‘I’ll go my way and let Roarty, Gimp Gillespie and Rory Rua go theirs,’ he muttered. ‘Life is too short and the world too wide to devote thinking time to trifles. In the immortal words of Gimp Gillespie in his cups, “Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?”’
Suddenly the door opened and Nora Hession came in out of the night, water from her grey raincoat forming a circle on the floor flags.
‘Am I glad to get in out of that waterspout!’ she said, pushing the door closed.
‘Am I glad you’ve come! I was nodding over a book, trying to stay awake.’
He took her coat and hung it on the back of the door. Kissing her on the cheek, he carried her to the corner seat and put her sitting by the fire.
‘The Canon’s gone out to Glenroe to hear confessions,’ she said. ‘He won’t be back till after nine.’
‘It’s just as well he performs a few of his duties. Otherwise I should never see you.’
He took off her wet shoes and placed them by her chair, out of the direct heat. In a moment she had transformed the small kitchen with the mystery and excitement of the night. Sitting by the blazing fire with her stockinged feet on the cobbled hearth, she took the glass of wine he offered her as if it were a queen’s ransom, her face alight with the pleasure of talk that made no demands on either of them. That was one of the things he liked about her, the fact that, unlike Margaret, she was possible to please. She was intelligent without being an intellectual, and now and again she was original in a way that had nothing to do with what she’d read in the women’s pages of the newspapers. She didn’t play conversational games to prove that she was different; she believed in whatever she said, at least while she was saying it. Best of all, no one would ever accuse her of being shrill; her voice was soft and even as she smiled her eyes in their dark depths bore a disturbing intimation of the ultimate loneliness of the night.
‘Before you came in, I was thinking that my time here is coming to an end.’
‘If only you’d found enough barytes...,’ she smiled.
‘In a way I’m glad we didn’t. At least it will teach those two arch-toadies, Roarty and Gillespie, a lesson.’
‘I don’t share your opinion of the Canon, Ken. It’s one of the things we’ll never agree on.’
He got up and sat on the arm of her chair. ‘Come away with me, Nora. Come to London, to a new and wider life. We can always come back here for a month in the summer. We’ll rent a cottage, and spend the time exploring places we haven’t explored before.’
‘Why don’t you stay here with me?’
‘I’m only here on secondment. When this job ends, there’s nothing left for me to do.’
‘You could get a job with the county council.’
‘I can imagine the pittance they’d pay me, nothing like enough to keep you in the style to which you should be accustomed.’ He grasped her hand and placed it against his cheek. ‘Think about it, Nora. Come to London.’
‘I went to London two years ago and came back.’
‘I know. You went to London and came back, and it was a very cold day.’
‘It wasn’t cold,’ she said humourlessly. ‘It was the middle of summer, so hot that I fainted in the Underground for want of fresh air. When I think of London, I think of being lonely in public parks on Sunday afternoons, feeling empty from having nothing better to do.’
‘It will be different with me. We’ll have lots of friends, a nice house and a big garden. You could grow onions and tomatoes. If you like, you could grow potatoes.’
‘I’m not going to London,’ she said firmly.
‘Then come to bed, you impossible girl.’
He bolted the door, switched off the light, and heaped his clothes on the back of a chair while leaping flames from the fire cast grotesque shadows that chased each other around the walls. As she undressed, the firelight caught her white thighs and the low droop of her bottom, prompting him to think that Velàzquez should have seen her before painting the Rokeby Venus. He caught her elbow and spun her into his arms. They stood locked together on the hearth, the heat from the fire pleasurably probing their exposed legs and thighs. He carried her to the outshot bed behind the curtains, and they lay between the warm blankets with the firelight glowing through light fabric, reddening the wall in contrast with the dark rafters under the thatch.
They lay quietly in each other’s arms because any movement, even the simple act of kissing, would have been superfluous, so perfect was their pleasure in the touch of each other’s skin.
‘What’s happened to your sheets?’ she asked after a while.
‘They’re in the wash. They’re the only ones I’ve got.’
‘It’s nice lying between blankets. You’re more conscious of them on your skin.’
‘To those of us who are not sheiks, they are more erotic than silks.’
He kissed her tenderly on the lips, eyelids, neck and breasts. They lay still again, their legs entwined and his erect penis pressing against her flat belly. There was strange comfort in the firmness of her body, bringing him closer to the living centre of her, awakening an avatar within that the false promise of pneumatic bliss could never have recalled to life. He kissed her breasts again, small and firm as a Cox apple, and suddenly and unexpectedly, she was ready to receive him. He had to move carefully because of his tight foreskin and Nora’s anatomical peculiarities. He used to worry about his foreskin when he first began going out with girls. The Harley Street consultant whose advice he sought had said, ‘Not quite phimosis, not sufficiently serious to warrant surgery, just a nuisance you’ll have to put up with.’ Then he met Margaret whose capacious accommodation introduced him to a new kind of love life that put him in mind of the dreamy atmosphere of Debussy’s prelude about the sensations of a faun on a hot afternoon. Now Nora Hession had woken him from his reverie with a warm ache in the tip of his penis that both protracted and intensified his pleasure. The Harley Street consultant must have been married to another Margaret. Only that would account for his failure to appreciate the poetry of this ineffable fusion of pain and pleasure. Quite possibly, a tight foreskin was the beginning of both poetry and philosophy; he wondered if there was any mention of the condition in classical literature. Without such an advantage, how could any man have a sensitive appreciation of the magic and terror of sex? Perhaps Napoleon’s foreskin was giving him trouble when he said, ‘Not tonight, Josephine,’ and then set out for Moscow the following morning to get on with what he thought he was best at. And, of course, if Henry VIII had had a tight foreskin, the history of England would have been different.
‘That was a quiet one,’ she said when he had exhausted himself. ‘It’s curious that it’s never the same twice. Is it different for you each time as well?’
‘Sex is a kind of sunset. No two are ever the same.’
‘Is it really different for you, tell the truth.’
‘Men don’t weigh things up as carefully as women.’
‘Men are too insensitive to appreciate sex to the full.’ She gave his shrunken penis a little squeeze. Holding it in her fist, she rubbed the tip against her labia and, kissing him, gave him a taste of her tongue. He thought he’d already experienced everything, but her unexpected kiss proved him mistaken.
‘Are men really less sensitive than women?’ she asked, letting his penis rest between her thighs.
‘We just see the sunset differently, that’s all.’
‘If sex is the sunset, what is the sunrise?’ she giggled. ‘The sunrise was when I first clapped eyes on you, courtesy of Gimp Gillespie.’
‘If that’s true, then men must spend most of their day thinking about every woman they meet?’
‘I can’t speak for all men. I spend most of my day thinking about you.’
‘You say the nicest things, Ken. If only they were true.’ She put her forefinger to his lips and whispered, ‘Don’t go away. Stay like this. I’d like to be quiet for a while.’
She went limp in his arms and withi
n minutes she was asleep. He felt deliriously happy, telling himself that she would never have fallen asleep with a man she did not trust. He had fallen in love with her because she was different from any other woman he’d ever met. She was simple in her tastes, yet not simpleminded. She knew her own heart in all its vagaries and she was capable of pointing out what she called his ‘fegaries’ as well. Though slender in figure, she was a fully rounded woman with insights that often surprised him into self-discovery, and now and again, self-criticism. At times it occurred to him that she had become a complementary extension of his personality, an insight he’d never had with any other woman. Now he began wondering if he’d imagined it all, because most of the women he’d known in London saw him as a confirmed misogynist or what they called a ‘male chauvinist pig’.
Such thoughts were beside the point, though. In her wisdom she had confronted him with a simple choice. Stay in the glen and live in love and in straitened circumstances or go back to London without her and possibly live to regret it. She was right, of course. She was born here and belonged here in this small, self-contained community. She was a flower of great beauty but a flower of one clime. She would wilt and wither in the rough winds of the anonymous and amorphous world he himself called home. He wondered if he were genuinely trying to find a way out of an impossible situation or seeking to excuse himself from facing up to what must be done. There was no painless exit. If Margaret in her omniscience knew of his predicament, she would say that he had brought it on himself; that she could have predicted the outcome if only he had consulted her in time.
So what was the future? The impossible English rose of his imagination? Another Margaret? Or even another Diana Duryea? Diana was a huntress. He’d met her at a press reception to drum up publicity for ‘a new and superior make of soil pipe’. In the crowded room she had approached him confidently, glass in hand.
‘I hope you won’t think me stupid,’ she smiled. ‘What on earth are soil pipes?’
He bent over her abundantly flowing mane and whispered an answer in her ear.
‘Oh, you are a one, I can tell,’ she smiled. Then she asked him to bend down again, and when he did, she whispered that she was assistant editor of the magazine Lift.
‘So what do you lift?’ he asked, as if in puzzlement.
‘I meant lifts that go up and down, elevators, you know. Now I’ve given myself away. Now you must know I’m American.’
‘And what might you be doing with soil pipes in an elevator?’
‘I always find that a fool question is the best conversational gambit. You see, already we’re on the same wave length. Neither you nor I spend our evenings thinking about soil pipes. Life at its best is to do with passing the time pleasantly.’
They had several drinks together, and after the junket they had more drinks in a pub in Chelsea and finally in his flat in Fulham. By this time she was Brahms and Liszt, as she kept saying in imitation of her Cockney flatmate. While he made black coffee, she lay on his bed with her long legs apart and her arms shading her eyes from the light. And while the coffee was percolating, he made love to her with a french letter protecting his vulnerable foreskin. The coffee had gone cold by the time they’d finished, but she said that she loved iced coffee and that she’d drink cold coffee since it was already halfway to being iced. She had dressed with quick efficiency and combed her hair in front of his mirror while he thought of her blue-veined breasts and how far apart they were, not quite right for intermammary ecstasy.
‘That was a clitoral,’ she said, letting the hairs from her comb fall on his newly shampooed carpet. The word ‘clitoral’ pierced his eardrum with a triple-jab, because he had never heard it said in an American accent before. It was not a word he himself used every day. And this was the first time he’d heard the adjective used as a noun.
‘That was a clitoral,’ she said again. ‘I thought you might be pleased to know.’
‘And what is a clitoral? Not a term I’ve come across in engineering, as far as I’m aware.’
‘A clitoral as opposed to a vaginal orgasm.’
‘It’s all news to me. I suppose I’ve lived a sheltered life. Or perhaps it’s just that English women like to keep their men folk in ignorance of these little refinements,’ he said in an effort to divert her thoughts from the possibility of further clitoral stimulation.
‘You do surprise me, honey. It’s a fundamental distinction that any self-confessed member of the technologico-Benthamite society should be capable of making. Most American men know all about it, but unfortunately there’s a world of difference between the theory and the practice.’
‘Personally, I don’t buy all this feminist theory. As a straight up and down sort of bloke, I feel more at home with the practicalities. If you ask me, the two-orgasm theory of sex will have as many proponents in a hundred years’ time as the four-humour theory of medicine has today.’
She put both her arms round him and gave him a bear hug of such horsepower that he felt helpless as worked-over putty in her hands.
‘What I like about you is not so much your wit as your small ass. We American women love men with neat asses. In a recent poll thirty-nine per cent of women in Greenwich Village thought a small ass the most attractive thing in a man whereas only two per cent yearned for a large penis. So you see, you needn’t be afraid of us women. We’re not the vultures you think we are. I’m on your side. I like the cut of your jib, as my flatmate says.’
Feeling quite exhausted, he followed her down the stairs into the night and put her on a taxi home. He never saw her again but he would not forget her combative style of conversation, nor her readiness to devour his most sensitive part in the hope of what she called a second bite of the cherry.
Nora nudged him. He could hardly believe he’d been asleep.
‘We both must have dropped off,’ she said. ‘It’s half-past eight. I’d better get back before the Canon does.’
They dressed in the dark, shivering after the warmth of the blankets and because the fire had died down while they slept.
‘You talk in your sleep, Ken,’ she said.
‘I never knew that. What was I saying?’
‘Something to do with mining, I think. Barytes, or coal maybe. All I could make out was the word “clinker”.’
He switched on the light and kissed her in grateful wonderment at the stroke of luck by which he’d found her.
17
He drove her back to the parochial house gate in the rain and, in spite of his earlier resolve, went straight to Roarty’s, that smoky den of male fantasy where the heartache of life’s disappointments and dishonourable compacts could be forgotten for at least an hour. As it was Saturday night, the bar was crowded. He made straight for the corner by the window, where Gimp Gillespie, Crubog and Cor Mogaill had established a bridgehead while debating without benefit of science whether lugworms were hermaphrodites. Cor Mogaill was saying that lugworms were really earthworms and therefore must surely share the sexual characteristics of the earthworm. As they were all keen observers of the antics of earthworms, the conversation became quite spirited for a while.
He bought a round and tried to interest himself in the intricacies of Cor Mogaill’s reasoning, but his mind was on Nora and a dilemma that would not let go of him. Now in retrospect he thought her wilful, even wrongheaded, yet while he was with her, he could not find words to counter the inescapable logic of her argument. Argument, of course, was the wrong term. It was really a matter of deeply ingrained feelings. The outcome he desired ran counter to her whole way of looking at things. He wondered if he was being selfish in putting his own happiness before hers, and then he told himself that most men in his position would do precisely that. If only he could share his thoughts with a friend. Gillespie was hardly a disinterested party, and Roarty, his only other friend, was rarely stone cold sober. He looked round the bar and told himself that his sense of isolation was really one of enrichment, a vital part of life’s chequered experience. The grea
t Victorian explorers had been here before him. He did not need to swaddle himself in the comforts and familiarities of childhood friends.
He arrived home at midnight and, reluctant to go to bed just then, he put more peat on the fire, made himself a cup of coffee, and opened Gimp Gillespie’s book at chapter three. It was an interesting little book, but in his present mood a thriller might have had a better chance of lifting the deep, deep gloom in his mind. Ever since his arrival he had been busy savouring what delights the local life had to offer. Now he had withdrawn to take stock and in the unwonted quiet, there was time for light reading. He was not a habitual reader of thrillers. In London he simply did not have time and besides, he felt that they lacked that imponderable ingredient that makes fiction truer than fact. Understandably, those of them that sported an intrusive infrastructure of fact lacked the ingredient all the more conspicuously. In spite of all that, he could enjoy a good thriller just now with the wind and the rain outside and the sea rising in the air and spilling onto the rocks below the cottage.
He finished the book at two, covered the dying coals with ash, and undressed. The kitchen had lost its warmth; he could feel on his bare ankles the draught that came in under the door. The bed curtains shivered in the draught but it did not matter. In a moment he would be lying snugly behind them under warm blankets that bore the memory of Nora Hession’s sexuality. He pulled the blankets up beneath his chin and closed his eyes. Outside, the night was wild. The door strained at the latch, the mountain ash scratched the window pane, the rain beat on the stone threshold, and the sapless rafters of the roof creaked under the force of the racing wind. All were distinct sounds which he identified one by one but they merged in a Wagnerian flow that dulled his brain to the verge of sleep.
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