This morning, the first thing after I got out of bed, I looked in the mirror. It is of chromium plated steel and I always carry it with me. My beard had grown during the night and now my checks and my chin were covered with stubble. I must have slept well; my eyes were less bloodshot than they had been during the previous fortnight. I looked at my image for a few moments and I could see nothing strange about it. It was the same nose and the same mouth and the little scar above and thrusting into my left eyebrow was no more obvious than it had been the day before. Nothing seemed out of place. Yet everything was out of place because there existed between the mirror and myself the same distance-the same break in continuity-I have always felt to exist between the acts I committed in the past and my present consciousness of them.
But there is no problem.
I do not ask now whether I am the "I" looking or the image which was seen; whether I am the man who acted or the man who thought about the act. I know now that it is the structure of language itself which lacks continuity. The problem comes into being as soon as I use the word "I." There is no contradiction in things, only in objects, that is, in the words we invent to refer to things. It is the word "I" which is arbitrary and contains within itself its own inadequacy and its own contradiction.
There is no problem.
I saw that. I turned away from the face in the mirror then. Between then and now I have smoked nine cigarettes.
***
It had come floating downstream, willowy, like a tangle of weeds. She was beautiful in a pale way-not her face, although that was not bad-but the way her body seemed to have given itself to the water. Its whole gesture was abandoned, with the long white legs apart and trailing, sucked downwards slightly at the feet.
As I leaned over the side of the barge with the boat hook, I did not think of her as a dead woman, not even when I looked at her face. She was like some beautiful white water-fungus, a strange shining thing come up from the depths, and her limbs and her flesh had the ripeness and maturity of a large mushroom. But it was the hair more than anything. It stranded way from the head like long grasses. It alone was alive, and because the body was slow, heavy, torpid, it had become a forest of antennae, intricately caressing, feeding on the water.
It was not until Les swore at me for being so clumsy with the boat hook that I drew her alongside. He and I reached down with our hands. When I felt the chilled flesh under my fingertips I moved more quickly. It was sagging away from us, and it slopped softly and obscenely against the bilges. Touching it made me realize how bloated it was.
Les told me, "For Christ's sake, get a bloody grip on it."
I leaned down until my face was nearly touching the water and with my right hand got hold of one of the ankles. She turned over smoothly then. Together we pulled her to the surface and, dripping a curtain of rainwater, over the gunwale. Her weight settled with a flat splash on the wooden boards of the deck.
We looked at her but neither of us said anything. It was obscene, the way death usually is, frightening and obscene at the same time.
The ambulance did not arrive until after breakfast.
I don't suppose they were in a hurry because I told them she was dead on the telephone. We threw a couple of sacks over her so that we wouldn't have to look at her and then I went over and telephoned and went back and joined Les and his wife at breakfast.
"No egg this morning?" I said.
Ella said no, that she'd forgotten to buy them the previous day when she went to get the stores. But I knew that that wasn't true because I'd seen them in her basket when she returned.
"Salt?"
"Staring you in the face," she said.
It was damp. I had to scrape it from the side of the dish with my knife. Ella ignored the scratching sound and Les, his face twitching as it sometimes did, went on reading the paper.
It was only when I began to eat my bacon that it occurred to me that they'd had an egg. I could see the traces on the prongs of their forks. Les got up noisily, without his second cup of tea. He was embarrassed. Ella had her back to me and I swore at her under my breath. A moment later she too went up on deck and I was left alone to finish my breakfast.
We were all on deck when the ambulance arrived. It was one of those new ambulances, streamlined, and the men were very smart. Two policemen arrived at the same time, one of them a sergeant, and Les went ashore to talk to them. I was still annoyed and I sat down on a hatch and waited. I looked out across the water at the black buffalo-like silhouette of a tug that crept upstream near the far shore. Beyond it, on the far bank, a network of cranes and girders closed in about a ship. It was still early and the light was still thin but already a saucer of tenuous smoke was gathering at the level of the roofs.
Then the ambulance men came across the quay and on to the barge and I pointed to where we had put the body under the sacks. I left them to it. I was thinking of the dead woman and the egg and the salt. I was bored because it was the beginning of the day and not the end of it, days being each the same as the other, alike as beads on a string, with only the work on the barge and Les to talk to. I seldom talked to Ella. She appeared to dislike me and gave the impression that she only put up with me because of her husband.
And then I noticed Ella hanging out some clothes at the stern.
I had often seen her do it before, but it had never struck me in the same way. I had always thought of her as Les's wife-she was always screaming at him about something or calling him Mr. High-and-Mighty in a thick sarcastic voice. I never saw her as a woman who could attract another man. That had never occurred to me-until now.
But there she was, trying very hard not to look round, pretending she wasn't interested in what was going on, and I found myself looking at her in a new way.
She was one of those heavy women, not more than thirty-five, with strong buttocks and big thighs. She was wearing a tight green cotton dress that pulled up above the backs of her knees as she stretched up to put the clothes on the line. I could see the flesh of her pink ankles growing over the rim at the back of her shoes. She was heavy all right, but her waist was small and her legs were not bad. I could imagine being between them, belly to belly, wrapped securely in the oval of their embrace.
I watched her, and I could see her walk through a park at night, her heels clacking, just a little bit hurriedly, and her heavy white calves were moving just ahead of me. Even in the dark I was able to see them. And I imagined the soft sound of her thighs as their surfaces grazed, as whatever she wore beneath her dress was wedged softly in their damp and tremulous moving. As she reached up, her buttocks tightened, the cotton dress fitting itself to their thrust, and then she alighted on her heels, bent down, and shook out the next garment.
My manhood stirred at the sight. The rest of the world slipped away and my mind filled with the thought of her. I longed to possess her and put her body to the test. Inspired by the back view I had now, I thought of raising that thin membrane of material as she bent, forcing her forward and belly down and mounting her from behind. Surprised and humbled, she would not resist long. Face down on the wooden deck I could take her then and there. I could see and feel her now, my knees astride those powerful timbers, my haunches hard on hers as my hands kneaded her buttocks and opened the rosebud of her anus to my view while my member entered her more womanly slit.
She would be both humiliated and pleased at the ravaging I would render. Thrusting and lifting my body away from hers as she was pressed down to the hard wooden deck, I could touch Ella as I knew she had never been touched by Leslie. Plumbing a long-married woman's cunt from behind, I've found, very often introduces them to pleasant sensations long lost in a marriage become dull with sameness and ungenerous sex. I could be generous with a strong, mature body like Ella's. She would be appreciative.
A moment later she looked round. Her curiosity had got too much for her, and she caught me looking at her. Her look was uncertain. She flushed slightly. And then, very quickly, she returned to her chore.
The police sergeant was making notes in a little black notebook, occasionally licking the stub of his pencil. The other cop was standing with his mouth open watching the stretcher bearers who seemed to be taking their time. They had put the stretcher down on the quay and were looking inquiringly at the police sergeant who went over and looked under the sheet they had thrown over her when they put her on the stretcher. One of them spat. I glanced away again.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ella's legs move.
The ambulance men had lifted the stretcher again but one of them stumbled. A very white naked leg slipped from under the sheet and trailed along the ground like a parsnip. I glanced at Ella. She was watching it. She was horrified but it seemed to fascinate her.
"Whoa!" the man at the back said.
They lowered the stretcher again and the front man turned round and arranged the leg out of sight. He handled it as though he were ashamed of it. And then they hoisted the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and slammed the doors.
The sergeant closed his notebook, looped elastic round it, and went over to speak to the driver of the ambulance. Les was lighting his pipe.
Leslie undoubtedly was a big man when he was younger, still was, but his muscles were running to flesh and his face was heavy round the chin so that his head had the appearance of a square pink jujube sucked away drastically at the top. As he didn't shave very often, the rough pinkness of his cheeks was covered by a colorless spreading bristle. He had small light blue eyes sunk like buttons in soft wax, and they could be kind or angry. When he was drunk they were pink and threatening. The way he was standing, you could see he wasn't a young man; in his middle fifties, I suppose.
The ambulance was driving away and the sergeant was going over to talk to Les again. I remember it struck me as funny at the time that he should address all his remarks to Leslie. I watched the cat sniffing at something near the quay wall. It tried to turn it over with its paw. Ella lifted the basin that had held the wet clothes and gave me a look somewhere between angry and intimate. She turned away and I could see she was in some way trying to get back at me for the long look I had had at her backside, so I didn't say anything. I heard her clump down through the companionway into the cabin.
Suddenly, I laughed. Les and the sergeant and the cat all stopped to look at me. But I went on laughing.
There was the discussion about suicide or murder. "What did the police think?" Ella asked Les as soon as the police were gone, as soon as the ambulance had driven away and he, with an unlit pipe in his mouth, came back aboard.
I watched Ella carefully. She was inquisitive. But, at the same time, she wanted us to think that she was above that kind of thing even if we weren't.
Les said that the sergeant didn't know. But there were no marks on the body so Leslie did not think it could have been murder.
And I knew Ella was going to say just what she did say about it "being just like men not to be able to keep their eyes off a woman especially if she had no clothes on." I thought the words just suited her standing there as she was in her too-tight green cotton dress, stretched so that you could see the shape and strength of her thighs and the muscles of her belly.
Ah, but if I could have had at her, I'd change her tune. If I could get her without her clothes on she'd know the pleasure of the nakedness she now derided. Just rip that wash-faded cotton rag from her body and expose her to my intimate scrutiny. No need to steal a glance or hurry the moment. Stripped naked I could savor the bodily delights now hidden from my view.
I could enjoy the spread of her broad hips above those sturdy loins. My gaze could explore the quick taper of her waist as it turned above her hips before it rose up and outward again to flesh-covered ribs that showed themselves ever so slightly before the underlying structure was lost in the middle softness distinct to a woman. Her tits were fine for me, I knew. I had glimpsed them from time to time. But to savor the sight of those pendulous hillocks, unfettered. I could teach her to enjoy the viewing as much as I would.
It's all in the seeing, you see. To be seen naked, stripped bare, by appreciate eyes makes all the difference even to one as fearful of the seeing as Ella. I was sure I could convince her. I was equally sure that, despite the view she vocalized there on the deck, she wished to be convinced.
From her breasts my gaze would caress her centerline, down the thin track of hair I was certain traced a path between her navel and the fuzz about her sweet slit. Beneath my unflinching eye her excitement would mount and those strong legs would tense and her mons would blossom. Her nether lips would engulf and darken and grow warm and moist, longing for a touch. She would shift and spread her legs apart for better balance and to better expose her sex. But I would not yet grant that touch to her or to my own desire. Just look on appreciatively. And that, in turn, would fuel her passion more.
Her nipples would harden and grow small and dark and tight with anticipation. Her buttocks would tighten and signal their desire to her innermost being. Color would rise from her shoulders and flush her cheeks with an outward sign of her inward need. And still we would not touch. Only look, a powerful, sensual look. I in the armor of my garments. She in the vulnerability of her flesh. I would move behind her, study her unseen by her. She would quiver at the power of it.
Then, with just enough rustling for her to hear, I would part my clothes, unleash the lance of my manhood and use it on her. That would change her tune once and for always. But now her voice broke the spell.
I had the impression that she was talking to me more than to Les, although she spoke to him. She grudged me the glimpse I'd had of her. She said that we were bad bastards, both of us. Then she turned away.
Leslie winked at me. I noticed there were red specks in the whites of his eyes. He said she had got up on the wrong side this morning. He nodded in her direction-she was sweeping near the stern-and he winked at me again.
But I remembered how, through the wooden partition between the cabins, it was her soft moans of pleasure that had wakened me that morning. It was such an uncharacteristic noise from that quarter that I raised myself up to peek through the small separation between the boards that afforded me a limited, but adequate, view of Ella's marital bed.
Although coitus had been long abandoned in her relationship with Leslie, Ella's sexual needs were not entirely uncared for. And that morning she was pleasuring herself while the drink-besotted Les snored beside her. Her gentle lowing was reflected by the rhythmic undulation waist-level beneath her blanket. Her shoulders raised and closed forward, the blanket slipped to her waist as her upper arms pressed her breasts together and up to the ceiling. Bother her hands moved stealthily about her hips, belly and, clearly, between her legs.
She rocked slowly for a while, both hands secreted. Then one began to move about, coming out from below the blanket, caressing her upper body, then returning again to join the other between her legs. Again it moved about, this time her fingertips circling her aureole then tweaking the tips of her upthrusting breasts. Then back below the blanket. Then exploring above again.
Finally, eyes shut against the morning light and the harsh reality of the cabin, she touched her moist and glistening fingers to her lips. She hesitated, then parted her lips slightly. Her tongue moved daintily out to taste. Inevitably her lips parted wider and she put first one finger, then all, in her sucking mouth. Meanwhile the activity beneath the blanket became nearly frantic. Certainly her hidden lips and fingers mimicked the exposed digits and orifice.
I, for my part, had grown excited as her excitement had grown. I grasped my rigid member and matched her action stroke for stroke, one hand flat against the cabin wall, steadying my view, the other active as Ella's was active, between my legs. As if the wall did not separate us, I held back my release until I felt certain that Ella too had peaked. My instincts were dead on. As her writhing reached its crescendo, so did my tension. I envisioned my rod between those pouting lips above and below the blanket, spurting its seed into the warm, willing mouth, filling it to the brim and beyond with the sweet cream Ella only now dreamed of.
Perhaps that, and not the sight of her as she hung the clothes on the line, was the beginning of it all. And I thought that perhaps she was angry with me because I knew about the egg, because she had been caught in a direct lie.
My reverie was interrupted when Les said he wondered what the hell was wrong now. I looked up and saw that the ambulance had halted at the other side of the vacant lot that ran directly on to the quay side. The driver was talking out of the window to a man in plain clothes. We watched without saying anything until the man stepped on the running board and the ambulance drove away.
"More to it than meets the eye," Leslie said.
I shrugged my shoulders.
I said it had got nothing to do with us.
"We found the body, didn't we?" observed Les.
I said that it might have been anybody.
"But it wasn't. It was us," he countered.
I didn't feel like arguing with him. I was thinking about Ella, wishing Leslie was to hell out of there so that I could make a play for her.
"Anyway," I said, turning away, "it's over now."
"Maybe," he said.
There wasn't much to do then until the lorries came with the load. We were leaving in the afternoon with a load of anthracite for Edinburgh and Leith. Ours was a motor barge, so we could move straight from the river to the canal without waiting for a tow. The idleness left both of us a bit uncomfortable there on deck, doing nothing while Ella never seemed to stop working. She had finished sweeping and she was now doing some vegetables in a wooden bucket. An occasional plopping sound came from it as the potatoes, peeled, white and shinning, were dropped in.
She was sitting just that distance away so that you did not know whether she could hear what you were saying or not. Every time I looked over at her I had the impression that she had just looked away. But maybe that was just my imagination. It may well have been because I couldn't get her out of my mind since I had watched her stretch up to put the clothes on the line. I had a faint nausea in the pit of my stomach when I thought that she might be as aware of me as I was of her. I felt idle then for the first time in a long time because I felt she was watching me. Obviously Les felt the same thing and was anxious to be occupied at some job or other, but evidently he could think of nothing to do.
Ella, meanwhile, did not appear to care whether we were doing anything or not. She just squatted there on the small stool, her bare knees showing, peeling potatoes and humming to herself. I couldn't hear her humming, but I got the impression that she was, and I could see by the corners of her mouth that she was smiling.
There was little doubt in my mind what her thoughts actually were at that moment. The way she held the knife in one hand, the potato in the other. That small wisp of a smile as she laid bare the glistening white moist and firm tuber hidden beneath the coarse and soiled outer jacket.
As surely as my own being swelled at the thought, in her mind that newly-laid bare potato, or the manhood it represented to her, was firmly planted in her steamy slit. Moist and coolly rigid but pliant, it was parting and reaching deeper into her waiting warmth. I could see her legs moving, nearly imperceptibly, apart and together again as she drifted in the thought. Unaware of her action, she laid the brown skin back. And as she did, she fairly caressed the smoothness, then moved her hands about the stripped gift from the earth.
She enjoyed the feel of her hands about the different shapes, that was apparent to those with the eyes to see. Given half the opportunity she'd have enjoyed the variety in the fit of those surprisingly human and manly roots beneath her skirt as she had enjoyed her flailing fingers in the morning.
I thought how I would like to help her in that enjoyment. While she peeled the roughness of the ground-covered phallus I'd spread the petals of the hair-decked flower now blooming beneath her skirts. I would assist in the pollination of that blossom with various starchy tubers peeled and shaped in a variety of delightful forms. Squat hard on the stool, her legs apart and bum pressed to the wood, we would both take pleasure in the thrusting and exploration.
Then, when Ella was sapped by our garden variety adventures, I would stand before her, my flesh stamen at her squatting eye level. She could hold it and fondle it and caress and cherish it as she now peeled the garden stock. She could take it raw between her lips as she dared not do with the raw potato. Then I would throw her to the deck and plunge home where our rooting about had laid open the way.
Suddenly Les began to talk about the corpse. He said that, in his opinion she must have fallen in. "If somebody had pushed her there would have been more marks on the body, wouldn't there? She would have struggled."
I asked him how he explained the fact that she had only a short petticoat on, that the skin on her buttocks was grazed. He said that she might have been drunk.
He knocked out his pipe and repacked. Now that he had said it, I don't think it convinced even himself. I glanced round and I was sure that Ella was listening. She was still smiling at the potato in her hands. I watched it drop like a plummet into the bucket. She took another potato from the sack beside her.
Leslie asked me my ideas on the floating body. He asked if I thought our corpse had made a night of it. He meant was she a tart who went aboard with some ship's officer or other. He was trying to visualize her drunk on deck with her skirt above her knees and her thighs splayed for the man who later got rid of her.
I knew how his mind worked. I knew a good many of the adventures he'd had in his more viral youth. He knew well the life and loves of a sailor, though of the affairs of the officer class his knowledge was but rumor and conjecture.
Doubtless from his question he had in mind the tale he had of late related to me of the chaplain's mate he had met during his service at sea during the war. A randy little fellow of Italian heritage Les told me.
Luigi was exempt from the horrors of the battle because he had trained for the priesthood before the conflict was joined. And his strict papist upbringing had left him with a gift for all the right sounding yet meaningless phrases and religiousness that fool the unaware and had left him with a penchant for practically every pleasure his church had taught him was unholy.
It was on the occasion of his last night of liberty in the safe harbor of these isles before he had to face the treachery of the North Atlantic that Luigi had exercised his sharp Latin tongue, spiritual corruption and holier-than-all prerogatives to bring one of the lovelier ladies of the docks on board his assigned ship, the flagship of the fleet. His double-duty as chaplain's aid and librarian gained him a berth in the space that served as both office and library.
There too was stored the sacramental wine, enough to service all the true believers and any battle-converted agnostics, although it was unlikely that the ship carrying the admiral's ensign would see much of the battle hellfire that tricks the otherwise aware into thinking it might be prudent to get some religion to hedge your bet.
More than a few drops of that unsanctified blood of Christ were shed during that evening in the process of saving Luigi and the object of his lecherous affections. And as the story was told to Les when it reached him below decks later the following day, more positions than any missionary ever brought to a gentle, unfettered native culture were employed. And Christ's blood was not all that was shed as things progressed.
It seems that, stupefied by red wine never fermented to be consumed in quantity, Luigi had become limp beyond control at one critical juncture with his unholy angel. She, having lost in the fruit of the vine much of the sense that is one of the sweeter aspects of a professional's nature, mocked his inability. Of his limpness she asked if Easter would be arriving soon so that the Lord might rise again. Confronted by his duplicity and false piety, and enraged by his inability, the chaplain's assistant turned Judas. Grabbing the crucifix stored with the wine and communion paraphernalia, he bashed the half naked courtesan across the temple.
Emboldened as his savior had been when he chased the moneychangers, Luigi felt the Holy Spirit move in his loins and was empowered from on high to do with the lifeless form what he had been unable to do with the life-filled child of God. Rigid again, he took pagan delights with her, the reports below deck later had it, buggering her senseless body as it lay face down across the library table. And all the while her life blood drained red and unnoticed by "Luigi the messenger of God" from the gash above her penciled eyebrow and painted face.
Of course, when he finally exhausted his religious rage and came partially to his senses, Luigi's conquest had been well on her way to meet her maker. Infuriated anew at having buggered a corpse and broken so many of his church's commandments at once, he rammed the cross of her mortal destruction where his manhood had previously sought the greater glory and pitched the body from the library, over the rail and into the dark waters of the harbor. Then, screaming Hail Mary's in a final act of confusion and contrition, he defied his church's teachings for the final time. He dove head first, stark naked except for the miraculous medal he wore about his neck, from the lofty deck of his library/office/bunk to splatter himself on the hard steel deck many feet below.
Early the next morning the corpse of Luigi's convert was fished from the harbor, crucifix firmly in place, to the stares of the changing watch. The Admiral's ship steamed out on schedule, on the turning tide. The crew never heard anything official about Luigi. But the first Sunday service at sea featured a simple metal cross fashioned below decks in the machine shop while the ship was underway.
I guessed that that was at the heart of Les' question about our corpse.
I said, "She might have been pregnant."
But he said, "Naw, we'd've noticed."
His blue eyes were worried and his eyebrows were twisted in concentration and his pink sugarloaf head tilted backwards as though he were in pain. I was thinking about the slow white thing which sagged beneath the surface of the water and of the petticoat like the petal of a flower, peeling back over the creamy white of the thighs. That's what remained vivid for me, not the irrelevant series of after-images of the morning, the cat, the policeman with his mouth open, the parsnip like appearance of the leg when the ambulance men tripped, the plainclothesman who stepped on the running board, all that, and even the sudden coldness at my fingertips as I grasped at the ankle, had nothing to do with it.
It was strange, but my thoughts of Ella, unlike the morning's police-court details, was very close to it all; close enough so that I could not think of the corpse without thinking of her. I can remember at that moment thinking how full Ella's lips were and how sometimes when she was cooking in the cabin, little pinheads of sweat stood out on her upper lip and when the light struck them, they glinted.
Perhaps Luigi's lustful playmate had glistened like that in the earlier rounds of their ill-destined adventures. Perhaps Ella would enjoy being conscious for a rough and tumble buggering like Luigi had delivered his corpse. Perhaps the deity that empowered her life would enjoy seeing his disciple's legs akimbo and penetrated by the symbol of a competing god.
I certainly would. There was a philosophy worthy of worship, an unsanctimonious code of ethics that realized the true nature of men and women. There was a system I could heartily endorse. I could easily become a priest in this faith. I would excel at missionary work. Ella would be my first convert. She already showed signs of interest in the ritual.
Virtually every thought I had would be holy. Every action and interaction between consenting men and women would be fraught with new meaning. Life would be exciting all the time, worth living every moment of every day. Even death would gain reasonable meaning. Luigi's corpse and the corpse of Les and my resurrection would not have died in vain.
For a moment, when Les spoke next, I thought he was talking about Ella, for he said: "She was a bit heavy."
"Who?"
"The stiff!" He winked at me.
"The water did that," I said.
"You think so?" he queried.
I lit a cigarette. Leslie and Ella, it was a strange combination. He must have been twenty years older than she. And with only a wooden partition between them and me, I knew quite a lot about them. I knew for example that Leslie was impotent. Too much carousing in his younger days left him jaded he bragged to me when we set out on manly excursions to nearby pubs in our barge journeys about. Closer to the truth was that too much carousing in the current days repressed his finer sensibilities for the sweet sex and rendered him incapable of little more than braggadocio, darts and-much like his tale of Luigi-occasional outbursts of violence that he mistook for sex on his part.
Ella, however, seemed in her way to appreciate the finer aspects of even his crude arousals of the flesh. For example, one night when Les and I returned after closing from a neighboring pub and I know he was quite drunk, I repaired to my berth and heard them fight. They both swore quietly, aware of my presence at the other side of the partition, and then I heard them crash into the table. There came the sound of flesh smacking against wood, and then a dull thwack followed by a scream from Ella. He was thrashing her with his leather belt, her belly sprawled flat on the table. At least that is how I, without seeing it, saw it. After a while he left off. I could hear Ella sniveling. Then her voice pleaded softly, "Again." A long silence followed and she repeated, "Again. Leslie. Please. Again." The oaf stirred himself and I heard the leather whir through the air and slap sharply to silence.
Ella whimpered, then begged, "Again."
Les obliged with greater speed and the belt sizzled and cracked louder with his newly-kindled vigor.
"Again," her voice came with a sob and her breath caught in mid-draw as the leather came quickly through the air and jolted abruptly against sweet white skin I knew was rising now in hot red welts.
Another suppressed sob from Ella but no vocalized request was necessary as the air in their cabin and mine was rent by the belt as it tore home to the quick ending against firm, rounded buttocks. Her juices would be flowing, that was for certain. Les' liquor-laden brain would miss all the subtlety and beauty of the moment. Another crack and a whimper.
Ella's cheeks would tighten in anticipation. The muscles of her anus would pull it down and tighten against the anticipated impact, then tighter still as cured leather met living flesh. The back of her thighs would tense and squeeze tighter her moistening pleasure box. The front of her thighs, pressed to the table edge, would tighten pulling her stomach muscles taut in turn tugging at the softness mounding over her opening soaked with her own juices.
Had I fired that passion with the licking Les now rendered I would certainly not let it go unfulfilled.
Yet the only pleasure brutish Les would know was alcohol-dulled power. He thought he'd humiliated her; controlled her. All the while she dictated her pleasure, unfortunately left incomplete by a man unable to bring her all the sensations she craved. Another roar of leather parting air... the stinging singing of flesh hard encountered and then, silence. Ella asked for no more. Not speaking, they shuffled about in the darkness. Soon we all slept. The following morning Ella looked radiant.
"Joe, what do you really think happened to our corpse?" Les asked growing suddenly serious.
I laughed. I began to tell him a story about a bridge at night and as I told him I became conscious of the fact that I had raised my voice. I realized then that I wanted Ella to hear what I was saying.
I described how the woman had gone to the bridge fully dressed and then, very calmly, undressed.
"First," I said, "she removed her jacket, then her blouse, a long-sleeved silk number with lace at the collar and cuffs and silk covered buttons closely placed down the front. She was quite elegantly dressed you realize. A broad-brimmed hat and tan kid gloves. A handbag of fine Spanish leather. Matching woolen jacket and skirt, plum colored, I think. Expensive white silk blouse. Fine under things, black brassiere and panties with a matching black garter belt. Dark shaded silk stockings. Exquisite leather pumps with heels just high enough to inhibit her easy walking and to tense her calf muscles just so.
"But, having removed her jacket as she exerted herself to reach the center of the bridge, she folded it carefully and laid it down next to her on the span. Then she put her handbag on top to weight the jacket in place. The first piece of clothing she took off was her blouse. With her gloves still on, she undid the buttons holding the sleeves closed at her wrists. Then, as the cuffs flapped open, she slowly, slowly undid the buttons down the front and slipped her arms and torso free.
"She carefully folded the blouse and slipped it between the handbag and the folded plum jacket. She cupped her breasts in her gloved hands and admired the black lace at the edge of her pale skin as she thought about the next item of clothing she'd remove. 'What will it be,' she asked herself. Then, her mind made up, she slid her hands down her ribs to her waist, reached behind and undid her brassiere. Her shoulders moved forward as she unfettered her breasts. The cool evening air splashed her warm, excited skin. Holding the scant bit of underclothing by the strap, she let it fall atop the handbag and the clothes piled beneath.
"'And next?' she thought. Probably the hat, I imagine. A woman stripped naked to the waist, pale and exposed above a plum colored skirt, might realize that the topping of a fine chapeau is a bit incongruous. But perhaps not. Maybe the skirt was next to go. She'd reach behind again, thrusting her breasts forward as her hands reached back and her elbows moved up to undo the button at the nip of her spine and waist. Then open the closing to allow the skirt waist to slip down over her hips. She would have moved as women do, leaning to one side as she stepped through the lowered garment, first with one stockinged leg, then the other. Arms outstretched before her she'd shake the skirt straight and smooth, then bring it to her chest, folding it neatly above the pleats, feeling the pricks of the wool against her bareness. Then she placed the skirt atop the jacket, below the blouse, bag and brassiere.
"Then the shoes, I think. She'd probably kick them off, lift one leg and gain her balance perched high on the heel of the other shod foot. Feeling secure, the raised leg would snap forward at the knee, pinwheeling the shoe up and out from the bridge into the dark, then arcing to the river below. Putting the stockinged foot on the ground, she'd immediately launch the second shoe with the same crisp snap.
"Now the hat, for sure. The incongruity would be undeniable now. She'd reach up, elbow bending across her face and grasp the hat by its brim. With a flourish and smile of triumph it would skim off at an angle, become lost in the dark, glide, then in its final distance, tumble to the water.
"More quickly now, sensing her growing nakedness and the urgency of her task, she'd release one stocking then the next. Then she'd grow calm. Why hurry now? Savor the moments. Lifting her slip-or was it a petticoat, what's the difference anyway-she'd unroll her stockings. First one, feeling the soft kid gloves on her inner thigh moving down, down to her knee. Then the other to the same point. Then, bending more and feeling skin touching skin, kid gloves and dark-yet-translucent silk caressing each calf, she'd roll them both until they reached her ankle.
"Suddenly she'd ask herself, 'Why am I taking such care?' And throwing caution to the wind, she'd grab one silken sheath by the toe and, loosely anchored at the ankle, it would unfurl like a defiant banner. The sight would please her as she tossed the stocking to the wind. And she would move even more slowly to replicate the action with the other silk tube. Half bent, half squatting, conscious of keeping her balance, she'd unleash this second pennant of her liberation.
"Now the moment of truth was approaching. Would she renege on the promise she made herself? The pile of neatly folded clothes left the option open. She could dress again in the partial ensemble that remained and walk back from the brink.
"'Hell, no,' she'd say aloud and, swiftly lashing out with her now naked foot, would kick the stack off the edge of the bridge and send it tumbling to the water. She passed the point of no return.
"With greater speed now she'd remove her gloves, her body suddenly chilled in its nakedness against the night and the damp of the river passing beneath. These she'd toss aside, uncaring.
"Next, off with her garter belt and panties. Then, standing in her petticoated nudity, calm would prevail again. No reason to shed the petticoat. The show was over. She'd look at the night and the sky and the stars. Gaze across the water at the flickering lights on the opposite shore and their reflection. She'd think about the events that brought her to this brink. Then she'd launch herself into oblivion, petticoat billowing about her, she'd drop to the water like a rose, float there for a brief moment and then be gone."
Silence hung heavy about the deck.
Leslie was looking puzzled. He didn't know whether or not I was trying to pull his leg. He asked me guardedly what kind of woman that was.
"Just an ordinary woman," I said.
"Some woman!" he bellowed.
I told him he might call her an exhibitionist. He asked me what I meant by that. He was suspicious. He didn't want to appear slow and I could see that he was getting ready to laugh at a joke that, at present, was beyond him. He had taken his pipe from his mouth.
I glanced over at Ella. She was looking down into the wooden tub but I could see that she had stopped peeling the potato.
I said that she wasn't the kind of woman who could have committed suicide with her clothes on.
When I looked over at Ella again she was dropping the potato back into the bucket. It made a little splash. She found another one and began to peel it.
CHAPTER TWO
Not long afterwards, the lorries arrived with the load of anthracite. There were four of them and they backed up against the barge in turn and the anthracite was shoveled down a metal chute straight into the hold. It was a dirty job for Les and me. After each load had been emptied down into the hold, he and I had to get to work with shovels and spread it evenly in readiness for the next load. It would not have been so bad working out in the open, but all the dust and grit in the world was down there in the hold. It got into our eyes and our noses and into the orifices of our ears. I never liked to carry coal or anthracite. Breathing coal dust usually gave me a headache and it was not as though we could take a bath afterwards. We had to wash off in a wooden tub on deck. The water was invariably cold with only a kettle of hot water poured in to take the chill off.
The loading took us about an hour and a half. I was hot and sticky and when, in some context or other, Les mentioned Ella's name, I could feel the dust prickle on my skin under my shirt. I became vaguely and physically excited. I thought about her standing naked on the deck while I beheld her charms. I thought of lying with her below deck with my fingers deep in the warmth between her legs, her lips and tongue caressing my stiff member. I envisioned her in the role of Luigi's whore and as the exhibitionist I had described to her obvious fascination.
In the dark and coal dusty hold I could imagine her against me, clean and warm and firm. I wondered how she would take it, whether her naked body would quiver and draw away, or whether it would thrust upwards on eager gimbals to meet my own lust. I tried to imagine her with no clothes on, but in the constant movement of anthracite and the rising dust I could not get beyond a vague white blur.
When we climbed out into the thin sunlight, Les signed the receipt to say that he had received the load and then left the last lorry. We closed the hatch over the anthracite and then all we had to do was to sweep away the dust from the deck and get washed.
As we were in rather a public place-it was at the quay side on the River Clyde in Glasgow-we could only strip to the waist. This was annoying because I could feel the coal dust in my boots and on my legs and thighs. We could only roll up our trouser legs and stand knee-deep in the buckets.
Ella had gone down below to get the kettle of hot water and Les and I relaxed on top of the hatch while we were waiting. I was no longer bored. I reflected on how, from the moment I had wakened that morning, things had begun to happen. Nothing spectacular-but a kind of excitement at the edges of me. I was aware of a kind of nascent odor in things. As I rolled my cigarette I could feel a dull ringing at the tips of my fingers. The air smelled good. I wanted Ella to hurry up with the water.
Les, as usual, smoked his pipe. It struck me as natural that Les should smoke a pipe. He had big heavy workman's hands with short fingers. His nails were broad and short, cracked and bitten to the quick, and the coal dust had settled on them, making them look alternately gray and pink. My own were the same, only my fingers were a bit longer and not quite so rough.
As I looked at the palm of my hand, moist and pink and gray, it occurred to me that if I placed my hand on a sheet of paper and pressed it there, it would leave a clear and perfect impression. At that time I had never had my fingerprints taken and the thought of having it done made me feel guilty. I found myself wondering how a man could destroy all traces from a place where he had been. Leslie interrupted me to say that we would leave for the canal as soon as we had eaten.
I asked him where we would stop for the night. Night, especially now since I had come to be aware of Ella, was full of possibility-especially if there were a pub close by, as a moth to a flame Leslie would undoubtedly go to a pub. So actually, where we halted for the night did not matter. There was not much to pick and choose between the small towns along the canal.
He said he didn't know, that it all depended on how far we got before dark. He said we were in no hurry, that we had a load of granite chips to pick up in Leith on Saturday morning. It was only Tuesday.
Ella and the kettle of water arrived. She carried the two buckets over for us; they were both about half full of cold water. And then she poured half the kettle into each bucket, or roughly half, because I thought she was more liberal with me.
"Hey, don't give him all that hot water!" Leslie said.
"Aw, shut your mouth. You're like a big kid!" Ella replied.
I liked the way she stooped to pour the hot water in, stirring it with her hand. As she bent from her strong waist, her breasts fell free and through the ragged-edged "V" at the throat of her dress I could glimpse the darker color of their sensitive peaks as they brushed against the material of her dress. She looked up at me as she poured and stirred the waters and responded to Leslie, her head at the level of my crotch, I felt I could see in her eyes and lips signals confirming that his observation was correct and intentional on her part.
I noticed, too, there was a damp patch under her arms and that the green cotton was discolored there, a gradual paling yellow like a leaf in autumn. Despite the coal dust I could detect the faint smell of her exertion and I thought of the beautiful beads and sweet scent of perspiration an energetic session of lovemaking would rise from Ella's work-tuned body. And I could fairly nearly smell her musky slit, well lubricated by vigorous pumping and moist with sweat and her hot juices and my volcanic spurting fluids.
Leslie and I both stripped to the waist and began to soap our chests and arms while Ella went down below again to prepare the meal.
In spite of his age, Les still had a big chest, but it rippled on to his paunch without clear definition. It struck me then that he must have weighed at least sixteen stone.
He was snorting into his bucket, washing behind his neck and ears which stood out like little red lamps on either side of his head, shiny and tufted with small sprouts of gray hair. As far as I could see, he was tattooed all over, with serpents and monograms and hearts and anchors in green and red inks. He got them done while he was still at sea. Each tattoo, he said, represented one woman, and he was able to bring back to mind their breasts, their thighs, their buttocks, the way they cried out-like alley cats, most of them, he said-just by looking at the tattoos.
As with his story about Luigi, there were certain tales related to certain tattoos that stayed fresh in my mind. The two women riding a horse tattooed on his chest was his first and would always be his favorite, he said. And the tale that went with it became my favorite for it became more elaborate with every retelling and it was retold often. I really did enjoy the story, too. In essence it was his first sexual encounter in the navy and his shipmates, knowing this, were of a mind to give him a treat unequalled in his experience to date.
Unbeknownst to Les, they pooled some extra coins collected from each of his below deck mates and arranged for him to receive the tandem rider treatment at the local whore house on the first liberty after his enlistment. And as part of the contract, they bargained that the final act of relief that would normally accompany the tandem rider should be withheld from the inflamed young seaman.
Now Les thought he was in line for a rather straightforward in-and-out, all that he had paid for out of his own limited funds. So when the rouge-cheeked madam separated Les from his fellow tars and escorted him up the heavily carpeted and draped staircase, he was, he readily admitted, perplexed. And when she handed him over to two tightly-corseted young things in the satin and velvet bedecked boudoir, he was dumbfounded.
Naturally this did not keep these professionals from earning their wage. A brunette and a blonde (a true blonde by the delta of hair below her belly, Les recalled in one of his later tellings of the encounter), together they slowly stripped him naked, taking time to fondle and kiss each other and Les. Breasts bursting over the tops of their bustiers and naked from the waist down save the garter clips that pulled taut black mesh stockings, time and again they tugged and pinched and prodded and pulled at the naked Les and each other. But so deft were they at their art that Les, standing there in his youthful manhood, was brought again and again to the brink, but never over, by their coy ministrations.
Rendered naked and afire with passion these Gemini of pleasure then conducted the totally malleable young sailor to the biggest four-poster he had ever seen. Easing him down, they bound him, arms and legs, with velvet covered cords to each of the posts. When he became conscious of his predicament, his first reaction was panic. But the twin angels of mercy, perched at either side of his bound body, were quick to assuage his fears. Facing the tethered young man, the blonde threw her leg across his chest and straddled his tense body. Like a cat in heat she began rubbing her moistening slit against him.
After several calming moments of this delightful action by the blonde, the brunette mounted behind her partner, also facing Les. He could barely see her charms, hidden as she was behind her blonde counterpart. But he could feel her stockings on his sides, her crotch hair and the slickness of her nether parts as well, grinding in his solar plexus below his rib cage and above his hips.
He pulled against his bonds as he struggled to rise up and know between his legs the pleasure they were having between theirs. But it was not yet to be. Suddenly the brunette's hands appeared under the outstretched arms of her playmate and grasped hard at the breasts upthrust above the blonde's corseted waistline. The red-nailed hands grabbed hard, distorting the bosoms and making the blonde wince, furrow her brow and squeeze her eyes more tightly shut with the sudden pain. But the hands were unrelenting and they crushed harder and contorted the twin peaks symmetrical shape even more.
Relaxing her grip but not releasing her hold, the phantom tormentor pressed the dark tipped, fleshy mounds together and rubbed them against one another, then pulled them in opposite directions, far apart in an unnatural formation the likes of which Les had never seen. Then the hands cupped the breasts from below, fingers kneading forward until each draped heavy, suspended from a tiny apex of the blonde's nipple, pinched betwixt thumb and index finger of the hidden brunette.
Small cries of pain and pleasure accompanied this exhibition for the trussed up Les, and much writhing by both the beauties astride his upper body. And had the touch of either of them released the flood of passion now dammed below his waist, he would have been grateful. But it was not yet to be.
One of the brunette's hands dropped from view as the other moved, clenched and reached where two had worked before. Then the blonde rose up on her knees, removing some of her weight from Les' chest and letting in a dash of air, cool on the wetness where her warmth had risen. Les looked down from the breast-high activity to the spot where his body met the blonde between her legs and, to his surprise as the sight registered on his eyes and the feel on his chest, he saw the red-tipped fingers of the brunette's hand and felt her knuckles on his sternum.
Four fingers appeared, the thumb still hidden beneath flesh and blonde hair. The blonde dropped her arms that had been outstretched in ecstasy and pressed the pink-tipped fingers of one of her hands against the golden fleece just below his chin. With the other she reached behind, clearly intent on returning the touch to her partner mounted behind.
The brunette wrapped her free hand over the thigh of the blonde and joined her in pressing against the blonde's pleasure dome. Simultaneously she hitched her hips forward, impaling herself firmly on the blonde's hidden hand. The four red-tipped fingers that Les could see became two and one as the longest digit slipped up into the rocking lead rider. Quickly the two women were moving in tandem, faster and faster astride the tied and tormented Leslie. They rode and rode, busy pleasing themselves and apparently as unaware of Les between their legs as they would have been of a gelding rented from the local stable.
Now, what Les had no reason to know at the time and did not learn until he returned to the ship, was that the usual denouement of this act was the release by the tandem riders of all the pent up passions of their stallion. But his fellows had contracted otherwise for Les. Finally spent and limp with exhaustion at their cross-country ride, the blonde and brunette silently dismounted and, arms about each other's waist, left Les, covered with their juices, imagination fired and erection raging, trussed to the bedposts. Time passed, interminably in Les' recounting, until the misshapen dwarf who served the mistress and the house, arrived to release him from his bondage. The dwarf was such an ugly sight after the mounted beauties that Les' ardor cooled immediately and irreparably for the balance of his shore leave.
Of course in his youthful naivete Les pretended a different outcome back on board the ship. Just as naturally, everyone who had been in on the prank feigned refusing to believe any part of his tale. After they had put out to sea, they owned up to their part in it all. And on his next shore leave Les got ripping drunk and had himself crudely tattooed to commemorate the encounter. Of course he didn't get tattooed for every tart he slept with. Most of them weren't worth it.
Leslie met Ella in a seamen canteen where she went to look for her father. Because there were no drinks served there officially, Leslie was drinking with him in the lavatory. They were both drunk and her father insisted that they should take Leslie home with them. Leslie had been ten years at sea as a stoker. One thing led to another and they got married. Ella's father died shortly after and Leslie gave up the sea and took to working the barge that Ella had inherited.
When we had finished washing our fronts, we washed each other's back, dried ourselves and put on clean shirts. After that, we rolled up our trouser legs and washed our feet and legs. Ella had gone below. When she was out of earshot, Les said we'd tie up at Lairs for the night. He said we'd be able to have a game of darts.
If there was anything Les prided himself on it was his darts. He played very well with a gentle little overhand movement surprising in a person of his weight and size. I can see him now, poised on the ball of his right foot, his tongue protruding slightly between his lips, balancing one of his expensive metal darts on the tip of his short stubby fingers.
But I was not really interested. Darts bored me just as much as Leslie's conversation. I was only interested in his wife.
After we had emptied the buckets over the side, we went down to the meal. It was a good smell. She had made some soup and we were going to have some mince and potatoes afterwards. I was watching Ella ladle the soup into the plates. The pot was steaming. Beside it, were two other pots. I could distinguish the bubbling sound of the potatoes and the stewing sound of the mince. I was hungry. She served Leslie first and then she served me. Leslie passed the bread she had cut in hunks and we both dipped it deeply in our soup as we ate. A moment later Ella came to the table and sat down. Leslie and I sat one at either end of the table and she sat between us at the side. She rested her left arm on the table while she used the spoon.
All through the meal I could not keep my eyes off her. On deck she had come on me suddenly, a woman hanging out washing with a vacant lot and a factory chimney in the background. I felt then as though someone had poured warm water on the back of my neck and it ran down over my front and back and down the inside of my thighs and down my legs and ankles. My rod began to rise at the feeling and the thought. But the sensation did not fade and leave me cold as the water would have. It lingered on my skin, reminding me of her. I couldn't keep my eyes off her and even when I looked down to dip the bread in the soup, I was still aware of her. She was close. Every movement, even the ones I'd associated in the past with Leslie's wife during the three months I'd been with them, seemed to have taken on the same quality. It did not matter whether she was reaching out for the bread and showing the yellow patch under her arm or standing at the stove serving the mince with the apron string loose across her haunches or pushing back her short straight straw-colored hair which I'd never seen her brush. It had the same effect upon me. I wanted her body-and I wanted it soon.
I couldn't keep my eyes off her neck, which was the yellow color necks sometimes are, and I couldn't help associating that with the change in color of a stalk of grass of which the blade is green and dry relatively and then lower down, where the grass enters the earth, the stalk has a sweet milky appearance. It is smooth yellow-white, like ivory, only it has the smear of life, of what breeds. And if you compare a woman to a stalk of grass, then her neck is the point at which she enters the earth, at which the sun strikes only intermittently, and below her neck she thrusts downwards, kinetic, towards the earth's center, like the moist white shoots and roots of plants. I had often thought that. That was why I couldn't keep my eyes off her neck. And while I was eating my soup, that was what I was thinking.
She got up to serve the mince.
As she did so, the cotton of her dress fell softly about her thigh and it was as much as I could do to prohibit myself from touching her as she passed.
Her odor wafted to my nostrils, sweet, pungent, slightly off as the sweat-faded armpits of her dress were off. And there was more to the scent that reached me. It was the strong musk of a body in estrus, coming into heat. Coming into heat for me, I was sure, certainly not for the clod Leslie. Ella was inflamed. My moment was approaching.
We didn't talk much at dinner. She asked Leslie when he intended to cast off. He said he wanted to get away as soon as the meal was over and that irritated me because I like a half hour to digest my food. But my irritation was only in the background, like a stray thought you don't take any notice of, because by this time I was too completely interested in Ella to pay much attention to what Leslie was saying.
When the mince came, Leslie said to her what he said to me about wanting to make Lairs that night. She said dryly that it didn't matter to her where he got drunk. Leslie said defensively that I had challenged him to a game of darts.
Ella raised one eyebrow.
"Do you play darts?" she said, unconvinced.
I really didn't know what to say for it was one of those questions spoken in that tone that makes you feel very small and tongue-tied and to which, if the question is unexpected as this one was, you give a false, weak, defensive answer.
"Sometimes... to pass the time."
"I thought you'd find something better to do with your time," she said, more dryly than ever.
I can't remember what I said next, but it was something that made Leslie laugh.
Ella got up and went over to the stove. She said to Leslie, "Don't rupture yourself!"
Leslie finished what was on his plate and a moment later pushed it away from him. By that time, with the feeling that I had said the wrong thing, I was going over in my mind the situation of a moment before. I felt I had missed a cue from Ella or, at least an opportunity of letting her know that I knew the implication behind her words. Perhaps she was defending herself even then, against a fear in herself, when she placed me precisely and adroitly in the position of having to answer an awkward question. And her sustained sarcasm, though it was not unusual at meal times when we were all congregated together, was aggravating now because since a few hours before, I wanted to change sides, to laugh with her at Leslie and not with Leslie at her.
So when she asked us if we would like a cup of tea, and I saw that Leslie was getting ready to say no, we would have to get under way, there wasn't time and I said I would.
"What about you, Leslie?" Ella asked and, as I had said yes, he quickly shrugged his shoulders and said yes, too.
I could see she was wondering why I had said yes so quickly and maybe she was amused. She had got that queer look on her face, a flush at her prominent cheekbones, which I had noticed before in the morning when she turned round from hanging up the clothes and saw I had been watching her. While she was infusing the tea, she was smiling and humming to herself like she was when she was listening to my version of how the woman came to be in the water. I guessed that she knew I was interested in her.
She brought the cups over and put them on the table and then went back for the teapot and sat down in her place again.
I was rolling a cigarette and trying to appear casual, but inside I was alert and wondering just how far I could go. Leslie was intently reading the morning paper with a look of pained disbelief on his face.
Walled into privacy by the newspaper like that was what gave me the idea.
Of course, I was taking a risk and I might have been wrong about everything I thought had gone before. But even then I did not think she was likely to give me away. She was a woman after all, a woman who had been brought up on the barges. I watched a frail spout of steam issue from the kettle on the hob.
Slowly, very slowly, I moved my leg until it was touching hers under the table, until my shin was round under the back of her calf. Then, touching, I drew up my trouser leg to expose my shin and moved it softly up and down against the back of her calf. Her flesh was warm, the skin slightly rough. I had time to be conscious of that; I watched the flush spread from her neck to her cheeks, saw her stiffen, felt her whole torso quiver as, in collusion, she pretended not to know anything about it. For a moment we sat in a kind of state of esoteric transmission, her profile towards me, her chin raised slightly, baring the thick sensuous line of her neck, her nostrils tense like shells and her right hand on the table gripping the salt shaker, playing with it as if it were manhood itself. I spent the next minute consolidating my position, massaging gently with my shin on her bare flesh. Beyond us, the newspapers rustled, Leslie coughed, and the kettle began to spew steam more energetically. With a kind of eager reluctance then, I moved my right hand to her thigh under the cotton. It was warm, and soft. She was breathing more heavily. She did not dare to look at me. Gently I stroked her, advancing over the smooth and quivering slab of her thighs towards the hotness that was hidden almost frantically between them. I was aware of an urgency at my fingertips as they sowed desire there at her thighs, an urgency which stemmed from the knowledge that my present advances could come to nothing, that at any moment the tension might be broken by an unconscious movement of the one possible spectator.
At that moment, my fingers came in contact with the prohibiting elastic of her old-fashioned knickers. The balls of my fingers scored into her soft flesh, bellying their way underneath the elastic, until suddenly, like a sudden carnal intuition, they were moving gently at the sensitive mass of her body's center. At the same time I felt her downwards movement, incredibly slow and incredibly heavy, as she slid forward on the wooden chair so that the lower part of her body raised itself almost imperceptibly at my fingertips, containing them.
At that moment she looked at me. It was almost, I felt, a look of hatred, her eyes brittle and passionate at the same time. Embedded in her without motion, my fingers were quite wet with her passion.
I felt a fool suddenly to be watching her, to be at such a distance from her. I am sure she felt it too, but from her point of view as a kind of treason. I tried to reassure her by glancing meaningfully over at the double bunk where Leslie and she slept. But that had the opposite effect. She breathed outwards quickly through tightened nostrils and heaved backwards with her rump to be free of my exploring fingers, at the same time moving her leg forwards away from mine in a delayed reflex action. Her left hand grasped with strong fingers at my wrist and thrust my hand from her.
In her alarmed movement, she must have kicked the table for our private world was invaded suddenly as Leslie lowered the paper in front of him and said: "Well, Joe, if you've finished your tea we'll get started."
Ella was hot and confused and busied herself collecting the cups. I stood up and said to Ella that I'd enjoyed my tea very much, but she didn't turn around. She was scraping the pot with a knife. I could not see her face.
CHAPTER THREE
Up on deck the air was cool, cool gray. Behind the sheds the brick factory-stack was enveloped in a stagnant mushroom of its own yellow smoke. Les spat out over the side of the barge and put away his pipe.
"I'll start her up then," he said, and went below again.
I let go the ropes and soon we had moved out into midstream and were heading for the entrance to the canal. The water was smooth and scum laden and it seemed to lean against us and fall away again, as we made way. Now and again a piece of pock-marked cork moved past low in the water. There was not much traffic on the river. Under the dirty lens of sky, Les was looking intently toward the quay, marking in his memory, I suppose, the stretch of water from which we had pulled the drowned woman.
Now, when you get used to it, it is boring to crawl down a canal, to wait for a lock to open, for water to level. But you see some interesting things too, like cyclists on the footpath where the canal runs through a town, and kids playing, and courting couples. You see a lot of them, especially after dusk, and in the quiet places. They are in the quiet places where there is no footpath and where they have had to climb a fence to get to. Perhaps it is the water that attracts them as much as the seclusion, and of course the danger. In summer they are as thick as midges, and you hear their laughter occasionally towards evening where the broken bushes spread down the bank and touch the water. You can seldom see them.
Usually you just hear their voices; the whispered intimacies, the deeper male voice urgent and insistent, his counterpart reluctant, difficult perhaps, coy. Then you can hear the sounds of success and submission. His grunts and her sighs and moans of pleasure as she submits to the plumbing of her depths at the water's edge.
Sometimes the roar of his great release breaks the muffled phrase on the wind; sometimes her loud cry as barriers break down and bodies give in to the most pleasant carnal knowledge. And, only occasionally, there are no human sounds at all once the rapture has begun, only the thrashing of bodies against the earth and underbrush as they writhe in darkness-shadowed knowledge of each other.
Of all the jobs I had been forced to do I think I liked being on the canal best. You are not tied to one place then as you are if you take a job in town. And sometimes, if you can forget how ludicrously small the distances are, you get the impression that you are traveling. And there is something about traveling.
Soon we were chugging along the banks of the canal and it rolled away behind us like a very neat black tape dividing two masses of green-brown countryside. I was at the wheel, which was aft, and Les was sitting on the hatch over the hold, smoking his pipe. He was gazing idly at the landscape, spitting occasionally, lighting and relighting his pipe. Ella was still down below tidying up. It was peaceful. Leslie looked peaceful, thinking no doubt of how he was going to show off at the dartboard in the little pub at Lairs. I could see him raise a pint glass of beer to his lips, drink deep, leaving a layer of scum-colored froth round the side of his glass. He would ask me then if I wanted a game of darts.
Yes, everything was peaceful, like the man who was plowing in the field over to the left and like the two cows that were grazing slightly ahead. There was the fresh air all around me and everything quiet and a little numb feeling of excitement somewhere deep down in me.
Standing there at the wheel, it came to me suddenly that touch was more important than sight. I felt conscious of the pull Ella was exerting, almost as though she were hanging heavily and warmly from my skin, a heaviness which centered at the base of my spine and at the back of my thighs.
Touch convinced in a way in which sight did not. I was struck by the fact that sight is hypnotized by the surfaces of things. More than that, it can know only surfaces, flatness at a distance, meager depths at close range. But the wetness of water felt on the hand and on the wrist is more intimate and more convincing than its color or even than any flat expanse of sea. The eye, I thought, could never get to the center of things; there was no intimate connection between my eye and a plant on the windowsill or between my eye and the woman to whom I was about to make love.
And I remembered Cathie. I had lived with her for two years before I came to the barge, and I recalled how sometimes I had looked at her and felt appalled by a sense of distance. Say she was sitting on the bed with her knees up, a book in her hands. Somehow, I was not convinced. She was there, but only indirectly, like the wallpaper or the view of the street outside the window. I can remember as a small boy I loved touching things. Trees. Cats. Flowers. I saw a violet or a rose but I had to destroy the distance, to feel the soft petals with my fingers, with my cheek; I had to draw the smell of it inside me and feel it living in myself.
It was the same with Cathie. I had to go over and bury my head in her thighs, to feel her in my nostrils, to move my hand over her belly and finally to draw her whole warm body close to me. But even that was not enough. Even touch was deficient. Perhaps she would be lying naked in my arms. I desired suddenly to see what it was that was so soft and moist and warm. Her body. But that was an abstraction, handy like a price-tag. It had nothing to do with the existence. I drew away from her and scrutinized her, the small breasts with their dull purple nipples, the firm brown heap of her belly, the chevron of black hair between her thighs. Her buttocks were smooth and yellow, rounded like marble where they fell to their deep and bosky cleft. But I could not touch these things. I wanted to touch what I saw. But I could only touch a soft thing, a moist thing, a hairy thing. Sight and touch may be correlative but their objects are vitally different. Ceasing to see the rise of her belly as I pressed my lips to it to confirm fled away from me, and in its place was something soft and warm. There was no intimate and necessary relation between what I saw and what I touched. The impressions existed together like a stone and a melody, ludicrous, fraudulent, absurd. It is the feeling that something has eluded you.
I smiled when I thought of it. Cathie. I met her for the first time in a holiday resort on the coast. I had gone there because I had to get a job to earn some money. I was leaning on my elbows on the balustrade of the promenade looking out across the sands towards the sea. I had been aware for some time of a slight movement, of the soft sea wind in colored cloth, just below me on the beach. A girl was lying there, attempting with modest movements to oil her own back. I don't know whether at that moment she was aware of me. I allowed my gaze to fall on her occasionally and each time I did, she seemed to react by giving up the attempt to oil her back and by moving her oiled hand over the smooth flesh of her thighs and calves. They were well within her reach and she oiled them with great sensuality.
I watched this ritual for perhaps ten minutes. I felt sure by this time that she was inviting me to make contact with her and I was afraid that if I did not do so, she would tire, gather her things together, and move along to a more populated part of the beach.
I walked quickly along to the nearest steps, descended to the beach, and walked toward her along the sand. I walked slowly, trying to gauge her reactions.
She was wearing sunglasses. Behind them, I felt her eyes focused on me, sizing me up.
There is a point at which a man and a woman stalk one another like animals. It is normally in most human situations, a very civilized kind of stalking, each move on either side being capable of more than one interpretation. This is a defensive measure. Each stalker can, as it were, pretend up to the last moment not to be aware of the sexual construction. This way no one is bound to admit the intention to seduce before he or she is certain that the seduction is consented to. But one can never be quite certain because the other is just as wary, just as unwilling to consent. So a man and a woman fence with one another and the fencing is the more delicate because neither can wholly trust the other not to simulate ignorance of all that has passed between them. In every situation the man might be a puritan, the woman a woman who wishes to have the pleasure of being courted without the finality of the sexual act itself.
Cathie, for example, could have pretended to be surprised at my sudden presence beside her on the beach. As a matter of fact, she did pretend surprise. It had given her pleasure to be seen stroking her own strong limbs and delicate ankles. Whether she would now consent to have me stroke them was not clear. She knew this, just as women usually know it, and she was going to enjoy having my purpose unfolded before her. At the point at which she was certain, she would be able to consent or not and without reference to my desire.
I knew this and she knew it as I sat down beside her and offered her a cigarette. She accepted. We talked casually about the weather, about the sun, and that made it possible for me to pick up the bottle of sun-tan oil and to examine it. She said I could use some if I wanted to.
I was still fully dressed and I had no bathing trunks with me. So I said there was not much point in it. Before she could interpret this as a withholding of myself, I suggested that I could oil her back for her. I also confessed that I had been watching her from the promenade above. She pretended not to know about this, but without a word she rolled over onto her belly and exposed her back to me. She was wearing a two-piece bathing costume of black nylon, the lower part closely sheathing her immaculate buttocks and most of the upper part that cupped her breasts now hidden beneath her except for the thin strand of nylon that ran across her back just below her shoulder-blades.
I began at the small of her back, working with the oil in ever-increasing circles to the limits of her exposed flesh. Soon, however, the massage became a caress. When I felt her succumb to it, her face buried in her towel in the sand, my fingers slipped first underneath the strap of the top half and then gently to the smooth mould of her buttocks beneath the taut black nylon. She made no effort to resist. By the simple expedient of closing her eyes she had shut out the rest of the world from herself, shut out the fear of a casual onlooker from the promenade. I continued to caress her for about five minutes, speaking occasionally to reassure her. Then my hand moved down across the sleek nylon onto the smooth heavy fats of her thighs. Still pretending to oil her, I caressed her ankles, her calves, behind the knees, and more voluptuously, the dull sheen of her inner thighs where they joined her abandoned torso and where the nylon, thin almost as a cigarette paper, covered the hot rut between her legs.
Not far away were some rocks where I knew it would be possible to be out of sight both from the beach and from the promenade. I did not even know the girl's name at the time. Still I was wondering whether I dared suggest that we should go out of sight of other people. After all, even with my hands so intimately at work on the softness of her body, she was at present safe, all fears gone and tensions relaxed.
I could find little relief for myself, could do nothing on the exposed part of the beach.
Of course, even if she were to consent, the sensations, the looseness which I had already instilled in her during the caress might disappear in the private place. She would have a hundred opportunities to revise and decide again. At that moment, I believe, had there been no danger of being witnessed, I could have pulled the pants of her bathing costume down over her thighs, parted her hot legs, and slid without protest between the thinly-sweated contours of her buttocks amongst the warm hair and lust-slackened lips of her sex. But whether, out of the sun, after a walk of a hundred yards, I would still be able to assert myself with a girl who was, after all, a stranger, I couldn't know. The thought made me pause. I was unwilling to lose what I had already gained in a premature attempt to take her. My fingers, moving upwards between her thighs, had already brushed her gradually moistening sex on more than one occasion. Now, casting all caution aside, I allowed them to mingle with her short hairs and with the wet lips which were soft and sleek to the touch. She was quivering with pleasure, totally oblivious to the people who walked past on the promenade overhead. I decided to risk it. I leaned down and whispered that farther along the beach we could find a place to be alone.
For a moment she did not answer. She was lying with her eyes closed almost as though she were unconscious. I knew then that she wanted to go to wherever is was, but that she had not yet overcome all her scruples. The longer she analyzed, the cooler she would become.
At this point it is always difficult to know what to do. If one is too enthusiastic, the woman has her "suspicions" confirmed; she knows what you want and is able by some species of rationalization to be shocked by your proposal. Further, as I've indicated, she's shocked, and in spite of the fact that she knew all along what you wanted; knew that she had no need to confirm her suspicions. She has, as it were, contemplated the possibility quite calmly and even with excitement up until the moment when you actually pose the question. At that moment, unless you have been extremely tactful, she is liable to become indignant that you should be able even to contemplate the possibility. On an animal level, she wants urgently to have sex. But, as soon as the desire reaches the level of speculation, the codes operative in everyday life come back into play. The most lustful woman is liable to be the most righteously indignant, perhaps because having copulated before, she is sentimental enough to regret the fact that she has nothing to lose. More probably though, it's because she resents your knowing it.
"What do you think I am!" she says dishonestly, knowing very well that you know as she does what she is and what you could most enjoyably do together.
If on the contrary, one is not enthusiastic enough, the woman is liable to be offended in almost the same way.
"What does he think I am?" she says to herself, resenting the fact that you take her compliance or non-compliance so lightly. "He treats me as though I were a lustful bitch!" That, of course, is true. The woman whose thighs have been stroked is a lustful bitch and the woman and the man (the lustful dog) both know it. The woman knows it. What she resents is the man's knowing it. She is ashamed of appearing naked in that way before another person.
The purpose of convention is to inculcate shame. Our priests have been singularly successful in teaching this for centuries. Thus a man must take account of a woman's shame, at least until he is between her legs. At that time, happily, the woman has no more need of her shame, except perhaps to increase her pleasure.
"Let's go anyway," I said. "We needn't do anything when we get there."
She opened her eyes and smiled, her suspicions calmed.
"It's not far, is it?" she asked.
Perhaps she, too, was frightened that her desire would die on the way.
"A hundred yards," I said, pointing. "Over by those rocks there."
Without another word, she rose, lifted her towel and the small bag in which she carried those articles which a woman takes to the beach, and walked beside me in the direction of the rocks.
We walked separately, almost without speaking.
The rocks were at the far end of the promenade, beyond the last hotel, and they rose up sharply and steeply enough to obscure anything from the sight of whoever passed by on the promenade. They were shaped almost like a horse-shoe within which small clusters of rock rose upwards from the flat sand, forming tiny water-logged caves. The nearest point sloped downwards almost to the sea's edge and as soon as we had walked round it, we had the impression that we were in a kind of amphitheater. Once inside, we followed the lee of the outer perimeter to a patch of dry sand, overhung by rock, but which was still in the direct line of the sun.
I threw off my jacket. She arranged her towel. We sat down. The inarticulate closeness that had existed between us a few moments before had evaporated. She was suspicious and aloof. We smoked two cigarettes, one after the other, before she finally lay down and closed her eyes. This time, she was lying on her back, the disc of her belly gleaming with oil, her long legs apart and tapering downwards from the sleek cask of her nylon bathing suit. Her thighs, soft and already tanned dark with the sun, rose smoothly under glistening particles of sand, which, as she had lain on her front, clung now to the oiled and almost hairless skin. Her breasts were held tightly and nervously in the black nylon pockets of her brassiere. Her hardened nipples showed themselves beneath the covering. Above was her face, the lips heavy and sensual, the eyes closed under almond-shaped eyelids.
There was no one in sight.
The bottle of oil represented for the moment our only means of contact. A hand uncoated with the viscous gold substance would have been received coldly, perhaps repulsed. I poured it generously into my palm before leaning over and smearing it over the smooth skin of her calves. Once my hand touched her flesh there was no further resistance, merely a twitch of her whole body as the oil ran down the inside of her legs. Now that the tensions had again relaxed, she raised her knees, exposing the hanging thighs to my caress. Soon my palms moved away and I was caressing her flesh with my fingertips. Her whole body reacted, buttocks tightening and straining to rise from the toweled sand in which they were embedded, her mound wet at my groping fingertips beneath the wafer of nylon.
The bottom part of her bathing costume peeled off the sultry white flesh of her lower abdomen like the bark off a supple switch. Suddenly the short hairs were there, windblown and rising from her damp skin in a minute commotion as the constricting nylon was pulled away. Without further delay I pulled the costume down over her willing thighs and calves and twisted it off her feet.
Her eyes were still closed. Her body was entirely bare now except for the brassiere. Gently, I insinuated my hands under her shoulder blades and unhooked it. Her breasts caved slightly to their natural set and the firm purplish aureole were exposed, stranded with spider webs of sweat that ran up over her breasts towards the armpits. She made no effort to resist as I exposed myself and laid my sex in the groove between the hotly bunched flesh of her thighs. A moment later, sucked inwards. She groaned. We rolled over under the shade of the rocks. That was my first experience of Cathie. We were together a long time.
Cathie. But she was in the past, buried there deeply, and finally. Now there was Ella.
But when, toward evening, she came on deck, she did not even look in my direction. She went forward to where Leslie was sitting and said something I couldn't catch. Then she came back. I tried to hold her eye but she avoided my glance and went below.
Her avoidance disturbed me, the more so because I had been watching her. Even a few moments before when she was standing talking to Leslie the wind had lifted her skirt gently towards the stern. I could imagine what it would have been like if I had been sitting opposite and had seen her from the other side. I thought then that the skirt would have been clinging up and against her left thigh, like a soft pew-cloth in the wind, and that the muscles of her thigh would have been clearly outlined against the cotton. I found it difficult not to think speculatively about her body, to finger it in my imagination, and yet it had been there at the other side of the partition for more than two months.
Simultaneously, I derived a pleasing sense of detachment and isolation from the fact that she ignored me. It meant, after all, that she was aware of me. From that I derived a powerful sense, a vindication, of my own existence. To exercise power without exerting it, to be detached and powerful, to be there, silent and indestructible as the gods. That is to be a god and why there are gods.
We could see the church-tower of Lairs in the distance, a black cone against a red-flecked sky, a witch's hat in a haze of blood. It seemed far away and enchanted.
Les said we would get there before seven. He knew a good place to tie up not far from the little pub he had told me about, so we would have our evening meal and get along to the pub about eight. He wondered whether our discovery of the corpse would be reported in the evening paper. He hoped it would be. Anyway, he would see a paper at the pub. He was in high spirits.
Leslie took over the wheel and I sat down and had a smoke. I was thinking that I did not want to go to the pub but I did not see how I could get out of it. I did not want to play darts, or to drink for that matter. Ella wouldn't have drunk anything and she might make that an excuse to refuse me. I had already decided to return earlier than Leslie.
Come to think of it, I had never been alone with Ella, not for more than five minutes at a stretch anyway. In fact, we had hardly spoken. She had resented me from the first, perhaps because I was a man and because she judged all men in terms of her experience with Leslie. And, of course, during the first few weeks Les and I had grown close to one another in a way that only men can. I was, I suppose, his ally against her. But now, after the dangerous intimacy at the cabin table, she must have known I was interested in her. I was anxious now to be alone with her so that I could see what her attitude was.
It was five to seven by Leslie's watch when we made Lairs. We tied the barge up in a little cutting off the main stream and before we went below he pointed out the road we would take to get to the pub afterwards. It was just up round the back of the church, he said, the coziest little place I would ever see.
Close up, the church tower looked just as disenchanted as most church towers in Scotland do. Later in the evening, as we skirted the churchyard to reach the pub, I noticed the usual ugly red and black posters proclaiming the evil influence of alcohol and the imminence of the Last Judgment.
"Let's go down and eat," I said. Les followed me.
The tea was already on the table, at least mine and his was, because Ella had had hers earlier. Leslie grunted. He had no suspicions at that time.
It was sausages for tea and bread with butter and jam to follow. So, as our sausages were already on the table, there was nothing for Ella to do except pour the tea. After she had done this, she sat down near the stove with her back to me and went on with her darning.
I began to put mustard on my sausages. Naturally they reminded me of little erections, semi-transparent and firmly sheathed in their taut casing. I paused and wondered as I contemplated the repast if Ella appreciated the similarity.
Could the musky, rutty scent I detected in the air be coming from the woman who sat now with her back to me or from my platter? Could it be she had pleasured herself with the meat now served to me? Could she have known my heightened sensibilities would appreciate the unique condiment she could have drawn from her deepest womanly parts and served exclusively to me while the lout Leslie dined on ordinary unadorned butchery?
Working below decks while we labored above, the cooking chore could thus have easily become a pleasure for Ella. She might have removed her underpants. Then, warmed before serving, she could have sorted my share of sausages from the lot. Slippery between her fingers she might have nimbly lifted one at a time from the pan and holding her dress high with the other hand, gently eased them between her spread legs into her waiting warmth.
The first would have been more difficult, her labia still tightly closed as she went about the routine of the kitchen. But slowly she would relax. The warm meat would signal its proximity to the tendrils of hair at her opening. Her juices would begin to flow and brushing the sausage against her outer lips she would slowly press it deeper and deeper until she surrounded it.
Thus mutually lubricated, she could extract the first fortunate sweetmeat and slide home another and another. No need to rush the process, she could have directed her attentions to her own feelings and explored the dark cavity below her bush as my fingers had earlier. All that would be left to evidence the exploration would be the spice the sausage left on the lips between her legs and the spice her juices left on my meal. I decided to do without the mustard.
I realized now that I was away from the wheel and the fresh air-the wheel itself under my hands had given me a feeling of control-it was only natural that I should have lost that feeling of restrained tension that made me feel so good during the afternoon. It was not easy to feel certain of her, down there in the cabin with their double bunk staring me in the face and her with her back turned to me and Leslie so sure of himself as he was thinking of darts. To Leslie it must have looked like she wasn't thinking anything, like she was just darning his socks and wondering how he got such big holes in them. But I knew she could not be as calm as she looked. She must have known she let me go too far at the midday meal to expect me to have forgotten about it. I suspected that was why she had her tea before us. She had probably thought it over during the afternoon and decided that no good could come out of it. Maybe she thought I was getting ideas above my station, for I had known for a long time that Ella was a snob and she had set her heart on leaving the canal one day to go to live in a nice little bungalow in one of the quieter suburbs of Edinburgh. Whatever she was thinking, I decided that it was a good thing I was going to the pub after all, because a couple of whiskeys would give me just the right amount of courage.
Leslie finished his food before me. He was anxious to get away to the pub. I have never known a man to hurry his meals so much. He always wolfed his meals, carrying goblets of food to his mouth on knife or fork; it depended upon which instrument was nearest which piece of food and upon the shortest distance between plate and mouth. He was leaning forward now to blow the steam from the surface of his tea.
I looked at Ella's back. It was a broad back, the back of a woman who in maturity was beginning to spread, not slackly, for I could see that her flesh was still firm, but spreading nevertheless. I thought a man might feel a powerful lust under him, opaque flesh, strongly muscled, and banded by the strong torque of her body's dynamism.
I thought, too, that so positioned he might know not just her womanly way but her tight, pinched rump hole as well. To bugger an experienced mature body like Ella's would be a treat. Perhaps even it should be her first introduction to my manhood. I doubted she had much experience-if any-at being taken that way. She would protest and struggle. That wonderful body would contort and twist as it resisted to no avail. I would triumph and break into her virgin hindmost passage.
Just the head of my raging gland first, barely into her, distending only the radiating opening that twitched its resistance at being violated so rudely. Then she would succumb to the sensations and I would read in her back and shoulders and buttocks her readiness to receive me deeper. And deeper I would plunge. Slowly, slowly, as I could interpret her surprise, her confusion and eventual delight at the new sensations this reaming would impart. Deeper and deeper until she was fully impaled and struggling for control. Her sphincter would contract and release about me. I would twitch inside her. Filled with my erection and held down by my weight astride her flanks, she would sweat and struggle vainly.
Then I would withdraw partially. A novice at such delights, she would think her experience complete. She would relax at the withdrawal while remaining cautiously tense still less she unleash the sweet vapors of her toilet. And, to her surprise, I would reverse my action and drive forward, harder and deeper again, slamming the hard bone above my probe against her tailbone, pulling and tearing at the outer limits of her nether opening while ravaging the interior. She would not be able to distinguish her pain from her pleasure; her joy from her humiliation.
I intended to return to her in the flesh, not just in my mind, just as soon as possible. I was certain that, beneath a few plausible inhibitions, she felt as I did, hungry, as though there were a kind of elemental fitness between our respective lusts. I have always felt like that about sex. Each time I close with a woman, I have the feeling that we were destined to come together, just in that way, at that time, in the field or in the bed or wherever it is. I suppose that doesn't mean anything except that I am always there, waiting, ready to be caught up in it. I am like a sexual divining rod moving furtively at the edges of a wellspring of sensuality. I wait for a sign. It has something to do with the propulsion I feel from the instant desire is born in me, a shadow on a neck, the outline of a thigh, flanks, a gesture of lips wetting themselves, until the instant when I close with the woman.
Right now I resented Ella's present coldness, her aloof resistance. It was kind of treason. She had already acquiesced. She could not back out. The whole thing sprang into existence when she stretched up to hang the clothes on the line, when the backs of her thighs were bared momentarily below her buttocks. And the risk we would run put an edge to it. I was certain that she was not unaware of my thoughts.
Leslie had already put on his cap and was waiting for me, so I went through into the small forward compartment to get mine from my bunk. When I came back, she was telling him not to get drunk. She had her back to me and I winked at Leslie over her shoulder. Then I walked past her, brushing her buttocks with the back of my hand, and climbed up through the hatch. I felt her shudder. But she didn't say anything.
"See you later," I said without looking back.
I heard Leslie laugh from above as I climbed through.
CHAPTER FOUR
A little bell above the door tinkled as we went in.
It was a neat little pub with an open fire at one end and some bright brass ship's bells hanging from the rafters. An old man in a bowler leaned across the counter and talked in a confidential voice to the barman who wore a lick of hair, stranded and oiled, like a comb on his gleaming pink forehead.
The only other customer at that hour was a young man in a cap who sat huddled over the fire as though he were trying to guard it against the room.
The barman nodded to us. He had prominent yellow eye-teeth and pinkly blue bulbous eyes. The man in the bowler turned, nodded briefly, said "howdo," and, resuming his confidential whisper, attempted to restrain the barman from hurrying to serve us. We waited politely a few yards along the bar.
Soon the barman approached us backwards, like a yoyo on a string, nodding all the time in response to the gradually expanding voice of the elderly man in the bowler hat.
"'Scuse me Mr. Keith," he said suddenly, and turned to face us. "What'll you have, gentlemen?"
We ordered two whiskeys and beer chasers. When he had served us, the barman asked us where we were from and Les told him we had come from Glasgow with a load of anthracite for Leith and the barman remembered him and asked him about another bargeman who used to come in sometimes-"What was his name?-a small sallow man he was with a harelip and he always had a woman with him who looked like a Gypsy, a girl of about twenty-five, an eye-catcher." But the barman hadn't seen them for months and the bargeman was probably dead or had given up the canal.
"Aye," Les said. "Like as not."
Les did not know the man he meant anyway and Les knew pretty well all of the bargemen. So they concluded the man couldn't have been a regular.
The barman said discreetly that he wouldn't have minded having a go at the girl. She was anybody's meat, he said, not that he would have, being married and all with two fine children.
I was impatient. I didn't like the bar. I didn't like the barman eyes, which looked as though they had been boiled in alcohol. I had difficulty in pretending not to see the look of proffered friendship in the eyes of the old man who was now edging towards us along the bar. Time was passing, valuable minutes were passing during which I could have been alone with Ella or at least outside, deciding how to go about being with her. I could not think clearly. Everything got in the way, the faces, the voices, the grease spot on the barman's tie, the hair on his pink arms, and his shiny yellow-white collar. I watched his Adam's apple move up and down as he spoke.
"How's business?" Les was saying.
I swallowed my whiskey at a gulp and pushed my glass forward to be refilled.
The barman leaned back, selected the bottle, and began to refill my glass. "It was slack," he said. "There isn't any money about these days. Saturday night wasn't bad."
"Same everywhere," Les said.
"Taxes," the voice of the man in the bowler hat said.
"Follow you to the grave," said the barman.
Les laughed. "Talking of the dead," he said, "you don't by any chance have an evening paper?"
"Sure. What's up?"
Les explained that he and I had picked up a stiff out of the river that morning. She was stark naked, Leslie said.
The barman whistled and the old man with the bowler took the cue to move up and join us.
"Murder?" he said. He had a long chin and his watery eyes were unpleasant. He was looking at me, inviting confirmation.
"Must've been," the barman said, "if she had no clothes on. Young?"
Les said that it was difficult to say, but that she could not have been over thirty. He asked me what I thought.
I said she was twenty-seven.
"Was she cut up like?" the man in the bowler said.
"Not a mark," Les said untruthfully, for the buttocks had been rather badly scratched. "Here, have you got the paper?"
The barman reached under the counter and passed it across. Les moved systematically over the columns with his thumb.
"Let's have another drink," I said.
The barman poured it automatically, changed the coin, and I retreated from the bar and sat with my drink at one of the tables. The conversation came to me from a distance. I examined the whiskey in the glass, allowing it to ride against the sides of the glass as though I were searching for something within it. Of course I was. But my gaze was the kind of impotent gaze that a man in the gallery casts towards a chorus girl in the front row. At that moment, I resented my poverty, intellectual as well as economic.
Just then I heard Les say triumphantly: "There it is!"
"Where for Christ's sake?"
"There!"
And he read: The body of a dead woman was found in the River Clyde this morning. The woman was wearing only a thin petticoat. She is so far unidentified. The police are investigating the possibility of foul play.
"Thought you said she was naked?"
"Same thing. These petticoats are transparent." It was not difficult to leave before Leslie. I told him I had a headache. The man in the bowler had offered to play darts with him. I said goodnight all round and left.
In the fresh air it came to me that I had had too much to drink. Not really too much, but enough to slow down my reactions, to make me careless and know it without being able to do anything about it. I felt it in my walk. That worried me.
I walked slowly down the narrow road past the church and stopped to read the poster, which I had glanced at on the way to the pub. It was too dark to see then. I found myself lighting a match and holding it close to the boards. The match burned my fingers and went out. I cursed silently and stepped backwards. Farther down the road I said goodnight to a policeman who I felt sure was watching me. Then I crossed the road quickly and turned down the little side street that led to the canal. I was already thinking about what I was going to say. By the time I reached the canal, clouds covered the sky and it was drizzling slightly. When I came within sight of the barge I stopped to blow my nose and laughed at myself for being nervous. I was nervous, without a single thought in my head about how I was going to do this thing, about how I was finally going to break in on Ella's world. I listened to the fall of my own footsteps on gravel.
The barge was lumpish, in shadow. I walked towards it. Somewhere nearby a dog barked.
***
Now it was dark and the canal water was there as witness. It forced itself on me, a sound, a smell, present as we walked. Ella was walking at my side and I had my arm round her waist. She had been insistent that we leave the barge, despite the damp weather.
It was a dark night on the towpath and there was no moon. Her face was there, just a bit phosphorescent beside me. I tried to recall how she was at first reluctant and then the sudden lift, her voice almost triumphant, when she agreed to come on deck with me. She put on a yellow slicker and we left the barge. We were walking past a hoarding when she stopped. She said that she wasn't going any farther, but she said it softly, as though she were afraid of being overheard. It was not that she was resisting me. Realizing it, I moved her against the hoarding and stood very close to her. It was a chill night.
The rubberized material of the slicker was very real and it filled my touch and nostrils with its presence. But all other bodily entanglements fell away. I touched and was touched only by the woman and the rubber foul weather gear. The scents intermixed and mingled, became as one to my mind. Living flesh and the textured, giving yellow outer skin of latex came together at my fingertips.
I realized suddenly that her clothes were not part of her. It sounds like a truism, but in the intensity of the moment it is a wonderful discovery. The cloth seemed to crumble beneath my hand and I felt the strong flank muscles arching firmly beneath. I had to put my hand under her chin and tilt her face upwards towards me. Her lips were thick and licentious. She opened her mouth without resistance. And then I slipped my hand under her slicker to her thigh. The cotton dress, the same one, was warm under my fingers. I could feel that she wasn't wearing anything underneath. The dress lifted lightly over her skin. I kissed her then at the same time and we stood there swaying slightly as though the light night wind, smelling of the canal, had the power to move us.
She sank downwards onto the grass. I followed her. And then my hand feathered her strong belly, teasing the hairs that were delicate towards the navel where, abruptly, the belt of the dress girdled her, making her belly curve upwards like a great white moon of sensuality. She was breathing heavily, her heavy thighs widening to encourage my pressure. Softly, with my knuckles, I came against her, allowing her rising wetness to be felt, considered, between my fingers. She had closed her eyes. Her frock, peeled upwards now above her hips, revealed the derelict posture, from the abdomen downwards, the knees slightly raised, the whole creature part of her like a strange night animal trapped beyond its lair. I moved downwards. Across her belly, across the thigh that rose against my cheek, I saw the glimmer of the canal water, and beyond that nothing, for the houses on the opposite bank were already lightless, their inhabitants asleep. The dog barked in the distance.
It was perhaps the dog's bark that brought me back to time. I don't think I had ever seen anything lovelier than Ella in her abandoned position. The obstinate stupidity was gone. The futility of her existence was utterly transcended. I heard her say huskily: "Now, Joe," and a moment later we were together, fused, as lead is fused to lead. The dew on the grass was on her buttocks and on the backs of my hands which contained them. There was an immense relief at my belly as hers rose, supporting it.
Later, she rose from the grass like an animal shaking itself into wakefulness. I had lit a cigarette and was standing back smoking with my back against the hoarding. I noticed then for the first time that the weather had cleared and there were stars.
I watched her tidy herself. She did it impatiently, or rather with the air of impatience, because she moved slowly, as though she were giving herself time to compose her face before she looked at me. I watched her button up her slicker.
"The police are investigating that woman," I said.
She looked at me. "What made you think of that?"
"Something to say."
"You've done enough talking for one night," she said.
I could see the expression on her face.
"Are you sorry?"
"A fat lot of good that would do me!"
"We'd better be getting back," I said. "I told Leslie you'd have a cup of tea ready for him when he got back."
"You would!"
She was bending down brushing her bare legs with her hand. As she rose again, I pulled her towards me and kissed her. For a moment we tried to see each other's eyes in the dark and then she freed herself.
"Get back to the barge," she said. "We must."
She made me walk, apart from her and, as the towpath wasn't wide enough for two to walk abreast and apart at the same time, she walked in front.
As I followed, I was wondering what thoughts were running through her head, whether she regretted it now it was over or whether she would want to develop the relationship. I knew that Leslie wasn't much use to her in that way.
She had told me her age, thirty-three. She was probably two years older. I wondered whether I was the first to take her since her marriage. I supposed I was. Living with him on the barge, it wouldn't be easy for her; they were moving most of the time. And anyway, she did not strike me as the kind of woman who would go out looking for it. She was a snob. And she despised men, at least up till now she had, or pretended to do so, with that thick sarcastic voice of hers.
We climbed onto the barge and went down below and put the light on. The paraffin lamp was smoking, scorching the globe, and she leaned over the table to turn it down.
As the lamplight struck her face I noticed again how full her lips were. She was the kind of woman I liked, mature, strong-bodied, with a thick opaque quality of flesh. Her hair, though cut short, was quite straight. In spite of the fact that I hadn't been aware of her before, I found myself thinking that she was the kind of woman a man was bound to be conscious of; a woman whose body was still young, not fat, and yet which appeared at the belly, hips and breasts to be about to tear through the fragile too-much-washed cotton dress that encased it. If she turned at the waist, it seemed, the cotton would rend apart.
"Too bad he's coming back," I said.
She finished with the lamp.
"What?"
"Too bad he's coming back."
I nodded towards the double bunk. There was something seductive about its faded quilt, almost colorless in the soft yellow light of the paraffin lamp. Through the partition I often heard it creak under their weight and their swearing, muffled conversations. And that time in the middle of the night I had heard the thick searing sound of the heavy leather belt. But the noises were always too spasmodic and infrequent for them to be those of a man and woman making love.
"In there," I said. "In the bunk."
She smiled at me for the first time since I had raised my body from hers.
"You're nice, Joe," she said, squeezing my wrist. And then she turned away and lit the gas under the kettle. I sat down at the table and glanced at the morning paper.
"Did you bring the paper back with you, Joe?"
"No, Leslie's got it."
"What did it say about that woman?"
"Not much. Just that the police were investigating."
She shrugged her shoulders and didn't say anything. I saw her profile from where I was sitting. Her face was set, heavy at the jaw, slightly sullen, tilted downwards, looking at the kettle on the stove. One hand grasped the handle of the kettle as though she were willing it to boil. Behind, on the planks of the partition, was her shadow. I watched that for a moment and then returned to the paper.
"Are you hungry?" she said. Her back was turned to me. Her voice came again: "I could fry you an egg."
It was a confession.
"Not now, Ella. Just a cup of tea."
A few moments later we heard footsteps on the towpath, and then the clump of Leslie's boots on the deck.
"It's him," she said without looking round, just as Leslie, climbing downwards and backwards, descended into the cabin. Sometimes he did that, although the steps were broad enough for a person to come down the other way. I supposed he had been drinking heavily after I left.
When he turned round, my first thought was that he knew about Ella and me. He looked at us, from one to the other, without speaking. Then he slipped off his raincoat and hung it up on a peg. Next to the slicker Ella had worn. He sat down at the table opposite me and looked at his folded hands on the table in front of him. The lamplight accentuated the scarred and dust-pitted surfaces of his stubby fingers.
"You two are bloody quiet," he said.
"Pity you aren't," Ella said without turning round.
I glanced at her. It was as though she had suddenly become her old self again. She was putting on her apron. When I looked back at Leslie, his face had changed too. He had that hurt, sullen expression that a drunk has when he is afraid of a woman and unable to answer her back. He looked out of the corner of his eye at me.
"What's up Leslie?" I said.
"I know damn well what's up," Ella said harshly, still without turning round. "He's been losing money at darts again. Then he comes back here and tries to take it out on me!"
"I never lost a penny at darts!"
"You're a liar!"
He looked as though he was about to strike her, but evidently thought better of it. He said instead, "Is the tea ready yet?"
"What's your hurry? You don't expect to come back at this time of night and have me at your beck and call?"
Leslie drooped. Ella's back was still towards us. Looking at her now, I realized that you had to think in terms of two women, his and mine. His was hard. I could understand Les' dumb frustration, even sympathize with it. Mine, he had probably never known. It was difficult to square what I supposed his experience of her to be with the woman who, half an hour previously, had bared her belly for me against the hoarding and then sunk downwards through my arms onto the grass.
The cabin clock, a little brass clock nailed above their bunk, struck ten. Ella was now infusing the tea, and Leslie, apparently recovered from his loss of face, asked me what I thought of the mangy write-up of our discovery in the paper.
I said I wasn't really interested.
"They always catch them in the end," Leslie said.
I didn't reply.
Ella poured the tea. She had removed her apron again and I felt her leg close to mine under the table. I put my hand on her knee under her dress and let it lie there, just moving my fingers slightly. The flesh was warm. She did not make any attempt to restrain me. But she did not respond or show in any way what was happening to her either. We sat like that, talking in a desultory way of nothing in particular for about half an hour, and then I turned in and left them together in the main cabin. I could hear their voices talking on for a while as I lay there in the bunk with the blanket drawn over me. Then the light in their cabin, which penetrated through the seam between two of the planks in the partition about a yard from where my feet were, was suddenly put out. After that, I could not hear what they were saying. Anyway, I wasn't interested. They were talking as a husband and wife talk, and that had nothing to do with Ella and me and our coming together. Leslie was irrelevant. Presently, he began to snore. It suddenly occurred to me that she might risk visiting me during the night, but I put the thought away from me. She wouldn't do that. I lay awake for a while. I could still feel her skin against mine, like smooth surfaces meeting. I supposed she could still feel me, even though she was in a bunk with another man. In a sense, she wasn't with Leslie at all, but there with me all the time, in touch, in smell, traces on my skin and in my nostrils as I fell asleep.
I closed my eyes. The water was lapping against the side of the barge. I dreamed the most pleasant dreams.
I dreamed of living in the golden age of myth and legend. I was a satyr and the gentle woods and pleasant hills and dales that were my domain ripe with nymphs and fairies and sweet things there for my taking.
Still, in this dream it was not an easy time for me. The subjects of my kingdom knew that a good portion of the ultimate pleasure, for them and for me, was in the pursuit. And they obliged by making it difficult. Also, they were not all ready at all times to accept all pleasures. So I was continually challenged by the game of detecting the correct partner to serve my wants and desires at the moment. And, finally, each of my dreamtime subjects was not always willing to do precisely as I desired. That meant I was called on to discover the pleasure and perversity of each and to create laws and mete out punishment to those who would ultimately disobey their lord and master. Ah, it truly was a golden age and a sweet dream.
CHAPTER FIVE
The slow lick of the water against the belly of the barge was still present when I awoke, as though during the night it had guarded the connection between states of waking and waking. Often when I woke up I had the feeling that I was in a coffin. Each time that happened I recognized the falseness of the thought a moment later, for one could never be visually aware of being enclosed on all sides by coffin walls. As soon as one saw the walls, as soon as light entered, one would no longer be cut off. So the finality of the coffin would have disintegrated. And then I would be conscious again of the sound of the water and of the almost imperceptible movement of the barge in relation to it.
That morning I was awakened by the smell of cooking bacon and by Leslie coughing in the main cabin. Leslie always coughed in the morning. You would have thought he was coughing his inside out, a big rasping cough which began somewhere deep down in his chest and ended with a struggle in his throat, as though all the poisons in his body had collected in his lungs during the night.
The convulsion lasted for about five minutes and then I heard him banging out the dottle in his pipe on the side of his bunk. A moment later he would have filled it again and he would be sucking the flickering flame into the heavy sweet black tobacco.
I ate a square of chocolate and as I screwed up the wrapper, the fact of Ella gradually dawned upon me again as a small needle-sharp excitement above and behind my loins. Ella. I was glad the day had arrived. Everything was changed, including my attitude toward the barge, toward the canal. For the first time in weeks, I was looking forward to getting out of bed.
Not long afterwards, Ella opened the door and came in with my morning cup of tea. She gave us both a cup of tea in bed every morning. Usually she came into my compartment, laid the cup on the orange-box which served as a bedside table and went out again. Usually, if I bothered to look at her face, I saw hostility there, at least impatience. This morning it was different.
I watched her hesitate in the doorway with the teapot in one hand, my cup in the other. Without speaking she put the cup down on the box and with her hand thus freed, opened her dressing gown. Her hand moved in a circle about her upper body, pushing the garment back on her shoulders and allowing it to drape free down her sides, exposing her breasts and belly and hips and delta of dark hair and powerful thighs and knees and straight shins and strong feet to my scrutiny. Eyes closed and head tilted back slightly, the flat of her hand explored all the exposed skin that fairly flamed with the heat and passion of her touch.
Still holding the teapot in one hand, she sank slowly forward to her knees, robe still open and hanging from her shoulders with the material from her hips to the hemline piled around her on the deck of the cabin. Her knees had come down a good distance apart, her thighs were separated and deep in the shadows I could see the moist glint of her pink labia deep between them. She settled not quite back on her haunches and her free hand moved between her legs and spread her moist slit further. Then she brought the teapot around and moved her singular grip from its handle to caress the vessel, spout toward her, with both hands.
Slowly she brought the tip of the spout to her waiting opening. A warm, moist breath of vapor condensed and glistened on the hair of her mons.
The opening of the spout entered her. As it did, she rose slightly on her tensed legs, her breath caught, her head tossed back a bit further and her entire body signaled the invasion. Only tip deep, she moved the teapot up and down, stimulating the length of her eager opening. Then she dropped it low, almost to the floor boards and rocked up and forward, then down, impaling herself fully on the length of the gooseneck. Thus pierced, full of the smoothly turned "S" of the spout, she rocked in pleasure. I could hear the warm golden liquid sloshing in the pot, up the spout and into her chamber and back out again. The seconds passed like hours as I watched her delightful performance.
Then, teapot still between her legs, she moved her grip once again and freed one hand. Without a word she ran it under the blanket, over my belly and down the side of my flank. She grasped my erect shaft and gave it a tug, slid her hand along its length to its tip, damp and sticky with the propellant of my seed, then released. She took her dampened fingers and put them to her lips as I had seen her do the morning she pleasured herself at the snoring Leslie's side.
Unrequited, I tried to reach out to her but she abruptly removed the spout from its fleshy tea cozy, gathered her garment about her and filled the awaiting cup with the mornings exotic mix.
"Drink your tea," she said.
She waited until she saw me drinking it before she went out again, and then I heard her heavy walk on the wooden floor of the main cabin. I closed my eyes. Each time her feet moved, the impact would send a minute quiver up the sinews of her leg into the ambiguous and tensile mass of her broad thighs. I could almost smell them again. I could taste her in the tea. I felt relaxed.
***
I was standing on deck, looking along the canal bank. There, about a hundred yards ahead, was the hoarding and the grass verge where we had lain down. About twenty yards behind the hoarding was a cottage of whose presence we had been unaware the previous night. We had made love almost in the garden.
"Nice little house," Leslie said.
I nodded.
We both looked at it for a moment and I wondered if the situation was as artificial for him as it was for me. It was as though, because we had nothing to say to each other, we tacitly agreed to feign interest in the same thing, or what was outwardly the same thing, for the cottage must had had different associations for him and for me. It occurred to me that human beings often compromise with each other in this way. They choose what appears to be, but what each knows certainly not to be, a point of contact. And so we looked together at the same cottage and I said: "It needs re-slating, though." Les, catching the thread, went on to say that re-slating was expensive these days. So the shuttle moved backwards and forwards between us, neither of us willing to interfere with the glib mechanism, not at least until an alternative point of contact suggested itself. What we said was trivial, but our saying of it was not. That was often the way between Les and me. And since the previous night, because I was aware of something which concerned him intimately and was unable to speak of it, the actual distance between us had increased immeasurably.
Conversation was difficult that morning. Les thought of something for us to do, I forget what exactly, with a hammer and nails. Ella came on deck with her shopping basket while we were doing it. She watched for a few moments and then, without saying anything, she went along the canal bank and out of sight into the road leading up to the church. Leslie was more involved in the job than I was. As I bent down over the wood, I watched her walk away swinging the wicker basket by her side.
I never get tired of watching women walk, especially if they walk like Ella did, with slow, heavy movements, and a spring that did not come to the surface but vibrated at the thighs and at the haunches like a force held in check. Those thighs taut as she positioned her body over and on the teapot flashed to my mind again. The tension as she rocked the teapot between those powerful haunches and stimulated her outer lips then into the deeper recesses of her succulent passage. The rippling as they held her pierced by the porcelain and poised on the edge of release. Ah, women's bodies are wonderful things.
"Mind your thumb," Leslie said, "or I'll cut it off."
He was grinning at me and I found myself steadying a plank for him and Leslie with a three-foot saw in his hands. That surprised me because I had not been conscious of the saw or of the new position I had taken up. I moved my hand slightly.
The moving saw began to retch its way into the wood.
"Think it'll rain?"
I looked up. The sky was beginning to be overcast, as though part of it were being stained gradually at its edges by the other part. The canal was choppy at the surface.
"Looks like it," I said.
"We'll go down and make a cup of tea," Leslie said. "There's nothing much to do anyway."
We were drinking this ordinary tea when Ella came back. She had been caught in the rain, soaked to the skin. She got behind me and changed her dress. Leslie was reading the morning paper she had brought back, and presently he looked up and said: "Not a word about it here, Joe. An old woman's had her head bashed in in Paisley, but there's nothing about our one."
Behind me, I could hear Ella's movement and her breathing in and out again as she stepped into dry clothes. There was a sliding sound, soft, prickling slightly, as the garments passed upwards over her legs and thighs. I was conscious of the wet smell of her as I was in the closeness of the night before. I fought an impulse to turn round. Then her voice said: "What's it to you anyway? Can you not leave her alone now she's dead?"
Leslie grunted inarticulately. When he spoke, it was to say that the old woman had sat upright in her armchair for three days after she was dead. If the milkman had not noticed that her milk remained uncollected at the doorstep and reported it to the police, she would still be there, dead, with her head bashed in, in the empty house.
"Funny that," said Leslie brightly. "Sometimes you don't know what's under your own nose."
Dinner went much as usual. I touched Ella once under the table. She flushed faintly and went on eating. When we went on deck, the rain was off, but over the fields and the canal gusts of whiteness blew, not rain, but damply and wild, visible only when they thickened under the force of the wind, making the atmosphere bracing and uncertain.
As I stood at the wheel and we moved slowly along the canal, that uncertainty communicated itself to me, making me impatient to be with Ella again. I wondered what she was doing, thinking, if she was waiting down there below, also fidgeting and impatient. I imagined the warmth of the cabin, the wood, the leather, the stove. Had I been alone on the barge with Ella, I would have tied up to the bank. In the cabin we would have been aware of the weather but been untouched by it. The barge would have rocked gently as she climbed naked onto the bunk for me.
After I had allowed her to explore me fully, Ella would mount me as she had mounted the teapot; as the tandem riders of Les' youth had mounted him. Astride my chest with her pungent sex spread open and willingly wet before me, I could lay my unfettered hands on the haunches I so admired and caress their tensile strength and powerful beauty. I would spread her thighs still further apart and cause her to rise up off her buttocks and bring her slippery slit closer to my waiting mouth. Then I would honor her with a tonguing that would leave her eager to know the full penetrating hardness of my rod.
First I would tease the fleshy darkness of her outer lips, moistening and tugging at them with my lips, letting them transmit to the deeper recess the hint of pleasure to come. Her hot juices would flow as I nuzzled deeper beyond the coarse hair and outer folds to the sweeter delights secreted beneath the sheltering flesh. My tongue would find the pinker meat of her willing body and ream the tighter orifice buried closer to the bone.
Her erect simulacrum of a penis would fall to my gaze as her openness spread before me. It would brush my upper lip as I extracted the tasty juice from her ravaged slit. Then I would lift my chin against the hindmost length of her womanliness and nip the tiny guardsman between my teeth. She would start at the experience, then plunge forward begging for further stimulation. And so I would ravage her, pressing my face fully into that fleshy wonderland of womanly intricacy, sucking and poking with my tongue, pressing my lips and face and nose at parts unseen even by their possessor, biting at delicate bits, insinuating the roughness of my beard on baby-soft flesh and bringing red blood dotting to the surface to commingle with all the saliva and womanly release mixing there.
With Ella thus satiated, I would have my release. Well lubricated below I would press at her hips and slide her down my chest until my erect member reached the first opening backing down upon it. While she was thoroughly afire, I would penetrate Ella's untouched nether opening and cram my rod hard up its tight passage.
She would throw her arms back to ease the entry, raising some and tightening those fine muscles in the fore part of her legs. Impaled by my horn up her rump, the entryway so sweetly tasted moments before would spread open before my sight, wet and tangled, all shades of pink, red and lavender, fairly gasping as if an independent living thing enjoying the sensations experienced by its near opening. And all the while the barge would rock with us, bringing parts deeper and closer together.
Later in the afternoon, Ella came on deck to hang up some wet dishtowels. She did this near the stern where the wheel was and I had an opportunity to speak to her. But she was evasive, pretending in the wind not to catch what I said. When she had hung up the towels she went below again. I had the impression that she was slipping away from me. Leslie went below then. About ten minutes later, he came back on deck with a cup of tea for me. He took the wheel while I drank and my eyes returned to the landscape where, in gusts, the trees and fields were swept as though by invisible brushes.
As evening approached, Clowes came in sight. Another small canal town, more industrial than Lairs.
We noticed the fair immediately. The marquees were pitched in the fields to the left which bordered the canal. The hurdy-gurdy music was suspended in the atmosphere for a long time before we saw them, or the stalls or the brightly painted caravans and lorries. Les stepped out on the deck for a better look. Ella, too, came up from below, looking questioningly up round the hatch. She had heard the music.
I realized then that the fields were out of the question that night, even supposing I succeeded in getting Leslie away from the barge and got back myself. I felt Ella look at me and look away. She was finding fault with me, I felt. Ever since she had come on deck to hang the towels up, the feeling that she was sliding away from me had persisted, like a toothache all afternoon. Now her glance, and the way in which she turned away again without a sign and without speaking, confirmed my doubt. I almost called out to her, but when she disappeared below again, I was glad that I hadn't. I would not have known what to say.
Les came back along the deck towards me.
"Seen it?" he said, nodding backwards over his shoulder.
I nodded.
Les sat down beside me and we both looked and listened. Then, on the towpath not far ahead, we saw a man. He was sitting on the grass verge, leaning forwards, his shoulders hunched, his chin on his chest. As we approached him he did not look up.
"Tramp," Leslie said.
"Not much of him."
Leslie glanced at me.
"The tramp," I said. "Look at his boots."
Two white sticks, the shins unsocked, like a thin neck from a collar, thrust upwards from split boots. The man's head under the old fedora remained tilted upwards as we passed.
"Can't hear us," Leslie said.
"He's not interested."
Leslie tapped out his pipe on the deck.
"Scare the birds," he said.
"Poor bugger."
"A man won't work," Les said.
"Not much work left there," I said.
"For the crows," Les said.
"Or the rain, Les."
"You'd be surprised," Les said. "A few nights in the open. They get toughened to it."
And we both looked backwards but the man hadn't moved. He was folded like a penknife at the waist as though for the last time.
"Might be dead."
Leslie laughed.
"You never saw a dead tramp," he said. "They don't die like the rest of us."
"Who buries them?"
"A pauper's grave," Les said. "But they don't die in the open. They go indoors to die."
The music from the fairground was louder now and we could see the brass poles of the roundabouts spiraling upwards and downwards.
"Not much farther," Leslie said. "We'll tie up along there."
"Do you think he was dying?"
"Who?"
"The tramp."
"Drunk more likely. Might take a look at the fair tonight."
Sure, I said. It might be interesting.
Leslie was looking back again.
"There he goes," he said.
The tramp had shifted. Still bent, his crumpled trousers tight on his shanks, he moved off in the opposite direction. He was more like a windmill than a man.
We tied up a few minutes later. And then Ella was calling on us to come down for our tea.
"You boys going over to the fair for a while?" Ella asked Leslie.
"What about you?" he inquired without answering.
"I've got work to do." She hadn't looked at me since I had come down, but it had not occurred to me until she spoke because I had been thinking about the tramp and wondering whom he reminded me of.
It was not a direct resemblance, but there was a connection somewhere with someone. Something vaguely familiar. I was not able to put my finger on it until later. The familiarity was the familiarity of limbs out of control, of something missing that should have been there. The dead are like that, and the maimed, and the tramp was as he moved off. All irrelevant. And the canal and time and the barge which has passed him while he sat folded up on the grass was irrelevant too, all except the gratuitous moment in which he was involved. Even that was not his own because the man was absent from it. He had come close then to my memory of the corpse in the water, which was only a movements of limbs, less rigid than he, but in some unmistakable way the same.
When Ella spoke, I gave up trying to find the connection. When I looked at her, she had raised the cup to her lips and they were touching the surface of the tea, pushing away and sucking at the same time. She was looking straight in front of her.
"I'll stay aboard if you'd like to go," I said.
I knew she was going to refuse but I wanted her to remember I was there. Somehow, I was afraid to touch her under the table. There was a wall between us, inexplicably there suddenly.
"I've no time," she said. "You can go, too."
"We'll go," Les said enthusiastically. Turning to me he added, "We don't need to stay too long, Joe."
"Sure," I said. But it had already occurred to me that Ella would be alone on the barge.
***
The ring of colored lights was turning. A man was speaking through a megaphone. The stalls opened like bright yellow mouths laughing. The hurdy-gurdy music formed a ceiling over the jutting squares of electric light bulbs. The timbers of the switchback were high over on the left. Leslie led the way, pushing through the crowd, turned, grinned back at me and then moved on.
Then at one stall the penny rolled down the chute and landed on a square marked 4d. The woman tossed four pennies flatly across the squared cloth. Leslie retrieved them.
"Always win," he said.
Above everything, the night was dark blue. The board at the upper rim of the stall read "Abott Bros." It was scored with mud and paint. A man at the other side of me was pressing against me, a weight of shoulder, smelling of brilliantine and tobacco. Leslie had lost. His last penny landed on a line between two numbers. He was calling for change. The moon-faced woman with crinkling blond hair seemed to swim across the stall to me. The man beside her was looking at a roundabout.
"Five pence," Leslie said, pointing.
It was raining. I had been aware of it for the last few minutes.
"It's raining, Les."
None of his coins had landed properly.
The shoulder dunted me. Excuse me, it said.
"It's raining," Les.
Somebody was making a commotion at the back of the crowd. I leaned forward under the roof of the stall to be out of the rain which spat coldly in. I was thinking of Ella. The roundabout had stopped. People were dismounting.
"It's raining, Les."
"What?"
"Rain," I said.
The commotion touched my shoulder. I turned round. A black face and white teeth, one gold one, was smiling.
"Leslie!"
"Bob!"
They shook hands.
"On the canal. We move off tomorrow morning," Leslie was saying.
People were hurrying away under umbrellas. A crush of three rushed past under one mackintosh.
"Come somewhere where it's dry," Bob was saying.
His friend was leading. We reached shelter under the structure of the switchback. After a few moments the fairground was deserted except for people taking shelter here and there near the stalls. The rain became heavier still, forming puddles on the grass. The music had been turned off. We listened to the noise of the rain.
"It can't last," Leslie said.
"How's the wife, Leslie?"
"Fine. Jesus! Look at it!"
The wetness rose damply with its smell and circulated round our trouser legs.
"Fine, Bob. How's yours?"
"She's expecting."
"Ha!"
"We're looking for a house."
"We'll make a dash for it in a minute," Leslie said. "Shall we head for the pub?"
Bob shook his head in the affirmative. In the bad light, his hair had a grisly appearance and the raindrops moved downwards slowly from his temples to his cheeks. Walls, with rain on them, I felt for a moment.
"I don't want to go home," Jim said.
"Jesus! What a night," Leslie said.
"You could take him to the pictures," Bob said. "Would you like to go to the pictures?"
"Then let's get going," Leslie said. "What do you think, Joe? You come along?"
"Aye."
I lit another cigarette, shielding the match in my hands. The palms, close to my eyes, were the same palms which would raise Ella's buttocks, causing her thighs to fall apart, like a book open, pressed upwards at the spine. That gave me a strange feeling. Then the match went out and I lowered my hands.
"All right, I'll walk you into town, have a drink with you boys as you reminisce."
"Come on now," Bob said. "It may come on again."
We moved out from under the switchback. Everything was dripping and the sodden turf squished underfoot.
"Watch where you put your feet," Bob was saying. "It's not far. This way."
His voice might have been that of a professional guide. We walked between two rows of stalls. The lights were going out, one by one.
"Tough luck on the fair," Leslie was saying.
"Up this road now," Bob said. "It's not far."
He was walking in front, chatting with Leslie. I tailed along. The air after the rain was pleasant, like air blown in off the sea at night, and the hedges on either side of the road rustled softly.
Shortly we reached the pub that was bustling with dampened fair goers who had much the same idea as we three. The mood was jovial and Les and Bob fell quickly into the spirit of the evening, full of boisterous backslapping and drink after drink. I remained subdued and innocuous, quaffed the first round that Bob bought for us and let the two of them gradually slip away from me. When some time had passed and more ale had been downed by the reunited old shipmates and the stories were getting more and more personal, I made my excuses to them fairly unnoticed and slipped out into the night.
I was walking along the main street, which was nearly deserted. The canal bank would be deserted, too. Gravel and rain. The deck of the barge would be slippery. I felt free for the first time since early morning. There had been a nightmare aspect about the fair. I had been involved without being caught up in something that had nothing to do with me, and, being so involved, was cut off from myself, from my own direction. Now suddenly I was no longer coerced and the world came to exist for me again, not as a foreign element to be looked at, but as a climate in which I could become immersed.
It had got colder. I buttoned up my jacket as I walked. I remembered the crinkling blond hair of the woman who had stood opposite at the stall and then the birdlike jerk of the tramp. It was then that it occurred to me that it was the dead woman he reminded me of. Something missing. What was missing seemed to imply what was not there.
The rain was still holding off. I passed the public urinal. I felt somehow a hostility in the glances of the few loungers who hung about it. It struck me as strange how they stood there alone or in small groups, smoking, idling the time away. One of them laughed, but I did not hear what was said. A policeman passed me on a bicycle. Funny-I always notice policemen. The tires swished along the wet road and his cloak blew out like a tent behind him. I supposed he was going home.
Then I was returning down the road between the hedges-hawthorn, I think. I could hear the branches dripping onto the grass and bracken on either side. A cat rose from the ditch, darted across the road and went through the hedge on the other side. Someone was walking in front of me, going in the same direction. His footsteps did not get any louder. I slowed down until they had passed out of earshot. Not far then. I passed the fairground. A few lights were still burning. I heard a woman's laugh. Farther on, I heard two men talking behind the hedge. By the time I reached the canal everything was silent except for the ambiguous presence of the canal itself. There is a noise that is peculiar to inland water at night, a kind of radiation that is not exactly sound and not exactly smell. It is closed to touch; it is, precisely, a presence. There was no one on the footpath. I walked carefully along the path and boarded the barge.
It was dark in the cabin and quiet except for the tick of the clock above their bunk.
I moved with my hands in front of me like a blind man. I found a chair and sat down. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I became aware of Ella's breathing. She was in the bunk and somehow I was convinced she was not sleeping. She must have known it was me. She must have heard me come down through the companionway.
"Ella!"
She didn't answer. Dimly, the clock face reflected what seemed to be an eternity behind the glass, as though there were a tunnel there leading into an obscure distance. I saw Ella's shape under the blanket, the edge of the table, the paraffin lamp, dark masses of varying densities at my elbows and at my feet and at the other side of the cabin. A shaft of lesser darkness came down through the companionway. "Ella!"
I put out my hand and touched her shoulder. It was only then that I realized she was crying, not loudly, but softly into the pillow. I could not see why. My fingers were still on her shoulder.
At that moment she moved her arm.
"Go away, Joe. I don't want to see you."
"You're mad," I said. I was mystified.
"Go away, Joe!"
"For God's sake!"
As I said it, I stepped backwards and my arm caught the paraffin lamp which tilted and fell over. The glass splintered as it crashed on the deck.
"Now look what you've done!" She sat up.
"I can't see a bloody thing," I said. "Wait till I strike a match."
Ella swung off the bunk.
"Give them to me," she said, "and stand back out of the way until I clear it up."
I felt her take the matchbox from my hand and a fraction of a second later a match spurted into flame between her fingers. In the sudden, brief eruption of the match I could see her clearly, her shadow on the woodwork, and the clock with its brass ring. At that moment it struck nine, its small chime magnified by the artificiality of the situation. The match went out and she lit another. She was bending, trying to see where the lamp had fallen. The cabin smelt strongly of paraffin.
"It's leaking," she said.
"Have you got a candle?"
"Les used the last one."
She did not appear to be aware that I was watching her. She was wearing a very loose white slip that hung on loose strings from her shoulders so that the nipples of her breasts showed clearly in the light. The slip clung tightly against her relaxed belly and stopped just short of the knees like a badly fitting curtain. Her thick legs were planted firmly on broad feet on the floor and her heavy upper arms slewed from side to side as she cupped her hands round the match to direct its beam on the deck. I noticed that she had a mole on her side, almost under the armpit where the hairs grew thickly and twisted into wisps. She smelled warm, of sleep-sweat, of the bed.
"Watch your feet," I said. "You'll get them cut."
"Can you see where the brush is?" she said, turning towards me.
I was barring her way.
"Joe... "
"He won't be back for hours," I said.
She was going to protest but when I moved against her, she drew in her breath instead. I held her against me, my thumbs under her armpits massaging the damp hairs and the remainder of my fingers crushing her at the fat parts of her shoulders. She did not resist. I relaxed my grip and moved my hands downwards over the hard flesh of her back to her haunches, pressing and relaxing with my hands so that her thick abdomen came against my clothed belly in a series of little shocks. A moment later, her head buried in my shoulder, she put one thigh between mine and pressed her belly close to me. As she did so, I discovered her skin beneath the smock-like nightgown and felt with the side of my forefinger the urgent little beard of damp hair that hung down between her thighs. I moved her to the bunk, undressed quickly and slipped in beside her.
The previous evening, I had met her at my most urgent part. We had come together only at our lower bellies and upper thighs. This time it was quite different. Our limbs intertwined, our bellies met, her full breasts gave as my chest pressed against them and her arms, soft and glistening now with a pinprick sweat, folded about me, one hand moving down between my buttocks and the other pressing my head close so that our lips met firmly and our mouths broke open to each other. I moved my hand slowly at the sensitive fork of her torso and rolled inexorably over until her broad front bore my weight like a broken catapult.
Afterwards, as we lay in each other's arms beneath the rough blanket, the sides of her belly and her flanks were covered in a thin lather of sweat. We breathed in and out together, deeply, so that our bellies met together and fell away again, leaving a slight prickle on the skin.
Outside, it began to rain steadily. We could hear the hushed fall on the water, on the gravel, on the wood. It was there with our breathing, a curtain of sound, something outside of us to which we both listened as, with our eyes open, and with our own thoughts, we looked at each other in the dark.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
Go back to the beginning.
It's an odd thing or rather was an odd thing. Thank God it's not likely to happen again.
I wanted to talk about Ella, about how she suddenly came to me, like a brain wave, almost. For that reason I said little about Cathie, at least I didn't show where she fit into the picture. She was there all the time of course, but you didn't know it. Or perhaps you did. She was the corpse.
I nearly said my corpse. But a corpse, strictly speaking, doesn't belong to anybody, and although I could have laid some claim to a stake in her body, I like to think that I have no claim, not even a murderer's, on her body.
I killed Cathie. There is no point in denying it since no one would believe me. The police, with their usual sensationalism, began to investigate the possibility of foul play, according to the newspapers at least. What it meant in fact, of course, was that they were already looking for the murderer. Well, they found one, but we'll come to that later. What convinced them, doubtless, was the fact that she was wearing no clothes. That, they no doubt felt, indicated the presence of a man. I'm with them there, of course. It's the kind of conclusion I might jump to myself. You too, perhaps. But the assumption that because a man has sexual intercourse with a woman in somewhat unseemly circumstances, because later the woman's body is found floating in one of our navigable rivers-the assumption that the man did her in afterwards seems to me to be entirely without justification.
The newspapers encouraged the idea. The public accepted it. Les believed. Even Ella believed. So I went on keeping my mouth shut.
As I said, go back to the beginning. It was an odd thing that I, who saw Cathie topple into the river, should have been the one to find her body the following morning, a mile from where she fell in. I felt at the time that it was ludicrous, so incredible that, if Les had not happened to come up on deck at the time, I should most certainly have refused to accept such an improbable event and have prodded her away with the boat hook.
Unfortunately, Leslie slouched up at the wrong moment.
***
The face of the man in the cloth cap came into the news between an air crash (forty-seven dead) and a financial conference to be held in Paris. The dotted image was set obscurely in the page, a glint of white in a host of darker dots, as though the face were trying to sink into the background and to merge with it. The caption underneath read: CLYDE MURDER MAN CHARGED Daniel Goon, plumber, of 42 Black Street, Glasgow, was today remanded in custody at the Central Police Court. He is charged with the murder of Catherine Dimly, 27, sometime actress, of 2 Noble Grove, Glasgow. Goon is the father of four children. Dimly's body was discovered two weeks ago by bargemen who recovered it from the river.
I found it difficult to understand what evidence they could have against Goon. Goon had nothing to do with it. And I was quite convinced that I had destroyed all possible evidence.
When Cathie tripped and fell backwards into the river, the scream choked in her throat before it was uttered. The lights on the opposite shore went on winking and everything seemed deadly quiet. The splash was contained inside my head for a few moments, like a cry in a wood, before I lay down flat on the quay and peered down at the black water. It sidled past the quay stones and a few yards away, quietly at the surface, a few bubbles moved, like suds from laundry, farther and farther away until there was nothing to be seen.
I remained where I was for a long time, my eyes well-accustomed to the dark after the hour we had spent together. First there was a match-box, and then a bottle, and then a spar of wood, and each object made a different noise as it scraped past the stones and disappeared with the flow of the current.
Cathie was down there somewhere. It had been too dark and now it was too late to do anything. I looked for a trace of her for a long time but, except for the debris that floated past, the water was evenly dark. It struck me that what I was trying to do was like trying to pin the tail on the donkey behind the sheet. She might have been anywhere, at any level.
There had been no scream. No frantic hand in the water. I was surprised at my own calm as I contemplated her disappearance. Did I believe she had swum a distance under water and reached the bank farther down? I knew she had not. I knew she couldn't swim. She had always been afraid of the water. I used to tease her about it sometimes when we went out rowing. A summer's day, perhaps, off the shore somewhere on the west coast, and we would be lying naked on the bottom boards under the seats.
She was more passionate that way than any other and that was because she couldn't swim, because our erotic struggle in the drifting boat represented for her a life and death matter. It was not only her abandoned flesh that prostrated itself in the thin shell of the dinghy, it was her whole life that she gambled with, uttering little screams of delirious pleasure when a chance wave decapitated itself on the gunwale of the boat and the cold water splashed on the taut flesh of her thighs. As she felt it lap around her buttocks, she gave little shudders of pleasure as though a slight electric shock were being intermittently carried to her body.
She said she felt the power of the sea through the wood of the boat and that she never felt she was giving herself so utterly as when, her flesh fitted to the rutted bottom-boards, the bows lifted, a spray of water chilled her thighs, and my male core, tilted with the movement of the boat, ploughed more deeply at the wet sex she bared for me.
Our love-making was usually a sudden affair. When we had lived together for some time, the constriction of our life set us at a distance from one another. We were no longer free to choose being together. It was the necessity to break through those constrictions that led us, unconsciously for the most part, to explore violence.
Perhaps you have watched a man and woman making love, from a distance. Or perhaps they have gone about it with you still in the room, the fact of the witness's presence increasing their desire. From this viewpoint you will be struck by the fact that in their soft nobbled movements, as their bellies slide together and retract in small strong heaps of muscle, there is an undercurrent of violence.
You become aware suddenly, as you disassociate the idea of love from the strong torques and thrusts of the limbs, that you are watching a union of animals, which will continue brutally at least until the moment at which the male achieves his orgasm. The female's legs perhaps have on more than one occasion sought to extricate themselves, because her position has not been satisfactory, or because she desires to arrest momentarily the flow of passion. But her muffled and near-impotent movements have been trapped and re-gathered, perhaps between his knees, much as a tomcat traps and re-gathers a female cat to him, and she is forced again to submit. These small, almost imperceptible, movements come across to a spectator and constitute the best evidence of the constant presence of violence in the sex act.
Now, if there is no passion, or if the passion had been suffocated by the civilized structure into which an ordinary man allows it to run-if the accumulated tedium of years of living together has killed the animal excitement of the sexual act-it is not surprising that men seek artificial means of stimulating violence so that the act, become frantic, may again be passionate.
So there was an undercurrent of violence always in our unions in the dinghy. But it was not until one day in our small flat in Leith that we came to realize that violence alone could make our love interesting.
Cathie worked during the day. I hung about, doing the small chores, reading, vegetating. One day I made a large bowl of bright yellow custard. I don't remember why exactly. There was a lot of milk in the house. The weather was quite warm and I was afraid it would turn sour. Anyway, I was bored. I made it early in the afternoon and it had stood cooling for about three hours before Cathie returned from work. I was reading the evening paper when she came.
I could see she was in a bad mood. She fiddled around with this and that without paying any attention to me. Now and again she sighed heavily to let me know that she was exasperated. I watched her over the top of the newspaper.
Suddenly she said she was going out.
I did not answer.
She hesitated and then, without another word, she began to change her clothes. She had taken off what she was wearing and was sitting in her panties, rolling on her best nylon stockings.
Even this did not excite me. I saw only an exasperated woman whose body now bored me and whose conversation was constructed for the most part to express her resentment of the fact that her body did bore me. Suddenly she said: "What have you been doing all day anyway?"
"Nothing much," I said. "I made some custard."
"You made what?"
"Some custard," I said.
"What did you want to make custard for?"
I stood up.
"I thought I might make some custard," I said. "It struck me as a good idea. So I made it. Here it is."
I walked toward the bowl. It was a large bowl and it must have contained about two and a half pints of custard.
"I don't give a damn where it is!" she said, pulling on her other stocking. "You'll have to eat it yourself, that's all. I certainly don't want any custard."
I looked at her. Suddenly I was annoyed with her. I had been bored all day. I had enjoyed making the custard. I was damned if I was going to have her sit there making nasty remarks about my custard. Her face had taken on that kind of stupidly defiant look. It angered me. She was not even looking at me. She was straightening the seams of her stockings. Above them were her black nylon panties. That was all she was wearing. Her hair, still in cat tails after her work, was hanging over her face as she bent to twist the stocking straight about her calf. I spoke slowly and threateningly.
"I made the custard and you're going to eat it," I said.
I don't know why I wanted her to eat it but I did.
"You know what you can do with it!" she said derisively.
"I know what I am going to do with it!" I replied.
I threw it at her.
The custard, slipping from the bowl, a massive yellow gob of it, sailed across the room and struck her on the breasts. It had not hardened. It had the consistency of a soft glue paste. She screamed and tilted backwards in her chair so that her body, now covered with custard, sprawled across the floor. Her thighs in their upward arc as the chair spun backwards, and her hot spread buttocks glimmering white beneath the gauze-fine nylon, stimulated me to further action. I lifted a stick from the fireplace, the split side of an egg crate, and leapt upon her. She was whimpering with fright. I grasped her by one arm and twisted her about so that her great and now custard-smeared buttocks were facing me. With all the strength of my right arm I thrashed at them with the rough slat of wood.
I thrashed her mercilessly for about a minute. She was making shrill whinnying noises as she threshed about on the dusty floor. The custard was dripping off her nipples and mingling with the short hairs of her sex.
I paused, moved over to the mantelpiece and grasped a bottle of bright blue ink. She was seated on her haunches, crying, wheezing and shaking. I emptied the contents of the bottle over her head so that it ran through her hair and down over her face and shoulders where it met the custard. It was then that I remembered the sauce and the vanilla essence. I stirred them into the mixture, tomato ketchup, brown sauce, and a bottle of vanilla essence, blues, greens, yellows, and reds, all the colors of the rainbow.
I don't know whether she was crying or laughing as I poured a two pound bag of sugar over her. Her whole near-naked body was twitching convulsively, a blue breast and a yellow-and-red one, a green belly, and all the odor of her pain and sweat and gnashing. By that time I was hard. I stripped off my clothes, grasped the slat of the orange box, and moved against her with prick and stick, like a tycoon.
When I rose from her, she was in a hideous mess, almost unrecognizable as a white woman, and the custard and the ink and the sugar sparkled like surprising meats on the haired twist of her satisfied mound.
I washed myself and went out without a word. When I returned, there was no evidence of the mess. She was in bed, and as I got in beside her, I felt her arms close about me and she kissed me on the lips.
***
After a while, I became used to the idea that she was drowned, beyond help. Somehow the quiet lap of the water against the stones was reassuring. More than that, it had a positive fascination for me. Undoubtedly that was because of the kind of compact that had always existed between our mating and the water. She attained an ecstasy through terror of it, and on more than one occasion she had said that she felt that that was how she would die, overtaken in sex by the water. And it had almost been like that.
If a policeman had come along at that moment, I should probably have made no move to escape. It was only afterwards that I realized that my own position was dangerous, that there was only my word that it was an accident. Or was it an accident? I suppose it was. It never occurred to me to kill her. I was merely walking away. She tried to hold me back. I pushed her. She tripped over a cobblestone and then she was in the water. It all happened so quickly.
Perhaps some people would say I was to blame because my reactions were so slow that I must have willed her death. I don't think so. Although certainly the feeling uppermost in my mind when she fell backwards was that of annoyance. I was annoyed with her. And then curiosity. She was gone suddenly, and as my anger evaporated I became breathlessly curious, a little frightened perhaps, and I leaned down over the water and looked for her.
I leaned down curiously with a sense of quiet shock, and soon I began to enjoy looking at the water as it swirled indolently past the slime-covered quay stones. The seconds marked themselves with the disappearance of the bubbles, and with the appearance of the matchbox, the bottle, the spar. Three minutes at least must have passed before I felt any sense of personal danger. That came suddenly, as though a trapdoor all at once opened into a deeper consciousness of the situation. My eyes left the surface of the water and moved across the flickering gleam of the river to the other side where the lights still winked in a kind of cynical confederacy. I felt very alone. There was only my word for what had happened.
I was now in a kneeling position on the cobblestones and I could feel the cold hardness of the stone at my kneecaps. I stood up and as I did so my eyes caught sight of the bundle of clothes Cathie had so willingly taken off for me. They were against the wheel of the railway truck under which we had made love. The siding was right on the quay. Both of us thought it was a good place.
It was then that it occurred to me that things would have looked better for me if she had had her clothes on when she fell in-the sexuality of the situation would tend to make it appear criminal. I had the absurd idea of finding the body and dressing it in the clothes. That struck me as funny a moment later. I picked up the clothes and looked at them. They were evidence. Naturally, I had to get rid of them.
It did occur to me to go to the police, but I saw no reason why they should accept my version of the incident. I always say the wrong thing at interviews. I dislike the way other people expect me to share their attitudes. I could imagine their questioning me about Cathie, the loaded questions they would thrust at me. So I dismissed the thought of going to the police almost as soon as it occurred to me.
There was no hurry. There was no sign of anyone about. I decided to smoke a cigarette.
The cigarette made me feel better. I was not going to do anything rash. The clothes were there, still slightly warm under my hand. I decided to think the whole thing out in detail before deciding on any course of action. I almost began to enjoy the situation. It had been forced upon me without logic; it was up to me to accept my predicament and to free myself of its implications.
Good. I ground out the stub of the cigarette on the stone. My hand had hardly left it when my finger felt for it again almost reflexively. It was, I supposed, evidence. I smiled then. It was a good thing I had smoked a cigarette. Somewhere under the truck there were two other cigarette butts and one would have lipstick on it. I repressed the urge to look for them immediately. There was plenty of time. The main thing was not to commit myself to any unanalyzed act, however slight it might seem and to destroy scientifically the absurd complex in which I had become involved.
I had got myself involved. Absurdly and without forethought. For I had met Cathie in the street quite by accident, after a space of two months during which I had neither seen her nor written to her. Our decision to make love had been as sudden as decisions sometimes are, made while seated in an alcove in a small cafe where we had gone for coffee. There I had impulsively put my hand on her thigh. That move brought back a hundred memories of nights during which we lay in one another's arms, or struggled desperately about the floor, her gleaming buttocks twitching as she dragged herself on her belly across the floor out of reach, and the bruises we suffered as we toppled over chairs in our lust for one another.
We had known each other for a long time and there in the cafe we did not need to speak about it. A glance was enough. A slight flush of excitement on her cheeks. She would if I suggested it. We left the cafe and walked straight to the river.
The proprietor of the cafe was an old Italian who sat on a high stool behind the counter. He had looked at us without interest, as later, while we were drinking the coffee, he had looked at the wall with the faded harlequins that happened to be opposite him. He said goodnight as we left. He might have recognized me again but there was little likelihood of his being called upon to do so. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing for me to be afraid of.
And unless we had been seen by someone who knew us, he appeared to be the only possible witness. We had met two streets away from the cafe, walked there together, and then, when we came out again, had gone quickly along the dark streets that led to the river. It's possible we were seen. But as I smoked my second cigarette, I became certain that we had not. It was dark when we met. We crossed only one main street. It was highly unlikely.
No connection for over two months. For the world, for the people who knew us, we were separated. She had had no chance to speak to anyone of our meeting. The element of chance had worked for, as well as against, me. There was no point in going to the police. It wouldn't do Cathie any good. She had no relatives. In a way, I suppose I was her only relative, and I already knew. I began to pity her then. It had been so sudden, so fraudulent, and she had been laughing a few minutes before. But going to the police was out. It might involve me, fatally.
What about the clothes? "Let me take them off," she had said, insisting. I was surprised at first but then I realized what it was she wanted. It would give her pleasure to feel the wood of the railroad tie and the gravel under her. She was almost frantic to have her bare bottom on the wood. She took everything off except the slip and that was above the waist, protecting her back only. Her naked hips were on the wood, her thighs on the sharp gravel, and she looked up at the oily underside of the truck. She was rubbing herself against the ground, like a cat does, and I knew that she wished to cut herself on the gravel, to have the knotty wood chafe her soft skin, before we made love. I aided her with a hand on her warm belly, pressing downwards, and by inciting her verbally to do damage to herself. I was used to that. She needed little encouragement.
As she worked to bring blood to her buttocks, her motions were as violent as those of an epileptic. Soon she was groaning with pleasure and pain. She stiffened as though she had inflicted a terrible wound and then, suddenly, she turned over on her belly and gouged it against the gravel. A moment later, she pulled me down on top of her, forcing me to get rid of my trousers altogether, then we fought while we drove our lust at each other, I to remain mounted, to keep her riveted to the wooden sleeper, and she to unhorse me so that with her on top I too should suffer the pain of the cutting stones.
I was sorry now that she had taken her clothes off. If she had been fully dressed she would not have been in such a hurry to stop me as I walked away. The whole thing might never have happened. And now the clothes were a problem.
Not much of a problem though. If there was nothing to connect me with her, then her clothes were irrelevant. The police might as well have them. They would miss them anyway. The coroner's verdict would be "murder by person or persons unknown." Some impulse made me throw the clothes into the truck. Afterwards I wondered why I had done it. Perhaps I derived a sense of having gambled from that act in spite of the fact that the clothes were irrelevant. Then there was the handbag. I had touched that, so there would be fingerprints on it. I rubbed the surface briskly with my handkerchief before finding a large stone, weighting the handbag with it, and throwing it into the water. That took care of that, doubly. And then I was suddenly annoyed with myself. There was a cigarette lighter in the handbag and I had touched that, too. But the bag would probably never be found.
My sense of tidiness made me search for the cigarette stubs. It was fortunate that I did so. I found her packet of Players and the cigarette lighter, too. I was pleased about that. The cigarette lighter had been my only oversight, and lying there under the truck for anyone to see and pick up might have been fatal. I wiped it with my handkerchief and threw it as far as I could into the river. I listened for the plop. I saw no point in wasting the cigarettes. I transferred what remained to my own box and dropped the empty package into the river. I found the two stubs and did the same with them. After that, there was nothing else to be done. Perhaps an hour had passed since Cathie had disappeared in the water.
I stepped forward and looked down at the water again. There was still no sign of her. The water was smooth and black, with lights like fish scales glimmering where a street or bridge lamp was reflected, smooth as though smoothed by a plasterer's trowel, and inscrutable. Behind me, the line of railway cars stood, silent and abandoned, their wheels at rest and their couplings dangling loose, screening me with their immobility from the movement of the city. They seemed bigger than they were, and their immobility communicated itself to me. I felt vaguely that the whole incident had taken place outside time, that there had been a break in continuity, that what had happened was not part of my history. It was pervaded with the unreality of fiction. I had merely to walk away to free myself of an obsession.
I walked carefully, in the shadow of the line of trucks. I did not wish to be seen coming away from the place. As I crossed the rails behind the last truck, it came to me that anyway I had never told Cathie my real name. She knew me as Joe Taylor-I always give my correct Christian name because it is difficult to remember and react normally to an incorrect one. Perhaps in her room there would be a few photographs, not many, because I never like having my photograph taken, but one or two, and that worried me. Still, it wasn't likely they would look very hard for Joe Taylor. Those who knew us both knew that we had separated over two months ago, without words and not in anger. I had not seen any of them since.
I reached the street without being seen. I passed only one man on the dark streets that led to the center of the city. Then, by another route altogether, I made my way back to the river and the barge. Ella-as yet Les' wife only-was awake when I got back.
"That you, Joe?" she called from the bunk.
In the darkness I heard Leslie's snore.
"Yes," I said.
"Fine time to get back!" she said.
I did not reply.
When I got into my bunk it never occurred to me that I would see Cathie again.
CHAPTER TWO
The facts were not made public at that time. I could get no information from the newspapers beyond the fact that the plumber had been charged with murder. I assumed that investigations were still being made and the lack of information in the press made me uneasy.
When I considered the whole thing calmly I saw no reason why I should even be questioned, far less suspected. But as the days passed and no new reference was made to the crime, the silence struck me as ominous. The fact that I could make no move to find out what was happening without running the risk of bringing attention on myself made things worse.
I wanted to act, I had an illogical fear that I had left something undone and that by so doing I had committed myself unknowingly, but to what circumstances or line of action I had no idea. There was nothing to do but wait. The silence could not last indefinitely. Sooner or later they would bring the plumber to trial. For the present, there was no moment at which I could say with certainty that I was more in danger than I had been the moment before. This inability to pin down a concrete danger made me morose and uncommunicative.
As for the plumber, I felt sorry for him, to some extent even responsible. But I knew very well that it was ridiculous to blame myself for the crass stupidity of the police. The position might have been reversed. I should not have expected Daniel Goon, plumber, to get himself hanged for me. I had no intention of being shamed by a convenient social fiction into assisting at my own murder.
It was not my sympathy for the plumber that took me to Black Street neighborhood. I was drawn there in the hope of finding out something that would make my own position clearer.
I walked to the end of the street and back again. It was a short street of tenement houses in a poor quarter of the town. It looked like any one of the surrounding streets. There was nothing to see. As I turned into it, a coal cart moved slowly towards me at the other side, but there was nothing special about the horse that drew it nor about the man who walked beside it, holding the horse at the bit. No one paid any attention to me. There was no sign of a policeman anywhere. I stood at the corner for about ten minutes and smoked a cigarette. There was nothing to be done. I returned to the barge more helpless than before.
Ella, meanwhile, was becoming less and less cautious. She wanted me to make love to her at every odd moment. When I protested that it was too risky, she laughed at me. I think she almost wanted Leslie to find out about us.
"Who's scared now?" she said.
There was nothing I could say.
One time, the three of us went for a picnic and Les went off to get water to make tea. He was hardly out of sight when she pulled me over on top of her. I made love to her quickly, almost passionately, because I wanted to get it over with before Leslie returned with the water. That kind of thing happened often and I began to realize that it was only a question of time before Les found out. Ella knew that too. It increased her pleasure, I think. Her attitude was infectious and I entered into the spirit of the affair almost because in doing so I was able to forget the other more serious threat which the silence of the newspapers seemed to signify.
Ella's body continued to excite me. When she made love now, she gave herself to me completely, almost hysterically.
She had learned to love the touch of my manhood wherever I deigned to give it to her. Of course she still readily and willingly lavished it with kisses and oral caresses at practically any opportunity. It was easiest for her to service me quickly in that way and she, it appeared from her enthusiasm and frequently self-initiated attempts to extract my penis from my pants, gained as much pleasure as I.
But that was only the beginning, of course. In the days and nights of our encounters, when Les was away and we were confident that time favored our amorous accords, I taught her delights of the body she had never dreamed of. And she took to each as if it were the singularly most pleasurable experience of her life.
I threw her across the table below decks, flipped up her skirt and buggered her ass and she delighted in the ravaging.
I straddled her ribs with my sword of flesh sheathed between her quivering breasts and ejaculated my hot sperm across her chest and chin and face and lips and she licked and lapped at the juice as if it was nectar from the heavens.
I bound her tenderly and bound her roughly and she took equal delight in whatever method I chose.
I punished her with items at hand below decks; my leather belt, the cooking spatula, odd bits of rope and she squealed and writhed and begged for mercy and later insisted on more new sensations.
Through her, I lived out a life that was separate and intact, with its own violence and its own risk and its own center.
Gradually I began to forget that I had been with Cathie when she fell backwards into the river and that there was any connection between the woman who had been my mistress and the drowned woman toward whom I reached with the boat hook. And then, one day, Leslie discovered us.
***
Ella had ceased to move. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing heavily. Inside me, a recession was taking place, the sensation of closeness was evaporating. The image sharpened. She was merely a woman I had just fucked. Her body was soft, like putty, unexhilarating, out of tune.
The weight of her thigh on my knee was uncomfortable. I had a slight headache. The clock with the brass ring ticked loudly, stabilizing the atmosphere in the cabin and drawing all objects back to their accustomed banality. The quilt was merely a quilt that had been washed too often. The varnished planks did not fit tightly together and the varnish looked unsmoothed and brittle. For the last few minutes I had been conscious of the buzz of a fly and now it landed on Ella's shoulder and walked towards the nipple of her breast. She appeared to be unaware of it. Her head leaned over to the side and the hairs of her temple were stringy with perspiration. There was a faint smile on her lips as though she were thinking of something that amused her. Her satisfaction seemed inane. The fact that she had withdrawn and remained confident with her eyes closed annoyed me. Her attitude was insulting. She appeared ridiculous to me with her smirk of withdrawal, her white flesh patched red where it had been crushed under my weight and with the fly at her nipple, hesitating, flexing its minute feelers.
"When will Leslie be back?" I said.
She opened her eyes and looked at me. At that moment the fly rose into the air and disappeared somewhere against the dark brown varnish of the planks. She was smiling.
"Not for a while yet," she said.
She put out her arm and drew me down to her again. I resisted slightly but she was determined. Her mouth was soft and too wet. I closed my teeth against her tongue. But without exerting myself I couldn't get free and so I closed my eyes and allowed her to go on kissing my neck and my cheeks. After a while my resentment seemed to move outside of me and to stand off at a distance, until, when her fingers moved at my belly again, it sank away like the light of a buoy below the horizon and I was no longer conscious of it. I felt no urgency at first, but gradually my submission ceased to be passive only, and I found myself fucking her again. Afterwards, we were both tired and we fell asleep.
Les must have come down to the cabin and when he saw us he must have gone on deck again. When we awoke, it was nearly dark and we could hear him walking back and forth on the deck above us. We listened for a while without moving. Neither of us had any idea how long he had been there, but he was obviously waiting for us to wake up, letting us know by his walking that he knew and at the same time giving us an opportunity to prepare ourselves before we faced him. We spoke in whispers.
"Do you think he knows?"
"Of course he does!" I said. I lit a cigarette.
"What'll we do?"
I smiled in the dark. "I suppose that depends on him."
Ella did not answer for a moment and then she said, "Why should it depend on him? Who the hell does he think he is anyway? Clumping around up there like the Day of Judgment?"
"It's only his way of letting us know he's there."
"He's done it," she said dryly.
She was waiting for me to say or do something and she moved slightly so that no part of our bodies touched under the rough blanket, which now seemed rougher and more prickly than it had before. I saw only the end of my cigarette glowing in the dark and somehow that seemed to fill my mind, that and that shadows beyond it. I knew without discussing it with her that if Leslie had been going to do anything rash, he would have done it by now and that he was probably as nervous as we were about what was going to happen when we met again.
"Are you just going to lie there?"
"There's no hurry," I said. "I'll finish my cigarette."
"What are you going to say to him?"
"What is there to say? The whole thing's pretty obvious, isn't it?"
She moved again, but she did not speak. I thought for a moment that she was going to climb out over me but she must have changed her mind for some reason or other. In moving, she had pulled the blanket off my right side, which was at the edge of the bed. She wanted me to move. Reluctantly, I lowered myself to the deck, struck a match and lit the oil lamp, and then, without looking at her, I began to dress.
Leslie must have become conscious of the light in the cabin because a few moments later he stopped walking back and forth on deck. For a moment I almost expected him to come down through the companionway and I pulled on my trousers quickly so as to be in a better position to face him. But he didn't come, didn't even call down to us, and Ella said then, "He's waiting for you to go up."
I did not answer. I wasn't in the mood to discuss it, to talk at all. Now that it had happened, the thought of the other danger came back to me. It was as though, unconsciously, I had all the time associated the two threats. It was as if now that one threat had been realized, a corresponding development in the other was threatening. At that very moment perhaps, the official in charge of investigations into Cathie's death would be noticing for the first time a connection between the deceased and one of the bargemen who had discovered the body. Or perhaps it was merely that the world of Ella and Leslie was no longer separate and self-contained, since Leslie had found out about us. I remember that my mouth was dry then.
Ella watched me but said nothing. She was withdrawn in a different way now, and it was I who was being looked at. That made me uncomfortable. I had no idea what she was thinking as she lay there on her side, supported by her elbow, watching me dress, with her eyes in shadow. I remained bent over my untied shoe longer than necessary and the hair on my naked arms looked gray and the flesh dirty where the veins rose near the surface like a complex of geographical contours. It occurred to me that I hadn't had a bath for more than three weeks.
When I had tied my shoelaces, I slipped my shirt over my head and while I was buttoning it, I looked at her.
"Are you getting up too, Ella?"
"Maybe," she said. "I'll wait and see what happens. Look. Your cigarette. It's burning the table."
A long bow of ash fell on the floor as I lifted it to stub it smoldering on the ashtray. I lifted my jacket from the back of the chair and put it on.
"I'll see what he says," I said then, more because I felt I had to say something before going on deck than because she needed to be told. I think she laughed as I turned and climbed up through the companionway.
***
When I returned to the cabin about fifteen minutes later, Ella, who had not moved since I left her, lay half-naked on her elbow with the blanket fallen away to the level of her navel. The cabin was already in semi-darkness but it did not seem to concern her. She had made no effort to reach out and turn the oil lamp down or to trim the wick. Instead she had watched as the arc of light moved away from her. The smoking orange eye of flame flickered as I climbed down through the companionway as though it were trying to draw all the light in the cabin back into itself. I turned it down and for a moment the room was in almost total darkness.
"You'll have to trim the wick," Ella's voice said to me from the bunk. And, as I burned my fingertips when I tried to remove the hot globe, she said, "There's a dishcloth behind you. Use that."
She did not speak again until I had pinched away the burnt part of the wick between my thumb and forefinger, relit the lamp and replaced the globe. The lamp was now burning rather dully because the globe was dirty.
"You might have turned it down," I said.
"It'll clean," she said shortly.
And I supposed it would clean. That was part of Ella, to be cleaning things, dishes or shoes or the table, scouring pots and pans, polishing brasses, which she did with a special cloth, blowing her hot breath on to the metal and then making it squeak under the friction of the cloth. I recalled her big forearm moving backwards and forwards like a piston whose energy you could almost see being drained from the tensed stock of her body and from the rigid stance of her powerful haunches.
I lit a cigarette and, crossing my legs, sat down at a distance from her. She appeared to be content to wait for me to tell her what happened. Knowing what had happened and the uselessness of any effort on our part to alter it, I was not in any hurry to speak. I had half finished my cigarette before she decided that she had waited long enough.
"Where is he?"
"He's gone," I said.
"Where for God's sake!"
"God knows," I said. "I suppose he'll stop at a men's club tonight and go to his mother's in Glasgow in the morning."
"Did he say he was leaving me?"
"He said he would write you a letter."
"Jesus!"
Big and white, she clambered from the bunk, the soles of her feet making a flat stabbing sound on the boards as she landed on the deck. She brushed past me leaving her odor as she crossed the cabin to the stove. To suddenly see her close like that, naked flesh in flat surface not six inches from my eye, which received the impression in a neutral, emotionless way, was in a new way horrifying. The flesh I thought I knew, had touched and had held under the pressure of my fingertips, was presented anonymously as an amorphous mass of gray-white, yellowing at its edges, and pitted almost like pumice-stone. It became a mass that lost its identity in its momentary passage in front of my eye, and, a fraction of a second later, was gone and replaced by an odor which grew familiar, of woman, in my nostrils. I moved my head to watch Ella arrive at the stove, strike a match and place the kettle on the lighted gas ring. The new sound, the thrust of the ignited gas, seemed to restore equilibrium to the cabin, to make of Ella again a woman with a tendency to fatness who no longer considered it necessary to cover herself in front of me.
"Jesus!" she said again. "So he's going to write me a letter!"
"That's what he said."
"Do you want a cup of tea?" She was smiling now.
"I could do with one."
"Me too," she said, and then, "It looks as though we've settled for one another, Joe!"
I didn't know what else I could do other than to laugh pleasantly.
She reached for the tea caddy.
CHAPTER THREE
During the days that followed, we remained tied up at Leith.
A feeling of constriction descended on me one morning as I was touching up the paintwork of the barge, which hugged the quay squatly. Nearby, a motor-crane, its gears grinding, advanced and retreated with nets of tarred barrels at its claw. A man in shiny serge trousers, stringed at the knees, bawled instructions from under wide nostrils, spat, and screwed each spittle under the sole of his iron shod boot as though he were trying to obliterate it from his memory. The dockside, fanged and strutted with steel girders in the pale fog, sprawled shadowy oblongs into the hawser-shortened distance. The scene rang hollowly with the monotonous splutter of blunt-nosed drills. The feeling of constriction remained with me all morning.
It was not lessened by Ella's occasional appearances on deck, the first time with a bucket of refuse, the second with some rung-out rags and a pail of muddied, soap-broken water, which she emptied over the side. I suppose it had to come to this. Considering everything, I had good reasons for remaining where I was, waiting for something to break. But at the same time, I had the uncomfortable feeling of having lost my identity. I had become part of a situation. The situation seemed to protect me against another, less enviable one-the one in which I should have been involved had I gone to the police. But the more I became involved in the small world of the barge, the more I felt myself robbed of my identity.
It has been that way with me as long as I can remember. I am a rootless kind of man. Often I find myself anxious to become involved with other people, but I am no sooner involved than I wish to be free again. Ten years ago I walked out of the university one spring morning with a small overnight bag. I never returned. Since then, I have worked when I needed money, or because I have wished to break out of a sexual situation in which the necessities of life were provided for me. In relation to the barge, I was beginning now to feel the familiar urge to break with the present.
During the day, I noticed Ella's attitude towards me was becoming more proprietary. She made a number of references to the future, all of which took me, my continued presence, for granted. She talked about divorce. I sat through it all quietly, without protest, eating mechanically, or smoking one cigarette after another, and answering her in monosyllables. When I thought of the plumber awaiting trial, my need to be safely involved came on me like a sickness, but my primitive protest was all the louder for that need.
And then Ella's voice would come back, "It wouldn't take long, would it, Joe?"
"What?"
"The divorce!"
"I don't know, Ella. I don't know about these things."
"I'll find out in Glasgow. That's where we were married."
"Yes."
"It'll be all right," Ella said with conviction.
I looked at her then and for a moment, in an oblique way, I found myself wondering what the reason was for her determination. It seemed pointless, not quite serious.
Later in the afternoon, she went ashore to buy food. After she left, I tried to read but found I couldn't. The atmosphere was still constricted and yellow, drawn in on all sides by the black spokes of the dock. Every now and again, metal clinked against metal, and then sharply the noise of riveting began. I was depressed, vaguely annoyed. I missed Ella, but only in an indirect way. I was bored with her. When she was there, I had good reason to be bored. When she was not, I could only find the reason in myself, reflected in the fog and in the hawsers. I had a need to act, which I repressed again and again. I wanted to break through the immobility in which I had become involved, but I had come to identify my safety with inaction, almost with the boredom, which I was beginning to feel in relation to Ella.
It couldn't go on. I had already decided to leave, I suppose, even that afternoon when I found myself telling myself not to be a fool, to wait and see. I threw away a newly-lit cigarette and went below again.
When Ella returned, I was lying on the bunk. She was excited. She said immediately that the date of the plumber's trial had been set. I took the paper from her and glanced at it: FATHER OF TWO TO STAND TRIAL 45 YEAR-OLD GLASGOW MAN ACCUSED IN CLYDE MURDER There followed a brief account of the facts the police had made public. Daniel Goon was known to have been intimate with the murdered woman, to have been associating with her for some time.
I did not need to read any further. I remember Cathie talking very quietly, persuasively, after we had made love. Telling me she was pregnant, that it was I, and asking me to marry her. That was how it happened, with her running after me as I walked away. And, of course, she had told someone, a friend at work probably, and she had told that friend that the father was Goon.
I was reading on and Ella said that she thought it was four he had. Children she meant. I said yes, I had thought so too but that it had probably been a mistake. She began to empty the contents of the shopping bag on the table.
"Move your paper," she said. "You're in the way."
She stuffed a biscuit into her mouth.
I watched her chewing. Her teeth were large. They broke it to powder.
Later, her face was damp. She had been working at the hot stove.
I was still the hired man. She laughed as she paid me, coloring slightly, as though she weren't sure what service she paid me for.
"We're making good money," she said, "sometimes. It will be better when everything's good and proper."
She included me, defending herself against her suspicions.
I made love to her under a haystack, noticing for the first time the tiny red network at the surface of her left thigh.
We moved along the canal. I saw the tramp, or it might have been another one, only this time he watched us from under the brim of his hat as we passed.
When everything would be 'good and proper'. She meant marriage, of course. The impropriety worried her. She wasn't sure of me. She talked about the divorce. Leslie wrote about it, almost apologetically. He hoped we were well. He had a job as a night watchman in a warehouse.
Sometimes, I looked at her back. Her hips seemed broader. The apron string still dangled. Most of the time she tried to be attractive, wore lipstick, crossed her legs casually so that I could see the smooth white rise of the back of her thighs. In the dark we were still lovers. But during the day, I was conscious of her looking at me, analyzing, speculating. From the newspapers I derived the impression it was a foregone conclusion that they would find Goon guilty. We heard that Les alone would be required as a witness at the trial. I began to wonder whether I would find myself in the courtroom watching the web of guilt being woven round the wrong man. Ella joked about my sudden interest in the affair. She said she thought I wasn't interested in that kind of thing. But she was pleased at the same time. She helped me cut out all the items from the different papers. Some evenings by the light of the oil lamp I sat with all the cuttings spread out on the table in front of me like a pack of cards in front of a fortune teller.
What if they convicted him? I resented my connection with Goon. There was no murder. The guilt was invented. And then, with the question unanswered, I put my hand on Ella's belly, and as she turned towards me and I felt our thighs touch I had an impulse to abandon myself and my freedom to the sheer physical power of the woman whose hands were cupped over my buttocks and who thrust her abdomen towards me, to place myself at her mercy quietly with words there in the bed as the violence of our sensations increased, but each time, before I spoke, the orgasm was over and she was separate again, heavy and separate and dangerous. Conscious of the heat of her body close to me, so slack now and so dangerous, I lay awake for a long time. My mind was not blank, but I could not have been said to be thinking of anything.
***
It was about this time that Ella picked up a letter from the post office. It was from Gwendoline, her stepsister in Leith, and had been lying in the post office for sometime. Her husband, Sam, a driver for a firm of fruit and vegetable brokers had fallen off his lorry and been crushed to death by a bus. He was already buried. Gwendoline said that although she would be the first to admit that poor Sam and her "didn't get on very well," it had come as a shock, a blow in fact, which was not entirely countered by the damages she received from the company he worked for. She wanted to know when Ella would be in Leith.
It was Saturday. We were tied up in Glasgow. Ella sent Gwendoline a telegram to say that we would come by train to visit her. In the compartment I sat beside Ella. I was feeling uncomfortable in the hard collar she insisted I wear. Ella was wearing a shiny black dress that was too tight for her and made her look hot and red. We didn't talk much during the journey.
Gwendoline lived in a tenement that was just like any other tenement in Leith, a bleakish gray building, scaled on the inside by a creeping gray stair with an iron banister, leading to brown doors with brass plates on them at every landing. It smelled of refuse and decaying food. Hers was at the top of the building on the fifth floor.
Gwendoline was in her dressing gown when she opened the door. It fell open at her breasts, which were long and white and pulpy like the long slender part of pears. She was younger than Ella. When she saw me, she caught up the dressing gown at her throat and smiled.
"This your new boyfriend, El?"
Ella sniffed.
"This is Joe," she said. "We're going to be married."
It sounded like an ultimatum, and she spoke it in an intense hard way, almost as though she were afraid she would be contradicted.
Gwendoline must have noticed my reaction because she laughed and said, "Pleased to meet you, Joe," and she stood away from the door to allow us to enter. "You'll excuse me for not being dressed," she continued, "but I wasn't expecting a gentleman visitor."
Her skin was very white and her mouth lipsticked heavily, like a bloodstain on porcelain. She led us into a sort of bed-sitting room with an unmade bed and her clothes lying about. I noticed there was a chamber pot under the bed. It was half full of urine. The window on the far side of the room wasn't open, the fire in the grate was out, and the air was sour, stuffy and motionless, impregnated with the cloying heat of a one-bar electric heater. It occurred to me that she had just got out of the bed to open the door.
"Sit down while I tidy up a bit," she said.
Ella looked around disapprovingly. This kind of thing brought out the worst in her.
Gwendoline was moving about stuffing things out of sight, her long chestnut hair hanging in strings at her pallid cheeks. She smoked heavily. There were cigarette stubs everywhere and the first two fingers of her right hand were nicotine-stained at the nails.
At first, I didn't pay much attention to her. I was looking at Ella. She sat in her shiny black dress in an old armchair. Her lips were pursed and an aura of respectability emanated from her. It seemed to move up from her stiff haunches to the tilt of her neck; a moral judgment smelling of eau de Cologne. I wondered how near I had come to committing suicide when I almost told her the truth about Cathie. I was horrified to think that I had nearly spoken. It seemed absurd now. I looked away from her at a little glow of the element of the electric heater.
"Excuse me, Joe!" Gwendoline said as she brushed past me. She had taken her hand away from the top of the dressing gown and as she stooped to lift a silk stocking from the floor I saw the breasts hanging, long and pear-shaped, and they shone with an orange color where the electric glow reflected on them. "I'll make you all a cup of tea," she said as she stood up again.
Ella said she would help her and the two women went through to the next room. They were talking but I couldn't hear what they were saying.
Left alone, I wandered about. The pot with the yellow liquid under the bed fascinated me. I laid my hand against the side and discovered that it was still lukewarm. A short while ago she had squatted on the pot and then raised herself on her long white flanks and returned to bed.
I stood up again. As I did so, I glanced at the cigarette butts and at the soiled underclothing pushed hurriedly out of sight under a cushion. I walked over to the bed again and put my hand on the sheet where she had lain. That too was almost warm and there was a feel of biscuit crumbs under my fingers. On the bedside table was a bent hairpin, a piece of ribbon, an ashtray with red-stained tips and chewing gum. Beside the ashtray was a bottle of aspirin.
Like an inventory clerk I took stock. Gwendoline, a widow. There was something unpurposeful about Gwendoline, a sort of tadpole quality which suggested that if she found herself in bed with a man she would stay there because she was too lazy to get out. At the foot of the bed there was a morning newspaper and a book on astrology. In the latter, as it fell open in my hands, I noticed that she had underlined the following: The terror which the Moon inspires in us is not altogether unjustified. The proofs of its evil influence are corroborated by a hundred flagrant facts. A red Moon is particularly detestable. I puzzled over the second sentence for some time, laid it down finally, and returned with the newspaper to my chair.
There was nothing in it about my crime.
I was sitting there when they returned with the tea.
"Gwen's having a holiday with us," Ella said almost immediately.
"Oh?"
"She's coming on the barge for a week or two."
Gwendoline smiled at me. She had gathered her dressing gown properly about her now and secured it, her tapering teats out of sight, with a safety pin.
"I hope you don't mind, Joe? I don't suppose I'm breaking up a honeymoon or anything?"
I shrugged my shoulders. I was glad that Ella spoke before I could say anything because I could not think of anything to say.
"It'll be good for her," Ella said. "She's going to pack now and come back with us on the train tonight."
"I'll just have a cup of tea," Gwendoline said.
Ella was looking hard at the pot under the bed. I followed her glance and thought what was so lately shed would understandably tend to stamp the room indelibly as Gwendoline's as it rose on the warm strings of the atmosphere.
***
Two days later, on a fine spring morning, we loaded early with limestone. We were well along the canal by midday.
It was good to be standing there at the wheel with the flat greens and browns stretching on either side as far as the horizon. At that point the landscape was almost treeless and the view across the fields was uninterrupted. The sun was strong and the yellow-black canal water reacted to it, glowing behind us as it peeled off the bilges in long black flakes. The wheel was warm with the sun. Everything seemed far away-events as well as things-and I almost forgot the plumber, and the dead woman, and Les and even the two women who were below.
Gwendoline did not get up for breakfast. She slept late. For her complexion she said. She was not the kind of woman who could make herself useful on the barge, not that I wanted her to do that. I was not interested in getting anything done quickly or efficiently. I should have been quite content to stop the engine and moor along the bank somewhere, or to tie up for a week, until the weather broke or until we ran out of food.
Not quite true perhaps. Ordinarily, I could have said that without misgivings. That was the way I lived. But since the arrest of the plumber I was uneasy, idiotically anchored to time, to events and processes over which I had no control.
Gwen came on deck around noon, up through the companionway and close to me almost before I was aware of her. She had done her face up. After watching me for a few minutes, she wanted to take the wheel. So I sat down near her as she steered. I rolled a cigarette. At first, neither of us spoke. She appeared to be engrossed in her work, which she did well (she had been brought up on the barge with Ella) and she was looking straight ahead. And then she put a question to me.
"Are you really going to marry Ella, Joe?"
"That's what she said," I said noncommittally.
She laughed.
"What about you?" she said.
"I don't say anything."
"Oh, have it you own way!" she said. "It's none of my business."
I agreed with her. She looked back along the canal.
She was wearing slacks. She had brushed the stringy appearance out of her hair, but its auburn color made her face appear very white, like bread and jam because of the sudden lipstick. She was younger, thinner and not as tall as Ella. She was intelligent enough to know that I had no intention of marrying Ella but it did not seem to worry her.
She looked, I thought then, as though she had just got out of bed. She would always look like that. Even in the spring sunshine she had that damp white look about her some women have so that you think if you brushed the palm of your hand over their skin it would come away quite wet, the kind of pallor that makes you think of sickrooms and flannel underwear. It occurred to me that she would probably have T.B. The thought of her slender white breasts seemed to confirm that impression. She would be white all over, white with a few pink parts where she had sat or where her belt chafed. Stripped naked she would look like a long white root with a tuft of brittle auburn hair at the center. And yet there was something attractive about Gwendoline. Not in her features, which were flat and puttylike. Not in the forward jut of her abdomen nor in the premature thinness of her legs. More, I think, in her whole attitude.
I had finished rolling my cigarette and I struck a match on the sole of my boot. I threw the match over the stern and watched it heaved aside on the surface of the water. Its movement reminded me of that of the bottle and the matchbox and the spar of wood that had moved beneath me as I searched for Cathie's body in the water.
Gwendoline was speaking again.
"Don't you ever get bored with the canal, Joe?"
"Sure I do, sometimes."
"I thought you would. You don't look the type."
I didn't contradict her.
"You've got to be born to it," she said.
I flicked the ash from my cigarette in reply.
"And even then," she continued, "if you're like me, you don't want any part of it."
"Why not?" I inquired.
"It's no life," she said. "I could tell the first time I saw you that you weren't cut out for it."
I was not impressed by her assurance.
"Did you see it in the stars?" I said mockingly.
"You're ignorant," she said flatly. "And you're not funny. But seriously, Joe, you know as well as I do that you're fed up with it."
"It's a job like any other," I observed.
She laughed at that.
"When are you going to walk out on her, Joe?"
"Today, tomorrow, the next day," I said. "I can't read the stars."
"Shit!" Gwendoline said rudely.
After a few silent moments, we talked on. She was telling me that Ella did not drink and that she couldn't understand a person who didn't drink, and that if it were not for the head she had in the morning she herself would get drunk every night. She liked gin, she said, not gin and lime or gin and Vermouth or anything else; gin straight. She didn't find it bitter. She suggested we ought to go for a drink together some time, that we could tell Ella we were going to the cinema. Not that we would. She didn't suppose I liked the cinema any more than she did. Once in a while to pass the time. What she liked was a good game of cards and a spot of gin.
In spite of her slacks, she looked incongruous at the wheel. The slacks were of a soft green velour, stained, and with bags at the knees. She was not wearing stockings. She told me that if there was one thing she hated it was to go to the dentist.
Ella came on deck a short time afterwards and called Gwendoline to go and eat. While we were under way we usually had dinner in shifts like that. I was left alone on deck. I could hear the two women talking and laughing below, and I found myself envying them. In one way, and for each of them, they were secure. The absurdity that touched them (if at all) was an acceptable one; they were protected by the structures of their own minds, by the fact that they were neither implicated in "murder" nor, to ordinary thinking, insane. But the absurdity that threatened me was the end of all possibility. Often when I was alone, I experienced a terrible certainty that it would strike and that when it did, I should be free neither to accept nor to reject it. There was nothing unfinal about death. No sane man could accept it. Or do I mean that no insane man could accept it?
But I was glad to be alone there at the wheel again with the sun on my hands and the water ahead pointing at the distance like a javelin-shaft.
The voices from below came back to me again. Ella had raised her voice. Apart from a slight apprehensiveness, I had no qualms about Ella. She had become again just what she was at the beginning, Leslie's wife. She was trying to force me to give what I had given freely. I think Gwendoline knew that from the beginning and that she sympathized with me, and perhaps that was what attracted me about her. Sooner or later-I was temporarily unable to make any decision-I would leave.
We tied up at Clowes in the middle of the afternoon. Ella had wanted to go on for a bit because it would be light until after seven, but she didn't insist. Gwendoline had already told her that she wanted me to take her to the cinema.
Gwen was young and old. She looked old and yet her body gave the impression sometimes of being almost adolescent. She was less sensitive than her stepsister and it was obvious that she despised Ella. And I could see that she wanted me to be unfaithful to Ella with her. It was difficult to believe that she was only twenty-nine.
She had changed into a red skirt and a green jumper the front of which, decorated with white vees, dragged flatly because she wore nothing to support her long conical breasts. Her white shoes were toe-less, and when she crossed her legs I was fascinated by the thick varnish-red toenail at the point of each and by the fine coppery hairs that ran down her shins in twin spines. I wondered vaguely if she was a prostitute. I could sense that she was really indifferent to men, only vaguely sexual.
A bow of lipstick was revealed brightly on the rim of her teacup.
We did not talk much on the way to the pub, the hotel-bar, the only one where women were allowed. Seated at the table-red, green, white and thin-Gwendoline smoked one cigarette after another and sipped her gin. She dabbed her lips with a handkerchief and said she thought it was about time Ella got hold of herself.
"Get us another gin, Joe," she said.
I had paid for the first drinks with the change I had in my pocket. As I drew out my wallet to pay for the new drinks, a photograph of Cathie fell out of it onto the floor. I froze momentarily. The waitress picked it up and handed it to me without looking at it. Gwendoline was smiling.
"An old girlfriend?" she said.
"Yes," I replied. "She died."
"But you still carry it?"
"I don't know why. I ought to have destroyed it a long time ago."
"Of course you should! The dead can look after themselves!"
She screwed her cigarette into the ashtray.
"Drink up," she said. "We've got business to attend to."
We made love very coldly and mechanically in a field. Not exactly business, because no money passed between us. It was very dark, the ground for the most part firm but in places, where the wind had caused a crust to form on the mud, soft as our feet sank in. Her cheeks were very cold. When I touched her breasts she did not react at all. The glow of her cigarette was bright and dim evenly; she seemed completely distracted. She interrupted me. She said she didn't want any trouble. And then, when it was over and she got up, she complained that I had got her all wet and she spent a long time drying herself with my handkerchief. It was over quickly. The cigarette she had been smoking was still smoldering in the grass. I put my foot on it. I was wondering if she always made love that way. She seemed scarcely aware of me.
We walked slowly back to the barge talking in a desultory way about Leith where we had both lived. She liked Leith, she said, and she thought she would go back there and settle down when the damages came for her husband's death. It was hard to believe he was dead, she said. What convinced her more than anything else was that his boots clumping in and out from the room to the kitchen no longer wakened her early in the morning. He was a big man, as big as Leslie.
She laughed then. Poor Sam. It was too bad the way she talked about him, she knew that. But what was the use of telling lies? Of course, she was sorry for him, so sudden it was, to go to your work one morning like any other and then suddenly to have it happen like that. It made you think. It gave her a queer turn when they brought her the news. Luckily, she hadn't time to dwell on it. He had to be buried. As soon as possible considering how the bus had run over him when he fell from his lorry. The police were very helpful, especially one fair-headed young man with a walrus moustache who kept making her cups of tea. She had always disliked the police but it just went to show some of them were human beings, too.
It was a quiet funeral and the young policeman took her home afterwards and she felt sorry for him he was so clumsy so she let him do it to her on the couch. Somehow the bed would not have seemed right. He was very nervous and it was a long time before he had it stiff enough to give it to her. He said he felt like he was desecrating the grave.
"Some grave," Gwendoline said to him. There was no clay in her furrow! "There I was," Gwendoline said, "with my knees up like shepherd's crooks and my pussy raised with my fists under my bum and all he could do was to stand there like a Methodist minister and say he was sure it was a sin with the grass not yet grown on Sam's grave."
It had taken all the spunk out of him. But when she said "now or never," he unbuttoned himself and disclosed his fright. Well, that was all right as far as that went. But she thought it was too much when he kept calling on her bringing her violets and lilies of the valley every day when he was off duty. She gave him an inch and he took a mile, she said. She said that she had found most men were like that and that she hoped I wasn't.
I had the impression that she expected me to reply and so I nodded and said that, although I could understand the young policeman's desire to continue the relationship, I could understand her point of view, too.
"I should hope so," she said rather pertly.
She became more confidential. "Anyway," she said, "married life was not what it was cracked up to be." She knew that and she was sure I did. All that Hollywood bunk, she said. She came to the conclusion that you got nothing for nothing in this life. She'd take a glass of gin any time.
I said that I supposed she was right.
"You're smart, Joe," she said. "I could see that the moment you walked in. Now Ella's a bloody fool. She always was."
Looking down, I could see her feet walking over the stones, and above them the thin white legs to the level of her skirt. She was smoking. She seemed to assume that I felt like her about everything. She did not expect to be contradicted.
I asked her how she came to leave the barge in the first place.
That was not where she had made her mistake, she said. It was no life on the barge. Her big mistake was getting married. Sam giving her two pounds a week to run the house and expecting her to be a bloody servant for him. She asked me if I could sympathize.
I nodded sympathetically.
She could have earned more every night of the week, she went on, and not running around picking up things after any man. It had not taken her long to realize her mistake. After that she did the best she could but it was difficult with Sam coming home in the evening. A girl had to make do with what she could get, which was not much because all the young men were working and that left only the old-age pensioners and those who were on the dole and neither kind had much money. Still, it wasn't so bad because the old age pensioners didn't ask for much. Ten minutes and sometimes not even that.
There was one old man who gave her ten shillings a week just for the opportunity to visit her twice a week. All he wanted was to have her squat on the palm of his hand while he lay on the floor with his head against her bare belly. She didn't mind that, she said, because she could read the newspaper at the same time. Ten minutes later it was over. She got up, put her clothes on again and he went across the street to the pub.
Each time she squatted, he said: "I've got you, you bitch! I've got you on the palm of my hand!" It was true, Gwendoline admitted, but after four years it wasn't even funny. If she was that way when she was old, she said, she'd blow her brains out-take poison anyway, because she didn't like blood.
We were coming near the barge and she said we'd better pretend to Ella that we'd been to the cinema and so we agreed on a film we'd both seen so that we would be able to speak about it if she asked.
"If all men were like you, Joe," Gwendoline said, "perhaps things would be different."
I was not quite sure I knew what she meant but I saw no point in discussing it. Whatever she said, she had a tone of hard conviction in her voice, and I had no intention of arguing with her.
Ella was very quiet. She made some tea for us without speaking and then sat down with a cup herself. Gwendoline looked at me and made a face.
I was wondering whether Ella suspected about Gwendoline and me. She had avoided my eye as she spoke and it was obvious she was disturbed. Still, she made no reference to where we had been, did not speak at all in fact, except to ask whether we wanted tea.
Gwendoline was smiling. I noticed that her little finger was cocked like a trigger as she lifted her cup to drink. I was annoyed with her. She was merely making things difficult. She appeared to take pleasure in seeing Ella subdued and me without words, not knowing how to make conversation.
About half an hour later, Gwendoline went to bed in the forward cabin. As soon as she had gone, Ella prepared to go to bed. She cleared the table and began to undress, still without speaking. I went over to her and tried to take her in my arms, but she pushed me away.
"Leave me alone, Joe."
I went up on deck and smoked a cigarette. It was a clear night. The stars were very high and far away, the sky vaulted, dark and impersonal. I knew that under the same impersonal sky the plumber Goon awaited trial with nary a clue as to what had transpired to bring him to his perilous state. I thought too of the other men who would soon weigh the so-called evidence against Goon. And yet the night was motionless, empty. I thought of Ella. I knew now that I was going to leave. I remained on deck for half an hour, smoking.
CHAPTER FOUR
From where I sat at the table in the bar I could see the last daylight merging above the partition with the pale electric light that had perceptibly grown in intensity as daylight faded. The men in the bar, the bottles, the conversation seemed somehow more in focus in the electric light. From outside beyond the swing-doors, the clang of city traffic moved inwards with the man who hesitated there, his pink gaze floating over the crowd in attempted recognition, until the gaze arrested and his raising a hand in greeting-"Bill!"-the other turning from a group and smiling in cross-recognition. The swing-doors pivoted, steadied, then closed, cutting off noises and restoring volume and excitement to the conversation, drink-calls, bar sounds. All the time I sat there I had been conscious of these things, as a man is always when for one reason or another he is excluded.
I laid down the newspaper not knowing whether or not to be satisfied that Goon would stand trial in two days. I had glanced at the fading panel of daylight and sipped the froth from my beer, tasting malt. I had heard Goon's name mentioned angrily by one man who wanted to know why we wasted public money giving the bastard a trial. At least one man chimed "hear-hear." Another, with a grin, made some remark that caused him and the man next to him to guffaw. The conversation swayed from heavy to light, was interrupted occasionally by a staccato demand for a drink, and by someone flourishing a newspaper. A suggestion that Goon was not guilty was greeted by a solid protesting wall of disbelief until the speaker, asking them to mark his words, said it was obviously the work of a homicidal maniac, a Jack-the-Ripper who didn't use razors.
"Necrophilia, it's called, but they won't let it out," he said cunningly, "you'll see."
The conversation continued as I drank my beer. I found myself listening to the man who was saying that hanging was too good for a man like that, a man who wouldn't let women alone ought to be burned. And I was apart at the same time, my knowledge isolating me, excluding all possibility of conversation. The glare from the yellow-painted wall was making my eyes smart. I had been looking at the wall, listening with my ears only. I turned in my chair and emptied my glass.
I walked back to the barge, which was tied up quite close to where we had been tied up when we fished Cathie's body from the water. I found myself wondering where she was now. She would be buried in some cemetery or other. I wondered whether they had a special place for people who had been murdered and whose relatives didn't claim them, perhaps a kind of ambiguous pit into which their scarred and autopsied remnants were gradually fed. And then I remembered that Cathie was a Catholic and that it would have worried her to die without confession and I wondered whether she had had time to think of that before she was drowned.
During the time we lived together, her religion always puzzled me. She wouldn't hear a word against the priests. And yet she did not like them. She went to confession once a year but as long as I knew her, she never attended mass. There was the same contradiction in her attitude toward me.
She disapproved of what she called my atheism and each night before she came to bed she knelt down, crossed herself, and mumbled a short prayer. A prayer for my conversion, she said. At first I didn't realize how serious she was. I remember one time while she was kneeling there at the bedside I approached her silently from behind, lifted her skirt, and tried to mount her like a dog bitch. She fought tooth and nail for at least two minutes before her resistance collapsed, her buttocks slackening to allow penetration, and even then she lay sprawled, belly downwards on the carpet with her eyes closed while I bared her lower torso and lifted her hot heavy thighs apart to disclose the wispy chevron in reverse.
Afterwards, she said that I shouldn't have done it, that it was blasphemy to attempt to come between her and God. I said roughly, I remember, that that was between her and Him, that He could have her soul but that her body was mine, before prayer, during prayer, or after it. The funny thing was that she laughed, apparently having forgotten all about her religion, and posed for me in her brassiere and her knickers, which struck me as altogether pre-Christian.
As I walked back from the pub I remembered very well how different her body was from either Ella's or Gwendoline's. It was younger, smoother, with no flatulence; a brown-yellow becoming yellow-white on the underside of her abdomen. As her belly was smooth and soft, so were her thighs. She had a trick of oiling them and it with sun-tan oil so that our movements were sleek and our lunges smooth until, after we came, the moment at which our skin peeled back, with a prickling of hairs, and a tiny sensation of tearing.
But in the end it did not work. Cathie was, for all the strange and insistent lust she developed over a period of time, a woman who made plans for the future. Those plans included me and the more definite, the more socially realizable they became, the more violent were the ways in which we strove to excite desires in ourselves for one another.
Cathie's thighs were smooth, under oil some of the most beautiful thighs I have ever seen. But they represented a prison. She wanted children. That meant that I had to find a job, to make a home. Cathie always agreed that this was unfair to me. It was an imposition. It meant that I would have to limit my desires, to canalize them along channels that would contribute towards the social idea and fact of marriage.
Cathie's last act was to inform me that she was going to have a child. She said it was mine in the hope that I would throw over my own life and make it contribute towards that of her child and herself. She must have known even at the time that it was hopeless. She must have known it because we broke up knowing it one night after some of the most wonderfully violent sex we had ever experienced.
Cathie had come home from work to find me doing nothing, as usual. I think I was doing a crossword puzzle in the evening paper. As often happened, she kept silent. She made herself a cup of tea and did not invite me to have one. While she was drinking it, she presented me with an ultimatum.
"It's no use, Joe," she began quietly. "Either you get regular work and we get married or we're finished."
I didn't answer. I had heard the same ultimatum a thousand times. It was usually retracted as soon as we made love.
"I'm serious, Joe."
"Forget it!" I said. "You know the answer for God's sake!"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, if those are your terms, we're finished."
"You selfish bastard! Is that all it means to you?"
"I don't present you with any either-or's. I take you when I want you. I don't make any prediction about what I'll want to do in future. If I don't want you in the future, I won't have you, that's all."
"But what about me!"
"What about you?"
"What do I get out of it?"
"That's for you to decide."
"I know what I want out of it," she said dangerously.
"Go on," I taunted.
"I want you. I want to be married to you and I want your children."
"You can have children if you want them."
"Who'll feed them?"
"Look, Cathie," I said gently, "we've been over this before. You've agreed in the past. I'm tired of the same old arguments."
"And what am I to do?"
"What you want to do."
"You're a fraud! I've wasted two years with you!"
"So you've wasted two years with me. I don't see how that makes me a fraud."
"Of course you're a fraud!" she raged. "You know I want children!"
"I know you say you do, but you don't do anything about it."
"How can I!" was her frenzied reply.
I was slightly rattled. I controlled myself. For the last time, I said quietly, "Understand this: I'll take you when I want you and when I don't, I won't. You are at liberty to do the same. You can leave now or next week. I have no intention of marrying you. I won't make any such damn fool judgment about our future together. As far as I can see, I'd want you even less if I married you. I have no intention of marrying anyone."
"What about me!" she screamed.
"If you want to stay, stay. If you want to go, go. If you want to be married, find someone who wants to marry you. I don't give a damn. If I want you, I'll have you. I'm not interested in your plans. I'm interested in what you and the Pope would call your lower nature. I've never pretended otherwise. That's the only sense in which you can have me. I have no intention of helping you and your friends build Christendom. I think that's a bad smell. I can't tell you what to do. You know yourself what you want to do. Don't come in here every day and present me with you bloody ultimatums!"
My voice had become excited. Cathie, meanwhile, had risen to her feet, and, with an angry impulse, she threw the hot cup of tea over me. It burned my face and I lurched towards her. At that moment Cathie lost her head. She lifted the teapot and the sugar bowl and crashed them to the floor. Then, systematically, she began to break the crockery. One after another, she threw the cups and saucers into the fireplace. Bits of china were scattered all over the floor.
Her actions made me very calm. I wiped my face, crossed to the coal bunker and armed myself with an axe. Without delay I set about making kindling wood of the furniture. First, I tackled the table. It came apart more easily than I had anticipated and soon it was merely a neat pile of sticks in the middle of the floor. Then, deliberately, I chopped three chairs, the wooden fender, a Japanese lacquered cabinet Cathie's mother had given her, and the sideboard of veneered walnut that we were buying on the hire-purchase system. I derived great pleasure from the sight of these symbols of "a home" destroyed.
Soon, unable to compete, Cathie left off breaking the crockery and watched my destructive carpentering. Finally, driven mad to see her valuable possessions thus annihilated, she threw herself at me with all fangs bared and succeeded in toppling me off my feet onto the sad mash of splintered wood and china. One of her long varnished nails opened a livid scar in and above my left eyebrow. The sight of the curtain of blood that splashed down across my vision on my cheek roused me against her. I slapped her once across the face with the back of my hand and she fell with a muffled scream on top of the pile of wood that had been the table. I turned my destructive impulse on her.
I did not unbutton anything. With short strong wrist-strokes I tore her clothes off her body. They came away in shreds. She tried to resist but I was too strong for her. I remember the sight of her breasts jumping free as the cloth of her brassiere was torn from them. Her shoes I hurled into the fire. The arched line of her naked belly appeared as I ripped her panties off, and her mound, hairy and rucked up by a sudden angry movement of her knees. Her buttocks rose from the sharp splinters of wood in which they were embedded and careened backwards like a beautiful soft jaw towards the china chips. We were both bleeding at the face and she from the various cuts and bruises sustained from falling heavily against the brittle debris of the room.
Now, there she was, spread-eagled like a starfish on the floor, her sex bared and her breasts cut, and all the pent-up anger and hate rippling in the muscles of her thighs and abdomen. Her whole torso was shuddering with emotion. I took off my belt and thrashed her. At first she tried to meet my onslaught but then, too weak to protest, she moaned and collapsed on the cutting china chips. At that point, I threw away the belt, bared my sex and, pinioning her limbs to the floor with my own, I drove my whole power between her abandoned thighs. She was never able to bring her resistance to the surface. It rose and melted into the gentle rubbing motion of her loins against mine, and soon I was able to release her arms without fear that she would renew her attempts to resist. Our hairs prickled, our movements became soft and relaxed, the whole sheath of her lower torso twisting upwards from the sharp splinters under them to nudge itself against the muscular rectangle of my moving front, and her legs, once eager to close themselves against me, became hot and flaccid as they widened to a bowl to contain me. My own body leapt with soft tense smacks within the limits allowed to it by the urgent clamp of her long naked legs.
We might have made it up, have gone on from where we had left off, with new crises and new reconciliations had it not been for the fact that the priest, Father Doherty, arrived about a quarter of an hour later.
We had almost begun an attempt at reconciliation when the knock came at the door. I opened it slightly and when I saw who it was, I threw it wide open and invited the gentleman to come in. I was still naked and Cathie, bloody and tired, was lying naked on the bed contemplating the destruction of her plans. The priest decided that his presence was urgently required. Cathie sided with him. They went into conclave. And I left with a small bag.
And so, although Cathie's body was different from either Ella's or Gwendoline's, she was not in any vital way different from either one of them. If I had allowed her, she would have spun a chrysalis of respectability into which my desires, castrated, perhaps defunct, would in a few years have been absorbed. That was why I left her and why she must have known when we were under the railway truck that it was impossible that I should consent to become the father of her child...
I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I almost turned directly into the street where the cafe was-where she and I had sat on the night of her death. As I turned the corner, a sense of familiarity made me halt and I stood for a moment wondering until the fact of my foolishness struck me. Then I turned and walked quietly back the way I had come.
***
Gwendoline was sitting alone in the cabin reading a paper. As I came down through the companionway she looked up.
"You're back?"
"Where's Ella?" She laughed.
"Ella's gone daft! Come on and sit down."
She poured me a glass of gin from the bottle in front of her.
"What do you mean 'daft'?"
"She's gone to Leslie."
I sat down, accepting the glass she offered me, and drank. It was not until the bitter taste of the gin was over my palate and in my throat that I remembered I hated raw gin.
"Christ! Have you not got something to go with this?"
"What I can't imagine," Gwendoline said, "is what she wants with a man like that."
I wasn't listening to her. I was collecting my various personal possessions and stowing them into the small kit bag with which I came to the barge.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"I'm clearing out," I said. "I should have gone a long time ago."
Gwendoline went into a fit of hysterical laughter. Her white face was like a ghoul's in the light from the oil lamp.
"Have you seen my mirror?" I said.
"What mirror?"
"It's a metal one. I use it for shaving. It's got a hole in the top end."
"Are you really going off tonight?"
"Yes."
"Have a last drink then."
"Not if you've got nothing to go with it."
I found the mirror in the table drawer and put it beside the rest of my property in the kit bag.
"Have just one drink."
"I don't like raw gin," I said.
She looked at me for a moment and then burst into laughter again. I left her there, her elbows on the table, laughing hysterically, her face pale and her coppery red hair like a wig in the lamplight.
Outside on the quay I looked around and then walked away towards the city. It occurred to me that I was free.
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
During the night I listened to the plumbing. The bed was hard and the broken state of the springs made the mattress uneven. The one-room-and-kitchen flat was at the front of the house and the windows gave onto the narrow crescent-shaped street. The pavement on the opposite side was on four levels, lava-like steps that sloped downwards to a narrow bed of cobbles. Only three vehicles ever came by, the dust-cart, the coal-cart, and the milk-lorry. The street was lit by five lamps, four lampposts and one scrolled Victorian bracket riveted almost opposite the window to the crumbling gray wall opposite. And now the light from it filtered into the room where I lay, in the recess bed in the kitchen. It gleamed dully on the bone-like rim of the sink from whose pipes the plopping and gurgling sounds came, and cast the floor in shadow so that the bits of furniture seemed to be suspended in mid-air. I had the impression of being within a shaft with unsubstantial furniture around me, and below, where no floor was, the shaft continued downward without sensible bottom.
I was lying on my side and with my hand I reached downwards tentatively and touched the floor. The feel of it reassured me and I caressed it with the backs of my fingers. My head rested at the edge of the bed and I tried to make out the surface my fingers touched. A moment later it was there, shadowy, under the dull droop-white of my fingers.
The noise from the pipes approached and retreated like a train along the rails. Out of the corner of my eye, beyond the hanging window, I could see the contours of the lamp-bracket and the pale glow it cast above the name-plate of the street. If I had not known the name already I would have been unable to decipher it from that distance in that light. But as it was, I could see it, blurred at first and then in sharp focus as though I were its creator. It was called Lucas Street.
I turned back to the woman beside me and laid my hand on her belly just above her mound. She was sleeping soundly and rather noisily. My fingers moved downward softly amongst the intricacy of her damp hairs.
It was the night before the day on which Goon would stand trial. I had been unable to sleep.
In the small Bridgeton flat I was given to understand from the beginning that it was my right as the lodger to avail myself of the narrow breasted, thin blonde of twenty-five. Her husband worked as a night-watchman in a warehouse in Stockwell Street. There was only the one bed to which I as one who contributed to household expenses, was unconditionally entitled from dusk to dawn.
Her husband's first act when he came in at daybreak was to remove his boots. These were big boots, shod heavily with iron yet warped by the sweat of his feet, His next act was to make tea for all of us. After that, he resuscitated the dead embers of the fire and warmed his feet. He was waiting patiently on those occasions for me to vacate my part of the bed. Later, when I rolled out from beside her and shaved myself at the sink, I heard the woman gasp suddenly as the man mounted her. He did so with no hint of gentleness. For him, she was something to be taken, almost vengefully.
I did not look round. I watched the soap thicken on the end of my shaving brush and remembered how from the beginning she had unquestioningly but without passion accepted my own embraces, saying: "I suppose you'll be wanting your due like the others," opening her pallid thighs like slender scissors almost mechanically.
I remained tinkering with my shaving kit, washing one piece after another under the tap, the soap swirling from the bristles of the brush until the grunts of the man and the heavy breathing of the woman were over. I turned then to the man who was lying sideways across his wife and said that I was going to watch the trial of Goon that day, that it would be interesting. He nodded slightly.
In spite of the mute rivalry that existed between us over the woman who served us both, there was also a tacit understanding. We were friends and we drank together, that too almost from the beginning-the night when I had left the barge and met him in a pub. That first night, back in the kitchen, he had lowered his eyes and said, "And you'll be expected not to bring any fancy women here. The wife here'll attend to you."
The wife, a thin hard-muscled woman of the slums, cocked an eyebrow and looked me up and down. Under her look, I felt the courage drain away from my spine and I could think of nothing better to do than to produce a handful of half crowns and shillings and pay two weeks' rent in advance. I lay the money, as though I were buying her, at the corner of the table near the wife. After a moment's hesitation, she passed two of the coins over to the husband and swept the remainder into the pocket of her apron. The man accepted them without expression and invited me to go downstairs for a drink.
"See you're not late for your work," his wife said as we went out.
Over a beer we talk about her. All the time we talked I felt it was strange he didn't talk about her body or about the woman either really, only, and with a stubborn primitive knowledge of what he was talking about, about his experience of her.
At the corner of the street we parted company, he to go to the warehouse, I to return to Connie.
The man seemed reluctant to go. I felt he would have liked to see me take his wife, for he was saying almost in embarrassment, "No fears about her. Give it to her good and straight. She can take any amount of punishment."
The word punishment came naturally to him.
And then, with a weight of chains at my abdomen, I was on my way back to her and the tiny flat in Lucien Street. It was then when I entered, that she said without formality and without warmth, that she supposed I, like the others, would be wanting my due. With that she lifted her skirt above the matted chevron of almost colorless hair and moved backwards towards the alcove and bed.
I took what I was offered, keeping well in mind, as I had been informed, she could take any amount of punishment. I unbuttoned my shirt, removed it and draped it over the back of a nearby chair. Then I moved my hands to my pants, undid my thick leather belt and slid it from my waist. Folding the tip to the buckle and holding the limp leather high in one hand, I took one step forward and reached out to her with the other. Her eyes grew wide and fearful and she moved backwards.
"Do as you're told, my dear," I said, and she remained silent and withdrawn. "Come to me," I commanded. Slowly she obeyed, taking my outstretched hand. Keeping her at arm's length I instructed her to remove all her clothing. She complied, her gaze fixed hypnotically on the upraised leather lash. Her body was hard, lean and worn but not unattractive in its life-toughened way. "Now kneel before me, woman," I directed, "and undo my pants." Mindlessly she complied.
"Take my tool in your mouth," I told her and in her awkward way she did as she was told. The moment her lips accepted my stiff gourd I slapped the folded belt against my free palm with a crack that made her start and withdraw her moist lips and look up at me, wide-eyed and mouth agape. "Deep in your mouth," I commanded and her eyes lowered and fixed again on the erect phallus threatening her. With renewed vigor she placed her palms flat where my thighs and hips joined and plunged forward, sucking in her cheeks and gradually taking a full three-quarters of my shaft into her mouth.
Again I cracked belt to palm, but this time she did not withdraw her favors, only ceased her progress and with lips encircling her swollen attacker, looked up with doleful, questioning eyes. "Lick me," I said fiercely and once again she quit her ingestion and began to tongue the head glistening with moisture before her. "Lick the length of my tool and my balls," I said cracking the belt above her again. Warming to the instruction, she moved to do as she was told and with that I passed the free end of the belt through the buckle and slipped the belt about her throat like a noose.
Thus collared I directed the movement of her head and her oral ministrations with a tug and a pull. When she tried to resist the belt's pull, I tightened its grip about her throat further and brought the flat of my free palm cracking across her cheeks. Her eyes filled with tears of pain, but she spoke not, nor defied my instructions. When I'd had enough of licking and felt confident of my control of her, I stepped back and snapped her head up like a disobedient dog on a leash. She began to rise up off her reddened knees and I, with a downward pull on the belt, brought her hard back to the floor, now on all fours. She tilted her head up and looked to me for instruction. Above tear-stained cheeks her fearful eyes questioned what was next in store, but she remained mute.
"Finger yourself, bitch," I ordered. She remained unmoving. "Finger yourself," I spat out again, yanking back on her leash and sweeping both cheeks first with the flat of my palm then with the back of my hand. Her hands dropped to her crotch and she began her self-discovery. She smoothed her hair, then spread her labia and massaged her waiting inner folds. I pulled up on the belt, tangling her hair and causing her to turn her head to one side and stretch up her body to keep from choking.
Her hands left the delta between her legs and reached for the constriction about her neck. My free hand shot out and smacked her reddened cheeks anew. "Finger yourself," I barked and pulled her outstretched body yet an inch higher, revealing all manner of lovely muscle, bone and a tracery of blood-filled veins beneath the tensed epidermis.
Finally she loosed a little whimpering cry and reached to comply. Her arms could not quite extend far enough to insert her fingers in her stretched-taut slit. Her face reddened rapidly above the brown leather choker that formed a border between it and a pale, translucent body that had, it seemed likely, never known the sun. I held her suspended for a few moments longer, until I thought she would lose consciousness, then I dropped the belt.
She slumped forward again on her hands and knees but struggled to remain upright. One hand reached to loosen the grip of the belt about her throat while the other dropped quickly to her lap to do the commanded duty between her legs. I moved behind her, dropping my pants as I circled. She bent forward and, leaning on one hand, the fingers of the other spreading her slit, accepted my thrusts with little reaction.
So went my first encounter with Connie. The man spoke truly. She could take it. Too well.
The man was now lying on his side at the back of the bed. The woman slipped out from underneath him, climbed out naked and joined me at the sink. I stood back. Without comment, she heaved her buttocks on to the sink and urinated there in front of me. The hot musky smell of her unwashed body and of her urine as it ran in a generous yellow stream across the chipped porcelain of the sink came across to me. I did not find it unpleasant. I might have laid my hand on her thigh as she pissed had I not thought she would have resented any tenderness.
She, meanwhile, could be said to be ignoring me, if you could take the active element out of the word ignore, for she was completely indifferent to me. I would have liked to have gotten close to this woman, to have had some kind of give and take with her, but I found it impossible. She ignored every movement of mine toward her except those she could interpret on a sexual level. To those movements she responded immediately, crooking the softness of her thighs and abetting the rise of my sex towards her.
She slid down from the sink to the soft female pads of her feet, crossed the floor to the stove and poked the fire. For a moment both of us watched her vaguely and then her husband closed his eyes and dozed.
She dressed in front of the fire without looking at me. I finished my ablutions at the sink and then sat down at the fire and smoked a cigarette. She was frying bacon. A moment later, she broke two eggs into the pan, let them fry for a moment and then emptied the contents of the pan onto a plate, which she passed across to me. I took it to the table with a knife and fork, broke some bread and commenced to eat. A moment later, she had laid a cup of strong tea beside me.
"You going to that police court?" she said.
I nodded.
"You think he's guilty?"
"They haven't proved it was murder yet," I said.
"Oh, they know that," she said vaguely, bringing her own plate, with bacon only, to the table beside me. "A woman doesn't get undressed for nothing."
"That's not the point," I reasoned.
"You'll see," Connie said, "they'll hang him."
I was uneasy about it. I could not deny that it was likely. But, anyway, for the moment there was nothing I could do. I would go to the trial. Les would be there, perhaps Ella. But I had to go to see how the lawyers and other court functionaries committed legal murder. In this instance, neither the victim nor the murderers would dream of taking their clothes off. That thought amused me. The judge would be an old man. He would lose altogether his so-called dignity if he were forced to perform before the public without his trappings. His skinniness, or his obesity perhaps, would give the lie to the odor of righteousness. The crowd would laugh at his pomposity and shout down the brutality of his sentence. All judges, it occurred to me, all the lawyers and the lawyers' clerks should be forced to try their case in the nude. In that way they would be unable to convict anyone, because their own voices, as they became aware of the ludicrousness of their postures, would lack all conviction.
***
I was out in the street early and found myself walking slowly along Argyle Street in the general direction of the Courts. I stopped for a cup of tea at a snack counter, smoked two or three cigarettes, and then continued on my way. As I walked though the town, a strange feeling of confidence settled upon me. The rain was on and then it was off. There were women in the street, typists, shop girls, clerks hurrying to go to their offices. A shot of whiskey, which I drank from a flask at my hip, appeared to have drawn things more clearly together. It gave me at the same time assurance, certainty, not of anything-unless it were of the fact that when I returned to Lucien Street Connie would be there, sexually approachable-confidence simply in the fact and in the necessity of my own isolation.
I boarded a tram. As soon as I was seated, I found myself putting my hand in my pocket to make sure that my money was still there. Of course it was.
I smiled at the almost transparent reflection of myself in the tram window and saw beyond it a girl in a pink coat who was looking into a shop window. I caught a glimpse only of smooth and sunburned legs under the hem of the coat. I wondered whether, under other circumstances, I would have had courage enough to introduce myself. The tram moved on a few stops. I got off with as little purpose as I had got on. The pavement was crowded. People pushed past me to get on, women with parcels mostly, touchable, aware of me as an obstacle only. I said to myself that, normally speaking, in relation to other people I could be regarded primarily as an obstacle.
When I reached the pavement I had already decided to have another shot of whiskey. I made my way to a snack bar and walked through into the men's toilet. There, sitting on the lavatory seat, I allowed the whiskey to trickle down my throat. I replaced the cap on the flask, pocketed it, and defecated. There was an excitement at my belly which made itself known at the surface in a slight sweat. I read the various invitations to sexual abnormality that covered the walls about me. The world really is a perverse place. A moment later, I wiped myself and walked back out to the street.
An old man with a gray beard was selling shoelaces and pencils. The shoelaces were draped over the arm which held the white stick. The head nodded wisely. It occurred to me that he was probably a fool even before he was blind. "A shilling for St. Francis." I skirted him, unwilling to be touched. I put on my gloves and went into a post-office.
I bought a letter-card. Over at the window, with one of the post-office pens, I wrote the following message in block capitals: I HAVE NO INTENTION OF SURRENDERING TO YOU OR OF PROVIDING YOU WITH FURTHER INFORMATION. IF YOU CONDEMN THE PLUMBER GOON YOU WILL CONDEMN A MAN WHO KNOWS NOTHING OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF CATHERINE DIMLY'S DEATH. I ALONE WAS WITH HER AT THE TIME SHE DIED. I CANNOT PROVE THIS WITHOUT IDENTIFYING MYSELF AND THAT IS OUT OF THE QUESTION. UNDERSTAND THAT YOUR HYPOCRITICAL MORAL NONSENSE WON'T SHAME ME INTO COMMITTING MYSELF FURTHER THAN I DO NOW. THE CORONER WAS WRONG. CATHERINE DIMLY'S DEATH WAS ACCIDENTAL, IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT SHE DROWNED IN HER PETTICOAT. SHE REMOVED HER CLOTHES FOR REASONS BEST KNOWN TO HERSELF. I SHALL FOLLOW THE "TRIAL" WITH INTEREST. I HOPE YOU DON'T HANG GOON BUT I SUPPOSE YOU WILL FIND REASON TO DO SO. I REALIZE THAT THIS DOCUMENT DOES NOT CONSTITUTE EVIDENCE THAT WOULD BE USEFUL TO GOON'S LAWYERS. BUT I AM AFRAID I CAN DO NO MORE.
I waited for the ink to dry in the air, not wishing to have the message appear on the post-office blotter. Then, sealing the letter-card, I posted it to the judge in charge of the case.
Of course, I was under no illusions that my dramatic message would make any difference to the proceedings. But it did give me some satisfaction to sow a seed of doubt in the judge's mind. Still I even doubted whether my message would have that effect. Whether or nor they admit it, all judges must look upon themselves as God. To judge is to become God, and that is why we have put words forbidding us to judge one another in the mouth of God.
A policeman directed me to the particular courtroom. It was already quite full of people, mostly middle-aged women. I had the impression that I was watching a parliament of birds.
As soon as I was seated, I began for some reason or other to think of my shaving mirror. I remembered that on more occasions than one I had dropped it and I was being continually surprised by the fact that it did not break. No matter how often I repeated to myself that it was made of metal, I could not rid myself of the expectation that it would break.
I tried to make myself comfortable on the seat, looked closely at the polished wood, my legs tired, and that made me look at the scarred black leather of my boots. In a way, I was bored. I had not realized how utterly dependent on things I had become, even if only to catalogue them, saying over and over again, the door, the seat, the boots, the mirror, the thing to urinate in. If I had had a big ledger I could have drawn up an inventory of things, neatly arranging columns of the names of the microscopic objects which, with the courtroom about me, formed so large a part of my experience. With a ledger and a pencil, I could have kept going indefinitely. The seats for example were grouped in rows, they were really benches with backs and multiple legs. The mirror-I had it in my inside pocket-had four corners. The table over there had four corners. The scarf of the woman next to me was, when examined closely, composed of weaves of wool ranging from a distinct red, through all the various shades of purple, to one strand that was almost white. I would not have been at a loss for things to catalogue.
It suddenly occurred to me that plumber Goon was still alive. It struck me as obscene that they should put him on trial for his life. He would be eating, drinking, sleeping, and defecating much as a housebroken cat might do under the same circumstances. He would be constantly forced to focus his attention on his bodily functions. That would cause him to be more aware of himself as a living thing than he had been before when, in his actions, he could lose sight of himself. Gradually his mind must have escaped less and less from the limit of his perceptions. He must have spent hours and days in measuring distances within his cell, making an inventory of its contents and his life.
I remembered one time, after a fight in a bar, I came to consciousness in a hospital. There were screens where the walls should have been and I smelled antiseptic instead of air that hangs around a bed where two people have slept. I was living with Cathie at the time. On returning home, things were different. As I awoke and began to take in my surroundings, I realized that the constable was not there on a chair close by the bed as he had been when suddenly at the hospital out of nothing I came back to my senses. I remember he was a young man with worried gray eyes and a white pouchy face. I cannot remember whether he had a black moustache or no moustache at all. I watched him for a time under the rims of my eyelids and then I must have fallen asleep again because when I looked back, he was an older man with veined cheeks and with eyebrows as fierce as shrimps. And I can remember the buttons on his uniform were very bright, so bright that beyond the pervasive consciousness of my limbs between the clean sheets I counted them twice at least to be sure I hadn't made a mistake. I forget now how many there were.
I was thinking of that, I suppose because that was my only direct contact with the police when, beyond me, someone said: "Nonsense!" and I was suddenly aware that the trial had begun. There was Goon, a pale-faced man of middle age, in the dock. Two policemen stood behind him. The remark-by whom it was spoken I do not know-was followed by silence in the courtroom, which gave way gradually to talking in hushed tones, terminated abruptly by the insistent rapping of the judge's hammer. Looking up at him, I had the impression that I was being stared at by a venomous old turtle.
The court became quiet.
A man in a wig was speaking. He seemed pleased with himself. Even in his gown it was obvious that he had an abnormally large rump. An ass with a large ass I thought. His voice derived somewhere from his adenoids.
The people in court looked more like birds than ever, tilted, an eye glinting, about to peck. I became absorbed in watching them. As the trial proceeded, they were sometimes bored, sometimes tense and feverish, and all the time ridiculous, blobs of expression huddled together, marveling at the sanctimonious odor of their paid prosecutors.
Throughout the trial, it was quite clear that they were not talking about Goon at all. The perpetrator created in the speeches of the prosecutor to fit the sea of evidence, had nothing to do with any self Goon was conscious of. I was disturbed by the placid way they all took it for granted that it was Goon The Guilty they were talking about. If they condemned the straw man they had created, they would condemn Goon. If they hanged their fictional perpetrator, it would be Goon's body they would cut down.
"When you went... " they said.
"When you did this or that... "
Questions. Off-key. Counterfeit. Loaded.
I could see that they wanted things to fit as a man wants to believe in God.
Poor bewildered plumber Goon sat, looking sullen and afraid. From time to time he was called upon to testify. He did so with a kind of helpless rage, almost tearfully. A woman's voice beside me whispered to no one that it was easy to cry when you were caught.
The courtroom smelled musty, vaguely perfumed. Very little light penetrated from the street through the high-level window. The lawyers stood up and sat down, sat down and stood up, and a small man in spectacles was explaining that Goon's fingerprints had been found on the shoes of the deceased.
"There could be no mistake."
"What?"
"None whatever." From a handkerchief, tilting his little voice, he looked out through his pince-nez.
That item of information obsessed me. No doubt the witness went back to his laboratory afterwards. He did not appear again.
Les appeared toward the end of the morning. He testified that he had recovered the body from the river. With Joe, he said.
"Joe?"
It is strange to think that I am mentioned in the transcript of the proceedings of this trial.
"My mate," Les said self-consciously, and there was a titter in court. Les wore a high white collar above which his sugar-loaf head with its cropped gray hair maintained a startled tilt during his questioning.
He was not asked for his opinion. The Crown ascertained that the woman was dead when she was pulled from the water.
The court was adjourned at the end of the first day. It was quite obvious that the prosecutor was going to get his conviction. He was a small man, rather self-satisfied, and he seemed to take a personal pleasure in murdering poor, pathetic Goon.
I did not feel like returning to the house immediately. Instead, I took a tram to Kelvingrove and walked through the park. I sat on a seat for a long while thinking about nothing in particular. Ella had not been present at the trial. Les had come and gone without seeing me. I wondered vaguely where he was a night-watchman. I missed Les more than I missed Ella. I was glad to be rid of Ella. There were many things I liked about Les.
After a while I got up.
I was walking near the tennis courts when two young men and a girl passed me on the footpath. I supposed they were students because they were carrying books under their arms. When they saw me they stopped laughing. It was as though what they were laughing about was too private to be shared with strangers. Then they were past me and laughing again, and the voice of one of the men came back to me, high, artificial, excited, as though he were mimicking someone. Then the girl's laughter again. I turned to watch them.
She was walking between them, in flat shoes and a summer dress, swinging a pot-shaped handbag on a long leather strap. Strikingly blond, her hair rose gracefully from her neck in a ribboned pony tail. She was slim-hipped, and desired obviously by both of them.
They walked out of sight.
I found myself thinking that she could not have been more than twenty and wondering whether I looked old to her. Then I found myself envying the two young men who escorted her. A feeling almost of despair came over me. I felt a devastating sense of loss for something I had never had. I was tired and slightly distraught and so it did not occur to me that that something was a thing no one ever possesses. It did not occur to me that that something exists only for the spectator without whom it could never become an object, never tantalize, never to be unattainable.
I was tired and distraught and it did not strike me then that her escorts were even farther than I from the thing about which I felt such an acute sense of loss. Their laughter, the swing of her hips, the ribbon, the familiarity, all that. It did not strike me then that even if she were the mistress of one of them-I had created the thing towards which I felt the sense of loss. It was not anyone else's to be enjoyed.
Afterwards I saw that it is ludicrous to envy someone because he is part of a situation which does not exist for him. I realized that night things can only be seen, and thus exist, from the outside and always as a lack. A man cannot have a sense of loss towards a situation in which he is seen to be involved because, being involved in it, that particular situation does not exist as seen for him. He can stand in no relation to it, feel towards it neither a sense of loss nor of possession. It is something for someone else, for the man who is on the outside, and eternally condemned to feel loss.
I did not think that then, but during the night. At that time I was tired, outraged.
When I returned to the flat in Lucien Street, Connie's husband was preparing to go to work. Connie was wrapping his sandwich in a newspaper.
"How did it go, Joe?" he said.
"They'll find him guilty," I said.
As soon as her husband departed, I was at Connie. I was enraged by the day's proceedings, confused by the slim-hipped girl, furious with Connie's indifference to me. For the first time since our initial sexual encounter, I unleashed my belt. Her back to me as she finished up her kitchen work, I gained her immediate and stark staring attention by cracking the two halves together.
Her hands dropped to her sides, she turned to face me and the color drained from her face. I gestured with a nod of my head and she immediately and compliantly stripped naked where she stood. I handed her the belt. "Leash yourself," I said. She fumbled for a moment as she passed the belt end through the buckle and slipped the big loop she had formed over her head. She shivered with anticipation, not knowing what to expect next. I stood and looked on.
"What do I want?" I interrogated.
"To be undone and licked?" she questioned. "To have me frig myself off? To have at me from behind?"
"Wrong," I intoned. "I want your obedience. Will I have it? Or must I exact the ultimate penalty for your willful noncompliance?" I sounded just like the pompous judge.
This last phrase left her with a befuddled look on her plain, uneducated face. I realized then that-like Goon-she was a simple creature, nothing more. Her needs were few and her pleasures were limited. The attentions I gave her were adequate for her limited life. The sexual act was, for her, as much a part of her routine as her morning ablutions. For me to make more of it or be offended by what I perceived as her lack of interest in me was folly on my part.
I replied, "I want to fuck you top to bottom, every opening in your body," and her eyes brightened with excitement at the thought. "Tighten the belt about your throat and we'll begin." She complied and moving toward me, rounded her sweet lips, dropped to her knees before me, and with one hand fumbling at my crotch, handed me the free end of the belt.
***
I had pushed Connie's naked loins away from me just as her husband came into the kitchen on the following morning.
There was a twinkle in his eye as he removed his boots.
"She's a game bird!" he said in a voice in which I could detect pride of possession.
I didn't know whether to reply or not. The woman didn't take it as a compliment. She turned over and pretended to go to sleep.
He began to kindle the fire.
"Going there today again, Joe?"
"May as well," I replied. "I've never watched a trial before."
"What's it like?"
"It's insane," I said.
The flames crackled in the grate. He filled the kettle and placed it on top.
"How do you mean?"
"It's like some kind of ball game," I said. "Goon, the plumber is the ball."
The man laughed. He began to rinse out last night's tea cups.
"It's just like that," I continued. "Goon's not important. It's the game that's important. Two teams of lawyers out to win. Only it was obvious from the beginning that the defense team is only a second-rate one. And that's just how they report it in the papers. It's a kind of tournament and the readers can follow it. The lawyers are all out to cut a fine figure for themselves. For them it's not the case that's important, it's what happens to their reputations."
He carried two cups of tea across to us. Connie sat up beside me and we both drank. I could feel her hot thigh close to my own and I had no doubt that soon her husband would be taking over where I left off. I drank my tea quickly, vacated my half of the bed, and crossed to the sink.
I shaved carefully, watching the smooth line of my chin appear from under the soap in the mirror. Reflected there I could see the man undressing. I tilted the mirror slightly to take in Connie. She was holding the covers up, inviting him to come beside her, the smooth line of one hip, thigh, and breast naked for his eyes. Further down, almost out of sight under the covers, was that part of her belly to which the hairs of her mound clung, close, like a wet leaf. A moment later, her husband clambered into bed beside her.
I did not delay overlong watching them. They were still at it when I left the kitchen and made my way down the stairs to the street. It was like the previous morning, the streets wet and rain threatening, but the air was warm.
Once again I found myself in Argyle Street. I almost decided not to go to the trail. The outcome was a foregone conclusion. They had created a crime and now they had created a man to fit it, as a theologian creates his God and then his philosophy. The only disquieting part about the whole freak show was that they would hang an actual living creature in deference to the system. Oh, there was no doubt about it. The man who was created in the speeches of the prosecutor was fitted admirably to the crime which, in turn, the police had invented. It is a very gratifying thing indeed to see two branches of the public service, the judiciary and the police, work together in such imaginative harmony. If they can do so much on so little evidence, there is nothing, nothing at all that is beyond them. Our system is built on a rock and woe betide to any anarchist, deviationist, criminal, bootlegger, or lustful trade-unionist who happens to brush against its web. At last, we may hope, the evil will be rooted out, and peace will reign in our unhappy land.
So I did not go to the Court in the morning. I found myself instead playing pinball in a dive in Jamaica Street. There were few people there at that early hour of the day and the attendant was almost suspicious of me.
After lunch, I made my way to the courtroom to find that the jury had already retired. The newspapermen were there with their cameras. I sat not far from where I had the previous day and waited for the twelve jurors (three ladies and nine gentlemen) to return. Their pomposity made them ridiculous. It occurred to me that there might be one among them who felt like a murderer. The rest were protected by their sanctimoniousness.
I can remember no quiet so quiet as that which followed when Mr. Justice Parkington had finished saying that never before in his long experience of crime had he felt so justified in awarding the maximum penalty. He said it almost lecherously, and only then was I struck by the fact that the man was quite mad.
Goon was called to stand. Mr. Justice Parkington had already asked him if he had anything to say before sentence was passed on him. The reply had been: "Just that I am innocent, Sir," said Goon without daring to look at the owl who leaned forward angrily towards him. The remark was received in silence. Its meaning seemed to escape everyone. Having said it, Goon began to sway. He had to be supported by policemen. I take it that this would have happened even if he had killed Cathie. At this point Mr. Justice Parkington fitted the black cap neatly to his balding crown and delivered his barbaric sentence in nasal tones. The law, it seemed, required that Goon be hanged by the neck until dead. A day was prescribed. The time, early in the morning. Mr. Justice Parkington's denture-shored mouth then uttered the formula that God should have mercy on Goon's soul.
The courtroom was silent and gray and heavy despite its high ceiling. The brass lamp brackets on the walls were high up and austere. I tried to hear the noise of traffic outside on the streets. I wanted badly to hear that, but the walls must have been too thick. And the people were silent except for a slight cough, a rustling of paper, the small scraping of a boot.
I cannot remember how the court broke up. All I know is that suddenly Mr. Justice Parkington was gone and the disintegration was already taking place. A woman in front was remarking to a friend that she felt exactly as though she had been in the presence of God.
CHAPTER TWO
Perhaps you think I ought to have kept to the side streets, to have walked quickly to avoid being looked at. But the truth is that no one gave me a second glance. The tedium of waiting for the trial wore me down more than anything. I was a spectator watching your justice from the outside. I had no doubts about its direction. The final judgment came as no surprise to me. Had I felt any sense of personal danger, I might have taken my walks at night, taken them to relieve the tedium of days spent eating, reading, or lying on the bed of my room. After a while I might have ceased to look forward to those walks because they would give me nothing more than exercise and fresh air. I would have spoken to no one. And gradually, as I saw that the people I met in the street paid no attention to me, I would have lost that sense of danger. I would no longer have started at my own shadow, no longer have turned my face away if a young woman brushed past me in the street.
But none of this happened. I realized from the beginning that you must be called a murderer before you become one. You must live up to the idea other people have of you. In that way they can dispatch you quickly at the end of a long rope.
But I did need a drink. Badly. The social syllogism in which Goon had been unfortunate enough to get himself entangled upset me deeply. If any act of mine could have destroyed that syllogism, I should have acted gladly. Go to the police? Confess? That would have been in an indirect but very fundamental way to affirm the validity of a social structure I wished to deny.
A double whiskey was more relevant, more fit under the circumstances. I drank two double whiskeys in an alcove in a bar. As I hadn't eaten anything since early morning, the alcohol had an exaggerated effect upon me. When I left the pub I was feeling tipsy.
My thoughts turned naturally to women, to the vital part of them which cannot be institutionalized. The tram passed under Central Station Bridge. Not far away, I recognized a bar to which I had gone one evening about a month earlier. Its clients were a melange of swarthy, foreign sailors, a few nondescript white men, and prostitutes.
There had been five women then and they all looked vaguely like Gwendoline. The comparison amused me. After a while, one of them broke away from a group at the bar and came over to me. Her lips were, I remember, thick and wet, and red like Gwen's, and her teeth, except for one gold one, were white and broad. Glancing at the other women in the background I remember being glad it was this one who had come over. The others were thin and dark-haired, with very thin dark red lips. She asked me if I would like to buy her a drink and sat down before I replied. She said she would like stout. She was a big woman, something like Ella, broad-bellied and fat-thighed. Her hair, dark at the roots, had the curl and color of a smoked haddock. I ordered a drink for her and another double whiskey for myself. She stayed with me until closing time and then we left together. We took a taxi to a small street on the other side of George's Square. In the room there was a dirty bed, an empty wardrobe, a marble-topped wash-stand with a flowered china water jug, and one unvarnished chair. She began immediately to take off her blouse. She had a broad belly. Her breasts were gathered flatly within a pink cotton brassiere, which was sustained tremulously by thin ribbons which, in their taut task, were embedded in the thick flesh of her back and shoulders. I watched her from the edge of the bed where I was sitting...
By this time, of course, the tram car had moved on and the pub in question was long ago out of sight. I wondered at my impulse to recapitulate the scene in great detail. I wondered why, if it had afforded me such pleasure, I had not got off the car and made my way to the same pub.
It was then that the thought came to me that, for all that many people pretended to be disgusted by her, the prostitute is an integral part of the same system which condemned Goon. She herself knows that she is part of it. Nothing is farther from her mind than the idea of revolt. The categories of civilization include and tolerate her: a necessary evil, like hanging.
I knew then why the movement of the young girl in the park had so excited me. She was a potential ally. In her-in any woman who gives herself angrily and freely-there is the impulse to revolt. The prostitute is an ally, an accomplice of the married woman. When marriage falls, the prostitute will be out of business; if the prostitute goes, marriage will be insufferable. The dishonesty of marriage is a fundamental one: it requires a man to make a judgment about future experience which only that experience can justify. Against all the cautions of probability, one is asked to accept an absolute judgment about another person and about oneself.
I got off the tram car at the foot of Gibson Street and walked slowly through the gates into the park. It was a pleasant spring evening with at least two hours before dusk.
I walked uphill and across the park so that soon I was looking across it towards the gray spire of the university. I sat on a bench and gazed over at it. It was over there that the technicians of our civilized sclerosis were manufactured. And sometimes, a rebel. My thoughts were not particularly profound. I was enjoying the seat and the fresh air.
About half an hour later I began to walk toward the Kelvin Way.
I was walking slowly, paying no particular attention to the people who passed me on the paths when suddenly, as I rounded a corner, I came upon the girl I had seen the day before. She had a briefcase under her arm and she was engaged in conversation with a tall serious youth who looked in the air as he spoke. I sat down immediately at a distance. They talked for perhaps five minutes, shook hands, and each continued in his own direction.
The girl was walking towards me.
I intercepted her. Something in my manner must have made her hesitate. You understand that almost ten years had passed since I had given up all pretensions of respectability. I was dressed like a shiftless member of the working class which, in a sense, I suppose I had become. I saw a pretty, approachable girl. She saw a man of another class with the visor of his vulgarity drawn down over his face. Had there been a policeman in the vicinity she might have called him.
When I told her I wanted to speak to her, a conflict of emotions was visible on her face. She was at once interested, afraid, and, I suppose, insulted by my tone of familiarity.
She asked me rather coldly what I wanted to talk to her about, no doubt thinking I was a hawker of stolen property or something of that kind. Our meeting was, from all ordinary points of view, improper. I realized this, but, since it was the impropriety I wished her to accept, I had no way of reassuring her. To apologize for coming on her suddenly in this way-molesting is the appropriate word-would have been to grant the rectitude of the very system my life had been lived to destroy. I found myself more angry with her than sympathetic. This had the effect of making her more nervous still.
"I don't know what it is you want to say to me," she said quickly, "but I am in a hurry. I have an appointment. I'm late already. You must excuse me, please!"
This caused me to laugh suddenly. She regarded me distantly.
"Go on," I said. "If you are in a hurry, it doesn't matter. I'm sorry to have detained you."
I leaned back against the railing and lit a cigarette.
She hesitated for a moment and then, seeing no one detained her, she took a few tentative steps away from me in the direction in which she had originally been going.
"I would still like to talk to you," I called after her.
She turned on the balls of her feet.
"Why don't you say what you mean?" she said in a proud voice. "Why do you have to pretend you want to talk to me?"
I hesitated and then I said: "All right. I don't want to talk to you. I want you to take your clothes off and make love to you."
She flushed and I thought for a moment that she was going to turn on her heel and walk quickly away. But she did not. She stood there undecided and I had the impression that she was looking for something very witty and devastating to hurl back at me.
"Why bother saying it?" I said. "Why do you look upon me as your enemy?"
"I don't," she said quickly, as though I had caught her out at something. "I'm just not interested, that's all."
"If that's true," I said, "there is no more to be said."
"I'm glad you understand," she responded hesitantly. "I have no wish to offend you."
"You cannot offend me since I had no previous idea of you," I said. "I had no reason to expect you to accept or reject. I was merely interested, that was all."
"I see."
"Will you let me take you for a coffee?"
She was looking at my clothes as though she were speculating on the possibility and its effect of being seen in my company. But suddenly she seemed to thrust all this away from her.
"I'd enjoy it very much," she said with a smile. "Where shall we go?"
"It doesn't really matter," I said, coming up beside her. "Wherever pleases you."
"There's a cafe in Sauchiehall Street at the other side of the park," she said. "We could go there."
***
In the old way, in the old places, there is a structure which you build up of another person in terms of which that person must make his impact upon you. Beyond this structural idea there is no experience; the structure itself is armor against it. For two people to come close together, it is necessary to destroy the structures in terms of which each experiences the other. When she accepted my invitation to take coffee with me, Jacqueline had done just that. She thrust away from her the whole system of weights and measures which a conventional upbringing had bequeathed to her. This she did tentatively, but a tentative movement is all that is necessary.
Let me be quite candid. I wished to undress Jacqueline and make love to her, quite literally. It was the experience I most desired of her. It is neither interesting nor instructive to say that all our talk led up to the very simple matter of going to bed together. In the first place it was not a simple matter. In the second place, the words that were spoken between us did not detract in the slightest from the value of the mating which was ulterior to them. Why do we consider that an ulterior motive is necessarily a shameful one? The words attuned us to one another, made it possible for us to contemplate a sexual union that would not be obliquely twisted by the truss of convention.
We re-interpreted a myth. The tree in Eden was the Tree of Knowledge; quite simply the tree of structures in terms of which, the apple eaten, our first fathers began to interpret the world. Before that, communion had been immediate, achieved without the aid of structural ideas. After countless centuries of mediated communion, it was not surprising that love was not a simple thing. It had become metaphysic. To achieve the communion of Eden it was necessary to jettison our ideas, of ourself and the other; to do so was to act in innocence, to allow the possibility of love.
It became obvious to us both as we talked about this and that, and things with no importance in themselves, that we intended to have sex with one another. At least that was obvious to me.
Jacqueline was, perhaps, more at the edge of things. She seemed interested, but meeting her own desire with reservations which her upbringing had instilled in her.
After an hour we were talking like old friends. She found the students at the university childish, she said. Of course they were interested in sleeping with her, but they were embarrassed and they usually spoke of marriage.
I walked her back to the park gates and said goodbye. We arranged to meet the following day in the same cafe at the same time. I watched her walk away along the path, her blond hair still high in a ponytail at the back of her head. Her body was lithe and slim and I could imagine the smooth warmth of her delicate young buttocks, modest now under her fresh linen, her bare legs below, tanned and smooth like the surface of mercury.
I thought at that moment that a whole night and day was a long time to wait.
The evening passed slowly.
I sat for two hours with a glass of beer in front of me. I suppose I was thinking, although the process that was going on inside me seemed continuous with something else which was below the level of thought. I had a vague feeling of desire. I was unable to direct it towards any of the tired prostitutes who occasionally stopped by my table. It had nothing to do with them.
Have you ever tried to explain anything to a prostitute? Prostitutes make the best listeners in the world because they don't listen. They smile and they agree with you. At first, perhaps, you are taken in. You expand, you have found your first neophyte. Or perhaps it is you who are the neophyte. You are feeling very expansive. You are about to have your way in spite of the fact that there is something of the fish bone in this tired woman. But at this point she tells you about her child in the country, and how she does it just for her. Little Mary will get a better start in life, go to a good school, perhaps even marry a professional man. At that point it comes home to you that you are about to fuck your mother. "What is it, dearie?" she says. "Is something wrong? Come closer. That's right. Wait till I wet it a little for you... "
I was thinking of Jacqueline. I had been looking for a woman like her a long time. Sometimes I have imagined I have already found her. That night, sitting in the pub, watching the prostitutes steer in and out through the swinging doors, I was feeling certain again, tentatively certain. To feel certain of anything is the proof that you have already lost it. No feeling of certainty, no feeling of uncertainty, just a feeling, undifferentiated, a well-being, and no word for it. One must resist all temptations to invent the word. In the beginning was the word, and that was the end.
I thought about poor Goon. He was part of a vast octopus organism which, spotlighting an individual cell, called that cell bad. Poor Goon was bad. The judge said so. The octopus said so. So the octopus would strangle him. Only poor Goon knew he was not bad. No doubt he was convinced that someone was bad. I, for example, although to him I was nameless. But I was sorry for him in spite of the fact that he thought I was bad. That didn't make him bad, not at all. It was the octopus that was bad. And even that was not bad all the time; that's to say, the people in it were not bad, only the idea they had of themselves as belonging to a society. And that was not bad either; it was merely unintelligent.
To tell the truth, Goon bored me. Rather, I knew that he would bore me if I ever met him. I wanted him to live and I thought for a long time wondering how I could get him off. I sat thinking for hours. But without wiping the arse of the octopus and getting myself strung up for it, there did not seem to be any way. If the lawyers couldn't do anything, I couldn't. After all, the lawyers made the damn setup. If they can't help you, no one can. That's why it always pays to consult a lawyer before you do anything bad. Then it may not be bad. He'll tell you.
I drank a bottle of beer before I went to bed.
***
I arrived at the cafe early.
The woman behind the counter had black hair and a mole on her upper lip that showed through the thick layer of powder. When I entered, she was talking to a man who might have been a commercial traveler. He had a briefcase from which he kept drawing display cards and catalogues which he then passed across to her. She examined them carefully and handed them back in turn, nodding all the time with the kind of nod that patronizes and humors at the same time. She didn't appear to want anything, but the man insisted on leaving two catalogues. He left the cafe as though he had just arranged a big deal. His step was one of a man of forty-five who thinks he's behaving like a boy of twenty. It left him as soon as he had crossed the threshold; through the glass door I watched him come to himself. He hesitated on the pavement as though he couldn't make up his mind and then he crossed the road slowly. When he had gone, the woman came over to take my order. He had been trying to sell her a new type of display case, she said. It was made of plastic and he had given her many reasons why it was preferable to glass. The woman did not seem to be convinced. She brought my coffee with a look of disbelief on her face.
At exactly 5.45 p.m. Jacqueline entered the cafe.
She was wearing a red coat and she was carrying a small traveling case. She had wrapped her long blond hair into a bun at the back of her head. When she saw me she smiled and came over at once.
"You came," I said.
"You didn't think I would?"
I pointed to her case.
"Does that mean you have decided?"
She laughed.
"I don't know," she said. "It's not too big to go back with!"
"You just brought it in case?"
She was looking at me seriously.
"I wouldn't have brought it unless I had been nearly sure," she said.
"And you want me to convince you?"
"No! Don't talk like that, Joe" she cried! "You'll spoil it."
I took her hand beneath the table and pressed it.
"If it can be so easily spoiled," I said, "you had better go carefully. There's no way back."
"I know that, Joe."
"I'll order you a coffee," I said.
The woman nodded from behind the counter. She was obviously inquisitive about us but her face was inscrutable. A moment later, spilling the fawn liquid into the saucer, she laid the cup down in front of us with her red hand.
I pushed it towards Jacqueline. She sipped it without saying anything.
"It's like believing in God," I went on. "Once you realize that He's a metaphysical construct, you can't believe in him any longer. There's no way back. You can't choose to believe in him again."
"I know."
"It's settled then," I said. "The train leaves at 11 from Central Station."
"I wish it were 11 now," Jacqueline said.
"Just five hours," I said.
She shuddered as my hand reached higher on the soft skin of her thigh under her skirt. Her cheeks were flushed. I stroked gently, feeling the smooth firm flesh ride between my forefinger and thumb. Then I felt her hand on my wrist.
"Not now, Joe. Please. Later."
I lit a cigarette.
"What shall we do to pass the time?"
"Could we go to a cinema? Then we could eat dinner. And by that time it'll almost be time for the train."
"Sure," I said. "We'll go when you've finished your coffee."
In the back row of the almost deserted cinema she turned her thighs towards me like the long slender necks of horses. They were smooth and dully white in the darkness, like pale flowers. Their grace and their naivete delighted me. She was breathing heavily and the rest of her body was slumped backwards in the seat. Had we not been in a public place, I would have knelt down beside her and buried my face in them.
I felt no sense of urgency. My whole body was wrung by desire for her but the delirium was controlled. I paid little attention to the film. I don't even remember what it was called. As I stroked her I imagined what it would be like to peel off her thin underwear from her young body... what it would be like for the first time to open with her wetness at my hand the scar-like weal at her soft groin, to try her young muscles with soft explorative pressures of my own, and finally, still with no conscious urgency, to break through the trim growth of her short hair into her warm, wet sheath.
I can remember a time when I would have moved quickly, when I would have been afraid of losing the opportunity by delaying too long. Those were the days when I took women intellectually. But that no longer interested me. Especially with Jacqueline. Neither had I taken Ella intellectually. It was she who raised the intellectual barriers against me. Was it because she was too old? Gwendoline was different. My desires were mixed. I didn't like Gwendoline very much.
Jacqueline was only twenty. I was delighted by that, for she was already young and she had not much life to unlive. I would take her the whole way, corrupt her utterly within two years. I wasn't quite sure whether or not I was committing a crime in taking Jacqueline. I wasn't quite sure of the law. It might have been an abduction. Unfortunately, I was not in a position to consult a lawyer, and so I put the question from my mind. It was improbable that her parents would be able to trace us. That was just as well because we did not intend to be married. I didn't know them. It occurred to me to ask Jacqueline. I leaned near her to do so, but her eyes were closed and she was breathing deeply so I didn't disturb her. Instead I stroked more gently nearer the edge of her knickers, searching with the blind pads of my fingers for the first signs of the frail hairs that would arrow inwards towards her sex. She moved her other thigh and pressed it against my hand. She whispered something, which I didn't hear. In the darkness her profile was very beautiful.
We sat until the cinema began to fill up and we were forced to discontinue our caresses. We decided to leave and go somewhere to eat.
In the street outside she suddenly threw her arms round my waist and kissed me on the lips.
"What was that for?" I said.
"That was for you!" she said, "and you deserve a silly answer!"
I laughed and we walked down the street towards a cheap restaurant.
"That's the only thing I'm sorry about," I said.
"What's that?"
"Money," I said.
"What about it?"
"It's hard to get."
"Oh, we'll manage."
"Of course," I said. "But don't be romantic. People must either give us things, or we must earn them, or we must steal them. I'm not really prepared to earn."
"I wouldn't expect you to, darling!" Jacqueline said brightly.
In the restaurant we ate quickly because the food was not particularly good. As soon as we had finished, I helped her on with her coat, I lifted her bag, and we left. When we were outside in the street, Jacqueline produced a teaspoon from her pocket.
"That's to prove I have decided," she said.
I took her arms and we walked down to the station where we deposited the bag in a locker. Then we walked slowly through the town, down to the river.
We stood on the suspension bridge looking into the water. Circles of reflected light seemed to spread and stay as they were crossed by the sleek tar-like movement of the water towards its estuary. It was raining slightly but the thin sprinkle was refreshing and we stood in the darkness quite a while before either of us spoke.
"How long is it now?" she said.
"About two hours," I said.
She was lighting a cigarette; I was reminded of Cathie. She had stood just like that not long before we made love. My eyes moved down the river towards the spot at which the railway trucks were, coupled together like so many boxlike houses, near the edge of one of the quays.
"I wish we had a boat," she said. "Wouldn't it be fun to sail away from here now, without waiting?"
I drew her towards me and kissed her.
And then we moved back against the side of the bridge against one of the girders which, with the rest, arched upwards over our head like the rib cage of a prehistoric animal. I ran my fingers through her hair.
"Are you quite sure?"
"Of course," she said without hesitation. "You must believe I've decided."
I kissed her again and we walked back along the bridge and turned along the street which was parallel to the river. We walked with our arms round about one another. Soon we came to the spot where Cathie and I had stopped a number of months before.
"I know a place out of the rain," I said.
She obediently walked quickly across the open space behind the line of trucks which still huddled squatly close to the water. She moved ahead hesitantly in the dark, propelled gently by my hand at her elbow. I counted the railroad cars. At the ninth one I stopped.
"Here," I said.
After a moment I took off my coat and threw it down under the car. I sat down and looked up at her.
She hesitated.
I was looking directly at her bare legs, slightly apart and visible under the hem of her coat. When she knelt down beside me it occurred to me that she was very nervous. Her face was soft but slightly tense, her eyes suggestive and afraid at the same time. I put my hand under her skirt to the sudden warmth of her thigh and drew her nearer. She swayed forwards, the undercurrent of reluctance in her movement countered by the pressure of my fingers on her flesh. The wind rose across the water making her skin chill at the same time as the hot strands of her desire grew. It played gently at the sparse hairs that quivered delicately close to her goose-fleshed skin. Almost suddenly she squatted down beside me.
The place smelled dankly and of oil. On one side the river was visible and the lights of the river street on the far side. On the other side our view, and the world's view of us, was totally obstructed. The atmosphere was close and her body's perfume hung about us like an insinuation.
I began to undress her. She put up no resistance. It was almost as though she were a spectator at her own seduction. Her shirt came away easily in my hands as she raised herself slightly, her lower body abetting its downward movement. The ambiguous warm scent of her abandoned limbs rose to me with the soft white discovery of her roundness, vibrant and somehow more naked than I could have imagined. I laid my hand on her mound above the fragile panties and moved my fingers gently at the hidden beard of hair over which the thin and moistened ruck of nylon lay, a discreet curtain, causing her sex to be emphasized and veiled at the same time. I felt her quiver at my touch. Her head was bent and her face was slightly averted as my fingers slipped tentatively between the material and the soft sweat-inhabited skin of her body's center. As one of my fingers stabbed between the frail sharded flanges of her sex, her face moved downwards shyly to hide itself on my shoulder.
Slowly, my right hand holding her fine blond head close to my shoulder, I unbuttoned myself to allow my own power to rise like a pale boom between my legs, thick growth of male hair at its roots gave it a gnarled, almost venomous appearance. And then, insinuating gently, I forced her head downwards over my bared belly until her lips came to rest on the moist bluntness. At that point I relaxed the downwards pressure, my hand at the back of her neck bathing itself in the heavy yellow coils of her hair. I wanted her to choose it for herself. Momentarily, although soft and loving, her lips remained closed as though they were savoring, perhaps fearfully, the first tentative realization of the situation into which she had willingly allowed herself to be led. Then, a decision made, her little pink adder's tongue thrust itself from between her lips and caressed the taut nakedness that I exposed to her. The point of her tongue painted sensations skillfully at the surface, sensations that radiated downwards to my vitals and caused the muscles of my back and buttocks to clench themselves in hard knots. This, like a rising platform beneath me, caused me to thrust upwards. Her mouth broke open lovingly, its soft wet interior containing me until I felt its first doting suction bring urgency to the muscles of my thighs. At that moment I took her head in both my hands and set it there at my body's center between the strong vice of my thighs.
While she doted in this way, I began to remove her upper clothing, passing my hands tentatively up over her respiring body, over the twin sleekness of her breasts to the sultry spun-haired resilience of her armpits. Then, when she sat white and young and naked except for her nylon panties, her head still bowed downwards at its intimate task, I moved downwards again with my hands, silhouetting the graceful form of her body to her haunches, allowing the elastic of her knickers to run over them like soft gloves. And then I moved downwards again, drawing them along her firm but flaccid thighs to expose navel, mound, and sex, all arching upwards now as her lips broke away and her body spined gently into an abandoned position and one of her sleek young thighs brushed against my cheek.
In her turn, her hands at the back of my head were insistent, and I allowed myself to be drawn into her, my mouth opening to the faintly odored hair that split and broke against my lips, minutely, like an uneasiness. Then the softness of her deep young flesh had engulfed me, with the warm and meaty blocks of her thighs closing about my ears. At the same time, I moved my hands to her lean young belly and pulled it downwards, shutting out the sight of the truck's wheels against which the rain inconsequently spat.
Her slim hands on my shoulders urged and inspired my fluctuation. The slim girl, pricked at the seat of her passion, became at that moment merely a desperate physique, a lithe thing, tubbed and hot, lowering itself relentlessly onto the mouth which doted on her. It was a ball-like motion which inhabited her hips and flanks, a motion which spread upwards like a strident poison into the muscles of her naked back and shoulders. She groaned, fell sideways, drawing me with her, so that my right shoulder came to rest on the stones. Her buttocks, ballooning outwards to be confederate with my face, failed to land on the coat in their fall and were grazed, a trickle of blood drawn, on the stones. She experienced it with a small cry of pain which seemed to have the effect not of loosening her grip but of knitting it to a frantic fleshy tightness that threatened to suffocate me. Gently, I parted her beautiful knees so that her sex, as yet undiscovered in its depth, became an expanding oval of wet desire, rising now, like the interior of an exotic flower through the forest of delicately stranded hairs.
A few moments later, I felt my head pulled gently upwards towards one of her young and sinuously curved breasts on which the nipples, silhouetted darkly in the gloom, were small tight buds of pigment almost rubbery to my lips. I circled the sweet nipple with my tongue and then, as she raised her breasts with one hand towards my face, I took if playfully between my teeth and subjected it to a long and doting suction.
The coolness of the night had the effect of magnifying the odors of her nakedness. Her skin all over was smooth and cool to the touch. The coolness in conjunction with the desperation of her physical being, in conjunction with the almost hysterical flow of warm and viscous liquid from her young woman's sex, had the effect of making her seem pure and immaculate in love. Her voice never rose above a shy and nervous whisper which urged me always and pleadingly to more violence.
Suddenly I thrust her downwards over the stones so that her sex struck against mine, and, after one cry of pain, I felt her cool hands close round my buttocks and with violent pressure pull me to her. She uttered a gasp of pain and joy and her teeth sank into my neck as my hard expansion broke through inexorably into her sex, which before had only known those secret instruments a shy girl knows, in darkness, in the locked privacy of her bedroom. And then, my sex contained firmly up to the hilt, our bellies met, rubbed, and doted, the flick of our haired fronts joined. I was aware suddenly of her legs draped downwards against my harder ones and touching like warmed silk. With gentle pressure behind her thighs I drew them upwards, crooking the knees until her calves encircled the purposeful cylinder of my body and her own torso strained eagerly forward to receive me. Our lips had come together, wetly; like the alluvial silt that was the product of our more sexual union. The wetness of our mouths seemed to feed us outwards into each other, absorbing at all our pores. Our pressures slick, and our limbs grafting themselves into the twisted embrace, a small seed of ecstasy, bright as the pole star, broke away from the vital nexus of my lower abdomen and became an electric needling jet through the part of me which impaled her. Sensitive to the growing shudder, her young loins burst like a poppy against my riding belly. Her whole lithe frame cracked upwards like a sinuous whip. She cried out. Her ankles twisted together, locking away all possibility of retreat, and her voracious young belly, swilling in its own juices, shuddered violently to receive my load. At that point, or a fraction of a second later, all her firmness left her and she softened backwards against the ground, like rain, I thought, so delicate she was, yet somehow substantial.
Her eyelids fluttered open and in the darkness I saw her smile.
"Oh Joe," she said, "I had no idea it would be so wonderful!"
Her trust made me nervous. I was almost afraid. I tried to judge her reactions to anything and to everything as I pressed her lovely slack nakedness close to me.
How difficult it was even to begin to say what I had intended from the first!
"I'm cold," she said suddenly.
I passed her slip to her. When she put it on, the lower part of her torso protruded from it like the long shoot of an uprooted plant from the earth-caked end of the stalk. I laid my hand on her soft wet cunt hairs and caressed her. She smiled, laughed softly, and closed her moist thighs against my hand, imprisoning it. With my free hand I gave her a cigarette. I watched her face light up and fade in the darkness as she drew in the smoke. Then suddenly I began to talk.
I talked softly and she sat there, leaning backwards on her hands, her legs flat on the ground and stretched out towards me.
"This is where Catherine Dimly fell in," I said.
"Who?"
"The woman they're hanging the plumber for."
"Oh."
She smiled in the dark and then she said: "I thought it never came out at the trial? Where she was pushed in, I mean?"
"It didn't."
She hesitated.
"How do you know then?"
"Because I was with her."
"You?"
"Yes."
"Oh."
"Do you want to hear about it?" I inquired.
"Yes."
"The plumber didn't murder her," I revealed.
"You did?"
"She fell in."
"Oh."
"She was with me. We made love under this railroad car."
"This one?"
"Yes. I was going away. She was trying to force me to marry her. She said I got her pregnant."
"Did you?"
I smiled. "What does it matter?" I said.
"Nothing. It doesn't matter at all," Jacqueline said softly.
"I was walking away from her. She came after me. I shook her off."
"And she fell in?"
"Yes. I didn't go to the police. If you fell in now I wouldn't go to the police. Do you understand? If there were the slightest possibility of their hanging me for the accident, I wouldn't go to the police."
"Yes." Jacqueline breathed.
"So I didn't."
"I see," she responded, the words coming in tense bursts.
"And they are going to hang Goon," I informed her. "Yes."
"And I haven't the slightest intention of going to the police," I said.
"Mm."
"Not now and not the morning they lead him out and hang him."
I hesitated.
"Are you still decided?" I said. "You will still come tonight?" I craned forward to look into her eyes. On her answer, on perhaps her mere tone of voice, her life depended.
