Stephen moved up the bed towards her. He put his hand down to the crutch of the camiknickers and he fumbled with the little buttons. Lily, her eyes still shut, flinched a little at the touch of his hand probing at her secret, private parts. “If you knew Suzie, like I know Suzie . . .”
Stephen had the buttons undone at last. Lily felt the bed sink as he moved over her. She felt him fumble to free his penis from his pyjama trousers. She kept singing in her head, determinedly holding the tune, as if someone else were singing a different song in her ear, trying to distract her.
Stephen was pushing against her. Lily felt something hard and rubbery and horrible at her thigh, at her belly, at the crutch of her body and then he stabbed her suddenly, without warning, and Lily pulled away from him and screamed. He had his hand over her mouth in a moment. “Sssh, Lily,” he said urgently. “Don’t cry, it’s all right, I’ll be as gentle as I can. It always hurts a bit, you know. You mustn’t shriek though!”
Lily lay still again, searching for the song she was singing in her mind, hunting for the tune. “If you knew Suzie . . .”
Stephen lay still for a few moments and nothing hurt too much except the sense of being suffocated and crushed. Lily felt horridly filled by him, an extraordinary sensation, as if she were being stuffed like a helpless Christmas turkey. “Oh! oh! oh what a girl . . .”
Stephen started moving. His hand tightened over Lily’s mouth to muffle her cry. Her vagina was quite dry and at every movement Stephen rubbed against her dryness, pulling the delicate skin. She was bleeding now and the feel of the warm wetness excited him, and made his movements more rapid and easier. He arched his back to push further inside her. Lily found that she had moved on to Madge Sweet’s song, “I’m a Red Hot Baby, try-ing to get along . . . a Red Hot Baby . . . never done no wrong,” and somewhere in her mind she noted the incongruity of that song at that moment.
Stephen plunged deeper inside her. Lily gasped at a new level of pain, and then Stephen said, “Oh God! oh God!” and tore himself away from her and fell at her side, groaning in pleasure as his seed, stained red from the blood on his penis, spurted against Lily’s pretty camiknickers.
They lay very still for a little while. Lily drew her legs together and noted, as a dancer, that though she was stiff and sore that no muscles were torn. She felt dry-mouthed and weary. The headache from the champagne and from the fatigue of the day was closing on her neck and on the back of her head. She felt neither resentment nor anger. It had been a good deal worse than she had imagined but it had been over quicker than she had thought, and she had not disgraced them by crying or screaming.
She was surprised, though, that the experience was so thoroughly nasty. She thought of Charlie and the moment of utter delight when he had lain on her and she had wrapped herself around him, pressing him closer and closer. She could hardly understand that the same movement with Stephen had made her feel smothered and sick. She did not understand his desire, his insistent eager burrowing into her flesh. She did not understand the sudden tearing away from her and the hot disgusting wetness at her side. She thought of Charlie and the smooth hairless skin of his crutch, criss-crossed with scars where his male body had been shot away and they had stitched him and patched him, and saved his life but made him into a strange sexless being, almost like a girl. Then she turned her thoughts away from Charlie, because he had written to her that he could be nothing more than a friend. And now she understood what he meant. He could not do this with her. Now she was a married woman. She would have to do it with her husband whenever he wanted, and it would be easier if she did not think of Charlie at all.
“Are you hurt?” Stephen asked softly. His hand came up to stroke her hair, and Lily flinched from the smell of it. A deep rich smell like sweat, only riper.
“A little.”
“Lie still, I’ll fetch a towel.”
He went, not to the bathroom, but to his suitcase. He had brought an old towel from home, planning to wipe Lily’s blood with it and then throw it away. Lily watched him as he took it from his suitcase and dabbed at her thighs and at the bottom sheet. She found his preparedness insulting, he was too knowing. He had planned ahead and he had known she would bleed for him.
“There we are, dear. Are you in much pain?”
Lily looked carefully at him. She heard her cue and saw the curious elation on Stephen’s face.
She smiled at him wanly and let her lower lip tremble a little. “It doesn’t matter. If it was what you wanted then it doesn’t matter.”
He bent over her and kissed her. “You’re the first lady I’ve ever been with,” he said. “I didn’t know what it would be like. We used to hear such stories—you know—from the other chaps. About what girls liked and what girls would do. You never really know where you are.”
Lily was listening carefully, gathering clues of what Stephen wanted from this painful intrusive experience, urgent to get the information she needed to manage him.
“You didn’t like it at all, did you, Lily?”
Lily shook her head tentatively, it seemed to be the proper response. It was what his mother had said, it was what he wanted.
Stephen leaned over and put out the light. His sigh was deeply contented. He gathered her to him and rested her head on his shoulder. “That’s how it should be. I won’t trouble you often, there is no need to be concerned.”
In a few moments he was deeply asleep.
Lily lay awake. The bright lights of the London streets shone through the curtains. On the ceiling the curtain rings let in little circles of light and when a cab went past, its motor rumbling, the little circles of light moved along the ceiling from one end of the curtain pole to the other.
Stephen started to snore.
Lily held up the blankets and slid noiselessly out of bed. She dropped the camiknickers from her shoulders. They were stained with her blood and with the pallid cream of Stephen’s semen. Lily put them, unhesitatingly, in the waste paper bin. She felt that the cost of them was a legitimate fine which Stephen should pay.
The suspender belt was tight around her waist. She undid it, and undid the clips on her stockings and rolled them down. She put them in the dressing table drawer with the belt and then pulled on the new silk nightdress. The light fabric felt as cold and slick as snow against her skin. Lily shivered. There was nowhere warm in the room. There was nowhere for her to go but back to bed beside Stephen. She sat for a little while in the armchair, watching him sleeping in the half-light which came through the curtains, watching the big shadow of the bed leap and flicker in the quickly moving light from passing cars. Somewhere near the hotel there was a party going on. Cars came and went, people were dancing, drinking, having fun. Women were in the arms of men they liked and when they kissed they did not feel a suffocating repulsion but instead that melting feeling of desire which Lily had known once. Lily sat in the darkness, watching her husband sleep, knowing that she must make the best of this marriage which she had undertaken in shock and in grief, and must now live with for the rest of her life.
• • •
It was hot in London in July, not a good time to go sightseeing around a crowded city. The parks were dusty and the flower beds drying out. The hotel was filled with visiting Americans and Stephen complained that the waiters were surly and slow from being constantly overtipped. Stephen and Lily went to another show, they took a pleasure boat up the Thames. They visited the Houses of Parliament, they went to London Zoo. Lily was amazed at the energy Stephen had for visiting places. Left to herself she would have wandered aimlessly along some interesting streets and then rejoiced in the idleness of sitting in restaurants, and cafés, doing nothing. But Stephen woke them early each morning with an itinerary that had to be completed by tea time. Lily was forced to learn history: at the Tower of London he bought a book on the kings of England and expected her to know one from another. She was forced to study architecture—he constantly pointed out buildings to her. Lily had never thought of churches or br
idges or houses except in terms of their function. But Stephen went on and on about how they looked and who had built them, and how old they were. They looked around the Palace of Westminster, quiet in the long summer recess, and Stephen lectured her on the meaning of democracy and why the British system was superior to any other in the world. He took her down to the Inns of Court and explained to her the legal system of which he was a part. Lily was exhausted, overworked, and bored beyond belief.
And she was grieving still. When she was tired, or in the honesty of early morning hours when she could not sleep, she would think of her mother. When she slept, she dreamed that the little corner shop was still open and her mother behind the counter. She dreamed that she could go home at any time she wanted and her mother would greet her in the old way, would hold out her arms to her and enfold her in that warm capable hug. When she woke, Lily would lie for a little while in the dark, puzzled by the unfamiliar shape of the room. Then she would recognize Stephen’s bulk beside her and hear his measured steady breath and know that her girlhood was over, that her mother was dead, and that she was married for life to this stranger. Her obedience to Stephen’s whims of sightseeing, of education, was made possible by her grief. For Lily, in those long hot summer days, nothing mattered. In the back of her mind, in the foreground of her dreams, she grieved for her mother constantly. Nothing else mattered at all.
One morning, on the third day of the visit, they were walking away from a long wearying visit to the British Museum, looking for a restaurant to have lunch, when a car on the opposite side of the road suddenly backfired with a gout of smoke and a smell of oil. It was so loud and so startling that Lily jumped and dropped her handbag, but Stephen dived without a moment’s hesitation towards the pavement and rolled over and over, in his best suit, with his hands over his ears, his arms around his face.
Lily shot a quick horrified look up and down the road. People were staring at them. A woman gave a little sound, halfway between a scream and a laugh, and pointed. Stephen did not move. Lily knelt beside him, put her hand on his shoulder and shook him. “Stephen, it’s only a car, get up.” His shoulders were shaking, his whole body was shaking. Lily thought he must be having some kind of fit. She stood up helplessly and looked around again. A man came out of the shop doorway and stared at her.
Lily knelt down on the pavement beside her husband again. Stephen was compressed like a foetus, he was kicking out with his feet, as his whole body shook in convulsive little thrashings, dirtying his suit on the pavement. Lily put her hand on the nape of his neck where the short haircut left him bare and vulnerable.
“Shellshocked?” the man in the shop doorway asked her. “Need a hand?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Lily said.
Slowly Stephen stopped shuddering. His long legs unfolded. He sat up, and gazed around him with blank unseeing eyes. He rose up to stand as slowly and unwilling as if someone were bawling orders at him. His arms were still wrapped around his head one on top of the other, his hands over his ears.
“Stop it!” Lily hissed. “Everyone is staring at us.”
She put an impatient hand on the crook of his arm and tugged it down from his face. Stephen stood with both hands dangling like a scolded child. His face was blank and white.
“Get us a cab,” Lily said to the man in the doorway.
She took Stephen’s hand. It lay limp in hers, icy cold and unattractively damp. A taxi drew up beside them. Lily got in and the shopman pushed Stephen gently in beside her.
“Poor devil,” he said. “You should get him to a doctor, Missis.” He spoke to Lily across Stephen’s stony shiny face. “They give them electric. Poor devils.”
He slammed the door. Stephen did not flinch at the noise, he did not seem to hear it. He had gone somewhere in his mind where nothing could touch him.
Lily gave the name of the hotel and sat back beside Stephen. He was staring straight ahead but his eyes were not moving. He did not even blink.
They were very close to the hotel. Lily paid the driver and tugged Stephen out of the cab. He followed her with the obedience of a beaten child. She took him up the front steps and the doorman held the door for them with an expression of professional uninterest. People stared at them as they went past, Lily pulling Stephen along by the hand. Suddenly Stephen jerked his hand from her grasp and gripped her shoulder. He walked behind her, with his eyes staring open but unseeing, gripping her shoulder, with his white mad face swinging from one side to the other. He made Lily lead him, like a blinded gas casualty, through the lobby of the fashionable London hotel, and up the elegant sweep of the marble stairs. As they went he muttered tunelessly, very quietly, “It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to Tipperary,” over and over, never more than the first line. People turned and stared at the two of them, Lily walking before him, her face scarlet with shame, and Stephen shambling behind her, one arm slack at his side, his other hand clamped on her shoulder and his eyes staring sightlessly before him.
The chambermaid was in the room making the bed. “Oh, get out!” Lily said, enraged, and slammed the door on her. Stephen sat on the edge of the bed with his hands dangling, his head drooped.
“Are you ill?” Lily demanded.
Slowly he shook his head. “Tired. Very, very tired.”
“Then lie down and sleep,” Lily said through her teeth. She pushed his shoulder and he sank back against the pillows and closed his eyes. Lily turned to the mirror and dragged off her hat. Her face was burning with colour, there were tears of anger and humiliation in her eyes.
“Kill her,” Stephen said softly. “Kill the whore.” And then he slept.
He did not wake until the afternoon. Lily let him sleep. She curled up in the armchair and watched him. His eyelids flickered in his sleep and his hands twitched. Sometimes he strained his head up towards the ceiling and his mouth moved as if he were trying to shout orders. Saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth. He dropped back to the pillow again. Lily shrank away. She thought him ugly. She thought his behaviour was unforgivable. She sat in the armchair and listened to the distant rumble of other people going out to lunch parties and having fun and she watched her husband sleep and twitch and dream.
Her stomach rumbled with hunger and she was chilled in her light summer dress. But Lily did not move. She sat in the chair, hugging her knees, staring at Stephen as if he were an enemy.
At half past three he stirred and opened his eyes.
“Lily!” he said contentedly. “How lovely it is to wake up and see you there!” He smiled at her, as sunny as a little boy.
“Are you all right now?” Lily asked icily.
He blinked at her tone, not understanding her. “I’m fine, fine.”
“Good.”
There was a silence. Stephen frowned, trying to recall what had happened, trying to comprehend Lily’s bottled-up fury.
“I can’t remember,” he said finally. “How did we get home?”
“A car backfired,” Lily said through her teeth. “You fell down on the pavement and rolled around. You wouldn’t get up. A man, a stranger, had to help me get you into the cab and get you home. You made me lead you through the lobby with your hand on my shoulder in front of hundreds of people. You sang ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary,’ over and over. Everyone saw us. And then you slept.”
Lily looked at the little gold watch he had bought her. “You have slept for four hours,” she said spitefully. “Dreaming and saying things.”
A shuttered look closed down over Stephen’s face. “Saying what?” Lily said nothing. She found she could not repeat “kill the whore” even though she longed to batter Stephen with the evidence of his abnormality. “You’re sick,” she accused.
Stephen swung his feet to the floor and went to the bathroom. He shut the door without replying. Through the thin dividing wall Lily could hear the stream of his urine, the clank and flush of the cistern, and then the taps running into the sink. She
heard him thrust his face under the water and splash, blowing out heavily. He opened the door, drying his face and hands on the white fluffy hotel towel.
“You’re not to say that,” he said.
It was as if a gulf had opened up on the floor between them. Stephen’s face was fixed, he stared at Lily unforgivingly. “You are never to say that again.”
Lily moved her little hands as if to push his determination away from her. “It’s only what the man in the street said. He said you were shellshocked, and that doctors could help. They give you electricity.”
Stephen came further into the bedroom. His step was heavy. “You are never to suggest such a thing. Not to me, not to anyone else.”
Lily looked mutinous.
“I am not shellshocked,” he said carefully. “There is no such thing as shellshock. Cowards and conchies pretend to have shellshock. But there is no such thing. I was decorated for my courage. I was mentioned in dispatches. No-one calls me a coward, least of all you.”
“But if you’re sick . . .”
“I am not sick.”
“What were you doing on the ground then?” Lily demanded. “Rolling on the ground when the car backfired?”
Stephen put down the towel and turned to the mirror. His shirt had been creased while he sweated in his deep sleep. He took off his jacket, tossed his tie to one side and stripped to the waist. Formidably half-naked, he brushed his hair with his two silver-backed brushes, as if he were grooming a glossy horse. The muscles across his broad chest and in his forearms rippled with the movement. He looked powerful. He looked triumphantly male. Lily could smell the sweat on him. “Who says?”
“Who says what?”
“Who says I was on the ground?”
“Well, I saw you . . . and so did all the other people who were there!”