England's Lane by Joseph Connolly

not even to sense them, to be quite unbound from lust and curiosity. Or to feel these things keenly, and then stamp them to death—but never quite to death, no, so that a mewling whimper of hopeless protestation always is dimly to be heard, a feeble just-alive gesture from a mangled and bleeding almost corpse. It is sex, after all—only sex. Do you see? A mere release. What is that, when compared to his love for me? The one thing I know to be true. There was just one occasion … only one—still we were in the house at Henley—when his abiding passion for another did cause me such very serious pain. For he had, you see, fallen very helplessly in love with one whom he believed to be a goddess, and as a consequence, and for good long time, my future and even that of Amanda did lie in considerable peril. I said not one word, extraordinary circumstances intervened, and now all that is passed. And so … as he walks into the bathroom, just as my water is cooling, do I feel love for this utterly tremendous man before me? I do. It pulsates. And it collides in the air with his love for me, the soft explosion and the balm from that, they engulf me.
    â€œI trust you are well, my dear. All seems secure.”
    Which is what he always says, when first he approaches me—stoops down then to kiss the top of my head. It makes me feel so safe, protected, while even as I sense his caress, I am alarmingly aware—inside and around me—of my retention of such tremulous screaming at this so spectacular a folly: to succumb if even for a moment to so rosy an illusion. A nebulous threat is never distant, of course I know that, and yet mercifully Jonathan is able to raiseup a barricade so as to screen at least the looming prospect, to contain its swell, to muffle the very worst of its maniacal hammering.
    â€œJust rested, thank you Jonathan. And your day …?”
    Jonathan gazed in seeming astonishment at his own reflection in the mottled mirror hung above the basin. As if genuinely amazed that it should be he who was in there, tired, wide-eyed and calmly staring back out at him.
    â€œAh … my day. Yes indeed, my day. Well it was quite a day, that may be said for certain. A day unlike others, I should regard it. But then, in their ways … each one is. No?”
    â€œI suppose. In its detail. And after? Tonight, are you …?”
    â€œIndeed I am, I fear. Some things just must be attended to. Tiresome, but there it is.”
    Yes: there it is. There it very much is, damn and blast it. There is mess to be cleared. And mess I dislike intensely. Because today, well … all had not gone according to plan. Well in truth, of course, there had been no plan—how could I have formulated a plan, when nothing remotely of the sort was even anticipated? All was to be straightforward, just as it has been for how many months? But there was something about the man, this time. Not just an air, but something he was clutching within him, with glee—people of this class, they are incapable of concealment. This bloody man whom I had assumed all along to be no more than a Middlesex smallholder and of little brain, eager to conduct a bit of brisk business by moonlight, while creaming the goodness away from the Revenue. The acceptance of the pig, it never took too long. And very soon I had a young lady to attend to, did I not? So I was hardly eager then for a pig to detain me, and nor its loathsome breeder, whatever the bloody man’s name is. Here was not a friendship, God in heaven—why ever should I have known his name? Soon my benevolent doctor would arrive to administer sedation to this gross and gently squealingcreature which—in a butcher’s yard—scented something malign: its eyes were far from easy. And then two five-pound notes were in the man’s hand—his signal, surely, to touch that greasy cap cocked so very comically upon a bony skull and be