‘Not always, no,’ he said, ‘I think it can cause a lot of damage.’
A slight look of worry came into her face, as if he had threatened her. She got up and wandered off in the direction of the wardrobe.
‘If you’re looking for the bathroom,’ he said, as she opened the wardrobe door, ‘it’s over there… and that’s the wardrobe.’
Inge stared at the clothes he had bought Sally. Felix felt naked, exposed and angry as never before in his life.
‘Full of beautiful clothes,’ she said. ‘Now I know your secret, Felix. You like to dress up.’ She laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell, so long as you are nice to me.’
It was his own fault, of course. He should never have let her come to the flat. But he was so used to entertaining women on his own territory, safe from the unexpected return of husbands and children and au pairs, that it had become a habit. Besides, it was tiresome to have to keep driving to Camden Town from Putney or Fulham and Inge was eager to get out of the house, so the arrangement suited them both quite well.
He said, ‘Inge, I seem to remember you saying when we started this affair that you always spoil a good thing. I’m beginning to see what you meant.’
She reached out a hand and very slightly flicked with one finger a black and silver jacket he had bought Sally just before she had told him she was pregnant. A jacket she had never worn. ‘I was only teasing you,’ she said. ‘Where’s your famous British sense of humour? You talk about it all the time, you English, but I don’t think you have it really.’
‘You do like to push your luck.’ The words seemed totally inadequate for the boiling rage he was feeling, but the tone must have reached her, for her expression softened and she turned to face him.
‘Don’t be cross with me, Felix. They’re such beautiful clothes and I’d like to try them on. May I? Did you buy them for a married woman who could never take them home?’
He supposed they had just had their first row and he found it oddly stimulating. They couldn’t love each other but at least they could fight. She was still Richard’s wife and the smell of her excited him and she had the most responsive body he had ever touched. Now she had blundered across Sally’s clothes and he wanted to punish her. He could be violent with her in a way he had never been to Sally and she would understand and they would both enjoy it. Perhaps she had even done it on purpose.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Now shut the wardrobe door and come back to bed.’
* * *
It was noisy in the coffee shop and Sally didn’t know all the people round the table, only the ones in her seminar group. They were discussing a case in the news, about a student who was taking legal action to try to prevent his girlfriend from having an abortion. Sally wished they would talk about anything else. She wanted to run away but she had only just come in and she was hungry; she wanted to finish her pie and chips and her nice fattening cake. She had been eating rather a lot lately but it never seemed to be enough.
‘But it’s her body,’ said Tessa, who was a keen feminist. ‘How can he possibly make her have a baby she doesn’t want?’
‘It’s his baby too,’ said a bloke with a beard. ‘He must have some rights.’
‘You’d be the first to shout if he was insisting she had an abortion.’
‘I think it’s murder,’ said someone with a cross round her neck.
‘God, you’re living in the dark ages,’ said Tessa’s friend Ann, munching a doughnut. ‘It’s a woman’s right to choose.’
Sally wondered if any of them had any idea what they were talking about, what it felt like to make that decision, to have a child inside you and let someone take it away. How surprised they would all be if she stood up and shouted at them that they just didn’t understand.
‘What about the man’s rights?’ said the bearded guy.
‘He doesn’t have any rights.’
‘Why not? Just because he’s a man?’
‘No, because it’s her body. I just said that. You don’t listen.’
‘Anyway, if he cares so much about babies,’ said a girl Sally had seen at the debating society, ‘he should have been more careful.’
‘She should too. It’s not that difficult,’ said the beard.
‘Anybody can make a mistake,’ said Tessa. ‘There’ll always be abortions because nobody can get it right all the time.’
‘It’s not about abortion,’ said Jamal suddenly. He was in Sally’s seminar group and she liked him but he was usually very quiet. ‘It’s about one person trying to force another to do something against their will. That has to be wrong. What do you think, Sally?’
Sally couldn’t speak. She was afraid she might start crying. She could feel Jamal watching her and she shoved more pie and chips in her mouth as an excuse for not answering.
‘If you don’t want that lasagne,’ said Ann to the beard, ‘can I have it?’
‘God, you’re such a pig,’ said Tessa fondly.
* * *
The next student was a girl. Helen wondered if she had realised yet the particular difficulties that lay ahead of her as a woman painter, or whether she thought the pill and woman’s lib. had taken care of all that. She wasn’t sure which way up her paintings should be, so they took some time to arrange. There were four of them, all different sizes, in red and orange and yellow, full of lines and holes and cuts.
‘They’re quite slow,’ Mike said after studying them for a while.
Helen said, ‘They seem to be about something in decay. Something bruised or damaged in some way.’
‘I’ve been leaving them to dry and then removing bits so I get a mark where they’ve been,’ the student said. ‘It’s like a sort of controlled accident.’
‘It’s as much about the edge as what’s inside,’ Andy said.
The student lit a cigarette. She looked as young as Sally, although she couldn’t be if she was in her final year. ‘I see the interior shape as an animal skin,’ she said.
‘The two middle paintings seem to receive light from outside,’ said Mike.
‘I’m thinking of making the canvas do the drawing for me,’ the student said.
‘That’s a neat trick if you can manage it,’ said Helen.
Andy said, ‘D’you see the paintings as concrete memories?’
The student looked surprised. ‘No. I feel they’re living things.’
Helen said, ‘Does anything about them disappoint you?’ She liked the students to be self-critical.
‘Yes, the scale is wrong. I worked on it too long without stretching it.’
‘What did you do in the summer?’ Andy asked.
‘I’ve been looking at wall paintings in monasteries in India. And Tantric art. And torn posters and stains and water marks.’ She sounded enthusiastic.
While I arranged my daughter’s abortion, Helen thought. But no one wanted to hear about that. Or at least there was no one to tell. No one to congratulate or sympathise or absolve. Was Sally punishing her by not writing, not ringing up? Or was theirs a conspiratorial silence to evade detection?
‘Have you seen Regent’s Canal since they drained it?’ Mike asked conversationally. The student looked vague.
‘The colour isn’t distorted through perspective,’ said Andy, still studying the paintings. ‘I see it very much as spaces within spaces.’
Helen said, ‘The ones that are painted stretched help the decisions you make about the edge.’
‘What’s your thesis about?’ Mike asked.
‘Suicide,’ said the student. ‘In painters and poets.’
‘Ah,’ said Andy, ‘death is a very big subject this year.’
‘Have you read Sylvia Plath?’ Helen asked, thinking that there was someone who wrote to her mother a lot.
‘No, not yet,’ said the student, as if there was no urgency with graduation only a few months away.
‘There’s a very good book about a psychotic girl doing paintings,’ said Mike.
Andy nodded. ‘A
nd who was that mathematician who killed himself by making cyanide from apple pips, using electrodes?’
It was strange, Helen thought, how they seemed to perk up at the mention of so much death. But that couldn’t be why Sally was silent. She couldn’t be as unhappy as that. And someone from the university would have got in touch.
‘Isn’t it interesting,’ Andy said, ‘how many people commit suicide outside their own country?’
The next student was a tall dark thin young man with glasses. His paintings were busy with vivid splashy colour all over the canvas.
‘How d’you know when to stop?’ they asked him.
‘When I don’t know what to do next.’ He frowned. ‘They’re not finished as such, but I don’t want to spoil what’s there.’
‘Well, I feel I’m allowed to sink back into the canvas,’ Mike said.
They both lit fresh cigarettes and questioned the student about the scale size. ‘How did that come about?’
He didn’t answer, although he looked as if he meant to.
‘You’re controlled by the way you make a gesture,’ Helen told him. ‘There’s a wedge of pictorial information that pushes you through the surface of the painting into another painting.’
The student had brought constructions and collages to be assessed as well as paintings. Helen asked him why he compartmentalised his work, but he didn’t seem to know.
‘Couldn’t you think more in terms of a synthesis?’ she persisted.
The student smiled but did not reply.
‘We’re going to be looking at thousands of these paintings soon,’ said Mike. ‘That’s not to say they’re bad.’
‘In fact they’re close to being very good,’ said Andy.
‘But they all look the same, or they soon will.’ It sounded cruel.
‘The nice thing about the collages is, they’re a breathing space,’ Helen said encouragingly.
The student was doing a thesis on guys who didn’t speak in films. There was not much they could say to that. The deadline was the end of March and he hadn’t started yet but seemed confident that he would have the first draft done by the New Year. Helen admired his optimism. She tried to imagine Christmas with Sally. Elizabeth asking questions. Felix dropping in.
The last student brought one large blue-grey abstract and a lot of small collages. They had a strong architectural feel.
‘These are spaces a human being could inhabit,’ Mike said.
‘In fact why not have a human presence?’ Andy lit a cigarette.
‘I want that ambiguity,’ said the student. ‘I don’t want to give those clues.’
‘Well, I’m not sure what the hell I’m looking at,’ said Mike.
‘Well, all right,’ said the student, hurt.
‘At its worst it’s too much about art,’ said Andy crushingly.
Helen was looking at the drawings in the notebook. They were quite different from the painting and collages on view.
‘These are much your best work,’ she said. ‘Very stylish, very assured.’ She had often found this so: the privacy of the notebook allowed students to relax and work naturally, whereas a large canvas could make them self-conscious and clumsy.
‘If you’re painting flags,’ said Andy, still looking at the picture, ‘why not stick on two flags instead?’
The student looked shifty, as if he had been caught like that before. ‘I like to hide things with aesthetics,’ he said.
‘I think you know what the subject-matter is and this is camouflage,’ said Mike severely.
The student lit a cigarette. He said he was doing his thesis on the harlequin. He equated the harlequin with art. It was all about frustrated means of expression. Helen sensed an accusation somewhere.
‘What next?’ she said. ‘Are you going to do your MA?’
‘Not yet. I thought I might go to Japan for a while.’
‘You’ll need to speak Japanese, won’t you?’ said Andy.
‘Or Germany perhaps,’ said the student quickly.
‘Do you speak German?’
‘No.’
* * *
Carey came to fetch her and they drove around Sussex, stopping for cream teas or walks on the downs. She found it hard to think of him as her father: it was more like flirting with a stranger, or going out with a new boyfriend or even (if she closed her eyes) being with Felix again. She found she talked all the time about Helen and the abortion, not sure if he wanted to listen but certain she was talking too much, yet unable to stop. Words leaked out of her like tears or menstrual blood, fluid beyond her control, and he answered, but she hardly heard his answers because she was so anxious to talk again.
‘I haven’t written to her at all and I only ring up when I have to, so Richard won’t think it’s odd. Then I pretend I’ve run out of money so I don’t have to talk for long. I’m so angry with her, I just want to punish her all the time.’ The anger pulsed inside her, alarming waves in which she might drown, yet all mixed up with wanting to see Helen and hug her and be comforted.
‘Well, she made you do something very serious,’ he said, sounding grown up and reasonable.
‘But I let her do it, so it can’t be all her fault.’ Even now she still wanted to be fair. ‘And Felix could have stopped her. It could all have been different.’
‘Do you wish it had been?’
‘I don’t know, that’s the worst thing. I don’t know what I feel. Sometimes I dream I’m still pregnant and when I wake up I cry because I’m not and yet I’m so relieved I’m not… So how can I blame her? It’s not fair really, is it?’ The dreams were awful and she dreaded them; they made her put off going to bed.
‘D’you blame Felix too?’
‘Yes, but not so much. I’m very angry with him but I have to keep remembering some of it was my fault. I didn’t tell him when I took a risk. I don’t know why I did that. I’ve thought about it a lot.’ And right up to the last minute she had thought he might change his mind and turn up to rescue her, but that was hard to say. ‘He wrote me a lovely letter all about how sorry he was and how he’d always love me, but I haven’t answered it. I want to punish him as well as Mum. Isn’t it pathetic? That’s the only way I can punish them, by not writing letters. That makes me look pretty feeble, doesn’t it? Maybe they don’t care whether I write them letters or not.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ he said gently, ‘especially Helen.’
‘Well, I could punish them more. I could tell Richard what happened and I’m sure he’d hit the roof, but I don’t want to do that. He’d be furious with them both and he’d be terribly disappointed in me and it still wouldn’t make me feel better. Sometimes I just wish I could go to sleep for years until I could be sure of waking up feeling different.’
There was an awkward silence then and she sensed him trying to say something difficult.
‘I feel a bit guilty too,’ he said at last. ‘Helen did ask me if we’d foster the baby if you wouldn’t have an abortion, but Marsha wasn’t keen. Not now we’ve nearly got four of our own. She said she would if she had to but she’d much rather not and I couldn’t really blame her, as she’d be doing all the work. I mean, I’m away so much.’
Sally felt confused, almost wishing he hadn’t said that. ‘Mum didn’t tell me that. She never made me feel I had any choice.’
‘Well, I don’t think you did, not really. Not without telling Richard.’
‘That’s the worst thing. She just made me do what she wanted and I don’t know if it was because she thought it was best for me or because she hates Felix so much.’
‘Maybe she doesn’t know either,’ he said, as if that made it all right.
She said, unable to ask directly for what she needed, ‘I’m really dreading Christmas.’
* * *
Richard was surprised how uncomfortable he felt to know that Felix and Inge were having an affair. He had thought it would be a wonderful relief: a happier Inge, off his hands and off his mind, and a happy friend enjoying har
mless pleasure. In prospect, this had seemed an ideal arrangement, beneficial to everyone concerned. But somehow in his mind they had lingered forever on the brink of an affair; he had not thought at all about the reality of them actually having one. When Felix said to him one night in the pub, ‘She really does love you very much,’ Richard felt a sensation he could not quite identify, a shiver of alarm that Felix was trying to tell him something he did not want to hear.
He said, ‘Ah, you’ve seen her again,’ and could not look at Felix although he could feel that Felix was looking at him.
‘Yes,’ Felix said, very clear and straight, ‘we’ve been seeing quite a lot of each other.’
A strange churning began in Richard’s stomach. Images of Felix and Inge naked, in bed, making love, flooded into his mind. It didn’t make sense. Surely he couldn’t be (it was difficult even to focus on the word, he squirmed at the thought) jealous? He loved Helen. He had been trying to escape from Inge for ten years. He said carefully, ‘So it’s begun.’
Felix said, ‘Well, yes. I didn’t know how to tell you. It’s a delicate matter.’ He sounded pleased with himself, Richard thought. ‘I couldn’t just ring you up and say “Oh, by the way…” now could I?’
‘It’s all right, Felix,’ Richard said, conscious of sounding irritable. ‘We discussed it in advance and I gave you my blessing or however you like to put it.’
‘Not quite the same as a fait accompli, though, is it?’ Felix drained his glass. ‘I actually feel quite embarrassed talking to you about it. That’s a new sensation.’
Richard said sharply, ‘D’you want sympathy?’
‘Sorry, sorry.’
‘No, I’m being stupid.’ Now he felt Felix was trying to humour him. He took a deep breath to steady himself. ‘It’s all for the best. I’m pleased, really I am. Now maybe she’ll cheer up and get a job and Helen won’t feel we’re being held to ransom all the time.’
A Sense of Guilt Page 22