by Helen Kitson
‘And anyway,’ she said, ‘it probably doesn’t exist. Not the kind of love that’s written about in novels. Grand romances, eternal passions.’
‘Too wearing,’ I joked.
‘You can’t love someone that much without wanting to die,’ she said.
I didn’t understand then, and I didn’t understand now. What I felt for Simon raided the borders of sexual obsession, but I’d experienced similar feelings before – that adolescent desperation for someone; the sense that if you lose them, life itself will become meaningless. Was that what Madeleine had felt for Simon’s father? Or was it the loss of her child that destroyed her? But hadn’t she given him up willingly? Whenever we talked about love we meant romantic love, sexual love. Any other kind was beyond our understanding and largely irrelevant.
The Song of the Air dealt obliquely with love in suggesting that true freedom could be found only in renouncing the lusts of the flesh. Whenever anyone asked me about that aspect of the novel I fudged the issue, distancing myself from the book’s narrator, insisting that this idea was intended to be metaphorical rather than taken at face value.
‘We find ourselves only by first losing ourselves,’ was the line I took. Madeleine had given me the novel, but not the key to interpreting it.
If I wanted to lose my body, it was only so that I should not have to watch its gradual disintegration.
‘What are you thinking?’ Simon murmured, sauntering back into the room and sitting far away from me.
‘Everything. Nothing. Love. Death.’
Revenge.
He said the manuscript of Madeleine’s first book was in the house. He’d taken my written confession, why shouldn’t I have her book in return? Surely that’s what Madeleine would have wanted.
‘I want to read the book,’ I said.
‘Maybe later. I only have the original, you see, and I couldn’t trust you with it. You must see how unwise that would be.’
‘You know I would never destroy it. You know how I feel about books being burned.’
‘This one’s different, though, isn’t it? It’s the one thing that stands between you and… And what? Ruin, really. It would crush you, wouldn’t it, for the world to know what you’d done? It might even kill you.’
He was right. There was only one thing to be done. I scrambled from the floor and rushed up the stairs. I would fight him to the death for the manuscript if necessary. I couldn’t allow him to ruin my life. That book was mine! Simon had never even known Madeleine. She hadn’t wanted him.
I opened drawers and threw them on the floor. I tipped out clothes, books, everything I could lay my hands on. I didn’t care what damage I did.
‘It’s under the typewriter.’ Simon stood in the doorway. I glared at him, picked up the typewriter, flung it onto the floor. He winced but made no move to stop me from grabbing the manuscript tied with string, the title and Madeleine’s name on the cover page in her handwriting. I clutched it against my chest.
‘You couldn’t destroy it, could you? Not a book. Not her book.’
Stalemate. To destroy it unread was impossible, I simply couldn’t bring myself to do that. But it was mine now and it must stay that way. I walked towards the door. Simon didn’t move.
‘You’ll have to get past me,’ he said. ‘I won’t let you.’
I pushed him. He was slim and wiry, stronger than he looked, but I took him by surprise. We scuffled on the landing, ridiculous and undignified, but I refused to let him beat me. The manuscript held up in front of me like a shield, I shoved him backwards. He lost his footing, tumbled down the stairs. He groaned, so I knew he was conscious. I stepped over him, ran through the house, then realised I had nowhere to hide the manuscript. Was my only option to destroy it?
I ran back to check on Simon. I could see his chest rising and falling, but he wasn’t moving. I’d have to risk putting the papers in my safe and trust that his talents didn’t include safe cracking.
He called out my name.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, walking back to him.
‘No you’re not. You might have killed me.’
‘Don’t over-dramatise. Let me have a look.’
He had a small graze over his right eye and a bump on his forehead that would likely come out in a fine bruise.
‘Will you let me put some antiseptic on it?’
He gave me a murderous look but nodded.
It was odd how little thought I had given to the surely bizarre fact that I had slept with the son of my best friend. If she’d lived – if she’d reclaimed Simon as a baby – it was likely he would have grown up thinking of me as a kind of aunt; a sender of generous birthday presents, someone he was forced to be polite to for his mother’s sake. I felt rather like his mother as I dabbed his grazed forehead with a cotton wool ball soaked in TCP. For once, I felt in control.
‘Would Madeleine have made a good mother, do you think?’ he asked.
‘How can I possibly say? She never had so much as a goldfish to look after.’
‘She wasn’t the nurturing type, was she? I bet not, anyway.’
‘No, not really.’
‘Sophie told me I should be grateful, because Madeleine could have chosen to flush me down the lav. She actually used those words, can you believe it? She wished Madeleine had got rid of me. I wish I’d been adopted. My dad’s had other affairs since Madeleine; we all know about them. Sophie knows. I hear her crying sometimes and I just sit there, thinking what a stupid bitch she is. Why does she stay with him?’
‘She probably doesn’t know what else to do with herself. Some women don’t. My mum went through a phase of reading Spare Rib magazine, but she would have done better to find herself a part-time job.’
The magazine had arrived through the post with a band of brown paper around it. For six months or so my mother read each copy from cover to cover, mildly raging against men, against injustice, against South Africa and anything else she thought worth complaining about. My father gently took the piss, asking if she’d bought some dungarees yet and if she wanted him to address her as “sister”. It was the only time my mother showed any streak of rebellion. I never found out what brought it on and sometimes wished she could have gone the whole hog, painting peace signs on the windows and picketing outside patriarchal institutions.
‘Maybe she had an affair,’ Simon suggested after I’d explained what Spare Rib was. ‘With a communist who wanted to raise her consciousness.’
‘Not very likely.’
‘An affair with a woman, then? A tempestuous Sapphic romance?’
Also unlikely.
‘Have you ever done it with a woman? You and Madeleine?’
‘Shut up, Simon.’
‘I’ll leave,’ he said. ‘Go back to my parents.’
‘Yes. Good.’ It was time he went. The sooner he left, the sooner I could start trying to repair the damage he’d done.
He thought of me as Léa. A woman on the brink of defeat. The fictional Léa’s victory over the passing years was also the conquest of love. An acceptance of her defeat would, I felt, have been a braver ending.
Chapter Twenty-Two
More reliable than an alarm clock, Pushkin could be depended upon to wake me at seven-thirty every morning. I’d no need to get up that early, but my mother’s example had taught me that lingering in bed was the thin end of the wedge. One slovenly habit would surely lead to others. Besides, cat ownership precluded the temptation to laze in bed. Pushkin, a typically insistent cat, would miaow, attack my toes and push her nose against my face until I consented to get up and attend to her needs.
I couldn’t hear Simon moving around and he clearly hadn’t fed the cat, so where was he? Had he left without saying goodbye? I slipped my dressing gown on. Pushkin – purring, tail erect – rubbed against my legs, triumphant at having achieved her goal. I followed her downstairs and into the kitchen. When I picked up her food bowl to clean it, I glanced through the window and saw Simon. Dressed in hoodie and jean
s, he was staring down at a small bonfire. My first thought was to rush out and tell him to put it out: the smoke would annoy the neighbours. But then I froze. What was he burning? What was he doing?
Pushkin head-butted my leg.
‘All right, all right,’ I muttered, slopping her breakfast into the bowl.
I went outside to speak to Simon. ‘I hope you’ve got a good explanation for this,’ I said. ‘No one around here has a barbecue at this time of year, let alone…’
My voice trailed away to nothing. I saw what he was burning. Pages of typescript.
‘You didn’t think I’d be stupid enough to leave her book lying around in my room and direct you straight to it, did you? What you’ve got in your safe is a bunch of blank pages under the cover sheet. Never thought to check what you had in your hands, did you? Too eager to get it away from me.’
Madeleine’s novel. The one I’d never had the chance to read.
‘It’s a bonfire of the vanities,’ he said, staring at me with smoke-reddened eyes, feeding the fire page by page. ‘I was right not to trust you, wasn’t I?’
I’d wished the book hadn’t existed, but I couldn’t bear to see it being burnt. And this was the only copy of Madeleine’s first novel in existence.
‘But why?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? She never wanted either of us. You were the boring friend who kept hanging round. I was the kid she should have flushed down the bog. The only person she knew how to love was herself. I’m destroying her book just like she wanted to destroy me.’
‘She was depressed, she couldn’t cope. If she’d lived—’
‘But she didn’t, did she? You made sure of that! Aren’t you going to try and save it?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you fancy grubbing around in the ashes to rescue what you can? Go on!’ He grabbed hold of me, forced me on to my knees, pressing me close to the flames.
‘You’re mad!’ I said, struggling uselessly against his firm grip, wincing as another typewritten sheet turned black, friable, unreadable.
‘You should be pleased. You’re safe now.’
‘You’re doing this for me, then?’
‘Don’t be stupid, of course not. I still have your confession, remember?’
I winced again. Maybe he was mad, some faulty wiring in his brain: a chemical imbalance, the same kind of thing that had driven Madeleine into the icy water that closed around her like a fist.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Anything would have been better than this.’
‘Even your shame? How would you have stood it? You know you wouldn’t. You’d rather have killed me than have anyone else know what you’d done. Isn’t that true?’
‘If you were really so worried about me getting my greedy hands on it, you didn’t need to let me know of its existence. Why destroy it? It makes no sense!’
He crouched beside me, prodding the last of the pages with a stick. ‘Why does anything have to make sense? Life doesn’t, not for most people. You grew up with loving, devoted parents. All I had was a cold father and a woman who resented my existence.’
‘Plenty of people put up with worse.’
He glared at me. ‘And what comfort is that supposed to be? Madeleine would never have come back for me, I know that. She was heartless, like all writers. They like bad things to happen because it gives them something to write about.’
‘That’s not true. She wasn’t like that.’ Unfeeling at times, too wrapped up in her own concerns, but not heartless. ‘She was complicated.’
‘And I’m simple. Simple Simon. That’s what my dad used to call me. I’d have only been any use to him if I’d been some kind of child prodigy. It used to hurt. I didn’t realise until I was in my twenties that it was all about him – his failures, his not being clever enough. He really minded that he wasn’t a great professor at Oxford or Cambridge. I should’ve dropped out altogether, told him to stick his precious education up his tight arse.’
‘But you did okay,’ I said.
‘Okay? Is this okay?’ He plunged his hands into the still-hot bonfire, gathering handfuls of blackened scraps of paper, scattering them over himself.
‘Stop it, Simon – stop it!’
‘Why? Do I frighten you? Is this the kind of behaviour you don’t understand? Is this why you let Madeleine drown?’
‘Why do you care? She didn’t love either of us.’
‘Life is so shit,’ he said, rocking back on his heels, weeping. ‘People always let you down.’
I was merely the latest in a long line.
He wiped tears away with soot-blackened hands, leaving streaks around his eyes and on his cheeks.
‘Come inside,’ I said. ‘You can clean your face – I’ll make you a cup of coffee.’
He allowed me to lift him to his feet. Before we went inside, I stamped out the last smouldering sticks and bits of paper. Just to make sure, as soon as I’d got Simon seated at the kitchen table I filled the kettle with cold water and poured it over the remains of the bonfire.
I passed him a box of tissues and he made a few indifferent passes against his face with one.
‘When are you leaving?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Do you mind? Will you cry when I go? Did you fantasise about us being writers together with me servicing you at regular intervals? Was that how our life together would have looked, to you?’
‘I always knew you had another life to go back to.’
‘Yeah. What a life!’
‘Go back to uni. You might as well.’
‘Not creative writing. I’m sick of writers – sick of words.’
‘Sick of me.’
‘When I came down this morning and started that bonfire, I rehearsed all these things I was going to say to you, to hurt you. To make you cry. It would have been so easy.’
He still could. He still might. He’d done harm, but once he’d gone my life would revert to the way it had been. Dull, eventless days; each day the same as the previous one, as the next one. Unless, of course, Simon chose to mail a copy of my confession to Madeleine’s parents. How could I learn to live with that possibility hanging over me?
I made coffee and set a mug in front of Simon.
‘Do you hate me?’ he asked.
‘You made no promises.’
The manner in which he sat – hunched forward, hands around his mug – reminded me of the first time we met, that awkward conversation in the café. Right from the start he hadn’t played a straight bat and I’d taken insufficient care to guard against the dangers he represented. The moment I first saw him I had wanted him, needed to keep him near me for as long as I could.
‘What will you do, after I’ve gone?’ he asked.
‘Maybe I’ll write a book.’
‘You could always marry the nice vicar,’ Simon said.
‘I don’t think atheists make very good vicars’ wives.’
‘Don’t see why not.’
It riled me that he could, even in fun, propose so restricted a future for me. The terrible thing was that I could see myself in the role, planted in Mr Latham’s kitchen wearing jeans and a checked shirt, doling out tea and sympathy to parishioners who would inevitably look upon me as the vicar’s deputy – a spiritual triage. My own beliefs would remain unexamined, for I would simply be the handmaiden, the conduit.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘Mr Latham isn’t the marrying type. Even if he were, it wouldn’t work. It would be cowardly and I’m sick of being a coward.’
He reached out and touched his fingertips to mine. ‘Will you miss me, after I’ve gone?’ he said softly. ‘Will you reach for me in bed when you’re half asleep, and shed a tear when you realise I’m not there?’
I pushed his hand away. ‘Don’t.’
A slow, sweet smile spread across his face. ‘I know the answer anyway.’
I narrowed my eyes. ‘Is that the best you can do? Do you not understand what a soft target is?’
He shrugged. He was a mess. Messed up by his parents, the ones who
were present but useless and the one who’d turned her back on him.
‘It was all a power trip for you, wasn’t it? Isn’t that what this whole insane month has been about? You didn’t care whether or not I started writing again; you didn’t care about me except as someone you could manipulate.’
‘I did care,’ he said. ‘I thought I did, anyway. I just wanted to know the truth. I wanted someone to be honest with me. I wanted to hate you. You were like those women my dad screwed. I thought you were, anyway.’
‘Why did you care what your dad did? You weren’t sorry for Sophie, were you? You despised her.’
‘They’re all as bad as each other. People fucking with other people. All my life I’ve had to put up with my dad belittling me, Sophie bitching about Madeleine. It was like I was the punch bag for everything they thought had gone wrong with their lives. My dad—’
‘What? What about your dad?’
‘He’s a selfish bastard. He wanted Madeleine to get rid of me just like Sophie did. No one was ever straight with me, except when it suited them; when they wanted to use me as a stick to beat someone else with. That’s what it was like.’ He gripped my hands, his eyes pleading with me to believe him, to take his side.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t have understood Madeleine any more than I did. She was unknowable. I think you’re the same.’
‘Do you?’ He shook his head. ‘You only confessed by accident. If we hadn’t argued, you never would have told me. And when you did, I saw how I could hurt you, make you pay.’
‘No, Simon, you knew long before then how you could hurt me. You knew exactly how I felt about you, didn’t you? My weakness, as you saw it.’
He shrugged, couldn’t look me in the eye. ‘I saw you were basically a decent person. That’s why it all fell apart. The bad guy act – it’s not who I am, I swear it. If you’d been straight with me from the start, I would have been straight with you.’
I doubted that. Cajoling me into writing my confession had been a form of punishment. He’d wanted someone else to feel what it was like to be battered, as he had been, by people with their own confused agendas.