Grahame, Lucia (27 page)

I was not pleased, therefore, when Marie delivered to me, less
than a half hour before dinner was to be served, another note in my husband's
hand. This one commanded me to present myself at the table.

I made an effort to conceal my impatience with Marie's painstaking
thoroughness as she helped me to dress. I feared if I was tardy it would bring
my husband to my room before I was ready to confront him. However, I was
unwilling to join him until I was in full panoply.

I chewed my lip with vexation as Marie carefully arranged my hair;
the clock had already struck the hour. I wanted to snatch the comb from her
hands and finish the job myself, but she had far more skill, and I could no
more afford imperfection than could a knight being girded for bloody battle.

It was my aim to look austerely beautiful, concealing every
haggard hint of anxiety. Only when I was satisfied that, in a sleeveless gold
damask gown with a heart-shaped neckline, I appeared as splendid and
impregnable as the flagship of an armada did I sail down the stairway. I
entered the dining room with a deliberate, leisurely gait. It was twenty
minutes past the hour. I expected my husband's expression to betray some
surprise—perhaps even approval— at the sight I presented to him, but all his
face revealed was irritation.

"You're very late," was his welcome. "I was about
to come and fetch you."

"Good evening, Anthony," said I very graciously, making
neither excuse nor apology.

We ate in silence. I watched him guardedly, but with new respect.
He had dressed for dinner with his customary understated black-and-white
elegance and appeared as remote and unprepossessing as always. Why, then, as
the meal progressed, did my composure ebb, to be replaced by that tremulous
anticipation which had come increasingly to plague me in recent days?

I could not resist an occasional, circumspect glance at the
opponent whom I knew I must never again underestimate.

He caught me once. I dropped my gaze—but the damage had been done.
His gaze fell over me like January sleet; I felt my face take on the telltale
color that my accursed pale skin could not conceal.

We were alone. My husband disliked to have servants hovering at
his shoulder after our plates had been filled. Now he laid down his knife and
fork and leaned forward with his elbows on the table and his palms pressed
together.

"I really have no objection, when you are alone, to your
taking supper on a tray in your room, like a governess," he said.
"But on the rare occasions when we are under the same roof, I will expect
you to join me at the dinner table. And I will expect you to be punctual. I
cannot think of any excuse for putting the kitchen staff to the trouble of
keeping the dishes warm until you have managed to drag yourself to the table.
Surely you—who have so little else to do—can at least exert yourself enough to
show a modicum of respect for the work of others."

I burned at the rebuke. My husband's well-ordered household ran
with a smoothness which concealed the enormous amount of labor thereby
consumed. He behaved toward his staff with a courtesy that manifested itself
not only in the politeness with which he addressed them but also in his
scrupulous habit of advising them as early as possible of any anticipated
disruption to the usual routine. For my part, I had tended to accept these
tranquil and orderly functionings—to which, as my husband had indicated, I
contributed virtually nothing—as evidence of his annoying lack of spontaneity.

Now, although I resented his tone, I could not dispute the justice
of his observation. Nor did I dare; I had agreed to the bargain which made
obedience, out of bed as well as in it, the price of my eventual freedom.

"I regret having been so inconsiderate," I heard myself
say in a low voice. "It will not happen again."

As I indicated my acquiescence, I felt a sensuous languor slide
over me. My nerves tightened for an instant, and then loosened softly, as if
preparing to deliver me over to my adversary.

His eyes met mine again, and I had a sharp and vivid recollection
of that moment of ecstatic release he had given me. I dropped my gaze and lifted
my fork, but now my appetite, never hearty since the loss of my child, had
completely deserted me, and I merely toyed with the turbot that adorned my
plate until my husband directed me to ring for a footman to come and clear the
table.

I went immediately to my bedroom when the meal had ended. My
husband had disappeared in the direction of his study, where, I supposed,
coffee or brandy would await him, along with a stack of papers demanding the
instant attention of the absentee master. I ensconced myself among my pillows
with the latest literary production of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. The reviews
proclaimed that it lived up to the promise of her fabulously popular
Robert
Elsmere.
I hoped it would. Neither
Robert Elsmere
nor anything else
from that woman's pen had I ever been able to finish, but the spiritual
torments of her vaguely repellent characters seldom failed to induce sleep.

Savoring one of the hard mint candies I kept in a covered crystal
dish on the table beside my bed—they had the pungency which Mrs. Ward's prose
lacked and were the only sweets I ever craved—I opened the book. And, indeed, I
soon began to nod. Yet when I gave in to the drowsiness and put out the light,
my eyelids refused to remain shut.

The room had a brightness, half warm, half cool, that came only in
part from the dying fire upon the hearth. The afternoon rain had cleared the
sky, and now moonlight poured through the sheer, pale blue silk curtains,
between the old-fashioned window hangings of heavy flowered chintz with which
my husband had had my bedroom outfitted shortly before I took possession of it.
These gave the room a quaint, cheerful informality which never could have been
achieved with more fashionable velvet. I always opened them before I went to
sleep to admit the moonlight.

At last I abandoned my bed to stand at one of the long windows,
which offered a view of the silvery lawn's gentle descent toward the riverbank.
As subtle variations in the dim landscape slowly began to reveal themselves, I
thought I glimpsed a figure among the venerable oak trees. These cast such deep
shadows that it was impossible to distinguish substance from illusion; the
effect might have been only a trick played by the night wind, the tossing
branches, the ragged little clouds sailing across the moon's face, and the
dappled light she shed.

He gave only the most perfunctory warning knock before opening the
door to my bedroom a quarter of an hour or so later. I pretended to be asleep.
Without a word, the invader lit a spirit lamp, banishing the moonlight. I sat
up in bed, feigning as much confusion and dullness as if I had been dead to the
world for hours.

He pulled the chintz window hangings closed and laid some wood
upon the fire. When the flames were dancing to his satisfaction, he sat down in
an armchair a little distance from the hearth. He was still dressed in the
black tailless evening coat and narrow trousers he had worn at dinner.

"You seem to have had trouble sleeping," he remarked, by
way of letting me know that he had seen me at the window.

"I had no trouble at all until you awakened me," I
replied, to maintain the fiction that I had been rudely jolted from my dreams.

He met this with a long, slow, and knowing smile which told me I
had chosen my words unwisely.

"Indeed," was all he said.

I felt myself turn crimson.

"Have you the necklace which I gave to you last month?"
he then asked.

"Yes."

"May I have a look at it?"

"If you like. It is in my jewelry case." I made a small
gesture toward my dressing room.

"Bring it to me," he said.

I left my bed unwillingly. In the dressing room, I opened the dark
red morocco case, stamped in gold with my new initials, which contained the
necklace and a few other pieces that he had given to me. My grandmother's
jewelry was in a strongbox in a London bank.

I lifted out the necklace and delivered it to my husband.

"Have you any idea why I gave you this?" he inquired,
holding it up to the glow of the lamp on the table at his left.

"You seem to enjoy decking me out in gewgaws and
baubles," I replied.

"True." He was looking at the necklace and not at me.
His eyes were narrowed critically.

"This has an imperfection in the clasp," he observed after
careful inspection. "I am surprised that I failed to notice it
earlier." He draped the diamonds over the fingers of his right hand and
looked up at me. "If you use it roughly—as I fear you will, since you do
not value it—the clasp may not hold."

"I do not intend to use it at all," I told him.

"Nevertheless, when I return to London, I will take it with
me and have it repaired."

"As you wish."

"But for now, I would like to see it on you."

I thought the diamonds would provide a curious embellishment to my
uninviting nightdress. However, I reached out obligingly to take them from his
hand.

"I'll put it on you," he said. "Kneel down."

As I obeyed, that strange and dangerous feeling stole through me
again, that soft, dizzying lethargy. I kept my head bent and my eyes lowered so
that if my face revealed this, it would not be visible to him.

My husband lifted the hair that hung like curtains over my cheeks
and let it fall behind my shoulders. His touch was as slow and delicate as a
lover's. He laid the diamonds on my throat and secured them there.

"Lift your chin," he said.

Reluctantly I did so and brought my eyes to his. But already I
felt as if my composed everyday face were being slowly chipped away from
beneath by that other, purely sensual being, who was racing to take possession
of me once again.

"That is not one of the nightdresses I bought for you,"
said my husband.

"No, it is not."

"Then it does not belong on you tonight."

"Shall I put on one of the others?" I asked, perhaps a
shade too hopefully.

"No," he said. "Since I do not like this one, and
you seem to dislike those I have chosen, we will compromise."

I did not like the compromise this remark foreboded.

"Shall I assist you?" he asked.

I began nervously to unfasten the buttons which secured my nightgown
from my collarbone to my waist. At last the white flannel slid over my
shoulders and settled into a little snowdrift around my kneeling self.

"Don't look away," said my husband.

So I met his gaze, and although I was hardly a blushing innocent,
my skin began to grow as rosy as if I were a maiden in imminent danger of
debauchment.

My debaucher was lounging with his right leg thrown over the side
of the chair. His right arm lay across the back, his hand propping his head.
His other arm hung idly over the left side; it needed only an empty wineglass
dangling between the fingertips to complete the dissolute effect of his
posture, which made so great a contrast to his flawlessly pressed coat,
starched shirt, and creased trousers.

His gaze drifted over me slowly and came to rest, with frosty
approval, upon my traitorous nipples. At last he leaned forward and reached out
languidly.

"These seem a little more eager to please than they once
did," he remarked.

Or to be pleased. It was true—his presumptuous touch had me
quivering with rebellion and delight. I pressed my lips together.

"Put your arms around my neck," he said as his hands continued
their leisurely exploration of my breasts.

He leaned closer toward me and I toward him. I laid my arms upon
his shoulders like a garland.

His breath warmed my cheek. I began to tremble and sigh under his
touch.

"Here is what you'll wear for me tonight," he whispered.
His hands left me. He slipped a tiny crystal vial from one of his pockets and
twisted the cap. The light, fresh, springtime scent of lilacs spun around me as
his fingertips touched the fragrance to my temples, my throat, my shoulders, to
the insides of my elbows and the back of my neck, to my breasts—and then no
more. He slipped free of the loose enclosure of my arms. I felt as incomplete
as a half-finished painting, and drunk with lilac.

He held the vial toward me with a hard little smile that conveyed
his wishes clearly. I opened my hand.

Slowly I clothed myself in those invisible flowers. They curled
around my wrists and ankles and over my infertile belly, they wafted along my
calves and wove themselves around my thighs.

When I considered myself fully arrayed in this remarkable fashion,
I reached out to take the cap from his hand.