Autumn in Oxford: A Novel Page 7

  Impatient, Liz threw her arms over his head as she had done in the train ten days before and drew his mouth towards hers. Tom followed her lead and then moved his hands to her shoulders, pulling each strap of her bra down so that the tops of each cup curled over away from the flesh until they revealed, first, two dark areoles, and then two very erect nipples.

  Now Tom pulled himself away, dropped to his knees, pulled down her underpants, and with hands on her thighs, moved them apart.

  “What are you doing?” Her tone was quizzical, not resistant.

  “Giving you pleasure,” he replied as his hands moved around her thighs and his face moved below the surprisingly scant fleece between her legs.

  It’s the very sort of wantonness you’ve craved, she smiled at herself, and yet you had not even thought of it yourself, Liz. She was soon responding to his lips and tongue. After a few moments, Tom rose to her breasts. But after only a few kisses and nibbles there, her hands were on his shoulders, firmly pushing him back down. He moved to his knees willingly. Being led by a woman was not a new experience for him, and he’d always liked it.

  They turned around so her back was to the bed. Then she fell back across it, with her feet still on the floor. “I want you . . . inside,” she commanded with an explicitness that surprised her. Rising up from his knees, he obeyed. But just at his orgasm, Tom withdrew, dropping to his knees again. Then he drove his face between her legs and kept it there until Liz began to spasm. With her legs still shuddering, she pulled his face away from her body. He threw himself on the bed beside her.

  “Well, you’re a very considerate gentleman, Mr. Wrought. I do believe you’d even hold a door for a lady.”

  He smiled, unsure which act of his had occasioned this observation. “I was just brought up right.”

  “By whom, your wife?” Liz really was curious, not jealous, curious about what had just happened. She needed to talk about it. Most people didn’t, of course, not even well-matched, long-married people. But she sensed that Tom shared her need, just for once, to get beyond the mores they’d grown up with. There they were, lying naked next to each other, spent after an act more uninhibited than she had ever imagined. Talk should now be easy. She began. “So, why did you withdraw?”

  “Surely that didn’t surprise you.”

  “With Trev when we still had sex, I had to force him to pull out. You just did it yourself, and at the last possible second.”

  “Well, it wasn’t much of a sacrifice. I am going to have you again in a few minutes, and there won’t be any need to be cautious the second time.”

  “Why not?”

  “Never made love with a fellow twice in one night? You have a treat coming—in fact, several.” He stroked her face. “Body can’t replenish sperm that fast. If I come in the next twenty minutes or so, there won’t be any.” There was a frisson between them at the clinical explicitness of Tom’s description.

  “As a matter of fact, I never had sex with Trevor twice in one night, when I was still having any sex with him at all. But that other thing you did . . .” It wasn’t so much that she couldn’t talk about it, as that she didn’t have the words to describe what they’d done.

  Tom supplied it. “Cunnilingus?”

  “Is that what it’s called?” She thought for a moment. “Why it’s practically onomatopoeia . . .”

  “Shall we eat in the hotel?” Liz asked, but before he could answer she observed, “No point looking for a decent restaurant. This is provincial Britain. You won’t even get good fish and chips in Exeter.”

  A few moments later they were in the dining room, contemplating the choice between fillet of plaice and kidney pie. Liz looked from her menu. “How did you manage that?”

  “What?”

  “Having sex that many times.”

  “Shh, not so loud. I don’t know, but I think it may have something to do with actually being in love . . .” He reached under the table for her thigh. He wanted her to say it.

  She wouldn’t. “Don’t mistake lust for love, Tom.” Before he could reject the injunction, she went on, “Nothing wrong with lust. In fact, it’s the most intoxicating cocktail there is. I haven’t had nearly enough of it lately, and I am going to make up for lost time.”

  “We have four days.” He wouldn’t tell her again that he was in love.

  “So long as Trev doesn’t find out.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re worried about. You don’t love him. You support him. In a divorce you’d keep the kids and get the house in Park Town crescent.”

  “I wish it were that simple.” She sighed. “I’ve seen a solicitor, the best matrimonial causes specialist in London. First of all, since I am the breadwinner, he’d get the kids to raise, and I’d have to support him.”

  “No! That’s absurd.”

  “The law, my dear, is a well-known ass!” She frowned. “Because I work, he’s treated as the principal caregiver. It doesn’t matter that there’s live-in help.” She looked at Tom. “And now he can sue me for divorce on grounds of adultery.” She gulped. “Then I’d lose the kids.”

  “Why not just take them back to Canada? Divorce laws there are different, no?”

  “Won’t work. The moment he got wind I wanted to leave, he’d take the children to his parents in Birkenhead, and then put up every legal obstruction possible. I’d be mired in the courts for years. More than one solicitor has told me the same thing.”

  “You have studied this matter.”

  “I’m afraid so. The children are the reason I’ve stayed married to Trev. My kids are the only thing I’d never give up.”

  “But . . . doesn’t this”—Tom looked round—“aren’t we putting them at risk?”

  “Very much. If Trev were to twig to . . .” She searched for the right word, but only came up with “this.” She looked at her lap. “If he found out about an affair and consulted a solicitor, the first thing they’d tell him is that he could take them away from me in a divorce for adultery. That’s what mine told me.”

  “Why did you ever consult a lawyer to begin with?”

  “Once it became clear that I was going to support the family, I thought I’d better know exactly where I stood.”

  The fish and steamed veg arrived, and they began pushing it around their plates.

  Tom’s unspoken thoughts dwelt on her children. They must mean more to you than I ever could. But then why are you here, with me, not with them? He looked at her, no more interested in the unappealing food than she was. I’m not going to risk losing you to find out.

  Liz was working through exactly the same problem. Why was she here risking everything for lust? It must be lust. Yes, but it was lust driven by love, made deep and rich and worth it all by love. You’re in love with this man, Liz. That’s what overbears the risk, not the lust. Do I need to tell you in words too, Tom?

  The next morning they reached the Dorset coast. Beyond Torquay, the road wound along the dark sand and shell beaches. Liz caught Tom smiling at the small palm trees planted before the tidy villas, each trying gallantly to suggest the Riviera in a wan sun. At Brixham they marvelled at the bathers’ hardihood in the stiff easterly. But then as they began driving away from the headland, the wind dropped, and the sun shone with almost Mediterranean strength. They opened the windows and let a soft July breeze sweep in. The road climbed a hill between ancient stone walls protecting an orchard. Abruptly the walls began to retain rising hillsides that steepened on either side of the narrow lane, until Liz and Tom found themselves enclosed by a canopy of trees, their leaves dappling the sun and in places dividing the light into shafts picking out dust moats in the still air. The car slowed at the crest, and Liz let it quietly coast through a dark tunnel of overhanging branches, down to where the road abruptly ended at the water’s edge.

  To their surprise, before them was a four-car open ferry just negotiating its junction with the end of the roadway. After a moment the ferryman signalled them to drive aboard. Cranking his bus ticke
t machine, he came up to Liz at the driver’s side. “Half a crown, please.” Tom passed her the coin, and she received her ticket in return.

  They got out of the car to enjoy the ride across the broad Dart River, wide here at almost its mouth on the English Channel. Looking across, Tom asked the ferryman about the large red-brick building on the brow of the hill above the town.

  “Royal Naval College.”

  “Ah yes.” Then he remembered the film from the Rattigan play. “The Winslow Boy and all that?”

  “Don’t know about no Winslow boy, but the late king and his father were cadets here.” The ferryman briefly contemplated Tom and Liz, then continued, “The first time the queen met Prince Philip was up there too, when he was a cadet, so they say.”

  Forty minutes from the ferry, a couple of hairpin turns brought them at last to a real beach, of fine sand and smooth pebbles, stretching out to the southern horizon.

  “Let’s go for a walk.” Liz pulled into a lay-by. Opening the door, she left her shoes and strode to the beach. Tom did the same. They walked hand in hand down to the water, wishing they were in swimwear. Tom rolled up his trousers and took off his shirt. Liz pulled up her blouse, unbuttoned it, and tied it at her midriff, indifferent to the black bra now visible under it.

  She pointed to a derelict hulk lying a hundred yards away at the water’s edge. “That’s what’s left of an LST.” Tom knew what an LST was—a tank-carrying landing craft—only too well. He said nothing. “This should be a famous place. But no one knows about it.”

  “Why?”

  Liz went on without answering. “My father was here in 1944. Canadian military liaison with the US Army. Brought me once, after the war.”

  “Why here?” Tom persisted.

  “The Yanks decided to have their dress rehearsal for D-day on this beach in April of ’44, just a month or so before Normandy. It was a disaster. Killed more than a thousand GIs. And no one ever heard about it, even when the war ended.”

  “What happened exactly?”

  “My dad said there were a dozen or so LSTs—landing ship tanks—big as freighters, headed for this beach, protected by one little corvette, what the Americans called a destroyer escort. They were attacked by German E-boats—high-speed torpedo boats. Complete cock-up. Lots of soldiers in the sinking LSTs drowned just because they didn’t know how to put on their life jackets. Others died of hypothermia; the water was that cold.”

  “So, what did the Americans do about the fiasco?”

  “Swore everyone to secrecy.”

  “It’s all a bit like Stonehenge, then. That wreck is a monument to illusion.”

  “Surely not. The fight against Hitler was real and urgent.”

  “Yes, it was. But not to a lot of the men who died here, or at D-day, for that matter.” Seeing Liz becoming visibly angry, Tom hurried to explain. “I was here. In England, with those guys. Right through the war, Americans mostly just wanted to fight the Japs. Not many of them ever cared about European ‘politics.’ That’s what they used to call the fight against Nazism—‘politics.’ Most of their officers shared the racism of the Germans, if not the fanaticism of the Nazis. The men didn’t have much against Krauts and no love for Yids, Frogs, Wops, or Ivans. We Americans even had our own Untermenschen—six million Negroes.”

  Liz turned towards him. “So, what you’re saying is the illusion is ours. We celebrate a victory the men who died here didn’t even care much about achieving?”

  Tom could only nod.

  She sighed. “You’ve got a deeply disturbing grip on the history of your country, Tom Wrought.” Then Liz surprised him. “And I know why you do. I’ve read your book, the one that got the Pulitzer Prize—What If the South Had Lost the Civil War?” Tom was silent, still surveying the derelict landing craft at the shoreline.

  They were finishing supper on the terrace of a surprisingly satisfactory seafood restaurant overlooking the tip of the Kingsbridge Estuary in the town of the same name. The evening had stayed warm even as the sun declined till its rays made the brackish water of the estuary glow in a pointillist foreground of flickering iridescence.

  Tom lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Liz, who fished one out and leaned forwards as he lit it. His eye searched the décolletage of her summer dress unbuttoned to not very deep cleavage.

  Liz dipped into her purse and drew something small from it. Then she reached across the table until she deposited what she had removed from the bag into his hand, which she closed around it. It was a flat box about an inch on either side. “Here’s a little gift I bought you in Exeter this morning.”

  Tom didn’t need to open his hand, which continued to cover the box. Only one sort of thing came in a box that size.

  “You wicked girl.” He smiled with pleasure as he slid the box across the table and into his jacket pocket without looking at it. “I couldn’t have bought any in Saranac, still less in Montreal. They’re illegal in New York, and it’s practically a capital offense in Quebec to be caught with them.” He wouldn’t say the words that described her gift. He didn’t like any of them. “I wondered why you went into that chemist’s this morning in Exeter. Didn’t want to ask.”

  “Thought I might be buying sanitary products? Men are so squeamish. We spent the entire afternoon and the last night nude and lascivious in every way we could, and you couldn’t ask what I went into the chemist’s for?”

  Tom admired her candour. “How did you pluck up the courage to ask for them?”

  “Wyvern Barracks, Royal Artillery, is right there in the middle of Exeter. So, every chemist in the town stocks French letters. They treated me like a trollop, but the chemist handed them over.”

  “Funny, the Brits call them ‘French letters,’ a lovely name, and the French return the compliment by calling them capote anglaise.” They finished their cigarettes and rose from the table. “By the way, you’re wrong . . .” He left the observation incomplete.

  Liz took the bait. “About what?”

  “We weren’t lascivious in every way possible last night. There are several more variations we can try tonight.”

  Friday morning they woke early. It would be a long drive to Heathrow for Tom’s return flight.

  “Liz, I’ve been holding back asking you what you thought of my book.”

  Behind the wheel, she turned to him and replied archly, “I was wondering a bit whether you cared.” Seeing he was serious, she went on, “Of course, the title provokes. What If the South Had Lost . . . ” Liz emphasized the last word. “But then you start reading and find you have to unlearn so much about the post-Civil War Reconstruction you thought you knew.” She thought for a moment. “Like, for example, the secret ballot. We were all brought up to think it a wonderful thing, a great reform that protects democracy. To learn it was introduced first in the South to prevent Negroes voting because they couldn’t read a written ballot . . .”

  “Yes. There’s a great deal more of American history like that. Take the two most important reforms of Roosevelt’s New Deal almost twenty-five years ago—social security and the right to unionize. They were both designed to exclude Negroes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Simple. Roosevelt needed the Southern senators to pass them. They wouldn’t vote for either unless they excluded agricultural workers and domestics—the two jobs Negroes were mainly limited to. So he cut them out of both.”

  “I see.”

  Tom looked at Liz. “I’m pleased you read the book.”

  “Months ago, Tom, and admired it.”

  He gave a mock bow from the waist. Tom’s hand closed around her thigh. “But I’m wondering, why is a Canadian who studied math in university even interested in this stuff?”

  “Well, apart from my interest in the author, why shouldn’t I be? Aren’t you interested in quadratic equations?”

  He winced. “Not in the slightest.”

  An hour later Liz pulled up at London Heathrow East Terminal, drove her tongue deep into Tom�
��s mouth for the last time, and pushed him out of the car. She drove off without, he noticed, looking back.

  Five minutes after leaving Heathrow, Liz finally remembered. In four days together she’d entirely forgotten to mention the two men—Americans, by their accent—who’d come to Park Town crescent looking for Tom, only to discover he had left for the States a few days before. Well, she thought, it probably wasn’t important.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Once the plane had reached cruising altitude, Tom asked for a martini, lit up the last of his English cigarettes, and began to think things through.

  He needed to decide what he wanted. Could he treat the problem as one of balancing credits and debits, what he was willing to give up versus what he’d receive in exchange? Well, you could try, he thought, looking over the Irish Sea and the lovely curve of the Constellation’s wing. Sixteen hours to Montreal should be enough time to figure things out.

  Then it overwhelmed him, the sinking feeling he’d had in a dream that came too often: suddenly you realize that you have agreed to go back to somewhere you never wanted to see again, and it’s irrevocable. He’d waken with immense relief that it was only a dream. But now he was awake and oppressed by the same feeling. Do you really want to live in Britain? For years? Forever? Little England? A year at Trinity had deprived him of most of his anglophile illusions. Could he bear Blighty anymore?

  Too often England depressed Tom, when it did not outrage him. To begin with, there was the class system that everyone bought into, even its victims.

  He remembered a particular incident with special vividness. One Saturday in the spring, he’d been showing American friends around the colleges. As they turned into All Souls, the porter came out of the lodge growling, “Sorry, sir. University members only.” Tom looked at him with visible disdain and said in just the right accent, “It’s alright; I’m a fellow of Trinity.” The porter drew back, inviting Tom and his friends to enter the precincts. No questions. Just the say-so of someone with the right accent. Did the disdain in his voice help? The deference had put Tom in a white heat for days.