England's Lane (12 page)

“Ah indeed! Our own, our one and only Mrs. Goodrich. Truly a
force of nature. One may only stand back and behold, in awe. Well Milly … it occurs to me that possibly one lunchtime—Thursday, conceivably, when I close at twelve … you may care to partake of a little, what do they say …? Bite? Yes? A bite to eat? If only so that you may know me without an apron, and elsewhere than behind a counter.”

“Well, Mr. Barton … Jonathan. I hardly think …”

“You would be doing me the most tremendous service, I do most earnestly assure you. I still do rather feel myself to be the new boy, you know. And you, Milly … well you are clearly locally so very admired, so highly respected, and there is so much knowledge, information, that you could … well, I really should be most awfully honored if you would consider my invitation. Think of it, if you will, as a charitable gesture.”

Well you can't, can you? You simply can't. Refuse so gracious and really very flattering a request. And nor did I. And until that Thursday dawned, I thought of nothing else. I was shopping in the Dairies, and I thought of Jonathan. I was getting Paul all ready for school, and he looked at me strangely: I hadn't heard his question because I had been thinking of Jonathan. I shoved a plate of Welsh Rarebit in front of Jim, and all I could think of was Jonathan. And the following Thursday, we went out. To a little Italian place he knew, just behind Swiss Cottage. For a bite to eat. Rather jaunty awning, and inside was very cozy with red-checked tablecloths and all these wine bottles in raffia baskets. And goodness—I don't know where the time went. We talked, we laughed—oh, how we did laugh. The spaghetti was lovely—I hadn't had it before, not the proper thing. And wine! In the middle of the day! I think I might have been slightly tiddly. I even had ice cream. And then there was a little cup of coffee for him, and I had tea. When I glanced at my watch, I could hardly believe it.

“Oh heavens, Jonathan—just look at the time!”

“Time so very blissfully spent …” is what he said.

“Yes I know, but—”

“Milly—I have something for you. Little thing. But a trifle. Though I should dearly love you to have it.”

“Oh nonsense, Jonathan—you've given me quite enough as it is. This lunch must have cost an absolute fortune …”

“I have it back at the shop. Could I ask you to accompany me? We can enter via the rear, of course, in order to save you any … and then you can be away within the minute. I do so entreat you to indulge me, Milly …”

I carried on with one or two more token and muted protestations, but of course I knew that I was going to go there with him. Simply, I didn't want to be parted from this man. I was also, I confess, intrigued as to this “trifle” he had for me: I could not remember the last time anyone had given me a present, not what I would call a proper present. At Christmas, Jim leaves for me under the tree a carton of Yardley lavender bath cubes. He doesn't ever wrap them: that, he says, would be stupid because I'll only tear off the paper, and I know what it is anyway. For my birthday I receive a further and identical supply, similarly unadorned. My wardrobe now is piled high with the blessed things: I don't at all care for lavender. Our anniversary he disregards altogether, and I too affect not to remember it. Eunice—dear Eunice, she used to: she used to give me presents all the time. Silly little things, often—a novelty pencil sharpener, or a card of pretty buttons. A length of ribbon. Or a book, which I always knew would be so well chosen. And it was Eunice now I was thinking of … now, as Jonathan paid the bill in the Italian restaurant and left on the table, I could not help but notice, a whole half-crown as a tip (this both thrilling and appalling me in equal and baffling measure) … because Eunice once
had expounded to me her theory about the “business,” as she called it, between the genders: this whole mysterious “business” of male and female relationships.

“It's the woman, you know, who always makes the decision.”

I was, to say the least, extremely skeptical about that.

“How on earth did you work that out, Eunice? It's pure nonsense. The man is in control. He always is. It's been like that forever. Man's world—remember? It's a man's world. Ask any woman. Or man, come to that …”

“In one sense, it is of course. But for all their physical superiority … the money, nice cars, important jobs … despite all that, it's always still the woman who decides what is or isn't about to happen. The trick is, of course—because men, they really are such tragically fragile little things—the trick is to conceal that power. To make him truly believe that it is he who has caused all this to come about. Do you see? No …? Well look—if a man … say there's this man, all right? Staring at a woman in a café, or something. Yes? Well if she doesn't catch his eye, if she doesn't hold it for no more than a second or two, and then just smilingly look away … well then he's sunk, finished, and he knows it. Pretends he wasn't even looking in the first place. But if the woman even fleetingly returns his interest, he simply has to believe that here is an ample demonstration of his complete and utter irresistibility, but of course it's nothing of the sort. The woman already has singled him out. The woman has decided that he'll do. And later on in a relationship, when you-know-what begins unfailingly to raise its perfectly beastly head … well if he does eventually have his wicked way with her, poor dear, then he thinks it's all down to his mastery, his prowess, his oh-so-manly powers of seduction. And the wise woman will encourage him to go on thinking just that, because a happy man is also a manageable one. The truth is that even when that woman
was bathing and dressing in preparation for the evening, she had decided that tonight a permission would be granted. All that remained was how, effectively, to disguise it. But if she had thought No … well then no seduction on earth was going to change that resolution. See?”

I remember just gazing at her.

“Do you really think that's true …?”

“Of course it's true. It's obviously true. Naturally, though, you have to watch out you don't have too many gin-and-Its. And there'll always be the odd bastard who'll just force himself on you … but if that happens, you simply get out fast. Kick him, if you have the time. Shouldn't have been there in the first place, of course …”

I laughed. I did see what she meant, I honestly did—but still I simply laughed, just as I did at all of her terribly bold and increasingly unsettling pronouncements. It was more her intensity as she expressed herself, I think, that provoked the laughter in me—it was that more than anything. But as I left the Italian restaurant and accompanied Jonathan to his car (the Chianti, it had gone straight to my head—the car, a Riley, it smelt of both leather and safety) I knew that he desired me. Desire …! Just thinking the word had made me go shivery. I knew too that I could deflect any such suggestion with barely more than a glance—not even that, just the lack of a smile and the lowering of eyelids—and I further knew that I harbored within me no such intention. I saw then that Eunice was right: it was I who possessed the power (I was charged, and quite giddy) and it seemed so very certain that I was about to wield it. Simply by doing what he wanted … and not because he wanted it, but because I needed it now, and with a force so sudden and utterly strange that it nearly frightened me. I needed for the first time ever unquestionably to be
me
, to allow myself that—and it was Jonathan whom I had selected to affect this transformation.

We found ourselves in a little wedge-shaped room behind the shop that I had not even known existed. Not a room at all, not really—more a sort of partitioned section of what once had been a bit of the yard. There was a large oak roll-top desk, two glass-shaded brass lamps, a swivel chair on castors and covered in very dark green leather—almost black, deep in the well of it, faded and rubbed to bright apple on the arms. Gray mottled box files stacked very neatly, and the sort of chaise longue that your maiden aunt might well have been proud of—though this was a fairly caved-in sort of an affair, tufts of yellowed horsehair breeching the slack and blousy buttoned chintz. Jonathan Barton smiled his smile and made a gesture toward it—so very elaborate was the ushering supplication in his arms that he might have been gushingly presenting a debutante at court.

“Hardly much …” he said quite quietly, “though possibly more comfortable than at first it might appear. May I offer you something in the way of a digestif, dear Milly? A liqueur of some sort, conceivably …?”

Milly laughed quite shortly as she sat at the edge of the chaise longue, her fingers probing to the left and right of her.

“You have liqueurs …? Oh dear, Jonathan …”

“I find it always rather assists one to know that a selection of life's little comforts is never too distant. A drop of Benedictine, possibly …?”

“I don't know what it is. But yes—thank you, Jonathan. That would be lovely.”

“It is created by monks,” he said, pouring it steadily into two small cut-glass tumblers. “The best liqueurs do seem to be. I expect it helps to keep the poor blighters warm—less cold, anyway—during all those black and solitary nights they have elected to endure.”

“An extraordinary existence …” said Milly, quite idly. “Mm. It's strong, isn't it? Very strong. It doesn't burn you, though. The warmth … it very gradually spreads. I like it. I like it very much indeed.”

“I myself,” said Jonathan—inquiring with his eyes whether he might join her on the chaise; when she smiled, he sat down gingerly. “I myself, I feel … would not be perfectly suited to the life monastic.”

“Few are, I imagine.”

And yes, she was thinking—you least of all. And why, I wonder, am I not consumed by trepidation …? Why do I feel so far from in pieces? Why do I not stutter, while stumbling clumsily toward the door and stammering out a tumble of such ridiculous excuses …? Because I have not been lured here: I am not the innocent victim. On the contrary: I see myself as the happy volunteer who knows quite well that easily she can deal with whatever is to come. For am I not a capable woman …?

“Lovely luncheon, Jonathan …”

“A humble repast. A bite. So glad you cared for it.” Something then seemed to occur to him. He turned around to face her. “Milly, my dear …”

She set down her glass on to a gunmetal filing cabinet. Then she leaned across to him and as those eyes of his were glinting, eased his head down and toward her. The flood of heat from those full red lips that she had tried so hard, and all through the afternoon, not to ogle, nor even to glance at—the prick of his perfumed mustache—these were so exactly what she had imagined and then longed for them to be that she felt no flutter, no immediate convulsion, but merely a languid relaxation: this easing into, at last, contentment. Her clothes he dealt with as if he had been scrupulously rehearsing each so delicate a stage of the intricate procedure until his performance was both deft and immaculate. Milly was muted by the shock of barely remembered sensation, and then a series of small amazements at every new release from the constraint of her tightly elasticated and clipped together underthings, at each fresh deluge of touch from two so soft and yet insistent hands (and through
closed eyelids, she saw their looming redness). She gasped only in the giving of a long-awaited welcome as she felt herself quite suddenly and completely full of him, her face tugged aside into an ever-widening smile that was happily and wildly beyond all control. She clutched his face. Slid fingers into his brilliantined hair and hugged him to her as he buried his face into the side of her neck—she gloried in his guttural and stunted roaring as they both quite briefly were quivering, and then so gorgeously subsided. And although no sound escaped her, she was singing within. Then there came a silent sigh.

Nothing, no part of her had been the same, following that charged though really very brief encounter. Immediately after, she had put herself together quite quickly … and as she looked at her face in the oval mirror of her enameled compact, she giggled as she flicked her eyes sideways and said that she looked quite utterly ghastly. Though never had she been so thrilled by her color, this wholly irrepressible sheen upon her bursting cheeks, the bright white points of dazzle in her eyes. Jonathan had given her the brooch—the gift he had had for her—as she continued to smile quite helplessly. A gleaming-faceted amethyst lozenge set in plain beveled gold—and he pricked his finger as he attempted to release the pin. Milly kissed the rising globule of blood—would have sucked at it quite avidly. Despite his protestation, she blotted the blood from the pad of that finger on the stark white cuff of her frock, and eyed its careful seeping. The provocation of such passion did not astound her. That frock she now kept in her special box, her box of small and special things. She had new clothes quite regularly now—not from Jonathan: she bought them for herself, and more than ever she had in her life. She could not help but think that Eunice would approve—of every part of it, actually. A tallyman would call at the back of the ironmonger's at as discreet an hour as Milly could arrange, and she would
choose from all sorts of very lovely things (he knew her size, he had her measure)—and of course all this on the never-never. How else could she have managed? This winking joker with his two big scuffed and brown fiberboard suitcases would tell her she had made a very wise choice indeed: in this she'd look a proper picture. And Up West, in the Bond Street fashion houses, they were selling this very article, madam—on my mother's life, I tell you no lie—for twenty guineas, not a penny less: to you, though—three-and-a-tanner down, thirty bob all told.

And Jonathan … every time she appeared in something new, he behaved as if he were struck by a vision from on high: his compliments were ample and various, and she cherished every one. Jim … he did not notice. Ever. Whatever she had on. The amethyst brooch she now wore daily—Paul had said oh, what a beautiful color. Jim had yet to spot it. And of course he knows nothing. Nor did he observe when just last evening, when she had been knitting, close to the fire, she had suddenly caught her breath and resisted the impulse to double right over, her stiffened fingers seeking out the source of the pain deep within her, needing to delve, and soothe it away. And now … alone in the box room, as the night crept on, it attacked her again. The spasm, it never lasted long, but the surprise and intensity were always quite shocking. And as once more it passed so slowly away, she blinked up at the shadows barely there on the ceiling, and she set to frankly wondering whether or not this was one of those stories that was destined to have a happy ending. In books they do, often they do. Though not, of course, always.