He was seeing life with a vengeance.
When Lydia came back he was talking and laughing with his new friends as if he had known them all his life.
He danced the next dance with her.
He noticed that she was not keeping step with him and he gave her a little shake.
“You’re not attending.”
She laughed.
“I’m sorry.
I’m tired.
Let’s go.”
“Has something happened to upset you?”
“No. It’s getting very late and the heat’s awful.”
Having warmly shaken hands with their new friends, they left and got into a taxi.
Lydia sank back exhausted.
He was feeling happy and affectionate and he took her hand and held it.
They drove in silence.
They went to bed, and in a few minutes Charley became aware from her regular breathing that Lydia had fallen asleep.
But he was too excited to sleep.
The evening had amused him and he was keenly alert.
He thought it all over for a while and chuckled at the grand story he would make of it when he got home.
He turned on the light to read.
But he could not give his attention to the poems of Blake just then.
Disordered notions flitted across his mind.
He switched off the light and presently fell into a light doze, but in a little while awoke.
He was tingling with desire.
He heard the quiet breathing of the sleeping woman in the bed by his side and a peculiar sensation stirred his heart.
Except on that first evening at the Serail no feeling for Lydia had touched him except pity and kindliness.
Sexually she did not in the least attract him.
After seeing her for several days all day long he did not even think her pretty; he did not like the squareness of her face, her high cheek-bones, and the way her pale eyes were set flat in their orbits; sometimes, indeed, he thought her really plain.
Notwithstanding the life she had adopted—for what strange, unnatural reason—she gave him a sense of such deadly respectability that it choked him off.
And then her indifference to sexual congress was chilling.
She looked with contempt and loathing on the men who for money sought their pleasure of her.
The passionate love she bore for Robert gave her an aloofness from all human affections that killed desire.
But besides all that Charley didn’t think he liked her very much for herself; she was sometimes sullen, almost always indifferent; she took whatever he did for her as her right; it was all very well to say that she asked for nothing, it would have been graceful if she had shown, not gratitude, but a glimmering recognition of the fact that he was trying to do his best for her.
Charley had an uneasy fear that she was making a mug of him; if what Simon said was true and she was making money at the brothel in order to help Robert to escape, she was nothing but a callous liar; he flushed hotly when it occurred to him that she was laughing behind his back at his simplicity.
No, he didn’t admire her, and the more he thought of her the less he thought he liked her.
And yet at that moment he was so breathless with desire of her that he felt he would choke.
He thought of her not as he saw her every day, rather drab, like a teacher at a Sunday school, but as he had first seen her in those baggy Turkish trousers and the blue turban spangled with little stars, her cheeks painted and her lashes black with mascara; he thought of her slender waist, her clear, soft, honey-coloured skin, and her small firm breasts with their rosy nipples.
He tossed on his bed.
His desire now was uncontrollable.
It was anguish.
After all, it wasn’t fair; he was young and strong and normal; why shouldn’t he have a bit of fun when he had the chance?
She was there for that, she’d said so herself.
What did it matter if she thought him a dirty swine?
He’d done pretty well by her, he deserved something in return.
The faint sound of her quiet breathing was strangely exciting and it quickened his own.
He thought of the feel of her soft lips when he pressed his mouth to hers and the feel of her little breasts when he took them in his hands; he thought of the feel of her lissom body in his arms and the feel of his long legs lying against hers.
He put on the light, thinking it might wake her, and got out of bed.
He leaned over her.
She lay on her back, her hands crossed over her breast like a stone figure on a tomb; tears were running out of her closed eyes and her mouth was distorted with grief.
She was crying in her sleep.