The First of July(42)

“But you didn’t love me.”

“For heaven’s sake, you sound like a petulant boy. Yes, I loved you. But you were twenty; I was older than you.”

“By four years. Nothing.”

“I’d had a life by then,” she said. “I’d been married, widowed. Life was very difficult.”

He remembered how exotic he’d thought her difficulties. A woman with a past. Isabelle was an actress, classically trained in Paris. He’d been introduced to her by a friend who’d met her at an after-theatre supper party, and all three of them had spent a foolish afternoon in Hyde Park on the Serpentine, rowing in circles and noisily showing off for this woman of the world. They were both a bit scared of her, he thought, neither daring to see her alone. She always wore the same dress, with black dots on white and a blue sash, and it had never entered his head that this was because she had no money. Nor would she tell him exactly where she lived, waving her hand and laughing when the subject came up. Finally he’d followed her home from the theatre to a grim street. She was embarrassed, even injured, he thought, when he’d caught up with her. But she’d invited him in and he’d seen how she’d turned two tiny rooms into a retreat. A photograph of a man, evidently playing Hamlet, was, he assumed, her late husband. Another, less formal pose revealed him to have had a splendid moustache.

She had followed his glance. “He was ill for so long,” she said. “He didn’t look like that in his last year.”

She poured him a brandy, then sat on a footstool, and they had talked and talked. She had no close family—only a cousin who was another widow, “even poorer than I am, and she has a child to support, poor woman.”

When her current run at the Lyceum was finished, she would need to decide whether to return to France or not. It was entirely a financial matter. Then he’d thought, clumsy with youth, that he could give her money. His mother had left him a substantial sum, and it had been well invested.

Later, she’d read to him from Molière. She’d agreed he could return, and the next time he had read her Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, and she’d clapped when he finished, and she had recited French sonnets from memory. The next time he arrived, she looked solemn. She took his hand—he remembered the marvelous feeling of her cool, soft fingers—and led him not to the usual chair but to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed as she very carefully removed her boots, her belt, her stockings, and then indicated that he should unhook her dress. It fell to her waist and she stepped out of its skirts. She looked at him, briefly, as if to check that what was happening was all right, then unlaced her chemise and folded every article carefully and with excruciating slowness, it had seemed to him. Finally she’d pulled two or three pins out of her hair. Naked, she was—like her dress—all contrast: very white and very dark. He had never seen anything so beautiful, or so thrilling, in his life.

She had given him a smile—not a confident one. “Do you like it?” she said.

And when she had finally helped him take his own clothes off—an everyday task at which he was suddenly all clumsiness—and pushed him down gently, she said, very politely, “You are a virgin.”

“No,” he’d lied. “Not really.”

As he explored her with delight and a desperate curiosity, he was astonished by how much pleasure he seemed to give her. He was nervous that it would all end too soon, but she guided him inside her almost immediately and seemed to encourage him to reach a climax, but then she held him and murmured “How I’ve missed this.” He supposed they slept a while before he felt her touching him and he took her again, much more in control but just as excited and amazed by her. She cried out in French as her thighs tightened around him, which he found unbearably arousing—she was somewhere else, in her own world—and that made their intimacy all the more thrilling. His face was buried in her hair and he kissed her, feeling that he wanted to become part of her.

Later she had gone to her tiny kitchen. He could hear her splashing herself with water. When she returned with a drink for him, she said “I miss my husband very much. You made me very happy.”

Now, a mature man, he realized that it had been a warning; but then he had had no idea that a woman might long for a man or that love might not be equal or straightforward, and he had just laughed in a sort of nervous relief. When he stood up, naked before her, he had echoed her words: “You like it?”

This time she had given him a broad smile, her cheeks dimpling, and nodded. When he was dressed, she put her hand over his. “Soon I shall go back to France,” she said.