‘Not tonight you haven’t,’ said Jenna primly.
‘How about the night of the exhibition? Since you’re going to make me work for that . . . you can have a little something of your own to work towards. I think that’s fair.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Jenna, biting the inside of her cheek.
‘Not “we’ll see”. The answer I’m looking for is “Yes, sir, if that’s what you want, sir.” Come on, then. Say it.’
He held both Jenna’s elbows in a tight grip, waiting for her words.
‘“Yes, sir, if that’s what you want, sir,”’ she parroted sulkily. ‘Now can we get on with this? It looks as if you’re right and she really is going to treat us to a bit of Victorian erotica. So have some manners and listen.’
Jason loosened his grip, satisfied with her answer.
‘Go on then.’
For me, who has been accustomed to view a body as a treacherous, weak thing – a wicked vessel for the more noble element of the soul – it was so unaccountable to hear such words that I scarcely knew where to look.
Luckily, my husband had some suggestions on that score. He urged me to look at myself in the pier glass.
I was reluctant to do so, for I have never allowed my gaze to linger over my n
akedness, but I had no recourse but to obey. I listened as he spoke in lustful, sometimes crude, terms of what he and I both saw. He ordered me to hold and touch those parts of myself I dare not name, let alone repeat the strange names he had for them. He saw that I was on the verge of shameful tears, and told me that this was a gift to me and that I must put away all my silly girlish ideas about modesty and propriety and accept that a wife’s role is to be wanton in the bedchamber, and to accept the pleasure her husband seeks to give. Thus it is useless to be coy about the body. He would teach me to enjoy myself, to bring my buried needs and desires to the surface and indulge each one of them.
I told him I would do my duty, and he laughed, loud and long.
‘Duty will be the least of it,’ he said. ‘Now bring yourself to me.’
I stood at his feet and he stood also, exploring all that I had with his fingers. If I protested, or made any sound at all, he sealed my mouth with a kiss. Such a kiss – he put his tongue between my lips. It felt so immoral, so disgusting – and yet, I hate to recall, I found it pleasurable in some deep way I cannot bring myself to examine.
Even when he probed between my legs, the kiss was enough to lighten my head and let everything pass. Everything was permitted to him. I had only to open myself.
He told me this, several times, in a low whisper, before laying me on the bed.
I watched, my eyes half-open, for I feared his wrath if he closed them, while he undressed himself beside the bed. What a time it took. He had so many different things to remove. Cufflinks, cuffs, tie pin, neckcloth . . . The list went on. With each act of divestiture, I saw a little more of him.
Everything I saw was impressive, from his strong wrists to his broad shoulders. When the neck of his shirt fell open, I wanted to gasp at the delicious sight of his unwrapped throat and the glimpse of a chest that seemed to have dark hairs upon it. I had not realised men’s chests could have hair upon them. I have only seen the pale little chests of the boys in the streets of Nottingham in summer as they play under the pump.
His shirt and undershirt removed, I saw a great many more of these dark wiry curls, descending low to his middle and then moving downwards, more downy and soft now, from his navel. How powerful he seemed without his clothes – more so than with them, though in a different way. The man of property in his swallow tail coat and silk top hat was become the elemental man, the essence of masculinity.
But I did shut my eyes when he came to remove his lower garments.
He did not chide me for doing so, but he noticed, and his chuckle was low and amused.
‘What, do you think if you shut your eyes you will be safe from what I have here?’ he said. ‘Indeed you will not. You might as well open them, and know what peril it is you face, rather than be left to your imaginings. No doubt they are lurid enough. Come, Frances. What do you fear?’
‘It is not fear,’ I told him. ‘It is . . . I cannot say. I do not wish to look upon it.’
I felt him kneel upon the bed beside me, the mattress weighted to one side.
‘You will do more than look upon it,’ he said, more roughly. He took hold of my chin with a finger and thumb, pressing them into my jawbone. ‘You will find much of your married life subject to its whims. Look upon it, Frances. Look upon your master.’
Jason laughed.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘The man’s off his head.’
‘So, you wouldn’t say that kind of thing?’ said Jenna slyly.
‘It’s different if I say that kind of stuff. I know you’re up for it. This poor cow hasn’t got a clue.’