The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (22 page)

^{"Would you like to wait while I get hold of a cab?"}

^{"No," she said firmly, "let's get on home. The walk will warm us and the first thing I'm having, before a bath even, is a stiff tot and the same goes for you, Martin."}

^{He took her hand and they cut through the back of the town to the' golf-links gate that led to the head of The Coombe, walking}

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^{swiftly and exchanging no word but when he saw her fumbling for the key he took her purse and opened the door and she said, simply: "You were wonderful, Martin! Quite wonderful!" and his triumph was complete.}

^{She put a match to the fire and fetched a half-bottle of cognac, pouring two generous measures and holding the glass toastwise. "Here's to you, Martin! By God, it's good to stumble on a real old-fashioned male, someone who can make a decision and shoulder responsibility instead of spreading it all around, like those other weeds. What would any of us have done if you hadn't been there?"}

^{"You came out of it pretty well yourself, Madge."}

^{"Drop the 'Madge'," she said grimly. " 'Madge' was a game, wasn't it? You'll always be 'Martin' to me but you can revert to Olga now. We've grown up a little don't you think? You especially!"}

^{She emptied her glass and pushed back her hair. "I'll tell you something, Martin, while I think of it and it's this. There isn't a damned thing you couldn't do if you wanted to or had to, so don't ever forget that and don't let anybody tell you differently!"}

^{"Oh, go and get your bath!" he said, smiling. "We can build up each other's egos afterwards."}

^{"How about you? You need one too, you know!"}

^{"I'll boil some water on the stove and clean up in the kitchen."}

^{"Nonsense, you're the paying-guest, I'm only the landlady!"}

^{"Just do as I say, Olga, and then we'll eat."}

^{She looked at him gratefully and went upstairs. He heard the water running and at once ceased to think of her as a cheerful companion but as the woman he had embraced a few hours ago and he remembered with pleasure the freshness of her lips and her lack of coyness. The glow of personal triumph continued to warm him so that he suddenly felt intensely virile but objectively so, telling himself that it was not simply her he needed to crown his achievements but any woman who could respect him as a man. He went into the kitchen musing and put the kettle on the stove^ stripping himself and pouring water into the washing-up bowl. While it was cooling he took down the roller towel, wrapped it round his middle and padded upstairs to his room for some clean underclothes,}

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^{nother pair bf slacks and a clean shirt. He stood for a moment . f
ron
t of the mirror feeling more satisfied with his reflection than at any time in his life, as though his achievement had put muscle and bone into his limbs. Standing here he heard Olga splashing in the bathroom and the realisation that only a door separated them made him recall her pretty legs. Then, as his heart began to thump, his reserve of self-discipline launched a belated counter-attack and he said, half aloud; "This simply won't do! If things corne to that she'll have to know the facts. She might be a good deal younger than you, my lad, but I'll wager every penny I have she hasn't had any real experience with men and it's time you stopped masquerading as a bachelor! We can't go on and on like this, being frank with one another about everything but the one thing that matters! Now if you had sense ..."}

^{But at this point she called to him through the bathroom door: "You'll need a big towel, Martin. There's a dry one here in the airing cupboard."}

^{'My God!' he thought, 'the airing cupboard is inside the bathroom!' and securing his inadequate roller towel with finger and thumb he almost ran out of his room and along the corridor.}

^{His arrival there was an anti-climax. She was standing on the threshold shrouded in steam and wrapped in a voluminous bath robe and when he scuttled up in his little towel she exploded with laughter.}

^{"Oh, my dear!" she said, .catching her breath, "is that the best you could do?" and at once withdrew, closing the door and leaving him to salvage what remained of his dignity with the large towel she had dropped at his feet.}

^{He went downstairs rather sulkily, feeling like a victim of an elaborate hoax and scoured himself as best he could in the washing-up bowl and sink. Then he cleared away, refilled the kettle and dressed, making a pile of his mud-soaked clothes for the cleaner. She was up there, he thought, a very long time and in the interval he occupied himself going through his pockets. He found the letter, now limp and indecipherable, that he had written to Sybil and hesitated before tearing it into small pieces and putting them in the stove. It was, in a sense, a final renunciation, for he knew now that he was done with that life for good. If things turned out}

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^{as he hoped he would set about tying up loose ends but not now, not at this moment, for his bones told him that the ordeal in the coach was exacting its toll and what he needed at this moment was plenty of hot coffee and relaxation in front of a blazing hearth.}

^{He made the coffee, set the tray and carried it into the little sitting-room, pushing open the door with his foot and there, tending the fire, stood Olga. She must have descended and crossed the hall without making a sound.}

^{She was wearing a blue housecoat over her nightdress and her hair, still very damp, was loose and pleasantly disordered. There seemed to be a great deal of it for it not only covered her shoulders but hung in curls and clusters about her temples where the light caught it and made it look more coppery than red. She had been attempting to restore some kind of order to it for she held a comb in her hand. Standing there, one hand on the mantelshelf, her head thrown back and a small slippered foot resting on the gleaming fender, she looked more mediaeval than ever, exactly like an illustration in a Book of Hours, or an idealised conception of the period from the brush of Burne-Jones or Rossetti. That was it- Rossetti!-one of those slightly gaunt, mysterious, ours-is-a-spiritual-relationship women whom Rossetti liked to paint against a background of tombs and ruins, half buried in a tangle of improbable briars. She seemed to be pondering something and it must have been a serious matter for when he entered and said: "Hullo ? I didn't hear you come down," she remained silent for a moment and then said, very quietly, "I'm not a bit hungry, Martin. I should be but I'm not! Are you hungry?"}

^{"No," he answered, "I don't think I am any more, I was when I came in but somehow I'm not now!" and he placed the tray on a little table just inside the door and at once forgot about it.}

^{He was aware then that this was the moment of crisis. Whatever was said, whatever movement was made by either of them, would, he was quite sure, have far-reaching consequences on their lives for there was an element of great suspense present in the room. The little carriage clock ticked on and on but somehow its tjcks had ceased to mark the passage of seconds. He realised now why she was looking so preoccupied and a sudden panic seized him lest}

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^{her ultimate decision should put her out of reach for all time. She had become a different kind of person and that in a very brief space of time, for when they had faced one another outside the bathroom less than half an hour ago she had been gay and relaxed but now she was tense and anxious, with colour in her cheeks that was not the result of confinement in a small, steam-filled bathroom. In the centre of each cheek was a bright, pink spot and as he watched her he could see her small breasts rise and fall under the pressure of an emotional stress. Then, quite suddenly, she faced round and began to say something but the words, whatever they were, did not emerge and all he heard was a harsh sound that might have been a sob. It broke the tension between them and time moved on, swiftly now, as though to make up for seconds lost and he crossed the room, taking her by the hand and turning her away from the fire, throwing his arms round her and holding her so fiercely that they swayed and his knee struck the armrest of the chair.}

^{"Oh God, Olga, 1 want you so much, so dreadfully!" he cried and buried his face in her damp hair but she twisted her head, finding his lips before he could misjudge her unexpected movement as a frantic attempt to break from him. Her kiss had nothing in common with the light-hearted kiss of the morning, or the passive response in the beechwood that afternoon. It was greedy and demanding, so much so that it hurt his mouth and the pressure of her body against his was so sustained that he would have staggered had his leg not been braced by the chair. Then, with a swiftness that made him gasp, she was gone, tearing at the curtains and switching off the table light as she circled back to him, not seeking to renew the embrace but standing fully erect before the bright fire and shedding her housecoat and nightdress in what seemed to him a single, deliberate movement. It flashed across his mind then that perhaps he had been quite wrong about her after all, that perhaps the years since the death of her young man in Malaya had not been as empty and arid as he imagined, but this did not make her any less desirable, or the need to possess her less urgent, and he would have reached out and taken her there and then had he not sensed in the way she stood poised between him and the fire that, notwithstanding her nakedness, it was she and not he who was to make the decision.}

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^{He said, mastering himself momentarily: "You're very beautiful, Olga and I want you most terribly, more than I've ever wanted anyone in my life, but if it means you'll regret it, if later you'll ' feel}

^{She cut him short, picking up his words where they faltered and using her own with a circumspection that was very odd in a timid woman standing naked before a man whom, only that morning, she had still addressed as 'Mr. Sermon'.}

^{"I need you far more than you need me, Martin!" she said, speaking with astonishing determination. "I know very little about loving a man but I want more than anything in the world to know! I'm glad now that I waited because you're the right kind of man, gentle and decent, and that's something I don't have to learn! I sensed it from the beginning, you understand?"}

^{Her frankness so humbled and amazed him that the moment he touched her physical desire succumbed to the discipline of his essential kindness, so that he was exceptionally gentle with her yet without abandoning male aggressiveness that is the basis of the sexual act.}

^{And he was right after all. She was virgin and this fact alone helped to temper his ardour and when it was over, and she lay very still in his arms, he was able to think of himself as a lover who had bestowed as well as demanded and taken.}

^{They did not speak for the better part of an hour and the fire burned so low that the shadows subsided and seemed almost to have tired themselves out with their dance over walls and ceiling. He watched them absently, listening to her quiet breathing and stroking her back with short, measured strokes. She lay with her knees drawn up and her feet tucked into the cushion-well of the big armchair and the scent of her freshly-washed hair was as fragrant as the scent that had come from the woods in the little valley.}

^{He felt no regrets, no pangs of conscience, and no sense of deflation that he remembered as the inevitable aftermath of his possession of Sybil, simply a great sense of peace and fulfilment that reached down from his heart into his belly and loins, a tide so strong and warm that it lifted him and carried him along like a piece of flotsam on the breast of a torrent. He was aware, subconsciously, of insignificant}

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^{things, the lazy shadows and the tick-tock of the carriage clock but closer to full consciousness were the physical aspects of the woman he held in his arms, the smoothness of her shoulders, the firmness of the little breast half flattened by its pressure against his ribs, the tiny spirals of reddish-gold hair under his chin, the unusual length of her bare thigh half-thrown across his knee and glowing lik; a greave in the firelight. He thought: 'She's wonderful and I'm in love with her and this is surely what the Avalon dream held for me all those years. A man would be a fool to risk losing this kind of happiness to blurt out a piece of information that would send her scurrying into her clothes and upstairs behind a locked door!' And then, with a slight wistfulness, he remembered her virginity and thought of it with wonder, a woman of this day and age who cheerfully admitted to thirty-three years and was charged with so much positive energy, but had waited until she could find somebody on whom to bestow that energy, someone who would use her gently and match her loneliness with his own. And of all the men in the world he had been selected, carefully and with a deliberation that tempered physical desire. Surely this was the greatest compliment anyone had ever paid to him.}

^{The coals slipped in the grate and a smoking fragment fell on to the hearth tiles. The rustle, and the pungency of smoke, must have awakened her for she stood up, smiling down on him and reached without haste for her housecoat. He waited for her to say something, trying to say all he felt with his glance and encouraged by her smile, the smile of a woman who, against all probability, is not subdued by shyness or reserve. She bent and retrieved the smoking coal with the tongs, popping it back into the fire with one of those neat, precise movements he had noticed as she moved about the house. Then, still smiling, she said: "Well, Martin?"}