Damage (8 page)

I didn’t write to him at all the next term. In my last week he sent a little card which simply read ‘Thank You’.

That summer we seemed to be our old happy selves again. My mother sought in vain to arrange teenage parties. Children of friends came to stay. But Aston and I were only truly happy with each other. We were more like children than young adolescents. He dazzled me with his knowledge of mythological heroes and Greek gods. I impressed him with my skill at the piano.

When I started my new term in September I began to write to him again.

He replied immediately.

‘I think there is nothing in the world as terrible as Love. I need silence from you. I cannot bear it here otherwise. Aston.’

I didn’t write again. When I talked to my mother on the phone, and asked about Aston, she said, ‘Everything’s going to be all right. It’s just adolescence, darling. I remember my own.’

That Christmas, my body had almost settled into a shape that really hasn’t changed much since. I felt very different from the summer before, heavier, stronger. I was developing much faster than Aston. He was taller. But his face, though thinner and more angular, still seemed basically unaltered.

His first words to me were ‘Oh, Anna, Anna, how you have changed!’

He had tears in his eyes. He moved towards me slowly, awkwardly, as if he was wounded in some terrible way.

I began to feel ill-at-ease with him. Uncertain what behaviour was appropriate.

The first week seemed to pass in furtive glances, and nervous laughter, and dying conversations that never went anywhere.

My mother insisted on a Christmas party for ‘the young people’. Aston protested violently at the idea.

‘It’s a cliche, parties with dancing. You can’t force friendships. Leave us be.’

But she was determined.

‘You two are becoming positively reclusive. It’s just not healthy. You need friends. This is a lovely time in your lives. Anna keeps turning down invitations to parties, it’s ridiculous. As for you, Aston, you’re so unfriendly to everyone, you don’t get any. It’s time it all stopped. I’m having a Christmas party here. That’s that.’ The invitations went out to all the children of the right age that she knew in her circle. Not an enormous number, but enough.

Aston was impossible. He wouldn’t dress properly. He was barely civil to the guests.

I had a marvellous pink dress, I remember. I found I enjoyed the dancing and all the flattery, the looks, and the fumbling of the more daring boys.

Aston kept leaving the party. He kept disappearing then reappearing with a haunted look on his face.

He came to my room when the party had ended. He was weeping. ‘I know everything is about to change for ever. You are changing, Anna. We have had our last summer. I don’t think I like the world very much any more.’

He came into my bed, and we lay chastely side by side.

But young boys in their early teens cannot lie chaste for long, beside a female body. Suddenly he was erect. Such a little movement, such a fleeting caress and his semen was on my stomach. He wept. His tears ran down my breasts. I felt as though I had received some strange benediction. Semen and tears. They would always be symbols of the night for me.

The next day we kept a distance from each other. It seemed better that way. I had a date that evening. One of the boys from the party had asked me to a dinner dance.

My vanity and my new confidence made me dress carefully, in a white dress with a low neckline. Aston opened the door for me, with a mock bow of both contempt and anger.

When I returned, I sat in the boy’s car outside our house. Unexpectedly, he kissed me. Then he tried awkwardly to touch my breasts. I was not unduly alarmed. In fact, pleasure was my main emotion. As I turned to get out, I saw Aston. He was gazing down at us from an upstairs window. I have never forgotten the look on his face, and yet even after all these years I have not found the words to describe it. Perhaps there are human expressions which only the artist can catch.

He followed me into my bedroom.

‘Next time he will go further,’ he said. ‘The time after that, even further. Until one night he will fuck you. That’s the perfect description of what will happen to you.’

‘Oh, darling Aston, please, please don’t.’ I was crying now. They seemed such terrible words, ‘he will fuck you’. Aston looked almost ugly as he said them.

He left the room. I locked the door. I don’t know why I did that. But it was very deliberate. I heard him shortly afterwards rattle the handle of the door. He whispered to me and the words were muffled as though he was sobbing.

‘Anna, Anna, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Anna. You’ve locked yourself away from me. I can’t bear it. Oh, it will get worse. I know it. It will. It must get worse. I’m doomed. There’s no hope for me.’

I did not open the door. I lay there trying to calm myself, to work out what was happening. Then I fell asleep.

I was awakened by a most awful sound. It was not a scream exactly. It was as though a desperate cry for help was being choked off, and then being released again. It was an animal sound. I fell out of bed and raced towards the door. My room was opposite Aston’s and as if in a dream I saw my father trying to pull my mother from Aston’s bathroom. My father was struggling so much with his burden as he tried to move towards the bedroom door that he seemed to be inching his way across Aston’s room.

‘Don’t go in there, Anna! Don’t move any further.’

But I ran past him to the bathroom door. Aston was lying in the overflowing bath. His wrists were cut, and his neck was slashed, and the bloodied water splashed my feet. He looked like some pale doll creature, who was not dead, but who had never been alive. I pulled a little bathroom stool to the side of the bath and sat there cradling his head. My father came back with the doctor.

My father looked at us, and whispered, ‘Impossible, it’s impossible that what I see is true. Impossible. Possible.’

The doctor took my hands away from Aston’s head. ‘Now, Anna, come with me. Come with me, come downstairs, there’s a good girl. Sit with your mother. My wife is on her way, and Captain Darcy and your father’s assistant will be here soon. I’m going to give you a sedative which will calm you.’

Soon it seemed an army of people, quiet, competent, calm, were packing bags and moving through the house and night. It was as though they had learned some technique for dealing with terror. The technique was denial, discipline, and silence.

My mother and I were spirited from our house to that of my young friend. He stood shocked and frightened in the doorway. The girl, from whose white dress he had only hours before tried to prise the unfamiliar treasure of her breasts, now trembled before him, an old raincoat thrown over her bloody nightdress. Then the silent army took over again and guided us inside.

‘Take Anna to Henrietta’s room, Peter.’ Someone handed Peter a bag. My mother started to become hysterical again. All attention turned to her.

Peter led me upstairs and into Henrietta’s room. The room was pink, with pink ruffles everywhere, and dolls dressed in pink were neatly arranged on the bed. A giant pink giraffe stood in a corner. A long mirror faced me. I walked towards the door, and turned the key in the lock. In the mirror, I watched my figure flit back across the room holding the boy’s hand. I turned and faced him and heard my voice whisper, ‘Fuck me.’

He was only eighteen at the time but with what care and kindness and love he did what I asked.

‘I am now going to have a bath. Perhaps you would stand outside the door?’ And he did. I bathed, slipping under the water again and again, knowing with glorious, triumphant certainty that I would live.

In Henrietta’s baby-pink room I dressed in the jeans and shirt someone had packed for me, then I went down the stairs into my new life.

What is there to say of funerals? They are all the same and each one is unique. They are the ultimate separation, the ultimate letting-go. For which of us would willingly join the body in its coffin in earth or fire or water? Life is usually loved more than our most sacred love. In that knowledge lies the beginning of our cruelty and of our survival.

Aston had loved me more than life itself. That was his destruction.

Over the years, these events followed. Some of them I’ve already told you. My parents divorced. I went to college in America. Then I came to England and became a journalist.

If all this has been presented to you in a flat voice, that’s because the truth of a life can never be told. I send you a journalist’s report. Some photographs would complete it.

My story has taken only a night to report to you. It has taken thirty-three years to live. The dailiness of it all fades away — others fade away. So few pages for Aston’s life! In your life how many pages for me? The external tale of a man’s life can be turned by any journalist into an article or two. And even after years of research by a biographer can only be extended to a book that can be read in two or three weeks.

And so here is my story, on a few pages. The map of my journey to you. Not to explain myself to you. That is unnecessary. But as one would show a photograph to one’s beloved, and say, ‘That’s how I was then,’ and smile at the lost creature of childhood. My ‘photograph’ elicits tears rather than smiles, but the creature is lost either way.

The dawn is coming. I’m tired. The type looks cold and dark on the white page …

Anna”

It was delivered to my office the following morning. It was marked ‘personal and confidential’ and thereby drew some furtive glances from my secretary. Anna was right. It was a map. That was all. A gift I would treasure. I had known her the first moment I had seen her.

I went for a short walk, touching the letter in my pocket as I went over its contents in my mind.

Mean thoughts came to me. Perhaps her terrible tale was told in order to furnish her with an excuse for her suggested arrangement of marriage to Martyn and a life lived profoundly also with me.

She spoke of arrangements. Why didn’t I examine some possible arrangements myself? Divorce Ingrid. Marry Anna. Martyn is young. He will get over it. And what of Ingrid? It had never been a passionate marriage and she had great reserves of strength. She had her large network of friends. She would survive. Sally too could cope well. After all, what I contemplated was a commonplace cruelty. The only unusual aspect was Martyn’s relationship with Anna.

My career would be damaged, certainly. But it could weather the storm. I was not so ambitious that my career would count for very much, if I had to choose between a public life and a life with Anna.

But Anna had said she would not marry me. Oh, but she will, she will, I told myself. Visions of Anna and me as man and wife — breakfasts together, dinners with friends, holidays together — flooded my mind. I felt sick. The visions had a hideous incongruity. It wouldn’t work. We were made for other things. For needs that had to be answered day or night – sudden longings – a strange language of the body. An inner voice cried, ‘Anna won’t marry you’. And she was right. Her arrangement was pure. No one would suffer. The surface could remain exactly as it was. Ingrid and I, Sally, Martyn and Anna, each of us continuing along our chosen path.

After all, I had lived a life that had never been real to me. I could surely continue to give my performance, now that at last I had a real life. The one Anna had given me.

T
WENTY
-F
OUR

‘A
NNA’S STEPFATHER
is in town for three days, at some writers’ conference. Martyn suggested we have him to dinner. I must say I rather jumped at the idea. We agreed Thursday. I checked with your office. They said that would be OK.’

‘Good.’

‘Ever read any of his books?’

‘Yes — two, actually.’

‘Oh, my intellectual husband.’

‘Hardly!’ I lived in a country where reading two books by one of America’s best-known modern writers classed me as an intellectual.

‘Well, what’s he like as a writer? He’s very famous.’

‘He writes about alienation. Middle-class urban alienation. Twentieth-century America, divorced from its roots, with all its old values disappearing under the twin burdens of greed and fear.’

‘God! That doesn’t sound too thrilling.’

‘To be fair, that’s a rather clinical summary. He’s a brilliant writer. His female characters are particularly well drawn. Even feminists like him.’

‘How long has he been married to Anna’s mother?’ asked Ingrid.

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘What age is he?’

‘He must be in his sixties. Mid-sixties, I’d have thought.’

‘Well, it might give me a different viewpoint on Anna. I’m really looking forward to Thursday. I’m going to attempt one of his books. Do you think they’re in your study?’

‘Possibly. I’ll go and check.’

I found them easily.

‘Here they are’ I said to Ingrid, who had followed me. ‘
The Glory Boy
and
Bartering Time.
‘

‘Which is easiest? No … which is shortest?’

‘Try
The Glory Boy.
’

‘I won’t finish it by Thursday, but I’ll have some idea, won’t I?’

‘You will indeed, Ingrid. He’s got a very specific style which permeates all his books. I must go. You look lovely in that beige dress.
Très chic.
‘

‘
Merci, chéri — au revoir.
’

Now that my real self lived and walked and breathed as Anna’s creature, oh lucky creature, there were days when I enjoyed my role as Ingrid’s husband more than I ever had before. I felt no guilt. All would be well with Ingrid. That morning I had an extraordinary illusion that she knew, and that she understood. She smiled so happily at me as I left, I was almost giddy with relief and joy.

T
WENTY
-F
IVE

W
ILBUR
H
UNTER HAD
presence. Wilbur Hunter was aware that he had presence. I watched him gaze at Ingrid with solemnity mixed with intense interest.

As he accepted a whisky, he said: ‘You know, I haven’t seen Anna for a long time. I’ve never even been invited to meet her friends before. So this is a very special occasion.’