Perhaps none of us will come back, my dear; perhaps only you, our few servants and the meek, damaged ones of the lieutenant’s troupe will inherit the castle. I look at you, yawning, brushing a heavy fall of dark hair back from your face and spreading some butter on a ragged slice of bread, and wonder if you’ll remember me fondly, or after a while at all.
Oh dear. I do believe this is self pity. I am imagining myself dramatically dead, tragically taken from you and even more lamentably forgotten. What dreadful cliches war and social strife reduce us to, and how powerful the effect must be, if even I am so infected. I think I must pull myself together.
You finish your breakfast and rub your fingers, looking around for a napkin. I am reaching for my handkerchief when you shrug and use the edge of a sheet, then suck on each finger in turn. You see me looking, at you and smile.
I wonder how much time we have. I ought perhaps to make the most of what may be the last occasion we see each other; pull the bedclothes from you, part my fly and quickly plant myself between your legs, urgent with the impending threat of an unlittle death.
Suddenly I recall the so, so many times our love deemed wrong, congenitally, and further enhanced by every irregularity we could devise was made manifest within this high, wide canopied bed, this stage for our copious acts, this platform for so many provocative views: once with perfumed oils that took an age their sweet odours to remove; once with a nightdress pulled up to your neck, stretched tightly over your face, removing you in that blankness, picking out each feature of your face as you bucked and writhed (which taught me that sometimes it is the smallest twist, the tiniest, most contingent variation that can provide the greatest pleasure); indeed how many times in some way masked while at the same time naked, or with the body as disguised, by the language of dress lying about its sex; or confined, tied, with soft scarves or leather thongs, one of us made an X of between the burly posts of this great bed; or in some incontinent abasement engaged, bestial and cruel; or you, or I, leashed, our very quickness held in the power of the other noosed, hide strapped or with your hair when it was long, my favourite gasping to an air starved climax our poor looters were denied; or with others, in a tangle of candlelit and lambent bodies, smothered and abandoned within a shared blizzard of caresses, sweet and tart and gentle and fierce and lenient and strict and lubricious and raw, all slipping, struggling, pushing and forcing our way to a staggered multiplicity of release.
And, especially, that first time I shared you, towards the dawning end of a party many years ago now, before our get togethers became quite as notorious as they later did, when, having so encouraged you, by hints, cajolings and implied example, I was allowed to find you here, unbridled upon this bed in a full plumped landscape of pure white, pinned and pinning and on a spur of pleasure jouncing, rising and falling like some abandoned vessel on a rolling, stormy swell of sea. He was a cousin, one of my better friends and one with whom I’d rode, shot and fenced and spent many another drugged and drunken night. Now I discovered him below, harnessed and secured by tasselled satin ropes, enjoying you as you rode him, erect and arched, hands round his ankles clenched, then once the lad had recovered from his initial surprise at my appearance and come’ round to the idea, and indeed, patently been further energised by the notion for me you bowed forward, leaning to him and kissing while I joined you too, ascending and mounting close by him, parallel with his generous strokes but tenderly, patiently, taking pains not to cause such applying myself to a more fundamental approach. With you by a word of mine stilled, like any obedient mare, and feeling, I believe, him move beneath and within, by his efforts he realised and released in me what he sought inside both you, and himself.
It was, perhaps, my finest moment. judged by the crude technicalism and regrettably naked score keeping that can attend such matters, we duly outdid ourselves on many a subsequent occasion, but there was a freshness, an irreplaceable, unrepeatable novelty about that first time which made it as precious no, more precious than the loss of virginity itself. That first act for any one of us is commonly a cause for nervousness, fumbling clumsiness and those exquisite zeniths of embarrassment only youth in full provides; it can never be attended by the physical accomplishment and the intellectual refinement of taste the ability fully to appreciate the act that one is engaged upon which experience only brings and which, over time, one is able to apply in subsequent variations of the deed, no matter in what specifics it may be unprecedented.
I appear to have persuaded myself. All is silent for a moment. I reach for your ankle, grabbing it beneath the covers while you look up, startled, and a door is brusquely knocked. The sound comes from my own room. We both look.
‘Yes?’ I say, loud enough.
‘We’re going now,’ shouts a soldierly voice. ‘The lieutenant says you’ve to come.’
‘One minute!’ I yell. I whip the bedsheets from you.
You look sullen, raising your hips to tug your nightdress up. ‘Are we attempting a record?’
‘Some things will not wait,’ I say, minimally unbuttoning as I hoist myself towards you.
‘Well, don’t hurt …’ you say petulantly.
More than pain, such unexpected forcing still takes time, however determinedly done. I bury my face between your legs, submerging in your scent, at once earthy and sea salt tanged. I loose a lubricating mouthful of spit, then rear and take my plunge.
Another shout.
Chapter 10
A lower vestibule; in the castle’s front hall, the lieutenant’s opera cloak lies discarded like a velvet skin, thrown over the shoulders of a hollow armour suit standing beneath a rosette of swords upon the wall. The jeeps’ engines sound cold and clattering in the courtyard.
The lieutenant is talking to the soldier with the grey hair and scarred face, the one with wounds to the legs; he leans upon his makeshift crutch, dutifully taking orders. A couple of our servants stand near, watching the lieutenant, then turning their attention to me.
The lieutenant looks me down and up. ‘Changed again, Abel?’
‘For the better, I trust,’ I say, touching my fly to ensure that all is secure again. I do not think the lieutenant registers the gesture.
The lieutenant too is dressed differently, still sporting her long boots but now, above them, tweed trousers and a waistcoat over her thick green shirt. Her camouflaged jacket and a steel helmet have to fight to re establish the martial effect over that of the country set. The lieutenant’s helmet has a green cloth cover stretched over it, and on top of that there is dark webbing, a black net stretched taut and tense and at this moment detumescing, heart thumping evocative.
The soldier with the scarred face mutters something to the lieutenant. She frowns, glances at the servants and bends to me , putting a hand to my arm and quietly saying, ‘They’ll bury old Arthur in the woods at the back; the best place might be in a shell crater it would be deep, at least.’
I nod, surprised. ‘And appropriate,’ I agree. So Arthur will join Father. His ashes were scattered there by Mother, thrown to the soil of our home after he eventually returned to us, in a box, following his assassination in a foreign city.
‘They’ll probably cut something on a piece of wood,’ she says. ‘What was his last name?’
I look at her, nonplussed. ‘His last name?’ I say, procrastinating.
She looks at me with narrowed eyes, and I fully expect that she anticipates my ignorance. She is quite right, of course, but this is one advantage over her I cannot pass up.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Arthur’s last name; what was it?’
Ignatius,’ I tell her, taking the first name that comes to mind (and now I think of it, that was the name of the cousin I found you with on that night of shared occupation).
The lieutenant frowns but then quietly transmits this false information to the scar faced soldier, who nods and hobbies off. She smiles thinly at me and lifts her gun from its place by the wall. I had not noticed. The receptacle in which the lieutenant had placed her long gun is an old artillery shellcase our family has long used to store umbrellas, shooting sticks, canes and the like. She catches my glance as she checks her gun and shoulders it. She taps the brass cylinder with one boot.’ ‘Smaller calibre,’ she tells me, then gestures towards the door and the courtyard beyond.