My five fingers meet
Your five fingers become
Our ten fingers joined
Together as hands’ kiss*
As they turned into the lane he said to her, ‘May I hold your hand?’ Giving him one of her brightest smiles she said, ‘Of course.’ So he did, slipping his fingers between hers and thinking immediately how their hands fitted so exactly, because at first they hadn’t. There was this physical unmatchedness, a tension that prevented their fingers achieving that delicious kiss that held hands can achieve. How often at this moment, when that ‘kiss’ took place, had he thought of their first such ‘kiss’? And particularly here, under the same hills where it had happened three years past.
It was late: they had come to his studio after supper and sat together on the sensible sofa under a single standard lamp. There had been music: the A minor Quartet of Robert Schumann, a work full of love for his Clara. Stretching out she had lain calmly, her legged limbs resting across his thighs,, her feet on the sofa’s arm, and all with that graceful attitude with which he had now become familiar. But then . . . a little claustrophobic, he moved to sit by his table and into the semi-darkness outside the lamp’s thrown light, his heart too heavy with that cocktail love and passion blends. As the music came to an end he had gone to kneel beside her, seeking a kiss with the lips: she had refused. Yet she kissed him with her eyes and the opening and closing of her lips as they talked.
Later, when they began to walk home to the guesthouse, it had been so dark outside that he could not actually see her, only sense her presence close by. So he had found her hand, and with that the moment arrived, when, under a veil of practicality, he had become joined to her and she to him. It was enough: more than he could ever have hoped it would be.
Now, walking up this narrow lane as the day cleared grey skies into evening’s clarity, and after only a few steps, he drew her close and into a passionate kiss. He held her: to feel the whole length and shape of her body, pressing himself to her in love’s abandon – and, and, and she was embarrassed that he should so suddenly do this, that he should declare himself in this way. Realising this, he immediately kissed her again as if to say ‘Don’t you understand?’ trying, trying, trying not to say ‘I love you so’, attempting to put all his words into a single kiss. But she was elsewhere . . . and so his passion fell away. He wanted to look at her, again, again, again, drink deep draughts of her beauty, the delicacy of her mouth, her hair’s fine confusion, the dear fall of her ******* under the dress he loved (and when he had first seen her wear it he had experienced an extraordinary desire – as it seemed to speak to him of the curves and secret places he had come to know, had come to touch.).
But, as she needed to be elsewhere, he didn’t look at her again. He released his hand from hers and, stopping at a gate that led onto a field of recently cut grass, looked beyond the field to the tableau of the hills that drew the eyes upward to the clouds, clouds no longer opaque but blotched with a faint blueness and the slight pink refraction of a now day-distant sun.
Was there a time, he wondered as he stood leaning on the gate, when lovers stopped holding each other’s hands? Perhaps, as age and familiarity grew ever onwards, it was only in the occasional passion of the bedroom that fingers might lace into fingers. He remembered one such occasion, feeling faint as the sensuous images flashed past him. Her hand lay on the pillow, cast behind her head up turned, at rest, fingers curled slightly as one occasionally sees in a Rodin sculpture. He had placed his hand on her forearm and moving towards her wrist brought the pads of his fingertips into her hand’s palm. He remembered feeling those destiny lines etched into her palm’s surface. He had let his index and middle fingers travel her life’s journeys. Then, then, then he had moved closer and pressed his hand closer, closer to her fingertips, towards the smooth pads of her fingers . . . until they met. There were no words, only shallow breathing, her sweet breath, the tickle of her hair on his nose, the press and press of their fingers.
And all this was when they had sought each other in the spell of a late afternoon in winter, had interrupted all business and the day’s completion of lists to be in each other’s arms, to press their hands together, to experiment with passions’ chemistry.
Such times he treasured still, and, as they walked back to their cottage, he put these thought-gifts away in the plain sandalwood box he kept on a shelf in her room, a room he had furnished for her in the only home he had – his mind’s imagination.