Infidelities
Page 16
The story was always to be a real story, a proper story, always that had been her plan. There was to be a woman meeting a man, a stranger, on the first day of her marriage, as had happened – and okay, so perhaps he thought she was someone he already knew … That’s all fine, that can all stay in. But then, from that, there was something else, an episode that she would imagine that would make the whole thing into fiction, fiction, all made up. So she might start with her morning, from all those years ago, when she went out alone and with barely any clothes on, dressed only to go swimming in the river, to go into that beautiful river, the ‘devastating’ river, was how she described it … So she would start with that. And then … And then … She would write something different, create an event, an affair, no, not an affair, more of an encounter that took place between a man and a woman one summer’s morning, something intense and physical and yes, it would be emotional, too … How a new bride was unfaithful on the first day of her marriage. How she could be unfaithful, how she had somehow prepared herself to be: ‘Because the next thing she knew, her eyes were open and there was light coming in through the slit between the curtains, through the partly opened window she could hear birdsong, and she was up and dressed, but no shoes on, no underwear.’ Remember? So the story might go on from there, but not to this – this other version. How call this ‘Infidelity’, this thing she’s written down here? How infidelity for her theme and content, the very idea behind her story, when nothing, nothing happened at all?
*
Only that nothing in her life had ever matched it. Not later, when she would hold her firstborn in her arms, or her second and third and fourth, not when she turned, over and over as she would turn, to her husband, in love and desire and comfort … Nothing would ever happen to her again that would take such strength, every second of strength in her, in her will, not to yield, and to be able to so break, and run. Nothing else had come close. In all her adult years of planning and striving and thinking, in her long lifetime of being with herself, knowing herself, watching over herself, being so careful with herself, never had this woman, this Helen, had anything come upon her with the same sense of utter shock, of complete and startling unknowingness that yet held for her no fear but was only something she wanted. As though everything else was secondhand, everything in some way planned or imagined or prepared for, her marriage, her children, her life, everything created, like a story, to be thought through and interrogated and organised in advance, and intuited or imagined or already foreseen – only this, a few seconds with a stranger, his fingers encircling her wrist like a bracelet … That … detail …
‘It was as though you were waiting for me,’ she said.
It came from somewhere else.
So write all that in, Helen, she thinks. Write it in if you can, but how could she? He did nothing, nothing happened between them at all, and yet, in that fragment of time together, every act had been committed, one upon the other. Every want. Desire. Every base and lovely thing. His name had been …What was his name? Did he even introduce himself – as he’d stood there before her for those long seconds holding her wrist in his fingers, had he even told her his name? She had barely been able to hear a thing through the surge of her blood.
Helen knows by now she’ll have to go back through the story and check some things. Certain words, sentences … She has to keep them safe. Write over them, somehow. Write around them – that part about the river, the way she was barely dressed … She’ll have to be careful how people will read what she’s written so far, or how they’ll interpret it; she’s not sure she can turn large parts of what she’s remembered into a story after all. Even if she does make a huge fiction out of it, a big affair and adulterous in intention and effect with the people in it all turned into characters with made up names and faces and lives … It’s one thing to use the idea of a secret, as a theme, and to have a story, the title of the story, come out of that idea, but it would be wrong to make what happened to her – what really happened, even if it was a long time ago – into a piece of writing for someone else to be curious about, to want to read. It would be wrong, for herself, for her children, her marriage, it would be deeply, deeply wrong.
‘Don’t go,’ he’d called after her as she broke from him and started to run. But she hadn’t looked back. He’d waited for her, no doubt, but she did everything in her power not to do that, stop, turn, go back for him.
And so should she submit ‘Infidelity’ after all, as her contribution to the writing class? Though her professor has told her to take something that happened and ‘from these details will come your fiction’. So: The light. The house she stayed in. The flowers in the garden. Though I can see all of this for her, for Helen – and I can put all these details in – I can also see now that writing in this way is not perhaps what Helen wants to do.
‘Don’t go,’ he’d said, but she’d started to run from him by then, she’d started to run.
‘Come back!’ he shouted after her, but she ran faster and faster and realised as she was running that she was crying, she was sobbing, great wrenching sounds coming out of her like the cries of animals, her whole body racked with weeping as she ran and she ran, back to that little cottage she was renting with her husband for their honeymoon, for the first two weeks of their life together. She ran past the cottage and kept running along the riverbank and further along the river until it came to the sea and then she ran along the beach as the waves came in and she kept running until she could run no more and then she stopped, finally she stopped, and waited, the crying stopped, and she turned and slowly, walking now, she retraced her way back, to the gate of the same little house where she was staying.
Infidelity.
Over the years, Helen has always thought, she would tell someone about that morning. About her first day of married life, the early hour and what had occurred. She’s always thought that one day she might even use it, somehow, write it down as something crafted, that she would add to it, she means, to make what happened to her into a fictional account, a long short story about a moment in the life of a married woman, a newly married woman – maybe as part of a creative writing class that, with her youngest about to start secondary school, she has finally found the time for, where the teacher has told her: ‘Detail, Helen. It’s all we have.’
But now that the detail is around her, how could she ever turn what happened into a story like that? A story like so many other stories, about love affairs and lies and sex? How be something that sits apart from her in that way, a particular morning when nothing happened and yet everything had? Louisa may have told her, ‘That’s how stories are made, Helen. Write every detail down and you’ll see. How nothing … Becomes everything.’ Still, how could Helen ever write that ‘everything’? When her husband would read it? Her daughters? Her son? How write that, half an hour later, when she left the beach and returned to the place where she and Richard were staying, there was no sign of the rage of emotions that had passed through her body and mind that morning. That she could go back to the house, through the front gate, walk across the grass again and now the dew had dried upon the lawn. The birds were no longer singing. It was hot and still.
She tries: ‘There was the little house,’ she writes, ‘just as she had left it’, but stops. She sits for a few moments, over her pages of sentences and paragraphs, before she scoops them all up and puts them in the bin.
Of course she can’t write this story. She was never going to be able to write it.
Instead she opened the door and stepped inside, out of the golden morning and into the darkness. Then, quietly, quietly she went down the shadowed hall to her husband who’d never woken and was still sleeping.
*
Acknowledgements
Stories in this collection have appeared in the following magazines:
‘A Story She Might Tell Herself’ in The Kenyon Review; ‘Elegy’ in The Warwick Review; ‘Glenhead’ in Gutter; ‘The Father’ in Granta; ‘Dirtybed’ in The Manchester
Review; ‘The Wolf on the Road’ in Five Dials; ‘Tangi’ in The Warwick Review; ‘Dick’ in Open City.
About the Author
Kirsty Gunn is the author of seven previous works of fiction, including The Boy and the Sea, which was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year. Her most recent novel, The Big Music, won the New Zealand Post Book Award and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She is Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee and lives in London and Scotland.
By the Same Author
RAIN
THE KEEPSAKE
THIS PLACE YOU RETURN TO IS HOME
FEATHERSTONE
THE BOY AND THE SEA
44 THINGS
THE BIG MUSIC
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2014
by Faber & Faber Ltd,
Bloomsbury House,
74–77 Great Russell Street,
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2014
All rights reserved
© Kirsty Gunn, 2014
The right of Kirsty Gunn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–30893–4