I needed to get away, right away. I needed to escape from the house that was booby-trapped with reminders of you; it almost drove me mad. I tidied away your toys and then I got them out again. I walked round with one of your little vests in my bag to sniff at. I could feel myself sliding down; the sides were slippery, I could have let go, but instead I took to walking. Walking my way up and out, walking my mind into a soothing rhythm, walking my way through the soles of my shoes. I walked for miles every day in every sort of weather, keeping my eyes away from parks and swings and pushchairs and then, one day on my way home, I paused by the Post Office and saw an advert in the window.
Family house wanted urgently to rent. I rang the number and a man came round to see the house. He was an Iranian doctor working in Britain and wanting to bring his family over. I let it to him right away.
†
‘Don’t go and leave me,’ Adam pleaded when I told him of my plans. But what could he do about it, stuck in prison? I thought a clean break would be better for us both. I went back to Calcutta. There were people I still knew there. Away from it all, I was able to slip back to a previous life, a previous self, could sometimes forget the grief, forget Adam even, for hours at a time. I returned to my old job teaching English, rented a room and began a relationship with a young sitar player, Ravi: gorgeous, skinny, funny and young. Well, my own age, but after Adam that did seem sweetly young.
There were always lots of little children playing in the streets; at first I couldn’t bear to look at them, but then I softened. There was a pair, a boy and girl, twins I think, who took to hanging around my door. I taught them nursery rhymes and songs: ‘The Spider and the Fly’ and ‘There’s a Hole in my Bucket’. Playing with them soothed the pain of losing you and, after all, I knew you were safe; you were with your mother. For both your sakes I had to let you go.
I could have stayed in India for ever. I thought of staying – until I got a letter from Adam with his release date. He needed me, he said, and I found I had to go. Ravi was lovely, but he wasn’t Adam. The soul connection wasn’t there. When we made love it was good but I didn’t feel as if I was plugged into the mains like I did with Adam – or rather, like the mains were plugged into me. I said goodbye to Ravi with regret, but there was no heartbreak on either side. That relationship had been a balm, a treat, fun – a word foreign to Adam since he’d found Jesus – but it was like a shallow-rooted plant, easy to pull up. The roots of my love for Adam were as deep as those of an old oak tree and entwined round my guts, my liver, my heart.
On the day of Adam’s release, I went to meet him at the prison gates. I hadn’t seen him for more than a year. I was shocked and disappointed. His hair was grey and thinning, he’d lost one of his incisors and put on weight. He was badly shaved and had a pale, puffy look as he stood blinking in the autumn sun. I had to keep my eyes away from the shiny red scoop in the side of his hand where his thumb should have been.
‘Honey,’ he said, and he hugged me tight and I had to hold my breath against the poor sourness of him. Actually, he wasn’t poor; there was still money left in the Soul-Life account, and rent coming in from Lexicon Avenue. But we didn’t go back to London right away. He wanted to be near the sea, somewhere wild and beautiful. We caught the train to Oban and got the ferry to Mull. We stayed in a cottage by the water. He took it for granted that I was still his wife and expected us to make love, but at first I couldn’t bear him to touch me, not with his deformed hand, not at all.
‘Not yet,’ I said. I told him about Ravi and I did have a pang remembering that perfect hard young body. In those first few days, I thought about going back. On the first night we drank a bottle of Jura between us and Adam told me the things that had happened to him in prison and you do not want to know them. Just imagine the worst and you’ll get off lightly. I told him where you were, of course, and cried all over him because you were Stella’s, not mine, and I had no right to have you.
He asked me to forgive him for the accident. I was the only one on earth whose forgiveness mattered, he said; the only one whose love could wash him clean.
The sun shone, his skin lost its pallor, his beard grew back. He swam every morning, though the water was too cold for me. We bought him new clothes in Tobermory and, eating chips on a bench and sharing a bottle of cider, it started up inside me again. Something he said, I can’t even remember what it was, but it made me laugh and our eyes met in the old way, conspiratorial, us against the world. He was getting himself back and I got him back too. I took his bad hand and ran my fingers over the awful dark and puckered place and it just felt soft and warm. It was nothing to be frightened of. It was only him. And I forgave him.
We couldn’t wait to get back to the cottage. We found a secluded, sunny slope and made love among some sheep, who didn’t even blink.
One morning I woke up late, reached sleepily out for him, but he’d gone. I went back to sleep for a while then got up, bleary and hungover, and made some toast and sat in my pyjamas on the step eating it, watching birds and a red admiral on a buddleia bush by the back door. The horizon was made of hills and a blue line of sea. I could smell seaweed baking in the sun.
I got dressed and walked down to the beach to find Adam. He was sitting cross-legged on a rock. His eyes were closed and his lips moving. I lay on my belly and stared into a rock pool. The ginger weed swayed in the invisible water and a magenta sea anemone wriggled its tentacles. The reflections of gulls flicked by as if they were down there in the depths. There were colourless crabs scuttling on the sand and, hanging in the water like a feather, a tiny swaying fish. It was a whole miniature world with business going on as usual – until I moved and my shadow startled the fish and the crabs away.
Adam didn’t stir for hours and I didn’t want to disturb him. I went for a walk along the beach and then returned to the house to eat a hunk of bread and cheese and doze on a deckchair on the lawn. When I woke up, Adam was sitting on the step with a cup of tea. His eyes were blazing with incredible light and I’ve never seen such a joyous smile.
‘There was a heron.’ A ripple of laughter came out with his voice.
‘Naturally,’ I said. I sat beside him and licked the sunny saltiness of his skin.
‘It was Jesus and we spoke and spoke and the messages, it’s incredible, everything is clear now, everything is different. We have to go to America,’ he said.
‘Why America?’ I said, though I didn’t mind. This was exciting. ‘Where in America?’
‘New York City to begin with,’ he said. ‘We must go back to London now. I must reveal the new wisdom that the Lord has bestowed upon me, we must act on it immediately, move the operation to America . . .’ He went on and on and I listened and made more tea. My heart sank at the biblical language and I had to fight against the little voice niggling in my head. It had grown from the bad seed Stella had planted there, a voice that mocked and told me he was deluded, mad even, and power-mad too. Why should Jesus choose him, out of all the people in the world?
We returned to London and he was welcomed like a hero, like a martyr. He told lies, or rather sculpted the truth. This was hard for me to take and sat inside me like a lump of undigested food. Of course they knew about the accident – Obadiah and Hannah had visited him in prison – but his account of how it occurred, presenting him in a heroic light, wasn’t true. He lost his thumb rescuing Stella from the wreckage, he said. When, later, I criticized him for this, he explained that he too hated lying, but he’d had to make that sacrifice for the sake of Soul-Life. We mustn’t let there be any doubt in the Brethren’s mind about him, about Adam as Our Father. It was all for the sake of the Church, and moreover it was Jesus’s instruction. And later, you know, I think he believed the story himself, as anyone might come to believe a lie that’s endlessly repeated.
As he preached, in the days that followed, I had trouble hearing him past the interference of another voice. And it was a snake’s voice, and I had to squash it down, not succumb to cynicism. That
is Satan’s most pernicious power, because cynicism flourishes most strongly in clever people and these are the people who lead the world. Cynicism is a cheap cleverness that undermines belief and makes faith a laughing stock. As I sought to immerse myself in the teachings this became clear to me and I understood why Adam had sent Stella away from Soul-Life. Stella was a cynic. She was dangerous.
‘Should Stella be allowed to influence Dodie then?’ I asked. If we could have got you back then, my happiness would have been complete, but Adam said we had to let you go and that one day you’d reject Stella’s influence and turn to us, to Soul-Life, of your own accord.
†
Soul-Life flourished in New York, as Adam had said it would. He was inspired by the accident into a new conviction: Ross and that little baby girl weren’t lost at all, he claimed, but liberated from the iniquity of identity to become part of the Universal Soul. His guilt was therefore washed away and he symbolized this regularly in the Festival of the Lamb. I hated the cruelty of the sacrifice, but did find solace in the belief behind it. It took me back to thinking of my ectopic pregnancy, which had meant nothing to my child-self, only pain and blood. But maybe that child-who-never-was had a soul and was part of the Universal Soul now. That thought was a comfort.
Through all the good – the golden – years of Soul-Life, about a decade of them, before trouble began to brew, Adam still believed that I would have his son. Of course, I didn’t conceive, hardly expected to, but it did mean that we continued to make love – and we were always good at that. One day in bed I noticed a swelling in one of his testicles. The swelling grew, became a lump and a distortion, began to cause an aching in his groin. I begged him to see a doctor of course, but he was steadfast in his refusal. ‘If God wishes me to have the disease, so be it,’ he said, ‘and if he wishes me to die, so be it.’
‘But why are there doctors?’ I said. ‘Surely that’s evi dence that God wishes people to be able to heal each other?’
This was an argument that angered him from other people, and I’d never dared to voice it before, but he gazed at me softly, sorrow rather than anger in his eyes.
‘What matters the individual, Martha?’ he said. ‘The kind of medicine that saves a single life, all it does is glorify the individual. In fact, it doesn’t matter when we die.’
‘If I died?’ I said.
‘When,’ he reminded me gently, and then sighed and stroked my hair. ‘If you die first I’ll be sad, of course, on a human level, but I shall rejoice that your soul has joined the Universal Soul, and will welcome my own death when we shall mingle again. But before I die, I must have a son. Jesus has told me my son is the chosen messenger.’
‘It’s not going to happen,’ I said.
‘I had a dream,’ he said. ‘In which Stella handed me a son.’
‘No,’ I said immediately, shocked that he could even think it. ‘Surely even you cannot expect that!’
He looked offended by my emphasis, but didn’t rise to it. ‘It is not my will, it is the Lord’s,’ he said.
Every argument I ventured only seemed to strengthen his resolve. And if Adam believed it was the Lord’s will, then it would be done.
†
It was the first time we’d been back to the UK in more than ten years and, oh, how dismal and cramped it seemed. We stepped off the aeroplane into freezing January drizzle and I had no sense of homecoming, or belonging. You didn’t know it but I saw you on that visit. We’d hired a car and parked in Lexicon Avenue outside the house, debating how to approach Stella with our request. How strange it was to be there again in that suburban street. It was late afternoon, the sky bulging with charcoal clouds, the streetlights casting a sickly wash over the wetness. We sat in the car under the dripping black laburnum. And then you came along the road. I gripped Adam’s arm.
‘It’s Dodie.’
You walked with your head down, a bag of books over your shoulder. I knew it was you the instant I saw you. Your step was like Stella’s, quick and light, despite the heavy bag, as if you only skimmed the ground. Your long black hair was glistening in the rain. You were in school uniform but with a gothic twist: dark eye make-up, black tights. I caught a glimpse of black nail polish – but your cheeks were fresh and pink. I saw your breath float in the air and my own breath caught in my chest. You were still you. I felt like I’d been punched. You pushed open the gate and paused, before you went off down the side of the house.
Neither of us had the spirit or the energy to go in right away. Adam drove us to a hotel in town where we slept. We had room service for our dinner and watched television. Neither of us had seen it since arriving in America and it was a shocking intrusion into our heads, the blaring sound and speed of the skipping images, the brightness, the colour and the pernicious messages that pour from it and into the brain, anaesthetizing the senses against anything more subtle. I had to agree with Adam about that. We turned it off and Adam prayed for help and guidance.
Next morning – you would have been at school – we drove back to Lexicon Avenue. Again we parked the car under the laburnum. The rusty squeal of the gate was just the same. The smell of rust and privet engulfed me in such a flood of memory that I had to lean on the wall to steady myself. We rang the bell and waited on the front doorstep, but there was no reply. We went round to the back door. I tried the handle but it was locked. We knocked. The curtain moved aside in the dining room, and Stella peered round it. She froze as she recognized us and let the curtain fall. We had to hammer on the door before, eventually, we heard the key turn in the lock.
She was wearing an old dressing gown that I remembered from years back, and her hair hung down in curtains. It was thinner, with a few threads of grey and when we got inside I saw the lines on her face. She was only thirty-three, but looked so much older, raddled and pickled with sourness and smoke.
‘Have you come to keep your promise?’ was the first thing she said.
‘Stella,’ I said, ‘it’s been so long.’ I tried to embrace her, but she was like a bunch of twigs and I didn’t dare to squeeze too hard in case she broke. She didn’t return my embrace. The kitchen was over-scrubbed and chilly, reeking, as always, of bleach.
‘I’ve missed you,’ I said.
She pulled a face and stepped away.
‘What about a cup of tea?’ I said.
She turned and put the kettle on. ‘What do you want?’
‘Just to visit, to see you, to hear how Dodie is.’
Adam was standing looking at his feet and I tried to sound normal, cheerful, to inject a bit of warmth into the place, if only with my voice.
He wanted me to ask her: sister to sister. I’d only agreed because I knew she’d say no to this charade. She’d laugh in my face. And I’d comfort Adam in his disappointment. We’d return to Soul-Life and wait for a new dream to tell us how to proceed. What else could we do? We could hardly force her.
Stella poured the tea and carried it through into the dining room where a puzzle – the Mona Lisa – had been started on the rosewood table. The table was polished to a deep and layered gleam. I looked down at it, beyond my reflection, and it did seem as if you could travel miles down there into a warm and rosy world.
There was no sign that a teenager lived here. Everything was immaculate and just as it had been fifteen years before, only more worn from all the scrubbing. The only thing of beauty was the table – and Stella still, when she turned her head or when in a certain light a little shock of loveliness spilled out between the lines. I’d grown heavy, my hair hacked off in its institutional cut. I’d seen in the hotel mirror how middle-aged I looked, though I too was only in my thirties.
‘The Lord has sent us here for a purpose,’ Adam said.
‘So much for small talk.’ Stella cackled. There was a silence, then: ‘You’re not getting your hands on Dodie,’ she said, narrowing her eyes.
‘Your sister will speak to you, while I . . . perhaps I’ll step out into the garden,’ Adam said.
&n
bsp; ‘He looks like shit,’ Stella remarked. And then, after a long awkward silence, ‘Well?’ And when I didn’t answer, she snorted. ‘I suppose he had a dream?’
‘How is Dodie?’ I said.
‘She’s strong,’ she said. ‘She’s doing well at school. She’s normal,’ she added, a trace of pride in her voice.
‘I’d love to see her,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘She’s forgotten all about you.’
‘What?’
‘You’re never mentioned.’
‘Not even by Aunt Regina?’
‘No. We stopped mentioning you when you went off and left her,’ she said. ‘Aunt Regina thought it best.’
‘I didn’t leave her! I only went away because you wouldn’t let me see her!’ I couldn’t believe that Stella thought that. Did she really think it? I felt sick.
Smiling to herself, Stella picked up a piece of chin and fitted it in the puzzle. ‘So. Tell me about the dream, then.’
I told her what Adam claimed Jesus wanted from her and she stared. Her mouth opened and closed and nothing came out at first, and then a splintered laugh.
‘You’re asking me to fuck that old git?’
‘I knew you’d say no,’ I said.
‘He killed my last baby, now he wants me to have another?’
‘It’s not about that,’ I said, and couldn’t prevent myself from adding: ‘She might have died anyway.’
She made a tiny gasping sound. ‘But not Ross.’ Her eyes were huge, the pupils flared.
‘Oh, Stell. You still miss him?’
She shook her head in disbelief then, frowning, rolled herself a spliff. She inhaled and blew out smoke, head on one side. She offered it to me, but I shook my head.
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