A Loveless Marriage

Chapter 12: Fred

The familiar faces of old friends greeted me in the hall, immortalised in carved oak. As a child I had loved the ornate Tudor panels of Loseley Cour. I knew every face and figure; where the wild boars ran from hunters, the monkeys chattered and the pomegranates split open overcome by their own fecundity. The panels were one of the few things untouched from the original house and a great source of pride for the newly-wealthy Cosgroves when my grandfather had purchased the house. As she walked ahead of me, I could see Mary secretly delighting in the designs, I imagined she was struggling against her desire to stop to look closer and her fear of appearing gauche in front of the servants. Her need to remain aloof won.

The beautiful head held high, Mary's elegant figure moved through the hall with a grace that I could not help but admire. I had seen duchesses with a less noble comportment and considerably less lofty principles. Her principles I could have done without. How I detested that bourgeois morality of hers, that kept her heart as tightly buttoned as her gloves. Yet I wanted to follow her as the housekeeper lead her to her room, to watch the delight spread across her face as she admired the beauty of Loseley and began to fall in love with the place as I had on my first visit. I sighed. I feared I would not be welcome at her side, so instead of following her up the stairs, I headed to the Smoking Room.

The Smoking Room was a creation of my grandfather, a testament to his love of the Moorish opulence of the Alhambra and he had built his eastern fantasy in that most masculine of rooms. Brightly coloured tiles handcrafted in Granada lined the floor, the walls gleamed brightly with beaten copper that added both beauty and practicality to the room. I lit a cigar and watched as coils of blue smoke danced up to the domed ceiling that shone from the light of glass stars. The room was a fantasy and now I was a married man, it would no doubt be a sanctuary from feminine scrutiny.

As I puffed on my cigar, my thoughts turned to married life, things would change now we were not in Paris. On our honeymoon, we had been thrown together and our relationship had bloomed like a hothouse flower, now we were home I was not confident it would survive the chill of regular life. To the outside, Mary would play the role of dutiful wife as well as she had played the role of dutiful companion but she would not pretend with me. Love was abhorrent to her in a way that suggested she had once held it in the highest regard. Some time in her young life she had fallen in love and her heart had been broken, when and by whom I could not tell, but it had made her fiercely protective of her affections. Young women who had been disappointed were easier to seduce, they clung to the hope that love could heal what it had once broken, and I knew how to pretend I would be their saviour. However, my wife seemed to be the exception to this rule, and her heart seemed as impenetrable as between her legs.

Again, this marriage seemed like cruelty bequeathed on us when we were so utterly different to one another. I was a hot-blooded man who loved pleasure and she was an ice-queen with a puritan streak. Now we were bound together in a union that seemed more binding for the false foundations it was built on. It was more than pride, I couldn't let her go because there was something about her that fascinated me and until my curiosity was satisfied with what it was, I needed her near.

Two cigars later, I decided that I would amble down to the library and see if there was any of the excellent brandy my uncle used to have there. A snifter of cognac and an excellent view of the grounds was the greatest pleasure the library held. To my surprise, Mary was already there when I entered, the pale winter sunlight shining through her hair as she bent over a book.

"I thought you would be resting," I said. "But I should have known you would have found the library too much of a temptation.

My wife smiled in reply, a warm smile like the sun coming from behind a cloud. We exchanged a few meaningless pleasantries until I pretended to sort through the drawers of a desk and she wandered along the rows of books. I feigned nonchalance, stealing furtive glances at her when she could not see me. Every now and then she would reach out, a gloved finger gently pulling a book towards her.