Sin

by Josephine Hart

  Sin

  Josephine Hart

  To Maurice Saatchi, again

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  A Biography of Josephine Hart

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  There are many ways to have a deprived childhood. One of them is to be too lucky. This knowledge, time's present, comes slowly. They say the veil that hides the future from us was woven by an angel of mercy. But what blinds us to our unpredictable past? Why are we hooded as we search amongst its ruins, trapped in the intricate web of motive and action? Novelists of our own lives, making ourselves up from bits of other people, using the dead and living to tell our tale, we tell tales. This is a tale—fragments from a life. From lives. Particularly mine. And hers.

  ONE

  * * *

  I never knew her really.

  I came closest to her through her husband, the man with whom I now live. And through her son, whose name was Stephen.

  And through the lie.

  There were some, not many, whose world it was natural for me to enter, searching for a secret knowledge of her. And others, peripheral figures, on the outer edges of whose lives I waited, silent, hooded. Hoping to trap some fleeting image that would light my path to her. Whenever I lost her, I slipped under the dark waters of my own life, tracing, from beneath the gloomy waves, the faint white glimmer of her soul. And when she hid from me, I sought her out. For I knew she hid only for advantage later. Subtle, secret, opaque, I would crush her yet.

  Though she wounded me beyond pain, I too inflicted deep hurt. Not born to murder her, still I sought to break her. With a small silver hammer of exquisite design, I would seek the exact point at which even the gentlest pressure would smash the glass. And her substance would be mine.

  Sometimes, it is in the split-second half decision we nearly didn't make that we stumble by chance into ecstasy, or despair. But chance did not bring her into my life. By grand design she waited for me. In my own home. She was my mother's first child. Though not her firstborn. A terrible injustice to me.

  Her name was Elizabeth Ashbridge. And I even envied her that.

  TWO

  * * *

  “There’s something fluttering in my room. Black. Mama, Mama. Something black in my room. Black. With wings. Mama. Mama. Where are you, Mama? Oh please, Mama. Come. Mama. Please. Please. It will land on my face.”

  I stumble to the door. I cannot reach the light switch. I am too small.

  “Mama, I can’t … . Mama. Mama.”

  Down the dark corridor. Black.

  “Mama. It’s coming after me. Oh, Mama. Where are you, Mama?”

  I must be near the back stairs. I stretch my arms … toes flexed. And still I cannot reach the light. Slowly, rail by rail, I cling to the banisters. And step by step descend into a further darkness.

  The back hall is so narrow. Arms outstretched, I can touch the walls. Wet face … stinging thighs … little drops of fear and shame.

  I stumble onward.

  “Mama. Mama.” I call towards the blessed light.

  “Mama.”

  Her voice, singing softly to the sound of the radio in the background, floats towards me. At last I push the door. Out of the darkness into the light.

  And they turn towards me. They are bathed in the light. A perfect trinity. My mother, brush in hand, is seated behind the kneeling Elizabeth. Her golden hair is spread out and down her back. A halo of light. My father, opposite Elizabeth, is bending, almost kneeling, arms outstretched, holding her cocoa.

  Perfect happiness. Complete happiness. And I am outside the circle. My mother runs to me. She gathers me in her arms as Elizabeth calls: “Ruth, poor Ruth. You’re crying.”

  My father rises to me, whispering: “Darling Ruth. Darling child. What is it? Oh, you must have come down the back stairs alone in the dark. You poor child.”

  And they kiss me. They pet me. They hold me. And they try to soothe me.

  I am given Elizabeth’s cocoa. And Elizabeth kisses me. On my legs.

  “Poor, poor Ruth,” she whispers.

  I start to cry again. Tears of hatred fall on Elizabeth’s head. Onto the golden hair. Then she turns her face up to me. I bend towards her. I brush my face across hers. And a tear drops into her mouth.

  Does it sting, Elizabeth? Does it sting?

  I am taken up to bed again. Through the main hall, lighted on my way. My mother is cooing as my father now carries me to my room. A search—oh, so thorough—reveals no fluttering object. Just a mobile, half-disconnected from its hook. My father sits with me and strokes my hair, my mother sings her soft song. And I drift off into sleep.

  A vision has been burnt into me, a vision of heaven. In darkness, I gaze at the light. The light in which I should have bathed alone.

  THREE

  * * *

  I believe now that I was exposed too early to goodness and that I never recovered.

  Trapped in the fierce grasp of Elizabeth’s kindness, aware constantly of the truthfulness of her gaze, I suffocated on the high thinness of the air around her. The corrosive power of her generosity killed, as they rose in me, my own small instincts towards goodness.

  It seemed to me that I came wrapped in a caul of darkness and anger into Elizabeth’s kingdom. For it was her kingdom. Given to her out of love and pity.

  Orphaned at only nine months, she was the child of my mother’s sister, Astrid, and of Oliver Ord Ashbridge, young, married lovers killed in a car crash. Elizabeth was taken to Lexington. Its old walls wove a stone sanctuary round her, and its famous gardens and lake gave to all her freedoms a restricted, formal beauty. So she lived in Lexington, loved and cherished, a daughter for my parents. Before me.

  Except, I was their only daughter. A blood right. One they had taken from me.

  No one was to blame. They had done what was right and good. They had given a home to Elizabeth. My home. And left me with the pain of something irretrievable, lost.

  I would be forever, falsely the second. Not only the second, but one of a pair: less valuable without the other.

  My mother and father were oblivious to the effect on me of their careful, equal love. On my mind’s eye they painted pictures for me. Of love and gentleness. Pictures that I came to hate: my mother sighing during the careful plaiting of Elizabeth’s long, blond hair—which took more time than the vigorous brushing of my short, black curls. “There is a solution, Mama,” I wanted to cry. “Cut Elizabeth’s hair. Throw it away. Burn it.” But I said nothing. For in those days I learned patience. Slow, hidden patience.

  My father, kneeling again, before Elizabeth, as she sat sobbing on her bed, on the day she left for boarding school. Patting her hand to comfort her and whispering, “Oh, my golden girl. My golden light.”

  Stop painting these pictures for me, my heart cried. Stop. “You’ve never knelt to me, Papa. You’ve never knelt to me. She’s not yours, Papa. She’s not yours.”

  They didn’t stop.

  Still I see the sad way they gazed at me in the week after she left—
when I copied little things I’d seen her do, that had elicited praise. And I hear them sighing, “Ah, you miss her too, Ruth. I know, my dear. I know.”

  I see my mother, seated in front of the headmistress’s desk, pleading with her to put us in the same house—a practice normally frowned upon at the school. “It’s essential to keep them close. Less lonely, for Ruth, who depends on Elizabeth so.”

  Two girls made my parents happy. Elizabeth and Ruth, the one following the other, made the magic.

  A magic that Elizabeth created. Encouraged when small to follow the sweetness of her behaviour—to imitate her many acts of generosity, to note her kindness—I followed in cold envy the path she laid before me through the years. Like Satan before the Fall, I came to hate the very nature of goodness, to fear its power.

  But during childhood I lacked the courage for rebellion. So I went underground. To search for secret ways to be. And secret ways to lessen her.

  Sometimes, as directed, I took her behaviour. And copied it. Then … her things. And hid them. Childish things for childish times. Her mug, the one with the red rabbits. Her favourite doll. The rag dog with the yellow mouth. Ribbons. I smiled to watch her search for them. And once to see her weep. For the doll.

  I used her smile. Sometimes. It didn’t suit.

  Later, as adolescence stole upon us at our boarding school, I built a different, though still small, collection. Underwear. Hair slides. Stockings. Insignificant items. Rarely used, always in secret.

  In those years of fierce discovery sometimes I would reach for myself and sigh. And often bank it down for a later conflagration.

  And so it all began in small ways. Maybe it always does. Small thefts. Little meannesses. Malicious pleasures. Minor cruelties.

  But what if I had been there before Elizabeth? What if I had been born first? Would she have been … like me? What if Seth, the third son after Cain and Abel, had been firstborn? What if the Lord had been pleased by Cain’s gift? Would Cain ever have disturbed the sleeping monster in himself?

  I chose my habit. I had, you understand, no grand schemes. For I was not ambitious. I did not need public applause. I was spiritual by nature. A spiritual, malevolent creature. There are, I believe, many of us about.

  FOUR

  * * *

  I was never promiscuous. I chose my lovers with intelligence and, I believe, some originality. Though my victims were players on a board of my design, even my arbitrary, predatory swoops were accomplished with some artistry.

  I am beautiful. A statement of fact. A statement of power. I have dark hair and sallow, almost poreless skin. My deep-set brown eyes slant slightly upwards. My eyebrows—and this is much commented upon—do not arch, but seem to wing themselves across my brow. My nose is long, narrow and straight. My mouth is strong, and even without lipstick my lips are red. It is a face in which the regularity of my features is made slightly exotic by the intensity of my colouring. “She’s a di Malta,” my mother had often commented—referring to my father’s Italian mother. I am of above average height, in fact only slightly less tall than Elizabeth. I have, however, a voluptuous figure.

  Physically, therefore, I was well equipped for the arena. But, most crucially for my future success, I had what amounted to genius in my deep knowingness of the beat, of the pounding rhythm of desire.

  As a young woman I had, of course, a different assemblage of Elizabeth’s things. A small collection. Silk underwear now. Hair adornments, two of them gold. Lipstick. Shoes, high heeled, black. Other insignificant items. I still used them rarely, and still always in secret.

  After Oxford, where I read English, I joined a small book publishing house as an editorial assistant. I progressed steadily, as careful in hiding my wealth as I was subtle in the deployment of my beauty.

  Like all truly beautiful women I dressed with extreme simplicity. I was aware that to emphasise for dramatic effect my already exotic colouring, or to shape clothes around the full curves of my body, would be to court vulgarity. Also it would rob me of the element of surprise, and undermine the precepts of stealth which are so essential to the successful disarming of prey.

  I had a small wardrobe of simple, elegant dresses—usually navy or white in the summer, and a soft cream (to which I am rather attached) and black in the winter, occasionally lifted by a touch of red. My accessories were extremely expensive and always in perfect condition. But the classic nature of their design, and the comparative dullness of their colour, deflected attention from the fact that my handbags, for example, could cost over a month’s salary.

  This particular method of presentation reassured my female colleagues. The men I met at work soon found that their advances towards me elicited a response of such vague elusiveness that—initially attracted by the mysterious quality surrounding me— they eventually retreated. Baffled, but with their pride still in place.

  Though my colleagues were not aware of it, and indeed the idea was only half-formed, I considered the possibility of trying to build a small book publishing division within my father’s magazine empire. I had a lot to learn.

  In London, I lived during the week in an elegant flat in a cul-de-sac behind Harrods. It was discreet. Though clearly implying that I did not live on my salary alone, it avoided any overt statement of my financial position. From this base I pursued a social life that, by careful manipulation, ran parallel to that of Elizabeth. I believed myself to be in control.

  Elizabeth was striking. Not beautiful. The promise of those early childhood years of golden hair and fine features had faded into a pale attractiveness, that she seemed unwilling to redeem in any way. It was her height, inherited from her father, Oliver, that made an impact. She was long-limbed, and slender. Her shoulders were of a slightly masculine strength, which the severity of her clothes seemed to emphasise.

  If mine was a wardrobe picked with care for a purpose only I could comprehend, hers seemed to be genuinely the result of a fastidious cleanliness, a high purity, that almost festered the eye. She dressed in white shirts of cotton or silk, with jeans or tailored trousers. In the evening, she wore velvet or silk jackets over longish, silk skirts, which she seemed to wrap sarong-like around her long waist. During the day, her hair was worn back from her face and held by a barrette. In the evening it was pleated into a simple chignon. It was a style that remained unchanged through the years as almost identical new items replaced the old.

  After art school—where Elizabeth enjoyed a modest success—she lived in an enormous studio flat in Kensington, where she painted. Obsessed with sky, she was unfashionable, rarely exhibited and in my opinion totally without talent.

  Her friends were few, and mostly artists. However, she retained from her school days a close relationship with the Baathus family, respected international bankers. Maria Baathus regularly invited Elizabeth to Paris, and to the Loire, where the family had a château. Elizabeth accepted those invitations with almost child-like joy. This hospitality she returned, by inviting Maria Baathus for occasional visits to Lexington. These visits were much appreciated by Maria, who seemed to love Lexington and its famous lake. For its “mystery,” she’d once said.

  Lexington is, from one perspective, a hidden, secret house. It is approached by a winding, climbing drive through woods. Then a sudden clearing and, shockingly, Lexington, washed red, commands the hill. Long, open parkland falls gently through tree-shadowed acres into water-light.

  Lexington, the house and lake into which over time we poured so much of our lives, had been acquired by my grandfather in the first flush of his spectacular business success. “The ultimate chess game,” as he described it.

  He had bought a small magazine publishing company with well-established, though not very profitable, titles. He moved the company out of its enormous, old-fashioned building in central London, and thereby realised the hidden asset he had seen all along. The property. With a considerable fortune in the bank from the sale of the building, within three years he had closed six weak magazines, transf
ormed others into market leaders and successfully launched two more. He had created a publishing empire—Alpha Publishing. So called because my grandmother’s name was Alexa, and they had called their two daughters Astrid and Aileen. “All Alphas” had been his little joke.

  After her husband died, my grandmother, either from grief or from joy, had Lexington’s grey stone washed red.

  My grandfather and my father returned from London each weekend and pursued male pastimes of fishing, hunting, cards, Weekends at Lexington were full of male odours, of an alien pitch of laughter that as a child had thrilled me. Even the colour of Lexington had seemed to change—its red hue seemed daring and triumphant. During its female week it had seemed to me blood red, with black somewhere clotted in its depths.

  FIVE

  * * *

  I have never been interested in handsome men. This is not because I believe that they are necessarily vain; nor indeed that they are incapable, as is often implied, of loving deeply. No. I know that nature is not all-bountiful, and, having endowed beauty, it will almost certainly not feel the necessity to be generous with other qualities.

  On a summer’s day when Elizabeth was in her late twenties, into Lexington walked the reason for the increased frequency of her visits to France. Hubert Baathus.

  He strode across the lawn towards my garden chair, his smiling, courtly face a veritable topography of the balances and planes of light and shade that make a man handsome.

  It is true that it was with a minimum of originality I intended on the seduction of Elizabeth’s lover, a plan conceived in the split second of his arrival. This banality did not, would not in any way, lessen the pain she would suffer.

  I smiled at him through the sunlight, and held my hand out for his perfect bow. And for the kiss on the hand, which, as he was a gentleman, avoided final contact.