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bewilderment, he laughed at me aloud, snatched the book from my hands and put
it down on the sofa.
"Have the nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustn't play with grownups'
toys until she's learned how to handle them, must she?"
Then he kissed me. And with, this time, no reticence. He kissed me and
laid his hand imperatively upon my breast, beneath the sheath of ancient lace.
I stumbled on the winding stair that led to the bedroom, to the carved, gilded
bed on which he had been conceived, I stammered foolishly: We've not taken
luncheon yet; and, besides, it is broad day-light. . .
All the better to see you.
He made me put on my choker, the family heirloom of one woman who had
escaped the blade. With trembling fingers, I fastened the thing about my neck.
It was cold as ice and chilled me. He twined my hair into a rope and lifted it
off my shoulders so that he could the better kiss the downy furrows below my
ears; that made me shudder. And he kissed those blazing rubies, too. He kissed
them before he kissed my mouth. Rapt, he intoned: "Of her apparel she
retains/Only her sonorous jewellery."
A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on
invisible trapezes in the empty air outside.
I was brought to my senses by the intent shrilling of the telephone. He
lay beside me, felled like an oak, breathing stertorously, as if he had been
fighting with me. In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his
deathly composure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall; I had
heard him shriek and blaspheme at the orgasm; I had bled. And perhaps I had
seen his face without its mask; and perhaps I had not. Yet I had been
infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity.
I gathered myself together, reached into the cloisonne cupboard beside
the bed that concealed the telephone and addressed the mouthpiece. His agent
in New York. Urgent.
I shook him awake and rolled over on my side, cradling my spent body in
my arms. His voice buzzed like a hive of distant bees. My husband. My husband,
who, with so much love, filled my bedroom with lilies until it looked like an
embalming parlour. Those somnolent lilies, that wave their heavy heads,
distributing their lush, insolent incense reminiscent of pampered flesh.
When he'd finished with the agent, he turned to me and stroked the ruby
necklace that bit into my neck, but with such tenderness now, that I ceased
flinching and he caressed my breasts. My dear one, my little love, my child,
did it hurt her? He's so sorry for it, such impetuousness, he could not help
himself; you see, he loves her so. . . and this lover's recitative of his
brought my tears in a flood. I clung to him as though only the one who had
inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it. For a while, he murmured
to me in a voice I'd never heard before, a voice like the soft consolations of
the sea. But then he unwound the tendrils of my hair from the buttons of his
smoking jacket, kissed my cheek briskly and told me the agent from New York
had called with such urgent business that he must leave as soon as the tide
was low enough. Leave the castle? Leave France! And would be away for at least
six weeks.
"But it is our honeymoon!"
A deal, an enterprise of hazard and chance involving several millions,
lay in the balance, he said. He drew away from me into that waxworks stillness
of his; I was only a little girl, I did not understand. And, he said unspoken
to my wounded vanity, I have had too many honeymoons to find them in the least
pressing commitments. I know quite well that this child I've bought with a
handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts won't run away. But,
after he'd called his Paris agent to book a passage for the States next day --
just one tiny call, my little one -- we should have time for dinner together.
And I had to be content with that.
A Mexican dish of pheasant with hazelnuts and chocolate; salad; white,
voluptuous cheese; a sorbet of muscat grapes and Asti spumante. A celebration
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of Krug exploded festively. And then acrid black coffee in precious little
cups so fine it shadowed the birds with which they were painted. I had
cointreau, he had cognac in the library, with the purple velvet curtains drawn
against the night, where he took me to perch on his knee in a leather armchair
beside the flickering log fire. He had made me change into the chaste little
Poiret shift of white muslin; he seemed especially fond of it, my breasts
showed through the flimsy stuff, he said, like little soft white doves that
sleep, each one, with a pink eye open. But he would not let me take off my
ruby choker, although it was growing very uncomfortable, nor fasten up my
descending hair, the sign of a virginity so recently ruptured that still
remained a wounded presence between us. He twined his fingers in my hair until
I winced; I said, I remember, very little.
The maid will have changed our sheets already," he said. "We do not hang
the bloody sheets out of the window to prove to the whole of Brittany you are
a virgin, not in these civilised times. But I should tell you it would have
been the first time in all my married lives I could have shown my interested
tenants such a flag."
Then I realised, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my
innocence that captivated him -- the silent music, he said, of my
unknowingness, like La Tenasse des audiences au clair de lune played upon a
piano with keys of ether. You must remember how ill at ease I was in that
luxurious place, how unease had been my constant companion during the whole
length of my courtship by this grave satyr who now gently martyrised my hair.
To know that my naivety gave him some pleasure made me take heart. Courage! I
shall act the fine lady to the manner born one day, if only by virtue of
default.
Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great
mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of keys from some interior hidey-hole in
his jacket -- key after key, a key, he said, for every lock in the house. Keys
of all kinds -- huge, ancient things of black iron; others slender, delicate,
almost baroque; wafer-thin Yale keys for safes and boxes. And, during his
absence, it was I who must take care of them all. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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