Free The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas

her lover’s hand touching her beneath the table cloth. Her head was spinning from their having drunk too much. Her lover and Madame Cottin had to support her as they made their way slowly out of the dining room. She protested that she could manage perfectly well, and for Madame Cottin to go upstairs ahead and get her coat for the funeral procession. But Madame Cottin said she was not going. She could not face it.
    In the bedroom Madame Cottin undressed the young woman and laid her gently on the bed. Her young lover’s penis had been inside her even while they were struggling up the stairs; and now Madame Cottin left her corset and stockings on so that he could stay in her all the time. Vaguely she heard the chants of the mourners as they set off for the cemetery, and she lay peacefully enjoying him. Her eyes were shut, but she felt him take her hand and guide it to where he wanted to press her fingers a little way into her vagina beside his penis. He felt, beside the stroke of the young woman’s fingernail, the hardness of Madame Cottin’s ring. “It’s helping me to get through,” whispered Madame Cottin, and the young woman mumbled that she understood: her own wedding ring had been a help to her in her sorrow, and she still could not bear to take it from her finger.
    The corpses were being taken on carts, which they heard for a while rumbling through the pines, before fading to silence. Theyoung woman felt empty where she was most filled, and asked for more, sleepily. Dragging her eyes open, she watched Madame Cottin and her lover kissing passionately.
    The path around the shore to the mountain cemetery was very long, and the priest had made this journey on foot once today already. Also, he felt weighed down with the food he had eaten and the strong liquor he had drunk. Clearly others felt much the same as he, and they soon grew tired of singing the funeral hymns. They fell silent, listening to the grumbling of the cart wheels on the sandy path.
    The priest fell into hesitant conversation with the pastor. It was the first time he had talked at some length to a minister of the opposite faith; but disaster makes strange bedfellows, he thought. It was an interesting talk, on matters of doctrine. They could agree at least that God’s love was beyond analysis. It ran without a seam or join through the whole of His creation. They were stumbling now with fatigue—because the pastor was not a young man either—and stopped talking to conserve their strength. The priest’s thoughts went back to the breast at which he had sucked. He tried to remember its roundness and its warmth. He thought also of Madame Cottin, who had given him such good advice, in their trek today, about his feelings of guilt.
    Madame Cottin’s ample flesh, released from the whalebone that dug into her after her heavy meal, was being tickled and poked by her two young friends, and she was threshing, crying and laughing as she fought to escape from their hands. Foolishly she had said she was ticklish, and they were taking full advantage. She was no match for a strong young man, let alone a young woman bearing down on her too. Once or twice she was almost free and off the bed, but each time the young man dug his thumbs into the tenderest part of her thighs, and she had to submit, lyingback panting. Then, while she was weak and off balance they caught hold of her legs and pulled them wide and she was shrieking and struggling again, and rumbling with laughter as they tickled her feet. The young man got between her legs and stopped her cries with his mouth, and she had to promise, in order to be able to breathe, to be a good girl and let him do it. She panted and laughed, more quietly, and her laughter faded into quick-taken breaths, through lips that gently smiled, or joined his in brief, swift kisses.
    A stiff breeze tugging the hem of his military coat, Major Lionheart recalled other mass graves he had stood over, and all the letters he had had to write.