Making Love

a romance

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By Lucretia Stewart

The University of Wisconsin Press

Copyright © 1999 Lucretia Stewart
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-299-19920-7

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Chapter One

In London, two days after my father's funeral, I began an affair with a man with whom I had first slept twenty-five years earlier in Italy. He claimed then, and subsequently continued to claim, that I was the first woman he had ever slept with.

I've never been quite sure why I didn't entirely believe him. Perhaps because what he said is what you would say if you wanted to get someone into bed. On the other hand, what else could account for the fact that Louis, on some fundamental level, had remained, if not continuously, then certainly recurrently, over a period of twenty-five years (and despite girlfriends and a marriage which survived for ten years), obsessed with me.

When I asked Louis why he had called me, why now, he said: 'I wanted to see if I was still in love with you.'

'And are you?'

'Yes, I think t am.'

How could I possibly resist?

We first met one Christmas in Athens, where our fathers were both stationed. Louis' father had only recently arrived, while my own father had been in Greece for several years and was, as it happened, about to leave. They overlapped for a few wintery months.

My father was Louis' father's boss; the boss, in fact, of the whole show, which gave him (gave us) a privileged way of life. We lived in a big, white house, the entrance of which was flanked with fluted columns, like those of the Parthenon. Recently, going through a box of my father's old papers, I found a brown envelope full of photographs of this house. Its sheer grandeur, which I had forgotten, gave me a shock. The hall, with its four sets of double doors edged in gold, would not have looked out of place at Versailles or at Blenheim. The polished marble stairway had a perfect crimson stair carpet and pairs of purple brocade thrones stood at regular, formal intervals against the ivory-coloured walls. Four crystal chandeliers were suspended from the high ceiling whose mouldings were picked out in gold, as was the elaborate cornice. At one end of the room hung a huge full-length portrait by Augustus John of Madame Suggia, the cellist, in a red silk evening dress. This picture, which depicted her bent over her cello, dominated the long hall, which was so big that it could have served as a ballroom - and indeed sometimes did.

I don't remember how many rooms the house contained. Lots, I know - I had a suite of rooms in the basement consisting of a bedroom, a little sitting-room and a bathroom. I do recall, though, that if I ever dropped an item of clothing, even a handkerchief, it would immediately be picked up and whisked away, then returned to me within hours, washed and immaculately ironed by one of the servants.

The servants ... How many of them were there? I remember a chauffeur; a butler; two footmen; a full-time seamstress; at least four housemaids and an ancient chef who had once worked as a kitchen boy for the last Czar of Russia. The old man made a wonderful meringue pudding' which he decorated with spun sugar as fine as Venetian glass. I always asked for it on the first and last days of the school holidays.

I met Louis during the holidays, over what was to be my last Christmas in Athens. I was just eighteen, Louis barely seventeen. Whatever he may have felt about me at the time, I certainly didn't think of him as a potential lover. I saw him more as a companion, someone to hang out with, a kind of more interesting younger brother. He would visit me in the afternoons; we'd drink tea, play records and talk about poetry - flirtation disguised as bookishness. Sometimes he would try to kiss me but I always pushed him away. If I fancied anyone in Athens, it was Louis' older brother.

It was the thing among my set at school to describe boys (and we almost never talked about anything else) as 'pretty' - as if they were parrots, or dresses. Louis' brother was definitely pretty, flirtatious too. He once told me at a party that my eyes had a post-orgasmic expression. Not true, I'm afraid. Anyhow, I knew his flirting didn't mean anything; he had a girlfriend back in London. I suppose Louis was also pretty. He was tall and slender with thick, springy, brown hair and fine, regular features.

Late one afternoon, I came home with him after a walk and found my parents sitting with a couple of their friends in the small drawing-room, the informal, family one where Thomas Phillips's famous portrait of Byron in Albanian costume hung. In early January, the air was cold and our cheeks were pink. We had walked all the way down to Monasteraki, the old market district below the Acropolis, and back again. Louis' face was flushed, not just with the fresh air, but also with excitement, possibly with the excitement of being with me and from the pleasure of our expedition. He loved Greece, he loved old things and, perhaps, he loved me. When Louis left the room, my father's friend, an English writer who lived in Greece, said: 'Isn't he beautiful? Like the young Alexander the Great.'

But I couldn't see it. I wasn't interested. To me, he was a younger boy, and we were only interested in boys who were nineteen, or twenty, or older. And we wanted them to be sophisticated. Louis wasn't. He was just young, and very clever, and sweet.

I had lost my virginity almost exactly a year before, three weeks after my seventeenth birthday, to a boy I had met at a Hallowe'en party. It was one of those uneasy parties made up of sulky teenagers and irritated parents, an ill-advised generational mix in which each side resented the other. The boy, whose name was Damon, had green eyes with thick, fringed lashes and thick, reddish-brown hair. He was eighteen and had just left Eton.

All through the second half of the winter term, I would take the train up to London whenever I could get away on Sundays, in order to see him at the flat which he shared in Earl's Court with another ex-Etonian. They were both students at a crammer, retaking their A levels and trying to get into some university or other. Sometimes Fleur, my best friend, would come too and we would all lie around on the floor on grimy cushions and smoke dope. Once Damon came down to see me at school and I walked about a mile to meet him at the little station. There was nothing for us to do there except trudge around the cold countryside. There wasn't even a tea-shop.

In London Damon would always try to get me into bed but I was wary. Virginity didn't seem like a burden to me. If it had, I could have shed it easily enough. One of the perks of my father's job was a house by the sea. There, I had spent the previous summer doing everything imaginable - except that - with the younger son of our Greek neighbours. Around midnight my father would come out on to the terrace and call me, as if I were a dog or a cat, and I would crawl out of the bushes and come home, dishevelled and flushed after hours of heavy petting. But Vassili was a well-brought-up Greek boy; he neither insisted nor begged for more. Probably he couldn't believe his luck. Greek girls of good family were unlikely to be as accommodating.

Damon, however, was different. He was an accident waiting to happen. I thought that I was in love with him. The temptation was great but the circumstances never seemed right. Apart from anything else, we were only allowed out from school for days, not for nights, and the fliat in Earl's Court was pretty squalid, not exactly the setting I had in mind.

Then came the Christmas holidays. Damon, who belonged to a fringe branch of a huge aristocratic clan which divided its time between the west coast of Scotland, Ireland and southern England, went home to his family in Argyll. I was with my parents who were over from Greece, staying in the cold, little, grey farmhouse in Berkshire that was our home base (some twenty-five years earlier my father, out riding or walking, had come over the crest of the hill, seen the valley lying below and had decided that this was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life). Every morning, when the postman came, I rushed to the door. Nothing. The days, the weeks, went by, and still I didn't hear from him. I was desperate.

In early January, I went up to London to spend the final week of the holidays with an aunt who lived in Stockwell in south London. I rang Damon as soon as I arrived and he suggested that I come and see him in Camden Town, where he was staying in his mother's mews house. I went that evening, 5th January, 1970. Damon's friend, Johnny, the other Old Etonian, was there and the evening followed the pattern of the Earl's Court days. But with one big difference. This time I stayed the night.

Penetration didn't hurl as much as I had thought it would and afterwards Damon said: 'You can't have been a virgin. You look like a cat that's had the cream.' Gallant as ever. Even through the rose-coloured spectacles of love, this didn't seem quite right.

The next morning I woke in a cloud of happiness. The cloud lasted all of two days. I got up. Damon made breakfast - eggs and bacon. Then I took the bus over to Notting Hill where I met Fleur and told her everything. I told her that Damon and I would get married. But I was wrong. What actually happened was that I didn't see Damon again before I went back to school. I couldn't understand what I had done. Every time Damon and I spoke on the telephone - usually, always in fact, it was me who called him - he would make some excuse about why he couldn't see me. Finally, I got up all my courage and asked him if perhaps he simply didn't want to see me. 'No, no, it's nothing like that,' he said, with a warm, convincing laugh.

But that is just what it was - and for the first and only time in my life (that is, until the death of my father), I lost weight out of sheer misery. School started. I went back there and cried every day and every night until March, when I knew he would be leaving for South America on an eight-month trip with Johnny after which there would be no point in hoping any more.

In the year that had elapsed between sleeping with Damon and meeting Louis, I had learnt a thing or two. I had come to understand that I didn't know how to say 'No', and also that I didn't always want to say 'No'. I had slept with several boys, eager brothers of my school friends. I didn't like it much, but I liked them too much - just because I had done it with them.

In general, the sexual act left me, not exactly cold, more lukewarm. I liked kissing and the feel of another body against mine and I liked rolling around with my clothes on, but I found naked erections alarming. (I preferred them safely encased in jeans.)

But everyone else was doing it, and I had been locked up in a convent for years and I still thought that if a man wanted to sleep with me, it was something to be grateful for. It wasn't that I was worried that they would ditch me if I said 'No'. It was more that I was pathetically grateful for their desire and failed to recognize its indiscriminate nature.

In late January 1971, just four weeks after I had met Louis,' my family left Greece for good. My brother and sister returned to school in England and I went with my mother and father to Italy. We drove to Nauplion and stayed the night in a hotel with a view across the town roofs to the bay. From there we took a boat to Bari, then drove the crooked length of Italy to the Veneto where my parents had built a house. Their intention was to retire there one day, although they never did. My father couldn't bear to be parted from his valley in Berkshire. We were to spend a month in Italy before going home to England.

Louis came to stay with us for a week. I can't remember exactly how this came about or even how we had become such good friends - if indeed we had. I think he came to stay because he adored my father, and my father loved to be adored. Apart from Louis' beauty, my father would have liked his mind: his lively intelligence, his erudition, so rare in one so young, his ability with languages. Louis may well have wanted to sleep with me, but it was my father he wanted to talk and listen to.

Ten days before Louis arrived, I had a dream about him. I dreamt that he came to me in my old room in Athens, crying, and knelt, burying his face in my lap while he sobbed.

The first night of his visit we stayed up late after my parents had gone to bed. We were in the drawing-room, sitting together on the dark green, velvet sofa that had belonged to my maternal grandparents. The room, long and light, with French windows that opened on to a stone terrace where we ate in summer and which overlooked the Venetian plain, was lit only by a couple of table lamps. Louis got up to put another log on the fire. When he came back, he sat closer to me, then slid his arm slowly along the back of the sofa, over my shoulders. He pulled me to him. Neither of us, it seemed, had had much practice at kissing. Our lips met - or rather they missed - in the clumsy, nuzzling, affectionate way of the inexperienced. We bumped noses, then adjusted, twisting slightly so that our mouths joined, fitting comfortably together, like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

I closed my eyes. Louis' mouth was warm, his lips felt slightly chapped, his tongue was sweet and moist rather than wet. His skin was as soft as if he barely shaved.

That afternoon we had walked up a nearby hill to look at a beautiful red, Romanesque church. It had been fun. I realized that I was pleased to see him and pleased that he had come to see me. So the kissing was fine. I've always liked kissing. It's how you express tenderness, how you show you care. But then, almost before I knew it, we were embracing on the sofa. Louis was breathing hard as he slid his hand under my sweater, pushed up the soft material and fumbled with the hooks at the back of my bra. Then, it was as if he'd suddenly got the knack, discovered the secret, the magic formula, the combination to the safe, and I felt my bra come loose and his cold hands on my breasts. The hands moved down to the zipper of my jeans and, all the while, there was the insistent, hot weight of his penis to remind me that there was no going back.

Some code of behaviour which endured until I was well into my thirties (together with a belief that it was physically painful for men to be denied) dictated to me that what you started, you had to finish. There was no such thing as 'date rape' then. I asked Louis if he was a virgin and, when he said 'Yes', I didn't see that I had any choice. We got up from the sofa and we went into his bedroom, my brother's room, a small, single room, on the ground floor. My parents were asleep upstairs. It was over quickly. I hardly felt a thing but Louis showered appreciative kisses on my face. His gratitude only added to my shame.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Making Love by Lucretia Stewart Copyright © 1999 by Lucretia Stewart. Excerpted by permission.
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