Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Because joy is a crime now, she told him.

He laughed in gratitude but shook his head. His confusion wasn’t allayed at all.

But it’s worse than anything I’ve said, he insisted. There’s a bogus marriage certificate… The French officers make them and sell them to us… When I get there I can say, Madame, the two-room reservation is a mistake… My wife and I need only…

She held her hands up. You needn’t tell me, she said. I leave that to you.

But why does the world make such a rigmarole?

To make people think twice, she suggested.

But they don’t think twice when they want to tear a young fellow’s head off. They don’t think twice about artillery and gas. You can get all that without jumping through hoops. No forgeries, no nods and lies.

That’s an argument you can’t win, Charlie.

He assessed her. He found it hard to believe in her acceptance. Whereas by now she’d got over her own astonishment at her will to go ahead.

If the driver who took them out along the river to Ailly that afternoon suspected their true plans, they did not care, and were pleased to be dropped off by the door of the hotel which was out of the town, in woods through which a path led to the river. Sally sat in a chair in the little parlor and let Charlie conduct the business at the desk. She felt far from abashed. She felt like a woman in possession.

The room was heavily curtained and lined with wallpaper crowded with roses on a dingy background. The bed seemed concave—sagging from the heavy ease people had taken on it over tens of years. It was covered with thick shawls and its pillows were muscular. Sally counseled herself that this was where it would happen. It was to be that arena—that high bed which shorter-legged women would be forced to enter only by unseemly gymnastics but which she could lower herself onto. She felt nervousness—for his sake and hers. She had, however, encountered something of the movements behind this rite in nursing texts. She knew the physiology. She was not quite as ignorant as if she had worked as a typist. She had certainly been untroubled by embarrassment when they signed in with the authority of their freshly minted but faked document placed on the desk by Charlie as casual proof of union. Now, here, he was still the one who was flustered because he thought she might be. He could not be argued out of the suspicion. It seemed he didn’t know this was a test they must put themselves to.

He took off his overcoat and Sam Browne and uniform jacket and hung them in the great sturdy armoire. A meticulous fellow, he made himself busy about it and commented on the mugginess of the room, even at this time of year, and asked her permission to open the window a little. It was stiff and presented him with a test—a swollen windowpane in a warped and shrinking frame. He seemed to be delighted to have to struggle with it. Sally took off her jacket and hung it in the armoire. Someone knocked tentatively at the door—it was a moon-faced girl with a tray of white wine and some grapes and cheese and biscuits. Monsieur, she mumbled and crossed the room and placed her tray on a table by two heavily upholstered chairs. Then—keeping custody of her eyes—she left, waving her hand in negation as Charlie offered her a few francs hastily delved from his pocket. He closed the door behind her.

Would you like some wine? he asked. For the tray offered him another grateful delay.

She was standing waiting in the middle of the room. She had taken off her gray overcoat and jacket—a reasonable thing to do in a sultry room.

Later for the wine, she told him.

Would you like me to wear… protection?

No, our periods don’t come. They did at Rouen. But they stopped again at the casualty clearing station.

But she was faintly willing anyhow to conceive a child in case Charlie disappeared.

She was aware now that she must dictate the terms. She reached for and caressed the side of his face. She had always undervalued touch except as a medical technique. She had discovered its spectrum now. He responded—all fears of cheapness dropping easily away. The wise, harsh, watchful face battle had given him was close. His mouth was of course tentative again at first, until he detected the frank invitation in hers. She uttered a sentence she could not have foretold. It was a sentence of no distinction but phenomenal novelty to her. It asked him to put his hand inside her blouse.

He did it. Again enthusiasm and certainty grew slowly within him. Touch my breasts now, she instructed. The touch brought a kind of convulsion in her stomach and at the spine’s base, a weakness of the upper thighs. This is why a bed is needed, it occurred to her. The lovers are lamed.

You should undress, she instructed him. Behind the screen, if you like. I’ll do my nurse’s work with the bed. We won’t need eiderdowns.

Again she had made him more sure of himself. You say undress? he asked. He seemed to want details on what this meant.

But you’re an artist—you’ve seen all those paintings of love. What do you see there?

Well, nakedness, of course, he said like a schoolboy at last achieving the right answer.

And those army shirts are pretty rough when it comes to texture, she told him with an instructive smile. Unless they’re tailored. And I don’t think yours is.

No sense in getting them tailored, he said. Clothes get ruined up there.

So I’ve noticed.

And you? he asked.

I’ll wear a shift for now, she said with this alien certitude of hers. I’m not an artist like you.

He went behind the screen. In the great ark of the bed she lay on her side in her shift, observing what she had read—in franker romances exchanged between nurses—that etiquette dictated she should not watch him as he emerged. According to these books, if you did not turn away a man might think you were assessing his person, his old fellow, his penis, his prick, his John Thomas—which in any case she was sure he would have covered for now with his hands. She turned to him though as soon as he entered the bed and covered himself with a sheet. Again, it was the question of pace which bemused him. He lay like an untutored log—or nearly so. She realized she might have the jump on him, knowing those technical diagrams from nursing textbooks. She dragged him by the shoulders. His hands with the terror of combats in them went around her as she waited in her shift. She could feel the calluses of his palms abrading her back. She could feel him at her thigh. At once an even more disabling flame and torture entered her body. She knew to part her legs. She never expected to have this instinctive willingness.

Then—as she wanted—he entered her, and that fury she’d been awaiting became possible between them. She had feared this penetration since she’d first been conscious it happened amongst humans. And here it was. It mocked all fear and she felt that marvelous irrelevance of outer worlds and outer populations.

Nonetheless, even now a large part of her mind stood above the bed. It waited just as the courtiers used to hang over the beds of young kings and queens, to make sure that nature—which took its course with peasants and farmers—took its course with Crowns. The point was that to Sally this was not only love. It was also an experiment on the future. This witness in her wished to verify that there was something here—some promise of becoming a single flesh, though not necessarily today. Because today ran the chance of being hit-or-miss. But in a longer run, over time and through regular exercise. He had acquired a more unified mind in the meantime. Large in ambition he now pounded himself into her. There was no end to the profane and delightful simplicity of Charlie as he moved and moved within her.