Sin (7 page)

“I don't know the book.”

Of course you don't, Elizabeth.

“Is it amusing?” Charles asked me.

“Yes.”

My husband looked at me.

Charles said, “You have a very private mind, Ruth.”

“What an extraordinary phrase, Charles. I always see myself as very open.”

“You're not. If you decide to pursue your plan in the future, I'll help. But I'd need to establish whether you had a private passion which you'd bring to the public—or if not, whether you're an effective arbiter of public taste.”

“Which do you think, Charles?”

“I would think not the latter.”

“You know, Charles, you understand Ruth very well.” I heard the note in Dominick's voice.

“Not better than you, Dominick.”

“Private minds—anything that's hidden always fascinates us.”

“Dominick's right.” Elizabeth spoke.

And what would you know of hidden things, Elizabeth? You, who have lived with my hatred for years. Unknowing.

“Well, I've known Ruth longer than anyone. What she hides most often is her brilliance … because she …”

Dominick laughed. Or rather made a sudden, abrupt sound that used the mechanism we know as laughter. The rictus on the face … the force to expel the air through the lungs. All this effort to cover his pain. But then laughter is never passionate.

“Ah, I hear their car.” Charles rose. My parents had been lunching with someone from my father's old regiment, who lived in the vicinity. They joined us for tea.

“Let's go into the garden and watch the boys.”

We all became an audience. We watched their hardy, wiry little legs collide at speed, and yet not break. And our heads were filled with screams that would have turned our blood to ice, had we not seen the boys ride the screams to laughter.

Bodies, warm and dirty, threw themselves at us. We held them tight, and, as boys will, they struggled free again.

“I was in the Navy,” Charles replied to a question from my father.

We were walking back towards the house. It was Armistice Day.

“Ah yes. The Senior Service.” My father smiled at Charles. There was a silence. My father had been captured as a young pilot and had spent a year in Colditz. He never spoke of it. His elder brother had been killed over Berlin. His name was Michael. Whenever my father spoke the name, it seemed to me he quietly saluted a ghost.

“It's a mark of how old I have become.” He sighed as we entered the house. “At last I can … occasionally and quietly … weep for the dead. For today, especially, we should acknowledge their sacrifice. It had a kind of glory.”

I felt my father was summarising his view of the world almost as though he was preparing to leave it.

Later Dominick lay beside me—his long nakedness dense and heavy on the bed. Men do not look right covered in a sheet. Sheets are a woman's adornment. As the nakedness moved towards me I remembered the choreography. And afterwards. My cold eye. Questioning. I wondered if, in the cold eye, he found some peace.

NINETEEN

Elizabeth considered it too cruel that I should receive by telephone the news of my father's sudden death from a heart attack. So she sent Charles to my home. At four in the morning. She knew William had accompanied Dominick to America, on a visit to his parents. She knew I was alone.

She gave me my chance. Her trust in me, and her kindness to me, gave me my chance. And it was my nature to take it. To bank down the sudden shock, to fight the pain. I would mourn later. Now, in this instant, I might know this man, Elizabeth's man—and through him know Elizabeth.

As Charles reached out to comfort me, I held the sympathy in his eyes and transmuted it into something else. It was my gift, you see. To find the centre. As he leaned towards me I moved—in such a way that his weight fell upon me as I collapsed with grief and desire against the wall.

When I opened my eyes, I saw in his face certain clues to my triumph. I saw that he knew himself. From past experience. That needs, past needs—buried now—propelled him towards me. He needed a sense of sin. To keep him in touch with his past.

I slowly opened the door to my dressing room. He followed me, down the steps. As I knew he would. Then, naked, arms above my head, I pulled on Elizabeth's silk slip—ageless enticement. And I thought I saw Elizabeth, ghost-like, stand beside me.

I lay on the floor, and he moved over me on all fours and grabbed my hair. As though to eat it. And then we separated and stood at either end of the narrow room. An image of my father flew across my sodden mind. And was lost. For I remembered that before I was even born it had been too late for us. The old anger crushed the pain that rose in me. And I acknowledged that it was now too late for everything.

My eyes beat Charles down and broke his resistance, as he walked, hypnotised, towards me again.

I took Elizabeth's pristine black shoe and licked the heel. I gave it to him. And quietly lay down. My eyes fixed on his face above me. Slowly he traced down the lines of my body with the gleaming heel of Elizabeth's shoe. Then he hesitated. I raised my back from the floor, for I saw the fear in his eyes. I wished to give him courage. Carefully, as though in a trance, he did what I wanted. And for the first time I wept for what I had become. Falling further away from myself, trailing Charles in his terror and delight towards the hidden face in the rock, which, unknowingly, he had begun to carve.

It was as I believed it would be. Elizabeth lay defeated beneath her black slip. Which I would not let him remove. A line long forgotten, came back to me.
Je est un autre.

I bathed and dressed—in Ruth's clothes. We drove to the hospital in silence. I kissed my mother. She was as noble in grief as one would have expected. Elizabeth opened her arms to me, held me tight and consoled me. Perhaps an acknowledgement that he was my father, my real father. And not hers. Too delicate perhaps, to mention it.

Charles sat with my mother, held her hand and did not look at me. Finally, we all left for Lexington. Charles drove us. The widow, and two wives. One of them his.

An adult family mourning its patriarch is not stricken by grief so much as grieving. Even the sudden death of the old has about it the knowledge that it was foreshadowed.

As I stood in church my sadness was pierced by the light of an endlessly playing internal film of Charles and me. And of our bodies. I looked at Charles secretly, intensely. Hadn't Dominick once told me that gazing at certain objects alters their composition? Are you the same man, Charles? Am I the same woman? Is there a persistent self? Somewhere?

I stood beside Dominick, who was exhausted after his night flight from America. And thought of the lie of the body and of the mind.

At dinner my mother told us of her decision to stay on at Lexington. “This is where I spent my life with him. This is where I feel closest to him. Remember, John spent the week in London for many years, only coming home at weekends. I would love to see you all at weekends. Yes, that would be lovely. You know what joy the children bring me … brought us.”

We knew her to be well cared for by Alice and Ben, who had been with us for years. With promises to carry on “coming home” for weekends, we left Lexington. Dominick went back to America for another week. He would return with William. We had considered a sudden trip back to bury “Grandpa” too traumatic for William, who had stayed with his grandparents. Elizabeth and Charles left for Frimton.

I waited in London. It was Charles's move next.

TWENTY

Two days later his face appeared on the intercom screen. Distorted, almost disguised as himself, he seemed like a robot on a grey canvas. Then he stood framed in the doorway.

“I have a key, you know. For the main door. And for … Elizabeth's …”

“Studio?”

“Yes. Elizabeth is in Frimton. Ruth, I won't demean what happened between us with apologies or explanations. It's now a fact of both our lives.”

I nodded.

“Ruth, I have thought a great deal about what I am going to say to you.”

“Thank you.”

“It was essential to think, Ruth. These are grave matters.”

“And we have full knowledge. But perhaps no longer full consent.”

“What?”

“Oh, it's a definition. Of sin.”

“My wife … my first wife, was a Catholic. I remember now. Grave matter. Full knowledge. And full consent.”

“Exactly.”

“But you're not Catholic, Ruth.”

“No. But religion has always fascinated me.”

“Oh.”

“I surprise you?”

“In every way, my dear.”

Ah … “my dear.”

“I assume you want some form of absolution.”

“No. No, I want to tell you …”

Tell me nothing, Charles. Tell me nothing. I am familiar with sin …

“Let's see. I assume you've come to tell me that ‘this will never happen again,' and to warn me.”

“You insult us both.”

I might win.

“We have a choice. This will sound very cold. Very calculating. Forgive me. Our choice is order or chaos.”

“Well, define ‘order' for me, Charles.”

“The order of denial. Or the order of … deceit.”

“And chaos? What about chaos?”

“Chaos of discovery. And the destruction of our families.”

“And?”

“And you, Ruth, as I have observed, are built for ordered deceit.”

“And you?”

“I don't know. On the surface, perhaps. Even more than you. But I don't know.”

“Elizabeth?” I ventured.

“The first rule, Ruth, is that you will never mention Elizabeth when we are together … like this.”

“Rules?” The rules of engagement.

“Yes. You see, Ruth, we match each other.”

“Perhaps.”

Children alone in the dark who have never been happy or good.

TWENTY-ONE

I, who believed myself a master in most things, now began my apprenticeship to Charles Harding.

I had believed him to be my victim. But he had been more willing than I knew. I had sought to trap. And was trapped, in a world of my own making. Which he came to dominate.

Nothing prepared me for my hungers, which, if not assuaged, would surely devour me.

Charles was not untouched by me—he had needs, too. But he could place limits on his desire. Whereas I had none. So I learned fear. But I never told my fear to Charles. Why arm one's master? He was already strong enough.

Charles was the stronger. And the stronger is always feared. “Better to be feared than loved”? Best to be feared and loved. Can they exist together? They almost always do.

Why does the child love? Fear of abandonment, when sustenance is still needed. Is it the same with “love”? But that is not the correct word. What is the word—when one body feeds another? I had been worshipped by Dominick. I had seen his fear. Of abandonment.

Now it was my turn. It always comes around. Your turn, for pain, for knowledge. The knowledge you wish you had not attained. But it comes. For no one can do your knowing for you.

Elizabeth's studio moved into the pattern of my lusts. Once, just once, I led a trapped Charles past blank, upstanding canvasses, and the blind blue skies she had painted were mocked by me—by my actions. In silence, though with sighs. And Elizabeth's … things … moved deeper into the pattern of my needs.

Over years, the lie became a habit. We wore it well. My lifetime of small deceits had made me a skilled exponent of a dubious art.

Had Charles learned his capacity for treachery early? Or had it suddenly blossomed in that short, fatal relationship of long ago? In the year of Felicity's death.

Perhaps his was just a natural talent. I feared him too much to delve too deeply.

And I sometimes wondered, did he not fear another tragedy? Or were Elizabeth's innocence and goodness his great protection?

Our times together, easily arranged—we had “privileged information”—were compulsive, fierce and never satisfying. They became a spiral staircase into rooms the doors of which we should never have opened. And I led the way. My first obsession leading to the next.

TWENTY-TWO

Housemaster's Report
William is a grave child. In many ways almost old-fashioned. He is, however, well liked by the other boys, although, and we have spoken about this before, he has been the subject of some bullying in the past by two of the more rumbustious personalities in his year.

As you will see from the other masters' comments, William's academic work is very good—particularly in mathematics—not surprising when we consider his background! We look forward to watching him prosper further on his return to us in September.

Andrew Brown, Housemaster

William's serious approach to his work and his generally quiet demeanour has made his first year with us most successful.

Keep up the good work, William.

Broughton West, Headmaster

William does well at Latin. A very real achievement, when we consider that when he came to us his grounding in the subject was not all that it should have been.

Carl Donn, Latin

William has made steady progress in French. His prep is always meticulous. And on time! Well done, William. I gather the family intends spending some time in France this year. This may improve William's accent, which tends to be a little heavy.

Alistair Knight, French

William is top of the class in mathematics. I believe I can claim only a small responsibility in this matter. Nature vs. Nurture? No argument here, I feel.

Duncan Heychurch, Mathematics

William is making good progress in English. He works hard. His written work is exceedingly neat and tidy. What he lacks, I feel, is style. A little more reading perhaps? I have prepared a recommended list—which I attach—as holiday reading. Sorry, William!