The woman looked up at him, a coquettish glance under her thin eyelashes. ‘Do you want to come home with me, dear?’ Jake had seen enough death. He had seen more men dead and dying than there were people packed into this room, but he had survived and he had brought home from the field hospital the discovery that he was not after all a coward, whatever the men who had fought more conventionally might think of him. He had seen the terrible things, and he had worked to alleviate some fraction of the suffering. Somehow he managed to contain the memory and the dreams of the war within himself, without letting anyone else know how they shadowed him. But it did seem that even now he could not escape from death. He had spent today hunched over a corpse, teasing out the strands of dead muscle tissue under their flaps of grey skin. He could smell decay as if it were embedded in his own nasal cavities, and now he wanted the scents of life. He wanted warm, living flesh under his hands and to taste the complicated flavours of skin and sweat.
Jake left Hugo and his friend at their table. He didn’t care if they wondered why he had disappeared, or if they were too far gone even to remember he had been there. He followed the black-haired woman out into Leicester Square, and into the warren of streets around Shaftesbury Avenue. They came to an upstairs room with a brass bedstead and a jug and basin on the table behind a painted screen.
There was a brief financial transaction. It didn’t worry Jake. He had enough money on him for her requirements, that was all that mattered. When she had folded it away the woman smiled at him.
‘How old are you, dear?’
He told her the truth. ‘Twenty-one. My name is Jake.’
She undid his waistcoat and took out his shirt studs. ‘Well then, Jake. Are you going to make me happy? A big, tall, beautiful boy like you?’
He said, ‘As happy as you will make me.’
He loved the deft, businesslike way she undressed him and herself, as if nakedness was normal and natural. He loved this room, with its bare walls and minimal furniture, the big bed. She settled back on it now, one arm behind her head, so that he could look at her. Her breasts rolled apart to expose the ridges of her breastbone.
She had heavy thighs, dimpled and very white. They were scented and powdery, reminding Jake of some childhood sweet. Turkish Delight, he thought. He remembered how the sweets came tightly packed in frills of paper, jelly ridges pressed close together to yield under his fingers. He lowered himself on top of her. Her skin seemed to give off little puffs of her sugary scent mixed with a salty, alluvial smell much closer to the earth.
She was very soft, soft everywhere, deliciously so. He wanted to bury himself in the rolls of melting flesh, deeper and deeper, until he silenced the endless commentary within his own head.
She spread her legs for him, exposing liver-coloured lips lapped with fur. Jake’s breath whistled in his throat. Without any preliminaries he pushed himself up inside her, as far as he could reach, amazed by the slippery heat. He forgot that he was supposed to be making her happy, but that did not seem to matter particularly. He forgot everything except his own scalding pleasure.
When he ejaculated a minute later he knew that what he had guessed was right, that none of his dreams or fantasies or masturbatory experiments could ever be as good as this reality. They gave only the faintest intimation of the heat and pressure and urgency of real love-making with a real woman.
The sensation was so intense he thought that his heart might stop, or that he would faint, or that the blood vessels within his skull would burst. For a moment he would have been happy to die there on the brass bedstead.
He didn’t die, or even faint. He lay with his face against the woman’s neck until his gasping breaths subsided. Then he opened his eyes. She seemed hardly to have moved; her head was still resting against her arm. There was a bluish patch of close-shaved stubble in the exposed armpit, where the salty smell was particularly strong.
Living and breathing, Jake thought. Full of life. Her various emanations mixed with his own seemed to affirm the vitality he longed for. He nuzzled his face into the cup of blue-white flesh.
The woman extracted her arm from beneath him and nudged him aside, not unkindly. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed, sitting slumped for a moment with her back to him.
‘Can I see you again? Can I meet you?’ Jake asked, understanding that their present encounter was at an end.
‘If you like, dear. You know where to find me.’ She stood up and went behind the screen in the corner. He heard water splashing and the faint squeak of wet rubber.
‘I know,’ he said happily.
He parted with her at the street door downstairs. She was back in her satin dress, in a hurry to be off. He wanted to kiss her goodbye, like a lover, but the gesture seemed inappropriate. He let her go, with regret, and walked back through the empty streets to his student digs in Bloomsbury.
Quintus Prynne woke up late, with a headache that made him feel as if he had been clubbed. He opened his eyes and saw that he had fallen asleep on the divan of his studio, instead of in his bed at home. The litter of empty bottles and dirty glasses scattered between the paints and canvases and jars of brushes reminded him of some of the events of the night before.
He tried closing his eyes again in order to dodge back into sleep, but it was too late. He was awake, with a mouth that felt full of sand and a vague sense of some obligation waiting to be fulfilled. Groaning softly in sympathy with himself he crawled out of bed and picked his black and white tweed suit out of a heap on the floor. After a careful search he found his pocket watch, and examined its accusing face.
It was eleven-twenty in the morning, and he remembered what he was supposed to be doing. Calling on Lady Leominster in Belgrave Square, to discuss a portrait of her damned dough-faced daughters, that was it. He staggered across the room, groaning still. At the sink he splashed cold water over his head and face and then, in the absence of a towel, rubbed himself dry with yesterday’s shirt.
The lack of a dry shirt, let alone a clean one, presented the next problem. The painter rummaged behind a curtain where he kept a small stock of old clothes in which to dress up his models. He found a grubby white cambric smock, and pulled his tweed trousers and coat on top of it. The addition of a piece of black silk foulard, extravagantly knotted around his neck, hid most of the smock front. He crammed his big black hat on his head and picked up a piece of stale bread and cheese left over from the night before for his breakfast.
Quintus Prynne was humming as he sauntered down Charlotte Street, his headache almost forgotten.
In the first-floor drawing room at Belgrave Square, Blanche was working at her embroidery and Eleanor had been reading the morning paper. She put it aside and looked over the top of her spectacles at the little gilt and porcelain clock on the mantelpiece.
‘This young man is very late, Blanche. I don’t believe he can be coming.’
‘Perhaps artists are less fettered by notions of punctuality than ordinary people? I think we should wait. Mary Twickenham was saying that Pilgrim is the most admired painter of the young generation, and that we will be lucky to get him. His designs for the ballet were the most beautiful, Eleanor, I wish you had been with us. I’m not even sure why he agreed to come this morning. Perhaps John’s name impressed him?’
Eleanor smiled. ‘Perhaps. But I think your Pilgrim is much more likely to have been impressed by the size of the fee.’
Blanche answered with a touch of irritation, ‘If one wants the best, then of course one must pay for it. John agrees with me, we must have a portrait marking the girls’ year that is as fine as our Sargent. It should be a picture worthy to be hung next to ours at Stretton. Don’t you think so, Eleanor?’
‘Of course, if that is what you both want. And if you say that Pilgrim is the finest portrait painter of his generation, then I can only accept that too.’
‘He