Chapter One Hundred and Eleven
They’d begun by discussing Petunia’s plans for the future, then Annette offered her thoughts on the importance of maintaining a cohesive womanhood in the historical battle against men, and before they knew it, they were naked and applying their fingertips and tongues to various loci on each other’s bodies. Now, Reader, don’t you go projecting your filthy porn-conditioned fantasies onto the innocent agents of this chaste narrative; this was long ago, generations ago, with Petunia, at least, enduring still the Victorian, Judeo-Christian conventions, instilled in her from girlhood, against allowing another to view one in the mildest state of dishabille, even when that other is one’s husband, even when in the act of attempted procreation; unless the other is a doctor, in which case he is free, nay, positively encouraged, to strip one of one’s last bashful stitch of dress and ogle one’s genitalia shamelessly. So you can imagine the gauntlet of spectres through which she had to run in order to climb out of her cave to the freedom of fresh air and sunshine, which, in this case, took the form of long, slow, exploratory caresses by a fellow female. All Annette’s virulence was transformed into tenderness; her hands pawed Petunia’s flesh like a cheesemaker’s fingers deep amongst the sticky curds, while Petunia, overcome by the first gentle touches ever to stroke her skin, cast off all the ballast of her marriage, her mores, and her modesty, and lit up, as if a shrivelled wick which had subsisted inside a darkened lampshade were for the first time kissed with flame. Neither of them had touched, or been touched by, a woman before; Annette had not even known a man, and Petunia found it charming to see Annette’s usual truculent confidence wiped away. To both of them, nothing had ever felt so right as this; indeed, the very notion of what could be termed “right” expanded to fill all the sky. Never, it seemed, had there been warmth, had there been softness; henceforth, “warmth” could only mean this, “soft” could only mean this; this new language onto which they’d stumbled through the fusion of their forms was so undefined and yet so properly composed, like a pair of undulating, merging jellyfish floating as one through the sea. It was as if a childhood riddle, which had stumped them long ago, and on which they had long since given up, barged back suddenly into their psyches, and proceeded to solve itself, unveiling double meanings to old words which had seemed so stone-hewn, such that the content of the intervening years of their lives had been based on a laughably false premise. Like a cunningly crafted design, which, when turned upside-down, reveals another, opposite yet equally enchanting image it had been impossible to detect, Petunia’s lifelong notion of immorality, thus flipped, turned to morality: pleasuring Annette, and inviting Annette to pleasure her, overturned every Commandment, punctured each illusion, and reified, enacted, apotheosised the Golden Rule. There’s so little one has to do, in this world, to be good, Petunia thought; just move one’s hand like this, over that part of someone’s body, and the world’s suddenly that tiny bit better for everyone.
Pleasure drowned them, simultaneously, in a flower-shower of beauteousness:
Petunia had grown up rich, knowing no cares. When a shy debutante, she met Marcel at her ball, danced with him, and was charmed by him, especially by his respectful restraint. After the dance, he bowed, kissed her gloved fingers, hoped he would see her again someday, and left. Over the months that followed, he was nowhere to be seen; a mystery, a dream which had refused to vaporise. She thought on him, pictured him, to the exclusion of her living, present suitors, who paled in comparison as a string of lame ponies pales against a prizewinning thoroughbred. Then, impossibly, he bumped into her coming out of a tailor’s. Of course he remembered her. He’d been thinking of her, writing every acquaintance in the frustrated hope he might track her down. He took her for a drink and plied her with sherry; she knew what he was doing, and tried to play coy—in her head, though rapidly retreating further into a dark, outer orbit, were her unchanged intentions to, like a good girl of her class, wait until marriage to the man she loved—but she was intoxicated by his charm, as much as by the wine. She let him help her to his hotel, let him persuade her to disrobe and to demean herself before him; then, after she’d soaked herself in shame, he took her, crudely and quickly, and left her sobbing in a heap on the floor. Disgusted by her womanly emotion, he left, giving her detailed instructions for returning the key to the desk when she checked out. Sickened with herself, she vowed to become a nun, and, against her parents’ will, took holy orders. It soon became obvious, however, that she’d fallen pregnant, which, it transpired, fell somewhat afoul of the sisterhood’s protocol, so her parents took her back, until they, in league with his parents, forced her to marry Marcel. After all that, the child was lost, and, despite his occasional selfish, oafish discharges inside her, she never fell pregnant again.
Annette had been treated viciously by her father and brothers when growing up, but found solace in church, until the pastor made a pass at her. Religion was, from that day, dead for her, and the icons of the saints spelt for her nought but the most ludicrous hypocrisy. School, too, held no appeal: science and maths were but men’s brutal ventures to subjugate the natural world, whilst literature was at best a polite sham; behind the romantic ravings of the dead males she was required to idolise, she could very well imagine the revolting lusts they wished to discharge upon the milky flesh of their muses. As her kin could not care less where she spent her days, she roamed the streets, joining her fellow truants in their troublemaking, in which she saw no point, for lack of any better thing to do. She beat up boys, but liked girls—she’d known it from the paintings of princesses in her picture books—and, when she was thirteen, she shyly kissed the neck of her best friend, who instantly denounced her before their neighbourhood, shaming her into exile. She fled into a life of tramps, fending off the wolves, stealing the food for which she was too proud to beg, before landing a series of domestic jobs in country manors, where she would be invariably harassed by male members of staff, as well as, usually, the patriarch and his adult and adolescent sons. All the while, she dreamt of eventual revenge, against the whole male gender, none of whose constituents had ever behaved other than boorishly towards her. Love, touch, concern—these, she had never known.
Until now: feeling her lover trace a juice-dripping finger across her lips, realising that she’s smiling. Smiling! She couldn’t ever remember smiling. She hadn’t known her lips could twist in that direction. What could this mean? Could there be hope for her, even in a swamp infested with men-frogs, after all?