Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  No details; Freddie’s mind could not deal with details now. What he saw was a blur to him, and later, when he tried to conjure the details, they continued to escape him. A pursed softness, mauve flesh; a dampness. Freddie groaned.

  “Let me touch—oh, Connie, please. Let me touch you. Quickly, quickly—someone may come up.”

  Constance pushed his hand aside. “Watch. Wait,” she said (as she always said), and Freddie, terrified to disobey, withdrew his hand. He clenched it, thrust it into his pocket, touched himself. Below him, on Acland’s bed, Constance’s face became blank and concentrated.

  Her little hand moved faster; one finger rubbed and glistened. Freddie—who by then could not understand what she was doing at all, but who was beyond caring—rubbed himself against the warmth of his own palm. Yet, something was happening to Constance; even the pet snake seemed to sense some danger. Constance’s body lifted; the snake slithered toward her head, and rested coiled on the pillow by her hair.

  Constance bent her knees; she raised her haunches from the bed; her throat arched back as if in spasm, and her eyes closed. She shuddered, jerked, and then was still. It was like a minor convulsion, even a little like death. Freddie was, for a moment, terrified; urgent though it was to touch himself, his hand fell still.

  A brief pause, then Constance opened her eyes.

  She wiped her damp hand on Acland’s bedcover. She made a deep and purring sound of contentment; she stroked the back of her snake, outlined the dark diamonds of its spine with one finger. Then, composed once more, she lifted her arms, folded them behind her head, looked up at Freddie.

  “You can do it now, Freddie,” she said, in the sweetest voice Freddie had ever heard her use. “I know you do it, in your room with the door locked. You were half doing it then. Go on—do it properly. I want to see it. I want to look at it. I want to see you. You can do it on me if you like; then we won’t make a mess in Acland’s bedroom. Please, Freddie, dear Freddie. I want to watch. Do it. Do it now….”

  Was that her birthday present? Was that Constance’s gift, first to let him watch her and then to watch her watching him? To be at once both surreptitious and free, to obtain a glorious release, in a way he had never imagined possible with a woman, in a way that he later decided was dirty, depraved, and probably taboo (and therefore all the more glorious). That, Freddie told himself, that had indeed been his birthday present.

  The next day he was less sure. He remembered the events of the previous night more coolly then, against the background of impending war. He watched his mother, weeping, as Boy and Dunbar departed, recalled to their regiment. He watched the other guests depart. He watched all these things, and by the end of that long, hot, oppressive day, when Sir Montague had gone and even Acland had left for London, he found himself alone, the last young man of their party still at Winterscombe. By nightfall a nasty and sick certainty took hold of him: Constance’s present had been given before they even entered Acland’s bedroom. Constance’s present had been the bundle of Boy’s photographs; Constance’s present had been the destruction of his image of his brother.

  That day, Freddie had found it very difficult to meet his brother’s eyes. He had been distant when Boy took his departure, even though he knew it was possible that something terrible might happen and he might never see Boy again.

  Guilt came to Freddie once his brother had left; guilt, and gloom, and disgust at his own behavior. He was very cool to Constance that day, indeed avoided her. He was cool the next day as well, and the day after that. Then it occurred to him that if Constance had noticed this coolness, she seemed unaffected by it. She behaved as if nothing had happened at all.

  Freddie found this maddening. A curious, unaccountable jealousy seized him. From worrying about his brother and his own behavior, he turned to worrying about Constance. Did she hate him? Was she disappointed in him? Would she ever be with him, look at him, touch him, again?

  A week. Constance waited a week, and then (perhaps when she judged that Freddie had argued himself back where she wanted him) she made another assignation. After that, more waiting, more agony and indecision and longing on Freddie’s part. Then the crumb of another little meeting was tossed his way.

  Meeting after meeting, hiding place after hiding place, summer into autumn, autumn into winter. It was a strange time.

  Looking back later, Freddie would know that it was not a happy time; as the months passed he felt no contentment. All around him his life was changing, and the pillars that had held up the structure of his world were falling. Boy had sent for his manservant; he was overjoyed to be posted to northern France. Acland was away in London, at the Foreign Office, doing work that—Gwen stressed—was of national importance. One by one, as the weeks passed, the servants were caught up in the war fever: Denton encouraged the men to join up (even threatened with dismissal those who were tardy in doing so); Arthur Tubbs left, surprising Freddie; Jack Hennessy enlisted, and his three brothers followed him; all the younger footmen left, and the drivers and the gardeners and the keepers and the estate workers. Freddie himself helped to bring in the last of the harvest that year; he worked in the fields bitterly, surrounded by old men.

  War, war, war: no one talked of anything else; it was the only subject in the newspapers, and the expectation of an early victory was still strong. At the breakfast table, letters from the front were read: Boy sounded elated and cheerful; waiting for a posting to the front line, he had passed an afternoon near Chartres, bird watching.

  Little to fear from this war. Freddie associated it with the packing of food parcels, the rousing tunes of the bands that accompanied the recruiting officers through the villages. He associated it with excitement, with a new sense of national purpose, and—in his own case—with frustration and shame.

  For what had happened, within weeks of the declaration of war? Why, he had been escorted by Gwen to a famous Harley Street specialist recommended by Montague Stern. This specialist examined Freddie at length. His blood pressure was taken, before and after exercise. Feeling a great fool, Freddie ran up and down on a small moving platform, dressed only in undershirt and underpants. His pulse was taken. Blood samples were taken. An X ray was taken. A most thorough and exhaustive physical inspection was made. At the end of this, Gwen was readmitted. The specialist looked grave.

  It was, he said, quite out of the question for Frederic to join up, and if conscription ever came, Frederic would be exempt. Frederic, he explained, had a slight irregularity in the heart valves. Had he perhaps experienced palpitations, episodes of dizziness? Freddie had, of course, and very recently, too—but those were not occasions he could mention then. He denied any malaise. The doctor remained adamant. Frederic had a weak heart; he should lose weight, exercise gently, avoid excitement, and forget the army. Freddie was shocked by this; his mother seemed shocked too. She left the consulting rooms with a white face and returned home weeping.

  In the privacy of his own bedroom that night, Freddie swung his arms, ran up and down on the spot, and waited to drop dead. Nothing happened. The man had seemed very certain, but Freddie was not convinced. However distinguished the physician was, he could have made a mistake.

  He pleaded with his mother for a second opinion. He tried to explain how dreadful he felt, the only man among his contemporaries at Eton who was still languishing at home. Gwen fell into such a paroxysm of weeping, such a violent clutching and clinging, that Freddie gave way. He remained at Winterscombe. He preferred to stay within the grounds. Visits to London made him very nervous. Freddie was tall, heavily built; he looked much older than nineteen. Every time he set foot in the street he expected to be accosted, to be given the white feather symbolizing cowardice.

  Freddie’s obsession with Constance grew stronger. Constance was his confidante and his consoler. When Freddie felt less than manly, Constance could prove to him just how manly he was, in the only way (she said) that really mattered. Constance kissed the war away. In her arms, drugged with the scents of her
body, Freddie forgot about patriotism and cowardice. Weeks went by in a priapic daze. Freddie learned the delights of enslavement, an enslavement in which nothing was more urgent than their next meeting, nothing more intoxicating than their last. Constance’s hair, skin, eyes, the whisper of her voice, the suggestions and ambiguities of her touch; hot days, hot thoughts; sweet delays and shocking promises—such a summer that was!

  Constance, experimenting with techniques that she was later to use to even greater effect, was an artist in sex. She understood that hints, promises and caprice, delays and deviations were a more effective drug than fulfillment. Step by step, kiss by kiss, she took Freddie down into the maelstrom. His body sweated for her; his mind itched for her. At night he invented; then he dreamed of her. Sometimes she would give more, then—for weeks—less. Freddie’s days passed like a dream; the second he left her, he would be imagining some new excess.

  One thing: she would not let him fuck her. This word—one Constance used casually and frequently, a little time device triggered to great effect in mid-embrace—would reverberate in Freddie’s mind like gunshots. He could not understand why Constance, who appeared without shame, who dismissed all sexual taboos, who introduced Freddie to practices he had neither heard of nor suspected, should impose this arbitrary, this incomprehensible stricture. Yet, on this point she was immovable: any variation—but no fucking. And then she-might smile: Not yet.

  Constance’s favorite variation, Freddie discovered, was to risk danger when one of his family was nearby. The threat of discovery from a servant, a gardener, a farm worker—that worked to a more limited extent. Freddie was beginning to recognize when Constance was most excited: It was when his mother, his father, or one of his brothers was at hand.

  The most outrageous example of this occurred in London, at the Cavendish house in Mayfair, in January of 1915. With his parents and Steenie, he and Constance had been visiting friends with an estate on the South Coast. From there, Freddie heard for the first time the famous and fearsome sound of the gun batteries across the Channel. Gwen heard them, too, and they sent her into one of her flurries of fear and protectiveness: They must stop off in London, she decreed. She could not return to Winterscombe without seeing Acland. Acland was duly telephoned at the Foreign Office, and agreed to meet his mother at home at five o’clock.

  The Cavendish house in Park Street had a tall and spiraling main staircase, which led upward around a vertical shaft from the hall on the ground floor to the attics four stories above. There, it was possible to lean over the banisters and look down a vertiginous well to the marble floor of the hall below. Freddie—warned against the dangers of that staircase as a child—still retained an odd, almost atavistic fear of it.

  Just before five, at Constance’s insistence, Freddie joined her on the shadowy, ill-lit third landing. By five, Constance was leaning forward against the banister, and Freddie was behind her, pressing against her sharp and agile little bottom. He was in a state of violent tumescence. (Indeed, just the thought of Constance these days provoked an erection.) He had one hand inside her dress (bright scarlet that day, and unfastened down the back). His other hand—weeks since he had been allowed to do this—his other hand was under Constance’s skirt. Constance was not wearing any knickers.

  Freddie’s left hand squeezed and caressed Constance’s breasts; his right hand groped and explored a soft damp place. So excited was Freddie that he hardly heard the slam of the front door or the footsteps across the hall. He became aware of Acland only when Constance called out to him.

  Acland came to a halt at the foot of the stairwell. He looked up and greeted Constance; Freddie he did not greet, for Freddie—whose hands stopped their explorations and became rigid—was invisible from below. Constance then proceeded to have a conversation with Acland. Indeed, she protracted the conversation most amusingly. At the same time she made it quite clear to Freddie (who had been about to withdraw his hands) that she did not want him to stop.

  She wriggled and rubbed against him; she pressed down hard against his right hand, so hard that—for the first time—Freddie found the miraculous aperture he had long been seeking. Two of his fingers slipped inside her; Constance gave a small tremor. While continuing to converse cordially with Acland, she rotated her hips, as if screwing herself down on Freddie’s fingertips.

  By then Freddie was too excited to stop. The fact that he was hidden from view, the fact that he was continuing to do this indelicate thing while Constance continued to speak, her voice quite as usual—all this combined to make Freddie both angry, aroused, and afraid. Fear, anger, and desire—oh, Constance understood the cocktail of sex. Freddie pinched and stroked at her nipples; from beneath Constance’s skirts he was aware of small sucking noises—she was very wet.

  “We could hear the guns, Acland; the wind must have been in the right direction, for we could hear them quite clearly….”

  Constance’s voice paused only a fraction; a hiatus before the ending of the adverb, and in that tiny space Constance had her orgasm. Freddie felt her body grow rigid for a second; then his dipping fingers felt the pulse from inside. Constance came; he had brought her to climax, something he had never done before, for usually Constance liked to do this herself, sometimes (she said this amused her) with Freddie timing her. Her record was thirty seconds.

  Freddie knew she would reward him, and—when Acland, suspecting nothing, finally left the hall—Constance did; she was scrupulous about such things. She knelt, unbuttoned his trousers. She took his penis in her hand. With a fixed, set face, she said, “I want you to say something, Freddie. Just three words.”

  “Anything,” Freddie muttered, frantic now and reaching for her.

  “Say, ‘In your mouth.’ Just that. Nothing else. All right, Freddie?”

  In your mouth: Freddie’s mind spun away into some vortex. This, Constance had never done, and the brutish simplicity of the words slipped the last of his controls. Heady; like diving into black water from a great height. Freddie said the words, and Constance obliged him.

  That evening, Acland stayed for dinner. Throughout, Constance was unusually quiet—so much so that Gwen asked her if she felt ill, and Constance, replying that she was tired, retired early.

  Freddie sat on for another hour, while his father slumbered before the fire; he tried to read a detective story but found himself unable to concentrate on the plot. Fragments of conversation between his mother and Acland drifted toward him.

  “Ego has joined up—Ego Farrell,” Acland remarked once, in a casual voice. “Gloucestershire Rifles. I saw him today, before he left.”

  “He might have had more sense,” Gwen said in a high strained voice. “I cannot imagine Ego’s fighting—and it cannot be necessary. He’s such a quiet man. Surely they have men enough out there?”

  Acland changed the subject. Later, Gwen took out her most recent letter from Boy, and read sections to Acland. Freddie, who had already heard the substance of this letter at least four times, used the moment to say goodnight. All he could think of was seeing Constance. He crept up the stairs and along the landing to Constance’s room. The London house was smaller than Winterscombe; here they had to be very careful. Constance was waiting for him.

  She was sitting at a table, a pile of black notebooks in front of her. As Freddie entered and closed the door, he saw that Constance was sitting in a stiff position; on her face was that dark, closed expression she had always had as a child. Without acknowledging him, she opened one of the black notebooks, flicked a page or two.

  “My father’s journals.” She picked up the book and held it out to him.

  Freddie looked down at the book; he glimpsed a date, lines of neat copperplate handwriting. These journals, which Freddie had never seen before, had not known existed, did not interest him in the least: Freddie, just then, had a mind that blazed with other matters.

  However, Constance mentioned her father rarely; if she chose to do so now, he could not brush it aside—perhaps, after all, i
n her own secretive way, Constance still mourned for him.

  “You shouldn’t look at them, Constance,” Freddie began. “It’s bound to bring things back. Much better to try and forget. Here.” He put his arm around her. Constance pushed it aside.

  “They are about his women,” she announced in a flat voice. “For the most part. Sometimes other things, but usually women.”

  This provoked Freddie’s curiosity; he at once felt more inclined to look at the journals. He glanced down at the page before him again, and there made out a word—several words—that startled him. Good God! And he had always thought Shawcross such a cold fish!

  “Have you read them, Connie?”

  “Of course. I read them constantly. Read and reread them. It is like a penance with me. I don’t know why I do it, quite. Perhaps I would like to … understand.”

  This statement seemed to agitate Constance a little, for the dead note in her voice changed.

  “Let’s look at them later, Connie.”

  Freddie had just managed to insinuate his hand beneath Constance’s skirt. He could feel the top of a stocking, a strip of silk garter, a taut thigh. His priorities at once adjusted themselves: No words, however shocking, could compare with the suppleness of Constance’s skin, with the agility and aggression of her body, with the way in which, teasingly, she would sometimes part her legs wide and then scissor them shut.

  “Later, Connie, please.”

  “Not later. Now.”

  Freddie at once withdrew his hand.

  “I want you to read this, Freddie. It concerns you too. Look, here, on this page. This is where it all begins.”

  “Where what begins?” Freddie drew back a few steps. Although he still did not understand, there was something in Constance’s expression that alarmed him. She had looked like this, he remembered, in Boy’s room, the night she showed him the photographs. He could feel the doubts begin; he felt uneasiness seep and creep into his mind.