Daniel Martin (48 page)

‘He shows off. Thinks he knows everything.’

‘Is that what you said to him?’

‘Mebbe.’

‘He’s more used to it than I am. That’s all.’

‘All he’s used to is having everything his own way.’

‘I thought you liked him.’

She sniffed, said nothing; and kept staring at her feet, as if they interested her far more than he did. He felt out of his depth: first she said one thing, then another. She seemed waiting, as if someone else was going to join them there. Almost bored.

He said in a low voice, ‘I like you awfully.’

Suddenly she smiled back at him, a little flash of mischief, of her old Sunday School self.

‘I’ll tell your father.’

‘Well I do.’ He felt his cheeks going red. She went back to her toes. ‘Don’t you care at all that I like you?’

‘Perhaps I do. Perhaps I don’t.’

‘You never call me by my Christian name.’

‘Nor do you.’

‘Yes I did. Only yesterday.’

‘Not when we’re alone.’

‘I never know what to say.’ He added, ‘in case you think I in being stuck-up.’

‘It’s just the way you talk sometimes.’ Then she said, ‘I know you can’t help it.’ There was a silence. The green evening air, the humidity on the still warm rock behind them. Without warning she turned on her stomach, her elbows bent, her chin propped; then she reached out a hand and picked off a tiny branch of thyme. Bit it. Then turned a little to face him. They were three feet apart. Those arched eyebrows, that enigmatic mischievous-simple mouth. Her eyes. They were the colour of germander speedwell flowers: shy and bold, dared and doubted.

‘I bet you don’t really like me.’

He looked down. ‘It’s all I think about. Seeing you. Not seeing you. Like yesterday. I hated yesterday.’

‘We bought you a present.’

‘Why?’

She smiled at his almost offended shock. “Cos we all like you so much.’ She bit the sprig of thyme again. ‘It’s a secret. You mustn’t tell anyone I told you.’

‘Of course I won’t.’

‘Cross your heart.’

‘Cross my heart.’

She said, ‘It’s a book.’ As if a book were some rare object, and its matter irrelevant. Now she rolled away on her back and stared up at the sky; then closed her eyes. He stared at her face, those cheeks, those closed lashes, those much more than childish breasts beneath the pink cotton, those bare feet. He plucked nervously at more grass.

‘I’d write to you. When I have to go back to school. If you wanted me to.’

‘Je mis, tu es, il est. Amo, amas, amat.’

Now she was being much too subtle for him. What on earth was that supposed to mean?

‘Would you write back?’

‘I might.’

‘I wish you would.’

But she gave no further promise. She just lay there, her eyes closed, as if she had forgotten he was present. Perhaps she would let him kiss her now? But he wasn’t sure, all this stepping forward, stepping back, noticing him, ignoring him. He felt irresistibly drawn to lean forward across the turf; and just as irresistibly tied to her, like Gulliver, by the thousand strings of convention, his home, his ignorance, everything. And supposing she should laugh; she were just teasing him, leading him onto make a fool of himself.

Suddenly she sat up and reached for her shoes.

‘I’m going home now.’

She was offended. He was an idiot, wet, he had missed his chance he had… he watched her lace her shoes, then gather up the little bunch of flowers she had picked and stand. He followed her up the slope to the lip of the quarry again, waited while she picked one or two late wild strawberries, then through the bracken and back into the wood. Without a word. He could have walked beside her, there was room, taken her hand at least or tried to take it, but he trailed behind. Then. No warning. She just stopped and turned, so abruptly that he almost bumped into her; put her hands and the flowers behind her back and simply stared at him, the old game of staring. Five seconds it lasted. Then she closed her eyes and raised her mouth to be kissed. He hesitated, he poised, he somehow found his hands gingerly on her upper arms; then the entire world, or sixteen years of it, melted.

Her lips tasted of thyme and caraway seeds, her body was his lost mother’s, her giving forgave in a few seconds all he had thought he could never forgive. From gentle he suddenly grew rough, pulling her to him. He had a strange sensation: the stable wood around them abruptly changed into an explosion, a hurtling apart of each leaf, branch, bough, smell and sound that constituted it, It disappeared, in fact. There was only Nancy, Nancy, Nancy; her mouth, her breasts, her arms slipping round his back, clinging as well, until she pulled her head away without warning and buried it against his shirt. How small she was, how much more understanding touch was than sight, how all faults of size, curve, visual appearance disappeared before touch and pressure. And victory! By several metaphorical decibels, the loudest cockle-cockadoo of all his life.

They said each other’s names, at last.

Then they kissed again. This time he felt the tip of her tongue and began to have an erection. He was terrified that she would feel it. Perhaps she did, because she said, ‘Don’t be so rough,’ and pushed him away; stood a moment with her face down, then turned and knelt and picked up the flowers she had dropped. He knelt beside her, put an arm round her waist.

She said, ‘We mustn’t. Not any more. Not now. I don’t want to… you do like me?’ She nodded. ‘Very much?’ She nodded again. ‘I thought you were just teasing.’ She shook her head. ‘You never seem to want to work with me or anything.’

‘It was mum.’ She said, ‘I’ll die if she finds out.’

‘What did she say?’

‘That I wasn’t to make eyes at you. Flirt.’ Still kneeling she spoke to her lap. ‘That day you dropped the apples on me. She must have been watching. She told me off afterwards. We mustn’t let anyone see.’

‘No.’

‘You promise?’

‘Of course I promise.’

‘She said you’d tell at the Vicarage if I misbehaved.’

‘That’s stupid.’ His opinion of Mrs Reed suffered an abrupt drop. ‘I’d never tell them. Never.’

‘I know.’

‘Please let me kiss you again.’

She twisted her head round, but wouldn’t let it last. After a moment she took his hand, laced her small fingers through his, stared down.

‘What about Bill Hannacott?’

‘I sent him packing. The other evening. Great fool.’

‘Was he… angry?’

‘I don’t care what he is.’

He felt her fingers lace his a little harder. It was like a dream, too delicious to be true. She liked him, she preferred him, she sought his protection.

‘Will you come every evening?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t. She’ll guess.’ But she added, ‘Sunday afternoon’s best. They all go to sleep then.’

Ten minutes later, having dawdled, stopped, kissed again, gone entwined through the trees to the cliff over the old limekilns, scrambled down, one last kiss above the road, desperate, as if it were their last, a moment’s blueness in her eyes, still a doubt, a searching, a tenderness he hasn’t seen before: she leaves. He watches her run down the lane, then break into a walk, round the bend and out of sight, in the green and gold evening light, towards the farm. Then he slowly drags his bike out of the undergrowth, stunned, ravished, rent with joy. Already distilling it, though not yet in worth; that first touch of her mouth, that melting away of all her wiles and tricks, the taste of her, the feel of her, the mystery of her.

And the lovely guilt, the need to lie, he took singing home.

A heavy dew, the good weather had held, the cutting would start, the world was all Ceres and simplicity, green early sunlight in the tunnelled lanes, and Nancy. He felt, that first fine tomorrow of victory, like a bird freed from its cage, totally liberated; too liberated, as she tacitly warned him by not looking at him, not noticing him at all, when he appeared in the byre. They hadn’t finished off the milking.

Only a snatched half-minute alone, in the dairy, before they all went up to the field. It was fraught with an unexpected shyness his move, this time. But when he managed at last to reach gingerly for her hand, as if she might leap away with a scream at the first touch, she turned at once. He didn’t mind when she snatched away almost as soon as their mouths had touched; it was enough—and her mother did come in a few seconds afterwards, as if to confirm how careful they must be.

Stooking, stooking, all day long; an old man hired out of retirement from the village for the day was there, and his grandsons, a little tacker of twelve, and they helped. Even Nancy joined in. No opportunity to touch, but chances to look, to whisper a few sentences from time to time, the secrecy of it, the being so close, the endless rerun of that evening before (although she warned him she would have to stay at home this one, all the usual daily jobs down at the farm had to wait until the corn was ‘on its legs’). But she wished she could, she wished she could, she’d thought about him as soon as she woke up. The deprivation seemed less cruel than he expected. It was the old harvest magic, that primeval breath of relief—there was still the ricking and threshing to be done, but it was like a voyage safely done, a landfall and solstice achieved, a promise kept. Nothing could really go wrong now.

Treacherous England, it rained out of nowhere that night and was still drizzling when Daniel arrived at the farm the next morning. It stopped before eleven, there was even some sun again in the afternoon, but no cutting was possible. He had one long, heavy kiss in the barn, a minute long; a cautious pressure from her foot under the table at dinner; and the mid-afternoon promise that she might be by the kilns when he went home. She was. They found a place under the cliff where they couldn’t be seen from the road. He locked against the rough stone and held her clasped; their mouths glued totally uninventive, just one long kiss after another. He had another erection, it was very embarrassing, but she seemed not to notice, or, if she did, to mind. He closed his eyes to shut out all daylight; to feel only; her breasts, her waist, her thighs pressing against his. Her jumper and shirt rode up a little at the back and by accident his hand touched bare skin. Apparently she did not mind that, either.

At last they broke off to whisper. She had kissed several boys. She liked kissing him much the best. Yes, he kissed much better than Bill Hannacott. She never liked kissing Bill Hannacott, she didn’t know what she’d seen in him. Then he was cross-examined; when he had first begun to like her, why, how many other girls he had kissed in his time. He lied abominably, but there was no doubting his sincerity when he said that she took the palm. Then they talked of their secret, how frightened she was of her mother noticing, if his father found out, the awful Romeo-and-Julietishness of their fate; which, at least in difficulty, was not so farfetched, after all. They were well outside the codes and comprehensions of both their homes, they were outlawed. They began to kiss again. That time his hand went straight to the naked back beneath the clothes.

She had to go. There was the Sunday afternoon, forty hours away, she didn’t know, she wanted to, but if her mother… in the end a plan was agreed. They would be at Matins, if he saw her drop a handkerchief and stoop to pick it up, it meant she thought she could manage to get away after dinner. He must go round by another lane, behind the farm, ‘up over’, walk along the top of the till he came to the beech-wood, enter it where there was an old stone lurhay, in ruins and covered in ivy; then wait near by.

He went to church especially early that Sunday, to be sure he could watch the Reeds come in. They did, but she didn’t drop the handkerchief. The service seemed the longest of his life, his father’s among the most boring; the lovely living sun outside, the motes of dust in the stained shafts from the church windows. There was a prayer for the Allied troops who had recently landed in Sicily; but all that was a world away. At last the purgatory was over. The Reeds left their pew, they stood in the aisle. Daniel said his first genuine prayer of that morning. Nancy turned and went back down her seat and stooped. He could hardly eat Sunday luncheon, he dreaded so much some stupid demand, some suggestion, some chore to be done, from Aunt Millie or his father. But his father seemed sleepy, and when Aunt Millie asked him how he was going to spend the afternoon, he risked the casual suggestion that he might bike over to the Common and ‘do some botany’. It was an interest his father approved, and sometimes he would come with him, if pastoral duties allowed; whence the risk. But the gamble paid. Aunt Millie thought gently he was working so hard, he should rest. That was easily brushed aside.

He was at the old linhay a quarter of an hour before the three o’clock appointed; and still there, a quarter of an hour afterwards. He had gone down into the wood, and sat against a beech-stump watching down towards the farm, which was hidden by the dense canopy of leaves. Part of him knew why she might be delayed, another part was shocked that she should fail to keep this rendezvous on time; and another part again half hoped she would not come.

Instinctively he knew many of the stories he had heard at school were boasts, wish-fulfilments; that middleclass girls were not like that at all. But Nancy was not quite a middleclass girl. She had kissed lots of other boys (it never occurred to him that Eve also can lie), she was much closer to the natural, the animal. She let him touch her bare back, she did not seem to mind that he could not control (as he was sure sophisticated boys could) his erections. Supposing… he knew the girl had to have a (what he then thought was spelt) pestlery, or the boy a French letter. It was not just that he feared being despised for not having one, but Bill Hannacott had had spots on his chin. And then a story had gone round his dormitory that summer of an American G. I. who had gone out with a girl from the nearest town and got stuck inside, they had had to be taken to hospital and separated surgically (it was all to do with muscle cramp or something). The virgin under the beech-trees had been much haunted by this tragic tale. But above all he had a very real and growing sense of impending sin. Kissing and meeting secretly like this was one thing. The other—he now knew better than divine lightning and the instant thunderbolt, but not much; the longer he waited, the more trepidation he felt.