Sin

by Josephine Hart

  “Elizabeth speaks of you with such admiration—I have so longed to meet you.”

  “You’re too kind,” I replied.

  “Too kind? Can one ever be too kind?”

  My too clever weekend guest, Helen, now spoke.

  “You’re taking the phrase too literally, Hubert. Sometimes in England we say, ‘you’re too kind,’ and mean something entirely different.”

  Hubert looked at me slightly puzzled.

  “I am sure I got Ruth’s meaning correctly. How clumsy I sound. My English is … stilted.”

  “No. Your English is charming,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. Charming. Now I do understand what the English mean when they say ‘charming.’ I understand the ‘nuance.’”

  He laughed. Elizabeth smiled gently at his little triumph.

  “Hubert may come to live in London for three or four years,” she said.

  “Really? Why?” I asked.

  “We have established a branch of the Bank in London. I will stay for a time to develop it before returning to Paris.”

  “Do you think you’ll like living in England?”

  “Oh yes. I am certain of that.” He shot a look of affection towards Elizabeth.

  “Have you ever lived in London before?” I asked.

  “Lived, no. But I have visited often. I love London. Its theatre particularly … is the best in the world. But now I seem to flatter you, no?”

  “We like being flattered.”

  Helen was now smiling at him too. Her cleverness had been put to one side as an inappropriate accessory in the face of his charm.

  Elizabeth was entranced. But why did she interest him? Did he perhaps have a lust for her soul? What a potent weapon it is when observed with the clarity of vision required to appreciate it. How serious were they about each other? Elizabeth? Very. Hubert?

  “Ruth.”

  Startled, I turned towards my mother.

  “Ruth, dear. You seem lost in thought. We should move to the terrace, darling. Lunch is ready.”

  I watched Elizabeth and Hubert walk towards the house. He had his arm about her waist, and she turned towards him. And gazed at him as if to light his path. Even on a summer day.

  I walked after them. My shadow fell across them. They stopped, and turned to me, smiling. I placed myself on the other side of Hubert.

  “I hope we’ll see you at Lexington at the weekends when you come to live in England.”

  “Hubert starts next month,” Elizabeth said.

  “You’ve bought somewhere to live in London?”

  “No. There is a company flat. In Mayfair. I shall stay there, at least for the immediate future.”

  We had arrived at the house. Lunch was being served on the terrace. Folds of white linen—an obsession of my mother, whose linen cupboard had an almost Alpine purity—fell from the oblong table onto the grey stone of the terrace. I watched Hubert eat. He was full of appetite, but discreet. An interesting tension. Elizabeth smiled with pleasure as he complimented my father on the wine—which he drank in considerable quantities, though not to excess. He goes just to the edge, I thought. But no further.

  Elizabeth toyed with her food. She drank virtually nothing. Elizabeth never goes to the edge. In her painting, for example, there is no danger, no excitement. As if he had read my thoughts, Hubert spoke.

  “I admire Elizabeth’s painting very much. She is committed to beauty. She is very much in the French tradition. We do not celebrate … ugliness … just because it shocks. You understand?” He turned to me.

  “Yes, indeed I do.” I tried to sound diplomatic. “But great art has always shocked. N’est-ce pas?”

  “Yes. But Elizabeth does not claim to be a great artist, Ruth. She does, however, have a true eye. And in time she may surprise you all. I have a feeling about …”

  “Oh, Hubert. Please.” Blushing, Elizabeth interjected. “It’s simple really. Painting is all I’m good at. And even at that, I have only a small talent. But it makes me very happy, and my small successes encourage me to continue with my …”

  “Enchantment?” Hubert offered.

  “Well!” sighed Helen. “You make an enchanted couple. God knows there aren’t many around.”

  “Ruth, where’s Dominick?” asked my mother. When he was not asking me to marry him, I found Dominick useful company on occasional weekends at Lexington.

  “He’s in America, Mother. Giving a series of lectures at Berkeley,” I replied.

  Dominick’s subject, mathematics, was such that it rendered any conversation concerning his work impossible. All enquiries were full of dread—that he might be tempted to explain. He read modern novels, avidly. Most of them he loathed. “It gives me something to talk about,” he often said laughingly.

  Yes, he had his charms. But with me he had strayed onto the wrong path. One of these days I would have to lead him to an exit. I hoped that he would leave with grace.

  SIX

  * * *

  “Ruth.”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “I don’t deserve this, Ruth.”

  I smiled briefly back at her.

  “I don’t deserve to be so happy. From the moment I saw him …”

  “I’m sure he feels the same. Like Dante and Beatrice. ‘I did but see her passing by and yet will love her till I die.”’

  “You always have the right words, Ruth. Always. It’s such a gift.”

  And her radiance—the bride’s radiance, caught in the long, oval mirror—seemed fairy-tale. Unreal. As though the image were such a powerful distillation of reality that finally only the image existed. I moved behind her, my deep rose dress blotted out by the folds of ivory in which Elizabeth stood. She turned suddenly. For a second we stood eye to eye. The bride and her maid of honour. She kissed me. I made no move. What should I betray? And, with the touch of Elizabeth’s cool lips still seeming to flutter on my cheek, I followed her from her room to join my mother in the hall.

  “Oh, Elizabeth. You look beautiful.”

  “Mother.” Elizabeth embraced her.

  Mother. Not true. And shortly after, Father. Not true either. His turn to worship. Then steadily, past various acolytes, we made our way through Elizabeth’s enchanted time to the church, and to Hubert.

  It is indeed a holy thing, the ritual of marriage. I looked at Hubert. His features had a kind of classic timelessness. It would ensure that any photograph of him stumbled upon in a trunk, or in a corner of some room, by an adolescent girl in time to come would elicit a little gasp of appreciation—that men could be so beautiful. As he turned towards Elizabeth, his face witnessed truth and love. I felt no pain. They should love each other … I searched for a word … profoundly. That was satisfying to me. Its perfection challenged me. Why mar something already imperfect? It is the first crack that ruins the Ming. The first lie that destroys Truth. The first adultery that breaks the conjunction. After that it’s only repetition.

  And after that, of course, it is always repetition. When perfection is defiled it is hard to resist the pleasures of destruction, and of lies, and of concupiscence. For then the sacrifice is for nothing.

  And so I stood, rose-coloured, beside the lily, and examined quietly the tiny thorns of my bouquet.

  I walked behind them, down the aisle. Alone. The third. Hooded, in silk. Then other rosy maidens followed us out into the low, gold summer day, which spread its slightly cloying warmth around the marble purity of the newly wedded couple.

  Lexington, as though drunk, seemed to dance with the rhythm of their laughter and to twinkle back at each and every smile. Long tables in the courtyard followed the shape of the house. The principal table was centred before the main building for the key actors in the tableau. Two long tables, on either side, followed the shape of the east and west wings of Alexa’s old dynastic dream for her daughters. After lunch and speeches, people drifted dreamily down the lawns, and a few towards the greater privacy of the distant lake.

  “They make a perfect co
uple.” Charlotte Baathus, Hubert’s twin sister, spoke to me.

  “Oh. Yes, indeed. Perfect.”

  “It was so sudden,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I will admit I was a little … surprised. Shocked even. Though Maria is thrilled. Maria always adored Elizabeth.”

  “Shocked? Why shocked?”

  “Well,” she went on. “They decided to marry within a month of Hubert coming to London. Then the wedding was so … soon … after that.”

  “Elizabeth wanted a summer wedding. There seemed no point in waiting until next summer,” I replied.

  I disliked Charlotte Baathus. Whereas Hubert was handsome, she had the common prettiness of the pale-blue-eyes-and-rosy-lips kind. She had a soft, rather breathless way of speaking her almost accentless English.

  “Charlotte,” I said. “I wasn’t at all shocked by the speed of the announcement. They are ”—the word came again— “profoundly, in love.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. I saw that she did not like the idea. To a trained observer like myself, it takes the merest tightening of the muscles round the mouth to show the meanness of the soul.

  I kissed Charlotte briefly. I hoped the kiss confused her, coming so soon after my tiny victory. I enjoyed the slight tension of her arm muscles, as I held them before the predatory swoop of my lips, which was impossible for her to escape.

  I walked away, and found another group of contented witnesses to Elizabeth’s and Hubert’s joy. I agreed wholeheartedly with excessive tributes to her beauty. I listened to some friends of Elizabeth, describing with seeming honesty her endless kindness to them. And I thought of how their sudden decision to marry had turned my plan into something much more interesting, more dangerous and more difficult.

  With soft smiles, I approached a hopeful Dominick. And I marvelled again at what a secret thing the human heart is, and the human mind. A merciful protection for us all. For who would survive a journey round the mind of another?

  No one in the world—no one knew my thoughts. God? I wondered idly. Did God know? Or knowing, care?

  SEVEN

  * * *

  A mathematician in love does not approach his beloved with a scientific analysis of the laws of probability of relationships. Particularly a mathematician whose love is not returned.

  But perhaps there is a scientific law here after all. Does the love of the lover expand or contract in direct relation to the love returned or withheld? Who can fail to believe that the intensity of one’s adoration, if further developed, will not elicit a response? “If there is love in this heart,” the saying goes, “then there is love in that heart. For one hand claps not without the other.” How seductive. And how wrong. For why trap what is already trapped? It is only in flight that we know the freedom of the bird.

  These were my idle thoughts on a walk with Dominick after the wedding. Thoughts concealed by my soft smile at his protestations, and expectations. For Dominick had developed the habit of expectation.

  And this being a light, feather-soft day, and our being hidden on the other side of the lake, his attempts at seduction were successful. His expectations were fulfilled.

  My decision. I allowed. I deigned. It was essential with Dominick to keep a distance. I knew it, he did not. I watched through shuttered eyes his disintegration. And into the after-minutes, while his body reassembled itself, I dreamed a little dream of Elizabeth and Hubert. Their conjunction—in holy matrimony. And again I felt no pain. Dominick whispered words of marriage again into my closed heart. With a sigh of irritation I left my thoughts. I planted doubt, and then its cruel cousin hope, in his heart. But not rejection. I had chosen to lay down my head on the quilted heart of a hosta, crushing it. I felt no guilt. Nature, after all, has never loved us back.

  We two walked back to Lexington, its guests now gone. A liar and her lad, with his clever, modish face. His straw-coloured hair endlessly flopping into his glasses. His long body, and all its lines that did not entrance me.

  We sat around the table with my mother and father. We ate tiny grilled fish. Then cold chicken covered in a pale lemon cream, and decorated with black olives shaped into hearts. The lilies on the table, some with the closed heads of snakes, gently opened during dinner. Predator turned victim.

  I drank red wine and wondered idly what Elizabeth and Hubert were doing. Now. Exactly now. In my mind’s eye, I wandered up and down her familiar body. I tried to imagine it with Hubert’s eye. And thought of that secret event, for which we find private places, hidden rooms, or darkness. So that no one else will see the particular way man and woman become one. Man thrusting blindly upwards, through the same passage that once he blindly travelled down into the world. Believing that he brings pleasure where once there had been pain. But still it leads to defeat. For from that sweetness come the pain and blood again, as down the passage the cranium pushes through bone. Again. And never once does God ask us for forgiveness.

  The red wine in my stomach sickened me. And, idiotically shocked, I thought of Elizabeth pregnant. In birth. A mother.

  “They will be very happy together.” My father spoke.

  “Is that an order?” I asked.

  “Ruth, dear. It’s simply my assessment.”

  “Based, dear Father, on exactly what?”

  “On my knowledge that a man would be foolish indeed not to be happy with Elizabeth.”

  “Ah. She has a secret formula, does she? Perhaps when she returns from Greece she can explain it to Dominick. Then he can create a mathematical formula for happiness and become famous. The Dominick Garton Principle of Happiness in Marriage, based on the Ashbridge-Baathus model. First discovered in the Greek archipelago while the couple were on honeymoon.”

  Before my father could voice his disapproval, I blew him a kiss, and said: “It’s a joke, Father. A joke. Of course they’ll be gloriously happy together. And you’re right. What man could fail to love Elizabeth?”

  My father and mother smiled at each other in uncertain relief.

  “And what man could fail to be happy with you, Ruth?” Dominick blew me a kiss.

  “Ah, Dominick. My only fan. I do not see myself built for happiness. It’s almost an alien concept to me.”

  “What nonsense, Ruth. What utter nonsense,” said my father.

  “Non sense. Only to you, Father. It makes sense to me.”

  “You’ve had a wonderfully happy life so far. Don’t be so careless of it. Let’s look at the facts.”

  My father and I had often engaged in this semibanter. It was our own language barrier. It had a certain style, specific rules, and achieved the overall objective—non-communication. An essential between adult child and parent. His legal training naturally led him to believe that a question-and-answer technique was the road to the truth. He always forgot that I was not under oath.

  “I’m going back to the flat tonight.” Dominick rose to go. “I have an early lecture in the morning.”

  “Elizabeth mentioned last week that she is going to keep her studio,” my mother said.

  “Yes. She’s decided to go on painting there. Hubert’s flat is too small,” replied Dominick.

  Dominick lived in the same block of flats as Elizabeth. A mathematician with an artist’s studio flat. This gave him, he believed, the bohemian air he rather longed for. His was an intelligence trapped within the wrong temperament. But such was his brilliance, and so quickly had it been recognised and rewarded by schools and universities, that the wunderkind never had a chance. He was later so loaded down with academic achievement that he was forced to succumb, and he became his talent. Almost to the same degree as he became English.

  His parents were American. His father, like Dominick, was a noted mathematician. His mother, after a number of years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had become a senior consultant to McKinsey.

  During a carefully planned mutual assignment to London, he to the London School of Economics, she to the London office of the parent company, Dominick att
ended Westminster School. There, he fell in love with England. And with all things English. He believed his passion was reciprocated—a familiar blindness in Dominick.

  Later, after his parents returned to America, he decided on Trinity College, Cambridge, as opposed to Harvard. There he began to accept what he had only half-understood at Westminster, that his passionate seriousness about his work needed to be leavened by irony. And that, in polite society in England, the sciences were rarely to be mentioned. A minor flirtation with the arts was much more laudable.

  I met him at a little party Elizabeth had given a few years previously. As visits to his flat would provide me with a perfect lookout, I encouraged his interest. My seduction of Dominick, in both strategy and tactics, was so subtly planned and executed that in the moment of possession it was his face which portrayed triumph. The increasing urgency of his deepening love for me was the only complication in an otherwise perfect scenario.

  Before Dominick there had, of course, been men. There was an early boyfriend of Elizabeth’s—a Mexican painter who, to my disappointment (I found this out too late), she had rejected. Then there was a liaison with a wholly unsuitable member of the aristocracy who was playing with the idea of being an artist. That … romance … had allowed me a stolen weekend in Paris. And that side of himself which I guessed he had kept well hidden from Elizabeth was allowed full rein. An interesting and educational two days. The son of a Lexington neighbour proved a much duller conquest. His guilt at his betrayal of Elizabeth was so excessive as to be almost amusing.

  I looked at Dominick. Ruth’s dedicated lover, never Elizabeth’s. The decision to keep her studio surprised me. Elizabeth hadn’t told me—perhaps believing it to be of no consequence. But it was of great consequence for Dominick. I sighed. For the immediate future at least, it rather seemed as if Dominick, and our relationship, would survive.

  EIGHT