Grahame, Lucia (14 page)

It was so odd to experience his gentle, exploring touch, never
unpleasant or clumsy, but always somehow distant and muted, as if my nerves had
been deadened and muffled, as if my body had been laid away in thick rolls of
cotton wool.

I tried to be as pliant and obliging as possible, but I was unable
to rise above a lassitude born of guilt and despair, self-loathing and anxiety,
as I allowed him to use me.

Nothing short of love and its attendant passion could have eased
the ordeal. I knew now why I had once been able to give myself to Frederick so
fearlessly and that it had, after all, had nothing to do with hot blood! But I
could not call upon love now. Darkness was my sole, flimsy protection, the one
barrier I could raise against the intimacies I dreaded.

Oh, why was I so frightened? Whatever private longings he might
harbor, surely my decent, well-bred, chivalrous husband would not dream of
shattering my psychic boundaries with the kind of behavior to which my
grandmother had assured me that no true gentleman would dream of subjecting his
wife.

He did not.

But even at the climax of his lovemaking, I felt a thousand miles
away.

I lay beneath him, understanding at last the magnitude of the
impossible role I had been driven to take on: I had sold myself to him. I was
nothing more than a mistress—as emotionally distant as my grandmother had said
one must be— but one who had committed herself to the lifetime job of
pretending to be warmhearted, open, and affectionate. But of how this
fictitious creature might behave in bed I had not the faintest idea.

Certainly not as I had: I was barely able to open my lips to my
husband's kiss. He had not pressed me; instead he'd simply moved his mouth
downward to the hollow of my throat.

As for the rest... there had been no escaping it, but it had
awakened nothing.

When he was finished with me, he shifted his body to the empty
space at my side. I almost imagined I could taste his disappointment.

I was disappointed, too, although I could never have told him so.
I was sure I would have been far less painfully aware of my shortcomings had he
merely shown the same indifference to my lack of excitement that Frederick had
latterly displayed before he had tired of me altogether.

I felt like a tight, locked casket, with all my guilty knowledge
sealed inside. I half believed that, if he had only the will to do so, my
husband might have used his own lithe body to drive it open, releasing every
secret and reawakening every desire. Perhaps with a little more insistence and
a little less restraint, he would have wrested from me both truth and passion.
But that would have put me entirely at his mercy.

Still I felt it was incumbent upon me now to do
something.
I
turned toward him and brought my lips to his cheek. I heard his soft sigh.

He was staring up at the ceiling and did not speak. I moved closer
and hesitantly rested my head against his smooth chest. He put his arm gently
around me, and I lay there, like the survivor of a shipwreck, stranded beside a
stranger, and counted my losses. I mourned, rigidly and with dry eyes, for Frederick,
who was dead, and for my little dead daughter, and for the man beside me, whose
joyous expectations were perhaps already dying in the face of what I knew to
have been so grave a failure on my part, and for the innocent, idyllic
happiness I had tasted in the Bois de Boulogne and once again on the morning
we'd set out for Fontainebleau. Now that was as dead as everything else.

Perhaps if I had yielded then to the almost overwhelming urge to
weep for everything that had slipped through my fingers, it might have released
me to feel something beyond guilt and fear and the terrifying hollowness which
seemed to be all that remained of me. But as usual, I held back the tears,
which could never have been more inappropriate than on my wedding night.

For once in my life, I longed for my grandmother's practical,
earthy advice. With what zest she would have risen to the challenge of
instructing me in how to hold a man's love, even if I could not return it, and
in how to fan the flames of passion even when I lacked any heat of my own.

But her voice, which had once railed at me so insistently, had
fallen silent. Perhaps it was because I was now in a realm where her heartless
manipulations had no currency. Could any of her clever stratagems withstand the
blinding light of my husband's love?

I soon discovered how weak they really were.

I knew that our wedding night had been a disappointment to him,
and I was determined to find some way to make up for it. I did not act on that
wish immediately, however, for I still had no idea how to go about this.

The morning after the wedding we set out by train for Lyon. From
there we would go to Nice, and then on to Greece by water. During the ride to
Lyon our conversation was amiable; but once we were in our hotel room, all my
anxieties returned. That night was not very different from our first night in
Paris; in Nice, it was the same. My husband always took me with tenderness and
restraint. I would lie passively beneath him until he had spent himself, and
then when I was free of his weight, I would move, almost apologetically, into
the shelter of his arms. He never turned away from me. He never suggested that
our relations were any other than what he wished them to be.

But I knew he was troubled.

While we were at sea, I had a little respite, for we slept in
separate beds. It was a mixed blessing; although I had not enjoyed my conjugal
duties, I'd almost welcomed what followed them.

I did not take this as a hopeful sign, however; it only made me
feel worse. What a hypocrite I was! I couldn't respond to my husband's
lovemaking, and yet, as faithless as a lost dog that had stumbled into a new
home, I liked to fall asleep cradled against that long, cool body.

In the daytime, when my husband seemed relaxed and almost
cheerful, I tried to convince myself that my coolness at night was pleasing to
him, that it was really what any well-bred Englishman would naturally wish to
find in his bride. My grandmother had always insisted that although English gentlemen
craved passion and abandon in their mistresses, they would be horrified to find
the same qualities in their wives.

In Athens, I recalled a fragment of my grandmother's counsel. It
told me what I must do.

"A clever mistress," she'd once said, "will study
her lover as carefully as any general studies his enemy's position. If she
watches and listens closely, she will quickly learn his strengths and
weaknesses; she will discern what pleases him and what does not. Every time he
betrays a certain desire or inclination, however subtly, she gains power and he
loses it. All she has to do is take that power and use it."

Of course I'd never had to employ such tricks with Frederick. I'd
practiced some of the other techniques she'd described to me—the kind it would
be unwise to reveal any knowledge of to my new husband—but I'd done it only
because it had excited me to give back to him the kind of pleasure he gave me.
It had never been a matter of trying to gain ascendancy; we'd been
co-conspirators, spurring one another on to bolder demonstrations of passion.
Our natures harmonized.

But now, where nature had failed, perhaps artifice could triumph.

That night I took greater pains than I had done before to please
my husband's eyes. I clothed myself in the one truly alluring nightdress from
my small trousseau. It was made of the softest lace imaginable, and had a
deeply scooped neck. I had bought it for my wedding night, but that night I had
worn no nightdress at all.

I unpinned my hair and let it rumble loosely over my shoulders; I
already knew that my husband loved to see it unbound. It made a glossy black
nimbus around my pale face and bare throat.

Then I walked slowly into the sitting room.

My husband was on the sofa, still absorbed in the newspaper he had
taken up while he waited for me to prepare for bed. At first he didn't look up.
I felt subtly rejected.

"Anthony," I said.

I saw him press his lips together and fold the newspaper carefully,
as if he were bracing himself for something. With a flash of genuine remorse, I
understood, far more fully than I ever had before, how troubled he was by our
unacknowledged difficulties—by the incompatibility of our bodies that was
rooted, although only I knew how deeply, in an incompatibility of spirit. It
would be even worse for him, I realized, because
be
had no way of
knowing what was at the bottom of it.

He lifted his head at last, almost reluctantly. I saw the resolute
set of his mouth soften. A slight flush came to his cheeks; a hopefulness that
I had not seen since our wedding day sprang to his eyes.

"Fleur," he said.

He sounded surprised, almost dazed.

I was somewhat stunned myself to think that my deliberate maneuver
could have such an instant and obvious effect. It made me feel both elated and
ashamed.

I forced myself to stand motionless and let him look at me. The
white lace might have been molded to my body. It was loosely woven but held me
tightly.

After my husband's eyes had taken their fill, he stood up and came
to me, still with that air of wonderment.

"Fleur," he murmured again huskily, putting his hands
upon my shoulders.

I tipped my head up and nearly parted my lips to his mouth, which
was moving down to mine. It wasn't a calculation; it was an impulse. To at last
be able to give my mouth over to one that didn't reek of alcohol! Toward the
end the fumes Frederick gave off had made me feel nauseated. But a cleansing,
healing kiss might—

I moved my head just in time. If I gave in to that one fleeting
but genuine hunger, who could say where it might end? It might start with a
kiss and end with my needing my husband—in every way.

But sooner or later my blackmailer would surely raise the ante
beyond anything I could possibly scrape together.

Then he would go to my husband.

And after that, my husband would never look at me again the way he
had tonight, would never bend his head tenderly to bring those firm and gentle
lips to mine.

Once he had absorbed those images of me splayed out upon the
canvas, he would be lost to me as irretrievably as everything else I'd ever
loved.

I couldn't risk letting myself come to love him, too.

Having evaded the perilous kiss, I rested my head upon my
husband's chest and swayed against him, weak with the knowledge that I had
narrowly escaped a sensation that might easily have swung out of control. In
this precarious marriage, control was everything.

"What is it, Fleur?" my husband was asking softly. His
mouth was buried in my hair.

I reminded myself of the part I must play.

"We don't have to... sleep apart any longer, do we?" I
murmured.

"Oh, Fleur, sweetheart, did you mind?" He sounded
astonished and remorseful. "I'm sorry. I thought it might be... more
comfortable for you."

"No," I whispered. It was as much the truth as it was a
lie. I never felt my loneliness and isolation more than when he was making love
to me; I never felt it less than when I was falling asleep in his embrace.

"What's gotten into you tonight?" He was stroking my
body gently through the fine lace.

"I don't like it when we're apart."

"You've missed me already?" The gratification in his
voice was faint but unmistakable. At least
one
of my grandmother's
lessons had begun to prove sound.

"Yes," I whispered.

I could feel his relief at being able, at last, to believe that I
wanted him the way he had let me know, with so many subtle signals, that he
longed to be wanted. He lifted me in his arms and carried me into the bedroom.

Again I asked him to put the lights out. I knew my part would be
easier in the dark. But the faint, watery light of a quarter moon trickled
through the two long casement windows. One of them was wide open. The other
seemed to have been painted shut. We had tried to pry it open earlier and had
failed.

Now we sat on the wide bed facing each other.

My husband's fingers were unfastening the tiny mother-of-pearl
buttons at my wrists. Then they moved to my breasts. His palms cupped me
lightly. The sensation was not one that I was able to enjoy; my breasts had not
given me any real pleasure since—well, for years.

But I let out a little sigh and arched my back slightly as if I
craved this touch, as if I were straining to give him greater possession. My
left nipple had broken its way through the loose network of lacy threads that
held my breasts and was wholly exposed to him. He brushed it tenderly with the
pad of his right thumb and began to stroke and flick my right nipple until that
one, too, sprang free. I raised my hands to his shoulders, gripped them, and
moaned softly.