World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

One day they told him that Nelly would not be there the next day. A client had asked her to go down to Liverpool and stop the night there with him. Sophie pulled a glum face of sympathy at him. "So it's only me, if you can bear it?" He said he thought he could—but not up here; if they tried it up here, he'd feel all the time that Nelly was missing. "Tell thee what," she murmured in a low, husky voice. "Why don't thou stay th'night too. If tha come 'ere a bit later; come at 'alf past nine, seem as tha'rt such a reg'lar, tha may stop wi' me all night for th'reg'lar two dollars."

  He wondered then whether he was ready for this test. He knew in the abstract that he could not forever be hiring pairs of girls; but had he yet learned enough to obscure their humanity until his force was spent—when they had no power to disturb him? If only Arabella were not pregnant, if only she were available at the complementary high level…Still, what better test could there be than this single proffered night with Sophie?

  And so cheap, too.

  But Sophie, by a thoughtless trick, was to render that night incapable of confirming his hopes or denying his fears. From the moment the maid showed him into the heavily curtained room and he saw her sitting crosslegged, jewelled, and naked in the soft light of two oil lamps, upon a mountain of mattresses and silken cushions, gazing up at him with her wide, dark eyes and smiling with those big, generous lips, her long hair let down and spilled around her, he knew that she was up to some private mischief.

  The air was heavy with a musky perfume. She did not stir until he had almost reached the edge of the mattress.

  "Hello," he said.

  Her smile broadened but still she said nothing. Then she leaned forward and unlaced his shoes, holding them while he stepped from them. She worked her way up his body, removing one piece of clothing after another, breathing on him, biting, gently scratching, caressing. By the time they had finished, they were both kneeling, knees touching, lips touching—just touching—eyes staring into eyes, trembling and aflame. She lifted her arms over his shoulders and pulled his head more firmly against hers; and when his lips closed around and over hers, she pushed her tongue deep into his mouth.

  He was too astonished to respond at once. This was not a whore's performance; it was a lover's. Was that really what she was trying to say? He was glad to note no response within himself—just a brusque impatience to have her. He knelt upright, lifting her and pulling her to him, trying to fork her thighs with his knee. But she pulled away at that and spoke her first word to him that evening: "Wait," she said.

  And reaching behind one of the cushions she pulled out a squat, dark bottle. She uncorked it and poured a small pool of oil from it into her palm and immediately began to massage it into his member, working it with especial care into the corona and around the frenulum. The action was strangely thrilling, yet as she continued, watching him carefully all the while, it became remote and somehow hypnotic.

  "What is it?" he asked. It was colourless and carried a faint, woody perfume not in the least aphrodisiac.

  "All-night oil," she said as she re-stoppered the bottle and put it back. "You know your usual trouble: ten minutes. That's about your limit."

  She held another bottle open beneath his nostrils. He sniffed deeply. "Mmnimmm!" That was one to stir the blood. "What's all-night oil?" he asked.

  "Lie back," she said. "You'll see."

  He obeyed and watched her pour this new scented oil on to her hand and massage him as before, now with one hand, now with the other, gently, cleverly, never too fast. Then she leaned over and lay full length slightly overlapping him, still manipulating him tenderly, and put her mouth to his ear. Slowly, with the low-pitched, husky voice that invariably thrilled him she breathed the one syllable: "fuck" into his mind. She said it again, more urgently, and again, and again, and again, time beyond number. It seemed to transfigure her to say the word and repeat it until it became a moaning, ecstatic possession.

  On any other night, it would already have been over with him by now; the oil she had used seemed to confer the power to linger on the threshold of delirium without crossing it—in fact, without being able to cross it.

  "Faster," he said.

  She obeyed, still murmuring that one word into his ear.

  "More!" he cried.

  And more she gave. But as one may run in a dream, accelerating to a frenzy… to a panic…and find oneself moving not a hairsbreadth forward, so he rose and soared, higher and still higher, toward some pinnacle of tumescence—seeing it recede before him as steadily as he appeared to gain upon it.

  And when her arms ached from the exertion and she forked herself over him and thrust down hard upon him, he hated her for the spasms of rapture that drove the breath from her and squeezed the sweat from her pores.

  He hated her. For the undreamed of powers she had conferred. And for the potency she had robbed from him. On they went. And on. And still on. However they lay—or sat or stood or crouched or knelt—whatever he did to her or she to him, whether strong and swift or languorous and slow, nothing could bring him to spend. The pain was exquisite, for it was a pain of absence. That thrilling sensitivity conferred by erection upon numb flesh was dulled—only half there. Yet that half was enough to sustain hopes and, ultimately, to stir his desperation.

  It was not impotence, for even after ninety minutes he was as hard and as lustful as when he had begun. He knew what impotence felt like; drink and fever had taught him that. There could be no doubt that this was something altogether different.

  Nor could there by any doubt why Sophie had done it to him. From the beginning, knowing what was to follow, she had fluttered with excitement. And from that moment when she thrust herself upon him, she kept herself on a tableland of ecstasy, passively, by submitting to all his wild attempts on her, and actively, knowing that however bold she grew, she could not lose him.

  After two hours, when he thought she could have no breath left to moan with and when every muscle in her lithe little body must surely ache as deep as his, she gave one last tiny sigh of exhausted contentment—and fell asleep! "Well here's a fine thing!" he said aloud. He shook her gently. She murmured, turned heavily on her back, and sighed a yawn. Briefly her eyes flickered open and, halfdrowned in slumber, she looked out at him and smiled. Nothing then would waken her. How could he still yearn for her after two hours? Why was the sight of her lying there, totally passive and beyond caring, still so stimulating—and how could he still be so stiff and eager?

  He oiled himself again and eased his way gently, almost reverently, into her. For a thrust or two it was all he anticipated. Without her there—consciously there, using me, he thought, I shall manage it. Now it's me using her, the way it should be.

  But his body had its own memories and standards, independent of his conscious will. His body found that having Sophie in these circumstances was uncomfortably reminiscent of having Arabella; and his body was unable to go on. For the first time that night, he knew true impotence. He laughed morosely to himself as he extinguished the lamps, pulled some bedclothing over them, and settled beside her warm, relaxed body to sleep. If there are brothels where women go to get pleasured by men, he thought, they'd be very like this.

  It was six the next morning, two drowsy, desperate sessions later, before he finally emptied himself into her. It felt as if he had saved himself for weeks and was trying to launch her on an ocean. For as the oil had spun him out and dulled each moment, so some residue of it seemed to have invaded his ejaculatory tracts, dulling their rapture even as it prolonged their mere activity. It was the most painful, least thrilling climax he had ever procured.

  At the age of fourteen, a horse had kicked him in the balls. He had forgotten the intensity and persistence of that pain until the moment came for him to hobble away from Sophie and that house, the physiological antithesis of panting, trembling, bundle of lust that had tripped toward it not ten hours earlier.

  I've got to give it up, he decided on the train out to Summit. It's ruining my health and my pocket. If I go on
at this rate, I'll have paid something like £150 a year for the privilege of dying of nervous debility. I've got to stop. He groaned and shifted tenderly. In one night that selfish, thoughtless, crude little Sophie had destroyed the neat divisions of his life. Never again.

  It was two days before an overtly sexual thought entered his head; two days—in which he was as free of his burden as a child. The religious people were right: When the lower being was subdued, the higher being was freed of something that weighed it down and mired it. Even after the pain had departed from his lower being, it remained quiescent; that terrible, orgiastic night with Sophie had set him free. He breathed again, a liberated man, a man renewed, shining, untarnished.

  Stevenson spoiled it by asking him to get a book or paper on Telford's modified macadam system for laying hardcore. Walter was actually at Oldham Road, waiting for the train home, when his conscience told him that at the least he owed Nelly and Sophie an explanation; they had become good friends these last weeks, over and above their business relations. He ought to take his leave properly.

  Twenty minutes later when they knelt naked, giggling, squirming in front of him—one pale, slender bottom and one buxom and haunchy, side by side—he had the honesty to let his spirit sing in exultation, then and all the hour that followed.

  Lower-being, higher-being—it was all Walter-being; what point was there in denying any of it? To do so was as stupid as cultivating one part of it to excess. That was the true lesson of his night with Sophie. When he took the last train home that evening he felt himself a replete, satisfied, well-rounded man in full and vigorous prime.

  And so it went the following week, and the first week into August. Always now he favoured Sophie. Nelly was sweeter and much more skilled; each time she could do something new to astonish his delight. But it was a very professional skill. Between their bodies, his and hers, was a mere bargain. With Sophie now—coarse, earthy, direct youngster that she was—with Sophie's body his had made a pact. Ever since that night there had been on her part a more than commercial agreement to honour, a more than economic hunger to meet; and on his part, there was something deeper—not higher, but deeper—than mere lust to assuage. Nelly reacted, swiftly, intelligently; Sophie responded profoundly, urgently.

  It did not matter that she lolled her head in an idiot way or laughed coarsely or panted a steady stream of obscenity into his ear when he lay clasped with her (so vile that even Nelly was shocked)—all these things in a curious way reaffirmed the purity of their love. For animal and earthy though it was, their love gleamed as pure and unsullied on its dark, hot plain as did his and Arabella's up there amid the great, cold, celestial peaks. There were no cries of conscience within him when, at night, he lay beside Arabella, one moment entranced at her cool radiance and at the thought of the child now so heavy within her, and the next moment trembling with lust at the prospect of Sophie's body waiting for him, warm, inviting, and available down there in Manchester.

  So, by one curious irony, it was his love for Sophie that brought his visits to an abrupt and painful end. And, by another, it was Nora who with her telescope had a better view of what happened than Walter himself.

  For weeks, Nora had noticed the pretty young girl who was put out in the sun everyday at Stone House. It needed very little observation to see that she was feeble-minded, but Nora wondered why her mother took such pains to rope her firmly—and constantly checked to see that the ropes stayed tight.

  One day, she asked Bess about it; and—with much blushing and stammering and hiding in aprons—she learned the story. So now, each time she looked through her telescope, she always trained it briefly on poor young Emily Ann and spared her a moment of pity. But on this day Emily Ann was not there. The ropes were there. The chair was there. But no Emily Ann.

  She swung the telescope slowly along the valley bottom, following the canal towpath, which would be the girl's obvious route. Not a hundred yards from Stone House she saw her, hobbling beside the rushes between the canal and the stream. Surely those unused, enfeebled legs could hardly carry her? The power of lust alone drove her forward. Manward.

  There was a man, too. On the other side of the canal. The man who had chased the pig into the Irish randy…what was his name? Eph…something. He stood panting on the far bank of the canal, his eyes almost extruded by the pressure of his lust. Nora could understand his dilemma: If he went the quickest way, over the Stone House bridge, he would possibly alert the mother; but if he went all the way down to Deanroyd and back, some other man would get her first. Men! she thought. Or some men, anyway. Thornton, for example.

  Talk of the devil! There he was, in his usual place in the rushes, relieving himself. It must have seemed like every adolescent dream made real when Thornton glanced up and saw Emily Ann standing at the fringe of the rushes, looking at him the way snakes look at frogs. Nora could not see whether Thornton had re-buttoned his front flap but from the maniac glee on Emily Ann's face, and the direction in which the girl was staring, she guessed not.

  Thornton was a master of these things; there was no gainsaying that. Any other man—any thousand other men, finding themselves unbuttoned before a young girl and seeing her gaze upon them, would do something to cover up. But Thornton, with that special acuity of his senses in these matters, stood on display without a twitch of modesty. Emily Ann ripped open her bodice and, cupping her breasts in her hands, advanced on Thornton.

  Kissing them perfunctorily he helped her to the ground. Oh, he was a man to pay a bill at sight! And the poor little idiot girl just lay there, twitching, with that seraphic smile on her face, while he went at her all he was worth.

  A pair of tattered boots dropped into the upper perimeter of the telescope field. She raised her line of sight. Eph. Face as black as onions.

  She followed him into the clearing among the rushes until he stood at Thornton's side, waiting his turn. It was probably a tradition of the Vale on these occasions that the man next in line got as ready as possible so as not to waste one golden second of Emily Ann at large. So that when Thornton finally became aware of the boots at his elbow and spun around to gaze skyward, it must have been an unusual silhouette he saw wafting above him. He stood at once and for a brief, incongruous moment they faced each other, bowsprit to bowsprit. Fancy loving that! Either of it.

  Then Thornton pushed Eph backward into the rushes, making two-o'clock to Emily Ann's noon. She, not discriminating, threw herself upon Eph and swallowed him within her before Thornton could have even cleared his throat. He shrugged, buttoned himself up, and left. Before he crossed the brook, three navvies ran eagerly to the place where he had just been. Word was spreading.

  Nora sent Bess to go and tell the mother where her daughter lay. Fifteen navvies later, though no one counted, Emily Ann was carried, weeping at her privation, back to Stone House. Shortly after, strong men winced and stopped their ears down in the cutting when the crack of the whiplash and the frail little creature's screams rang up the valley whose freedom she had sought and lost.

  It was the last time Emily Ann escaped—which was just as well, for not quite three months later her enfeebled body succumbed to the effects of secondary syphilis. Walter did not know it was he who had infected her, for when his chancre appeared the following day, erupting at the left anterior margin of the corpus cavernosum, he naturally assumed it was she who had bitten him.

  The pain was intense, the irritation unendurable, the stench of its suppuration nauseous. He could not possibly go back to Nelly and Sophie like that—except just to show them and explain. They looked at it, sympathized, and said goodbye. Sophie briefly regretted his departure from her life and then, like Nelly, forgot him entirely.

  He was subsumed into that endless flow of eager, trembling men who passed into and out of their rooms and their lives.

  Nelly did not even know it was she who had bitten Walter; her dose had been so long ago.

  The doctor was sympathetic but heartily implacable. "Got lost in Much Hadham, l
anded in Clapham, eh?" he chuckled. For the weeper, he prescribed corrosive sublimate of mercury to attack the virus at its root—if Walter would pardon the word, ha, ha. And blue pill, consisting of mercury, liquorice root, and confection of roses, twice a day. "Going to be an unpleasant month or two," the doctor said. "The mercury makes your gums go soft and tender and you'll have the perpetual taste of metal in your mouth. If it gets intolerable, change to calomel or some milder form of mercury. Children tolerate it much better than adults for some reason."

  "Children?" Walter asked.

  "Yes indeed. They get it too. Congenital, you see." He poked a monitory finger at Walter. "No connubial joys for you until I say you're clear! Understand?"

  Walter nodded. He breathed a silent prayer of thankfulness that Arabella's pregnancy had kept her beyond his foul touch. Suddenly, his notions of high and low vessels seemed both threadbare and disgusting. He wondered what could possibly have led him to entertain them. What can any metaphor teach— whether drawn from science or from natural history? If you had to seek for metaphors, you were disguising something. Truth was truth. You could point to it.

  Look at Stevenson and Nora. There was a truth you could point to. You could see they were XYZ-ampersand to each other. Away from her, he was the butcher's dog—he could sit by the beef all day and not even give it a sniff. That was how a marriage should be.