Sin (3 page)

“Charlotte,” I said. “I wasn't at all shocked by the speed of the announcement. They are ”—the word came again— “profoundly, in love.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. I saw that she did not like the idea. To a trained observer like myself, it takes the merest tightening of the muscles round the mouth to show the meanness of the soul.

I kissed Charlotte briefly. I hoped the kiss confused her, coming so soon after my tiny victory. I enjoyed the slight tension of her arm muscles, as I held them before the predatory swoop of my lips, which was impossible for her to escape.

I walked away, and found another group of contented witnesses to Elizabeth's and Hubert's joy. I agreed wholeheartedly with excessive tributes to her beauty. I listened to some friends of Elizabeth, describing with seeming honesty her endless kindness to them. And I thought of how their sudden decision to marry had turned my plan into something much more interesting, more dangerous and more difficult.

With soft smiles, I approached a hopeful Dominick. And I marvelled again at what a secret thing the human heart is, and the human mind. A merciful protection for us all. For who would survive a journey round the mind of another?

No one in the world—no one knew my thoughts. God? I wondered idly. Did God know? Or knowing, care?

SEVEN

A mathematician in love does not approach his beloved with a scientific analysis of the laws of probability of relationships. Particularly a mathematician whose love is not returned.

But perhaps there is a scientific law here after all. Does the love of the lover expand or contract in direct relation to the love returned or withheld? Who can fail to believe that the intensity of one's adoration, if further developed, will not elicit a response? “If there is love in this heart,” the saying goes, “then there is love in that heart. For one hand claps not without the other.” How seductive. And how wrong. For why trap what is already trapped? It is only in flight that we know the freedom of the bird.

These were my idle thoughts on a walk with Dominick after the wedding. Thoughts concealed by my soft smile at his protestations, and expectations. For Dominick had developed the habit of expectation.

And this being a light, feather-soft day, and our being hidden on the other side of the lake, his attempts at seduction were successful. His expectations were fulfilled.

My decision. I allowed. I deigned. It was essential with Dominick to keep a distance. I knew it, he did not. I watched through shuttered eyes his disintegration. And into the after-minutes, while his body reassembled itself, I dreamed a little dream of Elizabeth and Hubert. Their conjunction—in holy matrimony. And again I felt no pain. Dominick whispered words of marriage again into my closed heart. With a sigh of irritation I left my thoughts. I planted doubt, and then its cruel cousin hope, in his heart. But not rejection. I had chosen to lay down my head on the quilted heart of a hosta, crushing it. I felt no guilt. Nature, after all, has never loved us back.

We two walked back to Lexington, its guests now gone. A liar and her lad, with his clever, modish face. His straw-coloured hair endlessly flopping into his glasses. His long body, and all its lines that did not entrance me.

We sat around the table with my mother and father. We ate tiny grilled fish. Then cold chicken covered in a pale lemon cream, and decorated with black olives shaped into hearts. The lilies on the table, some with the closed heads of snakes, gently opened during dinner. Predator turned victim.

I drank red wine and wondered idly what Elizabeth and Hubert were doing. Now. Exactly now. In my mind's eye, I wandered up and down her familiar body. I tried to imagine it with Hubert's eye. And thought of that secret event, for which we find private places, hidden rooms, or darkness. So that no one else will see the particular way man and woman become one. Man thrusting blindly upwards, through the same passage that once he blindly travelled down into the world. Believing that he brings pleasure where once there had been pain. But still it leads to defeat. For from that sweetness come the pain and blood again, as down the passage the cranium pushes through bone. Again. And never once does God ask us for forgiveness.

The red wine in my stomach sickened me. And, idiotically shocked, I thought of Elizabeth pregnant. In birth. A mother.

“They will be very happy together.” My father spoke.

“Is that an order?” I asked.

“Ruth, dear. It's simply my assessment.”

“Based, dear Father, on exactly what?”

“On my knowledge that a man would be foolish indeed not to be happy with Elizabeth.”

“Ah. She has a secret formula, does she? Perhaps when she returns from Greece she can explain it to Dominick. Then he can create a mathematical formula for happiness and become famous. The Dominick Garton Principle of Happiness in Marriage, based on the Ashbridge-Baathus model. First discovered in the Greek archipelago while the couple were on honeymoon.”

Before my father could voice his disapproval, I blew him a kiss, and said: “It's a joke, Father. A joke. Of course they'll be gloriously happy together. And you're right. What man could fail to love Elizabeth?”

My father and mother smiled at each other in uncertain relief.

“And what man could fail to be happy with you, Ruth?” Dominick blew me a kiss.

“Ah, Dominick. My only fan. I do not see myself built for happiness. It's almost an alien concept to me.”

“What nonsense, Ruth. What utter nonsense,” said my father.

“Non sense. Only to you, Father. It makes sense to me.”

“You've had a wonderfully happy life so far. Don't be so careless of it. Let's look at the facts.”

My father and I had often engaged in this semibanter. It was our own language barrier. It had a certain style, specific rules, and achieved the overall objective—non-communication. An essential between adult child and parent. His legal training naturally led him to believe that a question-and-answer technique was the road to the truth. He always forgot that I was not under oath.

“I'm going back to the flat tonight.” Dominick rose to go. “I have an early lecture in the morning.”

“Elizabeth mentioned last week that she is going to keep her studio,” my mother said.

“Yes. She's decided to go on painting there. Hubert's flat is too small,” replied Dominick.

Dominick lived in the same block of flats as Elizabeth. A mathematician with an artist's studio flat. This gave him, he believed, the bohemian air he rather longed for. His was an intelligence trapped within the wrong temperament. But such was his brilliance, and so quickly had it been recognised and rewarded by schools and universities, that the wunderkind never had a chance. He was later so loaded down with academic achievement that he was forced to succumb, and he became his talent. Almost to the same degree as he became English.

His parents were American. His father, like Dominick, was a noted mathematician. His mother, after a number of years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had become a senior consultant to McKinsey.

During a carefully planned mutual assignment to London, he to the London School of Economics, she to the London office of the parent company, Dominick attended Westminster School. There, he fell in love with England. And with all things English. He believed his passion was reciprocated—a familiar blindness in Dominick.

Later, after his parents returned to America, he decided on Trinity College, Cambridge, as opposed to Harvard. There he began to accept what he had only half-understood at Westminster, that his passionate seriousness about his work needed to be leavened by irony. And that, in polite society in England, the sciences were rarely to be mentioned. A minor flirtation with the arts was much more laudable.

I met him at a little party Elizabeth had given a few years previously. As visits to his flat would provide me with a perfect lookout, I encouraged his interest. My seduction of Dominick, in both strategy and tactics, was so subtly planned and executed that in the moment of possession it was his face which portrayed triumph. The increasing urgency of his deepening love for me was the only complication in an otherwise perfect scenario.

Before Dominick there had, of course, been men. There was an early boyfriend of Elizabeth's—a Mexican painter who, to my disappointment (I found this out too late), she had rejected. Then there was a liaison with a wholly unsuitable member of the aristocracy who was playing with the idea of being an artist. That … romance … had allowed me a stolen weekend in Paris. And that side of himself which I guessed he had kept well hidden from Elizabeth was allowed full rein. An interesting and educational two days. The son of a Lexington neighbour proved a much duller conquest. His guilt at his betrayal of Elizabeth was so excessive as to be almost amusing.

I looked at Dominick. Ruth's dedicated lover, never Elizabeth's. The decision to keep her studio surprised me. Elizabeth hadn't told me—perhaps believing it to be of no consequence. But it was of great consequence for Dominick. I sighed. For the immediate future at least, it rather seemed as if Dominick, and our relationship, would survive.

EIGHT

“Well, you two … you couple.”

Hubert smiled. He and Elizabeth, Dominick and I were having a welcome-home dinner at a restaurant close to their home. Elizabeth was not a cook.

Bronzed, hair bleached, dressed in cream silk shirt and dark brown skirt, Elizabeth talked of Greece. Each word was shot through with love. She spoke of colour with her pretty painter's eye, and I felt sure that inevitably she had entered her Greek period. Its blue-green lightness and celestial white would be broken only by some cascade of blushing pink petals. Or perhaps, for dramatic contrast, a black-clothed peasant would ride or stride his or her way across the canvas.

“Well, Madame et Monsieur Hubert Baathus, newly wed … happily married … give us a definition of married happiness.” Dominick was always searching for definitions.

“It does not exist,” Hubert said.

Elizabeth looked shocked.

“Marriage has no intrinsic happiness. Happiness is to be with the one. And to be the only one for the other.”

“With or without marriage?”

“Yes. Though the ease and convenience and pleasure of formal togetherness is a delightful thing. A wise thing. So marriage is wise happiness. No?”

“Your English is improving dramatically.”

“Thank you, Ruth.” He smiled at me.

“Hubert's English is only a little stilted when he first meets people. He is shy.” Elizabeth spoke.

“Shy? … Only a little,” I replied.

“Wise happiness. I really like that. You both, I hope, will have years and years of wise happiness.” Dominick raised his glass. “To wise happiness—the happiness of Elizabeth and Hubert.”

We all went back to Hubert's flat, now their home, for coffee. It was a masculine flat, heavy, dark woods, paisley-patterned curtains, leather sofas—conventional, though elegant. The handsome abode of a handsome man. He looked at me looking at the flat.

“We'll move to Paris in a couple of years. It seemed pointless to set about furnishing a new house.”

“Is that definite?” Dominick asked. I was still digesting the thought of separation.

“Oh yes,” replied Hubert.

“That's why I'll continue to paint in my studio, until we go to Paris,” Elizabeth added. “Hubert assures me that I will have a studio, high at the top of the house.”

I envisaged a new Paris period of rooftops—grey-slated. Which cliche would she pick? Wise happiness was, I felt, going to be very boring. But if I were Elizabeth, what would I find with Hubert? If I were Elizabeth?

“Well, we must leave you two. It's a joy to see you back again. So harmonious. I'm always searching for mathematical harmonies—their beauty would astound you. The Greeks believed they were the essence of goodness, you know.”

“Why, Dominick. I've never heard you speak so romantically about your work before.”

“No, Ruth. Perhaps I'm afraid of mockery.” He did not say whose.

“Love's a miracle. A way of seeing someone … suffused by light. It's like my painting, my unfashionable, light-filled painting. Love's an extra dimension to sight. It gives a light that only the loved one seems to have. And only the lover sees. That's how I see … Hubert.”

Elizabeth turned away at the end of her extraordinary little speech. A speech quite out of character. In her thin, fine face there was a frightening fierceness. Had I, through my astonishment, betrayed my hatred? Had she run for cover?

“Previously, my life was a little spoiled and selfish. Elizabeth has made me better.” Hubert, handsome, happy—and humble.

“And what is the outward sign of this improvement?” I tried to sound mocking.

“There's no outward sign, Ruth. But I have changed. For example, I mock less.”

I had been put in my place.

“Well, Hubert, your English has certainly improved. No problem with nuance anymore.”

He laughed.

“Oh, Ruth, you too will melt.”

Dominick winced at this implication that he was ineffective in thawing my coldness.

Sensitive as ever, Elizabeth noticed. “Dominick has, I think, already started the process. Now I'll be very French, and give you two kisses and say au revoir.”

The kisses were perfunctory. We waved goodbye, and left. The less harmonious couple.

NINE

Is it possible to seduce a happily married man in the early days of his marriage? Particularly a man who sees in his new wife qualities that have meant little to him before.

The ordinary strategies would most certainly not work. Swimming too close to him in the discreetly hidden pool at Lexington, or over-enthusiastically leaning forward in low-cut gown, which I rarely wore anyway. Such full frontal assaults were not for such as he.

At a celebration dinner for my parents' anniversary I wore a perfect curve of dark, red velvet. Though it served to emphasise the ripeness of my body, I knew the effect to be of little interest from the lack of tension in his open, smiling response. And, to be truthful, I too disdained the slight vulgarity of my display.