Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  Pilgrim materialized beside her. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think, I think …’ She started to laugh, realizing that she had no idea what she thought. ‘I think you are magnificent.’

  ‘Thank you, dear Clio. I’m glad of that.’ He sighed theatrically. ‘It seems that we are both abandoned.’

  Clio squinted. Evidently Isolde had disappeared too. Mustering some dignity she said, ‘I haven’t been abandoned. I am just myself.’

  Pilgrim put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Yes, you are, aren’t you? Now, I am going to take you out to dinner. Don’t say no, or make some dull objection.’

  ‘I don’t have any objection. I would like some dinner, thank you.’

  Anthony and Grace had gone home to South Audley Street.

  There was a cold supper laid out in the dining room, so they took their plates and sat in armchairs beside the fire. Grace kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on a stool.

  ‘We could have looked in at the Ritz, or the Café de Paris,’ Anthony said, handing her her filled glass.

  ‘We could have done. And we would have joined some people, and then gone on with them to the Bat or the Slipspin. Then you would have said that you had an early start in the morning and should come home, and I would want to dance some more, so in order not to start a quarrel you would have come home in a taxi and somebody or other would have seen me back here later on. By which time you would be in bed asleep, and when I woke up in the morning you would already have gone out, and so I would not see you until tomorrow night.’

  Grace felt that she was describing the pattern of almost every night of their married life. She knew the grooves of their social circuit too well.

  ‘I would much rather be here, with you.’

  ‘Would you? Is that the truth?’

  His pleased surprise touched her. She swung her legs down and went to stand beside his chair, bending down so that her cheek rested on the top of his head. His hair was thinning. It came to her that she had wasted so much of their time.

  ‘Yes, it’s the truth,’ she whispered.

  She had told Clio the truth, too. Watching Anthony in South Wales had made her see a different man, a man who was not just her husband, who was not just involved in a business world that did not interest her. For the first time in their years together she had admired him. She had also felt that they were jointly concerned. The Conservative grandees liked her. Anthony needed her on the platform beside him, as the candidate’s wife.

  The selection and the work they had done together, and the prospect of the by-election itself, had had a powerful effect on her. Clio had correctly recognized the current of excitement.

  Grace had fallen in love with her own husband.

  Contemplating the possibility of her own happiness Grace felt it like a weight in the depth of her stomach, resting between the bony crests of her hips. It was comforting ballast that would help her to hold her course after years of drifting.

  But she was superstitious about happiness. It was an accessory to other people’s lives, not her own. If it is not already too late, she warned herself. If I have not wasted too much of our time.

  Anthony put his hands up, to hold her. ‘Grace?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘We didn’t go to the Ritz, or anywhere else. We came home together, instead. Let’s go to bed.’

  Anthony wanted another child, and Grace longed to give him one. She hoped that it might compensate for Cressida. It was harder still for Grace to look at Cressida now, to be reminded of the lie she told Anthony every day of their lives.

  They went upstairs together. At the foot of the second flight that led on up to the nursery, Anthony said, ‘I’m going up to see her.’

  He liked to lean over her bed and listen to the soft breathing, and to inhale the scent of soap and clean skin. Grace knew that he wanted her to go with him and bend over the white bed, so they could share their parental pride, pooling their love for the child. She smiled at him, feeling that it was like a crack in her face. There Pilgrim had been at his party, dressed up in a foolish shirt like some third-rate actor in a repertory Hamlet.

  ‘Go on, then. I will go and get ready for bed.’

  Anthony’s visit to Cressida only took a moment. Almost at once, as Grace was unwinding the ropes of pearls from around her neck, he was knocking at the door that separated his dressing room from her bedroom.

  ‘Come in,’ Grace said softly.

  Pilgrim and Clio had dinner together in Soho. The Eiffel Tower had not, just lately, played quite such a central role in everyone’s lives. There were other restaurants and retreats, and there was the Fitzroy Tavern. They ate well and wandered rather unsteadily through the rain-wet streets to Charlotte Street. They did not discuss where to end their evening, or how. The studio drew them back.

  The glass roof was dark overhead, reflecting first the yellow spark when Pilgrim struck a match, and then the wider bloom of the lamps. When Clio looked up she saw that the reflections fractured at the margins into blurred webs of colour.

  She wandered through the big room, smelling the oil paint and turpentine, and the mustiness of old clothes, and dust worked into folds of matting and the creases of an ancient velvet armchair. She sat down in the chair, rubbing her hands over the greasy scalp of the velvet, and looked at the canvases around the walls. The old nude studies of Jeannie had gone long ago. Pilgrim’s work had lately become more abstract. There were wells of primary pigment now, and slabs of flat ochre and sienna and umber like rocks in some desert. But there was no real change. Pilgrim’s work did not tease with sly, rhetorical questions. It came straight out and shouted.

  Then she looked at Pilgrim himself. He was standing at his table on which cups and glasses were jumbled together with jars and brushes and tubes of paint. He was polishing the fingerprints off a whisky glass for her, using an oily rag marked with indigo paint. The dim light hooded his eyes and deepened the hollows in his cheeks, emphasizing his piratical appearance.

  Clio pondered for a moment on Pilgrim’s secondary reputation. She knew how many women he was rumoured to have had. She also knew that the reality was probably less startling, but even so, many women found him attractive. She heard enough of the talk in the Fitzroy and elsewhere.

  She was attracted to him herself, and always had been.

  Yet somehow, they had mutually overlooked that. They had slipped past the point of possibility and moved on into friendship, without Pilgrim ever having made a serious overture to her. Clio felt impatient with the pallor of her own history. If she was not careful, she thought, the pattern of her life would become set, with her own existence forever on the margins of other people’s. Or rather, if she did not give up her circumspection. If she did not stop being careful.

  Pilgrim had shone the glass to his own satisfaction. He stuffed the rag into his pocket and from amongst the bottles produced an unlabelled version of Scotch. He poured out, generously. Clio stood up. She insinuated herself between him and the table, settling herself on the edge of it, so that she could look up at him. Their faces were close together, so close that she could see the reflection of herself in his eyes. She arched her neck back a little, widening the focus, to see his expression. She saw that he was surprised, but not displeased.

  Clio lifted her hands and cupped them around his face. Then she drew down his head and kissed him on the mouth.

  It was a liberating gesture. As soon as she had made it she felt that she had taken some small measure of her fate into her own hands, instead of always waiting for it to creep up and take possession of her by default. She was smiling, and panting a little.

  Pilgrim was quick enough to respond. His heavy arm came round her and he kissed her back, pushing her backwards until she felt the prodding fingers of bottles and brushes beneath her. Her experience elsewhere was limited, but Clio liked the way he kissed her. His mouth and tongue were gentle, almost playful. But she didn’t want him just to be playing with her.


  After a moment he lifted his head, studying her. ‘Clio, is it possible that you might be slightly drunk?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. I’m not drunk.’ It was the truth. She felt quite clear-headed. She supposed that she must have drunk herself sober again. In a steady voice she asked him, ‘Don’t you want … to?’

  Pilgrim was too rigorous for that. ‘Want to what?’

  ‘Want to make love to me.’

  As soon as she had said it, from the sharp inhalation of breath and the twist of his mouth, she knew that he did want to. The recognition gave her a sense of power. Not simply over Pilgrim, but over herself as well.

  She had the sudden sense of her virginity as a piece of luggage, too heavy, that would be easy to put down. Or as a skin to be sloughed off, leaving a shinier, more knowing skin beneath. Had Grace felt this?

  Pilgrim turned in the air, like a cat, concealing his surprise and the stab of lust. He did not like to find himself the prey rather than the predator, and his counter-question was crueller than it need have been.

  ‘Are you not afraid that I might make you pregnant? Or have you got an obliging stockbroker standing by, ready to repair the damage?’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you mean,’ Clio said. She stuck fast to the convention that none of them knew anything, that Cressida was Anthony’s, that there was no secret to keep. Neither she nor Jake nor Julius had mentioned it, even to one another, since Cressida’s birth. It frightened her that it should raise its head now, and angered her that she had not thought this far ahead. It was inevitable that the comparison, the old comparison with Grace, would disinter the roots of memory for Pilgrim.

  But she wasn’t like Grace. They were not alike even then, eight years ago, and they were utterly different now. She would not let him compare them.

  ‘You won’t make me pregnant,’ Clio said.

  ‘You can be sure of that.’

  She wriggled away from him and bent down to pick up her handbag from where she had left it with her coat. She opened her bag. ‘Look,’ she said.

  Pilgrim looked, and then gave a roar of laughter. Inside Clio’s bag, in their own neat inner bag, lay a flat sponge and a small phial of olive oil.

  Primly she said, ‘At the Clinic we have recommended a contraceptive sponge soaked in ordinary domestic olive oil as the most suitable method of protection for approximately one thousand nine hundred patients. That was the total the last time I went through the case-sheets and counted.’

  It was the simplest method. For that reason Clio had extracted a sponge for herself from the supply cupboard, and repaid the exact amount of money into the petty cash account. She had provided herself with olive oil from her own kitchen, and folded the two items away out of sight in her handbag. He conscious intention had been to be responsible, according to the Clinic’s teaching. She heard so much discussion of sexual practices and handled such a volume of contraceptive devices that it seemed quite normal and natural to be making her own arrangements, even though she had no lover present or past.

  Subconsciously, she now realized, she had probably been preparing for exactly the situation in which she now found herself.

  The subconscious, Clio thought cheerfully, had a great deal to answer for.

  Pilgrim was still laughing. ‘I had forgotten about Dr Stopes and her Clinic. I only think of you behind your typewriter in Max’s office, pounding away at rejection slips.’

  A fixture. Dear Clio, always there, never obtruding. That hurt her, but she knew that he had not intended it. ‘A bad mistake,’ she told him, pouting a little. She was reminded of Jeannie being coquettish, but this was not Jeannie. This is me, Clio warned herself. But she had come too far, now, to think of any retreat. Pilgrim had stopped laughing. He had come very close again. His hand was resting on her bare neck.

  ‘You are lovely, and original, and clever,’ he whispered. Original, that was what mattered. Herself, not a shadow of anyone else. ‘Come here, with me.’

  He took her hand and led her. There was the divan with its knots of paisley shawls and discarded clothes. She felt the edge of it against the backs of her knees, threatening to unbalance her. Pilgrim undid the fastenings of her dress and lifted it over her head.

  Clio remembered the complicated petticoats and underpinnings that she and Grace had worn beneath their dance dresses only eight years ago. Now, under her thin dress, she was almost naked.

  Pilgrim unrolled her rayon stocking from the tight garters and put his mouth to each of the red bracelet marks left on the pale skin.

  ‘Lovely Clio,’ he murmured. She wound her fingers in his wiry hair and let him wrap his arm around her haunches and tilt her backwards on to the divan.

  She watched as Pilgrim emerged from his clothes. There was a lot more curly black hair, matted over white skin. There was everything else she had expected to encounter from her reading and associated helpful diagrams. She could have put labels to the various parts. The thought made her want to laugh.

  Pilgrim lay down beside her. His skin was warmer than hers and the springy hair prickled her. He put his arms around her and held her close to his chest. His erection (that was what it was, of course. ‘Under the influence of sexual excitement the penis of the male becomes engorged with blood …’) prodded against her belly. Clio reached down and encircled it with her thumb and forefinger. She did not feel either alarmed or aroused. She felt a kind of detached interest.

  But Pilgrim propped himself on one elbow and with an unhurried calm began to explore her body. He ran his tongue in small circles around her nipples and reached his hand between her legs. Clio heard her own moist flesh make a small sound, tac, under his fingers. A shiver ran from the base of her spine through the pit of her stomach and up to her breasts. Tac. She stretched against him and his fingers probed more insistently.

  She forgot her academic interest. The edges of her consciousness seemed to blur and fade. She began to concentrate fiercely on what Pilgrim was doing to her. When he kissed her she opened her mouth to his tongue. Tastes and smells became mingled, whisky and tobacco, cleanish sweat and salt. He lay between her legs now. She looked down at the way their bodies cleaved together, pale and smooth, black and white.

  He whispered in her ear, ‘Clio, where’s your sponge?’

  She considered for a moment. ‘I think you have to effect complete penetration first. Before I can insert it, you see. Is that all right?’ She found that she could only command the lecture and textbook language.

  Pilgrim gave a series of small grunts, and then rolled away from her. He lay flat on his back and looked up at the glass roof.

  ‘This is the first time? For God’s sake, I’ve just realized. This is the first time, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It must have been the first time with Grace too. I’m not still trying to draw level with her.

  ‘Why are you so surprised?’

  ‘I imagined something else, that’s all.’

  From her age, and from all her confidantes in the Fathom offices and the Fitzroy, she supposed.

  ‘Clio, is this what you want? Here with me, like this?’

  As if she was not, after all, old enough to know her own mind, having reached her advanced age and having come this far.

  She said, ‘Yes, I do.’

  When he did not turn back to her, but went on lying on his back and staring up at the roof, she looked to see what had happened. And she saw that there was no longer any erection, but a series of small cushions of puckered flesh, pinky-grey and entirely vulnerable.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  There was a shrug.

  She had confronted him with the unexpected. She was the taker, to suit herself, and that was Pilgrim’s own self-appointed role. His expression reminded her of Lucas, Jake’s little boy. She felt immediately protective, and sorry that she had disconcerted him. She leaned over him and rested her head on his chest. She remembered, ‘No action that a loving and considerate man and wife can perform together is
wrong, so long as it is agreeable to both of them.’

  She moved her head, so that her hair brushed over his belly, and then took him in her mouth. The soft pouches stirred and stiffened and she had to lift her head so that he did not choke her.

  ‘You surprising girl,’ he said, with clear satisfaction.

  Pilgrim pressed her back into the nest of bedding and spread her legs. He pushed himself into her and she felt a brief shock of pain, only very brief. Then he began to move up and down, slowly, sighing a little.

  ‘Wait,’ Clio said.

  ‘The famous sponge?’

  She slid away from him and stood up. He lay back, in command again now, lazily grinning. She went behind the screen, the old model’s dressing screen behind which she and Grace had daringly taken off their dance dresses. She remembered just how she had felt, emerging from the shelter of it in her silk chemise to Pilgrim’s scrutiny. Her hand was shaking a little as she spilt the drops of oil on to the sponge and watched it soak in, darkening and softening the pocked surface.

  She put one foot up on a three-legged stool and took the sponge in her fingers. She was surprised by the muscularity of her own interior. When she looked down she saw that there was a thin thread of blood on her inner thigh.

  Clio emerged from behind the screen again. She walked back to the divan and Pilgrim.

  There was not much more, after that. He came greedily back inside her, prodding and bucking. He muttered incoherently into her ear as he reared up and down, and she tried to listen and to find the rhythm that would match his and also, as a kind of afterthought, to discover how to satisfy her own needs. Women did have needs, the reading she had done assured her of that. She had a sense that if there had only been more time, more care, she would have been able to pinpoint her own pleasure. She would have been able to peel back the layers of it and reveal the mysterious bud, whatever it was, at the centre of herself.

  Was that what Grace had felt?

  As it was, Pilgrim ejaculated with a roar that diminished into a groan.

  When it was over he lay on top of her in a heavy heap, his breath fanning the damp skin beneath her jaw. Clio stroked his hair. She found herself smiling over his shoulder into the skin of glass that held back the friendly night. She lay quite still. Dr Stopes had written somewhere that it was physically beneficial for men and women to absorb each other’s secretions.