“I understand,” Lucilla said, remembering the first time she’d seen a man other than her father or brother in shirtsleeves.
“She asked after my studies, and told me that she herself had left her home in Picardy to marry Monsieur Jacques when she was just sixteen, and she had never regretted this decision. She did not think I would regret it, either.”
“Did you?”
“No. She was the first person who had told me this. All my family, they left France to travel, but they always returned home, to the same two streets. I did not plan to return there, and to this day I never have, except to visit. You went away, to Somerville College?”
She didn’t want to talk about herself just now. “I did,” Lucilla said. “My father thought I would meet a man and marry before I’d been there a year. Tell me what happened next.”
“She asked me for help in removing her apron. The knot was too tight.”
“You believed her?”
“I did,” Pascal said. “I did not see myself as she did. I went to help her.” He paused. “She smelled of baking bread. Her nape was bare. I wanted to lean closer and lick it, perhaps even bite. I could see myself bent over her. I had never had such a desire before. I had to look away, but I could still smell her. When I touched the knot of her apron, I also touched her skin. It was hot and damp, from the heat of the ovens. As I untied the knot, I could not help but touch her with my fingertips, again and again.”
Caught up in the story, Lucilla was surprised to find that his description aroused her; whether the cause was imagining herself as Marie-Beatrice, or putting herself in Pascal’s place, or both, she didn’t know. “Did she touch you?”
“She removed her cap. Her hair fell onto my hands and across my wrists. It smelled of bread and vanilla. Then I did lean closer, and she told me I could go home if I wished.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I realized her intent as soon as she released her hair. I asked her why she had chosen me.”
Lucilla had guessed. “Because you were leaving.”
“Yes.”
When he didn’t continue, she asked, “How did she—”
“She lived above the bakery. She closed for the afternoon, and took me up the stairs, to her bedroom. The drapes were drawn, but sun beamed through gaps and laid bars of light on her bed. It was the largest bed I had ever seen, with many pillows.”
Lucilla’s pulse beat between her thighs. She was not Marie-Beatrice; she was Pascal, about to experience the hot wet pain of sexual congress for the first time. Her throat felt thick. “Were you ready?”
Pascal snorted. “In those days, there was no time when I was not ready. Or I thought I was. I sat on the bed, and I grew harder still while she undressed me. She explained that she did not want this encounter to be over too quickly, as we would not have the opportunity for another. I agreed, of course. She took off my cap and ran her fingers through my hair, as my mother and sisters had sometimes done, but her touch was utterly different. It went through me like electricity.”
“I would like to undress you,” Lucilla said.
“I will permit that, when time allows,” he said with some humor. “The widow Jacques, she undressed me down to the skin and laid my clothing on a chair. I had never considered before what happened to one’s clothing, as the couples I had seen all wore their clothing while coupling. When she bent to tuck my boots beneath, I could see into her dress.”
“Did you undress her?”
“No. She stood before me and disrobed. Her corset unhooked in the front and she—” He swallowed. “Beneath it, she was bountiful. She did not wear drawers beneath her shift. I thought I would choke for lack of air, when I realized I could see the hair on her cunt through the cloth. I had never before had a close view of the hidden places of a woman’s body, and I felt balanced above a fall into some great understanding. She touched her breasts, stroking her nipples. She told me she liked to have them suckled gently, and that later she would like me to take her from behind, as that was the best for her.”
Pictures flashed through Lucilla’s mind, and she nearly lost control of the motor. “Pascal,” she said, her voice shaking. “We need to stop soon. I need you to fuck me one last time.”
He drew a long breath. “Perhaps we could stop now. It need not be the last time.”
If only that could be true. Lucilla drew a matching breath, remembering where they were. “I would prefer to be safely in France first. Finish your story.”
“After asking me to fuck you, you still wish me to tell you of Marie-Beatrice Jacques?”
“Yes.”
“It’s difficult to think of her when I would rather think of sinking between your soft thighs.”
Lucilla’s heart pounded in her ears. “Finish the story.”
Pascal breathed deeply again. “Very well. We stood beside her bed and I explored her body through her shift. She explained that she liked the fabric to rub against her skin.”
“Especially when your skin is damp,” Lucilla said. She felt strangled, though she was breathing deeply; her nipples had drawn tight, and rubbed painfully against her bust bodice.
“I suckled her nipples and also her cunt, then she removed her shift. Her skin was like cream, except on her breasts, where the skin had stretched and left shiny lines. I licked each one, trying to forget my cock, but this was difficult, you understand.”
“No doubt. What did she do for you?”
“She held my shoulders or arms, but that was all. I think if she had done more, I would have spent myself immediately.”
She would have done more, had she been in the widow’s place. She wouldn’t have been able to restrain herself from stroking every inch of him, for wasn’t that part of the pleasure? The freedom to touch as one willed? Perhaps for Madame Jacques, the freedom had been in allowing another to borrow the control she held over her body. “And then?”
“When she was ready for me to fuck her, she knelt on the bed with pillows to support her, and I knelt behind her. I rubbed myself along her back and on her rear, which was soft as a pillow, and could easily have done nothing else, but she spread her thighs and cried out for me to fuck her. It was….”
“Powerful,” Lucilla said, imagining that she could order someone else’s pleasure.
“Yes. But as soon as I was inside her, I felt an obliteration of the self, of the self that thinks. It was not only my cock that she squeezed inside her passage, but my whole being, shrunk into one fine point. It was extraordinary. All-consuming.” He paused. “Is it like this for you?”
Lucilla had to think to understand the question he’d asked. He’d been honest with her, so she would do her best to be so with him. “It’s like…holding my breath, and reaching, and…No. That doesn’t explain it.” She swallowed. “There’s wetness, and tension, and it’s close, so very close…I’m no good at explaining this.”
If there were a formula, perhaps, and a predictable outcome. A protocol of physical actions leading to replicable results, easily described in terms of weight and color and viscosity. It ought to work that way, if the world were just. But she knew it didn’t. Though her first experiences with sex had only felt more than physical at the beginning, her later solitary experiments had been harder to quantify and more varied in result. And what she’d shared with Pascal had been different than that; she hadn’t always been aware of herself, or of her own body, in her fascination with him and his. Yet at the same time she felt fulfilled. Happy. Why? Did her body need sex, like a vitamin? If that was it, why was sex better with Pascal than alone? She shouldn’t notice a difference. She drove another kilometer in silence.
Pascal interrupted her thoughts. “Perhaps next time, I will ask you what you feel at the appropriate moment.”
“If I can form sentences, you’re welcome to try.” She took a deep breath. “What happened next? With Madame Jacques.”
The motor purred. “It progressed in the usual way,” he said.
Lucilla ca
st him a glance. “That’s vague. I thought you remembered everything.”
“I don’t think I can speak on this anymore, unless my hands are on you,” Pascal said.
Her stomach twisted a little, as if hungry for him. “Finish the story, at least.”
“The smell of baking bread is, to this day, a reminder.”
“So if I brought you a baguette, you would—” Imagining the lewd appearance of a baguette, Lucilla began to laugh. Pascal joined her. To her surprise, the rest of their journey, all through the night, became a blur of laughter and shared memories, but now only memories of safe things, such as her childhood experiments with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, and his first dish of ice cream, which had been strawberry.
She told him of when she’d been a girl, and imagined that she could easily dress in boys’ clothes and run off to have adventures, just like the boys in the illustrated stories that Tony and Crispin pored over. She’d had to read those stories in secret, sneaking them into the garden shed to avoid her mother’s lecturing on what was appropriate for a young girl and, at much greater length, what was not. “But now,” she said with great satisfaction, “I am on an adventure of my own.”
“Am I required to be your assistant in this endeavor? Or may I be the intrepid scientist?”
Lucilla grinned at him and deftly swerved around a hole in the road. “I stole the motor. I think you’d better be the girl. Only no swooning, I beg you.”
“Only if you ravish me at the end,” he said hopefully.
INTERLUDE
BOB HAILEY’S SISTER WAS NOT IMPRESSED WHEN told the regiment was mustering.
“You can’t leave,” Agnes said. “The water closet’s got a leak. It makes a terrible drip all night, and keeps Mother awake.”
“I’ll have a look before I go,” Bob said. “Captain Wilks is expecting me early.”
“You care more about that old man than about your own family!”
“It’s my duty.”
“We’re your duty! And what do you think will become of us if you get sent who-knows-where to be killed?”
“Haven’t I done enough already? You’ll get my pay, same as you’ve been getting,” Bob said. “I’ve asked Mrs. Tollis upstairs to look in every few days. She’s happy to do it.”
“She doesn’t care two pins for me, she just likes to gossip with Mother.”
“You’re able to take care of yourself,” Bob said. “You had a factory job before I went into the service. If you need to, you can do it again.”
“And then who’ll take care of Mother, I ask you? She can’t stay by herself any longer, and you know it. Yet I don’t see you here but once in a fortnight.”
Agnes was convinced the army was like a holiday camp, enlisted in for the adventure of it, much as their father had signed on with the merchant marine. Though of course he’d never been seen again.
“If I’m killed, will you still blame me for not mending the leaks?” Bob asked wearily. “I’m off.” To my other life.
5
LUCILLA DID NOT REALIZE THEY HAD CROSSED the border into France until she stopped the motor so they could relieve themselves. The night sounded unusually quiet; she’d grown used to the motor’s vibration and the mournful baying of dogs, and she stood for a moment, listening to the engine tick. She heard Pascal’s returning footsteps, then a curse. He’d stumbled into a stone milepost. She backed the motor enough for the headlamps to illuminate it. The distance it marked was worn illegible, but it sheltered a gaily painted plaster Madonna, her feet pinning at least twenty scraps of paper, their penciled prayers inscribed in French. Lucilla was tempted to leave an offering of her own, she was so glad to be free of Germany, but at the same time, she realized her journey’s end would mean the end of her affair with Pascal. She restrained herself from snarling at the statue’s serenely smiling face.
She stepped out of the headlamps’ glare and said, “If we keep going, we might find a village in time for coffee and croissants.”
“We could stop here and rest,” Pascal said.
“And sleep on the ground with no blankets? If we push on, we might find a nice, comfortable bed.”
The wavering headlamp turned Pascal’s grin more devilish than he might have intended.
“I intend to have a good day’s sleep, at least!”
“I intend to make sure of it,” he said. “Come. You’re right. This road should lead us toward Verdun and Reims. There will be towns along the way if we run out of petrol.”
Lucilla planned never to forget that dawn, pink and orange like a dish of sweets, the light gently washing over fields of summer hay. She glanced at Pascal to share it with him, but in the few moments since they’d last spoken, he’d fallen asleep.
She yawned, and considered pulling to the side of the road for a small nap herself, but she wanted a bed. More than that, she wanted one last time to make love with Pascal, so the sooner they reached a place where she could have that wish, the better.
This adventure was drawing to an end. She could feel it like a doom advancing. They would be separated, by her own choice before it could be his, and she would go home, and if England went to war, she would go, as well, who knew where—she might be sent anywhere. For all she knew, she would be sent back to Germany—that would be ironic. And Pascal had been in the army, like all Frenchmen. He would not be able to escape some form of service, no matter how he felt about it. And he could easily be killed, or be wounded or so changed by a war that he would forget about her completely. And that would be that. She would spend the rest of her life alone.
She berated herself for being melodramatic. It would matter to her if he were killed, but so far as her life went, it would not matter, as she knew already she would not see him again. Clinging together in the midst of chaos was no solid basis for anything long-lasting. He was a young man, with a future ahead of him, whereas she was already past forty and had no wish for children or housewifery. If she planned, hoped, to see him again, she would be building castles in the air, as she had when she’d envisioned marriage with Clive, long and comfortable and filled with hours of quiet study, when she should have known what he really wanted was a helpmeet and someone to bear his children. He’d only wanted an educated wife so he could show her off to his fellow dons as she served them tea.
She had even less idea of what Pascal wanted. She’d only known him for…she was too tired to calculate the hours, and too dispirited to think on the future any longer. Oh, for a thermos of coffee. And now they were in France. She could really have croissants, with thick creamy butter and clots of strawberry jam.
Pascal woke when she slowed the motor on the outskirts of a sizable town. He squinted at the sunlight and growled in French. His stubbled face and shadowed eyes made him look particularly villainous and bad-tempered. Lucilla grinned because she felt much the same. “We’ll have coffee soon.”
“And a bath,” he said, scrubbing at his face with one hand. “And a bed. If such are to be had.”
They soon discovered that hotel lodging was difficult to come by here, as well, but a concierge directed them to a lodging house that still had a few rooms. Posing as a married couple, by afternoon they were ensconced in a large attic room, a bit warm from the sunlight that poured through a skylight, but clean and smelling of lavender and old wood, and enlivened by bouquets of bright poppies. Best of all, there was a shower, the prettiest Lucilla had ever seen, with brass fittings on three walls in the shape of lily blossoms, and tiled in green-and-white patterns like lacework.
Lucilla was nearly asleep in a borrowed linen nightgown when Pascal returned from his shower. He didn’t speak, but smoothed his hand over her wet hair, and stroked her face. She murmured, pleased, and reached her arms for him. He went into her embrace, tucking her close against him, before he said, “Lucilla. Please wake up.”
She blinked, her hand lazily curling on his shoulder. “Be quick about it.”
“The German army has crossed into Belgium. Your country
and mine are now both at war with Germany and Austria.”
Lucilla closed her eyes again. She might not have forgiven him, had he spared her this news. They had little time left together now. She didn’t want to waste it in sleep. “Kiss me. And help me remove this gown.”
They woke in the wee hours of the morning and coupled once more, in a feverish and sweaty tangle of limbs that, in her fatigued haze, felt like a dream, even when their bodies struck together with enough force to shake the heavy iron bedstead. It was the sort of dream that is brighter and more vivid than reality, and that upon waking is so engraved in memory that it feels as if it were real. If only it were a dream, then she would not suffer the inevitable grief of their parting. Lucilla clamped her thighs on Pascal’s hips and locked her arms about his torso, hiding her face in his shoulder as she silently urged him on with her hips and fingernails; his fingers and cock, meanwhile, drove her higher and higher until she screamed her pleasure into his skin. After, he turned onto his side and kissed her for an interminable interval, his hands tracing over her skin as if to imprint her body on his perfect memory. They broke apart only to gasp for breath before joining their mouths again. Lucilla thought that was to be the end, but hadn’t reckoned with Pascal’s vigor. In a quarter of an hour, he rose to the occasion again, and this time she took him from above, silent and fierce and angry that this had to end.
It was less than an hour until dawn when she dragged herself from his arms and tugged him down the hall into the bathroom, luckily deserted at this hour. She inspected his injured arm once more, then pulled him into the shower with her, where they soberly soaped each other, and washed each other’s hair. When her gentle, soapy handling brought Pascal erect again, Lucilla backed him against the shower door and took his cock in her mouth. She’d never done such a thing before, but they had no condoms with them, and she feared, besides, that coupling would be unsafe on the slippery floor. He tasted of clean flesh and his cries, even muffled by his teeth in his arm, were the sounds of someone torn apart with pleasure. The hard pressure of his cock’s head against her palate reminded her of having him deeply inside her sex, except that she was more in control of this and could lick and scrape and tease and pull on his cock and scrotum to such an extent that his knees failed him and they sank to the floor of the shower in a heap.
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