Life Mask (78 page)

'Don't let go of my hand.'

'I won't.'

Mary stood very still. Then she subsided into the water and it reached her white chin.

'Think how much good this is doing you,' Anne told her. 'All that medicinal salt is refreshing your skin and stimulating your organs.'

Mary didn't answer. Was she fighting the temptation to let go of her friend's hand and stagger back to shore?

'The Greeks, of course, considered water holy,' Anne told her. 'They had their sacred springs and pools. What was it Homer said of water?
Clean, light, precious, most desirable.'

A wave wet Mary's mouth. 'Oh!'

'Kick your legs.'

Mary jerked out of the water like a seal. She'd dropped Anne's hand. She bounded up and down, waving her arms as if trying to put out a fire. 'It's—it's so—I can't bear—'

Anne joined in the wild laughter. Two mature ladies, wearing grotesque calico sacks, leaping about like sprats in a net! She plunged down for a long moment to let the water possess her entirely: her hot cheeks, the small chambers of her ears. It lifted her sack of hair and parted every strand at the root. She emerged with a shriek of pleasure, her eyes stinging.

Mary was splashing like a dog. 'I thought you were drowning!'

'Just take a big breath and hold it,' Anne told her. Her cap had come loose, and was hanging on her shoulder like bladderwrack; she tugged at it.

Mary gulped the air, then went down. When she rebounded her eyes were huge. 'What an extraordinary sensation.'

'Isn't it? I'll bet you're not cold any more, are you?'

'No,' said Mary. 'No, not any more.'

Between waves Anne took a mouthful of the water. The salt made her shudder. 'Powerful stuff,' she said when she could speak. 'Fordyce says if I could get down a glass of it every morning I'd never know a day's indisposition.'

Mary tried a sip, but her face puckered up like a baby's. 'It's abominable!'

'Oh, I'd pick it over that foul, sulphurous Spa water any time.' Anne took another long gulp of it, then wiped her mouth.

'Can you swim?' said Mary.

'No, I make sure never to go beyond my depth. But there is one thing I know how to do—if you'll help—' She found Mary's hand in the water and placed it against the small of her own back. 'Bear me up, just here, and I'll try to float.' Anne heaved herself backwards and felt the silvery water infiltrate her ears. Somehow it worked, the magic trick of buoyancy. Her costume trailed weightily, but Mary's firm hand was under her.

'Splendid,' cried Mary. 'Let me.'

Reluctantly Anne found her feet again with a great splash, and put out her hand. 'Lie back all at once,' she said, 'arch like a cat. Don't be scared.'

Mary smiled as she floated; her arms were spread like an angel's. Her cap had floated off; her dark curls relaxed on the water. No, not an angel but the statue of an angel, or something like it; the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which Anne went to see whenever she was in Paris. The calico clung to Mary's narrow limbs like carved drapery. She was a Sybil in white marble, a gleaming monument. Like someone who'd leapt from a cliff and now floated, free of her despair. Her eyes opened, and she and Anne were looking at each other.

When they came out of the water it was into a different world, or rather, it was they who'd changed, Anne thought, and they walked through the streets of Bognor like strangers. It was as if the waters had gone over their heads and worked a metamorphosis.

At midnight, when they should have been asleep, Anne was lying so close to Mary that tendrils of nape hair—still damp—touched her lips. Her breath was hot between them. Mary turned over, like a fish, and their faces were touching. 'Anne?'

'Yes,' she said and the word was a great falling.

'You must teach me,' Mary whispered.

A long silence, how long, ten beats of a sure and terror-struck heart? 'I can't.'

Mary moved as if to turn away, but Anne took her by the shoulder with her free hand. 'Don't mistake me,' she said, very low, 'please don't mistake me. I only mean I know no more than you.'

'But—' Mary lay still.

Did she think Anne was lying? For all their talk of candour and sincerity, the two of them had tangled themselves up in lies, it occurred to Anne now: the unsaid, the veiled, the unnameable. Six years, thousands of letters, murmured conversations, professions of faith and attestations of virtue, and what did it all amount to? She lay in the darkness, she and Mary breathing the same inch of fragrant air. It occurred to her that whenever Mary had said
I have full confidence in your frankness,
what she'd meant was more like
Don't tell me.
Now, after all these years, Anne was trying to tell the truth, but perhaps Mary thought she was lying. Was it impossible to say anything that wasn't some kind of lie?

Mary kissed her on the mouth.

Shock kept Anne where she was for a moment, then she kissed back, and slid her arm under Mary's waist and kissed her again, as if sealing a pact, though she couldn't have named the terms.

T
HE MORNING
was grey, but shimmered when the light pushed at the gauzy cloud from behind. At breakfast they were alone in the small dining room; the other lodgers had gone out already. Anne put down her piece of toast, thinking she should be the first to speak, and Mary flinched slightly. After a moment, Anne started eating again.

It was remarkable how life went on. It was as if nothing had happened, except that they were baggy-eyed from lack of sleep and kept hiding yawns behind their fans. They wrote letters and showed them to each other, as if by some silent agreement:
The weather has been fine on the whole,
Mary told her sister, and
My dear Walpole, we both continue to improve in health,
wrote Anne. The hours went by as they always had. They talked about the merits of Richardson versus those of Rousseau and debated whether Palladio's influence on English architecture had been entirely beneficial. For a minute at a time Anne forgot, then remembered, which was like falling over a cliff. They walked to the shop at the hotel in the afternoon, so Mary could buy a new comb, because her old one had some broken teeth. For dinner there was jugged hare.

All the time Anne was talking to herself.
Is this evil, then?
Was this the thing she'd feared and loathed all her life, shrinking from its touch? She found herself thinking of her sceptical tutor Hume:
Put it to the test.
How did one know the sun would rise tomorrow? Was it just a habitual assumption?
Assume nothing.
Empirically speaking, was last night evil? In what aspect did the evil lie? In the irrationality of this passion? But many things were irrational; Anne sometimes longed for an orange even when she wasn't hungry. In its turning against nature? Well, she and Mary were past all that, surely; nature, in her wisdom, had not made wives and mothers of them, had in fact turned them loose. In its excess? True, this was a strange and overwhelming feeling, a sort of whirlwind, but where was the real harm in that? Anne wasn't reasoning like Hume any more, she was pleading like a child.
Why mayn't I have this?
It was a sin, she knew that much. But what exactly was a sin? Who was damaged by this?
There are no universally agreed crimes,
Hume had told her once,
only things of which various people disapprove.

'Mrs Damer?'

She jumped. 'I beg your pardon,' she said.

'The gentleman asked you to pass the salt,' murmured Mary.

She gave the cellar to him so fast that it thumped the table.

At the end of the day the two ladies were sitting on a stone bench on the pier, watching the sun go down, as it had the day before when they'd bathed, unknowing, in the cold sea. Anne felt older. No, that wasn't right, she felt younger. Tired, and confused, and triumphant, like a girl. She thought,
I've become a girl again.

She remembered her wedding night, when she'd been just nineteen. It hadn't occurred to her to think of it until now; the two experiences had nothing in common. But she recalled her mother kissing her on the cheekbone the next day and murmuring something odd:
You're a woman now.
The bride had been struck by guilt that she was failing to feel the appropriate sentiments; she had no sense that she'd been changed by John Damer's brisk, muscular attentions. Whereas today ... the very thought of the night she and Mary had spent, now she let herself dwell on it, made her stomach twist and her temples sweat. Now it was—nearly three decades after her wedding—that she'd been truly changed.

'May we ... not speak of it?' Mary, beside her on the pier, spoke so quietly that Anne wasn't sure she'd heard the words.

'Of course we may,' she said at once, marshalling her nerve. 'I'm willing to speak of it, of anything.'

'No, but—I meant, may we, is it possible for us...
not
to speak of it for now? Please,' she said, after a pause.

Anne's heart had clenched.

'It's only that to speak of things changes them,' said Mary, watching Anne like a cat. 'All day I've been waiting as if for a storm—'

'What kind of storm?'

'Guilt, I suppose. Shame. Self-loathing. All that wretchedness.'

Anne's mouth tightened over each word.

'But the storm hasn't come,' Mary assured her. 'Only, I fear it may if we speak.'

And were they not speaking now, Anne wondered, speaking of the very thing? Were they not reliving in their mind's eye every silken line and curve, hearing again each whispered word, feeling again every wild, appalling touch? Was she the only one wondering what would happen this evening after the sun had sunk, after supper, after the candle was snuffed in their little room? 'Certainly,' she said, looking away. 'Let's just sit here and admire the view.'

They stared out to sea.

N
OTHING STOPPED
them. They got little sleep. On Wednesday Anne banged her bad leg against a lamp-post because she wasn't looking where she was going. After church on Sunday Mary shut herself up in their bedroom for half an hour before she emerged for dinner, red-eyed but witty. They bathed in the sea four times that week. They never spoke of what they did at night, but it was as if they were speaking of it all the time; in every
Good morning,
every
Such heat, for September!

How little she'd known, thought Anne—and how little she'd known herself. It seemed she wasn't naturally ascetic or born to solitude. She was no good at renunciation after all. It was as if her virgin heart had been fasting all her life, building up an endless appetite, and now she couldn't have enough of pleasure. She was glutting herself on love. She was unshockable; there was nothing she didn't like, nothing she could do without. Under her fichu the soft skin of her neck was purple with kisses.

She looked back over the years and saw that she'd always wanted this but hadn't seen it for what it was. She'd been confused, terrorised by the grotesqueries of the pamphleteers, the obscene silhouettes on black sofas. This was a private, pure astonishment. I
am this way,
she thought,
as simply as a stream flows down a hill. It has always been women. How many years of my life have I spent chiselling their beautiful cheeks?
This wasn't evil, this wasn't debauchery. It was love made flesh.

At dinner with two watercolourists and a curate, Anne found herself considering Mary's wrist, resting beside her plate, as a tender fruit; her mouth ached to close round it. That night as Mary reached over her to snuff the candle, Anne found herself saying, 'Don't.'

Mary didn't.

This is ridiculous,
Anne thought.
I'm nearly fifty years old.
It had taken her all this time to weave and stumble into understanding. It might be ridiculous—but it wasn't too late.

She'd begun to wonder about other women she knew. Had the Devonshire House ladies, for instance, ever known this bliss? It was not something she could ever imagine asking Georgiana. She could well believe that Georgiana and Bess had shared this secret for ten years—or had never thought of such a thing. Who could tell? Every love had its own peculiar story.

Three in the morning, by the tall clock that stood in the corner of their room, and Mary lay awake, pillowed on Anne's arm, and stared at the dragon wallpaper. 'Hideous,' she murmured.

'Isn't it?'

'I'd never stand for it in any home of mine.'

'Nor I.'

The word
home
seemed to linger. The clock ticked loudly for a moment, then faded away again. Five days before they were due to go home, or rather, each to her own, Anne to Grosvenor Square and Mary to join her father and sister in North Audley Street. Five minutes apart, but an unendurable distance, especially in the night.

Mary was about to say something, Anne could tell, though no words had been spoken; it was a matter of a slight tensing, flesh against flesh, an intake of breath. 'What is it?' she asked.

'I was just wondering,' murmured Mary. 'Were you glad when my match was broken off?'

'No.' Anne pulled away. Her heart was noisy in her chest. She'd almost managed to forget all that. 'Mary, I swear I did everything I could to help you and O'Hara. I wanted you to be happy.'

'I know.' Mary nestled back against her, wrapping Anne's arms round her more tightly. 'But you're glad now.'

Anne didn't know what to say.

'You wouldn't want me to be married,' said Mary, looking over her shoulder.

'No,' said Anne, letting out her breath.

'No,' murmured Mary.

The church bell belatedly rang out the hour. Anne looked down at Mary, who was fast asleep, curled into the crook of Anne's elbow. Now how could she move in order to put out the light? Well, it was burnt down to a stub already; it would die in an hour or so. They'd have to ask their landlady for another candle, not three days after the last; it would sound odd.
We read till all hours,
Anne imagined announcing;
we're vastly devoted to the life of the mind.
She watched Mary, though her own eyes were fluttering with fatigue. She thought of a saying that Plutarch ascribed to Heraclitus: that everyone while awake was in the same world, but that all of them, while asleep, were in worlds of their own.