Death of a God (32 page)

It was May, a long summer evening heavy with the scent of blossom, and I felt excited. I was bright at school and the coming exams did not frighten me. I only wished I knew some better way of celebrating my forty-eight hours of freedom than going down to the corner shop and buying an ice-cream with a chocolate flake stuck in it. I wasn't ordinarily allowed to have chocolate flakes. I wasn't even sure that when I actually got to the shop I'd have the courage to ask for one, in case word of my sinful gluttony got back to my mother.

On my way down the street I met Marilyn. She had seen my mother and father going off with a suitcase, and she asked if I was on my own. She was a large girl with big, floppy breasts and, I think, a careless, generous nature. I think it was because she was sorry for me that she told me there was a dance on at the air-base that night, and her father had said she could have the car, and why didn't I come too?

To my own astonishment, I said yes without hesitation. It was as if all my previous life had been a preparation for that moment. A couple of hours later, to guard against anyone from the Conventicle seeing me, Marilyn picked me up on the edge of town, and we drove to the dance.

It was a disaster from the word go. The heat, the lights, the noise of the band, quite disorientated me. I couldn't dance, I couldn't make small talk, my Sunday-best dress looked ridiculous. Even so, there being far more men than girls, I was asked to dance, at first. Then the word must have got about that I was a dead loss, because I spent the rest of the evening sitting against the wall, tears pricking my eyelids, praying silently for the moment when Marilyn would come up to me and say it was time to go home. When she did put in an appearance, all giggly and hanging on to the arm of a tall airman, she said that she and Jerry wanted to ride around a bit, but it was OK, there was a bus outside the admin. building laid on specially to get girls home who hadn't other transport, and she was sure I understood.

I found out where the admin. building was, just in time to see the rear lights of the bus disappearing through the gate.

I set out to walk the five miles home. I wasn't a country girl and the darkness and the night noises terrified me. My feet were killing me, and what would my mother say when she saw what a mess I'd made of my best shoes? Whenever a car came along, temporarily lighting up the road ahead, tired as I was I ran like a hare until it had passed, leaving the blackness blacker than before.

I must have done about a mile and a half when a car stopped, somebody in the driver's seat reached over and opened the nearside door, and a man's voice asked out of the darkness, ‘Care for a lift?'

I knew, though nobody had ever told me why, that one must never on any account accept a lift from a stranger. But I was sobbing with fatigue. I knew I'd never make it to Runstowe on my own two feet. I whispered, ‘Thank you very much,' and got in.

I told the man where I lived, and after that sat rigid, eyes on the road ahead, as if that would somehow preserve me from danger. I couldn't tell you what the man looked like, except that his eyes – but probably I dreamed this up later – were bright red. He drove on for another half-mile or so, and then he turned the car off the road into a field and raped me.

No need to go into that, except to say that the pain and the disgust were as nothing to the utter confusion which seized me.
What was the man doing? Why was this happening to me? Was he a devil sent by God to punish me for going to the dance?

When he had finished, he drove on to Runstowe and pushed me out of the car into the road. When I got home I stripped off what was left of my clothes, washed myself, and put on a sanitary towel. Then I wound up the alarm and went to sleep. In the morning I went to school with a story of having been knocked down by a hit-and-run driver, to account for my bruised face. I stuffed the clothes into a carrier bag, and got rid of them in a builder's skip. Surprisingly, I sat my exams without difficulty. In fact, I got the best marks of anybody in my year, and won the Governors' Prize, a book token for £5.

Are you wondering what all this has to do with killing two human beings? It has everything to do with it.

This will show you what an ignorant little fool I was. It was nearly five months before I knew anything was the matter. I was quite pleased to have stopped menstruating, and hoped that the messy business wouldn't start up again. My clothes were beginning to feel a bit tight round the middle, and I occasionally wondered if, after all, I was going to grow into a large woman like my mother. That was all, until one day, out of the blue, in the living-room, as I stood at the french window, the light behind me, my mother suddenly screamed and then ordered me to take off my clothes that instant, every last stitch of them.

Whilst I was undressing, she went out into the garden and shouted for my father, who was picking runner beans, to come in at once. My father had never seen me naked since I was a baby, and I cowered trembling behind the big armchair. My mother must have told him something because when they came back indoors together his face was mottled with purple patches.

They hauled me out from behind the chair, and made me stand under the electric light fitting while they pulled and prodded me as if I were a cow up for auction. They never said a word. Then my father told me to get dressed and get out.

Just like that. I wasn't even allowed to go upstairs for my coat.

It was on the bus that I first realized I was pregnant. I had found the rest of my lunch money for the week in my blazer pocket, and so – for no particular reason: I was beyond thought – I had taken a ticket as far as Newmarket. But when the realization came to me, I can't think how, that I was going to have a baby, I asked the conductor to put me down at a lonely crossroads called Hob's Cross. One of the four arms was no more than a footpath through the forest, signposted to Hob's Hole, the old flint mine. I knew that Hob was an old name for the Devil, so that it seemed an entirely fitting place for me to kill myself.

There was no carry-on. I don't even remember sparing a thought for that awful God who looked after the Conventicle of the Elect. It just seemed to me the sensible thing to do in the circumstances. One thing was abundantly clear to me: that life was a whole lot simpler if you were dead.

I followed the trail between the purple heather and the dying bracken until I reached the mine, where I had a bit of trouble getting over the fence. But at last I managed it, stepped to the edge of the Hole and, without thinking any more about it, jumped.

How annoyed I was to find myself in the Norfolk and Angleby Hospital still alive!

Instead of falling straight to the bottom of the mine, I had – by a miracle, as they said – landed on a kind of ledge, merely breaking a leg instead of my neck. It took me a little longer to realize that the miracle consisted of the pleasantly ugly man with the foreign accent who came daily to visit me, bringing me gifts of fruit and flowers. My rescuer, Leo Felsenstein.

On holiday from the dyestuffs company in Angleby where he was employed as a translator of research material, he had been on his way along the drove road towards the Hole and saw my efforts to climb the fence. He told me later that he had shouted out to me, but that I'd paid no attention. Well versed, after years in Auschwitz, in detecting signs of desperation, he had said nothing to contradict the ambulance men when they assumed that he and I were together. He gave my name as Mary Felsenstein.

So that it was only necessary to change one letter, the ‘y' to an ‘a', when I came out of hospital and moved into his flat over a chemist's shop in Mountergate. The first day he considered it safe to leave me on my own, he went back to the Hole, and brought back the statuette they call the Hob's Hole Venus, which had apparently lain in a niche behind the ledge, unseen until he had clambered down to help me. He set it up on the mantelpiece in the little sitting-room, and turned to me with a smile I shall never forget.

‘Our patron saint and protectress.'

Let me make it clear that Leo Felsenstein and I have never lived together as man and wife. What the Nazis did to him left him incurably impotent. Dreadful as it is to say it, I could almost be grateful. After what had happened to me I could never have stayed on any other terms.

As to the child growing daily larger in my womb, if I had known about abortion there would have been no Loy Tanner. Well, I didn't know, and I'm sure it never even occurred to Leo to tell me. The years he had spent cheek by jowl with death had given him an almost mystical reverence for human life. He could not have looked forward to the child's birth with more joyous anticipation if it had been his own.

What Leo really wanted was that we should get married before the baby was born, so that it would be born legitimate; but I wouldn't have it; just as, when we did marry – I was eighteen by then – I wouldn't let him adopt it either. I could never bring myself to tell Leo about the rape, preferring him to think of me as a silly, promiscuous teenager rather than have to speak about that night, the red eyes glowing in the darkness. Deeply as I knew I hurt him, I couldn't saddle him with responsibility for a human being with that heritage.

The boy was born soon after we moved to Sebastopol Terrace. I called him Loy after Robert Tanner's youngest son, hoping that to be doubly named after the most honourable Norfolk man who ever lived might be a charm against the red-eyed darkness. Leo was wonderful with the baby. And I? I did for him all the things a mother does for her child. I took him in my arms, kissed him, rocked him to sleep.

All useless. You can't love when you're afraid, and I was deadly afraid of my son.

I'm sure Loy sensed it, even at that age. He hung round me like a forlorn puppy, begging for the love which, to all surface appearances, I was providing in abundance. I was dreadfully sorry for him – sorrier than I was for myself: it wasn't his fault he was who he was. On the night he left home – the day Mrs Falcone came round and wanted to speak to him about Francesca – I even convinced myself that I was sorry to see him go.

But once he had gone – particularly after the money began to arrive as he started to make a name for himself as a pop singer – the old, ambiguous feelings returned. I knew that, whatever else I did, I mustn't accept money from him. It was too dangerous.

Yet, in the end, I did just that. The years in the concentration camp had undermined Leo's constitution, and he began to get more and more unwell. He had to give up his job, and I gave mine up too – I'd been working in a nursery school – so as to stay home with him. When Miriam took us both on as outworkers, it was a godsend.

Financially, then, things were very tight; but if it hadn't been for the progressive deterioration in Leo's condition we could have managed very happily. Time had only deepened our passionate – yes, passionate! – attachment. I couldn't face the prospect of life without him, and I ran about everywhere, from one specialist to another, spending money we couldn't afford, looking for a cure.

Then I heard of a new operation they were doing in America, still in its experimental stages, but offering hope beyond anything we'd been offered before. Here in England, the doctors said, ‘We're evaluating the procedure. In two or three years' time, maybe –' But Leo didn't have that long to wait. I found out that the cost of taking him to the United States and getting the operation done there was £13,000, and when Loy come round to see us the night before the concert at the Middlemass, I repressed all my doubts and fears, and asked him to give me the money.

When I did that, his face went empty, the way it did sometimes, as if he had retreated deep inside himself. Then he said, with no expression in his voice, ‘When you finally want something from me, it's not for yourself, it's for him.'

I replied that it was for me, too. ‘You know how much Leo means to me.'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I know.'

This is the difficult bit.

He brought the money round late at night, in a black case, after the concert was over. Leo, sedated to relieve the pain, had been asleep for an hour or more. Loy opened the case and I saw the bundles of notes packed inside. I saw Leo, by their magic, restored to health again. The vision impelled me towards Loy, to kiss him, for once, without reservations.

‘Hold on a minute,' he said, backing away. ‘There
is
a condition.'

‘Condition?'

‘That first you go to bed with me.'

You don't want to know how I felt, do you? Only what I did. What I did was go to bed with Loy Tanner my son, there on the couch in my own living room. Was it rape? You policemen will probably say no. After all, I was – wasn't I? – a consenting party.

Let me tell you, what my son did on that couch was worse, much worse, than what his father did to me in that field on the way home from the dance. For the first time in my life – me, a woman who had lived in complete satisfaction with an impotent man – was made to understand the meaning of physical love. Have I made myself clear?

I had an orgasm.

When he had done with me I left him lying there, face down, one arm trailing. He seemed drowsy, if not actually asleep. Feeling the burden of my own body unbearable, I dragged myself across the room to Leo's knitting machine, where a piece of ribbing hung on the needles, weighted down by some of those weights we knitters use to keep the bottom edge straight. They're quite small, and I don't suppose you've given them a second glance; but heft one of them in your hand after you read this, and you'll be surprised how heavy they are, solid metal under the plastic coating.

I took one of the weights off its hook, went back to the couch, and hit Loy over the head with it – hit him until I was sure he was dead. He made very little trouble about dying: one might almost have thought he welcomed it.

For a moment, no longer, as the blood came out of his mouth and nostrils and his eyes glazed over, I felt a piercing love for him. Then I went and opened the black case, took out the lovely crisp notes, and, bundle by bundle, burned them.