I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimig that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mothers apartment, into the unguessable try of marriage.
And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my mother would be moving slowly about the narrow bedroom I had left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my little relics, the tumbled garments I would not need any more, the scores for which there had been no room in my trunks, the cert programmes Id abandoned; she would linger over this torn ribbon and that faded photograph with all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of a woman on her daughters wedding day. And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, whe the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in being his wife.
Are you sure, shed said when they delivered the gigantic box that held the wedding dress hed bought me, ed up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallised fruit. Are you sure you love him? There was a dress for her, too; black silk, with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water, fihan anything shed worn sihe adventurous girlhood in Indo-a, daughter of a rich tea planter. My eagle-featured indomitable mother; what other student at the servatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of ese pirates; nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a maing tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I?
"Are you sure you love him?"
"Im sure I want to marry him," I said.
And would say no more. She sighed, as if it was with reluce that she might at last banish the spectre of poverty from its habitual place at our meagre table. For my mother herself had gladly, sdalously, defiantly beggared herself for love; and, one fine day, her gallant soldier never returned from the wars, leaving his wife and child a legacy of tears that never quite dried, a cigar box full of medals and the antique service revolver that my mrown magnifitly etri hardship, kept always in her reticule, in case -- how I teased her -- she was surprised by footpads on her way home from the grocers shop.
Now and then a starburst of lights spattered the drawn blinds as if the railway pany had lit up all the stations through which we passed in celebration of the bride. My satin nightdress had just been shaken from its ings; it had slipped over my young girls pointed breasts and shoulders, supple as a garment of heavy water, and now teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudgiween my thighs as I shifted restlessly in my narrow berth. His kiss, his kiss with tongue ah in it and a rasp of beard had hio me, though with the same exquisite tact as this nightdress hed given me, of the wedding night, which would be voluptuously deferred until we lay in his great aral bed in the sea-girt, pinnacled domain that lay, still, beyond the grasp of my imagination. . . that magic place, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam, that legendary habitation in which he had been born. To which, one day, I might bear an heir. Our destination, my destiny.
Above the syncopated roar of the train, I could hear his even,