‘No mum. We’re fine. I just came over funny when she started all them orders at me. Thanks, though. It’ll be best to take ’em out anyways, give ’em a nice time.’
I embraced Lucinda again. ‘Have a lovely time, darling. Make sure you listen hard to the story, so as you can tell it me later.’ Then I turned to Pansy once more, and said in a low voice, ‘Keep a close eye on her, won’t you?’
I waved them off up Ivy-street. The clock struck twelve, and Din was striding towards them, and me, grinning and waving. He stopped to exchange a word with Pansy, and pulled a flower from behind his back which he presented to Lucinda. Then he tickled Nathaniel in the tummy, waved good-bye to them and started up again with his jaunty saunter towards the workshop. I pulled inside before he reached the house; I did not want to talk to him. I heard him go into the workshop through the outside door.
The house was silent, but I was troubled. I was tired, oh, so tired: the exertions of the past year were catching up with me, along with the strain of Peter’s death, and now this constant warring of heart and head. I sat in the Windsor chair, and closed my eyes. I hated Din for an instant. I could hear him in the distance, rigging up the sewing-frame, but once he started to sew all was quiet once more. I could sleep here, now.
Instead, I unlocked the door into the workshop and drifted in noiselessly, towards the chair next to Din’s, where we used to sit and sew side by side on his earliest days with us.
‘I’m sorry Mr Diprose is always so rude to you, Din,’ I said.
He shrugged, and turned the sewing-frame that was in front of my chair towards him, so he would not have to reach too far across me, and started to dismantle the set-up.
‘He applies unnatural scrutiny to me. It was why I followed you to Whitechapel. He pressured me to find out more about you, and to find some way of binding you to me.’
‘You had no need, ma’am,’ he replied, before adding softly, ‘for I am bound to you already.’
‘I do not mean by dint of the Ladies’ Society.’
‘Neither do I.’
We fell into each other’s silence, only Din tried to clamber out again by passing me an old manuscript that was on the sewing-frame. I took it, and placed it on the table next to me. Then I started to wind the cord onto the sewing-frame. I did not know why I was doing his job, only that I was not tired any more, and I needed something to distract me. His hand went up to meet mine, but still I wound the cord, so he wrapped his entire hand over mine, and kept winding with it for a few turns. Eventually I could bear it no more, and pulled my hand back, and all the way up the length of his arm, and spun round to face him. We kissed – he pulled me towards him with his empty hand, while the hand still holding the thread went to the back of my neck – and I smelt him up close at last.
Unexpectedly, my eyes fill with tears, which stream down my face, and he kisses them, each one, before returning to my mouth, my neck, my chest. I forget about Peter in his grave, about Lucinda and Pansy and Nathaniel on the streets, about Sylvia and Jocelyn, and about myself. Then suddenly I remember.
‘Stop!’ I stand up so fast that my chair falls backwards. I do not pause to see his face. I push the sewing-frame out of the way and run to the door, find the key hanging round my waist, put it in the lock and turn it. Then I run back to him, and he stands up to greet me, and we kiss all over again.
He kisses my lips, then across my face, and my ear, and he walks slowly round to my back, his lips keeping contact with my skin all the way, and he carefully and unhurriedly unbuttons my dress, and slips it down over my shoulders, which he kisses, each one, before I turn back to him, and do the same to his shirt. It is stained brown here and there, and smells of beer, and sweat, and hedgerows. He takes my chemise off next.
My fingers trace the contours of the skin on his chest. I kiss his neck wound, which has almost gone, although I can see fresh scars on his arms and on one shoulder. I press my body towards him, and slip my hands round to his back. They feel something, and feel it again. A groove. It has me caught; I cannot move my fingers from it. Silky and smooth, a long groove, along which my fingers cannot help but trace. And then I lift my head, and I stare at him. I turn him round, but he twists his head back to look at me. On his back are deep, old welt-marks, like carriage wheels on mud, the entire length and breadth of his back, and the backs of his legs.
‘Dare not pity me,’ he said sternly. ‘Have a look, have a good look. But come back to me, or we both stop now.’
I came back, but I kept seeing them in my head, and struggled to know whether to touch them, or not to touch them, and how to show I didn’t care. He kissed me, and he pressed urgently against my hip bone, then towards my centre. The heat from my body seemed to drain towards that one point; my head struggled to reclaim control, and in the conflict, my body lost. I was feeling too much. I feared he would be more than I could bear. My breath was being overwhelmed by a sinister inflation, which threatened to obliterate my ability to inhale entirely. Before it could engulf me, I had to close it off. Instead of feeling too much, I made the choice to feel nothing.