the wedding because he knew he wouldn’t win, and now, here in their marriage bed, he was lying down as if some part of him was dying. Grace didn’t want him to die. Grace had wanted to live, but she didn’t want Wilfred to die in her place.
She reached out her hand across the bed, across the gap between them that had been maintained each and every night for the fourteen nights of the marriage, and touched his arm, leaving her hand there for a few seconds; it was a touch devoid of sexuality or passion, desire or wanting. It was the touch of one broken person reaching out, in recognition, to another.
Wilfred was curled up on his side, looking at the bedroom door. Neither of them had moved into the middle of the bed. This is what they must mean by a no man’s land, Wilfred thought, a land no man wants to go into. In a normal marriage, the centre of the bed was where the coupling – the marriage – would take place, the space into which the man would invite the woman. Eventually, over years, the weight of both of their bodies caused the bed, its springs and lattices, to squeak and sigh as if it were aching along with the couple’s bodies. In the middle of the bed the marriage was made. But not in this bed. This was Dr and Mrs Reece’s old bed in Grace’s brother’s old room in Dr and Mrs Reece’s house at 32 High Street, Narberth, Pembrokeshire. That’s whose bed it was. Wilfred didn’t think of it as his wedding bed.
Wilfred had once kissed Grace under the jasmine in the wood, before it flowered and when it was still in bud, and he had put his hand up her skirt and on to the velvety, fleshy pad of her thigh – and that had been the extent of it, that Good Friday, a few months back. He knew she would never let him touch her breasts, so, with some courage he had stooped to put his hand under her petticoat and along the ridge of her thigh. There she’d stopped him, put her fingers over his; her hand was over the cotton, and his hand was under it. Wilfred had understood, pulled his hand away and concentrated on touching her lip with his tongue. The embrace had taken minutes and it felt to Wilfred now as if in those minutes he had spent the whole of the rest of his life.
But I didn’t do anything, Wilfred wanted to say. He hadn’t done anything, had he? He had thought about it, he remembered that quite clearly. But that wasn’t the same as actually doing anything. Had he? He had touched her leg, that time. Perhaps Grace had sat on a toilet seat. But everything was spotless in Mrs Reece’s house. Wilfred was at a loss. He didn’t know about these things, no one spoke plainly about them and there were no books that he knew of, not in Narberth. There were rumours that contradicted and left him confused and unclear. He’d kissed her, once, when they went for a walk – had that been it? No. You couldn’t make a girl pregnant from kissing her – that was a load of old nonsense, surely? I’m innocent, he thought. But, he realized, Grace wasn’t.
But he hadn’t done that, hadn’t put himself there. Good God! If women got pregnant that easily, from men merely touching their legs, well, there would be babies everywhere and there would be millions, billions, of people in the world. Wilfred didn’t know much about these things but he guessed that what he used to hear in the Narberth Rugby Football Club bar was just about right, if a bit exaggerated. The rugby lads liked to exaggerate, especially when they had had a few pints, but he suspected they spoke something near the truth. A man could learn all he needed to know about women if he went to the Narberth Rugby Football Club bar for a drink and listened.
Wilfred felt hot, almost fetid, between the flannelette sheets and beneath the weight of the heavy, woollen blankets. There was even an eiderdown on top. It looked like Mrs Reece had sewn it from exact triangles cut from her family’s old clothes. Wilfred felt smothered. He wanted to kick away the bedding and the blankets.
It was as Wilfred was lying there perspiring, worrying, that he felt Grace’s hand rest on