It was like seeing normally in a country where most people were colour blind. Didn’t Beatrice feel that too? For of course she was one of the rare clear-seeing ones. He had felt it at once, the first time he met her. Beatrice nodded gravely. Yes, she too felt like that. Burlap smiled up at her; he knew it. She felt proud and important. Rampion’s idea of love, for example; Burlap shook his head. So extraordinarily gross and animal and corporeal.
‘Dreadful,’ said Beatrice feelingly. Denis, she was thinking, was so different. Tenderly she looked down at the head that reposed, so trustingly, against her knee. She adored the way his hair curled, and his very small, beautiful ears, and even the pink bare spot on the top of his crown. That little pink tonsure was somehow rather engagingly pathetic. There was a long silence.
Burlap at last profoundly sighed. ‘How tired I am!’ he said.
‘You ought to go to bed.’
‘Too tired even to move.’ He pressed his cheek more heavily against her knee and shut his eyes.
Beatrice raised her hand, hesitated a moment, dropped it again, then raised it once more and began to run her fingers soothingly through his dark curls. There was another long silence.
‘Ah, don’t stop,’ he said, when at last she withdrew her hand. ‘It’s so comforting. Such a virtue seems to go out from you. You’d almost cured my headache.’
‘You’ve got a headache?’ asked Beatrice, her solicitude running as usual to a kind of anger. ‘Then you simply must go to bed,’ she commanded.
‘But I’m so happy here.’
‘No, I insist.’ Her protective motherliness was thoroughly aroused. It was a bullying tenderness.
‘How cruel you are!’ Burlap complained, rising reluctantly to his feet. Beatrice was touched with compunction. ‘I’ll stroke your head when you’re in bed,’ she promised. She too now regretted that soft warm silence, that speechless intimacy, which her outburst of domineering solicitude had too abruptly shattered. She justified herself by an explanation. The headache would return if he didn’t go to sleep the moment it was cured. And so on.
Burlap had been in bed nearly ten minutes when she came to keep her promise. She was dressed in a green dressing-gown and her yellow hair was plaited into a long thick pigtail that swung heavily as she moved, like the heavy plaited tail of a cart-horse at a show.
‘You look about twelve with that pigtail hanging down your back,’ said Burlap, enchanted.
Beatrice laughed, rather nervously, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He raised his hand and took hold of the thick plait. ‘Too charming,’ he said. ‘It simply invites pulling.’ He gave a little tug at it, playfully.
‘Look out,’ she warned. ‘I’ll pull back, in spite of your headache.’ She took hold of one of his dark curls.
‘Pax, pax!’ he begged, reverting to the vocabulary of the preparatory school. ‘I’ll let go. The real reason,’ he added, ‘why little boys don’t like fighting with little girls is simply that little girls are so much more ruthless and ferocious.’
Beatrice laughed again. There was a silence. She felt a little breathless and fluttering, as one feels when one is anxiously expecting something to happen. ‘Head bad?’
she asked
‘Rather bad.’ She stretched out a hand and touched his forehead.
‘Your hand’s magical,’ he said. With a quick unexpected movement he wriggled round sideways under the sheets and laid his head on her lap. ‘There,’ he whispered and, with a sigh of contentment, closed his eyes.
For a moment Beatrice was taken aback, almost frightened. That dark head lying hard and heavy on her thighs—it seemed strange, terrifying. She had to suppress a little shudder before she could feel glad at the confiding childishness of his movement. She began stroking his forehead, stroking his scalp through the thick dark curls. Time passed. The soft warm silence enveloped them once more, the dumb intimacy of contact was reestablished. She was no longer domineering in her protective solicitude, only tender. The armour of her hardness was as though melted away from her, melted away in this warm intimacy along with the terrors which made it necessary.
Burlap sighed again. He was in a kind of blissful doze of sensual passivity.
‘Better?’ she asked in a soft whisper.
‘Still rather bad on the side,’ he whispered back. ‘Just over the ear.’ And he rolled his head over so that she could more easily reach the painful spot, rolled it over so that his face was pressed against her belly, her soft belly that stirred so livingly with her breathing, that was so warm and yielding against his face.
At the touch of his face against her body Beatrice felt a sudden renewal of those spasmodic creepings of apprehension. Her flesh was terrified by the nearness of that physical intimacy. But as Burlap did not stir, as he made no dangerous gesture, no movement towards a closer contact, the terrors died gradually down and their flutterings served only to enhance and intensify that wonderful warm emotion of tenderness which succeeded them. She ran her fingers through his hair, again and again. The warmth of his breathing was against her belly. She shivered a little; her happiness fluttered with apprehensions and anticipations. Her flesh trembled, but was somehow joyful; was afraid and yet curious; shrank, but took warmth at the contact and even, through its terrors, timidly desired.
‘Better?’ she whispered again.
He made a little movement with his head and pressed his face closer to her soft flesh.
‘Shall I stop now?’ she went on, ‘shall I go away?’
Burlap raised his head and looked at her. ‘No, no,’ he implored. ‘Don’t go. Not yet. Don’t break the magic. Stay here for a moment longer. Lie down here for a moment under the quilt. For a moment.’
Without speaking she stretched herself out beside him and he drew the quilt over her, he turned out the light.
The fingers that caressed her arm under its wide sleeve touched delicately, touched spiritually and as it were disembodiedly, like the fingers of those inflated rubber gloves that brush so thrillingly against one’s face in the darkness of seances, bringing comfort from the Great Beyond and a message of affection from the loved ones who have passed over. To caress and yet be a spiritualized rubber glove at a seance, to make love but as though from the Great Beyond—that was Burlap’s talent.
Softly, patiently, with an infinite disembodied gentleness he went on caressing. Beatrice’s armour was melted quite away. It was the soft younggirlish, tremulous core of her that Burlap caressed with that delicate touch of spirit fingers from the Great Beyond. Her armour was gone; but she felt so wonderfully safe with Denis. She felt no fears, or at least only such faint breathless flutterings of her still almost childish flesh as served to quicken her happiness. She felt so wonderfully safe even when—after what had seemed a delicious eternity of patiently repeated caresses from wrist to shoulder and back again—the spirit hand reached out of the Beyond and touched her breast.
Delicately, almost disembodiedly it touched, like a skin of rubber stuffed with air; spiritually it slid over the rounded flesh, and its angelic fingers lingered along the skin. At the first touch the round breast shuddered; it had its private terrors within Beatrice’s general happiness and sense of security. But patiently, gently, unalarmingly, the spirit hand repeated its caress again, again, till the reassured and at last eager breast longed for its return and her whole body was alive with the tingling ramifications of the breast’s desires. In the darkness the eternities prolonged themselves.
CHAPTER XXXV
Next day, instead of whimpering with every return of pain, the child began to scream—cry after shrill cry, repeated with an almost clockwork regularity of recurrence for what seemed to Elinor an eternity of hours. Like the scream of a rabbit in a trap. But a thousand times worse; for it was a child that screamed, not an animal; her child, trapped and in agony. She felt as though she too were trapped. Trapped by her own utter helplessness to alleviate his pain. Trapped by that obscure sense of guilt, that irrational belief (but haunting in spite of its irrationality), that ever more closely pressing and suffocating conviction that it was all, in some inscrutable fashion, her fault, a punishment, malevolently vicarious, for her offence. Caged within her own snare, but outside his, she sat there holding the small hand as it were between invisible bars, unable to come to his aid, waiting through the child’s quickbreathed and feverish silence for the recurrence of that dreadful cry, for yet another sight of that suddenly distorted face, that shuddering little body racked by a pain which was somehow of her own inflicting.
The doctor came at last with his opiates.
Philip arrived by the twelve-twenty. He had been in no hurry to get up and come by an earlier train. It annoyed him to have to leave town. His late arrival was in the nature of a protest. Elinor must really learn not to make such a fuss every time the child had a stomach-ache. It was absurd. She met him at the door as he stepped out of the car, so white and haggard, and with such darkcircled and desperate eyes, that he was shocked to see her.
‘But you’re the one who’s ill,’ he said anxiously ‘What is it?’
She did not
