A Spear of Summer Grass - By Deanna Raybourn Page 0,122
of us and I went anyway. I knew what would happen,” she insisted. “I wasn’t stupid or naïve. I knew he would try. And I knew I would let him.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Because I am twenty-nine. Because after the age of nineteen virginity is a burden. Because it was time to let go of it. I just wanted to feel. All my life is neat and tidy and so orderly I wanted to scream. I just wanted to put it all aside and feel for once.”
I said nothing and she went on, her voice calmer now. “It was different from what I expected. I’ve read books, plenty of them. But it was different. I thought it would hurt more. And I never realised...that is to say, when it was done, I think I understood you for the first time.”
“How?”
“It isn’t the pleasure you’re after. It’s the oblivion.”
She was right. She did understand me better. It was indeed the oblivion that I craved, that moment of swimming in the sea that is the wide-open pupil of God’s eye, where nothing exists but nothingness.
She went on. “I cleaned myself up and left him and I knew that would be the last time I ever did that. I thought I wanted it, that loss of control, that complete euphoria. But I was wrong. The feeling of things building up was quite pleasant. I shouldn’t have minded if that were all. But then it kept going, it kept pushing and urging, and it took on a life of its own. It frightened me, that feeling. I would have done anything it demanded. I would have killed in that moment, I think. I would have thrown myself into a fire or drowned myself to finish it. I would have clawed the flesh off my own bones to be rid of it, to have that moment of completion. It was frightful. Honestly, Delilah, I don’t know how you do it.”
She lit a cigarette then with a deft gesture.
“You’re taking on all my bad habits.”
“Just this one. But you can have men, at least the ones that want something back. I haven’t the stomach for it.”
She blew out a ragged little smoke ring that dissolved into the air. “Remind me to teach you how to do that properly.”
She smiled then and it was through her tears. She stubbed out the cigarette. “I’m marrying Lawrence this week. Then we’re leaving for Uganda. The inspector isn’t happy, but he has no grounds to ask us to stay. I won’t be here to see this finished.”
“I understand, Dodo. You’ve served your time. Godspeed.”
She rose and brushed the ash off her skirts. “I always knew it would end in tears between us.”
“I’m not crying.”
“Yes, you are.”
And so Dora left me. She had been my cousin, my companion, my chaperone, and I had become accustomed to her. Perhaps too much so. She had been my shadow, but shadows are insubstantial things, without depth or illumination, and Dora deserved better. I hoped she would be happy with Lawrence. Hoped it, but doubted it just the same. I heard through others that Evelyn was none too happy about Lawrence marrying and was devastated to leave her school. But Evelyn, like so many poor relations—like Dora, in fact—was at the mercy of her betters. She packed her bags and tagged along, the eternal third wheel. I hoped Kit had bedded her, too. God knew she’d have little enough to look back on with fondness at the end of her life if she kept on the way she was going.
I wrote letters to Dora and to Mossy and dozens of others, but there seemed little point in sending them. I tore them up instead and started a diary of sorts, writing down everything that had happened since that grey day in Paris when they had persuaded me to come to Africa. I didn’t blame them. I was a problem to be solved, and Africa seemed as good a solution as any. I had been swept under the carpet, tidied up like any other unpleasantness. And then I had to ruin it all by getting involved with a man who went and got himself murdered. The irony almost choked me.
So I read books I couldn’t remember and wrote letters I didn’t send, and taught the guards how to play poker. My grandfather had learned in the Civil War and taught it to me. We’d always played for cash, and he never cared if he cleaned me out of