‘Forsooth,’ I suddenly remembered, relieved that the last year’s toil had not been in vain. Then, ‘Verily sir, a mighty one.’ I lifted my head and strained to latch my mouth on to his ear, like I had read about. I bit hard.
‘Ouch,’ Din said.
I thrust myself forward and tilted the crown of my head towards the floor, and arched my back dramatically, but it was all wrong. ‘Oh, oh, oh, sirrah.’ I struggled to remember a sentence from The Lustful Turk. Something about ‘a delicious delirium’. I stopped arching my back, and started to writhe around beneath him, then lifted my head in search of his ear again. Our skulls clunked together, and our temples throbbed.
‘A tremulous shudder, an “Ah, me, where am I?” and two or three long sighs, followed by the critical, dying, “Oh, oh!” ’ That was it. I tried all those, in turn.
Din pulled back, and for the first time I could see nature’s grand master-piece, only his seemed to be wilting. I had not read of that, only of pillars, and engines, and skewers. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, perplexed.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Are you?’
‘Dora. Look at me.’
But I could not meet his eye. Oh, but the sham was more shameful than the real thing.
‘What is it? Have I misread you?’
‘No,’ I said quietly, then I sat up quickly, and hugged my knees into my chest, and sat there like a small curled thing, waiting for the fear to pass. For I’d read of too many fantasies to feel anything other than fictitious myself right now.
‘I’m afraid.’
‘So am I.’
‘But not like I am.’ I couldn’t tell him of the waves of feeling inside me I had felt with my husband, after which Peter expressed such revulsion of me that he never came near me again, except after vigorous scrubbing with carbolic and bicarbonate. I feared that what I had experienced all those years ago was a cousin of the great explosions, those throbbing, Vesuvial orgasms that I had encountered in close on a thousand erotic books since, which had told me more extraordinary stuff besides on how one should expect to appear to one’s man in the throes of firkytoodling, or what you will.
But I think Din understood anyway. ‘You do not need to do this to yourself.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered back.
‘And don’t say sorry.’
But I was sorry; I deeply repented my behaviour.
‘Sorry.’
‘Let me help you,’ he said. He lay me back down. ‘Don’t move. You are not to move. You may only move when you can’t help but move, but not before. If it takes for ever, so be it. If it happens now, so be it. But you are not to move until you want to.’
‘I’m scared, Din. I’m not Sylvia.’
‘I am glad about that. Because I know where my heart is.’
And I did wait until the movement came over me, and then it was as involuntary as fainting, and infinitely more pleasurable. I do not have a name for what we did; it was not the chaste embraces of popular novels, nor was it the tuneless organ-grinding of Diprose’s catalogue of work. It was ferocious, and it was lyrical, and we did it, wordlessly and without name, without ‘verily’s or ‘sirrah’s or ‘forsooth’s, long into the afternoon, amongst the paper shavings and leather parings on the floor, and I knew that I would never again be able to separate the smell of the bindery from the smell of him and what we did that day.
‘Would that we could bottle this, and keep it for ever,’ I sighed, in his arms.
‘You would make a captive of love?’
‘No. Just that I am more used to safety than you, and prize it more greatly. If all we had in the world was a square of cloth, you would stick a post up the middle, hoist sail, and ride the wide oceans a-whooping. What would I do? I would grab the edges, tuck them in at the sides, and huddle down beneath it.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, kissing me and stirring me inside again. I wanted to tell him to stop, to never stop, to go away, to stay for ever. ‘Why you, Mrs Dora Damage, you’re nothin’ but an outlaw, just like me.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Oh, but I have seen you battlin’ bravely in that world out there.’
‘Only because I want to be safe. Safety is an unknown quantity to you.’
‘To me, yes, but I want it for my children, and my children’s children.’
‘And yet I believe you are all the better for disregarding it. I admire you, Din.’
‘No you don’t. You pity me.’
‘I do not. Well, not entirely, at least. And I’m learning not to, besides.’