Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [51]
‘I might say the same, you know. You’re not particularly amusing when you’re like this.’
How tiresome, she reflected, these men who imagined that nobody had ever been in love before! All the same, she liked him. He was attractive. No, ‘attractive’ wasn’t the word. Attractive, as a possible lover, was just what he wasn’t. ‘Appealing’ was more like it. An appealing lover? It wasn’t exactly her style. But she liked him. There was something very nice about him. Besides, he was clever, he could be a pleasant companion. And tiresome as it was, his love-sickness did at least make him very faithful. That, for Lucy, was important. She was afraid of loneliness and needed her cavalier servants in constant attendance. Walter attended with a dog-like fidelity. But why did he look so like a whipped dog sometimes? So abject. What a fool! She felt suddenly annoyed by his abjection.
‘Well, Walter,’ she said mockingly, laying her hand on his, ‘why don’t you talk to me?’
He did not reply.
‘Or is mum the word?’ Her fingers brushed electrically along the back of his hand and closed round his wrist. ‘Where’s your pulse?’ she asked after a moment. ‘I can’t feel it anywhere. ‘She groped over the soft skin for the throbbing of the artery. He felt the touch of her finger tips, light and thrilling and rather cold against his wrist. ‘I don’t believe you’ve got a pulse,’ she said. ‘I believe your blood stagnates. ‘The tone of her voice was contemptuous. What a fool! she was thinking. What an abject fool! ‘Just stagnates,’ she repeated and suddenly, with sudden malice, she drove her sharp file-pointed nails into his flesh. Walter cried out in surprise and pain. ‘You deserved it,’ she said and laughed in his face.
He seized her by the shoulders and began to kiss her, savagely. Anger had quickened his desire; his kisses were a vengeance. Lucy shut her eyes and abandoned herself unresistingly, limply. Little premonitions of pleasure shot with a kind of panic flutter, like fluttering moths, through her skin. And suddenly sharp fingers seemed to pluck, pizzicato, at the fiddle-strings of her nerves; Walter could feel her whole body starting involuntarily within his arms, starting as though it had been suddenly hurt. Kissing her, he found himself wondering if she had expected him to react in this way to her provocation, if she had hoped he would. He took her slender neck in his two hands. His thumbs were on her wind-pipe. He pressed gently. ‘One day,’ he said between his clenched teeth, ‘ I shall strangle you.
‘Lucy only laughed. He bent forward and kissed her laughing mouth. The touch of his lips against her own sent a thin, sharp sensation that was almost pain running unbearably through her. The panic moth-wings fluttered over her body. She hadn’t expected such fierce and savage ardours from Walter. She was agreeably surprised.
The taxi turned into Soho Square, slowed down, came to a halt. They had arrived. Walter let fall his hands and drew away from her.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘Well?’ she asked challengingly, for the second time that evening. There was a moment’s silence.
‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘let’s go somewhere else. Not here; not this horrible place. Somewhere where we can be alone. ‘His voice trembled, his eyes were imploring. The fierceness had gone out of his desire; it had become abject again, dog-like. ‘Let’s tell the man to drive on,’ he begged.
She smiled and shook her head. Why did he implore, like that? Why was he so abject? The fool, the whipped dog!
‘Please, please!’ he begged. But he should have commanded. He should simply have ordered the man to drive on, and taken her in his arms again.
‘Impossible,’ said Lucy and stepped out of the cab. If he behaved like a whipped dog, he could be treated like one.
Walter followed her, abject and miserable.
Sbisa himself received them on the threshold. He bowed, he waved his fat white hands, and his expanding smile raised a succession of waves in the flesh of his enormous cheeks. When Lucy arrived, the consumption of champagne tended