The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [134]
It would have been better if they could have fallen impulsively into each other’s arms in a hayloft, but that was impractical, they thought, surrounded by art students and miscellaneous children. Methley had repeated, with gratifying urgency, “You must come to me, you must come, it is meant to be.” And he had his arrangements, pat, when he came to propose them, with an ease which Olive felt it better not to question. Over lunch, with a certain bitterness and jealousy he had criticised August Steyning’s “bloodless” theories of impersonal acting. Bloodless and soulless, said Herbert Methley. There is too little passion in the world for it to be removed from the stage, where it should flourish, without hindrance. Olive felt it was all embarrassing, to be sitting eating oysters, and discussing Kleist and marionettes, looking into the eyes of an intended lover. It was all too deliberate, and not spontaneous. She thought there were women who would have enjoyed this aspect of things—but she was not one. She thought about how to say she had made a mistake, and must go home, and could not frame the voice or the sentence. So she ate her strawberry tart with cream, and followed Herbert Methley up the narrow wooden stairs.
Inside the bedroom, he bent to lock the door, and lifted his hands to remove her hat. She stood awkwardly, like a statue. He said
“You are thinking you have made a mistake, and should go home. You are embarrassed to be committing adultery out of a kind of revengefulness. You feel this is all mechanical, not passionate. I can read your thoughts, you see, I know you.” Olive laughed, murmured “A palpable hit,” and relaxed a few muscles.
“I am a writer, I know what people are thinking. I put my mind into their bodies. I love your body, and you will love mine. This is—as sex always is, my dear—both ludicrously comic, and passionately important. We shall know each other, as the Bible says. What could be more amazing?”
He was taking off his clothes as he spoke, and folding them, and putting them on a chair. Olive looked sidelong at his body. It was not pale with red extremities, like Humphry’s. It was a kind of tanned yellow-brown, all over, owing to the naked sunbathing. She gave a snort of laughter. Bodies are ludicrous, she thought, he is very clever to say so.
“ ‘To teach thee, I am naked first. Why then
What need’st thou have more covering than a man …,’ ”
he said. She could not place the quotation. He undid her belt and began on her buttons.
“All the same,” she said, finding her voice, “you are right, I do think this may be a mistake, I am embarrassed.”
“Of course you do, and of course you are,” he said, removing her dress and beginning on her underwear. “But I mean to make you forget all those thoughts, soon, very soon now.”
And she plunged naked into the bed, with her hair pinned up, so that he should not scrutinise the slacknesses and scarring of her skin.
He talked a lot, during the sexual act. Humphry didn’t, Humphry was silent and manful and lordly. Methley was intimate, curled round her, she thought, like a snake, like a salamander, murmuring in her ear “Is it better like this? Is it better here—or here—? Is this not delicious …?”
Her body liked what he was doing—most of the time, and he noticed so quickly when it didn’t, he changed tack, he corrected himself. She looked at his “thing” which was narrow and brownish, unlike Humphry’s thick one. She must not think about Humphry.
“Don’t think, stop thinking,” said Herbert Methley in her ear, “now is the time to stop thinking, my dear, my darling,” and she did stop thinking, and came to a quivering climax such as she had never before known, with a full-throated