It is not as a wife should feel, is it? I dare not confess it to David, for he will know that I am not what he expected when he married.
‘You look ill,’ he said, roughly, unsympathetically, when he had finished and released me.
‘Oh, I am not ill,’ I said, though my nether regions throbbed and I could feel the warm trickle of the blood upon my thigh.
‘Then what’s amiss? I’ll fetch a cloth.’
He went to the nightstand and returned with a damp flannel, with which he dabbed at my sticky skin.
‘Nothing is amiss,’ I said, but my voice was high and forced. My breathing was not natural – sometime during the indignity, my breath had become caught in my throat, and I could not seem to correct it.
‘You might try and look it, then,’ he groused. He saw something in my face and his next words were gentler. ‘I promise you, the worst is past. Now that this hurdle is crossed, you will find that pleasure is easier to achieve.’
‘Will I?’
I could not im
agine it. I lay down and shut my eyes, hoping he would think me asleep.
He lay back down beside me and made me open my eyes, pulling the lower lids down with his thumb on my cheek.
‘Do not pretend with me, Fan,’ he whispered. ‘I will not have pretence.’
‘I am tired.’
‘You try to hide from me. But I am not the regular kind of man, who is happy to stumble on blindly, ignoring the distance between him and his wife. I will not have distance, or hiding, or any of those things that make a marriage slowly die. I will have you, in all honesty, as naked spiritually as you are bodily. I will own you and you will rejoice in my ownership.’
He sounded like a preacher, but what was he preaching?
I did not want to be preached to.
Is it wrong of me to wish I could step backwards in time?
For all the fortune and wealth and position I have achieved, I cannot help thinking that something else has been lost – something I can never retrieve.
‘Oh, that poor girl,’ said Jenna as Jason shut the book.
‘What? It’ll probably get better. Or it probably would, if she hadn’t married him. Stupid decision in the first place, though, marrying a Harville.’
‘Yes, well, I think you’ll find all this predated the trouble at the pit,’ said Jenna.
‘The disaster had already happened, though,’ he pointed out. ‘She never mentioned that.’
‘It was thirty years earlier. She wasn’t local.’
‘I suppose.’ Jason lay back. ‘I do feel sorry for her. But then, your first time’s always shit, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. Was yours?’
Jason gave her a droll upwards look.
‘Do you really want to hear about that?’
‘Go on. How old were you?’
‘Not old enough. Still at school, just.’
‘I hope you were legal.’