A Gift of Poison

by Andrea Newman

  A week passes like this, during which he phones her twice. She sounds sad but composed. ‘I did ask you not to phone me,’ she says.

  ‘That’s too much to ask,’ he says. ‘You know it is.’

  ‘Well, I can’t talk now, I’ve got someone here.’

  ‘Will you ring me back?’

  A pause. ‘No. It’s better not.’

  He leaves it a few days, smarting with the insult, then tries again.

  ‘Felix, please don’t do this,’ she says.

  ‘But I have to talk to you.’

  ‘No. It doesn’t help.’

  * * *

  He can’t afford a hotel but he hates the flat now. It doesn’t seem like a refuge any more: it is haunted by memories of Sally and Richard and Inge, the same memories that didn’t trouble him before, that used to seem merely interesting and dramatic. He feels unreal in it now, as if he is living in a stage set. It was never meant to be home. He only ever intended it as a place for work and sex, and now it’s not being used for either. As a delicious useful secret, it was glamorous; as his only refuge it is merely sordid. It only ever made sense in the context of going home to Elizabeth, and now he can’t do that it is like one half of a seesaw.

  It is also much too small: he finds it almost impossible to live in such a confined space. The bathroom and kitchen are tiny and he hates cooking anyway, so he eats out or has meals sent in. The bed is better suited to lovemaking than sleep and very soon gives him backache. He thinks with longing of his house, with its large rooms and its river view, his vast bed and his stereo system. He feels like an exile. He doesn’t want to think of himself as lonely because it is such a dirty word, evoking pity or contempt, something that afflicts other less fortunate people, like bad breath or VD. But he realises how few friends he has, how work and affairs have occupied all his time, how he has depended on Elizabeth for his social life. Now is the time he needs Richard most of all. But Richard has never responded to his friendly notes offering a truce.

  Grief and panic soon turn to rage. He is very angry with Elizabeth. She must know that she is calling up all his insecurity from the time his mother abandoned him when he was a little boy. He always begged her not to leave him and she promised she never would. Whereas he never promised to be faithful, and she accepted that. Her betrayal seems to him far more serious than his. He wouldn’t say she is making a fuss about nothing, but his punishment seems out of all proportion to his crime.

  * * *

  He is still in this mood when he drives down to see Sally a week later: furious with Elizabeth and in need of consolation. He has also sent the book to his editor, and this now feels like an act of nervous aggression. But Sally looks surprised to see him and not entirely overjoyed. ‘It’s been ages,’ she says. ‘Why didn’t you write?’

  ‘I didn’t feel much like writing,’ he says. ‘I get enough of that earning a living. You know that. If you were on the phone I’d phone you.’

  ‘You’ve always written before,’ she says. ‘It feels funny, having you just turn up. I might have been out, or busy.’

  ‘Or in bed with someone else,’ he says. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ she says. ‘I feel taken for granted if you don’t let me know you’re coming.’

  She takes the flowers he has brought her and puts them in the wash-basin, which she then half fills with cold water. He wonders if she really has got someone else and how he would feel if he caught them together: excited or demeaned? Or would she simply lock the door and not answer when he knocked? There is so much he doesn’t know about her. She seems combative today, as if she had been on some assertiveness training course, and it’s not attractive. Perhaps he never knew her very well. But she is looking and smelling good and he wants her. He would like to blot out all his anxieties by making love to her, submerge himself in her body and forget about Elizabeth and the book and his mother, forget everything that has ever caused him pain. He would like to feel safe and desirable again. It doesn’t seem much to ask. But when he touches her she pulls away.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she says. ‘Can’t we eat first?’

  * * *

  So he takes her out to lunch and spends money on her, to purge his offence. He buys expensive food and wine that he doesn’t want, and exerts himself to be witty and charming while anxiety thumps in his brain like a persistent headache. By the time they get back to her room he is exhausted and whatever erotic urge he had has gone. But now she pulls him close to her; she feels relaxed and forgiving, slightly drunk. ‘Well,’ she says, kissing him, ‘are you going to fuck me now?’

  Elis instinct tells him to retreat with honour and live to fight another day. Pride urges him on. They fall on the bed in a tense silence that seems to have very little to do with pleasure. She comes quickly and easily with his tongue or his hand on her clitoris; she comes several times and he feels envy. He gives her even more attention than usual in the hope of exciting himself or postponing the moment of defeat, but he knows with a dreadful doomed certainty that his cock is not going to obey him, that it is impervious to their hands and her mouth, though these all work with desperate efficiency and determination, like an emergency team trying to revive a cardiac arrest. He tries every fantasy that has ever succeeded for him, riffling through his filing system like someone slamming tapes in and out of a video recorder, but not even the dirtiest favourite will do the trick. He doesn’t feel relaxed enough to talk her through one of them; he would rather stop before he is totally humiliated, bending and flopping against her, a travesty of his former self. If they could cuddle for a while, he thinks; if he could sleep for a while, perhaps. It wouldn’t matter so much if it was someone else, on another day. He could even have made a joke of it. But it is Sally, and their relationship has been shifting for a long time. He feels dreadfully exposed with her: she is too young to understand that this can happen to anyone, though in fact it has seldom happened to him. This was meant to be an act of vengeance, a fuck of defiance, a V-sign directed at Elizabeth. And, probably for that very reason, it is not going to happen.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he says, stopping. ‘I’m just not in the mood.’

  ‘Don’t you fancy me any more?’ A small, resentful voice. He is angry with her for not being old enough to understand. No doubt all the boys of her acquaintance have permanent hard-ons. An older woman would have made excuses for him, pretended it didn’t matter, blamed the wine, or assured him she was satisfied by all the pleasure he had already given her. Or she might have thought of some way of exciting him enough. Or they could have joked, cuddled, slept, and next time the phoenix would have risen from the ashes. Sally does none of these things. Sally wants blood.

  ‘Don’t be silly, of course I fancy you,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. These things happen. I’m very depressed, it’s hardly surprising.’ He hadn’t meant to say that.

  ‘Why are you depressed?’

  He hesitates. ‘Elizabeth and I have separated for a few weeks.’ It frightens him to hear the words out loud: it makes it seem real. She is the first person he has told. ‘I’m living at the flat. It’s all taken a bit of getting used to, that’s all.’

  Sally sits up and pulls on a dressing-gown that was lying on the floor. She gets off the bed and goes to open a can of Coke that was standing on the window sill. It splashes her as it opens and she says, ‘Oh, shit. Why have you separated?’

  ‘It’s only temporary,’ he says. He feels suddenly cold now and starts to get dressed.

  ‘Yes, you said. What happened?’

  ‘She went to see Helen and got all the details out of her.’

  Sally shrugs. ‘I thought she must have known already. God, she met me coming out of your room in hospital, didn’t she?’

  ‘Well, we never talked about it before.’

  Sally turns round with the tin of Coke in her hand. ‘You’re really upset, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, of course. We had a horrible sc
ene. And it’s no joke trying to live at the flat.’

  ‘And that’s why we can’t make love?’

  He notices that she isn’t counting all the clitoral orgasms she’s had, though she wouldn’t like to do without them; she is still making him feel he’s failed because he hasn’t come up with a duty fuck. ‘Well, it doesn’t help,’ he says.

  Sally drains the can of Coke and throws it into the full waste-paper basket, but it bounces off all the screwed-up paper and lands on the floor. ‘I didn’t realise Elizabeth was so important,’ she says in a small cold voice.

  * * *

  They try to discuss it but they are uneasy with each other. They both need a proper drink now but he didn’t bring a bottle, only flowers, so they go to the student bar where he has to tolerate noise and smoke and disco music that gives him a headache. He has two double Scotches rather quickly and hopes he doesn’t get stopped on the way home. Then he remembers that he has no home.

  Sally says, ‘I thought Elizabeth was used to you having affairs. Why has she thrown you out because of me? After all, I wasn’t that important, was I? You didn’t leave her for me, did you? And I was really obedient, I had my abortion good as gold when you said I should, you and Mum.’

  He can see that she is going for the jugular, choosing this moment for dreadful recriminations. The cruelty of the young. She has no mercy. Hit a man when he’s down and all that. Put the boot in. And he doesn’t like being described as thrown out. He gets a sudden image of himself hurtling through the air and landing on the ground. He can almost feel the gravel grazing his face.

  ‘You were too young and too close to home. And she was upset about the pregnancy,’ he says. ‘And she found out we were still in touch.’

  ‘So I am sort of special after all. At least I’ve upset Elizabeth. I’m sorry, I’ve always liked her. D’you think I should write and apologise?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he says. ‘Things are quite bad enough already.’

  ‘Yes, they certainly are. I didn’t realise we were so dependent on her goodwill.’

  So much anger still. ‘Oh Sally,’ he says wearily, ‘why do both of you have to do this to me now, when it all happened over a year ago?’

  ‘I suppose we’ve both bottled it up for far too long,’ she says.

  They sit and look at each other in the noisy bar, and he wonders if it really is all over and he has inadvertently told Elizabeth the truth. But still they don’t quite say goodbye.

  * * *

  Elizabeth wakes each morning to remember that Felix is no longer there. The bed seems hugely empty, and she has to reabsorb the enormity of what she has done. But once she has adjusted to the shock, a sensation of peace takes over. At least there will be no more pain. She has another day of calm ahead of her, when nothing can happen to disturb her equilibrium.

  She sees herself as convalescent, giving her emotions a breathing space for the first time since she married Felix sixteen years ago, in much the same way that she might have lain in bed with a broken leg suspended in plaster. She is resting her heart.

  She knows that Felix feels outraged and wounded by her decision, but she is determined not to give way. Three months apart, she has told him, and then they will meet to review the situation. Ideally, she would like him not to phone her and she has asked him not to, but he does. His voice moves her profoundly but she is also enraged at the way he still ignores her wishes. She tried to keep the conversation brief, again very much like an invalid who is too tired to talk. She can’t quite bring herself to hang up on him, so she leaves the answering machine on as much as possible and she never rings him back. As time passes, she hears the sound of his voice change from pleading into anger and then coldness, until his calls become less frequent and finally stop. She is scared but she has to persevere, or what she has endured so far will be all for nothing. She is surprised by the strength of her own resolve.

  She knows she is trying to achieve one of two things but she isn’t sure which: either to accept that their marriage is over and she prefers to live apart from him, or to convince him that they can only survive together on different terms. She doesn’t think of it as crudely as trying to teach him a lesson, although other people might; she thinks it is far more complicated than that, and she would not have had the courage to do anything so casually vindictive. She feels she is trying this experiment because she has no choice, because she is emotionally exhausted, because there is nothing else she can do.

  She is lonely but calm. She has lived alone for many years before she met Felix, so it is not a skill she has to learn, rather something she remembers from her youth, like riding a bicycle, an ability people say you never lose. She tries to keep busy, though, so as not to have time to think, and she tries not to drink too much. She is beginning to realise how much she and Felix drank, and it scares her. She puts in more hours at the office, taking on a heavier workload, and going to more publishing parties to improve her image as well as her social life. It is a strangely exposed feeling, knowing she is there without Felix to go home to, alone in her professional capacity with an open-ended evening.

  The parties are the same as ever, noisy and crowded, full of people smoking and drinking and exchanging gossip. Some of them she likes, most of them she can tolerate, a few of them she actually hates. She is beginning to feel herself on a party treadmill, as if she has signed on at a club to work out with weights for the good of her health. Perhaps this would be worth doing, she thinks; maybe she should take it seriously. Then one evening at one of these parties she finds herself in a corner beside someone’s filing-cabinet next to a gaunt, dark-eyed young man who seems ill at ease, almost visibly skulking, as if he has no right to be there. She recognises him at once.

  ‘You’re David Johnson, aren’t you?’ she says, wanting to cheer him up with some attention, remembering how shy she had felt at parties when she was young. ‘I’m Elizabeth Cramer, I’m an editor at Bloomfield Press. I loved your book. It’s a great achievement, winning a prize like that with a first novel.’

  He smiles faintly and swallows his glass of red wine rather fast. ‘Those prizes are all very well,’ he says, ‘but they put so much pressure on you. People expect bloody miracles afterwards.’

  She says kindly, ‘Are you worrying about your second novel? I’d try to relax if I were you. Rest on your laurels for a bit. That’s what the money’s for, you know, to buy you time.’

  ‘If only it were,’ he says, seizing another glass of wine from a passing waiter. ‘I’m afraid most of it is going to my wife and kids. We’re getting divorced.’

  Elizabeth is still surprised at the speed with which men tell her their troubles. It has been happening all her life but she hasn’t got used to it. If she lets them, and she often does, out of a blend of sympathy, curiosity and inertia, they will talk about themselves for hours, then tell her she is a very interesting woman.

  ‘It’s ironic,’ David Johnson says. ‘She’s stuck by me all the difficult years, when we didn’t have any money. She’s a teacher and I used to work in a pub so we could make ends meet and I’d still have time to write. We’ve been together fifteen years.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ Elizabeth says, ‘you don’t look old enough.’ She doesn’t mean to be flirtatious or patronising; she is genuinely surprised. She knows in fact from his book jacket that he is thirty-five, but if she hadn’t known she would have guessed about twenty-eight. He has untidy dark floppy hair, heavy and straight, like an old-fashioned hippy, and a narrow, hollow-cheeked face; he is dressed all in black, with a turtle-necked sweater under his jacket, and he has bony protruding wrists, as if his sleeves are too short for his arms. Only his eyes are old, dark and intense, eyes that have seen a lot of trouble, she thinks. Then he smiles and he looks completely different, full of charm and ease. She finds herself noticing that he has a very beautiful mouth.

  ‘I imagine it’s always a shock when you break up with someone after so long,’ he says. ‘Don’t you feel that too
in your situation?’

  Elizabeth is startled. She thinks he is taking advantage of her kindness with a presumptuous intimacy and she feels her social smile freezing. ‘News certainly travels fast in this business,’ she says rather coldly. ‘And it’s only a trial separation.’

  ‘I hope I haven’t offended you,’ he says, looking concerned.

  Elizabeth says, ‘Not at all. Excuse me,’ and moves away. Her heart is suddenly racing and she is alarmed to realise how vulnerable she is. He hadn’t even mentioned Felix’s name.

  * * *

  A few days later flowers arrive at her office with a note from David Johnson: ‘Forgive me for being tactless. Please have dinner with me.’ The flowers are lilies, ornate and heavily scented, but so white and elegantly poised they remind her of swans. They are obviously very expensive too, a big romantic gesture. He has lashed out some of his prize money, the bit that hasn’t gone to his wife and children. What to do? Courtesy dictates a reply, but should it be thank you, yes, or thank you, no? She really isn’t sure what she wants. She has used up several weeks of her time apart from Felix and used it negatively in resisting his phone calls, which have now ceased. She feels a little bereft at having nothing to push against. She is beginning to miss him. She is beginning to wonder what he is doing with all his extra freedom and whether she was wise to give him so much of it. She feels that she and Felix are at war and involved in a dangerous game of counter-espionage. She feels exhausted from being so brave.

  She rings David Johnson on the number he has given her, aware that she could instead have written a polite note declining his invitation. Does this mean that she wants to say yes or merely keep her options open? She feels split in two, and one half is not in the confidence of the other. It’s alarming, when she has always been so steady and reliable. Is she perhaps becoming frivolous, so late in life?