Damage

by Josephine Hart

  ‘But you spoke of surrender, of being ruled.’

  ‘It is my surrender that makes you ruler. You must accept this. If you fight, or try to change the pieces on the board, or to design a scenario more acceptable to you, you will be lost. Kneel down before me now, and I shall be your slave.’

  And so I did, in the room in which I had first lain with her. Is it important which way I tried to take her? Which entrance? And whether with tongue or hand or penis? Did she lie or stand? Was her back to me or to the wall? Were her hands free or bound? Did she see my face or not?

  Tales of ecstasy are endless tales of failure. For always comes separation. And the journey towards the essential, fleeting unity begins again.

  Afterwards I left, a powerless ruler. Anna lay in some strange awkwardness on the table, silent, glistening, and still.

  I have no sense of place. Only once, in L’Hôtel in Paris, did the shapes and colours that make a room pleasing to the eye enter my consciousness.

  That afternoon, however, as I closed the door, the room seemed to paint itself on my mind’s eye. A dark swirl of rich green lay against pale beige walls. The velvet softly touched the glass windows which looked out over a tiny, walled garden. The wooden floor reflected darker beiges, and lighter browns that shone in spaces empty of furniture.

  The chairs and sofas were covered in an old brocade, which suggested all the shades of autumn, and no one colour. The hardbacked chairs, which had fallen on the floor as we struggled to the carved cold darkness of the table where she now lay, were cushioned in the same shade of green velvet as the curtains. From the walls huge angular faces, half in shadow, of a man and a woman and a child, gazed at each other and at us, with a malevolence the painter cannot have intended. Bookcases, containing only hardbacks and some first editions, stood either side of a stone fireplace, bare of ornament.

  I can look at this room for ever, I thought. I will always have it with me. Until I die.

  If you had seen me on television that night, standing in for my Minister, answering questions with my practised mixture of intelligence and charm, you would not have guessed that my inner eye gazed at my painting. As though it held the secret of my life.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “MY LORD,

  Sometimes we need a map of the past. It helps us to understand the present, and to plan the future.

  As you left you gazed at me and at everything, as though you were seeing it for the last time.

  After I had bathed and put the room together again, I decided to stay at home, to write to tell you why I am so certain that I am doing the right thing. I want to take away this mystery.

  I say little about myself because it matters to virtually no one. My particular past is important only perhaps to you, and to Martyn.

  I’m sorry. But I must bring him into this letter. I now feel certain we shall marry.

  You need this explanation more than he does. Martyn, as I said once before, is quite fearless in his feelings about me. He accepts, without of course knowing why, that a part of me remains for ever closed to him. He can handle disappearances, separations, and silences in a way that you can’t. You know him so little. Believe me he is remarkable.

  You both could understand my little story. Only you need to hear it.

  I travelled a great deal as a child. The process of endlessly starting in fresh schools, with new friends and strange languages, draws the members of a family very close indeed. The family becomes the only constant. We were a close family. My mother certainly loved my father in those early days. Aston and I were all-in-all to each other. We told each other everything. We shared each other’s problems. We became an invincible duo against every childhood adversity.

  You cannot imagine what such a closeness is like. When it starts so early you see the world always, and in every way, through twinned souls. When we were very small we shared a bedroom. We fell asleep to each other’s breathing, and with each other’s last words in our ears. In the mornings we gazed at each other and at each new day — together. Whether we were in Egypt, the Argentine, or finally in Europe, it simply didn’t matter. The world was Aston and me.

  Aston was much cleverer than me, academically clever. Oh, I did perfectly well. But he was brilliant.

  My father, to his credit, had resisted sending him away to school when he was seven. He decided in our teens, however, that it was essential we both go to boarding-school in England.

  My boarding-school was a perfectly proper one in Sussex. In the beginning I was miserable without Aston. But I adjusted.

  Aston, however, seemed to change. He was always quiet, but now he withdrew more and more into his studies. He seemed to make no friends. His letters to me were full of sadness.

  I told my father that I was worried about Aston. The school, when my father talked to them, put it down to a difficult period of adjustment.

  Our first holidays (we missed each other at half-term) started strangely. I ran to Aston, my arms and legs ready to grasp and hold him. He put his hand over my face, and pushed me away, saying:

  ‘I’ve missed you too much. I don’t want to look at you. I don’t want to touch you. It’s too much. Tomorrow, I’ll look at you.’ And he went to his room.

  My father was away. Mother put Aston’s non-appearance at dinner down to over-excitement.

  His door was locked when I went upstairs. I heard him call to Mother when she knocked, ‘It’s OK. It really is OK. I just want to have a quiet, early night. I’ll be fine in the morning.’

  And in the morning he did seem fine. We talked, played, and laughed as before.

  But later, in my room, he told me of his terrible fear that I was the only person he would ever love. I was shocked, and even a little frightened by his intensity.

  When the holidays were over and we went back to school he didn’t reply at first to the letters I sent him. Then I received a note that read ‘It’s easier if you don’t write.’

  I didn’t tell anyone. What would I say? My brother misses me … too much. I missed him a great deal, but not too much. It was a question of degree, you see. Who can judge these matters? Certainly not a young girl.

  I continued to write to him. He didn’t reply. At Easter he gave me my letters back unopened, and said, ‘Please, it’s easier, it really is easier when you don’t write. I miss you more and more. I cannot see how I can live a separate life. But I must. I have no hope of any other life, do I? You are changing. The boys at school talk all the time of girls — girls like you. One day, one of them will take you away from me. Completely away.’

  ‘But Aston, one day you and I will have boyfriends and girlfriends. We’ll grow up and marry. We’ll have our own children.’

  He looked at me, astounded.

  ‘You have no idea what I’m talking about, have you? I want to be with you all the time. When I’m away from you I can only survive by blocking all thoughts of you from my mind. I work like a madman. You heard Papa about my report, I’m top of my year at virtually everything. I’m going to be top of my year for ever.’

  I didn’t write to him at all the next term. In my last week he sent a little card which simply read ‘Thank You’.

  That summer we seemed to be our old happy selves again. My mother sought in vain to arrange teenage parties. Children of friends came to stay. But Aston and I were only truly happy with each other. We were more like children than young adolescents. He dazzled me with his knowledge of mythological heroes and Greek gods. I impressed him with my skill at the piano.

  When I started my new term in September I began to write to him again.

  He replied immediately.

  ‘I think there is nothing in the world as terrible as Love. I need silence from you. I cannot bear it here otherwise. Aston.’

  I didn’t write again. When I talked to my mother on the phone, and asked about Aston, she said, ‘Everything’s going to be all right. It’s just adolescence, darling. I remember my own.’

  That Christmas, my body had
almost settled into a shape that really hasn’t changed much since. I felt very different from the summer before, heavier, stronger. I was developing much faster than Aston. He was taller. But his face, though thinner and more angular, still seemed basically unaltered.

  His first words to me were ‘Oh, Anna, Anna, how you have changed!’

  He had tears in his eyes. He moved towards me slowly, awkwardly, as if he was wounded in some terrible way.

  I began to feel ill-at-ease with him. Uncertain what behaviour was appropriate.

  The first week seemed to pass in furtive glances, and nervous laughter, and dying conversations that never went anywhere.

  My mother insisted on a Christmas party for ‘the young people’. Aston protested violently at the idea.

  ‘It’s a cliche, parties with dancing. You can’t force friendships. Leave us be.’

  But she was determined.

  ‘You two are becoming positively reclusive. It’s just not healthy. You need friends. This is a lovely time in your lives. Anna keeps turning down invitations to parties, it’s ridiculous. As for you, Aston, you’re so unfriendly to everyone, you don’t get any. It’s time it all stopped. I’m having a Christmas party here. That’s that.’ The invitations went out to all the children of the right age that she knew in her circle. Not an enormous number, but enough.

  Aston was impossible. He wouldn’t dress properly. He was barely civil to the guests.

  I had a marvellous pink dress, I remember. I found I enjoyed the dancing and all the flattery, the looks, and the fumbling of the more daring boys.

  Aston kept leaving the party. He kept disappearing then reappearing with a haunted look on his face.

  He came to my room when the party had ended. He was weeping. ‘I know everything is about to change for ever. You are changing, Anna. We have had our last summer. I don’t think I like the world very much any more.’

  He came into my bed, and we lay chastely side by side.

  But young boys in their early teens cannot lie chaste for long, beside a female body. Suddenly he was erect. Such a little movement, such a fleeting caress and his semen was on my stomach. He wept. His tears ran down my breasts. I felt as though I had received some strange benediction. Semen and tears. They would always be symbols of the night for me.

  The next day we kept a distance from each other. It seemed better that way. I had a date that evening. One of the boys from the party had asked me to a dinner dance.

  My vanity and my new confidence made me dress carefully, in a white dress with a low neckline. Aston opened the door for me, with a mock bow of both contempt and anger.

  When I returned, I sat in the boy’s car outside our house. Unexpectedly, he kissed me. Then he tried awkwardly to touch my breasts. I was not unduly alarmed. In fact, pleasure was my main emotion. As I turned to get out, I saw Aston. He was gazing down at us from an upstairs window. I have never forgotten the look on his face, and yet even after all these years I have not found the words to describe it. Perhaps there are human expressions which only the artist can catch.

  He followed me into my bedroom.

  ‘Next time he will go further,’ he said. ‘The time after that, even further. Until one night he will fuck you. That’s the perfect description of what will happen to you.’

  ‘Oh, darling Aston, please, please don’t.’ I was crying now. They seemed such terrible words, ‘he will fuck you’. Aston looked almost ugly as he said them.

  He left the room. I locked the door. I don’t know why I did that. But it was very deliberate. I heard him shortly afterwards rattle the handle of the door. He whispered to me and the words were muffled as though he was sobbing.

  ‘Anna, Anna, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Anna. You’ve locked yourself away from me. I can’t bear it. Oh, it will get worse. I know it. It will. It must get worse. I’m doomed. There’s no hope for me.’

  I did not open the door. I lay there trying to calm myself, to work out what was happening. Then I fell asleep.

  I was awakened by a most awful sound. It was not a scream exactly. It was as though a desperate cry for help was being choked off, and then being released again. It was an animal sound. I fell out of bed and raced towards the door. My room was opposite Aston’s and as if in a dream I saw my father trying to pull my mother from Aston’s bathroom. My father was struggling so much with his burden as he tried to move towards the bedroom door that he seemed to be inching his way across Aston’s room.

  ‘Don’t go in there, Anna! Don’t move any further.’

  But I ran past him to the bathroom door. Aston was lying in the overflowing bath. His wrists were cut, and his neck was slashed, and the bloodied water splashed my feet. He looked like some pale doll creature, who was not dead, but who had never been alive. I pulled a little bathroom stool to the side of the bath and sat there cradling his head. My father came back with the doctor.

  My father looked at us, and whispered, ‘Impossible, it’s impossible that what I see is true. Impossible. Possible.’

  The doctor took my hands away from Aston’s head. ‘Now, Anna, come with me. Come with me, come downstairs, there’s a good girl. Sit with your mother. My wife is on her way, and Captain Darcy and your father’s assistant will be here soon. I’m going to give you a sedative which will calm you.’

  Soon it seemed an army of people, quiet, competent, calm, were packing bags and moving through the house and night. It was as though they had learned some technique for dealing with terror. The technique was denial, discipline, and silence.

  My mother and I were spirited from our house to that of my young friend. He stood shocked and frightened in the doorway. The girl, from whose white dress he had only hours before tried to prise the unfamiliar treasure of her breasts, now trembled before him, an old raincoat thrown over her bloody nightdress. Then the silent army took over again and guided us inside.

  ‘Take Anna to Henrietta’s room, Peter.’ Someone handed Peter a bag. My mother started to become hysterical again. All attention turned to her.

  Peter led me upstairs and into Henrietta’s room. The room was pink, with pink ruffles everywhere, and dolls dressed in pink were neatly arranged on the bed. A giant pink giraffe stood in a corner. A long mirror faced me. I walked towards the door, and turned the key in the lock. In the mirror, I watched my figure flit back across the room holding the boy’s hand. I turned and faced him and heard my voice whisper, ‘Fuck me.’

  He was only eighteen at the time but with what care and kindness and love he did what I asked.

  ‘I am now going to have a bath. Perhaps you would stand outside the door?’ And he did. I bathed, slipping under the water again and again, knowing with glorious, triumphant certainty that I would live.

  In Henrietta’s baby-pink room I dressed in the jeans and shirt someone had packed for me, then I went down the stairs into my new life.

  What is there to say of funerals? They are all the same and each one is unique. They are the ultimate separation, the ultimate letting-go. For which of us would willingly join the body in its coffin in earth or fire or water? Life is usually loved more than our most sacred love. In that knowledge lies the beginning of our cruelty and of our survival.

  Aston had loved me more than life itself. That was his destruction.

  Over the years, these events followed. Some of them I’ve already told you. My parents divorced. I went to college in America. Then I came to England and became a journalist.

  If all this has been presented to you in a flat voice, that’s because the truth of a life can never be told. I send you a journalist’s report. Some photographs would complete it.

  My story has taken only a night to report to you. It has taken thirty-three years to live. The dailiness of it all fades away — others fade away. So few pages for Aston’s life! In your life how many pages for me? The external tale of a man’s life can be turned by any journalist into an article or two. And even after years of research by a biographer can only be extended to a bo
ok that can be read in two or three weeks.

  And so here is my story, on a few pages. The map of my journey to you. Not to explain myself to you. That is unnecessary. But as one would show a photograph to one’s beloved, and say, ‘That’s how I was then,’ and smile at the lost creature of childhood. My ‘photograph’ elicits tears rather than smiles, but the creature is lost either way.

  The dawn is coming. I’m tired. The type looks cold and dark on the white page …

  Anna”

  It was delivered to my office the following morning. It was marked ‘personal and confidential’ and thereby drew some furtive glances from my secretary. Anna was right. It was a map. That was all. A gift I would treasure. I had known her the first moment I had seen her.

  I went for a short walk, touching the letter in my pocket as I went over its contents in my mind.

  Mean thoughts came to me. Perhaps her terrible tale was told in order to furnish her with an excuse for her suggested arrangement of marriage to Martyn and a life lived profoundly also with me.

  She spoke of arrangements. Why didn’t I examine some possible arrangements myself? Divorce Ingrid. Marry Anna. Martyn is young. He will get over it. And what of Ingrid? It had never been a passionate marriage and she had great reserves of strength. She had her large network of friends. She would survive. Sally too could cope well. After all, what I contemplated was a commonplace cruelty. The only unusual aspect was Martyn’s relationship with Anna.