I would have spent myself immediately.”
She would have done more, had she been in the widow’s place. She wouldn’t have been able to restrain herself from stroking every inch of him, for wasn’t that part of the pleasure? The freedom to touch as one willed? Perhaps for Madame Jacques, the freedom had been in allowing another to borrow the control she held over her body. “And then?”
“When she was ready for me to fuck her, she knelt on the bed with pillows to support her, and I knelt behind her. I rubbed myself along her back and on her rear, which was soft as a pillow, and could easily have done nothing else, but she spread her thighs and cried out for me to fuck her. It was…”
“Powerful,” Lucilla said, imagining that she could order someone else’s pleasure.
“Yes. But as soon as I was inside her, I felt an obliteration of the self, of the self that thinks. It was not only my cock that she squeezed inside her passage, but my whole being, shrunk into one fine point. It was extraordinary. All-consuming.” He paused. “Is it like this for you?”
Lucilla had to think to understand the question he’d asked. He’d been honest with her, so she would do her best to be so with him. “It’s like…holding my breath, and reaching, and…No. That doesn’t explain it.” She swallowed. “There’s wetness, and tension, and it’s close, so very close…I’m no good at explaining this.”
If there were a formula, perhaps, and a predictable outcome. A protocol of physical actions leading to replicable results, easily described in terms of weight and color and viscosity. It ought to work that way, if the world were just. But she knew it didn’t. Though her first experiences with sex had only felt more than physical at the beginning, her later solitary experiments had been harder to quantify and more varied in result. And what she’d shared with Pascal had been different than that; she hadn’t always been aware of herself, or of her own body, in her fascination with him and his. Yet at the same time she felt fulfilled. Happy. Why? Did her body need sex, like a vitamin? If that was it, why was sex better with Pascal than alone? She shouldn’t notice a difference. She drove another kilometer in silence.
Pascal interrupted her thoughts. “Perhaps next time, I will ask you what you feel at the appropriate moment.”
“If I can form sentences, you’re welcome to try.” She took a deep breath. “What happened next? With Madame Jacques.”
The motor purred. “It progressed in the usual way,” he said.
Lucilla cast him a glance. “That’s vague. I thought you remembered everything.”
“I don’t think I can speak on this anymore, unless my hands are on you,” Pascal said.
Her stomach twisted a little, as if hungry for him. “Finish the story, at least.”
“The smell of baking bread is, to this day, a reminder.”
“So if I brought you a baguette, you would—” Imagining the lewd appearance of a baguette, Lucilla began to laugh. Pascal joined her. To her surprise, the rest of their journey, all through the night, became a blur of laughter and shared memories, but now only memories of safe things, such as her childhood experiments with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, and his first dish of ice cream, which had been strawberry.
She told him of when she’d been a girl, and imagined that she could easily dress in boys’ clothes and run off to have adventures, just like the boys in the illustrated stories that Tony and Crispin pored over. She’d had to read those stories in secret, sneaking them into the garden shed to avoid her mother’s lecturing on what was appropriate for a young girl and, at much greater length, what was not. “But now,” she said with great satisfaction, “I am on an adventure of my own.”
“Am I required to be your assistant in this endeavor? Or may I be the intrepid scientist?”
Lucilla grinned at him and deftly swerved around a hole in the road. “I stole the motor. I think you’d better be the girl. Only no swooning, I beg you.”
“Only if you ravish me at the end,” he said hopefully.
INTERLUDE
BOB HAILEY’S SISTER WAS NOT IMPRESSED WHEN told the regiment was mustering.
“You can’t leave,” Agnes said. “The water closet’s got a leak. It makes a terrible drip all night, and keeps Mother awake.”
“I’ll have a look before I go,” Bob said. “Captain Wilks is expecting me early.”
“You care more about that old man than about your own family!”
“It’s my duty.”
“We’re your duty! And what do you think will become of us if you get sent who-knows-where to be killed?”
“Haven’t I done enough already? You’ll get my pay, same as you’ve been getting,” Bob said. “I’ve asked Mrs. Tollis upstairs to look in every few days. She’s happy to do it.”
“She doesn’t care two pins for me, she just likes to gossip with Mother.”
“You’re able to take care of yourself,” Bob said. “You had a factory job before I went into the service. If you need to, you can do it again.”
“And then who’ll take care of Mother, I ask you? She can’t stay by herself any longer, and you know it. Yet I don’t see you here but once in a fortnight.”
Agnes was convinced the army was like a holiday camp, enlisted in for the adventure of it, much as their father had signed on with the merchant marine. Though of course he’d never been seen again.
“If I’m killed, will you still blame me for not mending the leaks?” Bob asked wearily. “I’m off.” To my other life.
Chapter Five
LUCILLA DID NOT REALIZE THEY HAD CROSSED the border into France until she stopped the motor so they could relieve themselves. The night sounded unusually quiet; she’d grown used to the motor’s vibration and the mournful baying of dogs, and she stood for a moment, listening to the engine tick. She heard Pascal’s returning footsteps, then a curse. He’d stumbled into a stone milepost. She backed the motor enough for the headlamps to illuminate it. The distance it marked was worn illegible, but it sheltered a gaily painted plaster Madonna, her feet pinning at least twenty scraps of paper, their penciled prayers inscribed in French. Lucilla was tempted to leave an offering of her own, she was so glad to be free of Germany, but at the same time, she realized her journey’s end would mean the end of her affair with Pascal. She restrained herself from snarling at the statue’s serenely smiling face.
She stepped out of the headlamps’ glare and said, “If we keep going, we might find a village in time for coffee and croissants.”
“We could stop here and rest,” Pascal said.
“And sleep on the ground with no blankets? If we push on, we might find a nice, comfortable bed.”
The wavering headlamp turned Pascal’s grin more devilish than he might have intended.
“I intend to have a good day’s sleep, at least!”
“I intend to make sure of it,” he said. “Come. You’re right. This road should lead us toward Verdun and Reims. There will be towns along the way if we run out of petrol.”
Lucilla planned never to forget that dawn, pink and orange like a dish of sweets, the light gently washing over fields of summer hay. She glanced at Pascal to share it with him, but in the few moments since they’d last spoken, he’d fallen asleep.
She yawned, and considered pulling to the side of the road for a small nap herself, but she wanted a bed. More than that, she wanted one last time to make love with Pascal, so the sooner they reached a place where she could have that wish, the better.
This