Love (7 page)

Annabel, altogether too white and sinister in the soft light, was slowly blowing out the candles one by one. Because of the indifference natural to her, Lee thought she showed no interest in what had happened to Buzz though she might
have been too frightened to want to speak of it. However, he was too embarrassed at so much hysteria to do anything but act as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Besides, she would have to get used to that sort of thing, if she was to live with them for ever. They went to bed together and it was no better and no worse than any other time except that Lee found it more difficult than usual, for he remembered that a door can be only open or closed and he had made some formal promises, before witnesses, that he ought not to sleep with any other woman again until the end of his natural life which meant, perhaps, another forty years. Unless Annabel died. Barricaded behind her immobility, Annabel felt nothing but forgot the wedding ceremony almost immediately. Next morning, she started to paint the walls dark green.

In the rich, dark room his touch told her he could not deceive her but she said: ‘If you deceive me, I’ll die,’ and he hugged her more closely, on the brink of treacherous tears, for she did not even suspect him after they had lived together for so long. She would as soon have thought that her coronation mugs, her Staffordshire pottery figure of Prince Albert and her brass bedstead itself be unfaithful to her or her own clothes commit adultery. He occupied the most important place among these possessions she had bought at auction sales or which Buzz obtained for her; they went to the city tip together, too, and raked through ashes for objects. And they went out stealing while Lee was at work, to come home with their arms full of things, many of them useless.

Lee deluded himself that, since he was not emotionally involved with the girl, Carolyn, he was not, significantly, unfaithful to his wife. In the period of introspection which followed the inevitable catastrophe, he had ample time to ironically applaud the extent of his self-deceit but now he had neither the time nor the inclination to do so nor any intimation a catastrophe might be near for he thought that he had finally established an equilibrium and now things could go on for ever.

‘Sleeping with Annabel is like reading Samuel Beckett on
an empty stomach,’ he said to Carolyn as he walked her home through deserted streets in the small hours. Though he spoke primarily to clarify the situation to himself and so excuse it (for he felt some premonitions of guilt) it came through to her as a seduction speech; it interested her in him. When they reached her room, he blinked at the light and inspected her posters and paper flowers curiously. He had forgotten how far Annabel’s gloomy interior deviated from a young girl’s norm. Momentarily embarrassed, Carolyn halted with her fingers on the fastening of her fur jacket, for something in his manner suggested that though they had returned to her room with only one purpose, the act seemed too intimate to be performed by people so unfamiliar to one another.

‘Do right because it is right,’ thought Lee but the motto was no help at all since it only implied the question of the nature of the right.

She laughed out of embarrassment and enquiry; the space between them vanished immediately. Contentless sexuality is the most puritanical of all pleasures since it is pure experience devoid of any extrasensory meaning and Lee suddenly appreciated the iron will of the wife of his tutor in ethics, who had been strong enough to evade the perils of the aftermath in which confidences may be exchanged and information gathered. Carolyn told him how she was in love with someone who was in love with some other person and, in return, he felt bound to offer her a few behavioural snapshots of Annabel, such as Annabel drawing her deceitful tree that winter morning; Annabel flipping his penis between her fingers and asking, ‘What is it for?’ and Annabel being beaten. But he realized these were not so much pictures of actual events, even though they had all happened, but somehow the terms in which he was forced to describe them turned them into stills from expressionist films, stark, grotesque and unnatural. So he talked a little more, though, by trying to formulate and coherently relate the exact truth about certain aspects of their relationship, he inflated these details out of all proportion and, as soon as he showed her Annabel being beaten, he knew he had gone too far.

He and Annabel sometimes played chess for she liked to handle the pieces of a red and white Chinese ivory set that Buzz had somehow acquired for her; she would fall into a reverie, her eyes fixed vacantly on the board caressing the knight or castle in her hand while Lee gnawed his fingernails and waited for some startling, irrational move which would throw his mathematical attack into disarray.

‘She plays chess from the passions and I play it from logic and she usually wins. Once, I took her queen and she hit me.’

Though, he recalled, not sufficiently brutally to require that he tie her wrists together with his belt, force her to kneel and beat her until she toppled over sideways. She raised a strangely joyous face to him; the pallor of her skin and the almost miraculous lustre of her eyes startled and even awed him. He was breathless with weeping, a despicable object.

‘That will teach you to take my queen,’ she said smugly. There were bruises on her shoulders and breast when she took off her sweater to go to bed. She stroked herself thoughtfully and suggested: ‘I should like a ring with a moonstone in it.’

Her transparency astonished him but he was guilty enough to go and look for a moonstone ring the next day. But there were no moonstones to be bought in the city so he found her a print of Millais’ ‘Ophelia’ in a second-hand shop because Annabel often wore the same expression and she seemed surprised and contented enough with that, though he suspected she bore him a concealed grudge.

‘What was she doing?’ asked Carolyn. ‘Was she trying to humiliate you?’

‘Maybe. It’s a roundabout way of doing it, though.’

Already he felt remorse that he had told this story in such a way that he himself appeared in a good light, for so he betrayed Annabel when he did not know who she thought he was when he beat her. As he returned home, the street lights were winking out and the birds singing. He often went out without Annabel and came home late for his friends bored her but this time she woke up as he slid into the bed and said: ‘I had a bad dream. It was
morning and you weren’t here and were never coming back.’ He closed his eyes and pressed his face into the pillow but could not forbear to take hold of her terrible, hot, sticky hand for he knew he was her only friend although she did not like him much.

‘Sometimes I surprise her in front of a mirror, practising smiling,’ Lee told his new mistress and it was true, as far as it went, for he often found Annabel smiling to herself in the mirror and he could not think what else she might be doing if it was not practising how to smile.

‘Oh, darling, she does sound a bitch,’ said Carolyn with false lightness; she was not an imaginative girl.

His face went as blank as if all capacity for expression had dropped straight out of it and Carolyn learned, in that moment, that a woman in love can never afford to reveal what feelings she may have towards her lover’s wife. This knowledge in itself would have been worth the emotional price of the whole experience to Carolyn but, by the end of the affair, she had acquired so much miserable information about men and women she almost decided to give up relationships for good for, if she fell in love with Lee to distract herself, the cure proved worse than the disease.

She was a student of English literature and knew both brothers by sight and by word of mouth; they had an attractive reputation of danger because Buzz was a petty criminal and all kinds of rumours went around about the three-cornered household. Carolyn saw the wife once or twice in the street and dismissed her from her mind for Carolyn was far prettier than Annabel, much more passionate and three times as comprehensible. She was not at all prepared for the overwhelming jealousy she began to feel for this shadowy figure. It was as if she found herself cast willy-nilly in the role of the Other Woman and now she had to learn the entire traditional script, no matter how crippling she found it to her self-esteem. So, much later the same evening that Annabel had been terrified by the sun and moon, Carolyn arrived at Lee’s flat with some of her friends because Buzz was giving a party and Carolyn could use it as an excuse to infiltrate Lee’s home.

Buzz stuck candles by their own grease on to every flat surface and Lee helped him, half in hopes the house would catch fire and burn down for Buzz had told him about the scene on the hill. He had tried to talk of it to Annabel, she could not or would not answer him and now he was in a mood of savage depression. Buzz, half naked, had covered himself in stripes of red and black greasepaint. He pushed Annabel’s bed into a corner, cleared away enough of their common junk to make a dancing space and opened the double doors to create a single, large, L-shaped room. By the time Carolyn and her cover arrived, the party could be heard half a block away and the hosts were lost among the guests.

Annabel sat wrapped in a flowered silk shawl making right angles to the wall on her brass bed, still too frozen with fear to drink from the glass of red wine she held in her hand. When Lee felt her eyes upon him, he thought she was privately accusing him of hypocrisy and soon grew in the mood for violence. The brothers danced together, a put-on or come-on for which they were notorious, an exotic display. Loud music played. Carolyn detached herself from her group and edged down the room until she reached the long windows. She slipped the catch on one window and let in a breath of cold air which made the candle flames around her quiver and sent coruscating lights up and down the shining surface of her white satin dress. Lee saw her and was by now drunk enough to give her his most dazzling smile. Her principal distinguishing feature was an air of tranquil self-confidence and he thought it was both plausible and even inevitable she might light him out of Juliet’s tomb into some kind of promised land.

Afterwards, the events of the night seemed, to all who participated in them, like disparate sets of images shuffled together anyhow. A draped form on a stretcher; candles blown out by a strong wind; a knife; an operating theatre; blood; and bandages. In time, the principal actors (the wife, the brothers, the mistress) assembled a coherent narrative from these images but each interpreted them differently and drew their own conclusions which were all
quite dissimilar for each told himself the story as if he were the hero except for Lee who, by common choice, found himself the villain.

‘You’re crying,’ said Carolyn, touched.

He did not bother to correct her. He stood by the window and looked out across the tops of the leafless trees to the few windows still left glowing in the houses on the other side of the square.

‘We all stole a car, once. Well, it wasn’t so much stealing, more like taking and driving away, they told me I was too timorous for authentic stealing. I opened the glove compartment and found a leaflet that promised you a thousand destinations. Think of that.’

Carolyn, mystified, could not see the point.

‘What happened then?’

‘We couldn’t decide where to go,’ said Lee and laughed.

Annabel glimpsed the nacreous shimmer of Carolyn’s dress intermittently through the shoulders of the dancers. The music continued to play extremely loudly. Buzz, magnificently painted, sat briefly beside her.

‘All right, are you?’

She nodded. They both watched Lee’s leonine left profile bent over the head of the girl in white.

‘She’s done up like a bride,’ said Annabel softly, so that nobody could hear her.

‘Sure you’re all right?’ demanded Buzz, quivering in the expectation of disaster.

‘Give me your ring.’

He slipped his father’s silver ring on to her thin forefinger, the only one it would fit, and she allowed him a ghostly smile.

‘Now I’m invisible,’ she said with satisfaction. Since they often played inscrutable games together, he thought no more about it but smiled and kissed her before he went away. She drew the shawl around her shoulders and set her feet on the ground. It is hard to say if she actually thought she was invisible; at least, she felt as if she might be. She picked her way delicately towards the window, drew aside the curtain and pressed her face against the cool glass. She saw, in the
most immediate, domestic terms, a recreation of the sun and moon in appalling harmony.

Carolyn had become so obsessed with Lee that she had lost all sense of discretion or any sense at all. The landlord had replaced the rusted wrought iron of the lower part of the balcony by some graceless wooden boards so they were concealed from the street but Annabel gazed through the window at them like an infatuated spectre. The spectacle was as silent as if it took place under water and the arrangement of interlocking lines was familiar enough in itself; but this girl’s face was vividly contorted, not bland and impassive like that of the whore in the photograph and Lee was lost to her in a secret, ultimate privacy. She could not incorporate this manifestation of his absolute otherness anywhere into her mythology, which was an entirely egocentric universe, and she felt a grieving jealousy of the act itself, which she understood only in symbolic terms.

‘If you deceive me, I’ll die,’ repeated Annabel as if it were a logical formula. If she felt relief and even pleasure each time she herself evaded real contact with him, knowing the magic castle of herself remained unstormed, she thought perhaps he kept the key to the castle, anyway, and one day he might turn against it and rebel. But when she saw rebellion in action, she was forced to desperate measures to disarm him for she might, possibly, perhaps, hopefully, be able by these means to turn an event that threatened to disrupt her self-centred structure into a fruitful extension of it. She let the curtain fall back into place and turned from the window. The party went on as if nothing had happened and Buzz was deep in conversation with a Black man in dark glasses so she could get no help from him. It was practical help rather than comfort she wanted. Because she went stealing with Buzz and they shared the secret of the ring, she did not regard Buzz as too much separate from herself but it was Lee she loved and Lee she now intended to wound.