“Was that all right? I’m sorry if — if I wasn’t very good.”
“It was fine. Just fine.” She pecked him on the cheek and turned onto her side. “Let’s go to sleep now. Goodnight.”
Later, Andrew realised how foolish he had been to hope for anything more. His marriage hadn’t been exactly a love match, and a church ceremony, however splendid, could hardly have been blamed for failing to transform it into one. He had been a busy young parish priest, living on his own and greatly in need of companionship. Single women of the right age were in short supply, and in any case, Andrew wasn’t much good at socialising. Janet, his senior by some five years and experienced in the ways of the church (she was the daughter of a minor bishop) seemed a good if not perfect choice as a partner. It had been as simple as that.
And for a while, it had worked. Andrew immersed himself in his work, and Janet threw herself into her new role with, quite literally, a missionary zeal. While Andrew took church services, prepared sermons, and busied himself with the visiting, baptising, marrying and burying of his flock as required, Janet ran things.
She ran the flower rota and the church bookstall and the creche; she organised the annual church fete (a formidable operation involving some twenty stalls and a great deal of rather unchristian rivalry and backbiting, as well as the raising of astonishing sums for church funds) and played the organ (badly) when the organist was away. She rang round PCC members with news of cancelled meetings or revised agendas, and she put together the parish magazine. She was, everyone agreed, a wonder of energy and resourcefulness.
Sometimes when they passed each other in the course of their duties, Andrew would put out a hand or attempt to give Janet a hug, but she moved quickly away with a little laugh.
“No time for that, now, Andrew. Jobs to be done!” And she would bustle off to arrange yet another meeting or make more phone calls.
What Andrew missed most, when he allowed himself to think about it, was the physical contact; the feeling of another human body close to his own. Although Janet had never been demonstrative, he had found some comfort in the warmth of her presence in the bed beside him and, in the earlier days, the feeling of her hand in his. If he discounted the people whose hands he had to shake and the infrequent attentions of his barber and dentist, no one touched Andrew at all. Occasionally he would take the hand of a grieving parishioner, or pat a head or a shoulder, but no one actually touched him. Sometimes, baptising a baby, feeling the warm, soft little body in his arms, he would have a sudden urge to gather it up close to his face; to smell the baby skin, feel its cheek against his, kiss the downy top of its head. In other cultures, this might be acceptable, but while popes and politicians could kiss babies, ministers of the Anglican church were not encouraged to do so, and so he refrained. The cat, Andrew’s companion from his bachelor days, was the only living being who had, as it were, open access to his body, and being a cat, took full advantage of its privileges, jumping onto his lap or winding itself round his neck whenever the opportunity arose. Andrew could well understand why the old and the lonely took solace in the company of pets. Janet disliked cats, claiming to be allergic to them, but Andrew suspected that it was more likely that she was inconvenienced by unsightly cat hairs on the furniture of the house which she kept in a state of show-home cleanliness. Only Andrew’s office was spared her attentions, and it was here that the cat, Tobias, lived out his old age among the dust and the books and the saggy, comfortable cushions on the ancient sofa.
Once, Andrew had dreamed of a house full of noise and laughter and children; most of all, children. But Janet didn’t want a family; she said that Andrew had a vocation, and that her own calling was to assist him in it. Andrew knew that this was only part of the truth. The reality was that there was no room in her life for the inconvenience and untidiness involved in the bringing up of children. Janet had slimmed down in the years following their marriage, and her neat figure was not to be sullied by the bearing and suckling of babies. Her waist would remain trim; her stomach flat; her breasts firm. Andrew guessed that Janet was proud of her body, and when he glimpsed it, which was increasingly rarely, he could see that her pride was justified. But he would much have preferred her to have allowed herself to sag and droop a little with the battle-scars of motherhood. For him, that would have made her more truly a woman.
Of course, they should have discussed the matter of children before they married, he realised that now. But at the time, he had simply assumed that Janet would want a family. It had never occurred to him that twelve years down the line, he would find himself a helpless prisoner in a loveless, childless marriage.
Was Janet happy? It was hard to tell. Once, only once, he had asked her, and had been surprised when her eyes had filled with sudden tears.
“Happy? What is happy?” Quickly, she had whisked the tears away. “I do what I have to do. I feel — I hope — I’m useful. Happiness is something I try not to think about.”
“But us. What about us?” Andrew had persisted. “Ours is hardly a fairy-tale marriage, is it? I can’t believe it’s given you everything you want, has it?”
“I never expected to have everything I wanted,” Janet said. “I have — enough.”
“I’m sure you don’t love me anymore. In fact, I know you don’t. But do you like me at all? Do you like — our life together?”
“Does it matter? I help you in your work, don’t I? I support you as much as I can. If I have nothing else to offer, then I’m sorry. Maybe that’s just the way I am.”
“And that’s enough? That’s really enough for you, is it?”
Was there a slight hesitation? The merest pause before Janet replied? For a moment, she had looked as though she might say more, but instead she simply gave Andrew a small, tight smile.
“It’s enough. Of course it’s enough. We do what we have to do, you and I. I don’t believe in all this — looking into relationships. All this navel-gazing. You take what you’ve got, and you make the best of it. That’s how I try to live my life, and I’m sure you do the same. There’s no other choice. Besides, we don’t argue, do we? We don’t fight like so many other couples. I can’t remember when we last had a disagreement.”
No, thought Andrew. We are beyond arguing. We neither of us care enough anymore to argue.
These thoughts passed through Andrew’s head as he drove home from Annie’s house, and later on as he arranged chairs in his study for the confirmation candidates. Annie’s marriage had obviously been far from happy, but had it been so much worse than his own? Physical violence was terrible, especially when the victim was frail and a woman, but there had been occasions when he had felt that he would almost have preferred Janet to throw things at him or even hit him; anything rather than her seeming indifference. She might not mean it — in fact he was sure that she didn’t — but sometimes her behaviour felt almost like a form of abuse. But it’s my fault too, he thought, making a feeble attempt to tidy his desk. It takes two to make a mess like this. Gently, he picked up the cat and tipped it out of the open window into the garden, where it slithered into the bushes, snarling ill-temperedly. Janet said he shouldn’t allow the cat in the room during confirmation class. She said it was a distraction.
Janet again. Janet. In a rare moment of fury, Andrew picked up the overflowing wastepaper basket and hurled the contents into the flowerbed beneath the study window. He would have to clear it all up again in the morning, but just for the moment it made him feel better.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ophelia
Contrary to the belief of her parents and of her friends, Ophelia was not a virgin. On the part of her friends, this was an assumption. They all discussed their conquests and sexual activities openly and in detail, and because Ophelia didn’t join in these discussions, it was assumed that she had nothing to add to them. She would listen in some bemusement to the lengthy and, to her, rather boring accounts of who did what with whom, where, and how many times. And while she was entertained by t
he antics some people appeared not only to perform, but also to talk about afterwards, she herself kept quiet. It was safer that way, she decided. Apart from the fact that she had no desire to discuss any activities of her own, she had no wish to become the subject of gossip. Such friends as she had weren’t close friends, and they certainly were not to be trusted.
Sometimes someone would ask her what she had “been up to”, but Ophelia found that she could quickly turn the conversation away from herself. One of the things she had learnt early on in life was that people were on the whole much more interested in talking about themselves than asking about her, and when it came to sex, she was grateful for their lack of interest.
Her parents were another matter. Some months ago, her mother had asked her outright whether she had ever slept with anybody.
“Because if you haven’t, we need to talk. And if you have, I suppose we still need to talk.” Sheila had laughed, apparently pleased with her own openness; her willingness to accept whatever Ophelia might or might not have done. “It’s all right, darling,” she added, perhaps anticipating that some reassurance might be necessary. “You can tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Ophelia had said, wondering which planet her mother inhabited if she really thought it necessary to have a birds-and-bees discussion with her nineteen-year-old daughter.
“You mean — you mean you haven’t?”
“I mean I’d rather not talk about it.”
“But darling, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Why should I be ashamed?”
“If you haven’t — if you don’t — well, you know.”
“If I’m still a virgin, you mean?”
“Well, yes. I mean, lots of girls your age like to wait a bit. Wait for the right person, or at least for someone special.”
“Do they?” Ophelia very much doubted whether her mother had even the vaguest notion of what girls of her age did or didn’t like. From her friends’ conversations she couldn’t recall that anyone had seemed particularly interested in waiting for anything, never mind for someone special to come along and relieve them of their virginity.
“Oh, come on, Ophelia! Don’t be so coy! You can talk to me, you know you can.”
“Can I?” For a moment, Ophelia was curious. She had never felt able to talk to her mother about anything that really mattered, and she was intrigued that Sheila had managed to convince herself otherwise. In the course of her childhood, Ophelia had at various times been teased and bullied at school, witnessed minor acts of shoplifting by her classmates, and once, alarmingly, been touched by a male teacher in what could only have been called a thoroughly inappropriate manner. At the time, she had felt unable to tell her parents about these things. She knew that she could never be the daughter that Sheila and Billy had hoped for; the least she could do was to refrain from causing them any additional worry by burdening them with her problems.
“Well, of course you can talk to me. After all, I am your mother. I — I might be able to help.”
Ophelia thought about her sexual experiences, and laughed. There were no circumstances under which her mother would have been able to be of any assistance whatsoever.
“What are you laughing at?” Sheila sounded hurt. “I’m only trying to help.”
“I know you are, Mum. And I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that there’s nothing to tell, really there isn’t. My life is pretty uneventful.”
“Well, if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
Afterwards, Ophelia found herself feeling quite sorry for her mother. Sheila was no doubt looking forward to a nice, confidential girly chat. But it was too late for that now. The foundations for such confidences should have been laid years ago, when Ophelia needed them; not now, when her mother appeared to.
In fact, if you discounted the recent Tunisian experience (drunken fumblings in smoky bars with virtual strangers) Ophelia had only had sex twice, and neither occasion had really been worth writing home about. The first time had been more or less by mistake (the mistake being Ophelia’s), in the front seat of a Ford Fiesta. The boy in question was not someone to whom Ophelia was particularly attracted. She didn’t even like him very much. He was giving her a lift home from a party, and when they stopped in a lay-by, Ophelia naively assumed there was something wrong with the car. It wasn’t until her companion lunged across and put his hand down the front of her blouse that she realised her mistake. By the time her knickers had arrived round her ankles, and what she thought was the gear-stick thrusting eagerly into her thigh turned out to be something quite other, there appeared to be no going back. At least the gear-stick sported a condom, and for that Ophelia supposed she should be grateful.
Of course, she could have fought him off, but she was very drunk at the time, and suddenly overcome with a sort of gung-ho bravado. Her virginity was there for the taking; she had never valued it much anyway.
Afterwards, in the cold light of day, she had felt ashamed and disappointed. Ashamed that she should have been so easily seduced, and disappointed in what had been altogether a rather messy, ugly experience. For while she had had no high expectations (given the circumstances, she could hardly have had any expectations at all), she had nonetheless thought that sex — even sex with someone as unexciting as that — might have a little more to it than that cramped, sticky tangling of clothes and hair and limbs. It was some time before she could, as it were, look a Ford Fiesta in the face again, although afterwards she did wonder how on earth her seduction had been accomplished in so small a space. In her more optimistic moments, she wondered whether she could have imagined the whole episode, but its legacy of physical discomfort the following day had left her in little doubt.
Ophelia’s second experience of sexual intercourse nearly a year later got off to a much more promising start. She was — at least she told herself she was — in love with Simon. They had been going out together for several weeks, and she felt ready to make love. Simon, who had been ready for some time (“For goodness’ sake, Ophelia! What’s the big deal?”), was becoming impatient, and besides, it was high time the ghost of the Ford Fiesta was, in every sense, finally laid. Simon would awaken her body as it was meant to be awakened, and her womanhood would blossom as nature intended. Simon was usually banished to the sofa when he stayed the night; tonight she would invite him into her bed.
Poor Ophelia. Despite all the trouble she had gone to — the candlelit meal, the flowers, the freshly-laundered sheets — the night was a disaster. Simon’s idea of foreplay was to pour himself a stiff whisky to take to bed (the whisky being his only contribution to the evening. Ophelia disliked spirits), and the actual lovemaking (if you could call it that) was over in a matter of minutes. On one level, Ophelia was terribly hurt that the sexual act evidently meant so little to Simon; on another, she was furious that she had wasted so much time and trouble creating what she had hoped would be an appropriate ambience for their first proper sexual encounter. She had spent hours preparing the dinner, and the champagne (real champagne; not just sparkling wine) had cost much more than she could afford. And all so that she could end up lying awake and furious while Simon, sound asleep beside her, breathed gentle whisky fumes into her ear.
In the morning, Simon had declined the bacon and eggs Ophelia had bought for his breakfast, and made what could only be described as a quick getaway, accompanied by the vague promise to “be in touch some time.” Even Ophelia knew what that meant, and after he had gone she wept tears of disappointment and humiliation into her pillow, and later on, into the remains of the candlelit dinner, as she cleared away last night’s debris. What had she done wrong? she wondered, licking duck paté off the end of her finger. What was the matter with her? Was it her lack of expertise? Her naivete? Or, worst of all, was it her body?
Ophelia had gone back into the bedroom and examined herself in the mirror. Certainly, her tear-stained face wasn’t looking its best, and it had always been on the round side, but she h
ad good skin and her eyes were quite a nice shade of grey. She let her dressing-gown fall to the floor and regarded her naked body critically. If she pulled in her tummy and held her shoulders back, she didn’t look too bad, although she wished for the hundredth time that she had inherited her mother’s hour-glass figure. Her breasts were firm, if a bit on the large side, her hips broad (but unfortunately not broad enough to make her waist appear small), her legs ... But no, there was nothing that could usefully be said to recommend her legs. Hers was quite a good childbearing body, she concluded sadly, but probably not sufficiently seductive to attract a man who would care for her enough to want to put the child there in the first place. Not a bad body for a one-night stand, but finding someone who would want to wake up beside it every morning and love it enough to forgive it for its inevitable deterioration in its declining years was going to prove tricky.
And yet why was she blaming herself? Hadn’t Simon failed her every bit as much as she appeared to have failed him? Come to think of it, he wasn’t that good-looking himself, and while Ophelia had been reluctant to acknowledge it at the time, he had looked pretty ridiculous last night, standing by the bed in nothing but his socks.
She had pulled her dressing-gown on again, and stripped the bed, hurling sheets and pillowcases in a heap on the floor, removing every scrap of evidence of the night’s activities. She took the sweater Simon had left behind (she noted with satisfaction that it looked new and expensive) and threw it in the dustbin, and as a final gesture, she took his empty whisky glass and flung it against the wall, where it shattered into a hundred bright splinters. Ophelia smiled. She had never liked those glasses, and besides, what kind of parent gives a teenage daughter cut-glass tumblers for Christmas?
Ophelia wondered whether she should give up on men altogether. All the men she had been out with had ended up rejecting her, and she had already suffered enough rejection in her life to know that repeat performances would only further damage her fragile self-esteem. Maybe she would be better going it alone, at least for the time being. She had her friends, her colleagues at work, and the old people in her care. They at least seemed happy with the way she was, and didn’t appear to care about the quality of her intellect or the shape of her body. All Ophelia had ever wanted out of life was for someone to love and accept her for herself. Was that so much to ask? Her parents hadn’t managed it, and now it looked as though any men friends she might have were going to be equally hard to please.
Dead Ernest Page 4