A Sense of Guilt

by Andrea Newman

  One day there was a moment of breakthrough when she said to him, ‘Mummy was very sad when Daddy went away.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I expect she was.’

  There was a pause while Sally looked at him very seriously before asking, ‘Are you going to be my new Daddy?’

  He said, ‘I do hope so.’

  That night he said to Helen, knowing it was the right moment, ‘I want to marry you.’

  ‘But you’re married already,’ she said, unsurprised.

  ‘You know it was all wrong with Inge long before we met. I love you. I love Sally. I want us to be a family.’

  ‘What about the boys?’

  ‘I know. It’s a mess. But so is this. How can we live like this for ever, with me coming and going and telling lies at home? Inge must know something is happening, we have terrible rows. I’d like to be straight with her.’

  ‘I can’t handle the guilt,’ Helen said. ‘If you come to me, you’ve got to feel all right about it, or I’d rather go on as we are, or even break up.’

  The words gave him a chill of pure horror and he realised she had become indispensable, more than a romantic dream.

  ‘Christ knows,’ she said violently, ‘I’ve been the deceived wife and I never fancied myself as the other woman. I don’t know how I allowed this to happen. And you’re too bloody nice to be in this situation.’

  In those days they both still smoked and seemed to spend a lot of time lighting each other’s cigarettes and pacing up and down.

  ‘The thing is,’ Helen said, ‘I don’t ever want to live in a mess again. I want to love someone who loves me and I want to know the bills are paid and the house is clean and there isn’t going to be any drama. I want to get on with my work and come home to someone who’s really there, not drunk or stoned or in bed with another woman. All that sixties rubbish, I don’t ever want to live through that again.’

  She had never spoken so openly about Carey before.

  ‘I want to leave Inge and live with you,’ Richard said. ‘And I want to leave teaching and get into the probation service. I really want to change my life. Will you help me?’

  ‘No,’ Helen said. ‘I don’t want to be blamed if it goes wrong.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to do it all by myself.’

  She took his hand, ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s lonely. But I couldn’t leave Sally for you. How can I expect you to leave the boys for me?’

  ‘Will you think less of me if I do it?’ Her hand was rough and paint-stained; it felt very strong. Tough and square with short nails. He hung on to it as to a life-raft.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll just think I’m very lucky.’

  He kissed her hand and found that it was wet with his own tears.

  ‘I do love you, Richard,’ she said. ‘You’re a good man and there aren’t very many around.’

  She had not said that before, either, and he found it almost unbearably moving.

  ‘I’ll visit the boys a lot,’ he said, ‘and Inge as well, if she wants me to. You must be prepared for that. I want to make it as easy for them all as I can. I’ll never abandon them.’

  ‘I know,’ Helen said. ‘You’ll do your best to make it all right. But I think you’ll find it can’t be done nicely.’

  * * *

  When he told Inge he was leaving her, she let out a great primitive scream that went on and on like an animal howling in some death agony. It was a while before he realised that she was actually screaming ‘nein’ over and over again. The boys woke up and stumbled out of bed in their pyjamas to watch the scene with disbelief. Richard tried to pack but Inge clung to his legs, impeding every movement, and still the terrible screaming went on. He had never before heard such a sound come out of anyone’s throat. The boys started to cry and he tried to comfort them and take them back to bed. Then there was sudden silence. When he returned to Inge, he found she had cut her wrists and was making a bizarre and terrifying pattern of blood all over the sheets. He was totally horrified and unable to tell how serious it was, so panicked and called an ambulance. It was only while dialling 999 that it suddenly occurred to him that the German for no, if repeated three times, was also the emergency code, and that Inge had in fact been demanding the help he was now getting her, as if on some cosmic telephone.

  * * *

  ‘Shit,’ Helen said. ‘Happy birthday. Great timing she’s got.’

  ‘He said he was sorry,’ Sally said.

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘He did. He was very upset about it. And she can’t know it’s your birthday.’

  ‘God, you’re naive. Of course she knows it’s my fucking birthday. She’s had eight years to find out.’

  ‘Mum. Now you’re being paranoid.’

  ‘And I don’t want any clever stuff from you. I’m not in the mood for jargon or compassion or any of that rubbish.’

  ‘I know,’ Sally said. ‘I’m sorry. Have my present. Have a hug as well.’ She laid a parcel on the table and put her arms round Helen.

  ‘God, I’m a monster,’ Helen said presently. ‘Of course he has to go. They could all be blown up. The fact that I wish they would be is neither here nor there. You and I know she’s lying and he knows she’s lying but he still has to go. I’m just tired. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Have a drink,’ Sally said. ‘Let me pour you a big birthday drink.’

  * * *

  Inge watched him coming at last up the path. She had been waiting at the window like an impatient child, willing him to appear, weaving spells, making bargains with God. None of it had worked. But now, in his own time, he was here.

  She was reassured to feel her heart give its customary lurch, for if that did not happen, on what could she depend? Safe, like a seraglio wife, behind her veil of net curtain, she gazed at him greedily as he stood under the porch light. Because she saw him seldom, he looked strange but familiar in the way that film stars do, and weary, with smudges round the eyes like make-up. It was a look she treasured. But if she told him that, he would be amused, embarrassed.

  He rang the bell, glancing at his watch. She waited for the boys to open the door; she was no longer in a hurry. The sooner he came in, the sooner he would leave. She looked down at his short curly hair, shiny with rain, at the damp collar and shoulders of his mackintosh. She felt such piercing love that she ached. At the same time she could not remember if it had always been so, or if she had gradually tuned her feelings to a higher pitch since he left her.

  One of the boys went to the door. She heard Richard say hullo and the child’s casual voice answering.

  ‘Oh, hullo, Dad. Mum’s upstairs.’ Then a shout to her. ‘Mum? Dad’s here.’

  Other women did not go on loving like this. Not for eight years. Oh, she had read about people who never got over things but she had not met any of them. Not someone like herself. Old people, bereaved and heartbroken perhaps, waiting to die, but never anyone of her age, nourishing a passion, lying in wait for one false move, so that she could pounce like a spider, regain her territory and smother her prey with love.

  In the fantasy he would have climbed the stairs, found her in the darkened room, been overcome by lust for her body and flung her on to the bed to make love until they were both exhausted. Then he would have admitted he could not leave her again.

  ‘Inge?’ A faint edge to his voice. ‘Are you up there?’

  She walked reluctantly, urgently, to the top of the stairs and looked down at him.

  ‘I haven’t got all night,’ he said, the tone gentler than the words. ‘Why are you upstairs?’

  ‘I was lying down,’ she said. ‘The gas gave me a headache.’ She thought how beautiful he looked, so tired and so concerned for her safety that he had come all this way when he could have refused. He looked up at her, his eyes that curiously light brown, almost yellow, a colour she imagined belonged to wolves, a colour the boys had luckily both inherited instead of her own boring blue. She gazed longingly at the corners of his mouth where she had often pla
ced her tongue in happier days to tease him. It didn’t seem possible that all that passion could have disappeared for ever.

  ‘Well, I’ll go in the kitchen and have a look,’ he said. ‘Don’t come down if you’re not feeling well.’

  There was a sink full of dirty dishes in the kitchen and a strong smell of gas. He checked all the connections as a formality but could not find anything loose; Karl came in while he was doing it and stood watching him with idle, detached curiosity, as one might observe a man digging a hole in the road. Richard felt the reproach of years (you deserted me, why should I care about you?) and wondered if this was merely in his own head.

  ‘Find anything?’ Tone of polite interest.

  ‘Not so far.’ Richard looked up, but his son’s face was without expression.

  ‘Why not strike a match?’ Karl suggested. ‘That might do it.’

  Peter followed him into the kitchen. He too gave the impression of having nothing better to do with his time. ‘Mum’s been fiddling with the taps,’ he said helpfully. Karl glanced at him. ‘Well, she has,’ Peter added.

  ‘I’d better go and talk to her,’ Richard said, abandoning the search for the leak he had never really expected to find.

  ‘She gets awfully low,’ Karl said, ‘and we can’t cheer her up. Couldn’t you come round more often?’

  ‘She gets drunk,’ Peter said flatly, though the row of empty bottles was there by the bin for Richard to see.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Richard said. ‘I know it’s difficult for you.’

  ‘Oh, we’re OK,’ Karl said. ‘It’s just her. She can’t sort of, you know, get it sorted.’

  They were taller than Richard already. They had shaved parts of their heads and dyed the remainder orange and pink and made it stand up in spikes. They were a team. He felt the force of their unity as he looked at their blank childish faces.

  We are survivors, that was the message he picked up, and no thanks to you, so don’t get sentimental with us, because we’re giving it to you straight.

  ‘If I came round every day,’ he said, feeling ill at the thought, ‘it still wouldn’t be enough. She wants me here all the time and I can’t do that.’

  ‘No, well,’ said Karl, shrugging. ‘That’s it. Cheers, Dad.’ He drifted out of the kitchen and Peter followed him; Richard thought they were oddly like liberal parents creeping tactfully away to leave the young lovers together. He was reminded of the countless evenings he had spent with Inge when they were both nineteen and she was babysitting for his tutor. Then they could hardly wait for the sound of the car driving away before tearing their clothes off; now, as the front door slammed behind his children, he felt a profound apprehensive chill at the knowledge that he and Inge were once more alone in the house.

  He went back into the hall and shouted up the stairs, ‘Inge? I think it’s all right. But I’ll have to go in a minute.’

  The hall was full of bicycles and dust and old newspapers; there was even, now he came to look more closely, the remains of a bread roll, green with mould, behind the umbrella stand. He marvelled yet again at her talent for creating such chaos: it seemed deliberate, subtly designed, like a film set. He could remember a time when this house, his house then, had been clean and tidy. He had helped; he had pulled his weight. But in those days Inge had cared.

  Now she came down the stairs in a dressing-gown, which alarmed him. In the early days after their separation, she had often removed her clothes when he visited her, in order to tempt or reproach him, and the desolation of all that thin sagging stretch-marked flesh that he had once desired so strenuously made him feel unbearably sad for both of them. ‘I was going to take a bath,’ she said as she reached the foot of the stairs, ‘but then I remembered there is no hot water.’ She had washed off her make-up; she looked and sounded like a child. He felt he should have scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to bed, which was no doubt what she was hoping for, only he would have done it with promises of a drink of water and a story. He would have sat by the bed until she fell asleep and then he would have gone home with a lighter heart. Sometimes he felt that he truly might do any of these things, perhaps on his next visit, so potent was the spell she cast on him, which made him afraid to visit her at all.

  ‘You can turn it on again,’ he said. ‘It’s quite safe.’

  She shivered; her dressing-gown was of light material. ‘I’m so cold,’ she said. ‘Come and have a drink with me.’

  He followed her into the living-room where they had spent so many evenings together, not wanting to have a drink, not wanting to stay, but somehow swept along by the poignancy of their situation and the knowledge that it was all his fault. Inge poured whisky; he declined.

  ‘You make me feel guilty,’ she said, and he almost laughed. ‘You’ve come all this way and you look so tired. I’m wasting your time, I’ve given you this awful journey for nothing.’

  ‘It’s all right, Inge,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in both of us feeling guilty.’

  To his horror she began to cry: large effortless tears welling up and spilling over, like a child being sick, without trauma or deliberation. ‘Oh, Richard,’ she said, ‘I can’t bear it. I love you so much. I miss you all the time. I know you think I do these things on purpose and you don’t trust me any more, but I’m so lonely, if I can’t see you I feel I’m going mad and I really don’t want to live.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry. If there was anything I could do, I’d do it.’ It was a conversation they had had many times.

  ‘You could leave her,’ Inge said. ‘She could manage without you. I can’t.’

  He mopped up her tears and she clung to him savagely. He held her for a while until she was calmer, and warm again; he poured her more whisky.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ he said. ‘You know it is. I care about you and the boys but I want to live with Helen. I love her. Forgive me if you can. I can’t change. I don’t want to hurt you but that’s how it is. It’s not your fault, it’s mine.’

  ‘I can’t bear the pain,’ she said.

  He disentangled himself gently and got up. She followed him into the hall, clinging and embracing him all the way to the door. He was appalled by the nakedness of her emotion and yet it aroused his admiration and respect. He kissed the top of her head and promised to see her soon. Eventually he was able to escape into the rainy night.

  * * *

  On the night of the dinner party Sally watched from the window to see Felix and Elizabeth arrive. She was almost afraid to look but it was all right, he was every bit as wonderful as she remembered. She felt a shiver of delight at the sight of him, his face, his smile, his casual elegant clothes, the way he moved. Even watching him park the car was a thrill. How lucky Elizabeth was to be married to him: did she appreciate her good fortune?

  She was watching from Helen’s room and had to go back to her own room to finish doing her face. She could hear the excited greetings downstairs, the raised voices, Richard’s warm welcome, Helen going down after they’d arrived and being cool and polite. Then they moved into the living-room and the sounds became fainter while she went on painting her eyes. Waiting for her heart to calm down.

  * * *

  ‘It’s not that I love England,’ said Felix, it’s just that I hate abroad.’

  In fact he did love England, and he was not ashamed of his love, but he thought it unwise to admit it, since that would mean sharing it. So he pretended he had come back because he hated foreign food and foreign weather and foreign language, pretended that all this antipathy had finally forced him to tolerate the shortcomings of his native land. In truth England was a beloved mistress, whom he had betrayed with foreign whores, but it was safer to pretend that she was a boring wife. Only Elizabeth knew that Elgar and Noel Coward and even (God help him) Winston Churchill brought tears to his eyes; and Elizabeth would never tell. He was assured of her smiling complicity whenever he told the familiar tale of tax exile, and eventual disenchantment with the e
xpatriate life, and returning to take his medicine like a man. Patriotism and sentiment were not part of his image.

  ‘Well, it’s good to have you back,’ said Richard, pouring the drinks.

  ‘I think I missed Radio Three most,’ said Elizabeth. ‘The World Service didn’t make up for it at all. And you always get caught up with the other Brits, even though you swear you won’t. It’s really a very provincial way of life, with everyone gossiping madly about their neighbours.’

  That must mean, Helen thought, that Felix’s affairs had been common knowledge, whereas in London Elizabeth had at least a chance of not finding out. ‘You both look very well on it,’ she said.

  They had tried just about everywhere. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, seeming to promise the best of both worlds, had turned out like most compromises to be neither one thing nor the other, so near and yet so far. Turks and Caicos offered the perfect climate, but it went with a shortage of culture and a multitude of insects that ignored Elizabeth and bit Felix so savagely that he spent most of his time not on the beach but at the local clinic, having humiliating injections in the bum. Ireland had provided whisky, scenery and conversation, but so many soft days that Felix began to fear he might drown while walking down the street.

  ‘What about Andorra?’ Helen asked. ‘That might suit you.’

  ‘Come on, Helen, give them a chance,’ Richard said. ‘They’ve only just got back.’

  ‘Only trying to be helpful.’ Helen smiled at Elizabeth to show she did not include her in the helpfulness. Long ago the animosity between herself and Felix had resolved itself into a form of regular teasing such as siblings might enjoy. It was a way of pretending she did not really dislike him, a way of tolerating Richard’s oldest friend without embarrassing his wife.