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  ‘But—’ Godfrey said. ‘But, well, how did you come to it in the first place?’

  ‘How did I come to fall, you’d like to say,’ Lisa answered, a smile half of malice, half of genuine amusement turning up the corner of her crookedy mouth. ‘Ah, it was no fall at all. Down in Southwark where me mother and father lived when they came from Ireland, it was one room for all of us and childer in plenty. You soon learnt what goes on between a man and a woman. Or boy and girl, I ought to say.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Godfrey said. ‘A terrible life certainly.’

  ‘A bad life when we were hungry and cold, and ill too often enough. But not such a terrible life. You learnt quick to enjoy yourself when you could. And making love was the easiest way of doing that. Cheaper than gin, and better generally.’

  ‘I see.’

  Godfrey had never before thought of the reasons behind the life that he had occasionally gone fascinatedly to watch, diving down some dark covered passage too narrow for two people to pass in it and coming into the courts and yards behind the rows of outwardly respectable shops in the roads the traffic went along. But he saw now indeed.

  ‘So that was the way of it,’ Lisa went on, unconcernedly pouring water into the basin and washing her fingers. ‘What you’d learnt as girls and boys all in the same bed together you found would bring you money. Maybe at first it was only to get into the gardens at Cremorne or to a masked ball. But they were a taste of life, and soon you learnt how to pick up a flat that’d pay better than that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Godfrey, thinking that he now was ‘a flat’ and indeed had been to a few masked balls. But before he had had time to ask himself what he felt about that there came a thumping knock on the door and a small untidy girl of thirteen or fourteen entered with a large tray.

  ‘That’ll be a guinea for the champagne and half a guinea for the lobsters,’ she said as she banged her burden down on the table.

  Godfrey suspected that he was being charged more than he ought to be. But he nevertheless took out his purse.

  The girl left, bobbing at him for the sixpence he had given her for herself. Lisa bolted the door behind her.

  For an instant Godfrey flushed and almost demanded that she should draw the bolt back again. But he reflected that he could easily enough get out when the time came and said nothing.

  They ate sitting opposite each other at the little table. Godfrey began by being ravenously hungry and then abruptly could stomach no more. He drank more than his share of the champagne. He tried as well to find indifferent matters to talk about, the heat, the appointments of the room. Why, he reflected sharply, in a moment I shall be asking her if she knows of the latest ices.

  And then he could keep it up no longer.

  ‘But don’t you detest it, all the different men? Aren’t they sometimes brutal?’ he burst out.

  Lisa gave him her crooked quizzical smile.

  ‘You take your luck,’ she said. ‘And you soon enough learn how to deal with the ones who want to hurt you. Besides, there’s good and bad in everything. And there’s plenty good in this.’

  ‘Good?’ he exclaimed with involuntary heat.

  ‘Good, of course,’ Lisa said. ‘Wait till I show you.’

  And in an instant she had leapt up and was pirouetting round the room, swaying her somewhat thin body and looking back at him with a sharp mocking sensuality.

  Then, as suddenly, she had flung herself down backwards on the edge of the bed, kicked her legs wide, tossed up the skirt of her dress and her chemise, revealing that she wore no drawers, and was displaying to Godfrey a sight he had in fact seen only once before and that in a single confused glimpse.

  He stood up, but did not move from the table.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ Lisa said.

  She held out her arms.

  ‘Give us a kiss.’

  This was the time to go, Godfrey thought. But, no, it was not. That time had passed. He had meant to leave, when their supper was quite completed, with a polite word of regret. He could not leave now: it would be a cowardice.

  And besides he was inflamed for the strumpet lying in front of him.

  With unsteady strides, as if he was walking the deck of a ship, he crossed towards her. For a moment he stood in front of her, looking down at the dark triangle of hair and the wide-spread pink parting inside it. When, at seventeen, he had had that sudden summer tumble in his bedroom at home with the maid, Hannah, there had been nothing like this. It had been a clumsy embrace, a falling to the floor, two sets of hands groping, not really knowing what they were about, and then the near-furtive actual business, never afterwards repeated, never again referred to by either of the participants. Then, he had seen little enough. Now, all there was to see was being paraded under his eyes.

  He almost fell on top of her, his mouth dabblingly seeking hers. And at once he felt her tongue, sharp and hard as a spoon, probing between his lips. And then her fingers were working at his trousers and after a few moments’ wrestling both trousers and under-trousers were sliding down towards his ankles.

  And then, to his immense and immediate shame, he uncontrollably ejaculated.

  He lay for a little heavily on her, rapidly subsiding into quiescence.

  ‘I—I’m sorry,’ he muttered.

  ‘What’ve you got to be sorry about? Sure, to spend as quick as that, it’s a kind of compliment to a girl.’

  ‘But—But I ought to have …’

  ‘There’s time enough. I’m not one of your double-journey double-pay girls. You stay as long as you like. The room’s yours.’

  He pushed himself upright and stood, a sorry figure in his own eyes, with trousers and under-trousers in a hopeless tangle at his feet.

  ‘And you,’ he said ‘You’ve got it all over you.’

  At this she burst into frank laughter.

  ‘Dear God,’ she spluttered, ‘is it worse to have it on me belly than to have it in me quim?’

  And the very openness of her laughter conquered him in spite of himself.

  ‘I suppose it’s not,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s not. You must pardon me. To tell you the truth, I’m not very experienced in these matters.’

  ‘You’d no need to tell me that,’ she answered.

  But her smile as she said it, coaxing and friendly, robbed the words of any sting.

  Then she swung herself fully up on to the bed and rolled across the lacy counterpane to its far side.

  ‘Now you take all those blessed trousers off,’ she said. ‘Take off that waistcoat and that shirt and that funny white tie with it. And I’ll pull off me dress and me shimmy and then you come here beside me. And we’ll begin.’

  Chapter Three

  It was not until past four in the morning that Godfrey left Lisa and set out to walk through Leicester Square and along the Strand to the studio he had found a year before on the riverside at Gillingham Place by Blackfriars Bridge. Though the sun was up, the streets that had been so thickly warm the night before were cool now. He buttoned his coat—he had taken no paletot the night before, setting out for Lady Augusta’s —and struck out at a good pace.

  He found himself experiencing an unexpected sensation of total well-being. And, though he felt that he ought not to let his thoughts dwell on the night he had just spent, he could not help letting them do so.

  His original nervous fears and that schoolboyish débâcle he dismissed. It was their later—what to call them? their criminal conversation? their amours?—it was their secret couplings that rose up in his imagination. Each time they had at last come together it had seemed to him that unimagined doors were breaking open. Lisa’s fingers, thin and hard, had prowled over his body, setting up in the deepest recesses of his mind feelings and emotions that he could recall only as thunderous bursts of rare colours. And he in his turn had learnt little by little to explore her, and had experienced a fierce and heart-beating pride when he had realised that he was stirring her as she stirred him.

  But now
abruptly in the dawn he asked himself if Lisa had been play-acting. Could it be? Did they not say that all whores were dead to passion, mere machines? Were they? If they were, then would it be to the wives, the ladies whom he had never been able to picture to himself unclothed, that true unfeigned passionate excitement came? To some wives at least? It was not easy to imagine.

  Across his path when he reached the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields a procession of waggons bound for the market at Covent Garden slowly lumbered loaded with carefully heaped dark-green cabbages, pale-green peas in nets, feathery piles of freshly pulled carrots, immense mounds of globular white turnips. From a light spring-van bringing up the rear he caught a delicious whiff of strawberries, picked no doubt scarcely an hour earlier.

  Suddenly anger scoured through him. The world ought to be innocent, he thought. There ought to be simplicity and pure goodness everywhere.

  He looked down at his coat and trousers. The mire they had picked up in his fall had not been, he saw now, entirely removed by Lisa’s ministrations. He was disgusting, smirched with foulness. He held his hands up in front of his face. There had been no soap on the wash-stand there. Of course, there would not have been.

  But this would be the only time in his life, he vowed. It would be blotted from the book as effacingly as that other more hasty, less horribly knowing incident with Hannah the maid had been. It would be as if the night past had never existed.

  He must lift himself away from the mire. He would set off on another course. He would somehow direct these feelings into better channels. Yes, that was it. Miss Hills. Elizabeth. There was a person who could be his equal. He had admitted that to himself last night, before the madness had gripped him. And that too was something he would never succumb to again. Never. Deliberately to go staring and lip-licking over the lewd and disgusting. It was unworthy of a man. It was, above all, unworthy of an artist, a being who should strive in everything for purity, for true beauty.

  Tomorrow he would call on Lady Augusta. He had left the ball early: he owed her an apology. And he would hope to meet Elizabeth. Miss Hills.

  He was round at Brook Street at eleven. He had taken a bath as soon as he had got back to his studio, in cold water, bringing up the pails himself from the tap in the yard, taking precautions not to wake the boy he kept to run errands and clean his brushes, clumsy drinking-eyed Billy, fast asleep in his truckle-bed in the low-ceilinged basement kitchen. And in the tub, lifted with care into its place instead of being reverberatingly dragged there, he had scrubbed and scrubbed at his flesh with a hard brush, accepting with grim pleasure the rawness and the cold. And then he had plunged into his bed—rightly narrow—and had forced himself into sleep.

  But he had risen in good time to make a careful toilet before setting out. Not today the shirt worn with collar unbuttoned, the flowing loosely-knotted necktie, the velveteen jacket. Instead he shaved with the greatest care, standing before the somewhat spotted mirror in his bedroom and cursing the poorness of the light that came through the single small square of window. Then, naked for a moment, he had put on first clean body-linen, and next a white shirt, its pearly studs discreetly gleaming, with a smart upstanding Piccadilly collar. Some wrestling with the links in the stiffly-starched cuffs had mercifully left no mark. Then there had followed his new tight striped trousers, carefully braced to the right hang. Next he had chosen a tie, one of the very smallest bows for summer, and, after two attempts, he had got it into the neat flat knot he liked. Then the waistcoat, free from the effects of the inexpert pawings of Billy, thank goodness. He had dealt with his hair next, applying the Rowland’s Macassar that he now seldom used and getting the oiled hair to part accurately in the centre of his head. Then there had been the shoes, the polishing of which was perhaps the only thing young Billy did with any regular success. Over the shoes had gone white spats, after a little irritating work attempting to efface a long streak of what looked like rose madder from his brushes. And finally, when the spotted mirror had seemed to show that everything was as it should be, the morning coat of light grey tweed with the ivory-coloured buttons that still pleased him. And he was in armour complete.

  Just at the corner of the new bridge he had bought a carnation from the flower-girl who customarily stood there, her big oval bloom-crammed basket at her feet.

  ‘Thank you, yer honour,’ she had said.

  He had forgotten that she was Irish. The sound of those lilting syllables had made him purse his lips in sharp remembrance.

  However, getting down from his hansom in Brook Street, for the second time within twenty-four hours, he felt that at least everything outward about him was as it should be.

  Yes, said the footman who had gone to ask, Lady Augusta would receive him. He followed the man—was he one of the six with matching calves?—to the morning-room. And there was Lady Augusta, plump and pink of face, a crinoline of blue trimmed with magenta billowing plangently round her. And there beside her, in a deep green dress with a green-and-white striped bodice that set off magnificently the deep curve of her bosom, was Elizabeth Hills.

  Godfrey felt he could hardly look at her. She seemed to him so much to embody the highest feminine virtues, grace, gentleness and both maturity and innocence. She might indeed understand the workings of the human frame, but she could not know the workings of the human mind. What could such a person as she know of the inner tortuosities that had led him where he had gone after he had left her the night before? Her very unusualness, this choice of such a profession, was after all, as he had learnt from her own lips, only an excess of womanly tenderness springing from the sufferings of her mother.

  They talked of the ball. Godfrey contrived to drag up from a memory that he had not consciously filled details of the affair which he hoped it would please Lady Augusta to hear praised. He did not dare attempt to say anything expressly designed for Elizabeth’s ear.

  Lady Augusta listened to his compliments for almost ten minutes. Then a sharper glance came into the eyes in that pink puffy face.

  ‘But to hear all this,’ she exclaimed, ‘when last night you said that you had to leave early so as to have light for your wretched painting.’

  Godfrey felt an acute shame. Ordinarily he would have passed over Lady Augusta’s slightly malicious attack with a laugh. But the memory of what it was that had caused him to make that excuse to leave was iron-hard.

  Yet rescue came from an unexpected quarter.

  ‘Ah, your painting, Mr Mann,’ Elizabeth broke in, in her quiet voice enriched with its slight American accent, ‘I had hoped to ask you about that last night.’

  ‘Lady Augusta would call it my daubing,’ Godfrey said, still not wholly on his balance.

  A swift look of plain displeasure came into Elizabeth’s luminous grey eyes.

  ‘I hope you do not apply that description to your work yourself,’ she said.

  Lady Augusta laughed.

  ‘Now, Godfrey,’ she mocked, ‘you must take care what you say in Elizabeth’s presence. She is a serious young lady, don’t forget.’

  ‘And I am a serious young man. You have often enough rebuked me for it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I tell you frankly I am glad to hear you make the claim. I shall never rebuke you on that score.’

  Godfrey smiled.

  ‘May I venture to hope, however,’ he said, ‘that, if you see the need, you will not hesitate to rebuke me wherever rebuke is required.’

  ‘Ah, Godfrey,’ said Lady Augusta, ‘you make the request lightly enough, but I warn you you are likely to rue it.’

  ‘Oh come, you are painting Miss Hills as a real dragon.’

  ‘Don’t you be so sure that she is not,’ Lady Augusta declared.

  Before Godfrey had a chance to reply other callers were announced. While they were being introduced he thought about the exchange that had just taken place. Lady Augusta’s warning he dismissed. It pleased her to pretend that anybody with a spark of independence was a monster. But the request
he had made to Elizabeth, almost without thinking, caused him to look at himself now with more than a little wryness. What if she should, by some unimaginable chance, learn how he had conducted himself last night? Her rebuke then would be absolute.

  However, he had said that the events of the night were to be blotted out, and blotted out they would be.

  ‘And you still have not told me about your painting.’

  Elizabeth had left the others and come straight over to him.

  ‘And,’ she added now, ‘you are to tell me about it without false modesty. I hear that the Queen has bought your picture in the Academy, and for six hundred pounds.’

  ‘Yes, that is true. And it has been an enormous encouragement. A practical one too. I had a letter only a few days ago from Herr Pohlmann, who is our leading art-dealer here, asking what other work I was doing. And after many a year of steady discouragement from such people as my family trustees that falls sweetly on the ear.’

  ‘So you have been persistent. I like to hear that.’

  Elizabeth smiled at him. He bathed in the light of those grey eyes.

  ‘But, tell me, what is the subject of your painting in the Academy?’ she went on. ‘Aunt Augusta likes to pretend she can never remember. She says it is something to do with some ancient and obscure Italian poet.’

  Godfrey laughed.

  ‘She is wrong, and she is right,’ he said. ‘My subject is from Goethe, from his poem “Tasso”. I call the picture “Torquato Tasso Leaving the City of Ferrara”.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I am afraid you will have to write me down as a hopeless American provincial. It all means nothing to me, except that I find I have the impression that Goethe is a writer to be avoided.’

  ‘Yes, I suspect—whisper it not—that Her Majesty did not know the subject was from his work.’

  ‘Then he is disreputable?’

  Elizabeth looked at him sharply, with the beginnings even of distaste.

  ‘No. Goethe was a very great man, even the greatest Germany has produced. But I must confess his private life was not perfect.’