Give Us This Day (41 page)

There seemed no profit in beating about the bush, so she said, sitting beside her and throwing an arm about her shoulder, “I heard you at the pipe. Don’t worry, love. Clint didn’t. He’s far too bottled. Now, what
is
it, Helen? How can I help?” She was rewarded by a convulsive embrace on Helen’s part and another sob, stifled this time, that released a steady flow of tears.

They sat there for a long time until Helen mastered herself sufficiently to say, “It was unforgivable… Me eavesdropping like that… I… I don’t know what’s come over me lately… I remembered the pipe and then… well, you’re so happy, Jo! And for me everything’s so sour and wretched. There’s no end to it, and when I’m alone and have those awful dreams…”

“What dreams, Helen?”

“The one about Colonel Shiba, the Japanese attache. And sometimes the frightful one I used to have before about… about seeing Rowley’s head on the post. Not as it was but alive.”

Joanna tightened her grip. She knew all about Rowley’s head, but the name of the Japanese attache had no significance for her. She said, “Tell me about the bad dreams then.” Helen made no response. “Just saying things, just putting them into words. It makes them less important, Helen. Goodness, it’s no wonder you have terrible dreams after what you’ve been through. Anybody would. Most women would have gone out of their minds.”

“Maybe I have.”

“Not you. Tell me. Tell me everything.”

Outside in the coverts one of the resident Tryst owls hooted. It was a mild night for January and the wind, crossing the Weald from the southeast, went to probing the barley-sugar chimney-pots, but without the savagery it showed throughout most of the winter. Joanna draped a blanket over their shoulders without releasing her grip on Helen’s shoulders, and Helen said, “I don’t have the worst one now, or not often. But the new one is almost as bad. It’s so real. I can feel it happening to me. And so silly, too, for that man never behaved towards me in any way but correctly. He was a gentleman and brave as a lion. Everybody thought so.”

“The Japanese colonel?”

“Yes. He was there when I shot that officer through the loophole.”

“What happens to you in the dream, Helen?”

She told her, shamefully and haltingly, but forcing herself to describe both dreams in detail. She told of the macabre leer on the face of a decapitated head. She described the firm, expertly performed ritual of a public ravishment on a couch of sandbags sown from quilts and blankets.

“Do
you
think I’m going mad, Jo? Surely that’s a mad dream to have time and again, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t mad. And I think the dreams are linked in a way. One’s come to blot out the other.” And then, without diffidence, “Tell me about Rowley. Tell me about your life together
before
he was killed. How was he? How did he treat you?”

“He was always kind, or tried to be in his funny, absentminded way.”

“I didn’t mean that. How did he treat you as a woman?”

“He didn’t, not really. Whenever he did I… well… I had to encourage him, to remind him I was his wife even. He wasn’t like any other man I’ve known. You remember how most men didn’t need much encouragement that way. Clint still doesn’t, does he?”

“No, not Clint!” She came near to chuckling, despite what seemed to her the terrible poignancy of her sister’s plight. “But Rowley was never in the least like Clint, thank heavens. Sometimes I used to think Rowley wasn’t a man at all, just… just a kind of… well, a saint, if you like. But saints shouldn’t marry, should they? And this one did. It must have been awful for you. I don’t know how you put up with it all those years and in all those awful places.”

She thought hard, trying with all her might to relate the stray images and conjectures that occurred to her and arrive at some kind of conclusion that would lead her to comprehend Helen’s present state of mind. She tried putting herself in her place, not as a woman who had survived unbelievable terrors and hardships, but as a wife lying beside a husband night after night, unable to awaken more than a token emotional response in his body. It was very difficult but because she was her mother’s daughter, and because, instinctively, she turned her own sensual nature to very good account, she could get some glimmering of the truth, and in the wake of that truth she saw a possible solution. Or the means of promoting a shock, physical and spiritual, that held promise of a solution. Love and pity rode roughshod over her upbringing, and all the canons of so-called civilised behaviour, for here was her own sister, who had dragged herself home from the threshold of hell, and was now defeated by the clamour of her body and degradation of spirit that Rowland Coles’s indifference had invoked. Innocently perhaps, and from the highest motives, but mercilessly none the less.

She said, “Listen, Helen. Wait here. I’ll only be gone a moment. Wash your face and put a comb through your hair while I’m gone,” and she took her sister’s hand, jerked her up, and pushed her towards the wash-stand, pouring water from the jug and dipping a flannel in it. “Go on! Make the effort, for everybody’s sake,” and she hovered by the door until Helen began to lave her face. Then she slipped away, moving barefoot along the gallery to the stairhead where Adam left a fixed oil-lamp burning all night in the deep niche beside the sewing-room door.

She went down and stepped gingerly between the two truckle beds inside, then through into the wainscotted dining room, pungent with cigar smoke. In a sliver of moonlight she found and lit a candle, carrying it to the sideboard where, among other decanters, stood one containing Adam’s choice port. She poured a beaker and carried it back, lighting her way up the stair to the door of her room and peeping inside to see Clint sprawled naked across the bed. She pulled back the sheets and rolled him in, and although he muttered and opened his eyes, the lack of focus told her he was still asleep. She went out again and into Helen’s room, where her sister was sitting in front of the mirror brushing her long dark hair. She seemed calmer now, although her hands trembled violently. Jo said, handing her the port, “Drink it down. Drink all of it. It’s what you need. It’ll do you good,” and Helen, after a single look of bewilderment, began to sip. A little colour returned to her cheeks.

“You’re very kind, Jo. You always were the best-hearted among them. I’ll manage now.”

“Until you sleep you’ll manage. Then you’ll dream again, one dream or the other. There’s something else you have to do, Helen, and no one can do it for you. No doctor, nobody, you hear? Go in to Clint now. I’ll stay here until you come back.”

”
To Clint?
Me?”

She slammed down the glass so hard that the stem snapped and the bowl rolled across the dressing-table as far as the pincushion, leaving a small pool of dregs on the polished surface. “You can’t mean that, Jo. You… you
can’t
!”

“But I do mean it! You need a man more than any woman I ever saw, and I mean to get you one of your own the minute we go home. But you can’t wait that long, not to feel… feel
wanted
and needed. Not to feel like a woman again. You needn’t worry about his side of it. He’s bottled and won’t know he’s providing you use your wits. Just go to him, like I say. Just this once.”

“But it’s wrong, Jo. It would be terribly wrong with anyone’s husband, but yours…”

“It’s not wrong unless I say it is, and I don’t! I say it’s right. Just this one time. As I say, he’s drunk, but not so drunk as he won’t stir the minute he feels a woman’s arms around him. I should know. There’s nothing I don’t know about Clinton Coles.”

The colour in Helen’s cheeks flooded back. She sat twisting the ribbon of her nightgown, her eyes fixed on the smears of port on the dressing-table surface.

“How can you be so sure? I mean… why would a thing like that help?”

“I don’t know why, I only know it will. Maybe it would break that awful sequence of dreams and, anyway, you’d come alive again and that’s what’s important right now. Besides, what harm would it do? Do you remember how we schemed to switch our beaux that time at Penshurst? Well, it would make you feel young again, ready to start over again. Good grief, Helen, how long is it since a man held you in his arms?”

It was a question she could not answer. Eight months had passed since Rowley was butchered, but long before that, ever since the first refugees came in ahead of Boxers rampaging in the west and north, Rowley had been preoccupied, wholly absorbed in his work as healer and comforter in the field. Maybe a year or more had elapsed since he had used her in that way, and much longer since she had felt herself a wife to him. And remembering this, the prospect of lying with Clint did not seem so outrageous, for she began to discern a kind of logic behind Joanna’s reasoning. The mere thought of lying beside her jolly, ever boyish brother-inlaw, and of feeling his arms about her quickened her blood and breathing. What deterred her, however, was the cold-bloodedness of such a proposal, surely unique in the relationship of sisters. She said, wonderingly, “Don’t you love Clint, Jo?”

“I love him in my own way. The way he likes, and the way I’m used to. But I love you, too, and I won’t see you reduced to this, with no one to help, no one to turn to. Besides, he’s had other women since we married. Not often, and never seriously, but he’s had them. Believe me, I know what I’m doing, Helen.”

“But if he’s drunk… if he’s asleep now…?”

“He’ll come half-awake and then he’ll drop off again, thoroughly fuddled. As soon as he does, slip out again. I’ll wait for you here.”

She got up, both hands still fidgeting with the length of ribbon. “How do you
mean
exactly? A thing like that bringing me peace? Helping me to forget?”

“You’ll see. Do it, Helen. Just do as I say.”

She got up, realising that some act of physical propulsion was needed, and taking Helen by the hand she opened the door. The gallery was in darkness, apart from the faint glow of the lamplight that touched the head of the stairs. She could hear Clint’s snores, the only sound breaking the heavy silence of the night. Then she led the way along to her room, entered it ahead of her sister, and blew the candle out. She said, in a normal voice, “Shift over, Clint,” and surprisingly he obeyed, his snores ceasing as he stirred. “There, get about it, girl,” and she groped her way out, closing the door.

Helen had no certain knowledge now whether he was awake or asleep. She could hear his irregular breathing, and it caused her to hesitate a moment longer, telling herself that if he said one word she would turn back and tell Jo that such a thing was not to be thought of. He did not wake and presently she crept carefully in beside him, settling herself so close to her edge of the bed that she barely touched him. She could feel her heart thumping a rival rhythm to his swift, short snores as minutes passed before the warmth of his body communicated itself to hers and she turned, again very stealthily, lifting her right arm and groping for him where he lay just within her reach. She touched his exposed shoulder and fingertip contact with his flesh made her shiver so that instinctively she drew a little closer, touching him lightly with her knees and breasts.

Warmth and comfort seemed to pulse from him, communicating itself to her in a way that soothed rather than excited her, but the enlarged contact was enough to increase her rate of breathing so that soon, growing a little bolder, she enlarged her grip and pulled him half round so that he lay flat on his back. He moved sluggishly, almost unwillingly at first, but then, so it seemed, a tiny flicker of initiative passed to him and he flung his arm across her, drawing her closer as his volley of snores ceased abruptly.

Suddenly, outrageously it seemed to her, she wanted to giggle, the sheer absurdity of the situation inflating inside her like a large, coloured balloon, but she mastered the impulse and lay still for a moment, revelling in her own audacity and remembering a time—a thousand years ago it seemed—when she had first shared a bed with Rowley Coles as a girl bride who had entered marriage so confidently but had discovered, all too quickly, that her limited experience as a flirt counted for nothing with a groom cast in his solemn mould.

Time passed. It seemed to her an age had elapsed since she had joined him between the rumpled sheets and a sense of anticlimax stole upon her as she faced the fact that it was more than likely Jo had been mistaken about the certainty of him making the most of his opportunity. It seemed more than possible that he could lie there snoring until morning, and it was the prospect of advancing daylight that prompted her to summon up her courage to resolve the situation one way or another. She could, she reasoned, rely on a few seconds’ grace if he was sufficiently roused to open a conversation. She could slip away while he was still bemused and tell Joanna to return at once. She could be clear of the room before he had found matches and candle, but in the meantime she felt she owed it to herself to put Joanna’s theory to the test. Cautiously, an inch at a time, she lifted his arm and placed it against her breasts, holding it there, and was rewarded by the slow glow of satisfaction it brought her, as well as an insignificant signal that his senses were stirred inasmuch as he drew a little closer, stretched out his legs, and turned on his side, this time facing her. He did not wake, however, although his snores diminished to heavy, regular breathing and it was this, perhaps, that emboldened her sufficiently to turn her face towards him, and kiss his cheek. Lightly, almost teasingly, as though he had been one of those awkward young men who competed for modest favours in the far off days when she and Jo had been county belles with half-a-dozen swains at their disposal.

The kiss, light as it was, had a disproportionate effect upon her. He was sporting a growth of dark bristles announcing that, with the prospect of male company that evening, he had not bothered to shave for dinner, and the mere touch of his bristles on her lips was a sharp reminder of the contrast between Clinton and Rowland Coles, for Rowley had never needed to shave more than once a day and his whiskers were as soft and downy as a boy’s. It emphasised, somehow, Clint’s heavy masculinity and awareness of this, together with the weight of his hand on her breast, quickened her desire in a way she would never have thought possible a few minutes since. The initial shame that had restrained her from the moment Jo pushed her into the room fell away like shyness dispelled by a genial greeting, and she suddenly felt free and untrammelled by guilt, not caring, in that instant, whether he was awake or asleep. She withdrew her left hand and used it to encircle his head, cradling him closer and kissing him again, more purposefully this time so that his grasp on her breast tightened, then fell away as he made a halfhearted attempt to pluck at the join in her nightgown. He was too impatient or too sleepy perhaps, to loosen the neck ribbons, but the effort at least succeeded in banishing the last of her scruples. She plucked the bow loose herself and half shrugged herself out of the shift, her heart pounding like a steam hammer as she bared her breasts and enfolded him, showering his face with kisses now and straining towards him with a fervour she had never once displayed during Rowley’s perfunctory embraces, for somehow she had always sensed a demonstration of this kind would embarrass him. Asleep, awake, or somewhere between the two, Clinton responded, reaching down to grasp the hem of her half-shed nightgown and hoisting it to her thighs. Then, so swiftly that she had no real awareness of the transition, the initiative passed to him and he half-rolled on her, muttering unintelligible words only two of which she caught, but she could not have sworn that they were “fine woman.” Then, with a kind of unconscious expertise, he bore down on her, and under the stress of his weight and clumsy handling she uttered a low cry, half an expression of protest, half proclaiming an intense physical release akin to the moment of waking after the methodical ravishment by the courteous Japanese colonel. Seconds later he was done with her and sleep reclaimed him again, his fuddled brain suddenly unequal to the struggle against the fumes of all the liquor he had shipped. He slipped away, rolling over on his back again, and his snores recommencing, his inert hand resting on her belly.