Daniel Martin (50 page)

There was only one moment of consolation; on the Friday.

Nancy had already gone down to the farm to get the tea ready. Grandpa and Mrs Reed were up with them in the field and given her bedridden father his tea also. She had to stay for the egg-collection van, so Daniel was sent down to fetch up the tea-cans and the cake. He found Nancy in the kitchen, just putting the big kettle on the range to boil. They had five minutes. She’d been up to see her father, he was asleep. The farmhouse was silent. It was being grownup, married. Did he want to see her bedroom?

He crept behind her up the backstairs from the kitchen, then into the narrow room (the ‘library’ now) at the northeast corner of the house. He felt shy at first, the two short rows of schoolgirl romances and textbooks ranged on a homemade shelf, the trinkets, china horses, a present from Widecombe, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and his friends in hideous polychrome, the old chest-of-drawers painted pink to match the small wardrobe, the neatly made bed, the pillow with an embroidered spray of forget-me-nots in one corner, the heavy cretonne curtains at the one small window. It was more childlike than feminine, yet in some way a new dimension of her, a revealing, a baring, some kind of parallel to that innocent showing of her breasts ‘up over’. She took his hand and led him to the chest-of-drawers, opened one of the half-drawers at the top. Stockings and handkerchiefs; hidden among the latter she showed him a little pressed head of pink centaury, and suddenly they kissed. He began his please, please, again; and found mercy. She shyly unbuttoned her shirt. He saw the cotton brassiere and its shoulder-straps, then how it fell loose when she unhooked it, and put her hands behind her back. This time she watched his face, however, as he raised the cotton, feasted his eyes and hands, then bent awkwardly. That time he learnt not to keep his lips pressed tight. She stroked his head and whispered; then squirmed.

‘Oh, Danny. We mustn’t. You’re tickling. We mustn’t.’

Again they were interrupted: There was the sound of an engine from the front of the house: the egg van. He was pushed away, and there was more panic. He ran on tiptoe, hearing Mr Reed’s voice from his bedroom down the passage, for once not soft-spoken.

‘Ma? Nan?’

And Nancy’s voice calling behind him.

‘It’s only the eggs, dad. I’ll bring ‘ee your tea in a nun.’

The egg-man went straight up to Mr Reed for a little chat, gave them the chance to bemoan their fate as she made the tea.

They must meet Sunday; they must, they must. For Daniel, by good (or bad) chance, it was easy. His father and Aunt Millie were invited to tea in a neighbouring parish, a visit was excused, since their hosts had no children. He made the same careful detour as the previous week, hid his bike and slipped quietly among the hedges behind the combe, then through the rusty old barbed wire and down through the bracken to the rock. The bruised ferns, the space they had made; it had waited all week. Some of the bracken had sprung partially upright again, and he trod it down afresh. He had exercised much thought over the problem of disobedient erection; had gone at last to an old Christmas decoration drawer in the vicarage sitting-room, and rifled about under the collapsed paper concertina-chains and tinsel and folded ‘bells’ until he found an old toy balloon, it must have been from pre-war days, but Aunt Millie carefully deflated them each Twelfth Night if they had not burst, to use again. It was a little perished, and much too tight at the neck to be comfortable. But he carefully cut that away, and it seemed to hold and not hurt. As an extra precaution he changed from his usual underpants into his swimming-trunks. They kept him pressed down better. It wasn’t, of course, a question of a real contraceptive; simply of not wetting his trousers if he had to give way.

Nancy came at last, ten minutes late, and nervous, she couldn’t stay long. Louise and Mary had gone over to Tomes, she had to help her mother with the evening milking, she knew she suspected something… there was no cochineal this time, but a catalogue of fears and woes. She wore an old cream blouse under the same brown cardigan, navy slacks and rubber boots; she looked hot, a little tired. Daniel felt vaguely disappointed, he had come with an image of her that reality did not match at all. In the end she took off her boots and rubbed a sore spot beside one of her big toes. He sensed that she was in a mood, a temper of some kind; and that even though it wasn’t really with him, he did not dissipate it. They sat side by side, obstinately waiting for each other to move first. It was miserable. And the weather. It was warm, but there was no sun. A tired, diffused light came from the lifeless canopy of clouds. There was no wind, either. The summer wanted autumn, and Daniel Wanted summer till the end of time.

‘Aren’t you going to kiss me then?’

‘Want me to?’

‘Not if you don’t want to.’

He pulled out a bracken-haulm beside him.

‘It’s so rotten. All this being frightened they’ll find out.’

‘Well I can’t help it.’

She kept rubbing the sore place. He said nothing. Then she drew up her knees, crossed her arms on them and, hunched up, hid face, as if he bored her. He was stupid, he didn’t understand She turned her buried face even further away.

‘Nancy?’

She shook her head.

‘I do want to kiss you.’

‘No you don’t. You think I’m just a silly country girl.’

‘That’s stupid.’

‘You don’t think I’m pretty at all.’ She sniffed. ‘Stupid old clothes.’

‘I don’t mind. I like them. Honestly.’

‘You doan’ know what ‘tis like.’

There had been a sudden little upward break in her voice. With a shock, a strange being cleft, he realized she was crying; and he was as suddenly touched, all his own sulkiness blown away like thistledown by that one note of despair in her voice. He gently pulled her round, saw the wet rims to her eyes, then pulled her less gently down beside him and held her, kissed the tears.

‘I do love you, Nancy. I don’t mind. About anything. I just love you.’ He crushed her mouth, and they clung to each other in a fever of remorse and reawakened passion.

She asked if he wanted to see her breasts again; he had his first taste of exploiting an advantage in the sexual war. She’d been ‘silly’, he’d been generous, she owed it to him to be less shy. He was allowed to slip down and kiss them, to suckle them. She caressed his head. He took his first great initiative. He knelt back and peeled off his own shirt. She stared up at him a moment, then let him pull her up, and raised her arms as he peeled off her shirt and the tangled bra. The sweetness of those bare arms, that neck, the firm breasts pressing against his own, her surrender to it. He knew t was all getting out of hand, their tongues enlacing, searching, his loins bursting. He lay on top of her, crushing her down… until she twisted her mouth away.

‘I can’t breathe, Danny. You’re hurting.’ It was high time he rolled away, in any case. She sat up and rubbed her back, then suddenly turned towards him, knelt across him before he could stop her, on all fours, her hands beside his head, staring down at him, teasing… and something else, wicked, abandoned, much older. He reached upwards to the banging breasts, cupped them, then saw her eyes close as she sank down. Her loins pressing against his, the weight of her, the rough ground at his back, he knew it was awful, he couldn’t stop it, he had a terrible fear the wretched red balloon had slipped off, but he couldn’t stop it, he didn’t want to, he had to cling to her. It was paradise and a little bit painful, and he couldn’t hide it, at the same time as he sensed obscurely that she too could not hide something: a sudden burying of her face in his neck and trembling below in a strange down-pressing way, once, twice, three times. By a piece of outrageous beginners’ luck, they had achieved a simultaneous orgasm.

At least I suspect now that is what happened. We lay there so long afterwards, we were so silent, we knew we had done something terribly wicked, something new to both of us, and we felt the primeval shame. Eventually we disentangled ourselves, we dressed, we couldn’t look each other in the eyes, we hardly spoke. I was shocked, far more than when I lost my virginity in the full sense three years later. The famous descent of sadness, which is really just a re-awareness of one’s surroundings, took me by surprise. This girl, this silent bracken, this overcast sky, this person with nothing but a telltale wetness in his swimming-trunks… they were totally strange. Everything had changed.

On the Monday, the next day, things seemed, after an initial moment of shyness, much better. Mrs Reed had appeared to suspect nothing, the darker side of the previous day’s madness disappeared. We managed only one kiss, but we found time to whisper that we loved each other, we couldn’t wait till next Sunday… though we had to, of course. But on the Tuesday, a sinister incident, a premonition. I was pushing my bike up the hill home, when without warning a stone hit the lane six feet in front of me I thought it must be Nancy, though she’d been sure that she couldn’t slip away that evening. I stopped, staring up through the trees towards the kilns, expecting her to show herself. Instead, another stone came sailing out of the sycamores on the cliff above the kilns. This time it was too big to be a signal stone and came much too fast to have been thrown by a girl’s arm. It was also came straight at me, it crashed on the road and then into the spokes of the front wheel. I was very frightened. I began to run up the hill, then I jumped on the bike and started to heave frantically up the last few yards of the gradient. Another stone landed and hit the road behind me. I drove down on the pedals, standing on them, in a panic of fear.

There were no more stones, and I got away unscathed physically. But the damage was done elsewhere.

I told Nancy the next day, and we decided it must have been Bill Hannacott. She said he was a coward, everyone at school knew he was a coward, but he hadn’t looked like one to me at our only meeting. I dreaded that journey home from then on. It was like running a gauntlet, a constant terror, less of stones than of his suddenly standing out in the road, a fight… and what it meant that he knew about me and Nancy. That frightened both of us: that he might have watched us that previous Sunday. Like all the village boys, he was used to slinking about without being seen. Then my imagination… it wasn’t only stones and fistfights I feared, but gunshots. I knew he had a gun, he shot pigeons and rabbits. I saw my gravestone beside my mother’s. His choice of ambush also made our assignation place by the kilns impossible.

But as Wednesday and then Thursday passed, and I had still not been shot in the back or pummelled to dust, I felt a little more cheerful. On the Saturday afternoon Mrs Reed, who had gone into the village, had still not returned when I was due to go home. Mary and Louise were out working, the house was empty except for Old Mr Reed and his son and they were talking in the bedroom upstairs. Nancy and I crept into the barn, into a dark far corner where there was an old stall used for storing the hay they fed the cows during milking in the byre next door. We had our usual kissing and feeling, whispering about Bill and what his game as, how horrid he was, how had she ever seen anything in him, she had turned and I had pulled her back against me, my hands, her breasts beneath her clothes, a pleasant posture we had only just discovered. Perhaps it was the darkness of that corner. Something had haunted me since that first Sunday; what Bill had done that had so shocked her. I asked now. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t; but then she whispered. One evening. He wanted to take it out and have her ‘squeeze’ it. I was shocked into silence; that he should actually say what I could only dream of—and to be told it, to have it shared. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘I didn’t tell him anything. I slapped his silly gurt face.’ She said, ‘Bloomin ol’ cheek.’

‘Did you let him do this?’ She shook her hair against my face. ‘I bet you did.’

‘You’re the only one. ‘Cos I trust you.’ I held her breasts a little tighter.

‘And I can’t help it.’

She wriggled her bottom and put on her village voice. ‘Doan’ee be naughty now.’

‘I’m not naughtier than you are.’

‘Oh yes you are.’

‘I’m, not.’

‘You want me to do what Bill did.’

‘No I don’t.’

‘You’re all the same.’

‘I want to touch you all over.’

‘Well you can’t. So there.’

‘I only said it.’

‘Saying’s as wicked as doing.’

‘You let me do this.’

‘That’s different.’

I had one hand across her bare stomach, the other on her breasts. ‘Only touch.’

‘Always saying “only”.’

‘Didn’t you like it last Sunday?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘That’s what you always say.’

‘Shouldn’t ask rude questions.’ There was a silence.

‘I wish we were grownup.’

‘Would you marry me?’

‘Would you marry me?’

‘I might.’

‘I’d learn to farm properly.’

‘Pooh, I don’t want to marry an old farmer. I’ve had do up of that.’ She kicked at the hay they were standing on. ‘Rotten old… ‘

‘Say you’d marry me, Nancy.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want you to.’

‘Why do you want me to?’

‘Because you’re always teasing. I never know if you really… ‘

‘I’m not really teasing.’