Polystom (6 page)

She nodded, as if she had deeply considered and was deeply agreeing; slow, careful nods. ‘Get it out of the way,’ she said.

Although this sentiment had been implied in Polystom’s words there was something about the way she said it out loud that was actually rather upsetting. Stom swallowed. In a way that
was
what he had meant. But did she have to say it right out like that? As if making love with him were, somehow, a chore to be disposed of as quickly and painlessly as possible. The quiet, singsong way she had said that,
get it out of the way
, sounded in Stom’s ears as a rejection. An insult. Him! He was Steward of Enting, as if she didn’t know. His estate was the largest on the world. The Prince was his second cousin.

‘Well,’ he said, nonplussed. ‘If you don’t mind.’ And then, because that sounded feeble in his own ears, he amended it to, ‘Maybe that would be best. Yes, that would be the best thing to do.’

So he waited twenty minutes, fidgeting, attempting cul-de-sac conversations. Finally he stood up. ‘Shall we go upstairs then?’

Servants had prepared a separate bedroom from the one he normally slept in. He’d pondered that point at some length, and decided it was a good idea not to be distracted by his familiar things during this, their consummation. Coming into the room behind Beeswing he regretted that decision. He felt surprisingly agitated at the prospect of having sex with his wife. He missed the comforts of being in his own space. It had never been like this before. Playing with the daughters of local servants and farmers, bringing them wide-eyed and palpitating into his own house, or coupling with them in fields and barns. In all the scores, hundreds, of such experiences he had always had the gut-solace of his own superior status. Now, and despite his better breeding, his greater wealth, despite his better education and everything else, he felt somehow lessened in the presence of his wife. She was a tiny human being, so fragile-looking you might fear to embrace her for the damage you’d do, and yet she walked with a straight stride into the bedroom, and it was Stom who shuffled behind her, tongue-tied and blushing. When she was inside she looked all about the room, pulling the drawers open, fluffing the curtains out to check behind them, before settling down cross-legged on the bed.

‘Shall I?’ Polystom began to say, but the words stuck in his throat and he coughed. ‘Would you prefer it if I – wore a guard?’ A reasonable question; one he had thought through in advance. They had not married, as many did, merely for legitimate offspring. It was a true co-coupling. Accordingly, whilst children would clearly be desirable at some stage, they – she – might not want to become pregnant too soon.

‘Yes,’ said Beeswing, with uncharacteristic firmness. ‘I don’t want to become pregnant.’

Stom coughed again, went to the bedside cabinet and pulled opened the little door. ‘Eventually,’ he said nervously, fetching out the prophylactic spray, ‘you’ll want children of course. Of course, we’ll both want children eventually.’

‘Pregnancy,’ she replied, more dreamily, her attention apparently distracted by the lozenge-shaped patterns on the painted ceiling. ‘It’s not for me,’ she said, distantly.

Stom thought of contesting the point, but was fearful of spoiling the mood. They would, he resolved silently, come back to that another time. So, holding the prophylactic spray in his left hand, he unbuttoned his shirt and eased his body out of it. Beeswing turned to look at him and her dreamy eyes rested on his belly, on his chest, and on his face in turn. Then she uncrossed her legs in a single graceful movement, slipping off the edge of the bed. She was wearing a double-skirt, gathered at a button knotted into her hair at the back of her neck. It looked like a complicated arrangement, the cloth bunched and buttoned, intertwined with the braids of hair, but it took only a single touch with her right hand to untangle it all and leave the dress sliding off her body to gather in folds on the floor. She stepped free and sat down again on the bed. Stom took in her nakedness with one look before blushingly turning away. Her tiny breasts seemed all nipple and aureole, bruise-coloured circles with tiny thorn-shaped tips; her belly curved inwards, her hips traced out the slightest of arcs; her buttocks were flat, her thighs so slender that an inch showed between them as she stood. Her bush marked out a precise triangle, black against the silver of her skin. Only her feet were out of proportion in this faery-frame, for they were surprisingly long and broad. Stom, looking away, not understanding why he felt so abashed, pulled off his trousers. He flipped the top off the prophylactic spray. Erotic tradition suggested that the woman apply the stuff, as one of the preliminaries of lovemaking, but Stom felt inhibited from
asking Beeswing to do this. The awkwardness, the sensation of inward block, made him somehow, distantly, obscurely angry. His own member was hard as ivory, and he quickly sprayed the prophylactic around the end and up and down the length of it. It imparted its cold, plasticky sensation. He turned to face his wife again, and she was sitting, cross-legged, watching him. Again he felt an inward quailing, and he drowned it out by telling himself that she was his wife, that they were doing a proper thing, that he had a right to do this thing.

‘Shall we?’ he said, making himself meet her gaze.

She didn’t reply, but she did unhook her legs and lie back on the mattress. His own urgency pushing him on, Stom clambered on top of her. She exhaled in discomfort as his elbow crushed into her ribs. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, but he was already fumbling at her crotch with his right hand, inserting himself. There was a delicious sense of slipping inside. He could have cried with the pleasure of it. He started a rapid flexing motion with his whole body, going in, in, in, and arrived at his climax almost at once.

For the briefest time he was motionless, still inside her, his head clarified and free. Then there followed the sour falling away, the slippage back into flesh, the awkward sensation of post-coital belatedness. He was aware that he had come much too rapidly, which in turn made him feel unmanned, lessened. She would have expected more. She wouldn’t have enjoyed that very much. And, underneath that thought was a darker one: that it was somehow her fault that he had come so soon. If she had been more . . . accommodating. If she had played along, played with him a little; or allowed herself, somehow, to take more pleasure, instead of simply flopping back and opening her legs. If she hadn’t enjoyed it, then she had herself to blame. Sex was a two-way process surely. He pulled out, and rolled back, resentment curdling in his chest. She was doing it all wrong; this was not what he had the right to expect from a wife.

He pulled off the prophylactic. The gum adhered clammily to his now soggy flesh. A portion near the end had ballooned out into a little sphere, his seed, and he looked briefly at this little sachet of himself. He dropped the whole package over the side of the bed. Servants would clear it from the floor.

Beeswing was lying, breathing gently, still staring up at the patterns on the ceiling. Her placidity infuriated him. It seemed like a form of dumb mockery. Was she mentally judging him? Comparing him with better lovers? How could he break into the space of her mind, interpose himself between herself and her thoughts? He turned to her.

‘Sorry,’ he said, his words surprising him in their mildness. ‘I was a little quick. I haven’t had . . . it, since our betrothal.’ He started to ask
have you?
but the words blocked in his throat. What if she said yes? She was no virgin, had clearly had lovers in her life. There was nothing shocking in that fact, of course, except that it opened the horrible vista of other men possessing her body. Better lovers. Better men. And Stom shrunken and unimportant beside them. Stom useless, ugly, clumsy.

‘It’s fine,’ she said, in her distant voice.

At this, its suggestive indifference, anger fired up from Stom’s heart again, and his member stirred with the rage’s aphrodisiac. He reached out to grab her hips, to pull himself onto her again – this time without a prophylactic (because she wanted it with that protection, he would do it
without
), this time harder and longer – but he stopped, of course. His hand touched her skin, and it was cool and smooth. A piercing revelation went through him. He had made no mark upon her body. He had pushed himself upon her, had possessed her, and now that he had finished there was no indication that he had ever been there. The wind blows upon the green hill, moves through the blades of grass like a comb through hair, the wind knows the hill with absolute intimacy, and then it passes on, and there is
nothing to say that it was ever there. A sadness at his own transience dissolved the rage to almost nothing. He flopped backwards onto the mattress.

They lay together for several minutes, in silence. Through the open window could be heard the faint rhythmic noises of the waves joining the beach.

Later he called for coffee, and servants brought it on a splendid platinum decorated tray. Dressed in wraps, he and his wife sat on the bed drinking, and she looked away from him the whole time, staring out through the open window across the lawn towards the boatshed, and beyond it to the glistening of the sea, visible as a shining banner between the strips of land and sky.

‘This coffee,’ he said, miserably, wishing she would say something, that she would make the conversation – that she would raise any topic, do anything at all – ‘this coffee is from the Southern Continent. It’s usually considered the finest in the whole System.’ He despised his own inanities; but the silence was worse. It isn’t supposed to be like this, he told himself inside. Why doesn’t she act properly?

‘This isn’t my usual bedroom,’ he said. ‘It’s called the Mahogany room.’

‘Really,’ she said, still not looking at him. She acted almost as if in a trance, as if some vital part of her spirit were missing.

‘I’ll sleep in my usual bedroom tonight though. Will you . . . join me there?’ This sounded even more stupid in his own ears. His own wife! They weren’t a contract coupling – they were really married. Of course they should sleep together! So why did he feel so nervous, so awkward asking? ‘At night, I mean. You don’t have to of course. There are plenty of bedrooms in the house.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

Don’t mind. In a nutshell, he thought, that is the problem.

‘You’re not drinking your coffee,’ he said, in a weak voice. ‘I can order tea, if you prefer?’

Later, he set the coffee tray on the floor and rode one of his spikes of anger to a second sexual consummation. This second time he was not so premature in his climax; he pumped and pumped to the best of his ability, shooing away his own orgasm by deliberately taking his mind away from where he was, by separating out his bucking body from his thoughts. He thought of the
Pterodactyl
, his one-seater biplane. He mentally toyed with repainting her, imagining different colours. He thought of having all his vehicles, planes, boats, cars, redone in a new livery. Then he thought of taking a cruise, of having his boat brought out of the boatshed and dragged to the sea shore. He could motor over the Middenstead for a week or so. He could take Beeswing, just the two of them on the sea, in the sunshine. Doing it on the deck, her tiny body underneath his, him piercing her over and over with . . . and he was back, on the bed with her now, his orgasm unstoppable. He cried out in mixed pleasure and frustration.

He had worked up a sweat, and was panting a little. Beeswing was quiet. She did not look flushed. ‘Did you climax?’ he asked, ashamed that he hadn’t noticed her reaction. But he knew the answer as he asked it. She didn’t reply.

They spent the evening together, reading in the library, and for a while Stom believed that it was going to be alright between them. And that night they went to the same bed. He wasn’t in the mood for more lovemaking, but he embraced her and she let him. He fell asleep more hopeful, but woke in the middle of the night. Sitting bolt upright, out of some agonising dream, and patting the flatness of the bed beside him. Alone.

He pulled on the dressing gown and wandered the corridors for a while, hoping to locate her, switching on
the wall-lights as he went. He found her eventually, curled up under a silk blanket, on a couch in the library. She looked vaguely cross when he shook her awake, and there was even a small pleasure for him in that fact. ‘Would you really want to sleep here?’ he said. ‘Really? There are many more comfortable beds in the house. Or come back with me. Come back to my bed.’ His voice wheedled.

‘I was reading,’ she said, sulkily. ‘I drifted off to sleep.’ But there were no books about her, on the floor, on the arm of the couch, on the table, no books at all except the myriad volumes tucked away on their shelves.

She came back to bed with him, but when he woke up in the morning light he was alone again. It seemed that she had risen early. Stom, guided by Nestor, found her in the kitchen, huddled against the wood-cooker in the early morning chill. The servants looked embarrassed to have their mistress slouching in their space. Did she understand nothing? How could she embarrass herself in front of the servants like this?

She looked up when he came in and her face seemed almost pleased to see him. For a moment his heart bubbled with possibility; come to me, he thought, love me and I’ll repay it! I swear I’ll repay it sevenfold. ‘What are you doing in here!’ he said in tones of mock-rebuke, as one might with a child. ‘Getting in the way of the servants!’ He helped her to her feet and embraced her, to the further embarrassment of the cook. Then he led her gently away, up the steps, and into the breakfast room. But somewhere, on that short journey, his heart swelling with hope and the possibility of being loved – somewhere on that journey he lost her. Her face came over vacant, her steps absent. She slotted herself into her chair before Nestor had time to pull it away from the table. She was so slender that she could slip between the fat oak edge and the heavy arm-rest.

Polystom was tired from his interrupted night’s sleep,
but nevertheless he made a conscious decision to try to reach her. To find a piece of common interest. She kept staring out of the window, so she presumably liked nature. She could share his love for the forest.