Alexandra Guy: A Maiden's diary

“Gamey might be the better. Somehow, beneath my misgivings that the practice will be agony, there is a low, vulgar hissing of cilia, as if in anticipation of a cockfight of another order.” “Ha!” quoth my father. “I take that to mean, Mathew, you will not spare me this last indignity.” “I will spare your hams no quarter, and that will be no indignity. Come, madame, show me your fours.” “I fear I will blush to my roots.” “Blush where you like, Louisa, but do not stand in my way. You may kneel in my way, of course, providing that your haunches face me.” “In all the years of our marriage you have never asked this of me, Mathew.” “I have been naive, Louisa.” He laughed raucously. “We will now rectify the matter.

What a battle cry that would make. Let us now rectify those knaves who would disembowel all England. Let us rectify them in their very gut, at their very bottoms, aye -rectify!” “We are not at war, My Lord. Nor are you Prince Hal. But we are at the very slit of things.”

“Agreed, Louisa. Ah, what a curtsy of sumptuous lips you do. From black to pink and white. Rectify!” he shouted, and then it was that my mother let out a blood-curdling screech. “You need not move heaven and earth together,” she bawled. “As Archimedes might have said,” quoth my father, “give me a fulcrum and I'll screw the world.”

My mother sounded very hoarse. “I had never supposed that this stance could have made of the body one long quiver-” I fled down the corridor. I wanted to hear no more. My parents were indeed beasts of the field. I wanted no more of them. When I precipitately opened the corridor that debauched on the library, I turned and ran full tilt into one of the hollow armor men. It toppled over with a great crash and clatter. I stood there, transfixed. Why did not my brother James come and rescue me? I soon discovered why. In a matter of seconds my father, now draped in a handsome dressing gown, led James by the ear from the other door to the library. The Marquis of Portferrans was most distinguished in his silver-blond hair and high dudgeon. He betrayed no surprise whatever on catching sight of me. “Clarissa,” said he. “Yes, Father,” I said, and did a terribly brief curtsy. I would have galled it out with my sire on another occasion. I would have had a tome in my hand, my glasses perched on the tip of my nose, and muttering in Egyptian slant (we British have a panache for the exotic; one of our most well-known brigathers has confessed he goes into battle with a pocket Odyssey, in the original Greek, no less, which he sometimes relaxes with in the field during a lull). But the vision of my father and mother in copulo extremis and the debacle of the toppled suit of armor had been sufficient to demoralize me. All I could do now was to stand there guiltily and stupidly. James was in no less a pretty kettle, with the added disadvantage of having his earlobe, in the fingers of my irate father, twisted-any moment I expected it to become detached.

“Clarissa, I suspect you are a co-conspirator, although James has said nothing to incriminate you.” “That is very generous of my brother but I insist that his punishment will be mine as well. I will make a clean breast of it.” “I am not particularly interested in clean breasts, Clarissa,” said the Marquis a trifle dryly. “I find their owners more hygienic than humanistic. I think it my duty to speak freely when I say to you, Clarissa, young as you are, that a filthy little nipple never hurt a soul-with the exception, possibly, of the poor child suckling it; he, or she, in any case, if not shortly defunct, would become immune to many diseases.” The Marquis sighed and released James's ear. “The more I talk,” said my noble parent, “the less inclined I am to punishing you, but I must insist that the pair of you answer a direct question.” “Yes, My Lord,”

James said contritely. “At your pleasure, My Lord,” I said.

“Have either of you learned aught by watching your mother and myself?” “An essential,” said James promptly, “and that is that patience is the provocateur of passion at its most intense.”

“Well put, my son. I think I must pride myself on not having turned out to be the patriarchal stereotype so admired in this day and age.” My father turned to me. “And you, Clarissa?” “I think you tease too much, Father,” I blurted out. “And I promise myself I will gain revenge on every man I consort with.” “You will regret such a vow,” he admonished me softly, “each time you practice it. In time, however, you may forget it -I think your body, Clarissa, will be built for forgiveness, for it will have to bend toward most men. You will be a tall one, Clarissa.” “Yes, My Lord.” “Yes,” Quist-Hagen murmured the echo. He was, as was his fashion, already bored by the circumstance. “The staff ought to be up and about by now. Will you-” he addressed my brother -“be good enough to advise Wittling of the fallen armor up here and have him get someone to repair it?” “Of course, Father.” “In that case you are both dismissed. Be off with you. He smiled lovingly but distantly at both of us and returned to the bedroom-to Louisa. I suppose it was she, our mother, to whom the Marquis felt the closest. I cannot blame him-he loved her very much. But he need not have been so distant from James and myself.

This may have played a decisive role in our eventual preoccupation with sex-my obsession, if not James's. My mother, too, was as guilty as my father. She would graciously look in on us-as we had instructions with our tutors, before we went on excursions with our governesses, and she would read to us on occasion before we fell asleep. If either James or I fell ill of influenza, or the like, my mother deemed it wise to spend a little more time with us, varying her reading inclinations with games at cards… The general effect was that James and I grew closer and closer in our mutual regard. How close we were yet to see-we became aware of the closeness, really aware, early in the tenure of Angela, Angela Cleves, our last governess, when I was ten years of age and James, of course, was twelve. At the time we were at our London residence, Hagen House, in Kensington.

It was a cold, damp, foggy winter's night when I awoke from a bad dream a little after midnight in my bedroom. I had been out of sorts all day. I had shouted at our tutor, Mr. Oliver Harwell, for the simple reason that, as a prospective masculine predator, he seemed hopeless. I had snapped at Wittling, our aging butler, because he had not sent out one of our servants soon enough to catch the girl on the street calling for someone to buy her sweet lavender. I had been terribly out of sorts. There was an ancient sensuality foaming in my depths, something spiraling from the darks of my groin. I had attempted to masturbate before falling asleep, but it had been to no avail-it had not satisfied me… At any rate, waking, I flung aside the quilts and slipped into a bathrobe. As I look back on it now, how strange it is that someone so young should be pursued by a force so old. And at that point there was no adult I knew who would be willing to help me understand what was involved. Nobody at Hagen House comprehended the emotional and intellectual precocity either of my brother or myself, except Harwell, our tutor, who reported our mastery of the curriculum in the highest possible terms, but who lacked the judgment to convey the hothouse of our emotions to the Marquis or the Marchioness who were, after all, pretty much to the exclusion of all else, preoccupied by the London social whirl-the well-nigh endless series of balls, plays at the theatre, concerts at Covent Garden and, de rigueur, as I recall, attendance at Old Bailey, if possible, of the shocking trial of the dramatist, Oscar Wilde, whose alleged homosexuality was not considered a fit subject for converse in the presence of children. If Wilde and his putative peccadilloes had been mentioned in our presence, we would have been indifferent, for what we were fascinated by was our own libidinous explorations which required no wit, Irish or any other, to give them goad. Frankly, as I crossed to the window, I knew I was in the mood for the explorative.