Scissors, Paper, Stone (23 page)

She took a large sip from the glass of wine that had appeared in her hand. It mingled with the gin she had drunk earlier, enveloping her in a cloud of fuzzy detachment. She noticed that her eyes were not focusing quite as sharply as they should and that her tongue felt slightly too big for her mouth. She scanned the room, trying to find Charles’s familiar outline but she was overwhelmed by the noise of braying couples, the clink of bottle against glass and the bright swirl of her green, green dress against the Trenemans’ patterned white carpet. She felt a sudden urge for water.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to Marcus, who was looking at her with great significance, his eyes attempting to search out reciprocation where there was none. She was familiar with how that felt, with the cruel unrequitedness of it, and she felt a pang of sympathy for him. ‘Sorry, I just need to get some water.’

Marcus nodded his head limply, accustomed to the sensation of defeat, and turned back towards Antonia without a word.

Anne made her way to the Trenemans’ kitchen along the corridor, steadying herself by tracing the walls with the flattened palm of her hand. The air seemed to expand and contract around her, painting the evening in surreal, dream-like shades. She must have drunk more than she thought and she hadn’t eaten since breakfast – there never seemed much point in digesting a proper meal when Charles wasn’t there.

The kitchen was tucked away behind the stairs, around a corner at the end of the corridor. The door was closed but a narrow line of light was filtering through the gaps where the edges did not quite meet the frame. There was muffled laughter coming from inside and something that sounded like hushed squeaking. She wondered idly whether the Trenemans’ two young children – Camilla and Timothy – had crept downstairs to polish off the leftovers, sipping on half-finished glasses of wine with an illicit, adult excitement. She smiled at the thought of this as she pushed open the door.

A bright yellow light poured out of the room, temporarily blurring her focus and numbing her sense of what was going on. She found she had to take a step back before she could work out what she was seeing, consciously removing herself from the immediacy of the scene so that the oddness of it could be filtered through her mind.

There were two figures huddled together, one male, with his back to her, and one female. The woman was half-sitting, half-standing against the lip of the sink, her pale purple angora cardigan in a state of disarray, her knee-length skirt hitched up over her thighs so that the material had become stretched out of shape, her flesh straining and spilling against the hem that was cutting into her skin. The woman’s plump legs, shiny with the sheen of nude stockings, were spread apart. The man was pushed up against her, one arm round the woman’s back, the other hand pressed up underneath her skirt. The woman was giggling and simultaneously trying not to. Her eyes were shut in an approximation of helpless lust, the lids smeared with bright blue shadow. The man was laughing softly, shushing her and then groaning, softly at first and then more loudly as his hand worked its way further up the skirt. She squirmed at his touch, wriggling underneath his weight and then she seemed to surrender herself to it and the giggles transmuted into a series of high-pitched chirruping noises.

For several moments, the couple did not realise they were being watched. The man’s arm was pumping up and down. The woman was panting noisily, her cheeks glistening, her hair coming undone. Then, mid-squeal, the woman opened her eyes. Her face slackened in horror. Her mouth dropped open. She looked at Anne standing in the doorway and then looked away.

‘Charles,’ the woman said, but still the man’s arm kept moving. ‘Charles,’ Cynthia said, her voice more calm and adult than Anne had ever heard it.

‘What?’ His arm stopped moving. He was wearing his favourite tweed jacket, the one with patches that Anne had sewn on when his elbows wore through the tattered fabric.

She stared at the familiar outline of his broad shoulders, at the thickness of his hair, at the back of his head, his neck, the places she had touched and caressed and thought were hers alone. She stared at them with such intensity that she felt she could almost touch and smell him. She stared at him and willed him back to how he used to be, to how she had once imagined him. She stared at him and hoped, beyond hope, that she wasn’t seeing what was in front of her. And she realised, all at once, that this couldn’t be explained away and the knowledge of that felt like a rock being thrown into a deep, deep well, the echo of its fall sounding in the pit of her stomach.

He turned, at last, to look at her. She saw the blueness of his eyes and she saw that there was nothing beyond them. Wordlessly, Anne walked into the centre of the kitchen, still staring at them, trapped in their farcical embrace against the sink. She looked at them for what felt like a long time, her breath coming and going with disquieting regularity – in and out, in and out, in and out – the soft, whistling sound of it displacing the dead air in the room, shifting its atoms to one side, squeezing out the weight and shape and heat of what surrounded her so that there was nothing left except a bright blank numbness.

For a brief suspended moment she wondered if perhaps she was going to scream, or slap Cynthia around the face, or hurl a glass against the wall so that it would shatter into a thousand shrapnel splinters. And then she knew she wasn’t going to do any of these things. She swallowed the scream. She stilled her hand. She stifled the physical impulse to react.

She had lost faith in her own judgement, in her own ability to read a situation, to decipher what it meant. Her confidence had been chipped away, small slivers of certainty chiselled off over time so that all that was left was a single, fragile shaving blown about in the breeze of other people’s movement. She had lost her naive ease of self, the unquestioned assumption that the world was a fundamentally good place and that she was owed her own happy existence in it. She had lost it without noticing what was happening and now she had no one left to blame but herself and her own youthful arrogance. She had been so conceitedly confident, so irredeemably smug when she got married.

She did not want to run back to her parents and admit defeat. She did not want Frieda to have been right. She did not want to be the wife whose husband had been caught in an embarrassing tryst with the bubbly next-door neighbour, a woman inferior in both looks and intelligence; a woman so different in outlook and personality that it seemed to overturn everything Anne had once thought about her own attractiveness. She wanted to believe in what she had once taken for granted and, for this to be achieved, she had to sacrifice this new, uncomfortable knowledge. She had to push it to one side and pretend she had never seen it. Because, above and in spite of it all, she still wanted Charles. And although she hated herself for this, although she despised her own weakness, she knew with insurmountable certainty that this was the single most important fact of her existence. She was in love with him and she always would be, however trapped it made her. She couldn’t explain it. But there was something that pulled her fatally towards his power, as if the blackness of him drained everything else of colour.

No one spoke.

Anne turned and walked out of the kitchen. The swish and jangle of her dress made a weirdly tinny sound as she moved. She took her coat from a pile hanging over the banisters. She let herself out of the front door and walked back down the road to their house.

That was when the bitterness started to bloom inside her, a bruise spreading inexorably outwards, staining her consciousness. Gradually, over the coming weeks and months and years, Anne started to realise her own personality no longer existed as a separate entity. The wholeness of her identity began to divide and scatter into tiny pieces that drifted noiselessly into the atmosphere. She was losing herself, sinking slowly into the silt, waiting for Charles to come back to her, waiting, waiting, waiting for the affirmation that she had been right all along.

Charlotte

Charlotte had once admitted to Gabriel that she had never raised her voice in anger to either of her parents. They were talking about something entirely unconnected, drinking strong mugs of foamy coffee at their local café – the sort of place that was slightly too smug for its own good: its bread was ‘artisan’ and you had to sit at a rustic-style communal oak dining table – and he asked her to remember the last time she had argued with her family. Charlotte took a small bite of her heart-shaped shortbread biscuit and reflected for a few seconds, a small line appearing between her eyebrows as she thought. ‘I don’t think I ever have.’

Gabriel’s mouth dropped open.

‘What?’ he said incredulously, dropping his teaspoon for effect. ‘You must have argued with your parents. Everyone argues with their parents.’

Charlotte laughed. ‘I can’t remember a single time I’ve ever raised my voice at them.’

‘You’ve never raised your voice at them? Charlotte, my darling –’ He took her hand in his and it felt warm, like fresh-baked dough. ‘You’ve got serious problems.’

And it was true that Charlotte could not remember ever having shouted at either Anne or Charles, despite often feeling so angry towards them. She could remember clearly the feelings of pent-up rage, but she did not have a memory of ever having translated that rage into anything external. She had never once lashed out.

‘You shout at me all the time,’ said Gabriel, kissing the tips of her knuckles. He had a small speck of foam from his cappuccino at the corner of his lips. Charlotte wiped it away with her forefinger.

‘Mucky.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m terribly mucky. I’m also very dirty-minded.’ Then he got that look in his eye and Charlotte knew that they would spend much of the afternoon in bed, with the blinds down against the outside world, cocooned in the lovers’ luxury of doing something not-quite-right in the middle of the day.

But afterwards, she kept coming back to that conversation. Why was it that she felt able to shout at Gabriel – to scream and be unreasonable and emotional and irrationally passionate all at once until it was out of her system – in a way that she wasn’t able to with her own parents? She came to the conclusion that part of it was to do with fear. She was always frightened of upsetting the febrile equilibrium at home, of unwittingly ripping a hole in the tightly stretched film of unspoken accusation that lay between her and her parents. If it was unspoken, it meant that all three of them could pretend it didn’t exist. It meant that they could go on acting like a normal family even if the performance had no depth. What mattered was the appearance: both to the outside world but, more importantly, to each other.

There was another, more ingrained fear that Charlotte found it difficult to acknowledge to herself and that was the fear of her father. It was a terror that mingled with admiration and a desire for affection, so that Charlotte could often not distinguish between the knotted-together threads of frayed emotion. The thought of facing him down, of accusing him, of telling him exactly what he had done to her, was impossible. It left Charlotte with a sense of nauseous trepidation. He would be able to out-argue her, as he had always done. But he was also in a position of power: he could withdraw his love.

The realisation horrified her. For as long as she could remember, Charlotte had valued herself according to the value placed on her by others. It was a curiously exhausting way to live a life. She cared what passers-by in the street thought of the way she looked, just as she cared what the girls at school had made of her dress-sense. She laboured under the constant apprehension that people were laughing at her, making fun of her on some level that she did not understand, keeping secrets from her. As she had grown older, she had developed a means of arguing herself out of such feelings with the application of objective logic. She could talk herself into believing, quite rightly, that most people had more important things to worry about than what particular shade of eyeshadow or denier of stocking she was wearing on any given day. And then she found that the whole process was much easier if she didn’t respect the person – if Charlotte could dismiss their opinions as immaturity or stupidity or intolerance. She tried, as much as she could, to do this with Anne. She felt – erroneously perhaps – that she could out-think her own mother, that her way of looking at things was somehow more philosophical, more rational than Anne’s breezy expectation that the world would arrange itself around her.

But her father remained unassailable. He represented, for Charlotte, the purest type of intellect – an intellect that did not impose limits on itself for fear of being cruel to or damning of others. This made him self-centred, arrogant and bullying. But it also made him a rigorous thinker, an inveterate charmer and a man whose good approval still meant everything to his own daughter. She wanted, so very much, to hate him and yet she found herself simultaneously drawn to him, ineluctably, like a small river current sucked to the brink of a thunderous waterfall.

What else was she apart from her father’s love? What else was she worth? How could she possibly tell him all this? How could she make him understand, make him pay for what he had done when part of her had craved his attention all along?

And because she was unused to speaking about what she actually thought, she became, over the years, less and less able to work out what it was she felt. It left her horribly confused. Occasionally, with Gabriel, she thought she was angry only to discover she was in tears and that her overriding feeling was one of impenetrable sadness. Frequently, she found she was in the middle of an argument she had instigated, fighting for all she was worth, only to realise that she wanted it to be over as quickly as possible, that she didn’t mind admitting she was wrong if only they could kiss and love each other again. Gabriel said she was the most defensive person he had ever met. Charlotte knew that her defensiveness was merely a disguise for the deep-down dread that she would lose him; that he would discover, after all, she wasn’t worth what he had thought.