“No,” he said simply. “We will find a bigger house, perhaps in Genoa. But I will always offer a house to my sisters and to my mother; to your father too. Surely, you would want nothing less?”
I said nothing. To tell the truth, I did want to live with my father, and with Daniel. It was his mother and his sisters I found hard to bear. But I could hardly say to him that I would choose to live with my father but not with his mother.
“I thought we would be alone together,” I said mendaciously.
“I have to care for my mother and sisters,” he said. “It is a sacred trust. You know that.”
I nodded. I did know it.
“Have they been unkind to you?”
I shook my head. I could not complain of their treatment of me. I slept every night in a truckle bed in the girls’ room and every night as I fell asleep I heard them whispering in the big bed at my side, and I imagined they were talking about me. In the morning they drew the curtains of the bed so that I should not see them as they dressed. They emerged to comb and plait each other’s hair before the little mirror and cast sideways glances at my growing mop of hair only half covered by my cap. My dresses and linen were all new and were the focus of much silent envy, and occasional secret borrowing. They were, in short, as spiteful and as unkind as girls working in concert can be, and many nights I turned my face into my hay mattress and cried in silence for sheer frustrated anger.
Daniel’s mother never said a word to me that could be cited against her to her son. She never said a thing that I could quote in a complaint. Insidiously, almost silently, she made me feel that I was not good enough for Daniel, not good enough for her family, an inadequate young woman in every domestic task, an awkward young woman in appearance, a faulty young woman in religious observation, and an undutiful daughter and potentially a disobedient wife. If she had ever spoken the truth she would have said that she did not like me; but it seemed to me that she was absolutely opposed to speaking the truth about anything.
“Then we surely can live happily together,” Daniel said. “Safe at last. Together at last. You are happy, aren’t you, my love?”
I hesitated. “I don’t get on very well with your sisters, and your mother does not approve of me,” I said quietly.
He nodded, I was telling him nothing he did not know. “They’ll come round,” he said warmly. “They’ll come round. We have to stay together. For our own safety and survival we have to stay together, and we will all learn to change our ways a little and to be happy.”
I nodded, hiding my many, very many, reservations. “I hope so,” I said and watched him smile.
We were married in late June, as soon as all my gowns were made and my hair long enough for me to be – as Daniel’s mother said – passable, at l’Eglise de Notre Dame, the great church of Calais, where the vaulting columns looked like those of a French cathedral but they ran up to a great English church tower set square on the top. It was a Christian wedding with a Mass afterward and every one of us was meticulous in our observation of the rituals in church. Afterward, in the privacy of the little house in London Street, Daniel’s sisters held a shawl as a chuppah over our heads as my father repeated the seven blessings for a wedding, as far as he could remember them, and Daniel’s mother put a wrapped glass at Daniel’s feet for him to stamp on. Then we drew back the shutters, opened the doors and held a wedding feast for the neighbors with gifts and dancing.
The vexed question of where we would sleep as a married couple had been resolved by my father moving to a bunk alongside the printing press in the little room created by thatching the backyard. Daniel and I slept in Father’s old room on the top floor, a thin plaster wall between us and his sleepless mother on one side, and his curious sisters, awake and listening, on the other side.
On our wedding night we fell upon each other as a pair of wanton lovers, longing for an experience too long denied. They put us to bed with much laughter and jokes and pretended embarrassment, and as soon as they were gone Daniel bolted the door, closed the shutters and drew me into the bed. Desperate for privacy we put the covers completely over our heads and kissed and caressed in the hot darkness, hoping that the blankets would muffle our whispers. But the pleasure of his touch overwhelmed me and I gave a breathy little cry. At once, I stopped short and clapped a hand over my mouth.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, prising my fingers from my lips to kiss them again.
“It does,” I said, speaking nothing but the truth.
“Kiss me,” he begged me.
“Well, very quietly…”
I kissed him and felt his mouth melt under mine. He rolled underneath me and guided me to mount him. At the first touch of his hardness between my legs I moaned with pleasure and bit the back of my hand, trying to teach myself to stay silent.
He turned me so that I was underneath him. “Put your hand over my mouth,” I urged him.
He hesitated. “It feels as if I am forcing you,” he said uncomfortably.
I gave a little breathy laugh. “If you were forcing me I would be quieter,” I joked, but he could not laugh. He pulled away from me and dropped on to his back, and he pulled me to lie beside him, my head on his shoulder.
“We’ll wait till they are all asleep,” he said. “They cannot wake all night.”
We waited and waited but his mother’s heavy tread did not come up the stairs until late, and then we heard, with embarrassing clarity, her sigh as she sat on the side of her bed, the “clip, clop” as she dropped one wooden clog then another on the floor. Then we heard with a sharpness which showed us how thin the walls must be, the muted rustle of her undressing and then the creak of the ropes of the bed as she got under the covers.
After that it was impossible. If I even turned the bed creaked so loud that I knew she would hear it. I pressed my mouth to his ear and breathed, “Let us make love tomorrow when they are all out,” and I felt the nod of his silent assent. Then we lay, burning up with desire, sleepless with lust, not touching, not even looking at each other, on our bridal night.
They came for the sheets in the morning, and would have flown them like a bloodstained flag from the window to prove the consummation of the marriage but Daniel stopped them. “There’s no need,” he said. “And I don’t like the old ways.”
The girls said nothing but they raised their eyebrows at me as if they well knew that we had not bedded together at all, and suspected that he could not feel desire for me. His mother, on the other hand, looked at me as if it proved to her that I was not a virgin and that her son had brought a whore into her home.
It was a bad wedding night and a sour wedding morning and, as it happened, they did not go out all day but stayed at home, and we could not make love that day, nor the next night, nor the next night either.
Within a few days I had learned to lie like a stone beneath my husband, and he had learned to take his pleasure as quickly as he could in silence. Within a few weeks we made love as seldom as possible. The early promise of our night of lovemaking on the boat that had left me dizzy with satisfied desire could not be explored or fulfilled in a bedroom with four nosy women listening.
I came to hate myself for the rise of my desire and then my embarrassment that they would hear us. I could not bear to know that every word I said, every snatched breath, even the sound of my kiss was audible to a critical and intent audience. I shrank from his sisters’ knowledge that I loved him, I flinched from their intimacy with something that should be exclusive, just to us. On the first morning after we had finally made love, when Daniel came downstairs, I caught the glance his mother flickered over him. It was a look of utter possession, as a farmer might look at a healthy bull at stud. She had heard my cry of pleasure half silenced the night before and she was delighted at his prowess. To her I was nothing more than a cow who should soon be in calf, the credit for it all was to her son, the prestige of founding a family would come to her.