Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs (26 page)

‘Oh, how delicious your kisses are,’ he said when he had taken his lips away. ‘Darling, you’ll never know how much I’ve wanted to do that.’

‘Well … why didn’t you?’

He smiled. ‘I was afraid of arousing desires that perforce had to be denied. I mean my own, of course. While there was no possibility of taking them to any sort of satisfactory conclusion, I didn’t dare to risk it.’

‘What do you mean, no possibility?’

‘Your leg, sweetheart.’ He touched my newly peeled left leg and smiled. ‘You can’t have forgotten already.’

‘No … only … I see, of course.’

I remembered how uncomfortable it had been making love with Sebastian with one leg in a cast and was grateful to Rafe for his gentlemanly forbearance.

‘Oh, darling, I’m going on much too fast and I don’t want to frighten you, but you might be able to imagine a little of my frustration.’

My predominant emotion was not fear but confusion. He had behaved so little like a man in love. Or in lust either. He held both my hands between his. I was conscious that mine were extremely sticky.

‘Dearest Marigold,’ he continued, ‘do you trust me?’

‘Of course,’ I said at once. ‘More than anyone I know.’

He lifted my fingers to kiss them. A little blob of orange syrup adhered to his upper lip. ‘Oh, darling, I don’t deserve you. But I want … I want so badly … Sweetheart, will you come upstairs with me?’ He kissed my brow, presumably returning the syrup to my hair. ‘To my room?’

Well, he wasn’t wasting any time now he had begun. I debated internally, fast. It could not be said that I felt any violent physical desire to go to bed with him. The truth was that, in my previous lovemakings, it had all been over before I had a chance to get anything more than mildly interested. I was practically certain I had never had an orgasm. If I had not been constantly anxious about my balletic performances, I might have had time and energy to worry that my response to sex was so lukewarm. Perhaps tepid would be more accurate. But Rafe wanted to. And he was the stuff of dreams. Besides, if I said no he would be disappointed and angry.

‘All right,’ I said. Then, feeling this sounded a little cool, ‘I’ve never been in your room before.’

He laughed. ‘It’s not a particularly exciting place. But I don’t think we’re going to worry about that. Not for the next couple of hours, anyway.’ He stood up, still holding one of my hands. ‘Come on, darling.’

A couple of hours! Gosh! No one in the company, wherein
lay all my sexual experience, had ever taken more than twenty minutes, start to finish. I allowed my eyes to stray discreetly to the clock on Evelyn’s chimneypiece. That would take us up to six o’clock, which would leave plenty of time to get back and make sure that Dimpsie had something to eat. These days she tended not to bother unless I insisted, and she was losing weight alarmingly fast.

We had to tiptoe up the stairs because of Spendlove, and it was bliss to be able to, though the results of the afternoon’s walk were beginning to make themselves felt with a steady ache in my calf muscle. I did a rapid inventory of my underwear and remembered with annoyance that I was wearing a pair of my father’s old socks as all my tights were stuck in the broken washing machine. Luckily I had had a bath that morning. I knew where Rafe’s room was, of course, and occasionally during the period of my youthful infatuation I had peeked round the door to refresh my spirits with a glimpse of the beloved one’s cricket bat and rugby boots, but Isobel had once told me that he used to lay booby traps to keep her out so I had never dared to venture in.

‘Here we are, darling.’

Rafe locked the door behind us. At last, after so many years of wistful daydreaming, I found myself within the tabernacle, the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies. It was disappointingly austere. The planes made from plastic kits that once dangled from the ceiling had been banished, along with the cricket bats and Rolling Stones posters. The walls were papered with grey and white stripes and the windows were hung with dark red linen curtains. It was smart and masculine.

A plain brass bedstead stood in the middle of the room, with two electric fires directed at it, every bar ablaze. I considered myself to be the least demanding of women when it came to the vocabulary of wooing. Dancers are perpetually in a hungry, exhausted and highly strung condition, and romance is saved for the tulle and sequins of the stage. But those fires suggested
a presumption that grated. I acknowledged at once that this was silly of me. The room would have been arctic without the heaters and it had been considerate of Rafe to install them. Anyway, with my record of sexual opportunism, I had not a leg to stand on.

I became aware that I was being observed. Rafe stood with his hands on his hips, smiling. Almost the tallest man I knew, he seemed to have grown a couple of inches since we were downstairs. I felt a quiver of something – I hoped it was lust but it might have been apprehension. He went over to the bed and sat down, patting the space beside him.

‘Come here, sweetheart.’

I did as I was told.

‘Now.’ He put one arm round me and with his other hand stroked my cheek, and then let his hand run down my neck to my breast. ‘Don’t be afraid, my darling. We’ll go as slowly as you like.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, hoping that it would not be
too
slow as I had to get back.

‘Don’t thank me, darling. It’s I who should be thanking you.’

He pulled my jersey off over my head and we exchanged a fervent kiss. I put my hands up behind me to unhook my bra but he said, ‘Not yet. Just leave it to me. I know this is your first time and I want it to be just what you’ve always dreamed of.’

I heard these words with such an unpleasant sense of shock that the blood rushed to my face. Rafe observed it.

‘You’re feeling shy. I understand. Just a minute.’ He lifted my legs up onto the bed so that I was lying with my head on the pillow. ‘Relax. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.’ He went to the window and drew the curtains, throwing the room into semi-darkness. ‘There. That’s better isn’t it?’

‘Much,’ I said to the head-shaped shadow that loomed over me. As he climbed on to the bed beside me accompanied by a violent creaking of springs, I was thinking furiously. What on earth had given him the impression that I was a virgin? Then I
remembered that he had asked me quite recently after we had become reacquainted if I had ever been in love. I had said no. Being a respectable, properly brought-up man used to respectable, properly brought-up girls, he must have assumed that I would only give my body where my heart had gone before. It behoved me to disillusion him as soon as I could. But he had his tongue in my mouth and was kissing me – rather expertly too, quite firmly and without dribbling.

‘Rafe,’ I said the moment he removed it, ‘I’d hate you to get the wrong idea—’

‘Don’t worry, my sweet,’ he interrupted. ‘I know just what you’re thinking. Of course I’m not going to respect you less for letting me make love to you. I just feel so
proud
that I’m the first one. You can’t imagine how precious this moment is to me. I feel like a king. Oooh, what a lucky, lucky man I am!’

He folded me in his arms and held me so tightly that I had no breath to speak. Perhaps it would be better not to disillusion him until afterwards if it was as important as all that.

‘Of course, there have been women in my life,’ he continued. ‘You mustn’t mind. Men are different from women. They can love a woman physically without getting emotionally involved. Besides, I’m thirty-one. You wouldn’t expect me to have remained celibate.’

‘Of course not.’

‘And that experience means I’m better equipped to give you pleasure.’

‘Oh yes. I assure you I don’t mind at all.’

‘You’re an extraordinary girl, Marigold. So innocent, and yet in some ways so wise.’

I blushed harder and was thankful for obscurity. Rafe unzipped my skirt and pulled it down so that I was naked but for my bra and pants and those terribly unsexy socks which I hoped he wouldn’t notice in the dark. He started to stroke and kiss my body. His hands and mouth were light and it was soothing and delightful. When I attempted to stroke him back,
he murmured, ‘No, wait. I don’t want to get too excited and rush you. Just relax and think how much I love you.’

So I lay back feeling warm and comfortable, listening to the twitter of birds outside and the springs that squeaked with the slightest movement like a family of vociferous mice. He continued to caress my stomach and thighs and then undid my bra and kissed my breasts very gently. What with the darkness and the heat given off by the fires and the long walk after three months without exercise and the sedative effect of being stroked all over, my thoughts began to ramble. I tried to drag them back to Rafe’s hitherto unsuspected passion for me, but the squeaks of the springs reminded me of the visit to Bavaria when Lizzie and I had taken a rowing boat on to the Alpsee and everywhere had been absolutely peaceful and still with barely a ripple on the water or a sound except for the noises oars make in rowlocks, a rhythmical creaky noise. ERRK, errk, ERRK, errk. The mountains had been majestic with their hoary peaks and green skirts … I seemed to be floating on my back on the surface of the lake, surrounded by swans, dipping their heads and shaking their graceful necks. The king of the swans – the one wearing the tiny gold crown – began to nibble my breasts with his hard wet beak and it was not entirely pleasant. I tried to splash with my hands and feet to get away and then woke with a cry of pain as my foot touched the brass bedpost, which was red-hot from the blazing electric fires …

‘Ow-how!’

‘Marigold! My angel!’

Rafe tore off my knickers and before I could galvanize myself into enthusiastic action, everything was over much more quickly than he had originally proposed. Afterwards I lay in his arms, so steeped in guilt that I hated myself. Listening to his thundering heart, feeling the pressure of his hand caressing my elbow, registering a kiss on my parting, I told myself I was the meanest woman in the world. For the first time in my life I had been made love to by someone who had unselfishly devoted himself
to my pleasure instead of greedily snatching his own and I had rewarded him by falling asleep. I put my arm across his broad chest and pressed myself against him, vowing silently to make it up to him at the next opportunity. Sebastian had taught me one or two little tricks that, according to him, could bring a man to the edge of swooning with pleasure. And of course dancers have splendid musculatures and can if necessary perform extraordinary contortions …

‘Darling,’ I whispered, ‘thank you for being so kind and considerate …’

To my surprise he put his hand over my mouth. ‘Don’t. Don’t say another word. I’m not kind. Or considerate. I’m the most despicable …’ He groaned and broke off.

I pushed away his hand. ‘Rafe?’ I sat up and leaned over him, wishing that I could see his face properly. ‘Why do you say that? It isn’t true.’

He laughed bitterly. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

‘I don’t need to know. Unless it would make you feel better to tell me.’ When he didn’t reply I went on, ‘But if you can’t undo whatever it is, what’s the point of making yourself miserable? I expect you’re exaggerating your guilt because you’re still recovering from shock. Isobel told me you risked your own life to save someone else’s. You ought to concentrate on that.’ Then when he remained silent I added, ‘We all do things we’re ashamed of.’

‘I can’t believe you’ve ever done anything to be ashamed of.’

‘Oh yes I have. And I’ve no intention of telling you what. Not yet anyway.’

‘Well, then.’ He put up his hand to touch my face. ‘We’ll agree to put the past behind us, shall we?’

‘Let’s.’

He pulled my head down, rolled me on to my back and kissed my mouth with a fierceness that seemed to border on desperation. His teeth pressed into my lower lip and really hurt. ‘Marigold,’ he murmured, ‘Marigold, Marigold, Marigold.’

‘Are you committing my name to memory?’

He did not reply immediately and I regretted the little joke, for he was clearly not in the mood for levity. Just as I was beginning to wonder how I might tactfully suggest that we got dressed, he sighed heavily and said, ‘I promise, my darling, I’ll do everything in my power to try to make you happy and that you shall never suffer because I … through any behaviour of mine.’ I was about to tell him that no such promise was needed when he said words that made my heart do a
grand jeté
. ‘Marigold darling, you’re my salvation. Do you realize that? With you by my side I know I can kick these appalling fits of depression and become a rational man again. I don’t deserve you but I’m going to try to.’ His voice became eager. ‘I think we ought to get married as soon as possible. The expense of a huge wedding would be unfair to your father. And a terrible strain for Dimpsie. Why don’t we slip off to a register office and tell everyone about it afterwards?’

For a moment I felt as though my veins had been injected with air. The most desirable man I had ever known, the demigod whom I had worshipped from childhood, who could have had any girl in the county merely by snapping his fingers, was asking me to marry him. I felt as though I might float up to the ceiling, except that his body was pinning me to the bed. It seemed like an impossible dream. Just a minute – I tasted blood on my lips – it
was
an impossible dream. ‘Rafe … let’s not go too fast. There are … obstacles.’

‘You mean my mother.’

I was not thinking of Evelyn, though she counted as a very large one. ‘Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘She wouldn’t like it one bit. The daughter of the local GP isn’t good enough for her son. She said so, though not in so many words.’

‘You mean you’ve talked about it? You told her you were in love with me? I’m so flattered. I really had no idea.’

‘Not quite. She was leaping to conclusions because you and I seemed to be getting on so well.’

‘Don’t worry, my sweet. You can safely leave my mother to me. I don’t want you to have a care in the world ever again. Of course I can’t put things right between your parents. But you’ll always be able to lean on me. I want to be your source of strength and comfort.’