by Susan Green
‘Why shouldn’t I? A painting is made out of love and faith. Love for its subject, love of the act of painting. Faith in art not as a theory or philosophy, not a thing of the mind but of the whole being, of the soul, if you will . . .’
‘No, thanks, I won’t. I’d say you’re being pretty naive, Freeman. The world’s disintegrating. Life in general, you could say, is pretty pointless.’
‘But in particular?’ Rob gestured to the room, at the dark panelled walls, the light slanting in through the small paned windows and piercing the haze of cigarette smoke, the knot of drinkers at the bar, the gleam of the beer taps, the labels on the top shelf. ‘Is this pointless? Us, here, the four of us – the richness of it all.’
I knew Rob. I knew what he was trying to say. It was a plea for something real, whole, living, for an urgency of felt connection to the wonderful, terrible, tender, dangerous, impermanent, fluctuating, changing world. It was a plea for beauty, and for love.
I knew this, but I could not have said it then. In my imagination I tear strips off Gerald and Neil for their cynicism, their negativity and – how childish this sounds, and yet it is as real and vivid as any other feeling – for ganging up on my friend.
They didn’t answer him. Gerald went to the bar for another drink and Neil excused himself and headed to the gents, leaving Rob and me together at the table.
‘Oh, Rob,’ I said. There were tears in my eyes, and I squeezed his hand. ‘I’m so sorry . . .’
‘Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘And after all, it’s only art.’
That was the last time Rob turned up at the Duke of Windsor. And though Rob and I continued to meet for our lunches, for our galleries and museums, I stopped telling Gerald about them.
What we needed, I thought, was a holiday. It would make everything better if we could just get away from cold, grey London, away from the flat and its air of failure. What about a little tour of France, eating, drinking, visiting art galleries and looking at cathedrals with Judith and Rob?
‘I’d rather go by ourselves. Why did you say yes without consulting me?’
‘Because they asked me. And I’d like to go with them. It’ll be fun. I need some fun.’ That wasn’t true. I needed tenderness and care. ‘I’ll go by myself if you don’t want to go.’
‘I’m not sure how Judith would feel about that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, Bliss, don’t play the innocent. She’s a woman; don’t you think she ever feels a bit jealous of you two?’
I stared at him. ‘Rob and me? You can’t be serious. What – are you jealous? Do you think . . .?’
‘Of course not.’
Now, experienced as I am, I realise that he spoke too quickly. The invisible worm, as Rob’s beloved Blake would have said.
On our first night in Paris, after a meal with lots of wine, it began to unravel.
‘Where are my sleeping pills, Liza? Did you pack my sleeping pills?’
‘No. You didn’t ask me to pack your sleeping pills.’
‘You know I can’t sleep without them!’
Gerald was flinging shirts and underclothes from his suitcase. A pair of balled-up socks hit me and I reacted angrily. ‘Well, why didn’t you pack your own sleeping pills if they’re so important?’
‘Because I was working to earn the money to take this bloody holiday and didn’t have time.’
We were both gesticulating wildly and the blow from Gerald’s arm, though forceful, was accidental. I screamed as I fell, from surprise, pain and also, if I’m honest, excitement. There is a kind of thrill to be had from making a scene. I ran out into the corridor in my nightdress, crying. Judith opened their door and took me in her arms and I spent the night in their bed while Rob slept in the single.
In the morning I found that Gerald had left the hotel and returned to London. I continued on with Rob and Judith to Chartres and Rouen and Rheims.
After I returned from France, I stayed with Rob and Judith. Judith insisted and I was relieved. It was childish of me, I know, but I didn’t want to have to make any decisions.
And then, after a week, I knew I couldn’t go back. I’d thought that when people loved each other they mated for life, like swans or like doves, like Mother and Daddy, like Aunt Emu and Miss Minnie. I was wrong, of course, but in any case, I’d fallen out of love with Gerald and that was that. The end.
Here’s a question for you: how can one enjoy sex with a person one doesn’t even like, let alone love? It’s a puzzle that probably bothers women more than it bothers men. It bothered me at first. You see, after I left him, Gerald and I had the best sex of our marriage.
Are you shocked? It’s not uncommon. There’s make-up sex and break-up sex; nostalgic, one-last-time sex; sex that is manipulative, merciful or cruel. So many varieties and they can all be highly pleasurable at the time. That’s the kicker, of course. At the time. It is later that you feel the pain.
It was New York, not Greece, and Gerald was going alone. We needed to talk about the practicalities – the furniture, the divorce – so I went to see him at the flat. Three times.
It was never in bed. It was on the floor or against the wall. There were no preliminaries of kissing or caressing, no sweet nothings. Nothing sweet at all. It was passionate and tigerish; afterwards we both had scratches and even bite marks; we drew apart from each other like adversaries in a fight. Back in my own bed, in my own head, we did it again and again. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. Did this mean I loved him after all?
Was I making the biggest mistake of my life?
The day before he left was the last time. He was catching the boat train in the morning and his trunks had already gone. He’d been staying with a friend in Stoke Newington, of all places, and so I trekked all the way out there on the bus and met him in a teashop.
‘What on earth have you done to yourself?’ were his first words. He hadn’t seen me for a month.
‘Had a haircut, bought some make-up,’ I said. I fluttered my red nails and posed with my head turned to one side to display my close-fitting hat with its dark fur trim.
‘You’ve just added fifteen years to your age, Liza. You look very . . .’ He searched for the right word. ‘Polished. But not at all yourself.’
‘That’s the aim. I don’t want to be that self, Gerald.’
We ordered tea. He lit a cigarette and sat on his side of the table smoking and staring at me. ‘You used to look so pretty and sweet.’
Pretty and sweet.
They were the words Miss Weyman had used. She was the incredibly chic Home Editor of My Journal, and the edge in her voice told me ‘pretty’ was not, in her lexicon, a compliment.
‘Very jeune fille.’ A lock of my hair, which was long and held back with a pale blue velvet ribbon, slipped through her manicured fingers. ‘What do you call this?’
‘An Alice band.’
‘And do you think the office of a women’s magazine is Wonderland?’ Smoker’s cough turned her laughter into a hoarse bark. ‘Seriously, my dear, you must do something about this.’ She picked up another lock of hair and let it fall. ‘Raw beauty is not enough. It is like raw food; monotonous.’
I giggled. She said such odd things.
‘I mean it. You have a very natural face. Which works for now, with your shiny hair and perfect skin. But it puts you at a disadvantage.’
‘I think I look all right.’ I liked my full skirt, white rayon blouse and wedge-heeled sandals, my string bag, my battered leather purse.
‘No, you look far, far too young and vulnerable for anyone to take seriously. You need to present yourself if you’re going to get on, do you understand? Honestly, my dear, you need a little glamour.’
A ‘glamour’ in the old Scots ballads is a magic spell. A protective spell, an illusion of maturity and competence.
Miss Weyman said, very kindly, ‘Go to Emile’s in Sloane Street, my dear; say that I sent you. And here.’ She scribbled down a couple of
addresses. ‘Dress shops. Not expensive, but very smart. You can mention my name.’
But back to my newly polished self. Gerald and I checked our lists and exchanged documents. He gave me his New York address and I poured the tea. One for him and one for me. The waitress, rattling her tray, passed beside us and I asked her for more sugar. She refilled the basin and I thanked her, then slowly put one, two teaspoons in his cup and stirred it for him. Watching Gerald across the table as he smoked and fidgeted, I felt only impatience for him to be gone. But if I closed my eyes, even briefly, he was there and I was there, naked in our black velvet jungle and I felt faint with desire.
If I can only get through this, I thought, I will be all right. If I can get through this without giving in to him, it’s over, it’s done, he’s gone, and I’m free.
I tried to imagine myself floating above the table, looking pityingly down at the two of us. My hand shook only slightly as I drank my tea.
‘I wouldn’t stop you painting.’
‘You what?’
‘If we . . .’
No, Gerald, I thought, glad of my foundation and lipstick, my haircut and hat and sleek grey suit. Glad of my mask, my glamour.
‘I don’t want to paint. I have a job and I’m quite happy with it. The magazine’s engaged me to go with Miss Weyman to sketch interiors for a series called “My Favourite Room”. We’ve done the Oliviers’ drawing room at Notley, Googie Withers’ boudoir, Claire Bloom’s Chelsea entrance hall . . .’
‘You’re being ridiculous. I don’t understand. I thought you wanted to be an artist.’
‘I thought we agreed that I couldn’t be an artist.’
‘You’re twisting my words, Liza. I think . . . I think that you can be . . .’
‘Be what?’
‘A painter. The painter you wanted to be. Portraits,’ he said. ‘Women, children . . .’
‘Flowers?’
‘Yes, flowers if you want.’
‘Eggs, fruit?’
‘What on earth are you talking about? Perhaps I was wrong.’
‘Perhaps you were right. In any case, I have to earn my own living.’
‘Yes, but that stupid magazine! I don’t understand how you can –’
‘Lower myself?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t want to fight with you. Come on, let’s go for a walk.’
‘I haven’t finished,’ I said, but he sprang up, paid the waitress, put on his hat and stood waiting for me at the door.
I finished my tea to the dregs. It was strong and stewed, the way I liked it. I heard the bell on the door tinkle as Gerald stepped out onto the footpath.
‘Thank you,’ I said to the waitress, and smiled at her. She was middle-aged and weary and walked as if her feet hurt.
I left a couple of coins for her on the table, next to my empty cup. It was easy to be generous. Why not? By now I was floating above the teashop, the bus stop, the gritty, dirty high street. I was a curious and detached observer. No, more than that. I soared up and up until I was a goddess who has taken mortal form but has her divinity as an insurance policy against human pain.
‘Where are we going?’
He didn’t say anything until he’d pulled me by the hand through the cemetery gates. From the road it looked reasonably well-kept, but as you went further in, it was so overgrown with ivy and periwinkle that all you could see was upstanding columns and urns, with a few angels keeping their heads above the rising leafy tide.
Gerald put his hands on my shoulders and gazed at me. Was he memorising my face? Why? He’d drawn it often enough.
‘Liza, come with me to New York. I can’t live without you. I love you.’
Once, those words would have meant something to me, even if there were bruises and thumbprints on my skin. Now I heard them with mild surprise. This wasn’t Gerald.
He ran his hands down my body and put them around my neck, and I wondered for a second if he was going to strangle me. This would be a good place for a murder. The last person to see me alive, the waitress at the teashop, would say that the young lady and gentleman seemed perfectly happy.
He kissed me then, for a long, long time, and I found myself guiding his hand up under my skirt. Cami-knickers, which are what we wore in those days, are quite loose, and he could easily feel how wet and open I was. He groaned a bit, and backed me up against an ivy-swathed monument. There was a speckled marble angel above us, but her eyes were elsewhere and I kissed him again, nibbling and biting. I lay back against the mattress of greenery, he fumbled for a minute with a Frenchie – so this was planned? – and then he let me pull him into me. Deeper, deeper; I could hear him groaning and whimpering. Harder, faster; he cried out and I arched my back too as a deep, warm pulse reverberated through and through and through. I lay there for a few seconds, quivering from the aftershocks, and when I opened my eyes I saw, four or five yards away, a small boy with a West Highland terrier on a lead.
‘What were you doing?’ he asked in a clear, piping voice.
I pulled my skirt down. Gerald, his back to the child, struggled with his fly, and I thought of Rob’s party song.
Don’t know why,
He’s got buttons on his fly.
Takes forever,
When my man and I get together.
Zippers save so much time . . .
I started laughing. The little boy and the dog ran away, and Gerald’s face went a dark brick-red. He shouted at me. Perhaps murder was on his mind but I didn’t wait to find out. I grabbed my bag and ran like a deer through the ivy-covered monuments, jumping over graves, dodging vines and brambles.
‘Liza, come back!’
Never. Never, never again. I’d exorcised him, and he had no power over me any more. At the cemetery gates I picked the leaves and twigs off my suit, and then, when I found a public lavatory, I went into a cubicle, took off my ruined stockings and stuffed them into my bag. My cami-knickers were dirty and torn and the gusset was saturated, so I took them off as well and used them to dab between my legs.
There was a knock on the cubicle door. The elderly attendant said, ‘Are you all right, dear?’
‘Yes; yes, thank you.’ I pulled the chain and walked out. ‘I fell over,’ I explained. ‘In the cemetery.’
‘Well, I knew there was something wrong when you come in here looking like you’d been dragged through a bush backwards.’ She patted my arm. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, miss, you look all shaken up.’
‘I’ve lost my hat,’ I said, looking at myself in the mirror. ‘It must have come off when I fell over.’
‘You go home, dear, and have a nice cuppa tea. And put your feet up.’
I’d already put a penny in her little tray, but I dropped in another as I left. I got off the bus early and slipped into a little Cypriot restaurant to buy a half-bottle of wine. It was dark and sour, and I drank the whole lot.
They ask such intimate questions, don’t they?
‘Have you passed some wind, Mrs Bliss?’
Karen is more straightforward. ‘Any farting, dear?’
I can’t remember. It’s the morphine. Two tablets, morning and night, and then the magic potion for any pain that slips through in between. Though I haven’t needed any today, have I? For . . . oh, days. How many? I forget.
I used to claim to have a wonderful memory, just as I used to tell people I was uneducated and practically illiterate. The purpose of those particular claims? Simply, in line with my natural laziness, to lower expectations so that I could, if I wanted, appear quite scintillatingly brilliant at times. But – and this is the truly clever part – unthreateningly so. There’d be a flash of lightning across an otherwise empty sky, and so I came across a bit like an idiot savant. It was a little game I played. What a waste of time! And as for my memory? It was once very good in terms of detail – the precise join of the repeats on a pattern, the supplier for a particular passementerie braid, the little creases behind Alec’s ears as he aged. If it was also highly selective, how w
as I to know?
Once, at a cocktail party, I boasted to a writer about my powers of recall and was brought up short when he asked, ‘How do you know what you’ve forgotten?’
‘Obviously there’d be a gap,’ I said. ‘And there isn’t.’
‘Perhaps not a gap in continuity, but what if you’ve forgotten some infinitesimal detail – a look, a gesture, a word – which, left out of your narrative, entirely changes the whole meaning?’
‘That’s the sort of thing that only happens in novels. Your novels.’
We both laughed, and then he said, ‘What if our memories are a screen we’ve made to shield us from the truth?’
It took me a while to understand that people have to forget if they are to survive. It should come as no surprise that Gerald claimed to have no recollection of his childhood. People forget in order to escape culpability, too, as Edward forgot he had a wife and three children when he was having me up against some wall or in the back seat of his car. And others forget because they have no need to keep score. Darling Rob kept no record of my sins. And Alec? Alec did not even perceive them.
I’m ashamed to say that I have kept score. I’ve remembered my memories. I’ve kept my grudges green, watered and full of sap. In telling you about my first marriage, I know I’ve skipped over things somewhat. All right, a lot. I’ve reduced my marriage to a wedding night, some arguments and a rape. I was young and innocent; he was older, more experienced, and – to speak plainly – more fucked up than I could have possibly imagined. That’s the truth. It was his fault that we came to grief. Can I be any plainer? IT WAS HIS FAULT.
But if I try, if I stop telling the story as I have told it to myself for more than half a century, I can remember Gerald’s hand trembling as he touched my breast, and the break in his voice when he first said he loved me. I can remember mornings in our little flat, with Gerald dressed very properly for work in a grey suit with an overcoat and hat. I would kiss him at the door, straighten his tie and we’d often burst into complicit laughter at the thought of what we’d been doing only minutes before.