William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

She went to the dressing table and took some things from her Gladstone bag and placed them on the top. A saucer, a small bottle with a clear liquid inside it, and a tiny piece of sponge — slightly larger than a lump of sugar — to which an eighteen inch length of cotton thread was securely tied.

With a little grunt she lifted up the ewer of water from its basin and splashed a few drops in the saucer. Then she added a little fluid from the bottle. She mixed the two together with her finger, wishing the water was warm. Then she dipped the sponge in the solution, letting it soak there for a while.

She pulled up her night dress and put one foot on the chair, then, wincing from the cold, she pushed the little piece of sponge into her vagina as far as it would go. The thread dangled between her thighs. Felix, she was sure, had never noticed it in the eight times their ‘bodies had mingled’ since that first evening in August.

She replaced the saucer and bottle in her bag and offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Aunt Bedelia with her little handbooks and pamphlets and their commonsensical advice. Did Felix ever think of taking precautions, she wondered? Was it something that ever crossed his mind? Did he ever wonder what would happen if—?

But this train of thought made her feel suddenly weak — almost faint — at the risks they were taking. She shut her eyes and breathed in deeply through her nose. Why was she so weak? Why couldn’t she obey the dictates of her reason? She saw everything with utter clarity and understood with no ambiguity the absolute wrongness of what she was doing. That should have been sufficient, she told herself. If these things were so evident, self-restraint should be automatic. But even as she ran through the catalogue of her sins, in her mind some perverse illogic exerted a more powerful impulse. The answer was simple. She wasn’t deluded, she wasn’t out of control: in some sort of way she must want to do what she did.

“The flesh is weak,” she said to herself, in partial expiation. As if to prove her point she slipped off her night dress and stood naked in the cold room for an instant. She felt her body break out in goosepimples. Glancing down she saw her nipples redden and pucker.

“Brrrr!” she exclaimed and jumped into the still warm bed.

Felix came back.

“Nobody stirring,” he said. He saw her night dress on the bedpost and his smile broadened.

“Have I kept you waiting’ long?” he asked facetiously, as he took off his dressing-gown and pyjama jacket. “Ooh, it’s cold,” he said and hurried in beside her. They huddled close to each other.

“I should resist you,” Charis said, half-seriously. “But I’m so weak.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” he said, making a joke of it. “I’m irresistible.” She thought his smile was a little forced. They tried never to talk about Gabriel. She had no real notion of how Felix felt, if he felt as she did or not. By a kind of unspoken agreement they had arrived at a position where they didn’t mention his name if they could help it. It was safer. On the few occasions when some reference was made Charis found the feelings of shame and guilt burnt through her, her mind filled with images of their last days together. She would tremble with the effort of self-control; it seemed almost impossible to breathe. Felix showed nothing as far as she could see; he just became silent for a while. Was he wresting with his feelings? Or just respecting hers? She felt she desperately needed to know sometimes, but she didn’t dare ask for fear of what might be unleashed, of what would be for ever spoiled.

As she lay now in his arms she knew, though, that sometime soon they had to talk about Gabriel. They had to. It seemed to her they only got by because their meetings were so infrequent. When they were together for any length of time the spectre of Gabriel inevitably intruded on them, like Banquo’s ghost.

“Charis?”

“Oh sorry, Felix.”

“You’re not falling asleep on me, are you?” He kissed her neck. She ran her hand down the back of his head, her fingers seeking the top bump of his vertebrae.

“Just dreaming,” she said. She felt his hand on her breast above her heart, taking the nipple between thumb and forefinger.

“Dreaming of your demon lover,” he said.

“Thinking about last summer,” she lied.

“Oh. The ponds.”

Charis reached down and took his cock in her hand, holding it lightly, as if weighing it. It was very soft, like that, surprisingly so, she thought. She squeezed it gently, feeling it slowly thicken and firm, filling out her fist. Felix rolled on top of her. Her hand went back to his shoulders searching for a small mole, rubbery, slightly raised above the surface of his skin, a familiar map reference on his body, like the small scar on his thigh, the baby softness of his underarms.

♦

In the summer of 1915, during fine evenings, Charis often left her cottage and went to a stone seat by the middle fishpond which was obscured from the big house by a large clump of Portuguese laurel and rhododendron.

It was a little classical arbour which had been constructed by Felix’s mother. There was a sizeable piece of broken fluted column set in a border and beside the marble bench was a bust of the Emperor Vitellius on a slim octagonal plinth.

As the evening cooled the water the big carp would come up from the dark and weedy bottom of the pool and nose at flies, or cruise slowly to and fro. Charis began to take some bread crumbs with her to feed them and soon, she fancied, they came to expect her arrival, the first crumbs thrown bringing a dozen or more fish up from the depths.

One evening Felix joined her; he had seen her from his room, he said. They had become more friendly since their meeting after her party when, unaccountably, he’d turned up at her front door in his dripping evening dress. The distrust and caution on his part that had seemed to lie between them disappeared, and consequently, when Felix was at Stackpole, life there became noticeably more enjoyable. The bizarre gloom that emanated constantly from the major had been added to by the return of Nigel Bathe from Mesopotamia. During a bomb-throwing instruction course he’d been attending, a bomb had exploded in his hands and both arms had been amputated at the elbow. He came with Eustacia to convalesce at Stackpole. The air of lugubrious tragedy that permeated the house became almost palpable. Felix’s return from Oxford for the summer vacation brought welcome relief.

The evening meetings by the fishpond began naturally and easily to extend themselves, weather permitting. Some days Charis found him there before her, waiting. He told her about his life in Oxford, how boring it was, and his friend Holland. They argued about pacifism, Charis attacking Felix’s anti-war stance out of a sense of loyalty to Gabriel rather than through any firm conviction of her own. The presence of Nigel Bathe and news of disasters at the Dardanelles and Suvla Bay made her arguments harder to establish, but she persisted, and in talking this way with Felix came to understand something of his hatred for the soldiers in his family, the powerful need he felt to be different from his father and brothers-in-law. But what about Gabriel, she would ask, playing her trump card. Ah, Gabriel was different, the exception that proved the rule. But slowly Gabriel’s name came up less and less frequently. Sometimes they simply sat and looked at the cruising fish, not talking for minutes at a time.

One evening it was unnaturally hot. A dull static heat that seemed to promise thunderstorms a day or so ahead. Clouds of midges dithered above the pool. There was no breeze and the air was clinging and felt over-used, as if, Felix said, it was composed of exhalations only. All the people of the world breathing out at once. Charis wore an old straw hat in which she’d stuck cornflowers and poppies. She took it off and fanned her face, looping damp tendrils of hair back behind her ears. She glanced at Felix but he was staring fixedly at the pond, tapping out a rhythm on his knee. Confident he wasn’t looking at her Charis pulled forward the V of her blouse and fanned air down her sticky front, shutting her eyes and throwing her head back. When she opened her eyes Felix was looking at her. She blushed.