A Gift of Poison

by Andrea Newman

He has a bath and finally gets into bed beside her. He hates to think of all her body has had to go through to reach this conclusion. He presses her shoulder in a tentative gesture of sympathy.

  ‘What a sad birthday for you. I’m sorry,’ he feels bound to say.

  There is a moment of silence. ‘No, you’re not,’ she says. ‘You’re glad. You got your wish.’

  * * *

  David cooks well. Elizabeth doesn’t think she’s ever had such a good lunch in anyone’s home before, without cooking it herself. It’s clearly a feast in her honour and makes her feel cherished. Cheese soufflé that dissolves in her mouth; roast duck with crisp skin and apple sauce to counteract the sweetness, crunchy mange tout and waxy new potatoes in their skins; tangy home-made orange sorbet. She is beginning to wonder how his wife could bear to let him go. A mild case of manic depression seems a small price to pay for such food.

  ‘Did you do the cooking at home?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh yes, all the time, Kate hates cooking. But not always as grandly as this, of course, this is specially for you. Still, my bangers and mash were pretty famous. I like cooking. I find it relaxing. I can think about work while I’m cooking.’

  A man who likes Verdi and D. H. Lawrence and also cooks and has a beautiful mouth and is seventeen years younger than I am, she thinks. I ought to be very grateful and not thinking about Felix at all.

  ‘I made all the curtains as well,’ he continues. ‘Kate hates sewing. Well, I couldn’t actually write all day, of course, I hardly ever do more than four hours, but four or five hours manual labour after that, gardening, decorating, whatever, was ideal. It’s the perfect way to iron out problems in the book without feeling you’re idle or stuck.’

  Perhaps that was what Felix was doing when he had affairs, Elizabeth thinks. Keeping busy. Sorting out the book.

  ‘Well, that was a magnificent lunch,’ she says.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Oh – yes please.’ She needs coffee; she feels rather drunk. She has brought a bottle of Sancerre and drunk most of it herself. David says he doesn’t drink much at lunch-time and she wonders if he means ever or if he is planning to make love to her and saving himself for the event.

  Over lunch she finally talked about Felix. Perhaps that was a declaration of trust, an admission that she is ready to make love. If she can talk about Felix, then sharing her imperfect body should be easy. Once she began talking she could hardly bear to stop. It was as if she had never talked about Felix before, as if all the hours with Helen and other women friends didn’t count. She realised she had never before discussed Felix with a man other than her doctor, when she was very depressed about not having children.

  She was surprised how well David listened. She hadn’t expected that, knowing how much he talks, but apparently he can do both. She didn’t want to maintain eye contact with him because the sympathy she saw was too much for her, so she looked all round the room, which is austerely furnished in black and white leather and tubular steel. She has admired the flat out of politeness but she isn’t sure she likes it: it seems more like a showroom than a home. He then told her that he had employed someone to come in and do it all for him to a budget. ‘I’m no good with things,’ he said. ‘People, books, music, yes, but things defeat me. If I were rich I’d live in a hotel.’

  When she finally stopped talking about Felix he said, ‘I don’t know how you managed to live like that all these years.’

  Immediately she felt the need to defend Felix. Talking about him had brought him vividly into her mind, almost into the room, and increased her sense of loss. ‘We were actually very happy a lot of the time. It’s just that—’

  ‘That he causes you terrible pain,’ he said. ‘It’s a dreadful story. It makes me ashamed to be a man, the way I feel when I read about rape. I hope you don’t think most men are like that. I’ve never been unfaithful to Kate in fifteen years.’

  And are you about to start with me? she wonders, with a feeling of panic. She’s not sure she can bear to be so significant; she had rather been hoping that he had had at least a couple of affairs in the past year so that she would just be one more. If she is using him to make Felix jealous she can hardly afford to be taken so seriously: it will make her feel guilty.

  Now they are sitting on the sofa and she feels very tense. She feels nervous and silly and out of place, playing a rather distasteful game. She longs to say, Oh, come on, why don’t we just get it over and done with, so we can relax, but she knows she can’t. He puts down his coffee cup and turns to look at her; he says very gently, ‘Well, Elizabeth, are we going to make love?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’ she says, thrown by the question. All sorts of even more flippant answers spring to mind and have to be suppressed.

  He takes her face in his hands and looks at her very seriously. ‘You realise I’m falling in love with you,’ he says.

  She can’t think how to respond to that; it’s so much more than she wanted to hear. But perhaps he doesn’t mean it; perhaps it’s just something he thinks it is nice to say. She plays safe and kisses him instead. She still likes the feel of his mouth. She puts her arms round him and she likes the feel of his body too. It is thin and boyish and eager. He feels very young in her arms and that is a shock. Did Felix feel like that about Sally? She has to wipe out that thought very fast.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ David says, as if everything is all right.

  They go into the bedroom, another severely furnished black and white room, only smaller. She doesn’t like to ask for an extra drink although she longs for one; she’s afraid it will sound like asking for anaesthetic and he’ll be offended. They have a long embrace and she feels his cock pressing against her rather impressively. She runs her hand over the bulge to show appreciation, feeling it would be ungrateful not to, but lacking the courage to unzip him, even when he puts his hand rather tentatively up her skirt. It is sixteen years since she has touched any man but Felix and she doesn’t know how to start. The entire procedure feels like a very awkward manoeuvre, as if she were suddenly required to play chess and has forgotten the moves. She is afraid of making a fool of herself. But as his hand moves higher her body reacts even while her mind freezes. She feels like a teenager again, standing fully dressed in a strange bedroom being touched up. She’s embarrassed to have this alien hand inside her most glamorous underwear, feeling how wet she is. She knows she could come eventually if he goes on moving his fingers and she lets herself relax and concentrate. But she doesn’t want to: she panics and tenses instead and in a moment he takes his hand away. She notices he is very sensitive to her reactions. She wants to run away but she also wants to go on and have it done and over.

  They help each other to undress, pausing to kiss. She feels dreadfully self-conscious, worried about how the sex will be and trying to hold in her stomach. He takes a condom from a drawer and slips it under the pillow. If he has been monogamous for fifteen years, does that mean he thinks she is a bad risk because of Felix’s reputation, or is it simply an ordinary routine precaution? She doesn’t ask; she is glad to be protected. It is like him to do the right thing; it goes with the flowers, the dinners, the concert, the opera, all part of his general correctness. And it will help her to feel that it doesn’t count. There will be nothing left behind to remind her of him, to prove he has been inside her. She will be able to pretend it didn’t really happen.

  Finally they are both naked. She was right about his cock, which is in fact rather similar to Felix’s only not circumcised, but more impressive because it is attached to such a skinny body. She wonders if she should compliment him on it or if that would seem crude or give an impression of confidence which she certainly doesn’t feel. She suddenly longs to go home and knows she can’t, like a child at a party it is not enjoying. The whole procedure is as inevitable as labour now, which she has often dreamed about in the days when she longed to be pregnant. They have gone too far to retreat and their bodies will have to get them through it somehow.

>   ‘You’re so beautiful,’ David says. ‘And these are so beautiful.’ He kissed her breasts. Really he is being as nice as possible; it’s a shame she can’t let herself respond. It feels like the most difficult thing she has ever had to do.

  They get into bed. She feels slightly better once she is under the duvet, warmer and less worried about her flabby stomach, more able to kiss and hug naturally. She wishes she hadn’t eaten so much of the delicious lunch though. She feels ever so slightly sick now, either from nerves or greed, and she thinks how terrible it will be if she actually has to throw up. The ultimate humiliation, the ultimate insult. She concentrates very hard on convincing herself this is not going to happen. Felix keeps entering her mind although she tries to keep him out. She thinks she wants him to rescue her.

  The nausea mercifully passes and with it some of her terror. She likes the smell of David and that is important. She strokes his floppy hair, the part of him which she finds easiest to touch. It is very dark and very shiny and she realises why she likes it so much: it reminds her of the sixties and of being young, before she met Felix, when she slept around, when sex was easy and fun and a way of rebelling against her parents, not potentially lethal.

  ‘Relax,’ David says. He kisses her all over, but when he reaches her clitoris she doesn’t want him to make her come that way although she loves it, because it seems to belong to Felix. When his tongue finds the right place she wriggles away, yet it feels like refusing a drink when she is dying of thirst. She wonders if he thinks she is being very difficult. She thinks that if she were David, she would have given up on her long ago. But he goes back to kissing other parts of her and she finally manages to stroke his cock, still waiting, still erect, standing patiently at attention until she gets around to it. She feels like a bad hostess who has neglected to ask a guest to sit down. She can’t quite bring herself to take it in her mouth; that too seems to belong to Felix. Besides, it might just tip the balance with her uneasy stomach. He will have to make do with her hands, though no doubt he will be disappointed. She feels she is short-changing him in every possible way.

  He makes all kinds of pleasured sounds then, as if she were doing something very clever, although she knows she isn’t: she is giving a very routine performance indeed. Presently she says, ‘Come inside.’ She just wants it to be over. It seems grotesque to go on without either lust or love. This is not a suitable activity for two friends.

  ‘D’you want me to?’

  ‘Yes.’ What is one more lie when the whole thing is a lie, a sham, a ghastly mistake? She is being punished for using him.

  He puts on the condom very efficiently, while she thinks what an ugly necessity it is. She wonders what Felix is doing now. Perhaps the same thing. She feels the start of tears at the thought.

  ‘I love you,’ David says, sliding into her very gently.

  It’s a shock, both the words and the sensation. She’s tensing herself against him and he’s a good fit, like Felix. She can remember lovers of her youth who were too small and how she felt nothing and had to pretend, because women were not supposed to care about size, all the books said so, and she didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. David goes on moving and she doesn’t know what to do; she senses she could come if she pays enough attention or even in spite of herself, at the sheer novelty of the situation. But she doesn’t want to try and be disappointed, and she also doesn’t want to try and succeed, as if she might then owe him something and threaten her whole existence by proving other men besides Felix can give her pleasure. Part of her wants to prove exactly that and part of her will do anything to avoid it. She feels she is watching her body perform from a long way off and it could be having a good time if only she could join in. She feels sad. They go on moving for a while as this tense battle goes on inside her, until she is so tired and confused she says, ‘Come, please come.’

  He says, ‘Come with me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, please, please.’ She is suddenly iliogically furious at all this consideration. And he comes very quickly after that, so that she realises how close he must have been and how careful to hold back, but he does it very discreetly with soft moaning sounds rather than the loud cries she is used to, which is a relief in a way and yet makes her feel she has been cheated and missed the event, that it has gone on secretly without her and there must be a lot more under the surface that he is not sharing with her because she has shared so little with him. That makes him seem more independent and she feels great affection for him immediately afterwards, holding him tightly and stroking his wonderful hair, so thankful it is all over and they can go back to being friends and it serves Felix right.

  He says sadly, ‘You wouldn’t let me give you pleasure.’ And she thinks that is a nice gentle way of putting it.

  She says automatically, ‘You did.’

  ‘Don’t pretend with me, Elizabeth.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘Maybe next time.’ He cuddles her for a while and she feels him shrinking out of her until he withdraws and disposes of the sodden remains that she doesn’t want to think about, it seems so far away from friendship and the Verdi Requiem.

  ‘You know,’ he says matter-of-factly, ‘we don’t have to do this at all if you really don’t want to. We could just hold hands and talk.’

  She’s amazed and embarrassed and relieved. ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘it’s lovely, what d’you mean?’ and he actually laughs.

  ‘You sound like a child,’ he says. ‘In a minute you’ll be saying “Thank you for having me.” I ought to send you home with a balloon. Maybe that was the balloon I just took off.’

  She laughs too. ‘Well, why not? Why shouldn’t I be polite and grateful?’

  ‘Because you’re beautiful and I’m lonely and I love you,’ he says. ‘These last few weeks have been the happiest I’ve had since Kate and I split up.’ He kisses her. She feels very relaxed with him now. Presently he says in a very calm voice, ‘It’s all right. I know you’re still in love with Felix. That lucky, worthless man.’

  * * *

  After that it all gets a lot easier. She feels a great sense of camaraderie with him, as if they have shared an ordeal, like pot-holing or mountain climbing, and survived. There is also a feeling of relief that they don’t have to do it again just yet. She is reminded of going on an outward-bound weekend to encourage one of her authors, who was doing some research. Way beyond the call of duty, Felix said, but she went anyway, shared a dormitory, learnt orienteering, built a raft, climbed a thirty-foot rock and abseiled down. Going up, she shook so much while she groped for toe- and finger-holds that she nearly gave up. Only pride made her continue. But the view and the sense of achievement were a bigger reward than she expected and the magic of it stayed with her. Coming down, she did it all wrong out of sheer terror and bounced against the rock face several times. But she still felt brave as well as stupid. When she got home she had the most amazing purple bruises, which Felix said must be the result of a sado-masochistic orgy in the dorm. He urged her to confess so that he could enjoy the details. She laughed, but she had never forgotten that she had done something so unlikely and survived. Separating from Felix and going to bed with David seems to belong to the same order of courage. For the moment she can rest on her laurels.

  They cuddle. He kisses her. She hugs him tight to make up for being so difficult about the sex. She wonders if he remembers what he said about love. She wonders if he meant it.

  He says, ‘I’m sorry I was rude about Felix. I just can’t bear to think of you being unhappy.’

  She smiles and doesn’t answer. It is a big subject and she doesn’t want to reopen it now.

  He says, ‘Let me give you a massage. I’m good at that and it might give you pleasure. Turn over.’

  She turns obediently and presently she feels his hands moving over her back and shoulders and neck, unravelling knots she didn’t know
she had.

  ‘Relax,’ he says again. ‘You’re very tense.’

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ she says. She feels cared for.

  ‘I did a course, a long time ago. Kate used to get all sorts of pains and aches from school and it was the only thing that helped. Shall I get some oil and do it properly?’

  ‘No, it will get all over my clothes. But thank you.’

  ‘You could have a bath afterwards.’

  ‘I’ll have to be going soon.’

  ‘Maybe next time,’ he says.

  * * *

  The next day red roses arrive with a typed extract from a poem:

  ‘The night was a failure

  but why not –? …

  I could not be free,

  not free myself from the past, those others –

  and our love was a confusion,

  there was a horror,

  you recoiled away from me …

  It is enough, you are near –’

  Underneath David has written in his small spiky handwriting: ‘I hope DHL will forgive me for slicing it up rather, but I think he could be speaking for both of us, even though it was afternoon. Better times ahead, I promise. With my love, David.’

  Elizabeth finds this both pretentious and touching. She takes out her copy of Lawrence to look up the poem but while she is searching for it she finds another one. The words seem to jump out at her:

  Good husbands make unhappy wives

  so do bad husbands, just as often;

  but the unhappiness of a wife with a good husband

  is much more devastating

  than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.

  It makes her pause. She wonders if what it says is true. It makes her speculate about David’s relationship with Kate. She starts re-reading David’s novel Dark Sunshine, about a man who like Othello murders his wife who unlike Desdemona really is unfaithful. The Lawrentian epigraph haunts her: ‘I can feel myself unfolding in the dark sunshine of death.’