‘Right!’ So was she.
‘Okay! Since I can’t do anything right, I’m going to start to do everything wrong. Next week, I’m going to walk into your Victim’s Brigade and announce that they’re not to set foot in this house again while I pay my share of the rent. That’ll give you all something tangible to moan about.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ she had spat at him.
He had gone on, his venom spilling over now that he had started, ‘I don’t understand how relatively attractive, supposedly intelligent women, all of whom have more than their coats on their backs, can carry on in this idiotic fashion. Your daughters will grow up to loathe you, let alone your sons.’
She had shrieked at him then. ‘I want a divorce.’
‘Good, file for one.’
‘Go and have an affair with someone. One of those young dimwits who looks up to you in lectures with gooey eyes.’
‘I thought you respected women.’
‘I’m taking Janey.’
‘No you’re not,’
Their exact words were now lost to him, but the pattern of the row, repeated so many times over was eternally engraved in his mind. It had gone on, horrible, hateful, for days, months.
Until the summer, when Samantha had come to him with a self-satisfied smile on her face and announced that her friend Sarah had invited her to accompany her to France. She wanted to go. He could have Janey for the summer.
She was happier when she came back, a little easier, as he was. He suspected that she was having a Lesbian affair, but he didn’t pry, didn’t care. His move to Princeton was imminent and he would have liked to take Janey with him.
There was no question of that, Samantha was adamant. But he could visit every weekend.
He did. It drove him frantic, that little face lighting up when he arrived and then asking him every few hours with a mournful gaze when he had to go. He was stricken with guilt and a sorrow he didn’t know how to assuage.
That was over three years ago now.
There had been other women in that time, though not many: he had grown cautious. Yet he had too much intellectual self-respect to allow himself to universalise from the particular and attribute to all women what he had experienced in one. Then, too, after the first period of resentment, he had admitted to himself that the whole marriage had been a mistake from the start, on his part as well. He had been too easy going, too willing to treat his own existence like some exotic spectacle to be observed, experienced and then wrapped up in commentary before he moved on to the next. As if life were a never ending stream of riches that carried one lazily on from one lavish possibility to the next.
He was a wanderer by nature: Janey had put a stop to that, made him want to dig deeper, take stock.
And this year, he had at last stopped hating Samantha. He could talk to her with a degree of courtesy, appreciate her competence. He had almost forgotten the pain and felt he had a new fund of hope.
But perhaps that wasn’t the case.
Adam stared at the empty grate in the empty house and buried his head in his hands. Didn’t so many of the things he had said to Helena Latimer, had defensively felt, have their origins in Samantha? In his own fear of repetition where he least wanted it? Not in her, the woman who had shown him so much vulnerability, so much generous passion, alongside her boldness, a woman who in her loving was utterly unlike Samantha.
That was perhaps why she had run away.
A fool. Always the fool.
He stood up slowly and with an effort started to slosh paint on the wall. He would have to see her again by hook or by crook. Get her back here. How he wanted her back here. To Explain.
He knew that she had left the little inn she had told him she was staying at. Whether she had left Germany, he had no idea. He had written to her care of her paper in London, but there had been no reply from there. Probably wouldn’t be. If she had decided to go, she wouldn’t bother to answer his letters. Then too, she was presumably still looking for that man, that Max Bergmann.
That was it, of course. Adam held his brush in mid air and stared at it as if it were a magic key. He would have to find Max Bergmann for her. Somehow.
Screens flickered along the rows of desks in the crowded, brightly-lit newspaper office. Telephones rung unstoppably, hung from shoulders as fingers tapped. Voices were raised and lowered. Men and women with intent expressions on their faces stared into hardware or space. Paper cups with dregs of rancid coffee littered table tops.
‘It’s him again,’ Lynn, the assistant to the Environment Section glared at Helena. She was a fresh-faced, tow-haired, young woman, not long out of university and was prone to unstoppable chatter. ‘Fifth time in two days. What do I say this time?’
‘Tell him the same thing again. Or tell him I’ve gone to Timbuctoo.’
The woman made a face at her, then pressed a button on her phone, ‘I’m afraid she’s gone into another meeting. Can I take a message please.’ Her voice rang out in efficient tones. She scribbled something on a pad. ‘Yes, I will. Thank you.’
With a grimace, she handed the message to Helena. ‘If you don’t go to this lecture tonight, you’re a first class rotter. The man’s in love.’
‘The man’s a pest.’
‘Sounds pretty nice to me. And given the excuses, exceedingly patient.’ She grinned, ‘So what’s the story?’
‘The story is what’s up on my screen and not getting written.’
‘Okay, but I’m putting a bomb under your chair. It explodes at seven. And if you’re not out of here by then, bye bye.’
‘You haven’t given him my home address?’ Helena looked at her askance.
‘Would I break the golden rule? “I’m afraid that we are not permitted to give out…” ‘
In exasperation, Helena threw the crumpled message at her, then smiled. ‘Keep it up and I’ll get you an extra special birthday present.’
Lyn made eyes at her, ‘A cuddly toy boy.’
‘If you ladies would please try to concentrate on something green, I might get this page together for next week,’ Carl Sykes, their section editor, looked over from his desk, lightening his words with a laugh. ‘And I need your article, Helena.’
Helena focussed on her screen and tapped out a rapid paragraph, then checking her notes, another and another.
‘Coffee?’ Lynn called out behind her.
‘Tea, please,’ Helena murmured.
While Lynn was off and about, Helena glanced down at the invite which had been waiting in her tray on her return from California.
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. Guest Lecture by Professor Adam Peters (Princeton) and then, the title: Hybrid Lives. There was a note appended to it. ‘Please come. And join us for dinner afterwards. Please.’
For a moment she pondered the ‘us’ and wondered whether it included his wife. No, he wouldn’t be that callous. He had undoubtedly left his wife at home as men so often did. At home in Princeton.
There had been a letter from him too, sent earlier. She had chucked that out, flushing as she read it. A mixture of amorous twaddle thinly veiling his anger at having been left. Served him right. He had lied to her, lied doubly. About that letter from Max as well. She could recognize Max’s writing anywhere. And there it had been on Adam’s father’s desk. He was a liar who wanted her to be the other woman. She had never been the other woman. It wasn’t fair on the first or the other. Women needed to have solidarity.
When her profile of his father was printed, she would send it to Adam and attach her own cool little note, telling him how pleased she had been to learn of his child’s existence and how angry to find that letter.
Helena tried to concentrate on her article. She had had so much to catch up on since her return, though it had been a real pleasure to come back, to be greeted so warmly, to be surrounded by the familiar faces, to dawdle over a companionable drink in the evenings. But the matter of Adam wouldn’t leave her alone. Perhaps she ought to go to th
at lecture. Ought to tell him face to face. After all, she had nothing to be ashamed of. He was the one. And he couldn’t rape her in the midst of a crowd.
No, no that wasn’t right. He hadn’t raped her. Rape was what had happened to her in childhood. She had to be clear about that now. Quite clear. What Adam Peters had done was to seduce her, seduce her with her active compliance. The problem was he had seduced her into something she didn’t quite recognize as sex.
‘Tea,’ Lynn plopped a paper cup down beside her.
‘Thanks,’ Helena said absently. She picked up the phone and rang her friend Claire’s number. ‘Fancy going to a lecture tonight? At the LSE.’
‘Don’t think I can,’ Claire hesitated. ‘It’s Nick’s and my weekly night out. The one you persuaded us into, remember? To stimulate our marriage to new heights? Alone together, no kids, just a candle and dirty memories between us. On the other hand, a lecture and you between us might make a stimulating change,’ Claire laughed her familiar ironical laugh, rushed on, ‘What time?’
‘7.30. The New Theatre.’
‘We may be a little late. But we’ll be there. Grab some seats.’
‘Good woman,’ Lynn was grinning at her. ‘I couldn’t have coped with another day of messages. I’m proud of you.’ She was examining Helena with her prize-winning student’s expression. ‘You know, my father tells me - he’s a shrink - that men have very fragile egos, at home that is. In public, they’re ripe for trampling.’
Helena glowered. ‘Maybe I should go out with your father then.’
The lecture hall was already crowded when Helena arrived, a steeply raked room that looked as if might have been used for one of Charcot’s exhibitions of his hysterics. Not a fortuitous analogy, Helena chided herself. She looked round for some seats where she might sink into invisibility, found three by the windows on the side, not too far from one of the exits.
Being here, seeing that spectrum of faces both eager and dramatically bored around her, the chalky blackboards, the large institutional clock over the door, reminded her of her Cambridge days. She had enjoyed doing her degree in Modern Languages, had enjoyed her college existence as well, the endless trials and tribulations of a dormitory full of students who led high velocity lives.
It was towards the end of her second year that the creeping realisation came on her that her own internal life was a calm space in comparison to the drama-packed goings on around her. She was the one who was always called in at the moment of crisis, the shoulder to weep on, the negotiator, the peace-maker, sometimes even the bully. Like Em, she realised. And she relished that; she preferred it that way round, excitement on the outside, calm within.
It occurred to her now as she gazed at the empty demonstration table where Charcot might have stood that it was probably those turbulent early childhood days she didn’t like to remember that had prepared her for that. Life was always on the outside, better kept at a distance, safer, and her role was to tidy and make safe, to clean up. Armour had to be kept on for those external battles so that she could remain intact. The mess musn’t be allowed in.
‘Why Helena, it is Helena isn’t it? I haven’t seen you for so long.’
An old woman with papery cheeks was looking up at her from the seat diagonally below her.
‘My how beautiful you’ve grown. How glamorous.’
‘Mrs. Fenton. How lovely to see you.’
Mrs. Fenton was an old friend of Emily’s and Helena was filled with guilt at the thought that she hadn’t visited her in perhaps two years. ‘I thought you had moved down to Sussex.’
‘I moved back,’ the old woman smiled whimsically. ‘I got bored and missed dear grubby old London. There were no lectures to go to in the country. And no young people. Only the flowers to tend. And winters are very long, you know. So I moved back into a flat close to my old address, just round the corner in fact. You must come and see my sometime.’
‘I’ll do that.’
‘You know Emily and I were students here just before the war,’ she lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘She was madly in love with one of the younger lecturers. We used to come here, right in this theatre, and listen to him. Then he was killed in the war. She never got over it,’ she shook her head sadly.
Helena stared at her. Well that put paid to one of her other German fantasies. Emily and Max, a mother and a father. What a fanciful idiot she had been, a bereft child in search of a family. And yet…
‘Helena, there you are,’ Nick Foster, Claire’s husband, was waving at her vigorously from the bottom of the stairs. He strode up them two by two, pulling his long scarlet scarf off all the while. She smiled at the tall dramatic figure he cut, with his sleek black hair and pirate’s eyes, returned his embrace.
‘Hello gorgeous. You’re a sight for tired television eyes.’
It was when he sat down that Helena noticed Adam Peters had just come into the room, preceded by a small vivacious woman with a round doll-like face.
‘I came straight from the office. Claire must have been held up by the kids. Which means I get a whole two delicious minutes alone with you.’
‘In a vast crowd and just as the lecture is about to begin.’
‘Drats. Foiled again,’ he chuckled.
She didn’t take up the familiar banter. She was sinking down into her coat, making herself small and watching Adam Peters. She had forgotten how handsome he was. It was the suit that emphasized it, a chunky herringbone tweed which fell smartly from his broad shoulders, a bright blue shirt, and a tie with something yellow in it that brought out the warm hazel of his eyes. But it wasn’t only the suit.
Her face grew warm and she sank deeper into her coat.
‘There’s Claire,’ Nick stood to wave again.
If Adam hadn’t seen her before, it would be a miracle if he didn’t see her now, Helena thought. But she smiled at Claire, petite and vivacious, and as darkly dramatic as her husband. It was always a pleasure to see her, though when they had met on the evening of her return from California, Claire had been stern with her, had criticised her for running herself into the ground for Max Bergmann.
The woman was introducing Adam, paeans of praise about a list of books and publications Helena hadn’t known about. Meanwhile he was scanning the room, assessing his audience. Or looking for her she suddenly thought. She had an almost irresistible desire to run. Then his eyes rested on her. His lips curled into a smile which a second later had vanished.
He walked to the podium, looked out at them all for a moment before beginning. The silence grew expectantly.
‘In the West, we have a tendency to locate our hoped-for future somewhere in a golden past. Our paradises, those moments of essential purity, of authenticity, are always lost. And always somehow to be redeemed. It is as if we could only walk towards an imagined future by looking backwards into an imagined past.
‘For Christians, that golden age is Adam and Eve’s garden before that fiendish alien, the serpent inveigled his way in and propelled the fall; for certain feminists and sexual reformers, a matriarchal society before Fatherright usurped its just place; for Green’s a pagan or medieval countryside before industrialization brought its evils; for the Nazi’s the age of the great Nordic heroes, set to music by Wagner.’
There was a titter. He went on.
‘For libertarian capitalists, a time before the welfare state imposed its restrictions on almighty freedom. For native Americans, a time before the plundering white man arrived on their shores. And for the English, a time, I imagine, before the Empire had struck back to deliver the colonized peoples into this green and pleasant land.
There was some laughter from the audience accompanied by an uncomfortably shuffling of feet.
‘For anthropologists, the golden age is too often the primitive peoples we study with such attention. They are our very own dreams of innocence. So that when we find the serpent even in this garden, we would prefer to gloss over it. Paradise must remain pure, an authentic clime.
‘What I would like to explore today - and I will draw on a number of ethnographic examples - is what would happen if we rid ourselves of that fearful symmetry of loss and redemption, of sin and salvation - with its intermediary notion of apocalypse. And don’t forget that the discourse of the apocalypse is now both scientific and religious: environmentalists use statistics to evoke the late great planet earth, while presidents talk of Armageddon and God’s wrath.
‘It seems to me that there is little basis in the modern world for an essentialist and moralizing language of lost or future purity. All our cultures, from that of the Yanomamo Indians in the Amazon to the United States or Afghanistan, are hybrid, heterogeneous, mixed, diverse, impure - whether through the movement of peoples, global media or harder currency.’
Helena listened, her concentration so intense that when Adam glanced at his watch and noted the passage of the hour, she was taken altogether by surprise. He was smiling now, that ironical smile of his.
‘And as a parting word, my grandmother once told me that she couldn’t bear living under the weight of those twin burdens, “the sins of our fathers, the purity of our mothers”. “I want to invent the present,” she said to me, “the past is an outworn invention.”
There was a burst of applause. The woman next to Adam was glowing with pleasure as she rose to thank him and invite questions. Nick popped up instantly. Helena wished she could vanish as she saw Adam focus first on her, then on Nick, then back at her.
But he answered his question politely and fully, turned to another.
Helena rose as quietly as she could, whispered to Claire, ‘I have to go to the loo. Meet you outside.’
‘Let’s stay and talk to him.’ She raised ogling eyes to Helena, ‘He looks and sounds decidedly interesting.’
‘I’ll see if I can get back in,’ Helena prevaricated, smiled quickly at Mrs. Fenton who had turned to look at them. ‘I’ll ring you,’ she murmured.
Then she fled without looking back at Adam. When she reached the safety of the women’s room, she was breathing as hard as if she had run for her life. She felt as if Adam’s lecture had been directed specifically at her, as if he had set out to rumble the very underpinnings of her life, to cast a dazzling and annihilating light on the man she most valued in the world: Max, whom he had once called an apocalypse monger, a prophet of disaster.
Dreams of Innocence Page 60