Love (14 page)

‘What do you want me to say?’ asked Lee gently for he was prepared to say anything that would comfort her if it meant she would go away more quickly and leave him by himself.

‘Oh, please,’ she said. ‘I did love you, really, I did.’

Whether she said this because it was true or because the confession or reminder of the connection which, however briefly, had existed between them might be a clue to the meaning she sought, she did not know; nevertheless, it was a kind of coercion which Lee’s sentimentality could not withstand. He began to feel sadly protective towards her.

‘When did you find out you were pregnant?’

‘Just before Easter. It couldn’t have been anyone but you,’ she added wistfully. Lee’s sadness turned into misery.

‘She was still in the madhouse, then. Was that why you didn’t tell me?’

‘Yes,’ she said with a sudden plucky little jerk of the head that implied hitherto unexplored dimensions of feminine grit. Lee experienced an instant revulsion.

‘That was terribly, terribly brave and thoughtful of you,’ he said so sardonically she was shocked. He decided to undervalue her self-sacrifice as much as he was able.

‘I’ll tell you what I’d have done if you’d told me. I’d have left Annabel for good and gone to live with you, if you wanted me to, that is, and looked after you and the kid and so on to the best of my ability. Yeah, that’s what I’d have done.’

She did not believe him at all.

‘Come now,’ she said with a certain irony for she knew she herself had acted for the best. ‘What would you
really
have done?’

‘Oh, it’s all hypothetical. That was then and this is now and how can I tell what I would have done, really? I might have moved in with you, that might have been my duty. On the other hand, I might have jumped into the river to escape my conflicting obligations.’

‘You’ve become terribly bitter,’ she said.

‘At least mad people don’t talk such banalities,’ he complained fretfully, annoyed by the implication she herself had remained unembittered by misfortune.

‘You never cared for me at all, not seriously,’ she said. Lee was quite befogged by a dialogue taking place in a language
he did not fully understand for it was that of defensive emotional exploration. He shook his head to clear it and tried to answer her with a satisfactory degree of truth.

‘It was like as if you offered me a one-way ticket to normalcy. So of course I cared for you. And I would have lived with you, if you would have had me.’

At that moment, it seemed to him very likely he would indeed have done so, had it not been quite impossible. His voice was so steady and serious she was completely convinced by him and felt an immense nostalgia for her unnecessary misery; besides, he was still beautiful enough and, at the moment, sufficiently pitiable to move her. On the other hand, he was no longer a constant presence in her life but only a visitor from a time that was now gone for good; he was a revenant who no longer affected her. She reverted to the theme of his public humiliation for it was all there was left to talk about.

‘It was terrible of them to do that to you.’

Lee shifted his attention back to his brother and his wife.

‘It’s ironic, yes.’

‘I’ve got someone else to love, you know,’ she said almost apologetically and that, too, was ironic.

‘Go back to your new bloke, then. He’ll be wondering what’s become of you.’

But she could not leave him alone.

‘Where shall you go?’

‘Back home and wait for her.’

Carolyn was astonished.

‘Wait for her?’

‘Oh, she’ll be back,’ said Lee with a certain melancholy. ‘She’ll be back in a state of anguish in about two hours’ time, I reckon, though possibly a little before.’

‘Oh, darling, do come back with us,’ she said with well-bred solicitude for she could patronize him now he was helpless. ‘I don’t like to think of you, deserted, in that dreadful flat.’

Either because she had kept an excuse to leave Annabel for good to herself or, perhaps, because he would not stand for criticism of his wife in any circumstances, even if she was out of her wits, Lee now felt richly murderous towards
Carolyn. He put on a display of ill-tempered bad taste, pulled himself together and went home.

‘Shall I come back for coffee then? Can we watch television or shall I chat with your bloke about abortion-law reform?’

Buzz and Annabel shared a twined silence until the key turned in the door of the familiar but unknown room, and, for a moment, they interrupted their embrace in a mutual hesitation when they found they had arrived so quickly at the locale of its conclusion. Their surroundings were just as Annabel had imagined them; she checked with a mental inventory the peeling walls, bare and lopsided staircase, fissured linoleum underfoot, foetid accumulated reek of years of the greasy cookery of the poor and the single bulb which meanly leaked a dim light. She found she had overlooked no desolate detail. She shuddered with anticipation not so much to know she was near to assuaging a longing but that consummation would be accomplished in the place she herself had created for it.

The windows of his room were pasted over with sheets of black paper and the meagre sticks of landladies’ furniture were hidden by the detritus of his obsessions. The stained, brownish wallpaper was pinned everywhere with photographs of Lee and herself, of herself alone and of Lee alone. Lee had once possessed the rare knack of looking exactly like himself when photographed; his self-consciousness made it inevitable. She had not expected to see so many photographs of Lee. They represented, now, a fissure of tiny cracks in her scrupulous imaginary edifice. Nevertheless, she braved out his hundred eyes and stretched at once on the narrow, unmade bed where, as she expected, the sheets were yellow with use. Then began the slow decline of her hopes.

At first, she could not help smiling the easy smile which, if all went well on her own terms, might become her natural expression but Buzz did not speak and did not lie down beside her and, eager as she was to touch him, she grew uneasy. She knew no way to break the sudden constraint
between them except by speaking herself and she did not know what to say nor what he might reply. Buzz kept as far away from the bed as the constricted space would allow and his heavy lids drooped down over his eyes with foreboding for, now he had indulged his spite against his brother, he was left to face the consequences of it alone.

If jealousy or, rather, resentment of Lee had primarily moved him, his revenge would still be incomplete unless he recreated the maddening acts his inward eye had witnessed so atrociously as he lay beyond the thin wall, sweating at the sound of their voices. He always saw her only in relation to his brother; his interest in her was based on the knowledge he could utilize her both to defend himself against Lee and also to attack him through her after, first of all, she had usurped Buzz in his own home and his brother’s affections and then turned him out of both. Now it came to the testing, he would have sworn their shared games and mutual secrets were only so many exercises in manoeuvres although, at the time, he had cultivated them for their own sake, to pass the time; and if, incidentally, he estranged her from her husband and his brother from himself, that served to pass the time, also, in a way that suited his taste for dark corners and circuitous routes. But he only decided to hate his brother when Lee refused to live with him any more, and now, after a few months’ passionate imaginings, he believed himself moved only by hatred. He had forgotten or never realized that Annabel had credited him with the attributes of a saviour and had she told him so as she lay on his bed things might have turned out better; or else, far worse.

As it was, he faltered between her real self on the bed and her many shadows on the wall, determined to have her but thwarted by his inability to feel as intensely in situations that were actual as he did in the supercharged events of his imagination. Life rarely rose to the demands he made on it. He tried to stimulate himself with memories of past sexual dreams and encounters and found himself as if rummaging in a forbidden cupboard of grotesqueries until he found a memory of Annabel prone on a tiled floor with her blood
welling out through the silk pores of her embroidered shawl while, as he still believed, Lee lay in some other woman’s bed. This idea alone filled him with desire.

He had often seen her naked but he had never handled her cold breasts nor touched sufficient of her skin to discover how closely its texture, that of chilled rice paper, corresponded to its colour. Nor had he known she would fling out her arms in an attitude of subjugation or death and lie so unnaturally still. The more he caressed her, the stiffer and colder she seemed to grow as if her huge, grey eyes divined in his the true reflection of the perverse origins of his desire and so she made her body act out the role he had devised although she believed that all she wanted for herself would be to surrender to simple, voluptuous actuality. She wanted this desperately. So they began a duel of mismatched expectancies in which Annabel was bound to be the worst hurt for her hopes had been literally infinite while his, true to his nature, existed only in the two dimensions and glaring colours of melodrama.

But he had not bargained for his own horror which increased with every moment of her passivity and the excitement which contained within it such a high degree of dread. He turned over her limp hand and, seeing the faint, white scars on her wrist, found he could manage to kiss her only to discover her lips were made of ice and her tongue burned like freezing metal. His mother who assured her small, dark son with the infernal conviction of the insane that he was the fruit of all the evil in the world had given him many fears about the physicality of women; all the nightmares that had ever visited him rushed back into his head at once and he flinched back from Annabel’s mouth, which numbed him.

‘Open your legs,’ he said. ‘Let me look.’

She did as he asked her, faintly wondering, as she had once been with Lee, and already confronted with a great divergence between her desires and her actuality. Buzz crouched between her feet and scrutinized as much as he could see of her perilous interior to find out if all was in order and there were no concealed fangs or guillotines inside
her to ruin him. Although he found no visual evidence, he remained too suspicious of her body to wish to meet her eyes so he caught hold of her shoulders and roughly pushed her down on her face. She was astonished; she felt herself handled as unceremoniously as a fish on a slab, reduced only to anonymous flesh, and she could do nothing to help herself for she knew she had connived in her own undoing. He thrust at her from behind and it was all over in a few seconds; he came as soon as he clumsily pushed his way into her and instantly withdrew, in a convulsive movement like a gigantic wince.

She cowered in his rancid bed. He mumbled something she did not understand and pulled the sheet up over her, to hide her, but when his hand accidentally touched her hair, he jumped back. They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other’s phantoms, each in his separate privacy had savoured the most refined of pleasures but, connoisseurs of unreality as they were, they could not bear the crude weight, the rank smell and the ripe taste of real flesh. It is always a dangerous experiment to act out a fantasy; they had undertaken the experiment rashly and had failed but Annabel suffered the worst for she had been trying to convince herself she was alive.

She cowered in his rancid bed and whispered: ‘I want to go home,’ for the only solace she could envisage was to pretend this bitterest of disappointments was itself a dream and that, when it grew light, Buzz’s dark, strange body would revert to the familiar shape of her husband for she had often pretended the one was the other, anyway. Buzz covered his face with his hands and allowed her to dress herself and wander off alone through the dark streets, a fragile, flimsy thing whose body had betrayed both their imaginations.

As she came into the kitchen, Lee was burning his three precious photographs by holding a match to the tip of each; he watched while the blue flame blackened the picture and then he dropped each withered scrap into the sink and turned the tap so that the ashes were washed down the drain. She
took a cup from the dresser, went past him to fill it with water, and drank. Torn between jealousy and suppressed murderous rage, Lee was in an evil mood and quite prepared to eschew compassion; he saw only that she was in a state where it might be possible to injure her and at once struck out.

‘But what did he do to you? What did he actually do? Did he ask you to lift up his tail and kiss his asshole?’

She shook her head dumbly and Lee doubled up with unpleasant laughter.

‘When he was living with my aunt, it was the summer she died, he brought this young chick back and took her up to his room and I was getting the old lady her Benger’s food in the kitchen and there was this crash, this terrible crash, like someone falling downstairs, and the kitchen door burst open, didn’t it. And this chick fell right through it, she was stark naked and she was clutching her knickers in her hand and she said: “If he thinks I’m going to do that, he’s very much mistaken.”’

‘I would have done anything for him, if he had let me,’ said Annabel gravely. Lee saw she did not understand he was jeering at her and opened his mouth to make a more direct and brutal attack; then he shrugged and said nothing for clearly she would pay him no attention. He grew less vindictive when he saw how dazed and spiritless she was and would have tried to comfort her if he had known how and had he ever before been able to succeed in comforting her.