, the whole transience of this time that seemed my life but that would set me down at some point (although it would be soon, it did not seem so) and continue, far off and spiced, after I had awoken and gone.

I stirred and lifted my head into the room again, now filled with the queer presaging yellow light of a storm taking place unheard somewhere between us and the hidden sun. But Ludi was not looking at me now. His eyes, lids tender-looking from the protection of glasses, were closed and his whole face was beautiful with the tension of inward concentration. The corner of his mouth relaxed and
then pressed back white against his cheek. He tightened his arms around me but I felt that for him I was not there. And the light, deepening to the greenish gold of wine or pools far down from the sun, lay solemnly on his cheek, but he merely flickered the thin skin of one eyelid, not able to notice what it was that passed over him. He began to kiss me in this concentration and to caress me, and soon I was in it too. It held me and I kissed him and gripped him back and I felt I was trying with all the gathered distress of my body to get somewhere, to reach something. He lay on top of me and he was heavy and that was what I wanted. I wanted him to be more heavy. He could not be heavy enough. I did not know what I wanted, but that I wanted. All at once, an astonishing sensation startled me. As if I had turned my head only in time to see something whipped away, my eyes flew open—. Ludi was gone, lifted away from me; he stood in the shadowy corner by the sofa, shapeless in rumpled clothes, pressing the palms of his hands up behind his ears.

I cried sharply: “Ludi! Come back!”

I lay hysterically rigid, exactly as he had left me.

“Ludi!”

He came slowly over, almost lumbering, and stood at the foot of the sofa. “I can't,” he said, gently.

“Ludi,” I said, not moving, “it was such a wonderful—so wonderful just now. Come back.”

He shook his head. “It's impossible,” looking down at me.

I must have him back. I must find out. I must go back and find what I was about to feel. I felt my eyes terribly wide open, fixed on his.

He sat down on the edge of the sofa and gently bent my bare foot in his hand. At the same time I loved him desperately and I resented the lax gentleness expressed in his touch. “It's physically impossible,” he explained, gently, reluctantly. He stood up again, smiling at me. “I must go and fix myself up. I'll be back in a minute.”

I watched him go out, so untidy, with a curious, disturbed look at the back of his hair, and as I lay, not waiting, but simply lying, my body slowly let go. Now I became conscious of a need to move
my leg to another position, and, beyond my slow, deep breathing, heard that it was raining. It must have been raining for some time because the rain had already found its rhythm. All the room was darkened with the shade cast by the rain.

Ludi came back with the air of brightness of people who have just washed their faces and combed their hair, and as he filled the doorway he seemed to be very big and heavy-shouldered and somehow not responsible for, signaling appealingly as a prisoner from, his heavy man's frame. He lay down in the dimness beside me, quietly, hands behind his head. The warmth of his side made me sigh and smile. We lay a long while, perhaps five minutes. I was happy and sad, troubled and serene, bewildered and at rest. And I was thinking, vaguely, in snatches and dashes. And when I spoke, it was not of conscious intention, but like a sentence thrown out loud in sleep, the kind of accurate chance sum of thoughts and ideas not consciously computed in the mind.

“Ludi, have you ever slept with anyone?”

I think he knew what I was asking better than I knew myself. Ignoring the naïveté, the foolishness of the question, which he saw were not the question itself, he said, perfectly gravely, “Yes, miss, I have.”—He called me “miss” the way one flatters a little girl; it was his word of endearment for me.

A weak protest of pain flowed over me, as if the protective fluid of a blister somewhere inside me had been released.—Now when I put a finger on the spot it would be raw, unprotected by ignorance. I was silent.

Suddenly it did not seem ridiculous to him to be apologetic. He began to comfort me by excusing himself and I believe he really meant it. For the moment he really believed I had the right to complain of the ten years of life he had had while I dragged a toe in the dust of my childhood, disconsolate, waiting. He said the oldest, comforting words, that were new to me. “Always very perfunctory. It's no good without any real feeling, any other relationship to back it. Honestly”—he was looking at me now, not seeing me properly in the dark of the rain, without his glasses, his close, bristly lashes that I secretly loved so much, showing bright as he narrowed his gaze—“It's no good.” He put his arm under my head. I thought, he
means it would be different with me. He means he loves me. I was suddenly utterly happy. I turned my head until I could rub my nose on the hairs of his forearm.