Scissors, Paper, Stone (17 page)

‘I mean, how bloody useless!’ she had said, giggling. ‘After all that effort!’ Charlotte laughed along with her but couldn’t help thinking that she would be profoundly depressed if her wedding night turned out to be the same, literal, anti-climax.

For Charlotte, the act of sex had become a means of valuing herself. Until Gabriel, she had not been used to receiving compliments about her appearance from boyfriends. Charlotte did not seem to be the sort of woman who invited these easy snippets of flattery although she was never quite sure why. She had asked one of her boyfriends about it once and he replied, without a trace of either hesitation or irony, ‘But Charl, you’re so capable.’

‘Capable?’ She made a face. ‘Thanks very much.’

‘I mean, I wouldn’t have thought it’s the kind of thing you’d value hearing.’

She thought about this for a second and wondered how on earth she gave such an outward impression of confidence in herself when she felt so differently inside.

‘Every woman wants to hear she’s pretty,’ she said, quietly.

‘Well, you are.’

‘What?’

He sighed. ‘Pretty,’ he said, not raising his eyes from the newspaper he was reading.

It had always been like that. Charlotte had never wanted to ask for a compliment – too needy, she thought with a shudder, and ultimately, too trivial to mean anything – and yet she had secretly been desperate to hear how desired she was. Perhaps, she reasoned, these reluctantly emotive men believed that voicing a thought about her aesthetic qualities unnecessary when it was obvious that she looked nice.

When she was a child, she remembered bursting into tears when she brought home a report card from school that was liberally sprinkled with As and impressive test results. Her mother had read it, nodded her head, and handed it back to Charlotte without a word. Anne seemed surprised to see her daughter crying.

‘What’s wrong?’

It was rare for Charlotte to be able to work out exactly how she felt, to be able to express it in a fashion that would convey the precision of her emotion, but this time, she knew exactly what to say.

‘You never say well done,’ she said, in a raggedy voice that meant she had to stop herself mid-sentence and take a deep breath to continue. ‘Even when I get As. My teachers tell me more than you do.’

Anne raised her eyebrows ever so slightly so that a faint, horizontal line appeared across the top of her brow. She seemed momentarily lost for words. ‘Charlotte, you always do so well . . . I suppose I just expect it of you. And I know that your teachers think you’re terribly impressive so I suppose . . . I suppose I think that they’re telling you all that you need to hear and I don’t have to.’ She took Charlotte’s hand in hers, clumsily, so that Charlotte’s fist was still clenched and Anne had to extend her fingers right round this tight ball of her daughter’s frustration. ‘It’s obvious to me how clever you are,’ she added, softly.

But while Charlotte’s success might have been obvious to her mother, it wasn’t obvious to her and she needed someone to tell her. She regarded this need as a weakness, but it persisted nonetheless.

In the same way, she knew she was pretty because there were brief moments when she was able to look at herself dispassionately and see that the construction of her face held together in a relatively pleasing fashion – the blunt, upturned nose, the spray of freckles, the dark brown hair that hairdressers remarked was unusually thick, the light blue eyes that her friends said made her look vaguely Nordic. But all of this was a logical sort of reasoning: she was presented with the available evidence and she could draw a rational conclusion in much the same way as she could understand, objectively, that Gabriel loved her. Feeling it – actually knowing it without having to force herself to go through the motions of acquiring knowledge – was a different matter entirely. She did not feel beautiful. She needed people to tell her, to put it into plain words that could not be misunderstood. She needed something that could not be argued with.

When this was not forthcoming from a boyfriend, sex had become a substitute for speech. If someone was having sex with her, she reasoned, if the act of penetrating her was making the other person orgasm, then she must be attractive to them. It was a fact and the possession of this fact made her feel relieved and strangely confident for a few brief hours. Because the capacity to make a man weak with sexual desire was also a sort of power. In the past, if she had ever been angry or upset with a boyfriend, she would transmute this unconsciously into sex. She would become deliberately unresponsive. She would not cry out or dilate her pupils in an approximation of longing. She would not wrap her arms around his neck or her legs around his back. She would not touch him beyond the necessary. She would stare coldly into his eyes as he worked his way into her and she would clench her insides to trap him there. She would look at him, in the moments after he came and she felt his stickiness leak out on to the sheets, and she would sense the re-establishment of her superficial dominance. She did not need him like this. She could choose.

Paradoxically, such actions usually had precisely the opposite effect from the one she intended – her unusual submissiveness and wordless acquiescence seemed to turn men on far more than anything else she would do; more than all the sucking and kneeling and stroking and caressing and thrusting and panting. Often, Charlotte would feel as if she was looking on from the corner of the room at a convincing performance, rather than being carried away with the mutual abandon we are all taught to crave. It seemed as if sex was a conglomeration of images learned from movies and magazines. It, too, was never truly felt inside.

With Gabriel, it had been different. The images were all still there, but they were rearranged in such a way that she suddenly comprehended what they stood for. The sexual archetype, which had previously been painted out in monochrome, all at once became a blaze of colour.

‘So this is what sex is meant to be like,’ Gabriel had once said in the early days of their relationship, a laconic post-coital smile on his face.

‘That was incredible,’ said Charlotte, unable to escape the cliché of self-congratulation.

‘You’re incredible.’

Sex with Gabriel had been a shining discovery. Charlotte had expected it to be good, and it was, but it was more than that. It was – and she hated herself for sounding so trite about it – meaningful. It made them stronger, brought them closer. It was an expression of total honesty: no hiding, no pretence, no anxiety that either of them was being judged. She knew that neither of them had ever had sex like it and, for the first time, she felt she wanted to bring him pleasure rather than going through the motions because it was expected of her. She felt no distaste when she took his cock in her mouth. He was the only man whose cum she had ever swallowed. She was not scared of him.

Or at least, she hadn’t been until a few weeks ago. Then, inexplicably, things had shifted without either of them noticing, like the transfiguration of a landscape by a glacier’s creeping progression. Charlotte had stopped wanting to have sex. Neither of them thought much of it at first. It lay, unspoken, between them. They still kissed and cuddled and did all the other things that old swimming-pool posters would categorise as ‘heavy petting’. But there was no penetration. Whenever they got to the stage where it seemed to be the inevitable next step, Charlotte placed her hand softly but insistently on Gabriel’s chest and pushed him away with a smile and a shake of the head. He had accepted this for over a month without questioning her. But now, the shapeless feeling of unease had solidified. Gabriel was looking at her expectantly. Charlotte had to say something.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, more sulkily than she meant to.

‘You don’t need to be sorry. I just want to know what’s going on. What’s going on in here?’ He tapped the side of her head.

How to tell him? How to tell him that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable was directly related to that dinner with her father, to that profound internal misery that was gnawing away at her? How to begin to tell him all that had happened? She couldn’t. She could barely explain it to herself. She did not want to think about it more than she had to and she refused to let it define her. She imagined it polluting her life, a black swarm of flies blotting out the sun. If she did not admit it, it could not exist. If she did not acknowledge its power over her, it had none. Whatever ‘it’ was.

She looked up at Gabriel’s face, at its open sweetness: the large brown eyes that appeared bigger without glasses, their uncomplicated roundness reminding her fleetingly of those manga cartoon characters who seemed to swallow up the world around them in a single gaze. He was a decade her senior and yet, in this single moment, she felt so much older than him, so much more lived-in than this man-child who held her tight and did not for one second guess at the darkness that lay beneath. How could she drag him into the murkiness? It would endanger all that she most needed in him: his purity of intention, the honesty and directness of everything he said and felt.

‘I think I’m just a bit stressed,’ she said finally, and she knew that he was not convinced by this half-hearted attempt at dismissal. So she played the joker card, the one she knew there was no answer to other than affection. ‘You know, with my father and everything going on at the hospital and there’s still no change in his condition. My mother’s driving me mad but I know it’s not her fault.’ Charlotte took a deep breath, scratching the tender flesh of her inner elbow with one finger so that dry flakes of her eczema scattered over the pillow. Gabriel took her hand softly and held it away from her. Her fingernail, when she looked at it, had a thin red-brown line of blood at its tip.

‘Don’t do that, you’ll make it worse.’ He drew her into him so tightly that she could feel the strong protrusion of his veins against her back. ‘I’m so sorry, Charlotte. I’ve been incredibly selfish, I know I have. Of course this is going to have an impact on you. I don’t know how you’ve coped and here I am, I should be supporting you and instead, well, instead I’m demanding sexual satisfaction when clearly it’s the last thing on your mind.’

‘You’ve been wonderful,’ said Charlotte, who meant it. ‘Truly, you have.’

‘I haven’t. I don’t feel I’ve done enough, but you say you don’t want me to come with you to the hospital –’

‘I don’t,’ she said, sharply. ‘I really don’t.’

‘I’d do anything for you. You know that.’ He cupped the back of her head in his hand. She felt immediately guilty for having made him feel sympathy for her. Although Charlotte rarely admitted it, she knew that she felt little compassion for her father, lying there in his semi-dead state. She could pretend, of course. She had been used to doing that for most of her life. She could go and sit by his bedside and even take his hand on occasion and she could talk in a blithe and essentially meaningless fashion and, in a curious sort of way, it was a release. It was the sort of relationship she had always wanted with her father – easy chit-chat, unrestricted by the weight of knowledge that bore down on their shoulders like the heavy steel girders that kept you in place on rollercoaster rides. It was the only time she had ever felt wholly free of his judgement. She no longer craved his approval or pride because she knew he was incapable of giving it. She no longer felt the queasy trickle of threat that had run through much of their communication. She didn’t mind being alone with him any more because he couldn’t touch her, in any way.

How could she tell Gabriel all of this? She couldn’t. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. And so, because it was easier than verbal language, because it would mean she didn’t have to explain, she kissed him fully on the mouth and switched off the part of her mind that was screaming no and when it got to that pinprick moment when sex seemed the unavoidable conclusion, it was Gabriel who pushed her away, tenderly, with a smile and nothing else. She smiled back, relieved. They went to sleep, curved towards each other, their heads and toes touching like brackets at each end of a sentence.

Anne; Charles

It all started to go wrong almost immediately. Looking back at the early days of her marriage, Anne was always struck by how quick the change had been. There was none of the gradual slippage that she might have expected, none of the neat narrative clues that would have made sense of the sudden shift in tone. There was no little give-away sign, no scent of perfume on his shirt collar, no sleeping in separate beds, no slow drip drip drip of the tell-tale disintegration that pushed couples apart from each other in books or soap operas. It seemed simply as if Charles had shut a door, flicked a switch, drawn a line; as if, having married her, she was packaged neatly into a box labelled ‘wife’ that he no longer had to bother with. He had achieved the conventional marriage to the pretty bride without much effort, and it felt to Anne as if he had accomplished what he had set out to do and could put it to one side. It was as though he had met some internal target, as though he viewed the act of marriage as a chore to be ticked off on a list of necessities so that he might be liberated to get on with the rest of his life. Being married, for Charles, was enough. He didn’t need it to mean anything.

The wedding day went exactly to plan. The village church near her parents’ home was filled with so many sweet peas that Anne fancied she could smell their marzipan pungence as soon as she emerged from the pigeon-grey vintage car in her white silk dress.

‘I’m so happy, Daddy,’ she said to her father as he proffered his arm, guiding her over the grassy divots and the stone slabs engraved with ancestral names.