"Whatever we have," she explained, "I want more of it."
"Suppose he really meant that foolish romantic dream. Or even the realist picture, tree roots, flies, and all. Suppose that was what he discovered he really wanted?"
"He wouldn't be John if he wanted that. He wouldn't be the same person."
"We all change. You change. Even two years ago you would not have dreamed of taking on the Wolffs' money the way you did, with so little reference to John. And never, never in your life would you have arranged for an honest tender."
In that moment, all her suspicions about him came flooding back. The terrible thought occurred to her that he was telling her these things, in that flat unemotional tone, as his final triumph over her. He was saying that he had brought her and the Wolffs together because he knew it would push this wedge between her and John and cause the split he had for so long desired.
In her innermost heart, she knew it was not so. She knew, in fact, that Chambers was not really clever enough to work over that time and distance and on such a well-judged emotional scale. John could have done it. He could use people in that grand manner. And because she knew John so well, she knew too that Chambers was not made of such material.
There was no comfort in the realization. It did not ultimately matter now whether or not Chambers had engineered the division between herself and John—the division existed nonetheless. It was a fact. And it cried out for something to heal it.
"Broader horizons," Chambers said. "Encourage him to look outward."
Nora laughed despairingly. "I've tried that for years. I thought ironmaking might do it. Then the foreign work—and look at the sorry state that has brought us to! Then it was to be general building. And the only reason I encouraged him to squander all our Irish profits was that I thought it would get him involved with Pim and the British Association—and Parliament."
"It may yet," Chambers said. "That fuse is still burning."
She made a glum face, not soothed. He looked at her speculatively and licked his lips. "What are you not saying?" she asked when his silence had persisted too long.
"Probably wrong," he said and fell silent again. At length he went on: "Not that it matters; it's all under the bridge now. But it's my belief that if you had falsified the tenders to make sure the job went to Stevenson's, you would have destroyed all chance of saving your marriage."
She looked at him coldly. "Thank you for telling me in time."
He ignored the implications of her remark. "It's quite clear," he said, "that in all these months, you have not once tried to imagine these matters from start to finish as he must see them."
"But that is because I know he sees them wrongly."
Chambers shrugged. "If neither the mountain nor Mahomet will budge—we must pin all our hopes on an earthquake."
She left him annoyed with herself for having gone there at all. Whatever else Chambers had become, he also remained their banker. How many tens of thousands had she just subtracted from their credit with him? It was her first serious commercial blunder in years; and she knew she ought to confess it to John and seek his pardon.
She also knew she would do nothing of the kind. Blunder or not, she had had to soften up Chambers to get him ready to accept her plan.
Chapter 48
When we started this I had no idea things would become so entangled," Walter said. "Yes," Mrs. Cornelius agreed. "Yours is very much an engineer's approach to life."
"Of course it is."
"Of course!" she echoed. She leaned hard against him, forcing him to lie supine again, then quickly she leaped to straddle him, hanging her breasts onto his face, caressing his face with them as she spoke. It was an aggressive gesture, devoid of all tenderness. "You like to test a thing as you test a bridge or a tunnel, and give it a certificate and then use it without thought forever after." Her tone was soft, almost admiring—as if she were about to say "you old devil!"
He had no defence against such mockery. His body mutely adored her attack, especially when she was so lascivious; and he reached his trapped head, his lips, his tongue, into all that warmth and softness hanging like fruit above, craving for it to be still and to fold around him.
"There's maintenance," he said, pretending to play her game.
She stopped moving and giggled. It became a long, long laugh, humourless and low-voiced. A gurgle. A mad noise. She lowered her breasts onto his face then and reached her arms straight behind her; but her spidering fingers could not touch what they sought. She inched herself down, putting her hair and lips to his face. Her eyes gleamed with a mirth she was not sharing as her fingers clawed the air above dead Samson.
"Come on," she challenged, "the rope trick."
He groaned. His tortured eyes begged up at her for the peace his tongue would not demand. But Samson, like an aging king, rattled with all the pains of time, hoisted himself wearily, with limp zest, into the salacious, gentle torment of her clutch. "Do you like that?" she asked. "Or this? Is it better than yesterday's? Do you remember the twenty-third of August, 1848?"
Her tone was loving and warm, as if she really, really were besotted by him still and lived only in the memory of their rutting—of what he called their letching hours. That was what made it so difficult to counter. She was shooing him off territory he had always thought supremely his. Each time they parted, he thought, with vast, inexpressible relief, that he would never go back to her again. His spirit would sing all the way home to Bristol; this time he meant it, he certainly, decisively meant it. He had done with Mrs. Cornelius for all time. Over his dead body. But the following Thursday would find him with his key in the lock, his besotted craving flesh trampling in over his dead resolve, hungering for her as from three months' continence.
He had tried everything. He made important arrangements in Wales, the wrong way from Bristol. But come the day, it was a telegraphic message crossed the Bristol Channel; and he was trembling his way to London. He sought out the best of the hundred Bristol harlots he had known, and spent the evening before with her; but as he recrossed her threshold, back into the street, the images of Mrs. Cornelius, naked and inviting, pressed around him like Furies. For nothing could gainsay the fact that Mrs. Cornelius was supreme.
He had found wonderful joys with the other three hundred and eighty-nine girls and women in his life. If he had never known Mrs. Cornelius, he would have counted himself the luckiest man who ever lived. At his actual moments of ecstasy, he had often thought that no one could ever have been so blessed with pleasures. (Indeed, once he had said to the girl he was on at the time, "My cup runneth over." She, being evangelical and thinking he was blaspheming, had struck him violently and made his nose bleed. She had refused payment too, which he had lost all intention of offering.) True, he always parted from the company of such women with the feeling that something had already escaped him. Some memory had been left behind. And when he wrote about the experience, in his record, that element would not return. Even in the minutest description, where he tried to set down with the utmost fidelity every memory of the event, he could not revive it. Once he wrote rhetorically: "Is that why I keep returning and returning to them—to discover what it is I can never carry away with me, even in memory? When secret flesh warms itself in intimate folds of secret flesh…"
He never finished the sentence. Its proper ending was his perpetual quest. But the look of the words "secret flesh" so pleased him that he filled the rest of the page with them, repeated and repeated, without punctuation. At the very foot of it he added the word "ejaculate." In its childish way, he thought, it came closer to the ineffable than all the sheaves of memoir he had compiled.
He did not resent the sense of loss that pervaded his memory when each letch was done. He took it for a fact of existence—just as the happiest day of your life must end in sleep, and so must the saddest, and the fact of sleeping had nothing to do with the quality of the day it closed. So the forgetting was a fact of the body's mechanism, not connected with the quality of delight to which it referred. Or so he had decided.
But all that was before he had met Mrs. Cornelius. She had hungered after him, or after Man, as ardently as he had ever craved for Woman. And she gave more. More in every way. Whatever his fantasy might conjure, the fact of Mrs. Cornelius could top it. He left her, in those early encounters, with the memory not of loss but of surfeit. The memory of her flesh in intimate embrace with and around him and his was more than the actual experience, not less. Then he knew what all those other letches had lacked.
Only slowly did he realize—and she too—that to have your fantasies topped by reality is the true state of hell—where your dreams reach forward into an inexpressibly magic world of fleeting lusts, and you wake to find yourself already far beyond them; where nothing is half-seen, no temptation is withheld, no delights are saved for other days, because half-seen things, and things withheld and other days are limits—and in the hell of more-more-more, on the farther shore of your dreams, there are no limits.
So now when they met, chained to one another by a perfection of erotic skill that a million letches would neither improve nor exhaust, they ended always with her sweet, gentle, loving aggression and his mute, adoring abhorrence—as today and as last week and next, world without end…an antiprayer with no amen.
She had got him stiff enough now to work into herself again. She shivered with pleasure and straightened on him, kissing him, dragging her hair over his face, pulling her breasts outward for his fingernails, writhing, rising effortlessly into her ecstasy, staying on that plateau all his pain-filled lifetime—until he rammed and pumped his aching emptiness into her yet again, yet again, yet again. How it hurt.
He reached for the future. What was reality going to be like? And was it soon? Like a drowning man, he clutched the page of the book where today was going to exist…secret fleshsecretfleshhh secrete shhh.
The Ejaculations of Walter, 8vo,
silk bound, Privately Produced, Enriched with Numerous Curious Illustrations. In which our hero…builds a new Inferno. He wanted to laugh.
He laughed—except that to the external world it had all the appearances of weeping.
Mrs. Cornelius was sitting beside him, gleaming like alabaster with the perspiration. She wiped the tears from his cheeks, hoisting them up unbroken on cool fingertips to her face, placing them on her own cheeks, as if trying out an effect. "You have never done that before," she said.
He turned suddenly on his stomach, away from her, burying his face in the sheets.
She struck him hard with her fist on the shoulder blade, hurting herself more than him. "Talk!" she said.
"I thought you didn't want me to talk." His muffled words were barely intelligible. Then he lifted his face off the bed and said clearly, "What
do
you want?"
She leaned over and spoke gently an inch from the nape of his neck. "I want one letch so perfect I need never see you or touch you again. Nor any other man."
The low, vibrant intensity of her hate made him shiver. He was afraid of her. "You're mad," he said.
She lay on her back beside him, speaking to the ceiling. "I know that. I've known it for a long time. I thought it last Sunday at the Female Refuge, listening to the Reverend Wharton giving yet another variation of his Lusts of the Flesh sermon—what nonsense it was! There was only one female there it could possibly have any meaning to."
"Why—how can you say that?"
"Oh, Mr. Thornton." She shook her head bitterly. "If I told you, you would hate me for it."
"I never did understand you. From the moment I tried to have you in the old garden room, I thought you were odd."
"Odd," she echoed.
"Go on," he cajoled. "Tell me. You know how it excites me. You know I like to think of you among all those—women."
She laughed without a trace of mirth. "You defeat me every time," she said flatly. "You cannot be vanquished."
"Stop talking in that silly way. Tell me whatever it was you were going to say."
"I
wasn't
going to say."
"Well, tell me
what
you weren't going to say."
She sighed and obeyed. "In the last few years—centuries—I have spoken, I should think, to as many fallen women as you have clicked."
"I don't like that word."
"I can tell you four hundred others."
"You talk to them about that?"
"And clothes and cooking and sewing. It's all they know. The one thing they do not know is the Lusts of the Flesh. The red-faced Reverend Wharton might as well preach to them on…"
"Do they not talk of lascivious things, then?"
"Constantly. But utterly without feeling. They have not the vaguest notion of the urges that drive men to shower them with silver. Your fine letches are to them a military drill. Their endless chatter is of method and mechanism."
He laughed. "That is how they brazen it out amongst themselves. It is not so when they are with me."
"I knew you would say that. I have read your memoirs."
"It was a mistake to show them to you. And it is a mistake to listen to the Reverend Wharton if it occasions these morbid fancies. I think you should stop, my dear."
"I think
we
should stop, 'my dear,'" she echoed.
"Oh, if we but could!" He sighed, heavy with insincerity. "How many times have I made and broken that resolve?"