case,’ she said with a low laugh, ‘you might get peckish.’
She delighted in this parody of home-making. When she was little, she said, she had loved to play house, and indeed as I watched her producing one toy-like goody after another from her shopping basket and arranging them on sagging shelves about the room she seemed of the two of us by far the younger. I pretended to disdain this feeble simulacrum of domestic bliss that she was assembling piece by piece, but there must have been something in me, an enduring strain of childishness, that would not allow me to hold back but led me forwards, as if by the hand, to join her in her happy games.
Some games. Was she guilty of rape, if only in the statutory sense? Can a woman be a rapist, technically? By taking to bed a fifteen-year-old boy, and a virgin, to boot, I imagine she would have been legally culpable to a serious degree. She must have thought of it. Perhaps her capacity to conceive of imminent disaster was blunted by a constant awareness of the possibility—the inevitability, as it happened—that one day a long time off in the future she would be found out and disgraced not only before her family but in the eyes of the entire town, if not the country. There were occasions when she would go silent and turn away from me and seem to be looking at something approaching that was still far off yet not so distant that she could not make it out in all its awfulness. And on those occasions did I offer solace, try to divert her, draw her away from that dreadful vista? I did not. I went into a huff at being neglected, or made a cutting remark and flung myself from that mattress on the rotted floorboards and stamped off to another part of the house. The whitewashed privy in the back garden with its stained and seatless throne and a century’s accumulation of cobwebs in the corners was a favourite perch when I wished to punish her for some misdemeanour by a prolonged and, I trusted, worrying absence. What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper. There was a particular smell from outside, sharp and greenly sour, that came in at the square hole set high up in the wall behind the cistern, that I catch at times still on certain damp days in summer and that makes something struggle to open inside me, a stunted blossom pushing up out of the past.
That she never followed me or tried to coax me back when I had stormed off like this added fuel to my resentment, and when I did return, feigning a cold and stony indifference, I would watch from the corner of my eye for any hint of mockery or amusement—a lip bitten to prevent a smile, or even a gaze too quickly averted, would have sent me marching straight off to the jakes again—but always I would find her waiting with a calm grave gaze and an expression of meek apology, although half the time she must have been bewildered as to what it could be that she was being required to atone for. How tenderly she would hold me, then, and how accommodatingly she would spread herself on that filthy mattress and take inside her all my engorged fury, need and bafflement.
It is extraordinary that we were not lighted upon sooner than we were. We took what precautions we could. At the start we were careful always to make our way to Cotter’s place separately. She would park the station wagon in a leafy lane half a mile away and I would hide my bike under a patch of brambles beside the path along by the hazel wood. It was scarily thrilling to strike off through the trees and make my stealthy way down to the hollow where the house was, stopping now and then and cocking an ear, alert as Leatherstocking, to the woodland’s restive silence.
I could not decide which I preferred, to get there first and have to wait for her, palms wet and my heart hammering—would she come this time or had
She delighted in this parody of home-making. When she was little, she said, she had loved to play house, and indeed as I watched her producing one toy-like goody after another from her shopping basket and arranging them on sagging shelves about the room she seemed of the two of us by far the younger. I pretended to disdain this feeble simulacrum of domestic bliss that she was assembling piece by piece, but there must have been something in me, an enduring strain of childishness, that would not allow me to hold back but led me forwards, as if by the hand, to join her in her happy games.
Some games. Was she guilty of rape, if only in the statutory sense? Can a woman be a rapist, technically? By taking to bed a fifteen-year-old boy, and a virgin, to boot, I imagine she would have been legally culpable to a serious degree. She must have thought of it. Perhaps her capacity to conceive of imminent disaster was blunted by a constant awareness of the possibility—the inevitability, as it happened—that one day a long time off in the future she would be found out and disgraced not only before her family but in the eyes of the entire town, if not the country. There were occasions when she would go silent and turn away from me and seem to be looking at something approaching that was still far off yet not so distant that she could not make it out in all its awfulness. And on those occasions did I offer solace, try to divert her, draw her away from that dreadful vista? I did not. I went into a huff at being neglected, or made a cutting remark and flung myself from that mattress on the rotted floorboards and stamped off to another part of the house. The whitewashed privy in the back garden with its stained and seatless throne and a century’s accumulation of cobwebs in the corners was a favourite perch when I wished to punish her for some misdemeanour by a prolonged and, I trusted, worrying absence. What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper. There was a particular smell from outside, sharp and greenly sour, that came in at the square hole set high up in the wall behind the cistern, that I catch at times still on certain damp days in summer and that makes something struggle to open inside me, a stunted blossom pushing up out of the past.
That she never followed me or tried to coax me back when I had stormed off like this added fuel to my resentment, and when I did return, feigning a cold and stony indifference, I would watch from the corner of my eye for any hint of mockery or amusement—a lip bitten to prevent a smile, or even a gaze too quickly averted, would have sent me marching straight off to the jakes again—but always I would find her waiting with a calm grave gaze and an expression of meek apology, although half the time she must have been bewildered as to what it could be that she was being required to atone for. How tenderly she would hold me, then, and how accommodatingly she would spread herself on that filthy mattress and take inside her all my engorged fury, need and bafflement.
It is extraordinary that we were not lighted upon sooner than we were. We took what precautions we could. At the start we were careful always to make our way to Cotter’s place separately. She would park the station wagon in a leafy lane half a mile away and I would hide my bike under a patch of brambles beside the path along by the hazel wood. It was scarily thrilling to strike off through the trees and make my stealthy way down to the hollow where the house was, stopping now and then and cocking an ear, alert as Leatherstocking, to the woodland’s restive silence.
I could not decide which I preferred, to get there first and have to wait for her, palms wet and my heart hammering—would she come this time or had
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