Damage (7 page)
And so we lay in bed. A man whose eyes could deceive a wife of nearly thirty years, and a wife who after nearly thirty years could be so deceived. Our practised movements were as pleasant as an old remembered song of long ago. But even as I surrendered to those final shudders that are all and nothing, it was, I knew, a final defeat for Ingrid in a battle she did not know she waged. And it was a triumph for Anna, who had not even fought.
I cannot and will not do this again. That was my last thought as Ingrid drifted dreamily to sleep in my arms.
‘H
ELLO, DAD.
’ It was Martyn on the line.
‘Martyn. Thank you for last night and congratulations again.’
‘Oh, thanks. You were very quiet. Working too hard? I know you’re heading one of those committees —I gather it’s getting close to recommendation time.’
‘How do you know?’
He laughed. ‘I can’t reveal my sources.’
‘I suppose I’d better be more careful than usual now. Even secret smiles are out of the question.’
‘Absolutely. Journalist first, son second!’ He laughed. ‘Oh yes, I’d spill all your secrets for the chance of a scoop.’
‘Aha! I’ve been warned!’ I entered into the spirit of the thing.
‘Dad, I want to ask you something about my trust fund.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I talk to Charles Longdon about it? And to David, he’s the other trustee, isn’t he?’ He mentioned a cousin of Ingrid’s.
‘Yes. Why do you need to talk to them?’
There was a long pause. ‘I … oh, I don’t know. Plans, you know. It’s about time I examined all my financial affairs. Properly. Don’t you think?’
‘Well, you know the trust doesn’t come to you until you marry?’ I spoke slowly, staring unseeing out the window.
‘Yes, I know that. Still I’d like to talk to them about it. Just wanted you and Edward to know. I didn’t want to go behind your back, or anything.’
‘No. No, of course. I don’t mind. Go ahead.’
The call was over. No mention of Anna. Martyn would make his own decisions. There would be no consultation with anyone. Just as it should be. And his plans were very clear. He meant to ask Anna to marry him. She would refuse him, of course. What then? How would he react?
And what of Anna and me? We never spoke of the future. We never even spoke of the present.
‘A
NNA.
’
‘Come in.’
‘Was it difficult getting away?’
‘No. Do you want a drink?’
‘I’d like a glass of red wine.’
We were in Anna’s house. She sat opposite me. She put her glass down, slowly and deliberately, on a side-table.
‘You are going to start a conversation I don’t think I want to have. So it might be better to finish our wine, and part for today.’
‘No.’ Something in my voice may have told her I must be heard, because she replied, ‘All right.’
‘I must know that you will be in my life for ever. I must know that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I must know that I can look at you, listen to you, breathe you, be inside you. I have got to know that. I can’t go back to being … almost dead. It’s not possible for me. That is how I was. There can be no “after Anna” in my life.’
‘That’s because you can’t envisage it. But there can be. It’s just that it’s a life after —’
‘I don’t want it. It’s not going to happen.’ I got up from my chair and stood in front of her. Perhaps there was something threatening in my movements. There was a tense silence between us. I moved away.
‘I think Martyn is going to ask you to marry him.’
‘Do you?’
‘It will be very sad for him. But it will lead to a resolution of this terrible situation.’
‘What will be sad for Martyn?’
A marble coldness, the coldness of deep shock, enveloped me. Her words seemed frozen in the air. As if in a dream I heard her say, ‘I like Martyn. We have a very happy time together. I can build a real life with him. I may very well say yes. Martyn is far too intelligent to have gone this far, without at least the chance of an acceptance.’
There are words we never dream we will utter.
‘You are considering marrying Martyn?’
‘Considering. Yes.’
‘You would marry my son?’
There are answers we never dream we will hear.
‘Possibly. I warned you at the beginning. I told you to take care.’
‘Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.’
‘Yes. You remember. You can have what you want of me for ever. I want what you want. We can continue for all our lives, together. Lives can be arranged like that. If I married Martyn, think how easy it would be. We could see each other all the time. I could entwine myself around you like ivy round a tree. I recognised my ruler. The moment I saw you, I surrendered.’
Her voice almost sang the words as she moved about the room.
‘But I also want Martyn. I want his life to share. He is my normality. We will be like any young couple setting out together. It’s right, it’s normal.’
She spoke the word ‘normal’ as though it were a benediction.
‘It’s what I want. I want to marry Martyn. Be happy for me. You will have no less of me. You will have more of me. Yes. More, constantly more. Listen to me. I don’t want to marry you. Oh, I know you haven’t even thought about it. But you will, you will. You will start agonising over Ingrid. You will start making plans. Listen to me. Martyn would never, ever forgive you. He would be lost to you for ever. Sally would be dreadfully harmed. I would be the centre of a terrible scandal. And you, you would be destroyed. And for what? So that we could have a domestic life together. It would be a nonsense. We were not made for that. No, we are made for what it is that we have. The constant satisfaction of our need for each other.’
‘Perhaps you are mad, Anna. Perhaps that’s the reason for what you’re saying. Oh, God …’
‘I am totally sane.’
‘When did you work all this out?’
‘I haven’t “worked it out”, as you put it, in some cold-blooded fashion. Things happened. I met Martyn — we started our affair. It became more than either of us could have imagined. And then you turned a secret corner in your life, and I was there. I had no control over these two events. I did not know I was going to meet Martyn. I did not know I would meet you.
‘But I always recognise the forces that will shape my life. I let them do their work. Sometimes they tear through my life like a hurricane. Sometimes they simply shift the ground under me, so that I stand on different earth, and something or someone has been swallowed up. I steady myself, in the earthquake. I lie down, and let the hurricane pass over me. I never fight. Afterwards I look around me, and I say, “Ah, so this at least is left for me. And that dear person has also survived.” I quietly inscribe on the stone tablet of my heart the name which has gone for ever. The inscription is a thing of agony. Then I start on my way again. Now you and Martyn, and indeed Ingrid and Sally, are in the eye of a storm I did not create. What power is mine, and what responsibility?’
‘But you spoke of surrender, of being ruled.’
‘It is my surrender that makes you ruler. You must accept this. If you fight, or try to change the pieces on the board, or to design a scenario more acceptable to you, you will be lost. Kneel down before me now, and I shall be your slave.’
And so I did, in the room in which I had first lain with her. Is it important which way I tried to take her? Which entrance? And whether with tongue or hand or penis? Did she lie or stand? Was her back to me or to the wall? Were her hands free or bound? Did she see my face or not?
Tales of ecstasy are endless tales of failure. For always comes separation. And the journey towards the essential, fleeting unity begins again.
Afterwards I left, a powerless ruler. Anna lay in some strange awkwardness on the table, silent, glistening, and still.
I have no sense of place. Only once, in L’Hôtel in Paris, did the shapes and colours that make a room pleasing to the eye enter my consciousness.
That afternoon, however, as I closed the door, the room seemed to paint itself on my mind’s eye. A dark swirl of rich green lay against pale beige walls. The velvet softly touched the glass windows which looked out over a tiny, walled garden. The wooden floor reflected darker beiges, and lighter browns that shone in spaces empty of furniture.
The chairs and sofas were covered in an old brocade, which suggested all the shades of autumn, and no one colour. The hardbacked chairs, which had fallen on the floor as we struggled to the carved cold darkness of the table where she now lay, were cushioned in the same shade of green velvet as the curtains. From the walls huge angular faces, half in shadow, of a man and a woman and a child, gazed at each other and at us, with a malevolence the painter cannot have intended. Bookcases, containing only hardbacks and some first editions, stood either side of a stone fireplace, bare of ornament.
I can look at this room for ever, I thought. I will always have it with me. Until I die.
If you had seen me on television that night, standing in for my Minister, answering questions with my practised mixture of intelligence and charm, you would not have guessed that my inner eye gazed at my painting. As though it held the secret of my life.
“M
Y LORD
,
Sometimes we need a map of the past. It helps us to understand the present, and to plan the future.
As you left you gazed at me and at everything, as though you were seeing it for the last time.
After I had bathed and put the room together again, I decided to stay at home, to write to tell you why I am so certain that I am doing the right thing. I want to take away this mystery.
I say little about myself because it matters to virtually no one. My particular past is important only perhaps to you, and to Martyn.
I’m sorry. But I must bring him into this letter. I now feel certain we shall marry.
You need this explanation more than he does. Martyn, as I said once before, is quite fearless in his feelings about me. He accepts, without of course knowing why, that a part of me remains for ever closed to him. He can handle disappearances, separations, and silences in a way that you can’t. You know him so little. Believe me he is remarkable.
You both could understand my little story. Only you need to hear it.
I travelled a great deal as a child. The process of endlessly starting in fresh schools, with new friends and strange languages, draws the members of a family very close indeed. The family becomes the only constant. We were a close family. My mother certainly loved my father in those early days. Aston and I were all-in-all to each other. We told each other everything. We shared each other’s problems. We became an invincible duo against every childhood adversity.
You cannot imagine what such a closeness is like. When it starts so early you see the world always, and in every way, through twinned souls. When we were very small we shared a bedroom. We fell asleep to each other’s breathing, and with each other’s last words in our ears. In the mornings we gazed at each other and at each new day — together. Whether we were in Egypt, the Argentine, or finally in Europe, it simply didn’t matter. The world was Aston and me.
Aston was much cleverer than me, academically clever. Oh, I did perfectly well. But he was brilliant.
My father, to his credit, had resisted sending him away to school when he was seven. He decided in our teens, however, that it was essential we both go to boarding-school in England.
My boarding-school was a perfectly proper one in Sussex. In the beginning I was miserable without Aston. But I adjusted.
Aston, however, seemed to change. He was always quiet, but now he withdrew more and more into his studies. He seemed to make no friends. His letters to me were full of sadness.
I told my father that I was worried about Aston. The school, when my father talked to them, put it down to a difficult period of adjustment.
Our first holidays (we missed each other at half-term) started strangely. I ran to Aston, my arms and legs ready to grasp and hold him. He put his hand over my face, and pushed me away, saying:
‘I’ve missed you too much. I don’t want to look at you. I don’t want to touch you. It’s too much. Tomorrow, I’ll look at you.’ And he went to his room.
My father was away. Mother put Aston’s non-appearance at dinner down to over-excitement.
His door was locked when I went upstairs. I heard him call to Mother when she knocked, ‘It’s OK. It really is OK. I just want to have a quiet, early night. I’ll be fine in the morning.’
And in the morning he did seem fine. We talked, played, and laughed as before.
But later, in my room, he told me of his terrible fear that I was the only person he would ever love. I was shocked, and even a little frightened by his intensity.
When the holidays were over and we went back to school he didn’t reply at first to the letters I sent him. Then I received a note that read ‘It’s easier if you don’t write.’
I didn’t tell anyone. What would I say? My brother misses me … too much. I missed him a great deal, but not too much. It was a question of degree, you see. Who can judge these matters? Certainly not a young girl.
I continued to write to him. He didn’t reply. At Easter he gave me my letters back unopened, and said, ‘Please, it’s easier, it really is easier when you don’t write. I miss you more and more. I cannot see how I can live a separate life. But I must. I have no hope of any other life, do I? You are changing. The boys at school talk all the time of girls — girls like you. One day, one of them will take you away from me. Completely away.’
‘But Aston, one day you and I will have boyfriends and girlfriends. We’ll grow up and marry. We’ll have our own children.’
He looked at me, astounded.
‘You have no idea what I’m talking about, have you? I want to be with you all the time. When I’m away from you I can only survive by blocking all thoughts of you from my mind. I work like a madman. You heard Papa about my report, I’m top of my year at virtually everything. I’m going to be top of my year for ever.’