After the Storm by Margaret Graham Read Free Book Online

It was a relief to eliminate some of the down-draught from the ill-fitting sash-windows. He had hung the curtains himself as they were ones which Sophie had given him from the attic where she had been keeping them. Bellies. He tore his hands through his hair and made himself think of other things. The curtains.
    They were ones which Sophie had rescued from the sale of the house on the hill and they were his and Mary’s first purchase for that house. They had chosen a heavy damask drape. Oh yes, he remembered now how he had explained to Mary when they had been delivered to the house that damask was the name originally given to a rose from Damascus, hence the colour, whilst she was a rose from Wassingham. It sounded trite now in retrospect, but she had lifted her hand to his cheek and stroked him. She was so soft he could hardly feel her touch though the heat of her reached him.
    The maids had hung the curtains that day in spite of the fact that they were really too heavy for that achingly hot June, the one that blazed just before the world went mad. At least, he recollected, the farmers were able to reap their harvest in time to feed the troops who were quickly blasted away, so more came to eat the supplies the others were no longer hungry for and Iwas one
of
them. Balance and counter-balance, he thought, picking up the paper-knife on his desk, that’s what most things amount to. He ran his fingers either side of the blade.
    The ivory handle, carved in the image of some long forgotten Indian god was as cold as it always was. It was too dark by now to see clearly but he knew its contours intimately. It had been his father’s, made from the tusk of an elephant that he had shot himself when on one of his frequent forays to the Raj. Archie had always refused to go; he couldn’t bear the heat and he wondered whether Albert had ever been asked.
    His father had not liked Albert; not from the same mould, he had grumbled, can’t think what went wrong there. Just like your mother’s father, like a pot of cook’s gravy. Thick and slow. I wonder if Albert noticed, Archie pondered, but dismissed the memory as unimportant to him. Blood sports had disgusted him but the knife had always appealed. It was so impervious to human warmth, to friction. So totally detached.
    He turned in his chair, running the blade gently down the curtains. His ivory against her damask, his pale cold skin against her soft warmth. It was too much. He flung the knife on to the desk, burying his face against the faded worn curtains as she had done but that had been on the day when they were vibrant and new.
    It’s so beautiful, all of it, she had said, her voice muffled by its folds, and he had reached out, taken her shoulders, feeling her flesh beneath the light cotton day-gown and had drawn her to him. I love you so much he had murmured, his mouth in her hair, then on her neck, his hands seeking and finding her breasts, full now with her pregnancy. He could remember still how she had leant into him, pressing her laden womb against him and he had felt her down the length of him. The sounds of the summer which had filled the room through the open windows had disappeared and all that was left was her; hot, soft, urgent, leaning into him, her unborn child thrusting against him as though in protest.
    I love you, I love you, she had whispered. My cool ivory blade. I want you in me and she had coloured then, hiding her face in his shoulder, embarrassed at speaking words like these in the daylight, in the drawing-room with Annie curling and turning deep inside her.
    He had gripped her black hair which hung loose down herback, pulling her head so that her face lifted from him, kissing the damp strands which had caught on her forehead and finely boned cheeks. Some swept across her half-open lips and he had kissed her mouth and then her body.
    He stirred in his chair, rose and paced the floor.
    She had tapped a heat in him that he had not known existed. From the moment