Hearts and Diamonds (23 page)

Jason nodded sagely.

‘It’s so weird,’ continued Jenna, ‘to think that most girls from what would be called good families had absolutely no clue about sex. I can’t imagine growing up like that.’

‘The boys all worked it out from what they got up to at those public schools, I bet,’ said Jason.

‘You could be right. I hope none of them took quite the same approach with their brides, though . . . Ouch.’

‘Reminds me,’ drawled Jason into her ear, ‘I’ve got plans for your arse, woman.’

‘Not tonight you haven’t,’ said Jenna primly.

‘How about the night of the exhibition? Since you’re going to make me work for that . . . you can have a little something of your own to work towards. I think that’s fair.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Jenna, biting the inside of her cheek.

‘Not “we’ll see”. The answer I’m looking for is “Yes, sir, if that’s what you want, sir.” Come on, then. Say it.’

He held both Jenna’s elbows in a tight grip, waiting for her words.

‘“Yes, sir, if that’s what you want, sir,”’ she parroted sulkily. ‘Now can we get on with this? It looks as if you’re right and she really is going to treat us to a bit of Victorian erotica. So have some manners and listen.’

Jason loosened his grip, satisfied with her answer.

‘Go on then.’

For me, who has been accustomed to view a body as a treacherous, weak thing – a wicked vessel for the more noble element of the soul – it was so unaccountable to hear such words that I scarcely knew where to look.

Luckily, my husband had some suggestions on that score. He urged me to look at myself in the pier glass.

I was reluctant to do so, for I have never allowed my gaze to linger over my nakedness, but I had no recourse but to obey. I listened as he spoke in lustful, sometimes crude, terms of what he and I both saw. He ordered me to hold and touch those parts of myself I dare not name, let alone repeat the strange names he had for them. He saw that I was on the verge of shameful tears, and told me that this was a gift to me and that I must put away all my silly girlish ideas about modesty and propriety and accept that a wife’s role is to be wanton in the bedchamber, and to accept the pleasure her husband seeks to give. Thus it is useless to be coy about the body. He would teach me to enjoy myself, to bring my buried needs and desires to the surface and indulge each one of them.

I told him I would do my duty, and he laughed, loud and long.

‘Duty will be the least of it,’ he said. ‘Now bring yourself to me.’

I stood at his feet and he stood also, exploring all that I had with his fingers. If I protested, or made any sound at all, he sealed my mouth with a kiss. Such a kiss – he put his tongue between my lips. It felt so immoral, so disgusting – and yet, I hate to recall, I found it pleasurable in some deep way I cannot bring myself to examine.

Even when he probed between my legs, the kiss was enough to lighten my head and let everything pass. Everything was permitted to him. I had only to open myself.

He told me this, several times, in a low whisper, before laying me on the bed.

I watched, my eyes half-open, for I feared his wrath if he closed them, while he undressed himself beside the bed. What a time it took. He had so many different things to remove. Cufflinks, cuffs, tie pin, neckcloth
. . .
The list went on. With each act of divestiture, I saw a little more of him.

Everything I saw was impressive, from his strong wrists to his broad shoulders. When the neck of his shirt fell open, I wanted to gasp at the delicious sight of his unwrapped throat and the glimpse of a chest that seemed to have dark hairs upon it. I had not realised men’s chests could have hair upon them. I have only seen the pale little chests of the boys in the streets of Nottingham in summer as they play under the pump.

His shirt and undershirt removed, I saw a great many more of these dark wiry curls, descending low to his middle and then moving downwards, more downy and soft now, from his navel. How powerful he seemed without his clothes – more so than with them, though in a different way. The man of property in his swallow tail coat and silk top hat was become the elemental man, the essence of masculinity.

But I did shut my eyes when he came to remove his lower garments.

He did not chide me for doing so, but he noticed, and his chuckle was low and amused.

‘What, do you think if you shut your eyes you will be safe from what I have here?’ he said. ‘Indeed you will not. You might as well open them, and know what peril it is you face, rather than be left to your imaginings. No doubt they are lurid enough. Come, Frances. What do you fear?’

‘It is not fear,’ I told him. ‘It is
. . .
I cannot say. I do not wish to look upon it.’

I felt him kneel upon the bed beside me, the mattress weighted to one side.

‘You will do more than look upon it,’ he said, more roughly. He took hold of my chin with a finger and thumb, pressing them into my jawbone. ‘You will find much of your married life subject to its whims. Look upon it, Frances. Look upon your master.
’

Jason laughed.

‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘The man’s off his head.’

‘So, you wouldn’t say that kind of thing?’ said Jenna slyly.

‘It’s different if I say that kind of stuff. I know you’re up for it. This poor cow hasn’t got a clue.’

‘He could be a bit more sensitive,’ Jenna agreed. ‘But then, that’s Victorians for you, probably.’

‘Harvilles, more like.’

‘Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me. Harvilles.’

Jenna sighed, thinking of her own narrow escape with a scion of that ilk.

‘I don’t know if I dare read on,’ she said.

‘I’ll do it,’ Jason offered. ‘I’ve got used to that curly writing now.’

‘Oh, go on then. But don’t laugh in the middle of a sentence. Poor Frances. She deserves a bit of sympathy.’

‘No, I’m with you there. She does. OK then.’ Jason cleared his throat and read on.

‘
I opened my eyes, but what I saw was not what I had pictured. Nothing like the small appendage sported by Michelangelo’s David. This was a longer, thicker thing, curving upwards like a hunting horn
. . .’

‘You promised you wouldn’t laugh,’ Jenna reproached.

‘No, but “hunting horn”! I wonder if she wanted to blow it.’

‘Don’t be horrible.’

‘Sorry. I’ll try to control myself, OK?’

It was certainly almost twice the length of my hand, and it looked primitive and fierce, rising from its nest of downy dark hair as it did. I could look at it for only a second or so before lifting my eyes to his.

They glowed with satisfaction. His smile was wide and bright.

‘Touch it, Frances,’ he said. ‘Put your fingers around it and feel its spirit.’

Its spirit, if such it possessed, was warm, firm, and yet also soft. In my hand, it felt like something I could bend, but I did not dare try.

My husband was satisfied with my quick obedience. He rewarded me with kisses, and not just upon my face. His mouth roamed the length and breadth of my body, his breath hot and fast and broken by growls at times. He was like a wolf, come to feast upon its prey. I should never have imagined him so, from his behaviour in the drawing room. Are all men thus? I suppose I shall never know.

He left no part of me untouched by hand or mouth, even when I tried to shut my legs to his attentions. He would not have it, and made me lie in such an abandoned pose that I felt sinful in the extreme.

At length his wanderings seemed to come to their end, and he crouched above me, close enough for his hair to brush my skin.

‘You know what I must do?’ he breathed, and I shook my head. ‘The best I can do is show you. But be warned. There will be some pain, some blood.’

‘Some
. . .
blood?’

I felt a bolt of panic rise in my throat and I tried to push him off, but he held me in place, shaking his head.

‘No, Frances, no. You should have been told. Your mother?’

‘She said nothing of blood.’

‘It will be only very little. And it will not last long. The pain will soon ease and then all will be much easier.’

‘You are sure of this?’

He stroked my face.

‘I am quite sure. Hold tight to my shoulders. I will be as quick as I am able.’

Yes he was quick. And it did hurt. And there was blood. But none of these three things made the strongest impression on me. Much stronger, staying with me in my mind, was the sense of violation and of terrible degradation that I felt. Pain was nothing in comparison. Blood could be washed clean. But this feeling of having been burrowed into and invaded could not leave me.

It is not as a wife should feel, is it? I dare not confess it to David, for he will know that I am not what he expected when he married.

‘You look ill,’ he said, roughly, unsympathetically, when he had finished and released me.

‘Oh, I am not ill,’ I said, though my nether regions throbbed and I could feel the warm trickle of the blood upon my thigh.

‘Then what’s amiss? I’ll fetch a cloth.’

He went to the nightstand and returned with a damp flannel, with which he dabbed at my sticky skin.

‘Nothing is amiss,’ I said, but my voice was high and forced. My breathing was not natural – sometime during the indignity, my breath had become caught in my throat, and I could not seem to correct it.

‘You might try and look it, then,’ he groused. He saw something in my face and his next words were gentler. ‘I promise you, the worst is past. Now that this hurdle is crossed, you will find that pleasure is easier to achieve.’

‘Will I?’

I could not imagine it. I lay down and shut my eyes, hoping he would think me asleep.

He lay back down beside me and made me open my eyes, pulling the lower lids down with his thumb on my cheek.

‘Do not pretend with me, Fan,’ he whispered. ‘I will not have pretence.’

‘I am tired.’

‘You try to hide from me. But I am not the regular kind of man, who is happy to stumble on blindly, ignoring the distance between him and his wife. I will not have distance, or hiding, or any of those things that make a marriage slowly die. I will have you, in all honesty, as naked spiritually as you are bodily. I will own you and you will rejoice in my ownership.’

He sounded like a preacher, but what was he preaching?

I did not want to be preached to.

Is it wrong of me to wish I could step backwards in time?

For all the fortune and wealth and position I have achieved, I cannot help thinking that something else has been lost – something I can never retrieve.

‘Oh, that poor girl,’ said Jenna as Jason shut the book.

‘What? It’ll probably get better. Or it probably would, if she hadn’t married him. Stupid decision in the first place, though, marrying a Harville.’

‘Yes, well, I think you’ll find all this predated the trouble at the pit,’ said Jenna.

‘The disaster had already happened, though,’ he pointed out. ‘She never mentioned that.’

‘It was thirty years earlier. She wasn’t local.’

‘I suppose.’ Jason lay back. ‘I do feel sorry for her. But then, your first time’s always shit, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know. Was yours?’

Jason gave her a droll upwards look.

‘Do you really want to hear about that?’

‘Go on. How old were you?’

‘Not old enough. Still at school, just.’

‘I hope you were legal.’

He grimaced.

‘Can’t remember. Roughly. On the border.’

‘And was it with Mia?’ Jenna hesitated to bring up the name, but she thought there was no point brushing Jason’s past under the carpet, really. It was part of who he was, when it came down to it.

‘Yeah. Mia. We were at that stage. Little notes to each other, drawn-on tattoos on each other’s arms. Kissing in the kiddie park while all our mates made sick noises.’

‘I can’t see you as a mushy lad,’ said Jenna, wishing – not for the first time – that she could have known Jason earlier, saved him from some of what he had had to go through.

‘Not so much mushy as rampantly horny,’ he said with a cheeky grin. ‘Couldn’t keep my hands off.’

‘Some things don’t change then.’

‘No, and they aren’t about to either.’

He rolled over, pinning her down so suddenly that she squealed.

‘Got it?’ he said, coaxing her into a long, tongue-heavy kiss.

‘I think so,’ she said, emerging blearily. ‘Were you nervous? The first time?’

‘A cross between nervous and raring to go,’ he said. ‘I was worried about hurting her. She was all right though. She was more up for it than I was. She was no shrinking Fanny Harville. She knew what was what, that girl. What about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Your first time?’

Jenna wished she hadn’t brought up the subject. It all seemed such a long time ago now, and yet, when she shut her eyes, she could be there.

She could be there in the tent, at that little illegal free festival in a field in Lincolnshire, smelling of wood-smoke, hearing the thud and wail of the different sound systems outside.

A little blurred around the edges from cider and the fragrant smoke of the joints Deano’s friends were sharing outside, she lay down on the sleeping bag and let her mind whirl. They would think she was a lightweight. She had wanted to stay up with the others, to prove that she could rave around a campfire all night long, but the truth was, she couldn’t. She’d need to work on her stamina. All that marching through miles of fields with a huge rucksack, followed by dancing like a lunatic and blowing whistles, had broken her.

Or so she thought, until a voice spoke at the flysheet.

‘You aren’t going to sleep already are you, Jen?’

She opened her eyes and smiled. Deano’s hair gel had given up the ghost, and his blond spikes were flopping down. His eyeliner was smudged, but that seemed to suit him, making his unearthly, almost silver-blue eyes gleam more brightly than ever. He was the most gorgeous boy in town, and he wanted her. It was crazy.