by Barbara Vine
I came back into the house expecting to find it empty and planning on going online to find some nineteenth-century social-history websites and recommend them to my students. Instead I encountered James crouching on the floor in our hallway, waiting for Andrew.
Or so I supposed, but in fact he was waiting for me. And he was a sight, misery itself, the tears running down his cheeks, his back hunched, his hands fidgeting, wringing and twisting in front of him.
“I hoped you’d come,” he said. “I longed for you to come. I can’t stand being alone any longer.”
So I knelt on the floor beside him and put my arms round him, half-expecting to be shoved away. But he held me more tightly than I held him, his face pressed into my shoulder. I don’t know how long we stayed like that, several minutes certainly. Then we both got up, simultaneously it seemed, and I told him I was going to make us a cup of tea. He followed me into the kitchen, saying he couldn’t write, he’d tried but he had what he called “the grandmother of all writer’s blocks.” He could use the Internet for e-mails and research, or he could if he had anyone to send e-mails to or anything to discover, but he hadn’t. If he tried to write the novel he was halfway through, all that appeared was what happened in Old Compton Street that night, his friend attacked, stabbed, and kicked to the ground. He could describe Kevin Drake’s blue-and-silver trainers, soon to be splashed with blood, his bare, bony ankles and his frayed jeans. He could write the word Drake and the other man’s name, Gary, Drake used when they egged each other on and describe the distortion of their faces, red with meaningless, unprovoked rage. But his novel that he wanted to write, all that was lost and gone. He told me this as we walked into the study, carrying our mugs of tea. In the weeks since that night in Soho he had grown thin, his once-handsome face like a skull, the tendons on his neck, ropes stretched taut.
“Even if I were capable of doing anything,” he said, “I’ve nothing to do. All I’ve done for years is write, and now I can’t. I’ve no outside interests, I don’t care for sport, and I’ve no hobbies. Do people have hobbies anymore? Train sets and stamp collections? Maybe they do, but I don’t.”
This was when I had an idea. I asked him if he would help me with the social-history websites, expecting a blunt no.
But he said, “You mean find some websites and go into them and see what they say?”
“I’d like someone from the outside to look at this stuff from a fresh perspective,” I said. Give him something to get interested in he’d never thought about before. This plan was just a stage in my amateur therapy. Let him do something, instruct someone even, all in the good cause of distracting him from those disproportionate fears. “What I’d like,” I went on lying, “is if you could sit beside me and tell me what you think. Would you do that?”
He would try, he said. He knew nothing about the Victorians or their social history. I fetched more tea for us, thinking that this might be the therapy Andrew was hoping for. I hated to think that my brother might stop loving him just when he obviously needed love so much.
I sat down at Verity’s computer, and James drew up a chair beside mine. I was told something I’d known for years, how to use a search engine. I told him the language defeated me. I was a purist when it came to language, and among other solecisms I didn’t care to use access as a verb. He told me I didn’t have to do it “in the great world” off-line. Think of it as a foreign language you’re learning, he said, and then it will be all right. A few websites were found and I told him I didn’t want to have to go online every time I needed to refer to them. Print them out, he said, and I pretended never to have printed anything out, so he told me how, and soon we had a whole stack of quite useless sheets of paper that I didn’t need for my students and would never look at again.
But “helping” me like that did James a world of good. He already looked much better, said he would give me another lesson in using the Internet whenever I liked. I had a bottle of sherry in the cupboard that was here when we moved in. It’s an old-fashioned drink, but I suddenly had a fancy for it, so James and I each had a glass and he told me I had saved his life. The oxycodone was what I thought of, whether he was still using it, and if it might take the life I was supposed to have saved. I hadn’t yet thanked him but now I did, and he said it was nothing, as people do, and then he said, would I hold him in my arms again as I did when I found him in the hallway.
He was gay. I had never had any doubt about that, but doubt came quickly then. The kiss he gave me was a lover’s kiss, and the hands that began touching me were a lover’s. Why didn’t I stop him? Why didn’t I just say no gently and kindly, take my mouth away from his, slide away from under him, and remind him who and what we were? Andrew’s lover and Andrew’s sister. Trusted absolutely because trust was taken for granted, trust wasn’t even necessary to think about. So why didn’t I? Maybe because, skeletal though he had become, he was attractive. I’d noticed before, but I’d made myself not be affected by his attractions because he was gay and because he was Andrew’s. I forgot all that, yielded in silence and participated in silence. No arguing, no protest, no words at all, but a simple and intensely pleasurable giving and receiving.
We were on Verity’s sofa in Verity’s study, and because we made no sound but for a faint sigh, a quiet gasp, we came to a mutual climax on a deep, long sigh. He held me afterwards with a tenderness I took for gratitude, and that surprised me. I moved away from him, expecting remorse, but none came and I thought to myself, it must have been the sherry, that unfamiliar, old drink that may have been Verity’s favoured tipple. The date would be right.
Still silent, we got back into those clothes we took off, and at last I said something. I said what was bound to be said sooner or later. “I thought you were entirely gay.”
“So did I.”
“But?”
“I was married once, so I suppose you could say I’m bisexual, but I haven’t been since my divorce, and I never think of myself that way. Grace—what a lovely name that is—Andrew must never know.”
Perhaps he wouldn’t mind. After all, it was over and we were not going to do it again. That I was sure of and sure too that Andrew would mind very much. “It won’t happen again. We should tell him it happened once.”
“No, Grace, no.”
“We must tell him, but we can take two days and a night to think about how we’ll do it.”
And that was what we were doing. Apart, of course, for I was in my part of the house, my living-room, and James was in Andrew’s part with Andrew. At about eight I heard them go out. I heard them talking as they crossed the hall where James sat hunched up in despair, and then I heard him laugh, a carefree, happy laugh, the like of which hadn’t been heard since the murder of Bashir.
7
WHATEVER CONCLUSION James may have come to, if he had thought about it at all, I knew we must tell Andrew or our failure to tell him would hang over all my relations with my brother and spoil them. He had to be told, whatever came of it. This was what I would tell James in the morning after Andrew had left for work. And in thinking this way I saw that I was already on the path to deception for I had never before thought of keeping a secret from Andrew. And such a secret.
But for the time being they had gone out and were having a happy time, if James’s laugh was anything to go by. This was the first time I’d heard him laugh for weeks. I had planned to use this evening reading at least the beginning of The Child’s Child, wondering if it might possibly be of use to me in my thesis, and anyway, I wanted to know what happens. But as I went into the study, a strange thing happened to me, or perhaps not strange at all. My thoughts went back to what had happened there a few hours ago, not with sentimentality or any enhanced view of my feelings for James, but with guilt and a degree of shame. What it came down to was, I shouldn’t have done it. I could have said no to him and sat up and hugged him again. Now I have forgotten why I did do it, but not forgotten that I did. One single act of sex can have a profound effect on one’s lif
e, and now I had a quite reasonless fear that what James and I did was one of those acts and the effect would be cataclysmic.
I went into the drawing-room and contemplated the books on the shelves in there. But not for long. My eyes turned to the big window from which the garden can be seen. It began to rain, and not just to rain, but to come down in floods, beating on the glass and bouncing off the stones. Through it, the shuddering veil of it, the lawn and trees and bushes were a dense mass of varying greens. Lightning struck while I watched, lighting up glittering slate roofs and tossing treetops. I told myself what I sometimes tell my students in a comment on what I have found in their essays: do not subscribe to the pathetic fallacy. James and I had nothing to do with the weather, and the weather nothing to do with us. The thunder came so long after the lightning that it made me jump.
I wondered if James, in spite of what he said, was even now confessing to Andrew. Would he tell me if he was? I went up to bed but couldn’t sleep and came down again in my dressing gown. This time I did pick up The Child’s Child and started to read the first page again, but I got no further than the first line: He knew it was wrong of him, but his life today was so full of wrong actions that it seemed to him one long sin. It reminded me of me. Except for the sin part. Sin is a word that has gone out of our vocabulary, except, I suppose, for Catholics in the confessional.
I had started leafing through it, passing the point I had reached, looking for a date, when I heard the front door close softly. I did a stupid thing. I switched off the light. No one could have been deceived because anyone coming to the front of the house could have seen it, but I left it off, sitting there feeling like a fool and waiting for one or both of them to come in. To walk through the drawing-room and maybe burst into the study. Neither of them did. The porch light went out, the hall light went out, and I wasn’t just sitting in the dark, I was in the profoundest, deepest blackness. I don’t know why I felt for the window and then for the curtains. Pulling them back revealed the half-lit street, a cat as grey as the night sky emerging from under a car and streaking into the dense foliage of a garden.
As far as I could tell, the whole house was now in darkness. My green digital clock told me it was half past midnight.
IN THE morning, after Andrew had gone to work, James came down to talk to me. Like the ghost, he knocked on the drawing-room door, something he had seldom done before. He sat down, picked up The Child’s Child, said, “Here’s the book you showed us, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“I met him once,” he said. “Greenwell. He was very old by then. It was at someone else’s book launch.”
Silence fell. I wasn’t interested in someone else’s book launch and nor really was he. His face had become grave, the eyes half-closed. I said that I supposed he hadn’t said anything to Andrew.
“No, and I’m not going to. We’re not going to. Think about it, Grace. What would be the point? You might say, who benefits? Not you or me, certainly. Andrew would be devastated, and that’s one instance where that overused word is absolutely apt. He would be. And he would hate us both. I know how jealous he is. You don’t. You can’t. So who benefits?”
“Truth, I suppose,” I said, feeling like a prig. “What politicians call transparency.”
“Oh, please.”
We sat there, looking at each other, for a while in silence, then starting the argument all over again. I stopped it by reaching or apparently reaching his point of view. “All right,” I said, “we’ll say nothing. We’ll even try to forget it.”
“Thank you, Grace. I don’t think you’ll have any regrets.”
Before all this started, I would have expected if it had reached this end to have felt enormous guilt, but I didn’t. What I felt was relief, as if all along I had wanted to avoid telling Andrew, and perhaps I had. Once James had gone upstairs, had kissed me on the cheek and held me in a sexless hug for a moment before saying I had saved his life for the second time, I felt a burden lifted from my shoulders. I had agreed to do something I had thought was wrong and I would never agree to; whatever he said, I wouldn’t do it, and suddenly I was agreeing to it. I felt fine. It was all over, my brother and I would be to each other what we had always been, there would be no recriminations, no pain, no accusations and bitter reproach. All things would be well, as that weird woman Julian of Norwich said. I sat down at the computer and got back to my thesis.
ANDREW HAD a week’s holiday owing to him, and James and he went to Italy, to Lucca, where neither of them had ever before been. They had never disturbed me and I hope I hadn’t disturbed them, but I was able to work better while entirely on my own, and by the time I saw them again I was well into the thesis.
While they were away, some kind of notice had come—the sort of thing that’s called a communication rather than a letter—telling James he wouldn’t be needed as a witness at Kevin Drake’s trial. Apparently, the police had enough witnesses without him. He and my brother came to tell me, inviting me to have dinner with them. While we were in the restaurant, the now happy and enormously relieved James told me that he wanted to apologise to me. While they were away, he’d read a piece about a particularly dreadful kind of social engineering in Spain in the 1930s but, almost incredibly, continuing until the 1980s. Under this scheme the Franco regime and the Catholic Church removed babies from unmarried mothers and, telling them their children were dead, placed them with women of higher moral character. At first he could hardly believe it, but he checked it out and found it was well known and not only in Spain, where all over the country there are children’s graves containing nothing but stones. He was sorry he had said I exaggerated the suffering of the mothers of illegitimate children.
We were all happy after that. I told them I was still only halfway through the thesis, though Carla had told me not to hang about with it too long. She had once had a graduate student who could never bring himself to relinquish his and finally given up.
Perhaps it was strange that I could now look at James and talk to James without thinking about the “incident” in the study. It was over, it was past, and just as I had no urge to repeat it, so I was sure he hadn’t. I did think of it enough to marvel that I had ever considered telling Andrew. A good principle in my philosophy is to be careful never to confess something to a friend or a lover (or I suppose a husband or a wife) unless you can be entirely sure you’re not doing so out of self-indulgence or even, God forbid, pride. Yet nothing like that had prompted my powerful need, immediately after the “incident,” to admit the whole thing to my brother. Luckily, it wasn’t an impulse that had lasted long, and now I felt the same as James: keep silent, forget.
Nothing now, I thought, could make me feel that need to confess to Andrew, nothing could impel me to come out with the truth. I was wrong.
8
THEY CALLED it “being in a fix” in those days, though Martin Greenwell doesn’t. It never crossed my mind. I had taken the occasional risk before, being a sporadic user of the pill, and never had a scare. Now it was six weeks since my unexpected encounter with James, my period had failed to come, and the pregnancy test I’d bought had tested positive. Of course I had to put an end to it, I refused to be in a fix. Abortion is a nasty word, and the euphemism termination is only slightly better. But I didn’t have to think about that yet. So long as I had it done by, say, the end of August, everything would be fine. I was not one of those girls in fiction whose attitude to their pregnancy must have been a constant dwelling on it, from ghastly realisation through cringing acceptance to death wish.
There was no need for James ever to be told. I had seen him in Andrew’s company and he was much, much better. Andrew said James was suddenly lighthearted, went out for long walks, and hadn’t touched the oxycodone since that “communication” came. The book he was halfway through he had abandoned, but he told Andrew that when the trial was over, he might write a novel about the murder of Bashir.
I worked on the thesis, resisting—I’m not sure how success-f
ully—an urge to enter into the emotions of some of these girls who found themselves heading for disgrace or disaster. I did allow myself to dwell a bit on the almost uncanny power of marriage, a ceremony, “a piece of paper” as it’s often called, that in two or three promises and a hymn or two or a couple of names and a few words could save a life or transform a life or bring with it unimaginable relief. All gone now, of course, but once a cornerstone of social life, the magical process that made women pure and children honourable.
So I was careful to keep the things cool—businesslike was the word that came to mind—while all the time this undercurrent of dread and a strange kind of excitement was running along beneath the surface. The weeks passed, summer was coming to an end. One evening my brother and James were going out to celebrate Andrew’s birthday and they asked me to go with them. I said I would, then said I wasn’t well. To be with the two of them, both of them ignorant of what was happening to me, but Andrew much more so than James, Andrew innocent.
I didn’t go with them. I began on Greenwell’s book with its highly appropriate theme, the subject of the thesis and of my life at present. Next day I booked myself into an abortion clinic, telling myself all the time I gave my details and saw the doctor and fixed on a day that I was so lucky compared with all those poor girls I’d been writing about. I didn’t have to have a baby if I didn’t want to. It would be wrong for me to have a baby that was my brother’s lover’s child. That, I told myself, was true immorality, betrayal, treachery, positive cruelty. This way, I could have the deed done, it would be quick, no doubt I would be able to walk to the clinic and go home afterwards on the bus.