Various Flavors of Coffee (41 page)

He said reluctantly, “Some of it, yes.The pioneering work was done at the Salpêtrière Institute in Paris. The French medical

terms are the accepted ones to use. And,” he hesitated, “they en-sure privacy.”

“For the patient, you mean?” But he did not mean that, she saw immediately; he meant for him, for the notes, lest anyone find them and think that what he did was improper. She leaned forward.
Trop humide... La crise vénérienne...

Seeing her looking, he shielded the page with his arm.“A doc-tor’s notes are confidential.”

“Even from the patient?” He did not reply.

“I would have thought,” she said carefully, “that what we do here—the nature of the treatment—makes such niceties redun-dant.”

He put down his pen and gazed at her. His eyes—gray-blue, untroubled, rather beautiful—regarded her thoughtfully. “On the contrary, Mrs. Brewer. It makes niceties all the more necessary.”

“Do you have many patients?” “Above fifty.”

“Fifty! So many!”

“The mechanization of the apparatus makes it possible.” “But it must also make it harder for you.”

He frowned.“In what way?”

“You must like some of your patients more than others.” “What difference would that make?”

She was fishing for compliments now, she realized, but somehow she could not stop. “It must be easier with those you find congenial. Or those who are pretty. Whom you find pretty, I mean.”

The frown deepened. “Why would that have anything to do with it?”

Desperately she said,“Are you married, Dr. Richards?” “Really, Mrs. Brewer. I must ask you to stop asking me these

questions. If you wish to talk, you should make an appointment to see Dr. Eisenbaum for the Talking Cure.”

“Of course,” she said, recoiling. She felt a sudden, irrational urge to cry.
They were right after all,
she thought:
I am simply a hysterical, foolish woman.

The car was
waiting outside, but she instructed Billit to drive home without her. “I shall walk to John Lewis,” she told him. “I need to buy some handkerchiefs.”

As she walked south down Harley Street she was struck by the number of women coming in and out of the buildings. How many of them were there for the same reason she was? It seemed inconceivable that they were all being taken into these grand, high-ceilinged rooms and swept to hysterical paroxysms.

She walked on, crossing Cavendish Square, then turned toward Regent Street.This was the edge of respectable London: immediately to the east lay the slums of Fitzrovia, while to the south was Soho. Glancing down Mortimer Street, she saw a line of prostitutes leaning against the railings, unmistakable in their grubby, old-fashioned dresses, their faces made up like music hall caricatures. There was a time when she would have crossed to talk to them, fearless in her enthusiasm for saving them, but she was no longer quite so fixed in her certainties.

She did not go into John Lewis: it had been the walk she had wanted, the chance to burn off some of the heaviness she had felt after Dr. Richards’s treatment. And, if she was honest with herself, some of her embarrassment, too, the shaming realization that he had no more feeling for her than if he had been operating on a bunion or a broken bone. How easy it was to confuse attention with affection! It was the same with Arthur. These men did not dislike women, exactly, but they had a sort of template in their

heads of what a woman should be. For them, any deviation from the norm required intervention, as if one were a clock that must be set back to the correct time.

As if to mock her, she passed directly underneath a giant bill-board advertising Castle Coffee. A bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes, were toasting each other with cups of Castle.The headline read
IVOW . . . to give him Castle.What every husband wants!

If only, she thought, marriage were so simple.

A noise on the other side of the road caught her attention. A small group of women had gathered on the pavement. One of them held a placard:
DEEDS NOT WORDS!
It was so exactly what she was thinking herself that for a moment it felt as if someone had written it just for her.Two of the others were unfurling a banner on which was written in black paint
Votes for Women.
The group raised a ragged cheer, causing a few passersby to stop and stare. Rather than be seen gawking, Emily turned to watch their reflection discreetly in a shop window.

“Are you shopping here, sister?” The words came from a woman standing beside her.

“I am not, no. I am walking home.”

“Then you will not mind if I do this. Please, step back.” The woman raised her hand and made a stabbing motion at the win-dow. Emily jumped, but then she saw that the woman was only scrawling the downstroke of a huge V with a lipstick concealed in her hand. In a few moments the same slogan that was on the placard had been written in three-foot-high oxblood letters across the front of the window.

Up and down the street came shouts and cries of outrage as other windows simultaneously suffered the same fate.There was the crash of breaking glass. A policeman’s whistle sounded. Nearby, someone yelled. “ ’er—down there!” A man was pointing in their direction. “That’s one of ’em!”The woman suddenly looked panicked.

“Quick, take my arm,” Emily said. She took a step forward and

hooked the woman’s arm in hers. Then she swung her round to face the street. “Look down there, as if you can see something, too,” she urged her companion. “But whatever you do, don’t move.” Sure enough, a group of four men rushed past them, going in the direction in which the two women were looking, their feet pounding on the pavement. She felt the other woman’s body tense, then relax.

Emily said,“I think they’ve gone.”

“Thank you.” The woman’s eyes were shining with triumph. “We have struck a blow for freedom.”

“But what have shop windows to do with votes?”

“We have had enough of talk.We have a new group: we are go-ing to make a nuisance of ourselves. Unless we do that, we will never get anywhere.”

“But if you are a nuisance, you may annoy the men so much they never give us anything.”

“Give?”
They were walking down toward Piccadilly now, the woman striding along confidently as if she knew where she was going. Somehow, though, neither of them had relinquished the arm by which they were joined. “You make equality sound like a treat—like a bunch of roses or a new hat. It is not. It is our right, and the longer we go on asking for it politely, the more we give men the false impression that they can choose to deny it to us. Do you have money?”

“I’m married.”

“But you had money of your own, before? Then you pay taxes. There isn’t a politician alive who believes in taxation without representation—until it comes to women. Why should they be allowed to take our money off us, when we can’t tell them how to spend it?”

“Believe me,” Emily said, “I am strongly in favor of votes for women. I have been an active member of the Union for years. I’m just not sure about being a nuisance.”

“Then come to a meeting and let us persuade you. Tonight, if possible.”

Emily hesitated. The other woman said impatiently, “Here, I’ll write down the address.” She scribbled something on a card and handed it to her.“We will awaken the feminine force!”

They were almost exactly the same words that Dr. Richards had used.And then something else struck her.This woman seemed more energized by her act of vandalism than she, Emily, had felt af-ter Dr. Richards’s treatment.

She felt a sudden surge of excitement.“Very well,” she said im-pulsively.“I’ll come.”

[
sixty-seven
]

“Fiery”—a bitter charcoal taste generally due to over-roasting.

—
smith,
Coffee Tasting Terminology

*

t took me two years to get back. Perhaps fortuitously,
my attempt to travel up through the Sudan coincided with a small military standoff between Britain and France, subsequently known as the Teruda Incident. I discovered I had some ability as a foreign correspondent, and starvation was averted, for the time be-ing at least. From Egypt, I wandered up to Italy. I spent the summer on the shores of Lake Como; the same period during which I finished, and destroyed, a novel about a man who falls in love with a slave. It was a dreadful book, but writing it was the next part of putting all that behind me, and once the flames had eaten into the very last page of the manuscript, I knew, finally, that I was free

of her.

For I discovered something important, during that long return. I had loved Fikre, perhaps not as she deserved to be loved, but with an absolute physical passion, and even something a bit more

besides. Despite what had happened, I found that I hoped she was finally happy. That may not seem like much of a discovery, compared to the naming of Lake Victoria or pinpointing the source of the Nile. But for me it was new territory, to be marked in full on the hitherto blank atlas of the heart.

In the time
I had been away, London had reinvented itself yet again. Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin and Queen Victoria had all died within a few months of one another, just as the century ended; all those redoubtable Victorian queens escorting one another to the grave. Now, instead of Pater and Tennyson, people spoke of J. M. Barrie and H. G. Wells. The streets were full of what Pinker had called autokinetics, but which were now known as motor cars.The electrophone had become the telephone, and one could use it to speak to anywhere in the country, even to America. And the mood—that indefinable perfume of a city—had changed, too. London was well lit, well run and well regulated.The bohemians, the decadents, the dandies—all were gone, chased from the half-shadows by the electric streetlights, and in their place the respectable middle classes had taken over.

I had intended to avoid Covent Garden. But old habits die hard, and I had some business in Fleet Street which took me in that direction—a few small articles on my travels I had managed to place. I left the offices of the
Daily Telegraph
with a check for twelve pounds in my pocket. Almost unconsciously, my feet led me to Wellington Street. Much had changed here too—there were shops and restaurants where once there had only been houses of pleasure. Number 18, however, was still as it had always been. Even the furnishings in the second-floor waiting room seemed the same, and if the Madam did not recognize me, so much the better—I was not certain I recognized her either.

I chose a girl and took her upstairs. She too was new, but she

was practiced enough at her profession to see that I did not want to be disturbed with chatter, and after exclaiming at the strange tattoos on my chest she let me get on with it. But something was wrong. At first I thought I was simply out of practice.Then I realized what it was: it felt strange, somehow, to engage in the sexual act without trying to give pleasure. I tried to remember how I used to do it, years previously. Or had I simply taken for granted that all those groans and moans meant I was doing it properly?

I reached around and stroked various parts of her: she gasped obligingly, but she was play-acting. I tried rubbing and stroking harder, and it seemed to me that she sighed.

I stopped.“Will you do something for me?”

“Of course, sir. Anything.Though you may have to pay a little more—”

“This isn’t a . . . service. Or at any rate, not one you normally provide. I want you to show me how to give you pleasure.”

She sat up, smiling, and ran her hands up and down my arms, and rubbed her soft breasts against my chest. “You give me pleasure with your big hard cock, sir,” she breathed.“When you give it to me hard and strong.”

“I wish that were true. But if I touch you—here—gently, and move my fingers so—is that nice?”

“Ohhh! It’s exquisite, sir. Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” Now it was my turn to sigh.“No.Tell me truthfully.”

She looked confused. I thought:
The poor girl doesn’t know the rules of this game. She’s trying to work out what to say.

At last she said tentatively,“Everything you do to me is nice.” “Do you have a boy friend? A fancy man? What does he do

for you?”

She shrugged.

“Lie down,” I said. “I’m going to touch you, and when it gets better, tell me.”

Still confused, she lay down on her back and submitted to my

fingers. “But sir,” she said after a while, “why do you want to do this?”

“I want to know how to please a woman.”

There was a pause.Then she said in a voice that was very different,“Do you really want to know?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”

“Then give me another pound and I’ll tell you.” “Very well.” I fetched her the money.

She put it somewhere safe. As she climbed back on the bed she said,“You’ve just done it.”

“What? Ah.” I smiled.“The money.”

“That’s it, mister. Now I’m pleased as punch.” “I meant in bed.”

She shrugged.“Same difference.”

I persisted: “But suppose I wanted to make you feel . . . what your customers feel. How would I do that?”

“Doesn’t work like that, though, does it? I’d be out of a job else. If women needed what men need, there wouldn’t be places like this.”

“You know—you’re right,” I said, struck by the profound truth of what she had said.

“Well, I’m only stating the bleeding obvious. D’you want me to frig you off ?” She gestured at my cock.“You’ve paid for it.”

I would like to say that this scene ended with me nobly refusing to have her do any such thing, and that the conversation we had just had was more precious to me than a frig. But it would not be true.

Something else:
as I was leaving she said,“You know, I liked talking to you.You can come back, if you want.”

“And give you more money?” She laughed.“That too.”

I liked her. I never saw her again, but I liked her. For a few minutes on a sunny afternoon we had talked honestly, and got on, before conducting our business and going our separate ways. Perhaps, I thought, it is as much as one can ask of a civilized life.