A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [19]
She held his wrist to stop his hand and lay there with her eyes closed, dizzy and out of breath.
She was crying.
It was like finding your body again after fifty years and realizing you were old friends and suddenly understanding why you’d felt so alone all this time.
She opened her eyes. David was looking down at her and she knew that she didn’t need to explain anything.
He waited for a couple of minutes. “And now,” he said, “I think it’s my turn.”
He got to his knees and moved between her legs. He opened her gently with his fingers and pushed himself inside. And this time she watched him as he rolled forward onto his arms until she was full of him.
Sometimes she enjoyed the fact that he was doing this to her. Sometimes she enjoyed the fact that she was doing this to him. Today the distinction didn’t seem to exist.
He began to move faster and his eyes narrowed with pleasure and finally closed. So she closed her own eyes and held on to his arms and let herself be rocked back and forth, and finally he reached a climax and held himself inside her and did that little animal shiver. And when he opened his eyes he was breathing heavily and smiling.
She smiled back at him.
Katie was right. You spent your life giving everything to other people, so they could drift away, to school, to college, to the office, to Hornsey, to Ealing. So little of the love came back.
She had earned this. She deserved to feel like someone in a film.
He lowered himself gently to her side and pulled her head onto his shoulder so that she could see tiny beads of sweat in a line down the center of his chest and hear his heart beating.
She closed her eyes again, and in the darkness she could feel the whole world revolving.
15
“Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live.”
Bob lay just below the altar steps in a polished black coffin which looked like a grand piano from this angle.
“For a man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain.”
There were occasions when George envied these people (the forty-eight hours between trying on the trousers in Allders and visiting Dr. Barghoutian, for example). Not these people specifically, but the regulars, the ones you saw up at the front during carol services.
But you either had faith or you didn’t. No reentry, no refunds. Like when his father told him how magicians sawed ladies in half. You couldn’t give the knowledge back however much you wanted to.
He looked round at the stained-glass lambs and the scale model of the crucified Christ and thought how ridiculous it all was, this desert religion transported wholesale to the English shires. Bank managers and PE teachers listening to stories about zithers and smiting and barley bread as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence and be no more seen.”
The vicar made his way to the pulpit and delivered his eulogy. “A businessman, a sportsman, a family man. ‘Work hard, play hard.’ That was his motto.” He clearly knew nothing about Bob.
On the other hand if you never set foot in a church when you were alive you could hardly expect them to pull out all the stops when you were dead. And no one wanted the truth (“He was a man incapable of seeing a large-breasted woman without making some infantile remark. In later years his breath was not good”).
“Robert and Susan would have been married for forty years this coming September. They were childhood sweethearts who met when they were both pupils at St. Botolph’s secondary school…”
He remembered his own thirtieth wedding anniversary. Bob staggering across the lawn, slapping a drunken arm around his shoulder and saying, “The funny thing is, if you’d killed her you’d have been out by now.