by Sadie Jones
At first there was the need for her, needing to touch her and get to her and not knowing how, and then, when he was inside her, it was exquisite, and overwhelming. He shut his eyes and going into her was like going into the blackness inside his own head, and he had cried when he came and wanted to keep on crying like a child and had to stop himself.
When it was over she had laughed. The sound of it was shocking to him. He didn’t know how he felt, but he couldn’t have laughed. Then she stopped laughing and clambered out from under him. She became very practical, fixing her face and her clothes and wiping herself, and Lewis watched her and felt lonely, but it was nice to watch her.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I can’t have children.’
He looked at the back of her; he couldn’t see her face, except for her mouth in the mirror as she painted it.
‘Why not?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Do you mind if I use the telephone?’ he said.
‘No, I don’t mind if you use the telephone.’
She was laughing at him. He stood up and went to it. She seemed to realise he didn’t want to be overheard, or else she didn’t want to know.
‘You’ve got lipstick on your face. I’ll see you out there,’ she said and unlocked the door, and left him.
He went over to the mirror and got the lipstick off. He looked around the room. The bottom half of the wall was painted dark green with white above. The sofa had a rip in it. He picked up the phone.
‘Guildford 645,’ he said to the operator and after a while he heard Alice’s voice and got through.
‘It’s Lewis.’
‘Lewis! Where are you?’
‘I’ll go to Euston for the school train. Will you be there, with my trunk?’ His heart was beating very hard.
‘What? Are you all right?’
‘Will you be there? I need my trunk for school.’
‘Yes. Of course. Your father—’
He put the phone down. Jeanie took him home with her that time.
Lewis had nearly missed the train in the morning and when he got to school he was put into detention for not being in proper uniform. It made him smile to have a child’s punishment for sleeping with a woman and not being a child any more. He had to translate some passages from The Odyssey, and he wrote about Odysseus trying to sail home to Ithaca and remembered he had used to write stories about heroes. He sat in the detention room with his writing drying on the lines and tried to remember what his stories had been about and what the heroes had fought for, but he couldn’t remember, and the light faded from the room as he sat there. After a while the master waiting with him stood up and collected his pages and put them in the rubbish bin in the corner and let him go up to his room.
When he was a little boy Lewis had seen his life in sections; before and after his father had come home and then, later, with and without his mother. The section of life he felt himself to be in now had a more common, universally recognised watershed. It was before and after Jeanie. The before had the sweetness he felt kissing her, and her being close to him that first time, and the after had the familiar coldness he felt when he had slept with her and ever since.
It was an odd affair, even to Lewis. He saw Jeanie just a few times each holidays – when he could get away from home, and bear the prospect of the consequences – and she hardly asked him where he’d been. He didn’t even know if she knew he’d been at school until one day she’d said, ‘It’s been ages’, and Lewis, feeling a small delight that she’d noticed, confessed, ‘I’ve been at school.’ Jeanie had laughed again, opening her mouth wide, while he waited, nervous, and then she said, ‘I suppose posh boys don’t leave so young, do they?’
At first he had tried to hide his cut up arm from her, but she had seen it, and never said anything. Mostly she was sweet to him, but he never knew quite what she would be like. Sometimes he’d have to wait in the club all evening before she noticed him and he got used to waiting and would talk to Jack and the waitresses, and the evenings without Jeanie were often easier and lighter than the evenings with, except for the need for her tugging at him. It made Lewis feel free to be a different person when he was in London and when he was with Jeanie, but it made him feel like nothing too, just invisible and that he deserved to be. A part of him was still a child, with a child’s need to be watched over and comforted, and Jeanie didn’t see him; even when he was in her bed with his arms around her, he felt entirely alone.
Before and after Jeanie, before and after the club, before and after jazz, and Soho, and knowing somebody who was black, and gin out of glasses, and learning to drive and smoking … Jeanie had taught him both of those last, and he would have loved her just for that. When he started smoking he couldn’t believe it – he hadn’t had any idea they made you feel like that; grown-ups smoked and didn’t give any indication that the tops of their heads were coming off, or that they couldn’t think straight. He supposed you must get used to it. He didn’t know how anyone could smoke a pipe; his father did and it was horrible and he couldn’t imagine how you’d start. Cigarettes were bad enough to begin with – although the hit of them was almost as good as drinking when you did – but a pipe, a pipe was just ugly and complicated and for old people. He’d never do that.
At home he was careful to hide himself; he never uncovered his arms, he barely looked Alice in the eye. Even when she tried to be kind he turned away from her, but all the time he hoped, shamefully, in his child’s heart, that she would notice him, and hold him, and help. The bad things he did had been useful at first, but now they were stronger than he was. He knew he needed her help, or somebody’s. He scared himself.
Chapter Six
Alice had her new dress laid out on the bed and the different shoes she might put it with arranged nearby. She could hear Gilbert dressing next door and the familiar sounds of the wardrobe door opening and his footsteps.
‘Gilbert?’
‘Alice.’
She put on her stockings and sat at her dressing table and looked into her own eyes and tried to see deep into herself.
‘What is it?’ He was in the doorway. ‘Aren’t you dressed? They’ll be here in less than an hour.’
‘Gilbert?’
‘What?’
‘My period is late.’
There was a pause.
‘How late?’
‘A week.’
‘It’s been late before … Well. We’ll see.’
‘Gilbert …’
‘Don’t get your hopes up.’
‘I’m not. A whole week, though.’ He sat on the bed. She shouldn’t have told him. ‘Wouldn’t you be happy?’ she said.
‘You know I would be. It’s been a very long time for you. Waiting. I know that.’
‘Then we’d be a proper family.’
‘I know.’
She got up and went over and knelt in front of him.
‘I shouldn’t be excited.’
He stroked her face.
‘You’re looking very pretty,’ he said. ‘Let’s just wait and see. Try not to think about it.’
‘No. I’m not.’
‘It never helps.’
‘I know!’
‘Get ready now. They’ll be here soon.’
‘I’m getting ready.’
Dicky Carmichael stood in the hall and tapped his watch and waited. The big house was all around him and he knew where each of the servants were and his wife and his younger daughter and the state of each room; how tidy or how warm and whether empty or being used for something; and he felt his control and he was satisfied with it. Except that he missed Tamsin so much. The house without her felt wrong; almost under his hand and yet not quite under his hand. When she went to London it was practically intolerable not knowing where she was. He pictured her at parties, he imagined her being flirted with and he knew all of her dresses and wondered which one she was in and if she was warm enough and how late she was staying up and who with. Sometimes he pictured fa
celess boys taking her out onto terraces, or into strange bedrooms, and what they might do to her – what he had done to girls at that age – and he pictured their hands on her and had to control himself, and try to forget.
‘Claire! Katherine! Will you come down now!’
Kit was sitting on her window seat, reading. She didn’t want to go down one minute before she had to. She’d spent the morning in the woods trying to light campfires with damp sticks and getting scorched and watery-eyed from smoke, and Claire had shouted at her and made her change. She chewed the end of her plait and turned the page.
‘Katherine! NOW!’
That was the tone that said, if you don’t come now I’ll save it up for later and if you displease me I’ll belt you. Kit wasn’t going to be bullied. She read another paragraph, just to show him, and then got up slowly.
She came down the stairs and watched her father and mother as they put on their gloves, not speaking to each other.
Lewis was lying on his bed. He wasn’t drunk enough for lunch with the Carmichaels. He didn’t think you could be drunk enough for lunch with the Carmichaels. He heard Alice laugh. He called it her ‘love me, love me’ laugh. He lay back and shut his eyes and heard the car arrive and thought about getting up.
‘Lewis! They’re here.’
He had a bottle of gin under the bed and he stood up to see if he should have some more of it now or save it for later, when Dicky and Claire and Alice and Gilbert were in full flow. Later, he decided.
He washed his face in the bathroom and made sure his sleeve was down and done up. It was, but there was dried blood on it. He went back to his room and put on a clean shirt and went downstairs.
* * *
Claire and Alice stood by the door to the garden looking up at the bare winter border. Kit was in a chair by the fire, biting her thumbnail. Dicky and Gilbert stood in front of the fire with drinks.
Lewis sat at the card table by the window and went invisible.
‘And alchemilla is so pretty,’ said Claire, looking at the bare earth.
‘Well, it is, but the slugs always eat it.’
‘Hostas.’
‘Oh hostas, sorry, not alchemilla. Alchemilla … pretty when it rains.’
‘What about some campanula in there? That might cheer it up.’
‘Yes …’
‘It is rather cottagey, but it’s not a large bed, is it?’
‘Campanula is pretty,’ said Alice.
Lewis stared straight ahead. Come on Alice, he thought, tell her you don’t know what they are, stick up for yourself.
‘I thought a rose would be nice,’ offered Alice.
‘Don’t you think you have enough roses?’
Kit looked at Lewis, and he saw her looking and she looked away again. She should stop chewing that plait and biting her nails, it bordered on self-cannibalism. He watched his father and Dicky at the fireplace and marvelled at Gilbert’s ability to laugh so very jovially at Dicky’s stories. Gilbert rocked slightly on his heels, which made him look like a dog waiting to have a ball thrown for him.
Gilbert’s threats of special school hadn’t materialised. Somehow the very bad consequences of Lewis’s behaviour never did seem to happen. If Lewis was careful, he could keep it all under control, and still get by at school, just about. He just had to balance it right. He just had to keep control.
‘Of course, it looked all right in the summer,’ said Alice, and Lewis agreed with her, everything had looked all right in the summer.
The summer had been long and lazy and there had been ecstasy in it, even in the solitude. There had been London, a few times, and just the beauty of being alive and hoping. In winter it was harder to feel like that.
Kit stole another glance at him and wondered what was going on in his head. How could he just sit like that? So still? He was staring at the wall and everybody else was pretending he wasn’t there, or that it was normal to have someone sit like that and look so separate and – she thought about it – to look so wrong.
‘I think it’s time for lunch,’ said Alice, and they went into the dining room.
There was something in aspic to start with. They ate with small mouthfuls and talked about the golf club and possible changes in the rules of membership. Lewis’s arm was hurting him and itching; he rubbed it against his leg and felt the cuts move and thought maybe they’d opened up. He excused himself and went upstairs. In his room, he rolled up his sleeve and saw the cuts were bleeding – if he didn’t stop them, he’d bleed on through his shirt. He felt sick and tired and didn’t want to go back down. He took a hit of gin from the bottle under his bed and then went to the bathroom and bandaged it up. He was a little drunk and it was always tricky with one hand. One of the cuts was too deep and went too far into the flesh, that was why it had opened up the way it had and it was hurting.
‘Lewis, what’s going on?’
Alice was in the doorway and he hadn’t even heard her come up. She could see everything. His arm was a mess, he’d cut it recently on top of cuts that hadn’t healed. She stared at him and looked very pale.
‘What’s that? What have you done?’
All of his coldness, all of his safe numbness, began to melt away under her look. She looked so upset, so emotional, he couldn’t remember feeling like that for weeks. He supposed it was upsetting to see the arm, it looked pretty bad.
‘Lewis? For God’s sake, what have you done?’
He felt shame, sickening and, somewhere, relief, and the relief grew.
‘I hurt myself. I’m sorry.’
She looked over her shoulder, panicking, thinking about the people in the dining room.
‘You’re bleeding. Wait, wait. Wait here.’ She almost pushed him out of the bathroom and went in and closed the door and leaned against it and felt faint.
She tried to make sense of what she’d just seen. She came up to go to the bathroom because she was frightened she had started her period and hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near the dining room. She remembered that now, and lifted her skirt and pressed her finger into herself. She wiped it on some lavatory paper. It was pink, just faintly pink and the small, nagging pain in her abdomen started again. She felt as if all the colour had drained out of the world. She opened the bathroom cupboard and found pads and belt. No baby. Not this time. She closed the lavatory and sat down. She sat very straight and opened her eyes wide so they wouldn’t get filled with tears. She remembered Lewis and what she had just seen and her mind seemed to shift, jolt against the shock of it.
She stood up and opened the door, but he wasn’t on the landing any more. She could hear Dicky laughing downstairs. She saw the door to Lewis’s room was closed. He couldn’t leave the lunch table, neither of them could – what would Dicky and Claire think? She wanted to cry. She went to Lewis’s door and opened it. He was trying to bandage his arm again.
‘Here. Let me do it. We have to go downstairs.’
She went over to him and took the bandage from him. She felt him watch her doing it and she could smell alcohol on him, and she realised he’d been drinking. She wanted a drink too now, she wanted one very badly.
‘Did you do this?’ she asked and he looked at the floor and didn’t speak and she felt his weakness. She didn’t have time for him. She didn’t have time for any of it.
‘Why would you do this?’ she said. She fumbled with the bandage. ‘God, Lewis, this is—’
It was so horrible, this blood, these wounds – what was he thinking? It was appalling. And then she remembered no baby, no baby again, and she’d been counting on it this time, and she’d been waiting so long.
‘This is a disgusting thing to do. It’s disgusting.’
‘I know.’
‘Everybody’s downstairs.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘There. It’s done. We’ll talk about it later.’
He looked at her then, and he looked just like he had when he was ten.
‘Don’t tell Dad. Please.’
‘Please?’
‘I won’t. I promise. Let’s go down.’
They went.
‘You go in first.’
She shoved him in the back and waited on the bottom step for a moment. She made her face bright again, she thought she wouldn’t look at Gilbert, he might know, and then she wouldn’t be able to pretend.
Kit saw Lewis come back in and made sure she didn’t stare at him. The two men didn’t stop their conversation, still about golf, but now the condition of the greens, and then Alice came in and sat down. Mary cleared the first course and, after a pause, during which a different wine was opened, the beef was brought in. Claire and Alice discussed the butcher and how much trouble they both had with him.
Lewis found that he felt quite calm and as if the scene with Alice hadn’t happened at all.
‘So, Lewis,’ said Dicky, as Gilbert carved, ‘how’s Harrow?’
Lewis looked at Dicky’s face leaning towards him and tried to bring himself back into the room.
‘Not bad, sir.’
Alice admired his blankness and thought of the bandage under his shirt, and she remembered tying the knot and the sight of the drying blood. Her throat tightened. No baby, she thought, no baby.
‘Treating you all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Still a keen cricketer?’
Lewis couldn’t be bothered to answer him.
‘Rugger this time of year, I expect.’
Gilbert looked over at him, waiting.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ said Dicky.
‘No, sir.’
‘Still getting into trouble?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Whenever your father mentions you, you seem to be in some kind of trouble.’
Lewis had had enough. The numbness had all gone and he hated this man and he could feel rage starting. He looked at him and let what he thought of him show, instead of hiding it.