And I learnt to keep my eyes open – why were they always closed in the books? – whether I was up close to his skin or beholding him half a body’s length away. For I learnt that it is not just the men who like to look, as I sat myself up on my elbows or twisted myself round, the better to observe my lover’s attentions. But I learnt too that men have the better view, as Din pulled himself up and back, hands on my hips to control the movements, and watch and smile, then look back into my eyes as if he could transfer the image to me that way. And he would place a candle between my thighs, and gaze and gaze and smile, and I learnt at last what my best angle was.
But the books never told me either that the more we did this, the greater would grow the urge to tell him that I loved him, and I wondered if that urge grew in him too, but somehow I doubted it. It was always the men, in the books, who said it first, and always beforehand, to convince their unwilling victims into the act, and never afterwards. I may have defied the books in many ways, but I knew I would not, could not, say it first.
Sylvia needed me every evening of those five days, which was just as well, for it was after hours, in the aftermath, that I found it hard to reconcile the shame prickling over my skin with the impetus to dance and run riot with fulfilled desire. I would sit in the tin-bath and pour icy water over my guilty, spent flesh, but I was torn: I wanted to rid myself of all traces of him, as much as I wanted to smell of him for longer.
The sixth day was Sunday, so the bindery was closed. But on the seventh, he did not come back to work.
I sat in the empty room, ennerved first by anticipation, and then by confusion, anger, and at times, relief, over the next few hours. I held myself tight in the waiting, as if any sudden movement would shatter the tentative and fragile bowl containing these new sensations, and disperse their memory for ever. I tried tidying as I waited for him, as if I could impose order on what had so recently been a temple of pleasure, or a boudoir of vice, I was still not sure which.
Presently I wandered into the kitchen, where Pansy was sorting the washing, and we heard noises in the parlour. Sylvia had opened up the dining-table with the spare leaf, and was trying to move it over to the window.
‘I’m going to change the piano with the bookshelf, too. And do you like the scarves I’ve draped everywhere? I think it gives the room a certain freshness, don’t you think, Dora?’
I shrugged, as I watched her struggle with the table.
‘Aren’t you going to help? Are you just going to stand there? If you will not help me, I will help myself.’
So I came over to the table, but as I placed my hands on the edge she gave it one almighty shove, with the full weight of her anger behind it, and it screeched towards the corner.
‘You see, I don’t need your help at all.’
And so I retreated once more into the bindery, and tried to busy myself with work. I knew I had not made much headway on the crates that arrived after Peter’s death, what with Jack being gone. I pulled out a stack of manuscripts, but I did not want to disband them and rig up the sewing-frame. I could not shake Din out of my head that way. I would have to ask Pansy to take over the sewing, in Din’s absence. I fiddled around on a piece of paper with a few designs, and willed the day to go quicker, and passed it as in a fog.
My yearning for Din was as intense as Peter’s had been for laudanum. The pain of not-having transcended the immediate satiation demanded by those lustful Turks. It brought with it its own thrill, which gratified me in the face of the strutting women of Lambeth, the respectable old women of Ivy-street. How free were they all, really? And what of Knightley, and Glidewell, and Diprose, and their lot? Libertines, were they? It felt as if Din and I were the only true Libertines in London society. The conversations we were yet to have; the parts of his body I was yet to kiss; the pouring ourselves over each other and languishing in the smells, the tastes, the heat. Dora, he said. Dora, he called across my fantasies. I cherished the way he said my name. It defies transcription. It leans on the ‘do’, and dwells on the ‘r’, richly mouthed, with a full pucker, like an Englishman would never do. Dooarra. He felt my name fully in his mouth as he spoke it. My name felt at home there, as if it were basking on the bed of his tongue, in an exciting new room. It felt safe there. Dooarra. Yes, my beloved Din.
Oh, but I needed to distract myself with work, before I succumbed to brain-fever. There were some sewn manuscripts ready for forwarding. But we were low on leather, and I could not send Jack to the tanneries to buy some more. I would have to go myself, but some other day, for what if Din arrived just then to find me gone? I ferreted around in the drawer for scraps of velvet to appliqué on to another binding, and came across the single strip of Diprose’s special leather which I had saved. It was too late to return it, and he would never have known I had it. I had nothing better to do – everything else seemed like a superfluous nonsense at a time like this – so I thought that I might as well play. I measured the scrap with an angle, and cut it into a perfect rectangle, and then I tooled it into an elegant bookmark for my daughter.