– Oh, oh, he sighed into my ear, his breath hot. Ah my dear, so beguiling, my dear.
It was new, undreamt of, that I had reduced a man to this inarticulate yearning. Almost begging. It filled me with a sense of how powerful I must be, after all. I felt myself to be as big as the night, free, a thing with no boundaries. The sky was infinite, the stars blazed like the exhilaration that filled me, their shifting pulses and shimmer a promise of time, space, eternity, all the things a woman never had. I was at last free to find my own size, and I was gigantic.
– Sweet, sweet mouth, he whispered.
Not the words, but the tremble in the fingers: that was what made me lie back against the hedge. The stars, the crackle of the bonfire on the far side of the next field, its flickering hectic light through the hedge: all was tremulous and strange. But this was Midsummer Night and all was strange, all was allowed, everything was new and I was, you might say, drunk with delight in the power I was discovering myself to have. This, then, was what it was all about, the care they wrapped us in, the fear they made us feel, the never-quite-spoken thing that made it necessary for us to be so relentlessly protected. Not our fear of their power, but their fear of ours!
Now I could feel his whole body trembling as it pressed me down. There was a scuffling at the fabric between us, a wrenching-away, finally bare skin in the night air. Yes, I knew I was being assailed. Knew this was what I had been warned of. Had seen enough of those rams and dogs to know what was happening. I cannot claim that I did not know. But as surely as anything I had ever believed, I felt this to be my act, my decision, fully my own choice. How could there be any mistake? I was a colossus, a god. The feeble voices of warning faded, leaving nothing but a glory of certainty, a bliss that could not be wrong.
Just for such a very short time. Then he shifted away from me and stood up. There was a mighty shout from somewhere over there and the bleat of a puzzled woken sheep—and the event unspooled so that I saw what a lie it was. There was no more trembling, there were no more moans, no more sweet nothings about being beguiled. Only the anxiety I could hear in his voice, anxiety and coldness too.
– Get up, get up, Miss Veale, he said in a rasping whisper. Miss Veale!
I was no colossus after all. I was just Miss Veale, to be pulled to her feet with a cool steady hand under my arm, and to be led, like one of those sheep, beside the hedge to the stile. No tomfoolery at the stile this time, only his hand gripping mine with no motive but the need to get me over.
– Best go round the side, he said, as brisk as a gentleman ordering his carriage. Quickly now!
So we went scuttling along like rats in the shadow of the hedge and came out near the bonfire as if we’d always been there, and as separate as if we were strangers.
Well, I thought, waking up early next morning, Bridie innocently asleep beside me. Now I know. I kept saying the words in my mind, there was a grim satisfaction in them. Now I know. As if knowing was a way of getting back a trace of that huge powerful person I’d been for those short mad minutes behind the hedge. Now I know.
I see now, sixty years too late, that he had not expected me to yield. The seduction of Elizabeth Veale was one of those unattainable ambitions that no one would expect to achieve. I am familiar now with the satisfaction it gave him to fling himself at the impossible. It was the chase, not the prey, that he loved. Coming out from behind the hedge, his coldness was in part disappointment. The fox had delivered itself up to the hunter. Where was the triumph in that?
CAUGHT OUT
I’d heard things, the way you do, and I’m ashamed to say I tried them all. Hot baths, jumping down from high places, skipping till you got a stitch in your side. Rosemary, I’d heard, and there was plenty in the garden, and I was determined, cold with the need of it, my will forcing it down, but with the direst need in the world no one can swallow enough rosemary to effect what I longed to effect.
I ran full pelt up the muddy lane from the village, so fast I slipped, hands flat down in the mud. Got up, went on running past what I could bear, but forced myself on, got to the top and wanted another hill. At the top of that bent muddy lane, where the church is—I can see it clearly in the eye of memory—the lane flattens, a straight level run all the way from the vicarage to Holsworthy. Now, if that dull lane, down which Mr Macarthur had strolled so many times, had only been a hill like the one I’d just run up, he might not have bothered. As it was, I stood looking along that lane in a hot sweaty pother, the stitch in my side a glorious hopeful pain. Surely no babe could stick to me after that!
There was no shame. There was simply a job to be done. Joan of Arc could not have had a steelier resolve.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
I could not find a way to tell Bridie. She was sad, though putting on a brave appearance: Captain Moriarty had not, after all, made her a proposal. He and Mr Macarthur still paid calls, but he had clearly drawn back from any consideration of Bridie as his wife. To reveal my own situation would engulf hers and make it seem by comparison trivial, which it was not. Besides, how could I explain that something as childish as curiosity, and another thing as unworthy as vanity, had lured me to this pass?
But among women, in the intimacy of a household, that particular secret has nowhere to hide for long.
Bridie and I sat side by side on the wall between the house and the church, looking out into the August night. I had a fan. Not that it was such a hot night, but Bridie knew, and I knew she knew, and I had the impulse to hide. Not out of remorse at the wickedness of what I had allowed to happen. Only humiliation, that I’d been such a fool. To have been warned all my life, to have been taught a truth about the world, and then to think I knew better.
I had not been forced, or only by my own folly and arrogance, that let me think I was in control of what was happening—and my sad ignorance of the ways of men and their flattery. Oh, the thrill of having a man reduced, or seem to be, the mighty man brought low!
Behind the fan my cheeks burned. It was rage that burned there, the rage of not having been able to take a single step beyond the permitted without being punished. Not one step! Not once!
Now, telling over this old story for you, I can see it plain, as I could not then. I ask you not to judge too harshly. I would like to take that young woman by the hand and say, You were not a fool. Or not only a fool. To stay always within the bounds laid down is to remain a child.
A flame had burned in me, to be bigger than those bounds. That should be no crime.
Bridie spoke all the words, around and around, gentle with me but distant, like a person safe on a ship calling out kindly to someone fallen overboard, beyond rescue. Then there was nothing more to say.
In that calm night, all her soft words said, her hand warm in mine, I recoiled from her pity. I had gone behind the hedge with eyes open. That night, with the world tilted irrevocably from one place to another, I decided: let no one pity me. As pride was the key to Mr Macarthur’s character, refusal to be pitied would be mine.
Now I lay awake beside her, knowing that this was the last night of our old lives. The dawn streaming towards me was the last dawn of my secret, the morning ahead the first morning of my future. What future? To be married to that moody stranger, both of our lives poisoned by regret? Or some other fate, one so far beyond my experience in genteel Bridgerule as to be unimaginable? What exactly would a girl do who had no family and no money, only a belly containing a bastard child?