The Sacred Band

This is my first attempt at writing about a lesbian relationship. Please forgive the presumption and please send me criticisms, suggestions and comments.

The Sacred Band, chapter thirteen

Ivy and Ginny (and Donald and Bruno)

told by Ginny.

She just started singing All the things you are to Bruno's sympathetic guitar backing, and we all stared open-mouthed at the sweet, controlled lyricism of her golden wisp of a voice. Of course I had heard Ivy singing in the bath. I told her that she had a lovely voice, and she said it was just the bathroom acoustics.

Privately I knew that bathroom acoustics do not give you perfect pitch, but sometimes I just give up trying to compliment Ivy, because she turns everything into a joke against herself. How can someone so wonderful be so insecure?

I picked up the clues at our first meeting. Here was a lovely person who thought of herself as worthless. I wanted to make it my work, (my life's work I hoped), to show her herself in a different mirror.

How we met

Acting on information received from an informant (Laura of course) I proceeded down The Hinckley Road in a south-easterly direction and found myself outside a small shop called the Leisure Hour Library...

Laura had found me two places I might meet Sapphic women, and I had tried them both. The nice woman behind the bar in the Midland Hotel looked me up and down, saw how frightened I was, and kindly gave me a Britvic orange on the house. I suppose to her I must have looked about sixteen.

She said that I should try the Leisure Hour Library, because I looked as if I needed a minnow rather than a shark. I think I saw what she meant when I looked around at the banquettes, and saw a thin-faced

woman in Harris tweed suit, trilby hat and cigarette holder eying me and licking her lips as if I were a fairy cake and it was a long time since lunch.

So off I trailed.

The Leisure Hour Library turned out to be a subscription library. Yes, I know, the London Library is a subscription library. This one had the same resemblance to the London Library as your local chippie has to the Savoy Grill - for a start I can afford to eat at a fish and chip shop!

The window told the story. There were cowboy books, of which J.T Edson and Louis L'Amour seemed to be the star turns with Zane Grey bringing up the rear; detective thrillers with Hank Jansen and Mickey Spillane well represented, and about half the window made up of pulp romances by such literary luminaries as Barbara Cartland and Denise Robins.

Fivepence enabled the discerning purchaser to borrow up to three books a week. Two discerning customers - in the shape of shapeless middle-ages housewives with headscarves covering up their hair-rollers, carrying capacious shopping bags, were scouring the shelves, looking for something a bit more spicy than Mrs. Dale's diary.

Seated at a desk in the front corner of the window, sat two women sipping tea. One was motherly and middle-aged, wearing a pinafore over her blouse and skirt, and bedroom slippers on her swollen feet. She clearly worked here, and I greeted her politely.

The other woman was younger, in her thirties, and quite beautiful. Her face was long and a perfect almond shape, with a long straight nose. She had red lips made for smiling, and, behind her horn-rimmed spectacles, the saddest hazel eyes I had ever seen blinked and blinked at me.

She was wearing a tailored grey business suit with a pencil skirt that came half-way down her calves. Her calves tapered to slim, elegant ankles in black suede, buckled low-heeled shoes. The jacket revealed a crisp white blouse held together with a handsome cameo brooch at the point of the v-shaped opening.

Her hair caught and held my attention, small waves of a rich auburn, gathered at the nape of the neck in a club with a green velvet ribbon, with curly tendrils of hair around her ears and the nape of her neck making their bid for freedom.

I stared at her, and I suspect that my mouth was agape. 'God!' I thought; 'is this love at first sight?'

The shopkeeper saw my expression and comprehended immediately. I was clearly not here for the latest Naomi Jacobs. She stood up, smiling.

"Hello dear. Come and have a nice cup to tea - I'll just fetch you a cup. Have you met my friend Ivy?"

Ivy looked up at me briefly, then blushed crimson and averted her eyes. She looked so shy and so insecure that I wanted to hug her.

"Hello Ivy", I said. "I'm so pleased to meet you. My name's Ginny; I've just started at the University this term."

She visibly pulled herself together. Good manners made her overcome her desire to make herself invisible. She extended her hand.

"Ivy Matthews. I work at the public library in Bishop Street."

I held her hand just a little too long - maybe ten minutes...

I afterwards learned that she had achieved her Fellowship of the Libraries Association with distinction, and that she was the Head Reference Librarian for the City. Ivy had a compulsion to belittle her achievements before any else had the chance.

Well, let's be honest. The first time I felt truly alive, and not just living a shadowy half-life was when I confided my secret to Laura. That afternoon with Ivy I took another step.

I suppose I felt for the first time in my life that I was free to fancy a woman without exposing myself to ridicule and obloquy. I fell for Ivy, first of all because I could; even before I realised what a truly remarkable and lovable person she was. In retrospect it seems a bit mechanistic, but I was caught up in the moment.

My cup of tea arrived, and the shopkeeper introduced herself as Deirdre Collins. We exchanged greetings. Ivy looked all ready to retreat into herself, but Deirdre brightly kept the conversation going by extracting every scrap of information about myself. Her training in the KGB was certainly paying off.

Ivy listened attentively, and every now and again I felt her eyes brush across my face, and return to her lap.

We finished our tea and I rose to leave. I simply could not think how to prolong the encounter. Ivy solved the problem for me.

"I've got to start making my way back to work. This should be my afternoon off, but I'm swapping an evening session with a colleague, so I'm on duty from four to seven. Would you like to walk back to town with me?"

We walked back to the centre of town. on the way we passed what was then a new phenomenon, a brightly decorated Chinese restaurant. Idly I wondered aloud what the large calligraphic characters on the window meant.

"I don't speak Cantonese, only Mandarin, but the characters are the same for both. It says Dragon of good fortune - Lucky Dragon you might say. In China dragons are a symbol of good luck."

"What!" I exclaimed in astonishment. "You read and speak Chinese? How on earth did you learn it? Isn't it fearfully difficult?"

"Not if you're born there. My mother and father went there as Baptist missionaries as soon as they were married. My father's family were very well-to-do, and they were strongly against the whole project, but my parents were unshakeable.

I was born a couple of years after they got to China, and I was brought up by a succession of Chinese nurses, and by the time I was four I spoke Mandarin better than I spoke English.

Then my father took over my education. He overruled my mother and found me an old Confucian scholar who could teach me to read and write Chinese. When I got to England I realised what a good education I had been given. I was sent to Cheltenham Ladies' College, and I was years ahead of the other girls my age."

"Why did your parents send you back to England? Where did you go?"

I lived with my grandfather in his big house in Shropshire. There were just the two of us and the servants. After China it was a pale imitation of life.

They sent me back for two reasons. One, they wanted me to get a good education, and go to Cambridge like they did. Secondly, although I only realised it later, I think they knew that all-out war with Japan was coming and they wanted me to be safe."

Her eyes filled with tears, and, standing there in the street, I took her in my arms and she put her head on my shoulder and cried.

"They starved to death in the great famine," she sobbed. "The last correspondence I had with them was a flaming row about me refusing to got to university. I wrote such angry, hurtful things to them, and all the time they must have been slowly dying of starvation. I can never forgive myself..."

I must have made a spectacle of myself, patting her and murmuring sympathetic noises to a woman four inches taller and fifteen years older than I was. I called her a poor darling, hugging her and kissing her cheek as if she had been a four-year-old with a scraped knee.

I dried her tears with my hankie and kissed her wet cheeks. I had never kissed anyone but my mum and dad, but it felt so natural and so right.

"Thank you for being so kind. I don't know what came over me. It's all so long ago, but it just welled up in me. I'm so sorry for being so pathetic."

"You were not pathetic, you were hurting and all I wanted was to comfort you."

"If we go to Bishop street we can sit in the staff room and it will give me time to pull myself together. Would that be all right?"

I took her hand and squeezed it tight. I hoped that it conveyed that I would go with her to Siberia of she wanted me to.

I stayed with her until the reference library closed at seven. Readers drifted in and out, reading periodicals and checking reference books, but, all but a few, they knew what they were doing and needed no help. At around six thirty, a poorly dressed elderly man came in smelling a little the worse of drink.

I watched in awe as she explained to him how to decode the form of racehorses from the back pages of the evening paper. From the stacks somewhere, she pulled out a copy of Timeform and patiently explained how to use it.

She could not have been nicer or more thorough if he had been an important local businessman wanting trade statistics. I giggled as she gently detached his hand from her bottom without pausing in her explanation.

After he shuffled away to find a bookie's runner, we both looked at each other and bust out laughing. I could see that she had enjoyed every minute and thought her time was well spent. I afterwards discovered that the copy of Timeform was her own, and that her grandfather had taught her and encouraged her to bet on horses.

As I sat there in the commercial library, watching Ivy, I started to understand something.

Readers came to the counter and asked for help. She got them to explain as precisely as possible what they wanted to know, and put her hand unerringly on the appropriate source. No sign of nervousness or shyness; just complete professionalism. Within that particular context she had a role - she felt secure.

It seemed to me that in an odd way, I fell into the same category as her readers. She knew what I was there for, and what I wanted from her. She did not have to carry the whole load of insecurity and self-doubt. All she had to do was to decide whether or not to grant me what I obviously wished for.

When the library closed, we went to Lyons for poached egg on toast, and then, she smiled her sweetest smile.

"Shall we go back to my flat?"

I jumped to my feet, spilling my last half a cup of tea into the saucer in my haste. Ivy laughed, and so did I. Sometimes I wish I were not such a clot.

Her flat was in Oxford Street, close to the Royal Infirmary. It was surprisingly spacious and well furnished with the first wall-to-wall carpets I had ever seen. Our own home in Market Harborough has nice Wilton and Axminster carpets like islands in the sea, with stained and polished floorboards all around.

We went straight to the bedroom, and, without a word, started to undress. Ivy took off her suit and put it on a hanger in the large, well-filled wardrobe. I watched, enchanted as she took off her blouse, carefully unfastening the cameo brooch, which was guarded by a tiny gold chain and safety pin.

Over her head came the long petticoat, and it joined the blouse in the washing basket. Now she stood in bra and knickers and seamed nylons held up with a suspender belt . She was so slim that she had no need at all of a corset, and wore none.

I was a bit surprised. All the sixth-form girls at Grammar School had worn roll-ons as a matter of course, as much to provide a comfortable way to hold up their stockings as to suppress unsightly bulges.

I was too busy watching her to attend to myself. My drainpipe jeans take some getting off, and Ivy knelt down to help me. She took off my socks; picked up my feet one by one and kissed my toes, then began to pull off my jeans, a big smile on her face. I jack-knifed at the waist, and dragged my sweater over my head.

We lay together in our undies and kissed. It was my first kiss and I simply did not know what to do. Gently she forced my mouth open with her tongue, and we lay, open mouth on open mouth, exchanging souls.

Later she undid my bra and kissed and suckled my breasts. I felt my nipples hardening and rising up to meet her lips. I took her lead and did the same. Her breasts were larger than my little bee-stings, with large brown nipples that stood up like sentinels.

As I sucked on them I heard her breathing get faster until she was panting. She was as excited as I was. Her hand stole into my knickers and I suckled on, with her fingers painting magic stardust arabesques in the slick wetness of my opening.

After a minute I reached down to do the same to her, but she took my hand away and kissed it.

"No, not tonight, please. Just let me make love to you. Don't worry, you will learn everything, but tonight you are mine."

That night, and ever after, I was hers.

***

After Ivy's song, the party soon broke up. Bruno had arranged for Eric Weiss to cover for him on piano for the first set at the Mardi Gras Roadhouse. He wanted to be there in time to set up for the second set starting at 10.45, so he and Donald had to leave.

"Why don't we all go?" asked Denise, who loves a party above all else. The next day was Sunday, so there seemed no good reason not to go, as long as the menfolk were acceptable in lounge suits. Bruno manoeuvred Ivy and me into Don's car, and he then spent the journey persuading Ivy to sing her song a second time in the club.

She was obviously a bag of nerves at the idea, but Don and I joined in the persuasion. I was so proud of her and so astonished at her talent that I am afraid I probably put a bit of unfair pressure on.

She could refuse Bruno and Don, but she could not bear to disappoint me. She agreed to sing just the one song, soon after the start of the second set.

That was the start of something that leavened the lump of all our lives. She walked up onto the small stage like Mary Queen of Scots to her execution, and sang like an angel.

Bruno had arranged for Danny, the manager of the club to act as sound engineer, and the microphone made her small voice fill the club. The applause was deafening, and she smiled and curtseyed like a trouper, before running off to the ladies to be convulsed by the dry heaves.

I held her tight as she retched, and dried her watering eyes before leading her back to our table.

Next time I went round to her flat, as I let myself in I heard laughter and music, and went into the lounge to find that she and Bruno were having a whale of a time singing a duet version of Making whoopee and hamming it up outrageously.

Somehow, without anything being said, it became a weekly event for us to go with Don and Bruno to the club, and for Ivy to sing half a dozen songs widely spaced through the evening.

Don, always immaculately dressed and groomed, made a perfect partner for Ivy, leading her around the pocket handkerchief-sized dance floor in a stylish foxtrot. Ivy was soon making trips to Bond Street to buy new evening gowns, and with every week that passed she seemed happier and more at home in herself.

Bruno and I had a similar attitude to life. He was never happier than in his gansey and corduroys, looking relaxed and amused by life. As the we started spending more time together, going to concerts, the pictures, and sometimes just out for a meal or a drink, it seemed that all four of us felt that we had found something that was missing from our lives.

We all found a private joy in the fact that, at the end of the evening, Bruno and Don would go back to their bed, and Ivy and myself to ours.

When, a few months later, Denise suggested that the four of us should buy a house together, we all wondered why we hadn't thought of it ourselves. But that was to have to wait, whilst we confronted Rotkoff.

follows:

chapter 14. Denise and Andy.

chapter 15. Rotkoff - beginning the fight back.