HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) (18 page)

I got out of the bath and started to dry myself. Your low voice called again: ‘That’s settled, then. Of course, we’re only guessing: it may not work.’

I felt I was being insulted, none too subtly. ‘Work? Of course it will work. Who do you think I am?’

‘Just a man, sweet, just a man.’

‘If you know a better method–’

‘Oh, I think it’s come to stay … Why do you feel so sure? If you say anything like “Years of practice”, I shall lock that door.’

‘Wait till I’m on the right side of it … When we agree that I am to give you a child, precious, I think we will make a success of it.’

You laughed softly, almost to yourself. ‘We’ll see about that when the time comes.’

‘The time is here,’ I said and walked through into the bedroom. You had been brushing your hair before the mirror: when I came in you rose suddenly, and we looked at each other. Then the few paces between us melted away. Your eyes were indescribably gentle and loving as I took you in my arms: your body felt as softly compliant as the nightdress which graced it. Presently, with my free hand, I pressed downwards on your breast and shoulder, as if drawing myself up to you: then I kissed your soft mouth and held you against me, until an adorably familiar movement told me that simply holding you was no longer enough for either of us.

Asterisks now? I still don’t think so. Do you remember what a strange night, confused and lovely, we made of it? It seemed to contain everything, that night – everything in the physical realm, everything in the emotional: dissolving all the earlier shyness and hesitation, we seemed to traverse the limits of every sort of feeling, from the spurring of a candid sensuality to the secrets of a floating dreamworld where we travelled together, clinging to each other in a sort of light-headed, astonished ecstasy. It was our last night together, and it became memorable, by a natural process. We did not set out to make it so: it happened. We were lucky of course; but it was really astonishing what two heads on a pillow can concoct.

If that is not too strong a word. These things are not planned or worked for – they simply take place, without effort or forethought, between two people in love: they express, subtly, a simple and endearing fact. I don’t mean the dreary ‘variations’, the mechanical jiggery-pokery which seeks to turn love into a gymnasium exercise. Those things are for the bored or the perverted. But there are, genuinely, so very many different sorts of lovemaking – friendly, emotional, purely sensual, laughing: it is the change of mood which makes for the variety, and which can carry you urgently or swiftly or unexpectedly through a lovely countryside, some parts of which are as familiar as instinct can make them, and others unsuspected until by chance you lead each other to them.

You and I were lucky, sweet – lucky and yet deserving. We earned that night and the delight it gave us by being completely in love, in the most unselfish way possible – that is, with the idea of doing the least for ourselves, and the most for each other, that lay in our power. On those terms love is glorified beyond any physical expression of it. It becomes an ecstatic mutual service, a competition in tenderness and exhilaration in which neither can be the loser.

Thus were we lucky … There was the first time – inevitably wild, since we had not seen or touched each other for over two months – when we each took such frank delight in our power to excite and to give release to the other: when, drunk with your magic, I was laughing and shaking you gently and making you glow and move with me, and sigh and lose all control for the last few moments, and then cry and whisper, ‘How can I let you go?’ and then smile again and say, ‘How lovely that was!’ After it we were close and loving and contented, with all the wildness and the jitters gone, the way it was after we had given each other everything we could of love and shared sensual excitement and fun. And even as we lay a little apart in our relief, we were both thinking: this is love, we have all this, and in a short while we can, if we want to, have it again … That was something else we could do to each other – leave the recollection, even at such a moment, that the future could match the past.

There was, a little later, that odd half-world of which I have spoken, visited by us as we lay dipped together in entrancement: a secret world, swinging between heaven and earth, wherein we seemed to float on an ecstatic timeless sea, where only at the very end did our bodies give bodily evidence of their desire: where you wept bitterly, half for the nervous relief, half with the sadness of parting, and I matched your tears with my own. You did not mind, did you? Or think less of me for those tears? They were not masculine, by any standard, but then men should not always be masculine: men should sometimes cry, for only thus can they honour the women who give them everything in a moment of lavish tenderness.

When we entered and shared that world together we had the same bodies and were the same people who, a little while before, had been lost in another and wholly different ecstasy. We were the same people, but the things we did together, and to each other, were as different as any two human activities could be. I do not know what that proves, unless it be the scope of humanity: but we were lucky to be able to embrace together the twin worlds of the senses and the spirit, and to carry each other so easily and inevitably from the first to the second and, as we soon showed each other, back again.

For a little later we were physically enraptured once more … I remember that, suddenly aware of a fresh urgency in me, you lay back looking distractingly lovely and available, and yet somehow afraid of what I was about to do to you: afraid that some movement I might make, or fervour I might reach, would be so overwhelming to your senses that you could not guarantee a sane response: that you might die upon a moment of communicated lust … I leant away from you, enjoying your loveliness and your confusion in equal, unrelenting measure; and then as I bent forward and down again the picture diminished, and the changing focus, on the verge of blurring to nothing, took in only your loving, startled eyes and your delighted breasts.

Sweet, you were so lovely … You don’t mind my occasional frankness, do you? It’s part of us, isn’t it? – to be articulate about our lovemaking, to mention the fact that a certain movement, a certain kind of caress, gives us pleasure or exhilaration. Remember how you suddenly remarked, out of nowhere: ‘Very glad to have you aboard, sir!’ and I said: ‘Dear me, what do they teach you in the Wrens?’ and you answered – no, it’s unprintable after all, but you probably do remember … That is how we should talk, to match what our bodies did: our lovemaking was never furtive or embarrassed, a pair of groping hands in the darkness and an awkward silence in the morning: if we liked something we told each other, with laughter or tenderness or further desire. That is how it should be, surely – a fully shared blessing, the communion of two people who, discovering love, are jointly gripped by its intricacy and its power to move.

YOU: ‘That was love.’

ME: ‘It was everything.’

‘We’re lucky.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are other people as good?’

‘I’ve an idea that they are, yes.’

‘Everyone?’

‘No. People with imagination and some kind of close tie, and, I suppose, good bodies. But that’s probably more common than you’d think.’

‘It’s disappointing, in a way, I want us to be special. I don’t want any other woman in the world to feel just what I’m feeling now, or any other man to have the same pleasure in a woman as you had then.’

‘I’m contented enough not to feel jealous … If other people can approach that standard, or even catch a glimpse of it, good luck to them.’

‘Good luck to them … Darling, it won’t always be like that, will it?’

‘No.’

‘What will happen to it?’

‘It will fade.’

‘Ah …’

‘It must. Very slowly, perhaps, but it must. Time will – will take the edge off it. We’ll probably never want each other quite so sharply as we do now, or have the same kind of overwhelming desire, or the same shattering relief. It can’t do anything but grow less.’

‘That’s sad.’

‘Ah, no. We’ll have something else to put in its place, some other brand of exhilaration. In fact, probably we won’t even miss it. Somehow it will deepen as it grows quieter: we’ll still want each other and enjoy each other, but it’ll be more with the heart than with the body.’

‘But you’ll want me less?’

‘Physically? Yes.’

‘Because you’ll have had me a lot of times?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s difficult not to feel that there’s something horrible in that idea.’

‘But it’ll be the same on both sides, sweetheart – and as long as we acknowledge it, and don’t pretend to each other, what does it matter?’

‘Suppose one of us gets tired before the other?’

‘There’s no comforting answer to that one.’

‘What is the answer?’

‘Hell.’

‘For both.’

‘Yes, for both. There’s nothing but misery in it. The loser will feel unwanted and left behind, and will be horribly hurt by it: and the winner – if one can call it that – the winner will feel guilty, and ashamed of his lack of desire, and then angry because he is made to feel ashamed when it is something he cannot possibly help.’

‘You said “He”.’

‘I meant “he or she”. You know that. It can happen to either side.’

‘Yes … You were right, there is no comforting answer … Is it true, from the masculine angle, that when you’ve had a woman once, or twice, or a dozen times, you don’t really want her any more?’

‘Yes.’

‘Darling–’

‘What?’

‘Say something more about it. Make it sound less – less brutal.’

‘Sweet, I tried to give you an entirely accurate answer. When you’ve enjoyed something, after wanting it for a long time, you never want it in exactly the same way, do you? As a matter of fact, it simply isn’t there any more: what you wanted has disappeared, has been spent. After all, there was only one – one virginal you, wasn’t there?’

‘And now you don’t want me?’

‘Now I want all the other you’s – the later, lovelier ones. But I don’t want the girl I started the honeymoon with, because she doesn’t exist any more.’

‘That’s a quibble.’

‘Yes, it is rather, isn’t it? … But it really isn’t a “brutal” idea – or rather, it’s only brutal if you think of marriage as a series of sexual exercises linked by daylight. That’s not the sort of relationship we have in mind.’

‘No. But I still don’t want to feel that there’s a night coming you won’t really care whether you sleep with me or not.’

‘Somewhere in the future there is a night like that. Darling, I can say to myself, when I have you in my arms: “I’ll never grow tired of this.” I can whisper it to you at the same time. But it’ll be a lie. In the sense that I’ll become less interested in enjoying your body, and more intent on simply binding up my life with yours, I will grow tired of it. So will you, in the same way. And when we’ve reached that stage, when we’ve explored sex thoroughly, and found out what gives us comfort, and what suits us after a bottle of wine, and what we feel like when the spring comes and we wake up with the sun on the pillow – then we’ll start being married.’

‘What is this, then?’

‘Our honeymoon.’

‘Darling, I think – I shall like being married to you, after all.’

‘At present I like the honeymoon best.’

‘Me, too.’

‘And I’m not tired of you.’

‘No.’

‘In fact I may have made a mistake when I said that some day I would be.’

‘It seems possible.’

‘I must have been mixing you up with someone not quite so lovely and smooth and warm.’

‘An obvious error.’

‘I won’t make it again.’

‘I don’t intend to … Darling, you must get some sleep, mustn’t you?’

‘Presently, yes.’

‘I mean presently.’

We slept very little, of course: it was one of those nights when sleep is jealously grudged, for the ruthless way it blanks out the time together. Time lost at such a moment is the saddest of all: sleep, lonely sleep, can wait till later, but now every waking minute must be hoarded before it slips away. Occasionally we would doze off, but one or the other would soon stir, impelled to consciousness by this subconscious desire to lose nothing of our time together, and once more we would talk or kiss or lie in close contentment.

We talked a lot, that night: even if we had not been so new to each other, so eager to explore, we were aware all the time that the things we said now would have to last us for years to come … Some of what we said was happily unrecordable, some of it about our child, some of it about the future and our hopes in it. We talked, perhaps, most about that, because it had the most promise surrounding it. The past, before we met, seemed uninspired, the present was constrained and fleeting: only tomorrow, the world’s tomorrow, held the springs of happiness and a warm and hopeful significance.

True, the springs were still secret, the significance a trifle cloudy: one had to peer about a bit to divine the hope – and still more to justify it … I didn’t really agree with what the sailor at dinner had said – that is, the idea of carving out one’s own life from surrounding circumstances and the opposition of ambitious or greedy people: I am not that sort of man, partly from diffidence, partly from the conviction that such personal striving makes for a desolate world.