Devices and Desires (17 page)

It took only two minutes of lying stretched and rigid on his bed for Alex Mair to realize that sleep was unlikely to come. To lie in bed wakeful had always been intolerable to him. He could manage with little sleep, but that was invariably sound. Now he swung his legs out of bed, reached for his dressing gown and walked over to the window. He would watch the sun rise over the North Sea. He thought back over the last few hours, the acknowledged relief of talking to Alice, the knowledge that nothing shocked her, nothing surprised her, that everything he did, if not right in her eyes, was judged by a different standard from the one she rigorously applied to the rest of her life.

The secret that lay between them, those minutes when he had held her shaking body against the tree trunk and stared into her eyes, compelling obedience, had bound them with a cord so strong that it couldn’t be frayed, either by the enormity of their shared guilty secret, or by the small rubs of living together. And yet they had never spoken of their father’s death. He didn’t know whether Alice ever thought of it or whether the trauma had erased it from her mind, so that she now
believed the version he had formulated, had taken the lie into her unconscious and made it her truth. When, quite soon after the funeral, seeing how calm she was, he had imagined that possibility and had been surprised at his reluctance to believe it. He didn’t want her gratitude. It was degrading even to contemplate that she would feel an obligation towards him. “Obligation” and “gratitude” were words they had never needed to use. But he did want her to know and to remember. The deed was to him so monstrous, so surprising that it would have been intolerable not to have shared it with a living soul. In those early months he had wanted her to know the magnitude of what he had done and that he had done it for her.

And then, six weeks after the funeral, he had suddenly found himself able to believe that it hadn’t happened, not in that way, and that the whole horror was a childhood fantasy. He would lie awake at night and see his father’s crumbling figure, the leap of blood like a scarlet fountain, would hear the harshly whispered words. In this revised and comforting version there had been a second of delay, no more, and then he had raced for the house shouting for help. And there was a second and even more admirable fantasy in which he had knelt at his father’s side, had pressed his clenched fist hard into the groin, quenching the spurting blood, had whispered reassurance into those dying eyes. It had been too late, of course; but he had tried. He had done his best. The coroner had praised him, that precise little man with his half-moon spectacles, his face like a querulous parrot. “I congratulate the deceased’s son, who acted with commendable promptness and courage and did everything possible to try to save his father’s life.”

The relief of being able to believe in his innocence was at first so great that temporarily it overwhelmed him. He had lain in bed night after night drifting into sleep on a tide of euphoria.
But he had known, even then, that this self-administered absolution was like a drug in the bloodstream. It was comforting and easy, but it wasn’t for him. That way lay a danger more destructive even than guilt. He had told himself: “I must never believe that a lie is the truth. I may tell lies all my life if it’s expedient, but I must know them for what they are and I must never tell them to myself. Facts are facts. I have to accept them and face them and then I can learn how to deal with them. I can look for reasons for what I did and call those reasons excuses: what he did to Alice, how he bullied Mother, how I hated him. I can attempt to justify his death, at least to myself. But I did what I did, and he died as he died.”

And with that acceptance came a kind of peace. After a few years he was able to believe that guilt itself was an indulgence, that he didn’t need to suffer it unless he chose. And then there came a time when he felt a pride in the deed, in the courage, the audacity, the resolution which had made it possible. But that, too, he knew was dangerous. And for years afterwards he hardly thought of his father. Neither his mother nor Alice ever spoke of him except in the company of casual acquaintances who felt the need to utter embarrassed condolences from which there was no escape. But in the family only once was his name mentioned.

A year after the death his mother had married Edmund Morgan, a widowed church organist of mind-numbing dullness, and had retired with him to Bognor Regis, where they lived on his father’s insurance money in a spacious bungalow in sight of the sea, in an obsessive mutual devotion which mirrored the meticulous order and tidiness of their world. His mother always spoke of her new husband as “Mr. Morgan.” “If I don’t talk to you about your father, Alex, it isn’t that I’ve forgotten him, but Mr. Morgan wouldn’t like it.” The phrase had
become a catchword between him and Alice. The conjunction of Morgan’s job and his instrument offered endless possibilities of adolescent jokes, particularly when he and their mother were on honeymoon. “I expect Mr. Morgan is pulling out all his stops.” “Do you suppose Mr. Morgan is changing his combinations?” “Poor Mr. Morgan, labouring away. I hope he doesn’t run out of wind.” They were wary, reticent children, yet this joke would reduce them to screams of helpless laughter. Mr. Morgan and his organ releasing them into hysterical laughter had anaesthetized the horror of the past.

And then, when he was about eighteen, reality of another kind intruded itself and he said aloud, “I didn’t do it for Alice, I did it for myself,” and thought how extraordinary it was that it had taken four years to discover that fact. And yet was it a fact, was it the truth, or was it merely a psychological speculation which in certain moods he found it interesting to contemplate?

Now, looking out over the headland to the eastern sky already flushed with the first faint gold of dawn, he said aloud: “I let my father die deliberately. That is a fact. All the rest is pointless speculation.” In fiction, he thought, Alice and I should have been tormented by our joint knowledge, distrustful, guilt-ridden, unable to live apart yet miserable together. Yet since his father’s death there had been nothing between him and his sister but companionship, affection, peace.

But now, nearly thirty years later, when he thought he had long come to terms with the deed and his own reaction to it, memory had begun to stir again. It had started with the first Whistler murder. The word “murder” itself constantly on someone’s lips, like a sonorous curse, seemed to have the power to evoke those half-suppressed images of his father’s face which had become as unclear, as devoid of any life, as an old photograph. But in the last six months his father’s image
had begun to intrude on his consciousness at odd moments, in the middle of a meeting, across a boardroom table, in a gesture, the droop of an eyelid, the tone of a voice, the line of a speaker’s mouth, the shape of fingers splayed to an open fire. His father’s ghost had returned in the tangle of late summer foliage, the first fall of the leaves, the tentative autumn smells. He wondered if the same thing was happening to Alice. For all their mutual sympathy, for all the sense he had of their being irrevocably bound together, this was the one question he knew he would never ask.

And there were other questions, one question in particular, which he had no need to fear from her. She wasn’t in the least curious about his sexual life. He knew enough psychology to have at least some insight into what those early shaming and terrifying experiences had done to her. Sometimes he thought that she regarded his affairs with a casual, slightly amused indulgence, as if, herself immune to a childish weakness, she was nevertheless indisposed to criticize it in others. Once, after his divorce, she had said: “I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?” And now he found himself wondering whether she knew or guessed about Amy. And then, as the flaming ball rose from the sea, the gears of time slipped, went into reverse, and he was back only four days ago, lying with Amy in the deep hollow of the dunes, smelling again the scent of sand and grasses and the salt tang of the sea as the late-afternoon warmth drained out of the autumn air. He could recall every sentence, every gesture, the timbre of her voice, could feel again the hairs rising on his arms at her touch.

She turned towards him, her head propped on her hand, and he saw the strong afternoon light shafting with gold the cropped, brightly dyed hair. Already the warmth was draining from the air, and he knew that it was time they were moving. But, lying there beside her, listening to the susurration of the tide and looking up at the sky through a haze of grasses, he was filled, not with post-coital sadness, but with an agreeable languor, as if the long-committed Sunday afternoon still stretched ahead of them.

It was Amy who said: “Look, I’d better be getting back. I told Neil I wouldn’t be more than an hour and he gets fussy if I’m late, because of the Whistler.”

“The Whistler kills at night, not in daylight. And he’d hardly venture on the headland. Too little cover. But Pascoe’s right to be concerned. There isn’t much danger, but you shouldn’t be out alone at night. No woman should until he’s caught.”

She said: “I wish they would catch him. It’d be one thing less for Neil to worry about.”

Making his voice carefully casual, he asked: “Doesn’t he
ever ask where you’re going when you sneak out on Sunday afternoons, leaving him to look after the child?”

“No, he doesn’t. And the child is called Timmy. And I don’t sneak. I say I’m going and I go.”

“But he must wonder.”

“Oh, he wonders all right. But he thinks people are entitled to their privacy. He’d like to ask but he never will. Sometimes I say to him, ‘OK, I’m off now to fuck my lover in the sand dunes.’ But he never says a word, just looks miserable because he doesn’t like me saying ‘fuck.’”

“Then why do you? I mean, why torment him? He’s probably fond of you.”

“No, he isn’t, not very fond. It’s Timmy he likes. And what other word is there? You can’t call it ‘going to bed.’ I’ve only been in your bed with you once, and then you were as jumpy as a cat, thinking that sister of yours might come back unexpectedly. And you can’t say we sleep together.”

He said: “We make love. Or, if you prefer it, we copulate.”

“Honestly, Alex, that’s disgusting. I think that word is really disgusting.”

“And do you do it with him? Sleep, go to bed, make love, copulate?”

“No, I don’t. Not that it’s any business of yours. He thinks it would be wrong. That means he doesn’t really want to. If men want to they usually do.”

He said: “That has been my experience, certainly.”

They lay side by side like effigies, both staring at the sky. She seemed content not to talk. So the question had at last been put and answered. It had been with shame and some irritation that he had recognized in himself for the first time the nagging of jealousy. More shaming had been his reluctance to put it to the test. And there were those other questions he
wanted to ask but daren’t. “What do I mean to you?,” “Is this important?,” “What do you expect of me?” And, most important of all, but unanswerable, “Do you love me?” With his wife he had known precisely where he was. No marriage had begun with a more definite understanding of what each required of the other. Their unwritten, unspoken, only half-acknowledged prenuptial agreement had needed no formal ratification. He would earn most of the money, she would work if and when she chose. She had never been particularly enthusiastic about her job as interior designer. In return his home would be run with efficiency and reasonable economy. They would take separate holidays at least once every two years; they would have at most two children and at a time of her choosing; neither would publicly humiliate the other, the spectrum of marital offences under this heading ranging from spoiling the other’s dinnerparty stories to a too-public infidelity. It had been a success. They had liked each other, got on with remarkably little rancour, and he had been genuinely upset, if principally in his pride, when she had left him. Fortunately marital failure had been mitigated by the public knowledge of her lover’s wealth. He realized that to a materialistic society losing a wife to a millionaire hardly counted as failure. In their friends’ eyes it would have been unreasonably proprietorial of him not to have released her with a minimum of fuss. But to do her justice, Liz had loved Gregory, would have followed him to California money or no money. He saw again in memory that transformed laughing face, heard her ruefully apologetic voice.

“It’s the real thing this time, darling. I never expected it and I can still hardly believe it. Try not to feel too bad, it isn’t your fault. There’s nothing to be done.”

The real thing. So there was this mysterious real thing before which everything went down, obligations, habit,
responsibility, duty. And now, lying in the dunes, seeing the sky through the rigid stalks of marram grasses, he thought about it almost with terror. Surely he hadn’t found it at last and with a girl less than half his age, intelligent but uneducated, promiscuous and burdened with an illegitimate child. And he didn’t deceive himself about the nature of her hold on him. No lovemaking had ever been as erotic or as liberating as their half-illicit couplings on unyielding sand within yards of the crashing tide.

Sometimes he would find himself indulging in fantasy, would picture them together in London in his new flat. The flat, as yet unsought, no more than a vague possibility among others, would assume dimensions, location, a horribly plausible reality in which he found himself arranging his pictures carefully on a nonexistent wall, thinking over the disposal of his household goods, the exact location of his stereo system. The flat overlooked the Thames. He could see the wide windows giving a view over the river as far as Tower Bridge, the huge bed, Amy’s curved body striped with bands of sunlight from the slatted wooden blinds. Then the sweet, deluding pictures would dissolve into bleak reality. There was the child. She would want the child with her. Of course she would. Anyway, who else could look after it? He could see the indulgent amusement on the faces of his friends, the pleasure of his enemies, the child lurching, sticky-fingered, about the flat. He could smell in imagination what Liz had never let him know in actuality—the smell of sour milk and dirty nappies—could picture the dreadful lack of peace and privacy. He needed these realities, deliberately emphasized, to bring him back to sanity. He was horrified that even for a few minutes he could seriously have contemplated such destructive stupidity. He thought: I’m obsessed by her. All right, just for
these last few weeks I’ll enjoy my obsession. This late summer would be brief enough, the warm unseasonable days of mellow sunshine couldn’t last. Already the evenings were darkening. Soon he would smell the first sour tang of winter on the sea breezes. There would be no more lying in the warm sand dunes. She couldn’t visit Martyr’s Cottage again; that would be recklessly stupid. It was easy to convince himself that with care, when Alice was in London and no visitors expected, they could be together in his bedroom perhaps even for a whole night, but he knew that he would never risk it. Little on the headland was private for long. This was his St. Martin’s summer, an autumnal madness, nothing that the first cold of winter couldn’t wither.