King of the Sea

Chapter 27

Chapter 27

She gave a sigh of despair for she honestly did not see how she could make her tale more boring than she already had. When he'd first started on this "I want to know you as well as you know yourself" nonsense, he'd been so persuasive that he'd actually set her to it with some enthusiasm. But, as the minutes ticked by and she listened to herself, her old conviction returned - that she was nothing but a rather dull, dim-witted young girl from a dirt-common family, and that her only redeeming feature was that she could usually manage to forget the fact and enjoy quite a happy life. He sat up, full of concern for her. "Does it make you unhappy, my darling?" he asked solicitously. "Raking

back over all these things?" "Bored!" she exploded. "It bores me silly. All I want is to have a good time, enjoy life before it snuffs me out. Why can't we have a good time instead of all this

. slop?"

"What d'you call having a good time?"

"You know." She smiled archly but with little hope. "I mean ... we got this room, haven't we. Everyone thinks we're doing it anyway. We're being hanged for a sheep and we've not even tooken the lamb yet! You should see her next door." She raised her voice and shouted at the wall. "I'll bet she's got her ears glued to a tumbler right this minute!" In a more normal tone she added dourly, "Unless she's gawn to sleep, that is which I wouldn't blame her

for doing." At that moment the springs of the bed in the apartment above began to creak in an unmistakable rhythm.

"See!" She smiled at Lawrence. "Everyone's at it! Sunday afternoon ... the nippers are all at Sunday School." She sniffed and added, "except the one they're making now."

He laughed with delight. "You see how much you know! How wise you really are. Why d'you always run yourself down so? You know so much about life!

A thought like that would never occur to me in a million years. And to you it's so obvious!" "Oh Gawd!" she told the potted plant he'd brought her. "Now I've started him off again."

"Started me off on what?"

She stared at him with a blank kind of fatalism, as a horse might face a twenty-foot wall in a jumping contest; unlike any horse, however, she attempted the impossible. "I know just what you'll do now. You'll come at me with all your words, telling me I don't know the half of how wonderful I really am, and ..."

"You don't!" He was delighted that at last she seemed to understand.

"Stop it, Lawrence! The reason I don't is because I'm not. I'm ordinary. Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary! I'm so ordinary I fall asleep just thinking about me. Whatever you dream you've found in me... I mean it just isn't there! It's a ... a ... what's that word?" "Wonder?"

"Yes! No! The bleeding opposite. What desert." you see in a

"Mirage. But it's not. It is there."

"It f*****g isn't!" She faced the wall again. "Got that did you, gel? It f*****g isn't! I said it." He frowned. Her language distressed him but he

knew she was trying to pick a quarrel, so he forced

himself to smile instead.

She settled grumpily in the nook of the sofa and went on, "Anyway, it isn't true about them upstairs. They haven't got no nippers to send to Sunday School. Tisn't even their lodgings, it's his mum's, only she fell under a horse two months ago and broke her back. She's in hospital down Gray's Inn Road."

"And he brings his floozies here and..." "No!" she interrupted him. Her tone and eyebrows signalled that the truth was even more amazing than that. "That's his wife with him up there! Disgusting, I call it. He brings her here every Sunday and they do it on his mum's bed."

Superficially Lawrence thought it disgusting, too. But, to his surprise, he caught a whiff of understanding somewhere in his mind, saw a flash of it as it darted through the shadows where, he was beginning to suspect, all genuine discoveries about life and people came from. "What's up with you?" she asked accusingly.

"I don't know. What you just said ... I felt a sort of ." He shrugged. "Don't you think it's disgusting? On his mother's

bed? In her own sheets?" "I don't know. Perhaps it's something he has to do."

"Has to?" she asked scornfully. "I'd like to know how you work that out. You mean there's a law or something? Is there a copper standing by the bed, saying 'You got another five minutes, my lad!'?"

He rose and sat on the sofa, a foot or two away from her. Staring down at the carpet he had just quitted almost as if he were speaking to a former self-he mused, "Perhaps it's his only way of leaving home. My Aunt Daphne once said a lot of men never leave home, really. Even if they marry and rent a new house, they bring their mother along with them" he tapped his forehead "in here, I mean. Not in the 1 flesh but in here."

To her horror Emma remembered that her own mother had once made the identical comment about her father. She stared venomously at Lawrence, hating him for his ability to strike chords inside her that she would prefer to remain unstruck. He was going to end up changing her completely, and at moments like this she felt powerless to stop him. Because there was, in fact, a certain awful fascination in discovering these things about yourself - thoughts and fancies that were there all the time but you never knew it. Even so, given the choice, she'd rather go on living from moment to moment, grabbing what fun she could and not thinking too much about herself and the future and things like that. If only he would

allow her that choice! Before she could stop herself she said, "Here! Is that what you'd like? Do me in your mum's bed?" He drew back his hand to strike her... realized with

horror what he was about to do and let it drop limply back to his side. "Yes," he admitted after a vehement pause. "Not really, you know. I mean, if it came to it, I wouldn't. But when you said that about them" he jerked his head toward the ceiling - "I did sort of, you know, understand."

In the ensuing silence there was nothing to do but sit and listen to the rhythmic song of the springs above. It was absolutely even, with a mechanical regularity that hardly seemed human.

"It can't be much cop for her," Emma commented. She observed Lawrence closely, hoping he hadn't noticed the tremor in her voice, for the sounds from above and the thoughts they evoked disturbing her somewhat. - were

"Why?" he asked, knowing it was a silly question but being unable to think of anything else. A curious paralysis seemed to have come over him. His limbs felt weak, as if his blood had dropped to only half strength.

"Like a bleeding machine," she said. He remembered a vulgar song from his schooldays, about just such a machine: Round and round went the b****y great wheel... He shook his head angrily and felt sick of himself. "Give us a kiss," she said.

He turned to her in surprise and was even more surprised at what he saw. Usually when she said something like that she had a coy smile on her lips but now her face was pale and drawn; her jaw shivered - indeed, her whole head seemed affected by a small tremor. "Please?"

Instead of moving to a more comfortable position near her, he leaned across the gap and tried to reach her with outstretched lips. The result was that he toppled against her, almost falling with his head in her lap. But it released whatever spasm had held her. Now she pounced on him with exaggerated glee and, twisting him as he fell, pinned his head on her thigh and held him there where she could stare down at him and pretend he was at her mercy. "Now, Mister Clever-d**k!" she exclaimed.

"Now what?" He smiled and abandoned the struggle to sit up again. "This!" She lowered her head and raised her thigh,

bringing their lips together - but at right angles to each other. In a series of rapid, tender kisses she worked her lips across his, left to right and back again. She had bad breath but he relished it because it was hers; funnily enough, her mouth, when he pushed his tongue gently inside it, tasted sweet and warm. Just another of her many enigmas.

He relished, too, the nearness of her body, the pressure of her bosom on his cheek, the way the back of his head fitted so perfectly in the depression Her thighs. It felt very grown-up to be so near those exciting and dangerous parts of her - and even more grown-up to be paying no apparent heed to the fact, treating it like the most normal and everyday occurrence.

She released him at last and lowered her thigh, cuddling his head tight against her belly, in the depths of which he could hear liquid rumblings. "I wish I'd never started this," she said in an oddly happy tone.

He was about to ask what when there was a marked change in the rhythm of the creaking from above; instead of two or three firm but moderate creaks each second the interval stretched out to more than a second between each and they acquired an almost desperate force. Five... six ... seven, Lawrence counted, and then came the faintest sound of a male, "Aah!" There was no sound from the female at all. "Poor woman," Emma commented.

"Have you ever done it?" he blurted out. "No," she replied at once. "You?" "No," he said.

There was a silence during which neither of them breathed. Then he said, "If you make a pot of tea, I'll toast the crumpets. Then I'll have to go."

"All right," she said, giving him a quick, almost sisterly kiss before she lifted his head away. "Why

He took his leave half an hour later and sauntered homeward along Upper Street. It wouldn't have done, he assured himself. It wouldn't have been right at all. She thinks she's ready for it but she's not.

He caught sight of himself in a tailor's shop window full of cheap reach-me-down suits, which offered a flattering comparison with his own reflection.

All the same, he'd have the lapels just a shade narrower on his next, he thought. She's definitely not ready for it, he told one of the suits.

Over his shoulder - or the shoulder of his reflection - he was surprised to see ... surely not? But yes, on turning round he saw it was, indeed, his sister and Aunt Daphne. "I say, hello!" he called out to them. "Out for a stroll? Pretty cold, what?"

As he crossed the road to join them, the last verse of that awful schooldays song popped into his mind. He had been fighting off its crudities ever since it had first come crawling out of the slime of juvenilia in the unswept angles of his soul. Now two whole lines recurred before he rang down the curtain on it:

This is a case of the biter bit There was no way of stopping it...

A before Lawrence had emerged from The Nest (as Daphne had dubbed it, in her best sepulchral voice), Catherine suddenly "remembered" she was wanted urgently at home - leaving Lawrence to squire his aunt across the Fields. "It won't do, young man," she said bluntly as soon

as the girl had gone. Lawrence felt his stomach fall away inside him. "What's that, Aunt?" he asked lightly.

Harding." "How ... well. This business with I mean... ." he stammered. "You know

"You know very

about it?"

Emma

"My dear young Lawrence! Do you seriously suppose you can wander around this tiny patch of green for an hour on a Sunday afternoon - where at least a dozen of our friends reside and not have it noticed?"

"Oh." He took rapid stock of the situation and brightened. She knew about the walks on Highbury Fields but not about the rooms in Upper Street. "You're right, of course, Aunt Daphne, as always. 'S'matter of fact, I've chucked her." "Really?" The tone was polite but not very

interested.

"Well, as you can see, we haven't been strolling about here this afternoon. I chucked her, as I said." "I don't understand what you saw in her in the first

place. She is quite excessively plain and ..." "Oh come!" he protested. "I can't allow that. I mean everyone to his opinion, I grant you, but it's in

the eye of the beholder, what?" "It's a singularly odd eye you must have, then." She smiled sweetly. "But ... if you've 'chucked' her ... no harm done, eh?"

"Actually..." He scratched his head diffidently and gave an engaging smile. "Don't breathe a word to Kathy but Emma chucked if me, you must know."

For the first time his aunt's interest seemed to

quicken. "Oh?" she said on a steeply ascending note.