The Progress of Love

ice-cube tray.
    “Did you find any?” calls Mrs. Cryderman.
    “Just checking out here.”
    He has a package of cigarettes in his hand, but rummages noisily in the cupboard beside the sink. He presses against me, side to side. He puts his hand on my shoulder, squeezes. He moves that hand across my back, touches my bare neck. I stand with the ice tray in my hands, looking out the window at an old bus parked in the back lane, behind the gospel hall. The words “Calvary Tabernacle” are painted on its side.
    Just the tips of Mr. Cryderman’s fingers move on my throat. Their touch is light at first as drops of water. Then heavier. Heavierand heavier, finally stroking my skin as if they would leave furrows.
    “Found some.”
    When I take Mrs. Cryderman her drink, Mr. Cryderman is sitting in the armchair by the stand-up ashtray.
    “Come sit where you were,” she says, in her silly-sweet voice.
    “I’m smoking.”
    My throat tingles as if it had taken a blow.
    The second scene a few days later, on the next regular day of my employment.
    Mr. Cryderman is working in the garden. He is in his shirt sleeves, still wearing his tie, hacking away with a hoe at the vines that cover a little tumbledown summerhouse in a corner of the yard. He calls to me warningly, and waits for me to come over to him through the uncut grass. He says that Mrs. Cryderman is not well. The doctor has given her something to put her to sleep, to keep her still and quiet so that the baby won’t be born too soon. He says that I’d better not go inside today.
    I am standing a couple of yards away from him. Now he says, “Come over here. Here. There’s something I want to ask you.”
    I go closer, with shaking legs, but all he does is point to a vigorous, leafy, red-stalked plant at his feet.
    “What is this thing, do you know? Should I dig it up? I can’t tell what’s a weed around here and what isn’t.”
    It is a rhubarb plant, familiar to me as grass or dandelions.
    “I don’t know,” I say, and at the moment I don’t.
    “You don’t know? What good are you to me, Jessie? Isn’t this a queer little hole of a place?” He waves at the summerhouse. “I don’t know what it was built for. Midgets?”
    He grabs some vines, tears them loose, and says, “Step in.”
    I do. Inside, it is a wonderfully secret place, shady and neglected, with drifts of leafy debris on the bumpy earth floor. It is true that the roof is very low. Both of us have to bend over.
    “Are you hot?” asks Mr. Cryderman.
    “No.” In fact, chilly waves are passing over me—waves of weakness, physical dismay.
    “Yes, you are. You’re all sweaty under that mop of hair.”
    He touches my neck in a matter-of-fact way, like a doctor checking the evidence, then moves his hand to my cheek and hairline.
    “Even your forehead is sweaty.”
    I can smell cigarettes on his fingers, and the inky machinery smell of the newspaper office. All I want is to be equal to this. Ever since Mr. Cryderman touched my throat at the kitchen sink, I have felt that I am seeing the power of my own lies, my own fantasy. I am a person capable of wizardry but helpless. There is nothing to do but submit, submit to the consequences. I am wondering whether the passionate attack will take place here, without further preparation—here in the shelter of the summerhouse, on the earth floor, among the dead leaves and scratchy twigs that perhaps conceal the dead bodies of mice or birds. I do know one thing, and that is that the lovelorn declarations, the delicate pleas and moonings often voiced by Mr. Cryderman in my imagination, are going to have no place on the agenda.
    “You think I’m going to kiss you, Jessie?” says Mr. Cryderman. “I have no doubt you’re a handy kisser. No,” he says, as if I’ve specifically asked him. “No, Jessie. Let’s sit down.”
    There are boards attached to the summerhouse walls that serve as benches. Some are broken. I sit on one that isn’t, and he sits on another. We lean forward to escape the tough branches that have broken through the latticework walls.
    He lays his hand on my knee, on my cotton skirt.
    “What about Mrs. Cryderman, Jessie? Do you think she’d be very happy if she could see us now?”
    I take this to be a rhetorical question, but he repeats it, and I have to say, “No.”
    “Because I did to her what you might like me to do to you, she’s going to have a baby, and she isn’t going to have an easy time of it.”
    He strokes my leg