A Sense of Guilt

by Andrea Newman

  Felix liked the sound of that. It would be like camping. All three of them in a tent cuddled up together to keep warm. Breakfast in a blackened frying-pan over a log fire. Washing in a stream, or with a bit of luck not having to wash at all.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  Tears came into his mother’s eyes. ‘Oh darling,’ she said, ‘don’t break my heart.’

  (‘You poor little sod,’ said Elizabeth twenty years later.)

  (‘You made that up,’ said Helen.)

  (‘If it’s what he remembers,’ said Richard, ‘it’s real for him.’)

  Felix was no longer sure what was real or imagined or what he had reinvented. His mother had left him, that much could be confirmed by lawyers who arranged the divorce, but he had written about their parting so many times in his novels that he could not disentangle their dialogue from fiction. He had become Seriozha, and it was Anna Karenina who kissed and caressed him, who wept over him, who stole into the house with presents when he was asleep. He first read the novel with a sense of shock, as if Tolstoy had stolen his life; then later he wondered if he had appropriated the plot for himself. It certainly impressed female undergraduates and made them more eager to go to bed with him.

  That part of it was all right to tell, an interesting sorrow. He never quite managed to get around to telling the later bit, when he went to live with his mother after Martin had left her. She cried all the time and he just held her, in a chair, at the table, on the bed. She cried like someone trying to wash herself empty, and Felix, who was seventeen, did not know what to do. He tried not to leave her alone too much, but he had his school work to do and his friends to see. It would not help, he told himself, if he failed his exams. His father had already refused to give him any money as long as he stayed with his mother, so he needed a scholarship or he could not go to university at all.

  His mother had long hair and it clung to him. In the middle of a lesson he would find a piece of it attached to his jacket or his shirt. Her scent was on his body when he got into the bath. In later years he thought he had not had such a physical relationship with anyone else, no matter how much he had fucked them. When he listened to Sinatra singing ‘I’ve got you under my skin’ he felt sick with love and loathing and loss. He could not forgive his mother for the day he had come home to find a note: ‘My darling boy, forgive me, I have gone to Italy with Luigi.’

  Obviously he had left her alone enough. The raddled woman of forty had become a radiant escapee. The family at the delicatessen were equally mystified. They had no idea that Luigi and the signora… and they shrugged to prove it.

  Felix was shocked by the anger he felt. He wanted to seek his mother out and injure her, kill her slowly, repossess the body that had haunted him through school. Luigi he saw as a mere shadow, a pleasant enough youth, twenty-five maybe, with an ingratiating smile and looks no better, no worse, than the average Italian. It was melodrama, it was farce, and the worst part of it was that his mother had made a fool of him. For this he had left home and his father’s money; for this he had hurried back from school; for this he had hugged the sobbing body night after night.

  His father would laugh. His father would say it was all his fault and it served him right. His father would say he had seen through his mother years ago and Felix was a fool not to have done likewise. He could not tell his father.

  He went on living in the empty flat, alone. One day he took the few clothes his mother had left in the wardrobe and cut them up. Cutting up her clothes gave him an orgasm. He was very frightened.

  He passed his exams and went to university without his father’s money. His mother wrote to him and said she was expecting a baby. She was very happy and Felix must be happy for her too. He must forgive her and understand. Felix felt he had been doing that all his life. He found he was behaving very badly to several girls at college, who loved him. He was ashamed of himself but he could not stop. Behaving badly excited him. It gave him a sensation of release. He wrote back to his mother that of course he was happy for her and there was nothing to forgive. Of course he understood. He would come out to Atrani in the long vac before the baby was born and be a help to her. He and Luigi would be like brothers.

  In June Luigi wrote to tell him that his mother was dead.

  * * *

  It was cold in the studio though the sun shone outside. Helen was desperate to finish the bit of the painting she was working on before the light went, but Elizabeth showed no sign of being ready to leave. Officially only Richard and Sally were allowed in the studio, apart from Magdalen and potential buyers, but at some point in the past Elizabeth had joined the ranks of the privileged few and now she seemed in the mood to abuse her good fortune. It was hell trying to work with someone in the room and ordinarily Helen would have said so, but then ordinarily Elizabeth would have known. Now depression blinded her to everything and also stopped Helen asking her to leave, though it did not prevent her from becoming extremely bad-tempered.

  ‘He’s definitely got someone new,’ Elizabeth said. She was sitting in Helen’s battered armchair and watching Helen work, though Helen knew she did not really see what was going on. The painting she was staring at might as well have been television or wallpaper. Elizabeth was too far sunk in gloom to see anything but the inside of her own head. ‘I think it started soon after we came back,’ she added, ‘but I can’t be sure.’

  Helen longed to be brutal and say who cares. It was of no interest to her if Felix was fucking every other woman in London provided she was left alone to get on with a painting called Lust for a mad American whose money would pay for a new second-hand van. She hated commissions at the best of times and today was the first day the painting had begun to give her anything back: she had just a glimpse of how it might be if she could keep her concentration and not let it slip. Tolerable was how it might be, no more than that, but after the despair and rage she had felt as she wrestled with it in the early stages, tolerable seemed like miraculous. At this point she would settle gladly for anything that would not cause her actual shame. At the same time she made the mental resolution never to accept another commission in the whole of her life.

  ‘Any idea who it is?’ she managed to ask.

  ‘No. Somebody’s wife, I expect. He usually goes for married women. They know the rules, I suppose.’

  ‘Then you’ve nothing to worry about.’ She thought misery made Elizabeth appear very heavy and lumpen; it was embarrassing to see her like this, like watching somebody ill without their permission.

  ‘I’m so afraid this one’s different.’

  ‘You always say that.’ How often she had heard the sad repetitive story; only the names were changed.

  ‘Do I? But this one really feels as if it might be serious. He’s so nice to me. He keeps buying me flowers and presents and taking me out to dinner.’

  ‘I hope you choose somewhere expensive.’ The painting was fading before Helen’s eyes, retreating into itself, shutting up shop for the day, even possibly for ever, it was so precariously balanced. Red and black, not colours she usually worked in, with a hint of jagged shark’s teeth about it that she was trying to submerge but not to lose.

  ‘And he won’t show me any of the book. Usually he lets me read it, bits of it anyway, just to encourage him; he’s so used to my being his editor, it’s a sort of habit. But not this time,’ she ended in a positive howl, as if parted from the Holy Grail.

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t need encouragement this time.’ God, this was going beyond all the reasonable bounds of friendship.

  ‘But he does, well, he did, he was really frightened of starting. Now he says it’s going well but he won’t let me see it.’

  ‘Don’t you have enough to do editing other people?’

  ‘Not really, I’m only working part-time since we came back. I’ve been feeling tired, but Felix says it’s the menopause, he puts everything down to that.’

  If she’d been working full-time she would have been safely in her office at thi
s hour and not in the studio. Silence. A chance to do some last-minute work perhaps? No, a foolish hope.

  ‘I’m so afraid he’s letting her read it instead of me. Or maybe he’s too busy and happy to work. He works best when he’s on an even keel, you see. Not ecstatic and not miserable. That’s why I’m so good for him. Well, usually. Until he gets bored.’

  Next time, Helen thought, I won’t answer the door. I’ll pretend I’m not here. I’ll disconnect the bell. ‘Terrific,’ she said.

  Elizabeth looked at her for the first time. ‘You despise me, don’t you?’

  ‘Christ, I just hate you to put yourself down, that’s all.’ Helen gave up and began to clean her brushes, longing to ram them down Elizabeth’s throat and up Felix’s arse.

  ‘I’m not, I’m only being realistic.’ A long silence. ‘I’m sorry, I’m interrupting and you’re really busy, aren’t you? I shouldn’t have come but I thought I’d go mad if I didn’t talk to someone.’ She got up and began to roam about the studio. ‘Are those your Seven Deadly Sins?

  ‘Yes. I thought I’d try and do them all together, then if I get stuck on one I can go on to the next. Maybe that’s what painting by numbers really means.’

  Elizabeth actually studied them quite carefully for several minutes. ‘They’re so different from your other work.’

  ‘If you say you like them better, I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Of course I don’t, but they’re impressive in their own way.’

  ‘Well done.’

  ‘No, I mean it.’ Elizabeth stood in front of the black and green one, the one with the eye at its centre, the one Helen disliked most. It was banal. But then envy was banal. It was not a subject she knew much about and she had thought of Inge while she painted it, assuming that was what Inge felt, or was it jealousy; and perhaps simple loathing had made the painting even worse than it might have been, or perhaps even thinking of Inge had put a jinx on it. ‘Envy?’ Elizabeth said, on a note of enquiry.

  ‘Spot on. I thought I’d keep it simple for him, he’s not very bright.’ But she knew she had lost when she had to put down someone else to excuse bad work. She wondered if she would have to scrap Envy and start again, or if somehow it could yet be rescued.

  Elizabeth moved on to the painting Helen disliked least, the one that reminded her of the desert. She had placed horizontal bands of colour, yellow, orange, pink, blue, purple, but very gently, so that they blurred into each other like sky and sand. It could be sentimental but if she got it right it might just work. It was meant to be very pure, both oasis and mirage.

  ‘Sloth?’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Give the woman a prize.’

  ‘It reminds me of “The Lotus Eaters” – you know, the land where it seemed always afternoon.’ She was silent for a while. ‘They’re smaller than I expected.’

  ‘The prices he’s paying, he can supply his own magnifying glass.’

  The other canvases were empty or nearly empty. On the other side of the studio was her real work, neglected, waiting for her to take it up again. Elizabeth stood in front of the red and black painting, the one she had almost ruined with her distress. Helen had to grant that she was doing her best to make amends. She was a friend and she was in pain and she cared about painting, though not as much as she cared about Felix. Helen could feel compulsory forgiveness beginning to seep out of her in Elizabeth’s direction.

  ‘This has to be lust,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Three out of three.’ She managed to smile.

  ‘It helps that I can’t remember all seven.’

  ‘Nobody can,’ Helen said. ‘I had to look them up myself. Lust was easy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It always is.’

  * * *

  Elizabeth, adolescent in the forties, was inclined to believe her father when he said that men would not respect her if she gave in to them. After all, he was a man, so he should know. It was only later, comparing notes with her girlfriends, that it struck her as odd that he and not her mother chose to impart this information. It was not even as if she had asked him for it; she went naturally to her mother for advice on emotions and bodily functions. But her mother seemed able to deal only with menstruation and childbirth, and both in a vague and weary manner, as if the effort of remembering either completely exhausted her. If Elizabeth ventured to ask about anything else, anything less clearly linked to physical discomfort in a good cause, anything redolent of pleasure, then her mother would sigh and look honestly baffled as if these experiences had somehow passed her by, as if she had never been out in the real world at all. ‘Oh Elizabeth,’ she would say, looking not so much embarrassed as bemused, ‘you must ask your father about that.’

  Elizabeth, of course, did not; but inevitably, within a few days, when her mother was out or resting, her father would come to her and say, in the manner of someone addressing a board meeting, ‘Your mother tells me there is something you want to ask me.’ The first couple of times this happened Elizabeth was dumb with embarrassment, but her father, clearly well briefed by her mother on whatever the subject was, would happily lecture her on the perils of masturbation or the mechanics of contraception (both, it seemed, were useful for men but unnecessary for women). In later life she wondered if he could possibly have meant what he said, but at the time he seemed amazingly sincere.

  She gave up questioning her mother and approached her father directly; he had a knack of rendering anything to do with sex as remote as a geography lesson. She was astonished that he could hold such strong views on something so obviously distant from both of them that all embarrassment vanished. She gathered that she was expected to remain a virgin until marriage and faithful thereafter; that she would be rewarded with children; that her husband might not be entirely monogamous; that her parents would appreciate it if she looked after them in their old age. None of this was linked to any religious influence, for her father was a scientist who prided himself on his rationality, but it might as well have been: the path of duty was as clearly marked as if by some celestial spotlight. She gave up asking questions altogether, of either parent, because there seemed nothing left to ask. Her life was mapped out for her as if predestined; it appeared to have no connection with the plan to achieve a degree in English and a career in publishing, and yet that too was part of her duty, for her parents believed in education and work as they believed in cleanliness and fresh air, as self-evident benefits.

  Elizabeth’s parents were old by conventional standards (forty and fifty at the time of her birth) so there was every chance of their declining years requiring her attention in the very near future. A heavy burden to place on any young man, she thought, so she lived chastely at first, thereafter as a mistress of married men, tutors at college or colleagues at work. She felt safe: none of them would be volunteering to share the parental burden, which she was sure anyone would find intolerable, so nothing could go wrong. She also discovered the depths of sexual pleasure from which her parents had tried to protect her. It was an amazing revelation, comparable to a religious experience: she had expected something difficult or dull and instead she found a source of easy transfiguring joy. Buoyed up by her discovery, she lived in one room and spent all her money on a housekeeper/nurse for her parents. It seemed cheap compared to the alternative, which was living at home. She visited her parents every day and maintained a radiant calm while her mother sulked and her father complained. She knew she was doing all she could, and they had taught her to be rational, so she refused to let guilt intrude. In later years, looking back, she was impressed by the strength of her own resolve.

  * * *

  ‘He won’t make you happy, I’m afraid,’ her mother said when Elizabeth announced she was going to marry Felix. ‘I should so like you to be happy, Elizabeth. Your father and I have had such a happy marriage.’

  Elizabeth stared at her mother. Nothing about this pale, exhausted, non-communicative person had ever suggested happiness. She did not remember the word being mentioned even by h
er voluble, authoritative father. She had in fact received mixed messages from her parents: study literature, where all sorts of emotional risks are taken, but lead a careful, blameless life. Vicarious thrills had been the order of the day. It was the first time she had realised they meant that was the way to achieve happiness; she had assumed it led merely to safety, and happiness was irrelevant. It had never occurred to her that for her parents safety and happiness might be the same thing.

  She was then thirty-six. Meeting Felix had been a profound shock. Suddenly there was this attractive young man of twenty-five in her office, author of three well-written novels and requiring an editor’s help with his fourth. When he smiled at her, she felt all the feelings she had read about. He was amusing, sexy and frivolous: a character straight out of the fiction she had consumed like a drug all her life. He loved her but he would hurt her because he wanted to be free. Here at last was her chance to be Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary and Camille.

  It was the end of the sixties. She had watched mini-skirts and free love, the drug culture and flower children. She had tried to join in as well as she could but always with a slight feeling of incongruity, like a maiden aunt getting drunk at a wedding. She was a veteran of many affairs, mostly with safe married men who would not challenge her life as dutiful daughter and efficient editor, but she had never been in love. Felix gave her feelings a violent jolt, as if she had suddenly been plugged into the mains.

  * * *

  Shortly before the wedding she found out that Felix didn’t believe in fidelity. She was still in her euphoric state and had made some idle remark about the magnitude of the marriage vows, expecting him to deny it with a compliment. Felix actually laughed.

  ‘Well, if you’re idiot enough to take them seriously,’ he said, ‘you deserve all you get. Not you, darling, other people, I mean. All that rubbish about having no one else till death. It’s enough to make you turn up your toes on the spot.’