Lucy was touched by his adoring tenderness, touched and surprised. She had had him because she was bored, because his lips were soft and his hands knew how to caress and because, at the last moment, she had been amused and delighted by his sudden conversion from abjectness to conquering impertinence. What a queer evening it had been! Walter sitting opposite to her at dinner with that hard look on his face, as though he were terribly angry and wanted to grind his teeth; but being very amusing, telling the most malicious stories about everybody, producing the most fantastic and grotesque pieces of historical information, the most astonishing quotations from old books.
When dinner was over, ‘We’ll go back to your house,’ he said. But Lucy wanted to go and see Nellie Wallace’s turn at the Victoria Palace and then drop in at the Embassy for some food and a little dancing, and then perhaps drive round to Cuthbert Arkwright’s on the chance that…Not that she had any real and active desire to go to the music hall, or dance, or listen to Cuthbert’s conversation. She only wanted to assert her will against Walter’s. She only wanted to dominate, to be the leader and make him do what she wanted, not what he wanted. But Walter was not to be shaken. He said nothing, merely smiled. And when the taxi came to the restaurant door, he gave the address in Bruton Street.
‘But this is a rape,’ she protested.
Walter laughed. ‘Not yet,’ he answered. ‘But it’s going to be.’
And in the grey and rose-coloured sittingroom it almost was. Lucy provoked and submitted to all the violences of sensuality. But what she had not expected to provoke was the adoring and passionate tenderness which succeeded those first violences. The hard look of anger faded from his face and it was as though a protection had been stripped from him and he were left bare, in the quivering, vulnerable nakedness of adoring love. His caresses were like the soothing of pain or terror, like the appeasements of anger, like delicate propitiations. His words were sometimes like whispered and fragmentary prayers to a god, sometimes words of whispered comfort to a sick child. Lucy was surprised, touched, almost put to shame by this passion of tenderness.
‘No, I’m not like that, not like that,’ she protested in answer to his whispered adorations. She could not accept such love on false pretences. But his soft lips, brushing her skin, his lightly drawn finger tips were soothing and caressing her into tenderness, were magically transforming her into the gentle, loving, warmhearted object of his adoration, were electrically charging her with all those qualities his whispers had attributed to her and the possession of which she had denied.
She drew his head on to her breast, she ran her fingers through his hair. ‘Darling Walter,’ she whispered,’darling Walter.’ There was a long silence, a warm still happiness. And then suddenly, just because this silent happiness was so deep and perfect and therefore, in her eyes, intrinsically rather absurd and even rather dangerous in its flawless impersonality, rather menacing to her conscious will, ‘Have you gone to sleep, Walter?’ she asked and tweaked his ear.
In the days that followed Walter desperately did his best to credit her with the emotions he himself experienced. But Lucy did not make it easy for him. She did not want to feel that deep tenderness which is a surrender of the will, a breaking down of personal separateness. She wanted to be herself, Lucy Tantamount, in full command of the situation, enjoying herself consciously to the last limit, ruthlessly having her fun; free, not only financially and legally, but emotionally too—emotionally free to have him or not to have him. To drop him as she had taken him, at any moment, whenever she liked. She had no wish to surrender herself.
And that tenderness of his—why, it was touching, no doubt, and flattering and rather charming in itself, but a little absurd and, in its anxious demand for a response from her side, really rather tiresome. She would let herself go a little way towards surrender, would suffer herself to be charged by his caresses with some of his tenderness; only to suddenly draw herself back from him into a teasing, provocative detachment. And Walter would be woken from his dream of love into a reality of what Lucy called ‘fun,’ into the cold daylight of sharply conscious, laughingly deliberate sensuality. She left him unjustified, his guiltiness unpalliated.
‘Do you love me? ‘ he asked her one night. He knew she didn’t. But perversely he wanted to have his knowledge confirmed, made explicit.
‘I think you’re a darling,’ said Lucy. She smiled up at him. But Walter’s eyes remained unansweringly sombre and despairing.
‘But do you love me?’ he insisted. Propped on his elbow, he hung over her almost menacingly. Lucy was lying on her back, her hands clasped under her head, her flat breasts lifted by the pull of the stretched muscles. He looked down at her; under his fingers was the curved elastic warmth of the body he had so completely and utterly possessed. But the owner of the body smiled up at him through half-closed eyelids, remote and unattained. ‘Do you love me?’
‘You’re enchanting.’ Something like mockery shone between the dark lashes.
‘But that isn’t an answer to my question. Do you love me?’
Lucy shrugged up her shoulders and made a little grimace
‘Love?’ she repeated. ‘It’s rather a big word, isn’t it?’ Disengaging one of her hands from under her head she raised it to give a little tug to the lock of brown hair that had fallen across Walter’s forehead. ‘Your hair’s too long,’ she said.
‘Then why did you have me?’ Walter insisted.
‘If you knew how absurd you looked with your solemn face and your hair in your eyes!’ She laughed. ‘Like a constipated sheep dog.’
Walter brushed back the drooping lock. ‘I want to be answered,’ he went on obstinately. ‘Why did you have me?’
‘Why? Because it amused me. Because I wanted to. Isn’t that fairly obvious?’
‘Without loving?’
‘Why must you always bring in love?’ she asked impatiently.
‘Why?’ he repeated. ‘But how can you leave it out?’
‘But if I can have what I want without it, why should I put it in? And besides, one doesn’t put it in. It happens to one. How rarely! Or perhaps it never happens; I don’t know. Anyhow, what’s one to do in the intervals?’ She took him again by the forelock and pulled his face down towards her own. ‘In the intervals, Walter darling, there’s you.’
His mouth was within an inch or two of hers. He stiffened his neck and would not let himself be pulled down any further. ‘Not to mention all the others,’ he said.
Lucy tugged harder at his hair. ‘Idiot!’ she said, frowning. ‘Instead of being grateful for what you’ve got.’
‘But what have I got?’ Her body curved away, silky and warm, under his hand; but he was looking into her mocking eyes
‘What have I got?’ Her body curved away, silky and warm, under his hand; but he was looking into her mocking eyes. ‘What have I got?’
Lucy still frowned. ‘Why don’t you kiss me?’ she demanded, as though she were delivering an ultimatum. Walter did not answer, did not stir. ‘Oh, very well.’ She pushed him away. ‘Two can play at that game.’
Repelled, Walter anxiously bent down to kiss her. Her voice had been hard with menace; he was terrified of losing her. ‘I’m a fool,’ he said.
‘You are.’ Lucy averted her face.
‘I’m sorry.’
But she would not make peace. ‘No, no,’ she said, and when, with a hand under her cheek, he tried to turn her face back towards his kisses, she made a quick fierce movement and bit him in the ball of the thumb. Full of hatred and desire, he took her by force.
‘Still bothering about love?’ she asked at last, breaking the silence of that languid convalescence which succeeds the fever of accomplished desires.
Reluctantly, almost with pain, Walter roused himself to answer. Her question in that deep silence was like the spurt of a match in the darkness of the night. The night is limitless, enormous, pricked with stars. The match is struck and all the stars are instantly abolished; there are no more distances and profundities. The universe is reduced to a little luminous cave scooped out of the solid blackness, crowded with brightly lit faces, with hands and bodies and the near familiar objects of common life. In that deep night of silence Walter had been happy. Convalescent after the fever, he held her in his arms, hating no more, but filled with a drowsy tenderness. His spirit seemed to float in the warm serenity between being and annihilation. She stirred within his arms, she spoke, and that marvellous unearthly serenity wavered and broke like a smooth reflecting surface of water suddenly disturbed.
‘I wasn’t bothering about anything.’ He opened his eyes to find her looking at him, amused and curious. Walter frowned. ‘Why do you stare at me? ‘ he asked.
‘I didn’t know it was prohibited.’
‘Have you been looking at me like that all this time?’ The idea was strangely unpleasant to him.
‘For hours,’ Lucy answered. ‘But admiringly, I assure you. I thought you looked really charming. Quite a sleeping beauty.’ She was smiling, mockingly; but she spoke the truth. Aesthetically, with a connoisseur’s appreciation, she had really been admiring him as he lay there, pale, with closed eyes and as though dead, at her
