Laura

CHAPTER THREE

The breeze curls through my eyes, making me blink. Was there another path I could have taken in my years? My wanderings were ever circumspect. Eyes watched me from among the green leaves growing; the laurels whispered of summers that I had not known, of the long grass that grows around the boles of trees where the gardener has not swung his scythe.

There was a gate from the garden that I never passed through. I could see it sometimes in my swing's high swinging, between the elms that brushed the feathered clouds. I asked father what was there.

“A bull,” he said, “you must not go there.”

“She does not want a bull,” my aunt said, and laughed. She was my maternal aunt. I believe she often held secrets from my mother. My paternal aunt looked at her from her garden chair and said, “We must not be coarse. There must ever be delicacy. See how prettily her white-shod ankles twinkle when she moves.”

I did not then doubt their rectitude. One evening, unseen and unregarded, I ventured to the gate. My chin brushed the rusted iron bar of its wide striding, but I saw nothing. Only the forlorn sadness of grass that waits for dawn.

“Your ways are given,” I was told, “do not question them.”

The hedges about the garden stood as barriers to my being, but I felt no resentment. I had no desires from my eighteenth year, the year of my blooming, to go beyond-only to rediscover my discoveries, for the toys of my Measures were then utterly new to me. The dark inter-woven branches and twigs of the hedges fascinated me. I could forgive them what they hid. I knew their innocence, their intertwining. The interventions and manoeuvres of others were ever hazards that faced me.

“Shall you, then, go upstairs again?” my mother would occasionally ask after supper.

“It is but for reading,” I would say.

“You may read down here. What are you reading?”

“A book,” I would answer, for I kept several ever by my bed. The answer appeared to satisfy her. Our reprises were ever mundane.

“She will come down again, will you not?” one of my aunts would say comfortably, for of occasion it was my penance to do so and not to wriggle as I sat. My palms moistening, I would ascend, trailing a haze upon the polished bannister. In my room then I would wait but for a few minutes until I was attended upon. The closing of the doors downstairs was ever seen to.

Should I not have cried out in the wild wind's wailing- sought succour in my grandmother's shawl? The pigeons cooed from the roof in their grey mantles. None could speak for me save myself. I uttered not words at first but incoherencies. After the lemonade in the garden, the busy bustling of skirts, a startlement of starlings from the trees, then came the evenings of languor and douleur. The shapely stemming of my legs pleased and was praised. The tightness of my garters, ruched and resetted as now they were allowed to be, flattered the swelling of my thighs, my orb made naked by revering hands.

I knew the nuances of my fate. At night when the gas lamps outside fluttered and flirted with the dark, I who had first sought oblivion in my bubbling cries, my sobs pelleting like raindrops on my pillow, I knew the benedictions of ensuing silence, broken only by whispers, compliances.

There were miracles to be known. Coaxed, cozzened, and commanded in my postures, a breeze cried for me and curled around the corners of the house, telling the ivy and the moss. Sometimes the smell of loam from the household plants on my windowsill came to my nostrils, obscure, unsought, but ever now remembered. I entered red-hot castles in the fire and hid myself. There watching then I watched, as if myself and yet another. Eyes stared at me from sepia likenesses, framed by silver on which the firelight glinted. Only the snapping of the strap broke the silence of the unforgiven, urging the surging of my hips, back-forth, back-forth until fulfilment came.

On Sundays, the family assembled in the drawing room that yet was but a neighbouring world to the otherness of worlds above, father would read from the works of Browning, Southey, Keats, or Shelley. Through words I learned with the wild, high geese to fly, though all was solid and arranged in our outward demeanours. My mother understood less of the words than I, for she heard not the silences between the words where lie the small plains of thought and introspection.

We were not as others in their modulated trailings to chapel and to church.

“If there be wailings, let them be within,” my father said.

“And if there be supplications?” my paternal aunt asked.

“Let them be satisfied, fulfilled. In our fulfilment is our homecoming. Let the fire warm the surfaces and the interior will glow.”

My mother would complain then of one and all speaking in riddles. My aunts both said however that it was plain for all to see and that philosophising should begin between the sheets and not between the pews. It was then that I began to doubt their rectitude, being well appraised in that moment by their eyes. My mother said she understood not at all unless it were a matter of praying in bed.

“They who pray receive. Unto them who suffer is given,” my paternal aunt said. I had not prayed nor had I sought to. I drank my port quietly. Messengers of fire ran through my veins. I curled my toes and waited for the night, my Turkish slippers neatly crossed. My thighs kissed and parted, exuding secrets.

The constable has gone. Perhaps he thought me austere. I descend the steps and turn. Like a speck of dust poor Millie floats somewhere among the meaner habitations. Devoid of wings, she seeks her own salvation. I, winged and angelic, return to the sea's fringe. Its vastness even so terrifies me. I prefer the enclosures of space-the locked door and the clock that chimes for tea, the twitter of a bird that knows the safety of a cage. I have read Milton: surely I shall not offend the gods? There is a private luxury in being oneself or being locked to another when the bottom shimmers still with heat, in knowing one's knowing, obtaining one's obtainings, ankles misted, twisted in the sheet, small feet to large, the aloneness at midnight in the aftermath.

Perhaps I know now where Julian is, although I wish I did not. The framework of his house etches itself in my mind as if in a sketch by Durer. I fly beyond, become a bird. I sniff at the dusty porticos of the black door through which I have so often passed, wearing my widow's weaves of deprivation. The beach is but fretted with few figures now. I gaze upon them, seen and unseen: the hypocrites and lecteurs, the taught and the untaught.

I spoke with a tradesman once at the back entrance, which offended Julian's mother muchly. He was a large man, bluff and quiet in his coming, of able limbs. I could not help myself but envisaged the weight and hang of him in his maleness. So should a man be, strong with authority in his loins.

Preachers have spoken to me, though not of sin for they knew me not as one of sin in my demureness. I minded them not, save for their eyes. Their eyes were funerals. They knew not the coaxed workings of my hips, the magical emergence of the male rod moving in my moon, a stammering of muffled breaths, the moonlight sheened upon my offered orb.

Ah, the gurglings of sperm that I drew from the stem, my sobs a metronome of lust, smack-slap of testicles beneath my bulb. The seepings on my sheet no maid dare speak of when she changed the linen. I had spilt milk, I said. I kept a glass ever by my bed, the cool milk thick with cream. My eyes are mirrors on and on. None see within them save in Perdition. In its retreat, its reluctance, its withdrawing, the penis would spill its last tears on my thighs. I warmed to them, reached back and touched the trickling pearls that stained my stocking tops with dissolution.

Should I know shame or delight in this? I knew it not as a matter for performances of thought nor mental gestures. Let none who do not care despair-let none.

My thighs burnish the air that swirls beneath my skirt. Eyes escort me and I know again their seeking. I hear the laughter of the lolling girls under the arches beneath the promenade, sucking the sweets of summer from their fingers. Perhaps I would take one-command her to ascend. Sensing my superiority, she would surely do so. An urge comes upon me sometimes to fondle a suaveness of hips, to feel the know of knowing as I in my maidenhood was felt, to brush with fervent touch the pubic moss of secrecy. Yet she must be virgin as was I, the better to be urged, persuaded, conquered-and left then virgin even as was I.

Between the fruitful pouting of my lovelips-the lips as tight as a forlorn nun's prayer-I succoured no insurgence of sperm until Julian was upon me, dark in the night though pale in his stirrings. His fingers have sought not my rosette in our bumpings. I have urged his hand there and felt it withdrawn, uncertain, dismayed, fretful perhaps of his own ignorance. I have spoken not. I do not answer his occasional crudities. He knows not the purities of sin, the immaculacy of silence broken only by the imperative murmurs of pleasure, the imperceptible sighs of indulgence.

Shall I enter as one who laughs, not knowing what she laughs at? The square faces me, endeavours to enfold the yawning sea but cannot. The house is seen, tall in its terracing. I am watched perhaps by servants who have long put away the tea things and have oiled the lamps for evening. Once when my mother was absent, my father read passages from Brantome to us. I knew the lives of gallant ladies. I was permitted to laugh. It was but a parable of strange observances and bodily concordances, my paternal aunt said. The English came too crisp to it in translation, my other aunt observed. I studied French the closer thereafter but could never find the words that like bright butterflies had been all about me in my father's reading.

Perhaps it was an indiscretion, for my mother returned and the book was put away to be replaced by Household Words. The mansions of my mind became thereafter many. I polished all within and laid my favourite thoughts in coloured boxes, there to be conserved. Long have I tinted them with other words, with dreams, observances. Such diaries as I kept hidden beneath the corner of my bed were muted by symbols. Thus: “the curtains fluttered” was the raising of my dress. “The moon rose high” conveyed my offering. “The tap water was warm” evoked my memories of sperm, deep bubbling in my bottom. “Milk was churned” I used also to this purpose. Knowing my naiveties, I blush-I-conquered, riven, put to the pestle's pounding, saddled in silence to the needles clicking that sounded as but an overture below.

Having no doorkey now, I ring. Julian would not let me have one.

“It is not proper so, Laura, unless a woman has a servant who may carry it. One of the maids is ever here to admit you.”

The door opens. I am regarded. Julian wears a pearl grey suit such as seems proper to him at this hour. I sense a perspiration beneath. Distasteful.

“You may not enter, Laura. All is done. You have walked too far alone, too long.”

He has said this before. Has he said this before? I am not deprived who have not.

“She is here again. Why is she here?” His mother appears. “Your possessions are at the station. You have not proven yourself. Immorality was ever rife in you.” Her body appears to me as but a support, a backcloth, for the two large blancmanges that of occasion wobble faintly under her corsage.

“I was elsewhere. Am I to be peered at through a microscope?”

I intended to add that it would be a black-lacquered one with brass-rimmed lenses, but it seemed not to matter. The tall thin entomologist approaches. The dead butterfly quivers. It mattered not to me what I had done for I counted it not a particular adventure. The episode had not had the ornateness that I wished. The actors had been paltry. I pass between Julian and his mother-between the blancmanges and his rather hard, pointed shoulder. Perhaps, as it occurs to me, I had become brazen, but such things apparel the outerness and not the innerness of one. The staircase within the hall regards me sombrely. They are no longer the stairs I wish to climb nor ever were. I recall no moments of salvation above, no luring of my hesitant, no desirous fumbling such as might have stirred me with pleasure. In the aboveness here I have ever been beyond the immediate moment and not in the moment, passing so rapidly from one moment to another-as one might float through empty windowpanes-that I have known no satisfaction in the moment.

“There is a dryness here,” I remark.

“There is dust, yes. It is never got rid of.” Julian is at my side. I feel the beseeching of a hound in his glance. He would stay me if he could.

“You have struck matches, Julian, but found not the tinder.”

It amuses me so to speak. As if to assuage him, I lay a mist of sadness among my words, though trailed so lightly that he does not notice it.

“I shall leave now. This woman may remain.”

“I am not of your kind! How dare you speak of me thus!” The floorboards creak beneath her heavy step.

“That is true-that you are not of my kind.” I turn, move in my moving. The openness of the door enchants. I am upon the world.

If the trees could come to me now, called from the lanes and the pastures, dragging their roots like long sloppy skirts, I could hide among them. I would peep from between them even as I peep upon myself through memories of myself.

I am told that all do so, though I am not sure of it. Someday when passing people perhaps I shall ask them, enquire of it. I shall ask only those who are well clothed and not pursed of mouth nor pompous in their stances. Their memories shall invest me with the promises of their pasts that I may compare them with my own.

There are cockles to be had along the promenade. I shall dine in London. Father once took me there. I remember the hotel, close upon Southampton Row- how vast and high the bed, the tassels trembling. The guardian at the door bowed to me as if I were a princess. Father had pressed half a sovereign in his hand. I will conserve one in my purse. One should return to one's beginnings-the light falling at morning across the waiting steps, the scuttling of the maids' brushes along the lintels, the cry of an owl at night announcing a dark outerness to the closed dark house.

The door now does not close behind me. Perhaps the lock has been oiled for caution, as was mine. Julian and his mother stand as actors in the wings who have come to the wrong theatre, having no part within the play and neither audience nor participants are. Participants. Yes. Say it but slowly and it tiptoes like a ballet pupil trying her first steps. Yes.

A trail of hansoms sags along the street, the broad air bluff above the sea. I raise my hand. A cabman's whip is snapped. Ah, that I but knew it closer. I jerk my hips a little out of habit, feeling its seeking tip beneath my skirt.

“Where to go, Miss?”

“There is a station here? Is there a station close?”

“Not close-not far. Up yonder, through the town. A bob will see you there. Are you lost?”

“People should know whether they are lost or not, should they not?”

He misunderstands me, shakes his head, his hair an unutterability of filth beneath his hat. Tired with its journeys the coach creaks as I enter. Am I always thought to be lost-a piece of paper drifting in a colour different from the rest? Few people have a colour in one's thoughts. Most are thought of as beige or palely white perhaps. People should become seagulls, soaring in the wind above the headlands lost.

Do not look at me so. The station will soon enough be reached. The cabman has the voice of man who speaks in statements, settlement, facts, declarations, knowledges. To such I would ever speak for they enter not too deeply into one's eyes.

“We are here, Miss!”

We have passed through people in their loiterings, the streets, the voluminous places. I shall be late in my arriving, yet not too late for dinner.

I enter the station, its broad blankness. A waiting of locomotives, heavy in their ironness. There are few movements about. A barrow stands beyond, my trunks upon it. A girl sits close, dressed in a grey dress as a pigeon might be dressed. She broods. Her arms are languid. A porter approaches, hesitates, and approaches again.

“People should know whether or not they are lost.” My words fall upon the ground between us. They roll, wobble, and are at rest.

“That's the truth, Miss, as ever was. We gets a lot such in their comings and goings, hither and thither. Is that your luggage, Miss?”

I move past him. His furtive eyes appraise. He rises no doubt from bed with a fat woman, one whose underclothes are unwashed, her feet tinged with grey. The girl apprehends my look. Her eyes raise themselves to mine.

“I could not remember whether it was yours or mine.” Her voice has a middling tone. It speaks neither of wealth nor of want. Her feet are pleasingly small. Her small toes would be pleasing to suck upon. I would draw her stockings down, feeling the svelteness of her thighs.

“Claims belong to them what claims. The unclaimed stays here often.” The porter bustles up.

“Do you not open it if it is unclaimed-enquire, examine?” I gaze at the girl but speak to him.

“The privacies cannot be disturbed, Miss.”

“We should go,” the girl says, “mother will be anxious. Edward will be angry.”

“Edward, yes. He is often angry?”

“You know he is. With you especially. You are given to taunting him too much. Only his shyness veils the greater parts of his anger. Mother has often said that.”

I count her of my years but know not always my becomings. With father all was stable, taut, inert. The days were ribboned and unseparated. Only the indiscretion of the volume of Brantome fell like a loose key that could not find a door.

“There will be charges, Miss. It weren't paid for, you see, but waited upon your coming. I has the regulations here. So much a mile it is and then a bit beyond.”

“Show me.” I extend my hand, black gloved and elegant. The list he produces is crumpled but neatly printed.

“The Directors insists on it, Miss. Their names is at the bottom. It is all proper and signified.”

I scan their names. Broadhurst, Benton, and Buckle. The B's hum. I see their busyness.

“Even so, I do not know them. One is perhaps related distantly to my father by way of business, but we have not been introduced. There will be comings and there will be goings. This is ever so. What time does the train for London depart?”

“It has steam up now, Miss. Ten minutes or thereabouts. Keep the windows closed when you go through the tunnels.”

He gives me a leery look. The girl utters an impatient sound. “We shall be late. Pray get the luggage aboard.”

We stand as two, conscious of the distance between us, unyielding to the urge to touch. The geometry will require rearranging. Regarding us dourly, the porter heaves and trundles the barrow forward. No doubt he waits to be paid. He holds the printed list as evidence. One should of occasion cross the palms of servants with silver in case they are found to be of future use. I might after all return to Brighton. It has a pleasing air of nouveau decadence. Let the wind disguise me as I walk, in my long summers of contentment.