Postcards From No Man's Land (26 page)

I did not resent Mr Wesseling’s intrusion, but liked him for it. He added to the excitement of the evening and gave me a sense of security, of my welfare being watched over by a fatherly eye. And by then, after so many stressful days away from my parents (the first time in my life I had been away from them for so long), I needed such reassuring papa-love as much as I was ready and longing for the unsettling passion of falling-in-love for the first time.

You will rightly guess that I slept very little that night. And that my mind was lively with new hope. Hope for what the future with Jacob might be like, where we would live and how. New love has tunnel vision, its retina is a movie screen, it views the world remade in its own amotopian image.

Next day the unremade world was just as it had been the day before, only worse. Colder, muddier, dustier, bleaker.
And my predicament—servant to Mrs Wesseling, farmgirl-housekeeper to Mr Wesseling—more of a burden than ever. All I wanted, all I pined for was to be alone with Jacob. But thank my genes, I am blessed with an active nature. The lower my spirits plunge the greater my impulse to be up and doing. An inheritance from my mother. So I threw myself into my chores with a frenzy forged of frustrated desire.

Yet so perverse is human nature, each time I saw Jacob during that day, to take him his breakfast and mid-day meal, hot water to wash in, return laundered clothes, I was overcome with such chronic shyness that I could hardly look him in the eyes. I tried to behave as matter-of-factly as possible, tried to bustle about as if too busy to stop and talk, tried to pretend that nothing had changed between us, that I was still only his friendly nurse Maria. But of course it was useless. Everything had changed. Harder than looking at him was touching him, and hardest of all, being touched by him. Usually, I changed the dressing on Jacob’s wounded leg after breakfast. But this morning his leg was no longer merely a wounded limb, it was a part of the desired body of the loved one, which I craved to kiss and caress. So I muttered something about an urgent problem with Mrs Wesseling to put off changing his dressing till later, when, I hoped, I had prepared myself.

‘Later’ came after the mid-day meal. We had always spent half an hour together then, relaxing before the afternoon’s work. That morning Mr Wesseling had cleared out dung and used straw from the cowhouse. Jacob had helped by hobbling about on the gallery, forking fresh hay and straw down to Mr Wesseling. By mid-day he was dusty and sweaty, his bandage was grubby, had worked loose and was annoying him. If I did not want to change it, he said irritably when I took him his meal, he would do it himself. But this I could not allow. No hands but mine, not even Jacob’s, must tend my patient, my beloved. Such jealousy! I had never felt a hint of it before. Till then, I thought of
jealousy as an ugly weakness, which I viewed with scorn. Now it seized me in an unmistakable spasm of emotional cramp that took me by surprise and flustered me all the more.

Without a word I scampered off to collect a pitcher of hot water and fresh dressings. When I returned Jacob was sitting on the bed in his underwear, having given himself as good a wash as he could manage in cold water. I had seen my patient like that often, but not since our changeful time together the night before. I wanted to throw myself in to his arms. Instead, tried to act my former self. But bustled too clumsily. Into the basin I poured water from the pitcher, but sloppily. Onto one knee at his feet I went down with a painful bump. With trembling hands I took the end of bandage that had come loose above his knee and began to unwind it from his leg. But because my fingers were all thumbs I fumbled as I rolled the unwinding ribbon, which fell into the basin of water by my side. As if the basin were a reservoir piped to my eyes, this ineptitude produced a flow of tears. Which I forced myself to ignore, keeping my head down so that Jacob should not see them, while I reached into the basin with slow-motion control, retrieved the drowned bandage, and with studied care went on unwinding the remainder from his leg, after which I laid the roll of soiled cloth aside. Stood. Discarded the contaminated water. Rubbed the basin clean. Placed it on the floor again. Poured more, now only tepid water in to it from the pitcher. Bent over Jacob’s leg and was about to start removing the dressing that covered the wound—always the worst part of the process because congealed blood glued the dressing to the sore, making it painful to strip off—when Jacob’s hands took me by the shoulders and, using me to support himself, got to his feet, and still holding me, waited until I could no longer keep my head bowed, could not help but look him in the face, and look at last in to his eyes. Those eyes that from first sight had bewitched my heart.

Such a moment, such
stasis
, is not to be endured for long. There can only be advance or retreat, acceptance or rejection, acknowledgement or denial. What else could there be from me then but advance, acceptance, acknowledgement? With the clarity of unthinking instinct I raised a hand and drew his face with my fingers, from brow and temple to lips and chin. The stubble of his unshaven cheek sent a tingle down my thighs. As my fingers cupped his chin, he leaned towards me and kissed my lips with lingering delicacy. Grasping his head with both hands, and rising on my toes, I kissed the lids of his closing eyes, first right then left. Wrapped my arms around his neck. Pressed myself close, all of myself, firmly to him. And for the second time felt his sex swell, but now against my belly, and with trembling pleasure at the fact of it, the sign of his desire for me, and the longing to know the power that it stirred in me.

Not a word was spoken, only the exhaling of sighs and crooning of pleasure that is the glossolalia of love.

(What a foolish old woman I am to tell you all this! What can the detail of it matter to you? Am I not merely embarrassing you? Besides, love-making is so universally the same that there is never anything to tell of it that is not a cliché. But like those tedious holiday-making travellers who turn up to coffee armed with their snapshots, I am impelled to spell it out by some irresistible compulsion. To relive it myself, perhaps? To memorialise something that fixed the rest of my life? To confirm its reality? No matter.)

We clung to each other, kissing deeply, for some long while, the brevity of which was agonising. No more that day than this. At last reluctantly breaking apart when we heard the sound of Mr Wesseling returning to work among the cows.

After quickly redressing Jacob’s wound, I hurried back to my chores with a bursting urgency, my blood singing, my thoughts in confusion, and longing longing longing for more.

Other signs of my condition I won’t dwell upon, such as the flush of my skin, the perking of my breasts with the imprint of Jacob’s chest upon them, the almost painful ache in my womb, the wetness under my arms and between my legs. Thank heaven there was no one in the house to observe my fluster and bliss. By the time of the evening meal I had collected myself, but knew that if I took Jacob his food I would return in disarray again, even if I could tear myself away from him. So I asked Mr Wesseling to take it to him, with a message that I would visit later.

But I did not go later. Or, I mean, not later that evening. A great nervousness gripped me. I could not trust myself. How would I behave? How
should
I behave? How would Jacob behave? And how should I respond to him? Would I know how? There was fear as well as longing in my passion.

What is more, suddenly I felt unfit for him. My body dirty, my clothes dowdy and faded, shapeless and unlovely. Of what did I smell? That evening’s cooking? The dust of the house? The hen coop where I had just been to lock the hens up for the night? The cheesy smell of the dairy, where I’d spent half an hour working the machine that separated the cream from the day’s milk? Or my own body sweat and sex odour? The thought appalled me. I could not bear myself a moment longer. It was as if my outer self was a repulsive carapace, a hardened shell, old and outworn, imprisoning a new self that strained to break free. I wanted to discard it like a snake sheds its skin or a butterfly its chrysalis as it emerges from the husk. Wanted to? No, no.
Had
to! Not a possibility. Not something wished for. But an imperative. A necessity. A biological requirement.

I had not bathed for some days. This was not unusual. We did not take baths so much then as we do now. And showers, at least where I lived, were unheard of. People were less fastidious about their bodies. But our house in Oosterbeek had a bathroom, whereas the farm still did not. So I noticed the difference. The inconvenience, if nothing
else. On the farm there was all the trouble of boiling up enough water, preparing a portable bath, which was always placed in front of the kitchen range, both for the warmth and to make it as easy as possible to transfer water from the boiler to the bathtub. Afterwards there was the trouble of emptying the bath and clearing up. And there was the question of propriety and modesty. While the women were bathing the men would keep out of the way and vice versa. In the Wesseling household, the men bathed on Friday nights, the women on Saturdays. Any change in this ritual was remarkable. After an illness, perhaps, or for some special occasion—a birthday, for example, or before a journey away from home. But never simply on a whim. Never just because you felt like having a bath.

This was a Thursday. What reason could I find that would satisfy Mr Wesseling’s surprise at my taking a bath that evening? I could think of only one that he would not question, for I knew even mention of it would so embarrass him that he would not want to discuss it. It would also quite genuinely embarrass me, for women were not given to discussing womanly conditions with men in those days, even if the men had heard of them, which it is almost unbelievable now to say that many, even married men, had not. The particular functions of the female body were treated between men and women as if they did not exist. Open talk of them, at least in respectable religious families, was regarded as at best bad manners and at worst as a social sin worthy of severe punishment. My excuse also had the advantage of being a fact. My period had finished the day before. The only untruth I would have to tell would be the smallest hint that my period had been in some unspecified way unpleasant, and Mr Wesseling would leave the house without a second question. Which he did, saying he would go and listen to the news, then call on Jacob, and be back in an hour or so, if that would be long enough. Yes yes, I said, and away he went.

*

It was while I was bathing that the thought finally surfaced that I was doing this not for myself but for Jacob. In preparation for receiving him into myself, like a bride.

‘I mean to go to him,’ I said out loud, ‘because I want him inside me.’

The shock of my shamelessness made me gasp. I would never have believed myself so forward! Yet at once with almost cold rationality, I began to plan how I would do it. I would finish my bath, clear up, dry my hair in front of the fire, then go to my room. There I would pare my nails, oil my hands and legs, inspect and tend to every nook and cranny of my body, scent myself with lavender, arrange my hair, and dress as becomingly as my few spare clothes kept for ‘best’ would allow. I would take my time, enjoy myself, wash from my mind the strain and stress of the last weeks, fill it only with thoughts of Jacob. I would wait until Mr Wesseling had retired to bed and I heard his volcanic snores (a regular feature of his sleep). Then I would steal away to Jacob.

Not until I was in my room, the warmth from my bath quickly chilled by the cold damp air of the autumn night, did it occur to me with as cold a chill that the romantic encounter for which I was so eager might produce unwanted consequences.

About the practicalities of sex (need I tell you?) I knew next to nothing. Even about what went where and how it got there I knew only the rudiments, and these from the uncertain authority of friends, not from parents or teachers or books. Among the things I had been told about under the desk, so to speak, at school, was the so-called ‘safe period’ method of contraception. It was all right to have sex seven days before your period started, for the three or four days of the flow, and for six or seven days following. Otherwise you had better make sure that the man left the church before the last hymn was sung. (How we giggled, we
girls, as we uttered that ridiculous code we thought so secret for
coitus interruptus
. And how confident and proud we were of our possession of these adult ‘facts’.)

Well, as I told you, the flow of my period had finished the day before. But, I thought now, how could I be sure my school friends were any more accurately informed about the ‘safe period’? And even if they were, how safe was ‘safe’? One hundred per cent? Doubt invaded my romantic amotopian fantasy and kept me brooding for some time after Mr Wesseling’s volcanic eruptions commenced. Long enough for me to decide in calmness of mind that love cannot be love without risk. It seemed obvious to me, though I do not know how or when I had learned it, that love that is real is always dangerous. And more dangerous to the one who gives it than to the one who receives it.

Even then I had few illusions about the behaviour of the human body, just as by then the war had left me with few illusions about human behaviour. The body, I was sure, could be just as errant as human behaviour, just as untrustworthy, just as prone to fluctuations from some supposed norm. Any rule, any law, whether enshrined in nature or made by human beings, implied exceptions and provoked deviation. I knew I was about to break several human laws—religious (fornication, connivance in adultery, coveting another woman’s husband), legal (having sex before the age of consent), and social (betraying the trust of my parents and of people who had taken me in at risk of their own lives and cared for me at their own cost). Why should my body not be just as vagrant and break the natural law? If I were caught, there were heavy punishments for all these transgressions. Was I prepared to accept the consequences, I asked myself as I examined my body in the mirror in the candle-lit coldness of the night. And replied to myself aloud, with the brave arrogance of untried youth, ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’