POST 17

He showed no signs of leaving.

"Oh, I don't know," he sighed. And came to look over her shoulder to see the view perhaps where she stood looking out of her tiny window at next-door's blank wall. He put his hands on her shoulders.

"I don't know. I don't know."

"Don't shake me to death," she whispered.

"Of course not." He pressed his front thoughtfully and unconsciously to Constance's back as though she was his shield. His arms came over her shoulders, his hands on her crossed arms, their feet started to move in united stiff-leg sway, very slowly, from side to side an inch at a time. An old game. He was thinking. Constance was inclined to believe that the pressure of his stomach against her back because done unconsciously was more vital to him that his abstraction into thought. But she did not envy Frances the disturbing attentions of this divided heart.

Her nightgown was very thin. The coldness of his belt-buckle was getting warm against her back.

Philip went on thinking and there was something about this mental space between them more than Constance could very well stand. His body was hard and cool, the belt and buttons and rough stuff, and the smell of him clean and severe was nostalgic and maddening, giving rise to perfect fantasies of lust. The time had come for a little creative interference in that distant self-possession. She too was possessive, and inspired. She could not help herself.

"I'm being a wall to you," she whispered.

"Oh wall," he whispered down her back, "full often hast thou heard my moans". She shivered from her neck right down the backs of her legs, and closed her eyes. "I'm being a wall to you," he whispered again. "Women grow on the sunny side of the wall", he breathed behind her ear.

"Who said that?" She turned her face slightly into his shoulder from an inability to keep still. Comfortable this shoulder.

"Don't know."

"Within this wall of flesh there is a Soule counts thee her creditor," she said softly, the effect of flesh on mind prompting the resurrection there of lost wisdoms.

He hugged her gently, responsively, consciousness returning to his flesh; and slightly, from the inside, the wall cracked. She turned round in his arms and he did not loosen them. In the candlelight his eyes were dark and beautiful and his pale face flawless. She watched his lips.

"O w'wall, thou sweet and lovely wall..."

She put her fingers across his mouth and stopped it. "In this same interlude, it doth befall, That I, one Constance by name, present a wall: And such a wall as I would have you think That had in it a cranny'd hole or chink, Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, Did whisper often very secretly." She looked at him through her fingers, at his forehead, his eyebrows, his eyes, his mouth. "This loam, this roughcast and this stone doth show That I am that same wall: the truth is so: And this the cranny is, right and sinister, Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper."

She had him there, transfixed. Her hands as gentle as flowers on his face, she joined a small ring with her fingers and thumbs and through the ring, touching his mouth, she kissed him full on the mouth. Both of them trembled.

To relieve herself of the pain of the following silence and wonder and the warmth of his hands hard on her back, she said in a shrill loud voice she could not control "If I blow my horn hard enough will the wall fall down on Jericho?"

He let her go then, slowly, with an amused look that seemed to but did not quite in fact offer up a spy-hole through the wall behind which he kept his world. "I give you the wall," he mocked, one arm thrown out. "The cleaner, safer side of the pavement."

"We'll see!" she mocked back.

"Ah, Con! Dear me!" He drew her back to him again. "Dear me, dear me..." He buried his head in her neck, hugged her to him, and then kissed her so gently that there was no doubt that he meant it. "You're a tower, not a wall," he said, and put his hands up round her throat. "You're going to be..." There could be but one turn of events now, and the idea made her frightened and helpless in his hands.

"It's all right, it's all right, Con," he whispered. "I really have to go now." But he did not.

He caught at her as she swayed a little.

"I'm all right," she said, but she could not look at him.

He kissed her, his eyes lingering longer than his lips, and sat her down gently on the bed. "Goodnight, Con. Sleep well."

She lay on her bed for hours, missing him.

Well, there were messages here, but she had no idea what they were, except that she was going to take it that he had said more than he knew. She had certainly said more than he knew.

His stutter these days was reserved largely for Camilla apparently, and that was a relief.