‘A woman like that does what she wants, does she not?’ Lavinia asked.
‘Within social protocol, Frances is happy to provide a modicum of scandal but she would never be foolish enough to risk ostracism.’
‘Would you?’
James looked at her over his paper, aggravated by her persistence. ‘Don’t be absurd. What is it? You have that curve to your mouth that indicates disappointment.’
Lavinia sat on the edge of the bed. The physical distance between them had mysteriously lengthened. Why was it so hard to broach such matters? When they were courting, she had assumed he would treat his wife as an equal, both intellectually and emotionally. It was an understandable delusion: James had been so respectful of her own ambitions, so attentive to her own amateur scientific hypotheses—even those absurd notions created from snippets of information she had gleaned from her father: how the starfish might have got its legs; why the anteater had a snout. But far from ridiculing her strange fusions of fact and fiction, James had gently pointed out biological truths without patronising her.
He had also captivated her with his stories of the battlefield. He regarded heroism as residing in the small gestures: a medic entering no-man’s-land to carry out an injured infantryman; a horse leading a blinded soldier to safety; a drummer boy who saved a brother. And yet he expressed heavy criticism for the blundering war strategies that had caused so much catastrophe and unnecessary bloodshed in the Crimea—commands he had often been forced to carry out. All these doubts and revelations he had shared with her before their marriage. But now here she was, her unspoken question a turning stone in her mouth.
Lavinia stared down at the lace counterpane. A wedding gift from her father, it had once belonged to her mother.
‘You have not lain with me for over six months.’
The Colonel took off his spectacles, folded them neatly and placed them on the side table.
‘Am I failing you as a husband?’
There was a peevish tone in his voice which angered Lavinia. An older cousin had once warned her: Do not expect love in marriage. It is an illusion that does not fit with the pots and pans of domesticity. Besides, men only love you before they have had you. We are not the same as them, do not ever forget it.
Shocked, the fourteen-year-old Lavinia had sworn she would never make such a compromise, and had every intention of expecting both passion and love, as much as any man, gentleman or otherwise. Smiling sadly, her cousin had accused her of trying to imitate the heroines in the French novel
s she read so avidly.
Later that same day, fearful that she might, indeed, be unnatural in her ideas, Lavinia had furtively perused the medical treatise of the great physician Dr William Acton, a tome her father regarded as the ultimate authority on the human psyche. In a chapter headed ‘The Married Woman’, the eminent doctor declared that the ‘proper female’ lacked sexual feeling. The phrase had terrified Lavinia. Was she improper, then, to feel such sensations?
As her mother had died before she was two, Lavinia had received little feminine guidance, and the range of sensations that had invaded her adolescent body had been both bewildering and frightening. The only image she had ever stumbled across which seemed related to the curiously pleasurable sensations that threaded themselves through her nightly was an old woodcut of Eros and Psyche. Psyche was leaning over her lover, holding up an oil lamp so that she could see him for the first time. The dishevelled abandonment of the beautiful sleeping naked youth and the look of awe and lust on the girl’s face had intrigued Lavinia; she found herself wanting to be both in the body of the supine youth and in the skin of the excited girl.
‘You were so attentive when we were first married,’ she answered softly.
‘Lavinia, you are a mother now.’
‘And that precludes congress between man and wife?’
‘It should not, but I thought it might be intelligent to wait before conceiving another child.’
Lavinia reached across and lifted his large hand in her own. He kept the contact deliberately expressionless, his fingers a dull weight across her palm.
‘Do you no longer desire me? I still want you.’ Her voice tightened in her throat. Why ask the obvious when she knew the answer? Her eyes traced the line of black hair that led down to his naked chest beneath the silk. James said nothing. So she waited, his scent drifting across the bedspread lulling her body into tumescent hope. If only she were a man, or as audacious as Lady Frances Morgan, then she would take him anyway.
‘You must be patient,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps when the child is older.’
In lieu of a reply, Lavinia leaned over and kissed him, the heavy veil of her hair temporarily eclipsing his face.
To his surprise, the Colonel found the assertiveness of her gesture arousing. Catching her tongue between his lips, he pulled her under him, but when his hands searched out her breasts, the unfamiliar protrusion of her nipples, altered by breast-feeding, instantly dampened his enthusiasm.
‘Forgive me,’ he murmured as he extricated himself.
Smoothing down his ruffled hair, he reached again for his spectacles. Lavinia’s optimism stumbled then fell, like an ice skater who had miscalculated her pirouette.
12
HE SITS WITH HIS RIFLE across his knees. The shelling stops and the sudden silence makes him look up. He can even hear the faint cry of a circling hawk. White plumes of gunpowder smoke drifting across the sky part to reveal a gateway of azure. Heaven, oblivious of the Hell below, he thinks.
Stanley is sitting to his left. He always knows where Stanley is. He is James’s talisman. Fused to him through the war, the blood and the shit and, most terrifying of all, the tedium of waiting. There is a faint vibration. Stanley must be whistling, he thinks; a tiny drumming James can feel in his own lips. He turns.
The sky turns white then red, fragmenting as he is thrown against the sandbags. A shattered portrait of the young Queen tumbles to the bottom of the trench while beside him Stanley’s body shudders.