Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (4 page)

For Janice's twenty-first birthday Mrs Gentle made a special effort and produced a birthday cake. The first since, well, she could hardly remember. Could Janice? Janice could, just as she knew her mother could, but she forbore to say so. Instead she opened the parcel her mother handed to her, out of which tumbled a coat of myriad colours, product of many hours' boudoir struggle by Mrs Gentle: a ravishing item made up of long-squirrelled-away remnants and the cut-up remains of what had once, in the good days, been Mrs
Gentle
's not unstylish wardrobe.

Janice was astonished at its colourful variation and brightness. It made her think of Chaucer's Madame Eglentyne in her pretty cloak and her coral and green gauds. Generally clothes were not something which interested her, she being somewhat well-covered for mini-skirts. This, however, was a delight; it flared around her plumpness without feeling restrictive, and she slipped it on the very next night when she went out to her Literary Society. It uplifted her spirits. There was something jewel-like about it, something that made her feel she glowed like a detail from an illuminated manuscript, something altogether fitting to her ways. It continued to uplift her as she left the Adult Education Building to catch her bus home. It was a rainy February night, bleak and cold, dismal and forlorn, but Janice did not feel any of these things. As s
he mused over Thomas Campion (1
567-1620) and his absurd notions of Astrophel and Stella and Sir Philip Sidney's even more conceited tribute to the starstruck pair (making a pun with his own name, of course -
very
Elizabethan to riddle-me-ree rather than delight in the distancing of self and controlling the form), she looked pink-cheeked and happy. There was something altogether delightful about being snuggled into this soft, bright stylishness. She looked quite radiant, like a beautiful feminine ball in her contentment. Such is the power of clothes.

Dermot Poll coming out of the Bell and Bugle public house stepped swaying into the drizzle and shivered. A young Irishman with a pale (despite the Guinness consumed), appealing face and damp black curls, he embraced the night in sentimental mood. His wife, somewhere behind those low lit windows of the hospital opposite, had just been brought to bed with his first son, and

Dermot Poll was prepared to be in Love with the World. Everyone in the Bell and Bugle had loved him and he had assuredly loved them. Now it was the turn of the rest of humanity to experience his emotional beneficence. It being rather a bad night, however, the rest of humanity seemed to have stayed indoors. Only one human figure graced the darkness. Janice. And when he saw her, head bowed against the rain, body glowing radiantly against the shadows of the street - Madonna, Life-Bearing Womanhood - he felt a rising desire to worship.

Janice, still mulling over Thomas Campion and whether his apologia for classical metre was a useful piece of information or not, was concentrating. As she tried to recall some lines of his
Astropbel,
and not muddle them with Sir Philip Sidney's, she was wholly absorbed and did not notice the approach of the rapt young Dermot. Concentrating was an attractive facial arrangement for Janice in those days. Her large, pale eyes, unseeing, had a misty quality, and the line of her mouth was puckered in a rather delightful way. In a low voice she att
empted to recall the verse exactl
y.

'Hark, all you ladies that do sleep;

The fairy queen Proserpina

Bids you awake and pity them that weep.'

Janice paused, unsure of the next line. Dermot paused, entranced. What better for a son of Erin, with a belly full of beer and his potency so recently made flesh, than to hear beautiful words in the night?

Janice recollected what she had forgotten, and continued.

'You may do in the dark

What the day doth forbid;

Fear not dogs that bark,

Night will have all hid.'

Dermot remained entranced. 'Night will have all hid
..
.'

But not from Dermot Poll. He saw and he was conquered. Oh how he needed to worship. To worship was a requirement that was becoming acute. Woman. B
irth-giver, God's unsullied cre
ation. He fell to his knees before Janice and lifted up his shining, pretty face so that the light from a shop front near by illuminated him.

'Oh Queen of the Night,' he said, 'you are colour and you are magic. I have come to worship you and you have captured my heart.'

The emotion spilled out of him. A Father. A Man. And here was Woman. Woman who looked undeniably pregnant, full with seed, the highest state of feminine being.

'My heart,' he said, 'is yours, Fair Lady.' And he offered himself in the purest sense.

Janice took this very well. She did not run away nor scream, for threat was not in the air in those days. A stranger bending his knee to her on a wet pavement was, however, unusual, so she looked down at him and gave a hesitant half-smile, revealing a pair of pretty dimples.

'Ah, Mother of God, the Night Queen has dimples,' said Dermot to the empty street.

'Perhaps you should get up,' said Janice, 'for your knees must be quite wet.'

But Dermot, as much feeling the gravitational pull of the Guinness as the overwhelming thrill of the moment, stayed where he was. Janice continued to be unafraid, so she smiled at him again. Smiles from girls to sober men are pleasing. Smiles from girls to inebriate men are bewitching. Dermot Poll was duly bewitched and said so.

Janice blinked, astonished. Modern men were philanderers and brutes, were they not? Yet this one knelt before her like some knight of old.

Courtly Love, she thought, and she whispered aloud, 'Love unto Death.'

'Is that more of your poetry, O Lady of Colours?'

'What?' said Janice, who had already gone back in time to see it emblazoned upon a courtier's shield.

'More
...
of your poetry?'

Janice, obedient, heard this as a request.

'Well,' she said, 'it is not the sort of poetry I really care for you to see, but of its kind it has a certain ring.'

Dermot nodded encouragingly. What did it matter what the vision said, so long as she stayed here in the dark and the cold with him? It was infinitely more joyful than being alone.

So Janice continued with Campion, realizing that this sort of thing was some people's preference.

'"This night by moonshine leading merry rounds/Holds a-"'

'Moonshine!' Dermot Poll felt indignant. 'This is not moonshine . ..' And indeed, he felt quite convinced it was not. He took her hand, in its woolly glove, and kissed it chastely. On the whole he was enjoying himself and was now firmly entrenched in the undemanding role of lyrical enslavement.

Janice blinked again. Something stirred within her. A little urge to reach out and touch his face with her other woolly glove, an urge she resisted. Very possibly he might bite after all. Courtly Love, she found herself saying, first made its appearance in twelfth-century poetry, term probably originated in Islamic culture, original European tenets set down by Guillaume de Lorris before 1240, but. . .

Vous
ou Mort.
..

Vous
ou Mort
...

It just kept getting in the way.

Dermot Poll looked about him for inspiration. He wanted to go further, he wanted to see signs, give symbols, but he had nothing. And then, like a miracle, he saw. He rose from his knees, clasped the hand he had so recently kissed, and led its owner, as if she floated, towards the lighted shop window near by.

'See,' he said, gesturing towards an enormous satin heart that rested in the window. 'A sign
..
.'

She looked cautiously from Dermot to window and back again. She looked unconvinced. It was therefore Dermot Poll's absolute requirement to convince her.

'You are my heart's delight,' he began to sing, placing his free hand McCormack-like on that area of his anatomy.

Janice's eyes widened even further, though whether at the sentiments expressed or at the manner of their expression he could not tell. So he stopped singing and spoke to try it both ways.

'You are my heart's delight,' he said, 'because you are colour. You are radiance. You glow like an exotic flower and I wish to worship you.'

Janice's heart bumped again.

'A picture made of jewels,' he continued, quite caught up in the joy of it all.

Book of Days, thought Janice excitedly,
Les Tres Riches Heures

'In your lovely coat, your magical, magnificent, momentous coat, you are blessed with the beauty of a rainbow. Ah, I could sing to you all night. ..'

Janice stared, no longer able to hear above the rushing in her ears the pumping in her body.

Dermot Poll, exhausted both by metaphor and by passion, loved the world and all creatures in it. 'I love you,' he said, making a grand, all-encompassing gesture. 'And I worship your womanhood . . .'

Christine de Pisan, in her fourteenth-century study somewhere in the ether, said, 'Do not listen.'

Thomas Campion and the Court of Gloriana said, 'Hark.'

It was scarcely a contest. Gloriana was yards in front.

This, then, was what she had been avoiding for so long. This, then, was true and real and beautiful. She stroked her coat. How wrong her mother had been. How unlike Mr Gentle this beautiful, poetical young man was . . .

Dermot watched entranced as her hand slid over the swelling of her belly.

She looked at him, saw the enchantment in his eyes, and saw that this, her gallant, spoke a truth so strong that it trembled. Indeed, she noticed, from time to time his voice became quite indistinct with the burr of emotion. How could she
not
believe? How could she
not
let him worship her and love her if he wished?

Poor Janice. Fatal trust.
Vous
ou
Mort.
She offered herself up.

'Tell me who you are,' she said. Her eyes never left his beautiful, shining face as she spoke. This was love, she was convinced of it. It was beautiful and real.

'My name is Dermot Poll,' he said. 'I come from Skibbereen.' His eyes grew moist. 'And one day, when I have travelled the world, I shall go back there. But meanwhile, O lovely creature, this' - he looked at the lettering in the shop window, he smiled at her, a warm smile, a blind smile, a smile that belonged to the absent Deirdre - 'is St Valentine's Eve.'

'Yes,' she breathed, skirting the voice in her head, which was her own, her former, now deceased, academic persona, which said, 'Valentine, martyr, date unknown, legend lends no credence to connection with lovers . . .' Instead she smiled and exhaled a sigh with the involuntary huskiness that befitted such romance.

'Tomorrow, then, is St Valentine's Day . . .' he breathed.

Janice disregarded the faint, last whisperings of her bluestocking ways, which pointed out to her that this was tautological since he had already said, had he not, that this was St Valentine's Eve?

Dermot Poll remembered that he could sing. Through the mists of this impassioned sensibility he recalled that it was by singing he earned his living. The Irish Balladeer, beloved at over-sixties clubs everywhere, the popular high spot at many a silver wedding, doyen of a dozen Irish clubs up and down the Kilburn High Road and beyond . . .

He burst forth, his lungs leaping readily to the task. 'I'll walk beside you through the passing years . . .' he warbled into the damp dark night and Janice Gentle's ear.

Janice Gentle continued to believe. If anything, her believing deepened. Dermot Poll was now singing for all the women in the world. Janice listened, entranced. When he had ceased, she whispered, 'Do you really think you love me?'

Deirdre had said that on the night of their first physical union, nine months since and four months before they were wed. It was an emotional remembrance. He said the same now as he had said then.

'Love you?' he said with passion. 'Love you? I will love you for ever. I will never leave you. And if ever we are torn apart, I shall come looking for you, or you for me. Though I go to Australia, America, China even, I will find you again or you will find me. Now kiss me, darling . . .' Janice had become Deirdre. Dermot was beginning to be very muddled.

Janice, cautious, desiring, restrained and obedient, leaned towards him and planted a kiss upon his pale, damp cheek. It felt strangely alluring, exotic, tight, cool and with the slightest rasping from the stubble lightly sprouti
ng there. It was essence of man
liness after Mrs Gentle's slack and sweet-smelling pinkness.