Chapter 54
Alfred
Once more, my wife has delivered me an intensely erotic release—and once more, she hasn’t even touched me.
How she did it, when she is ill, when she isn’t even in the mood for bedding, I will never truly fathom.
When I awoke this morning, I felt strangely free.
It wasn’t like the first time she freed me.
Back then the noose of restriction was so tight that I was dying.
That first encounter with her in the cold dining room at Trescott when I climaxed just from pleasing her was the first gasp of air after being held underwater.
This time, however, it is different. I haven’t been deprived. But I can breathe a little more deeply now. It feels as though that the piece of myself that was taken from me in boyhood, that I forced down at the request of others, is restored to me.
Unfortunately, it appears that I am the only one feeling better this morning.
Annabelle wakes as ill as the day before. She attempts to come down with me to breakfast, but the food and the movement make her so nauseous that it all ends in the hall water closet.
Instead of going back to bed, however, she insists upon going to her study.
“I want to review those ledgers,” she tells me. “And now that I’ve been sick, I feel better. I will just have some toast and tea perhaps. You should go out.”
“I don’t want to leave you alone when you are ill,” I protest.
But she insists. And I sense that she will feel more comfortable if I do, indeed, go out into the city, even though I have no desire to leave her.
“In fact,” she says, “I have a suggestion. And perhaps you could even bring me back a present.”
She proceeds to describe a bookshop, Willoughby’s, that sells illicit volumes of the kind we have already shared together.
“Do you have any requests?”
“Just what suits you,” she says, her eyes straying to her ledgers.
Last night, for the first time, Annabelle didn’t want to bed me. I understand why and am not at all affronted. To me, it was nothing. But I could tell it made her uncomfortable. Perhaps this excursion could help in some way.
Thus, leaving the house is the least I can do for her. She has been so generous with me—especially last night—and I want to be so in return.
I tell her that I will leave the house, visit the bookshop, and pick out a present for her.
And it is good to get out into the fresh air—or what passes for fresh in London. The day, however, isn’t bad or too cold. The bookshop is only a short walk.
And I marvel at how much freer, how much fuller, how much happier I feel walking the streets than I was a few months ago. Then I felt shackled, heavy, desperate, agonized. Annabelle is the reason, of course, that I feel so differently now.
As I walk, I imagine a future in which Annabelle and me and our child form a family.
I see how the child might have Annabelle’s spirit, the one that makes her so indomitable, and my literary sensibilities.
I would not ever have to wonder where I belong, because I would always know that I belonged with my wife and child.
The thought of that future fills me with such sweet longing that it scares me. It seems too much to be allowed in this life. Is anyone ever allowed to be that happy?
As if in answer to my question, as I pass a newsstand an image catches my eye.
It is of a couple, a man and a woman, and I am not sure why I pause.
Neither figure truly looks like me or Annabelle.
The woman is very coarsely drawn, her limbs distended in cruel lines, reminiscent of Rowlandson’s countless older women, and the man is thin, narrow-shouldered, and knock-kneed.
But somehow, despite these distortions, I know instinctively.
The caricaturist has done his job.
I study the broadside. The woman, her blouse open, leers at the thin, clumsy looking young man as she pours wine down his throat.
The caption reads: seduction a la de Lacey.
“One shilling,” the man behind the stall says. “It’s a funny one, ain’t it, sir?”
I stare at the image.
Is this what people really think about me and Annabelle?
Surely not. It cannot be.
While the caricaturist attempted to mock Annabelle’s looks, anyone who saw her in the flesh would be able to see her beauty. The artists cannot really think that such a woman, of only thirty years of age, is such an object of disgust that she must get a man drunk to bed her.
But the lines along which they drew her aren’t new—I have seen many caricatures in a similar fashion with older men and younger women, the joke usually being that the women are only bedding the men for coin.
No. No one really thinks that this depiction of my wife is true.
Or at least not anyone who has ever seen Annabelle or known her.
No, I realize with shock.
I understand for the first time. And it shames me that it has taken this long. I never comprehended before why there was such a discrepancy between the woman I saw in the papers and the one I met at Trescott. When we married, I didn’t really understand why they would lampoon her for it.
Now, suddenly, I do.
It is a way of punishing Annabelle. Just as her father did. They want to punish her for her disobedience. For being a woman who refuses to heed the rules laid down for her, who wants power and obtains it, who dares to tempt men and make them feel desire, and yet who is only ruled by her own.
I not only fail to see the humor in the illustration.
I am ashamed.
Because I believed similar drawings before I knew her. I thought that if they spoke of her this way, then they must have a reason. If they said such things, they must have the truth on their side.
She must be lascivious.
She must be wicked.
Why would they say it otherwise?
Now, I understand why.
Because Annabelle merely being herself is a defiance of our society and all the men in it. Because there is an irresolvable tension between who she is and how our society demands people like her behave.
I set down the broadside.
“How many for all of them?” I ask the man.
There are at least forty stacked on the stand.
“Two pound,” the man says. “But all of them, sir?”
“Yes.”
The man shrugs. “If it pleases you, sir.”
I hand over the money and take the broadsides.
I can’t stop them from printing these things.
But I can destroy what is in front of me.
Without particularly thinking why, I take one of the broadsheets, fold it, and shove it into my waistcoat pocket.
For some reason I want a memento of this moment.
I want to remember my own idiocy. To keep this piece to remind me of it. As a form of punishment. And as a reminder to question the world around me.
Then, shoving the papers under my arm, I take out my matches and light one. I remove the broadsides and light them on fire.
“Sir!” cries the newspaper man, stepping out from behind his stall.
I fling the papers into the gutter.
“I bought them, did I not? You have your two pound.”
“But I—burn them, sir!”
Once the flames have consumed the paper, I stamp at the remaining flames with my boot.
When I am sure the fire is well and out, I turn and stride off down the street.
Despite the definitiveness of my action, I am not sure how I feel.
Annabelle warned me of course.
For that reason alone, I’m not surprised or shocked.
No, I feel numb.
The inside of the bookshop revives me, however.
Annabelle told me to ask for the back room and the attendant takes me to a small antechamber where a different type of book predominates.
I look over them, smiling, thinking of my wife.
I select a few of the most intriguing options.
And then I see it.
A familiar green cover.
It is another copy of my beloved green book.
I am flooded with affection for it.
Once, it was all I had to feed that hungry churning inside of me that I was not allowed to slake.
I wish I could buy a copy for all the repressed young men in Britain.
The women too.
And then I get a wonderful idea.
I pick up the green volume and the other books that I want to bring home. I purchase them along with a few front-room novels that I have been meaning to read, and before I go, I find the most odious section of the store and its most odious author.
And I slip my little green book right beside it.
Just in case someone needs it.
An antidote, if you will.
I return to the townhouse with only two hours having passed since my departure. Thus I find Annabelle, still peaked but nevertheless diligently looking over her ledgers, in her study.
Not wanting to disturb her, I merely inform her that I have returned and will be reading in the drawing room.
She nods and when I settle down with one of the volumes (a very interesting book about a love affair between a high-born lady and her father’s valet), I am unsure if I will see her for the rest of the afternoon.
But only a half hour later, she comes to me.
“You were not on the town for very long,” she says, sitting next to me on the sofa. I might fancy her annoyed if it weren’t for a certain softness in her tone.
“I told you,” I murmur, not looking up from my very interesting book, because I have the strange sensation that if I do, she will start like a deer. “I do not like to leave my wife for long. Especially when she is ill from carrying our child.”
She sighs.
“You are very attentive. But I do not want you to grow bored.”
“I am not bored.” I cannot stop myself from looking at her now.
“I know—last night—it was not as it has been with us.”
Of all the things in the world, I do not want her worried about this. But I am at a loss for how to convince her that one night—or a hundred such nights—will not upset me. I know it is passing—and even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter to me.
“Annabelle,” I say, trying levity. “I lived twenty-eight years—or, well, let’s subtract fifteen for childhood—thirteen years of my life, my entire adulthood, at war with myself and my desires. I think I can tolerate a few weeks of my wife being indisposed.”
Her face twists at my words. And I know I have failed.