The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [330]
They went up to the bedroom. Charles/Karl said it was a pity about the midges. Elsie began to take off her clothes, in a practical sort of way, finding coat-hangers, aligning shoes under the bed, as though she was alone in the room. She hung her skirt, and blouse, and went, in her petticoat, to clean her teeth, still looking practical. He loved her muscles, as she bent to untie shoes or stretched to hang her skirt. She brushed her teeth fiercely. She said “Don’t just stand.”
So he too began to undress, shoes, woollen socks, breeches, jacket. His feet were long and white. They looked unused. He brushed his own teeth. He brushed his hair, for no good reason, and Elsie laughed. So he walked over to her and began to undo her bodice, with slightly tremulous fingers. She put her fingers over his and helped him. All their fingers were electric. She stepped out of her petticoat, and out of her bodice and stood there in her drawers.
“What the butler saw,” said Elsie Warren.
Her breasts were carved, like a goddess, he thought, and her nipples were brown, chestnut brown.
She turned, and bent, and lifted the cover, and slid into the bed. The cover was white cotton embroidered with white rosebuds and roses.
Charles/Karl took off both his rational vest and his Jaeger underpants. He thought, this sort of thing happens in most lives and always differently. He felt a little drunk, but was not.
He got into the bed, beside her, and did not know what to do, partly because he did not know what she wanted. Beside him, she slid out of her drawers and moved close to him. She stroked him, and he grabbed at her, and she wriggled and laughed, and took hold of him, and guided him—like this, just like this, said Elsie Warren. And she took his hand, and guided it down, between the curls and twists of their underhair, and then he, or it, or they knew what to do, and found a rhythm, and he said, on a caught breath, “Oh, are you happy now?” and she said “Yes. More now. Oh yes.”
Breakfast was happy and sad. There were already things between them that they were not saying, not discussing, deliberately not thinking. He did not think about seeing that fine face over breakfast for the rest of his life, nor did he think of sleeping nightly with his hand on those carved breasts or between the lean, strong legs. He did say, they could find a place for another night, and she did say “I mustn’t stay away from Ann, Ann needs me.”
• • •
Walking across the gravel path to the cab, after paying the bill, he thought confusedly that he could now never marry, because he could not imagine wanting another woman. He had made decisions that had made… muddle … for everyone.
48
In 1911 King George V was crowned in Westminster Abbey on June 22nd in the middle of the longest hottest summer the country had known. The King took a measure of 98° Fahrenheit on his greenhouse thermometer. Neo-Pagans slid naked into cool pools in Grantchester, under hanging boughs, and hid giggling in the undergrowth, watching punts pass, full of tourists and dons. The royal yacht Hohenzollern carried the Kaiser and his family to the Coronation. Queen Mary wore a hat with cream roses and delicate feathers. In July the Kaiser sent the new German gunboat, Panther, to Agadir and was accused by the French and the English of interfering in French colonial affairs.
The Webbs, the driving force of the Fabian Society, had absented themselves from heat, gaiety and tension together, and had parted for Canada on a tour that was to take them a year. Work at the National Committee diminished in intensity. This was partly because the poor, the workers and their dependants, were stirring with discontent, dissatisfaction, determination and even rage, all over the country. There had been miners’ strikes and railwaymen’s strikes, strikes of woollen and worsted workers in Yorkshire and of cotton spinners in Lancashire, strikes by the Card and Blowing