Without Consent

by Frances Fyfield

  He rang again, and when, with suitable stateliness, she let him in, she remembered to be casual.

  ‘Sorry that took so long,’ she said, smiling. ‘I was out the back, come and see.’ He bowed from the waist, giving her a glimpse of the top of his smooth head. There was nothing better to get a man indoors and unwary than a kind of distracted friendliness. Nothing sinister about his examination of Rose’s evergreen window-boxes and a discussion of why, after a downpour, the flowering shrubs grew crooked. Good smells wafted from the kitchen. She chatted like a starling; she knew she was amusing. Hope these clothes are right, she thought. A pretty loose-weave top over an upholstered bosom, multi-coloured skirt almost to the ankles, neat leather pumps. Not particularly sexy in themselves; the pretty clothes of a plump, budget-conscious, working woman, better chosen than most and, only incidentally, easy to remove. He had brought flowers and chocolates. Such clichéd gifts annoyed her; wine would be better; they hardened her resolve, but there was one troubling feature. In some utterly bizarre way, she really was pleased to see him.

  ‘What a lovely room this is,’ he said when they took the second glass of the cold fizz into the living-room. ‘How clever you are.’

  It was as if he had never been here before. He moved from object to object, glass in hand, commenting on the watercolour seascape which had been such a delightful bargain, the bright-coloured porcelain of no known make which she had so artfully assembled on the shelves to make it appear striking and valuable, the pastel-patterned throws which made her chairs look inviting. ‘I haven’t the knack to do this,’ he was saying; ‘I can’t create comfort, I wish I could. I have a living unit rather than a home, and oh, what’s this?’ holding, gently, the favourite of her few, carefully chosen ornaments. A small clay bird, nestling by the vase of abundant miniature roses.

  He was turning back the clock; he was the soul of natural charm, behaving in exactly the right slightly shy, curious way; alert to her answers; concentrating his interest in everything which was hers; smiling appreciatively. It was exactly the way she would have wished him to act on his first visit. A courtier, humble but proud; the way a man should be if he was seriously interested in her. Oh praise, the wilful nature of it; she wilted and simpered beneath it. Her sofa was the perfect casting couch, the ironing-board was as absent as his memory of it, the burn marks on her arms as vague as they always would be, and her capacity for revenge was somehow dulled, and his mellowness was all too soon. And she was, because of the unusual amount of sipping which had gone on in the afternoon while she experimented with bruises, slightly drunk. More on hope and revenge and tension than wine, but still not entirely in control.

  She laughed with him; she poured more wine; she shook her head roguishly, making the thick shoulder-length hair which was her finest feature move in tune with her own animation. Pressing the bruise on her thigh to remind herself of her purpose, she wondered, in spite of everything, whether clocks could be turned back. She ached with a sense of what might have been.

  It was all going so much like clockwork, there was not even an audible tick. They ate by candlelight in the kitchen, the back door open and the smell of flowers competing with aubergine, oil, spices. He had the right kind of admiration for the food, too: not exaggerated; asking how she did this or that, eating well, talking about work in between. Why he did this and not something else, mutual commiseration about the state of medicine. She found herself longing to tell him how much she wanted a child, the hideous and direct contrast between herself and most of the patients at the clinic, but that one would wait. She had thought, in the planning stage, that this might be a sexual ploy he could not resist. Now it seemed ridiculous. The food, eaten sparingly in her case, sobered her a little.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, casually, as she moved dishes from the table and brought the perfect fruit and cheese, ‘why is it you take so much more notice of some patients than others? So much longer with them? And then look them up on the computer after they’ve gone?’

  His glance was suddenly intense, then he laughed.

  ‘Do I?’ he said. ‘Do I? If I do, I take more notice of the unhappy ones who need me.’

  She sat down again, her face flushed.

  He leant across the table and took her hand, turning it over. Even in the candlelight, the V-shaped mark of the burn from the iron was visible on the underside of her wrist.

  ‘How did you do that?’ he asked gently. Anna let her hand rest where it was.

  ‘You did it,’ she said. Because it was too late for pretence. ‘You did it.’ Her voice had become shrill. He shook his head, in disbelief.

  ‘Oh Anna, darling, I didn’t realize.’ Those fine brown eyes were full of sympathy.

  Bailey detested the shop manageress with an intensity he had no difficulty disguising. Even conceding that his present mood would make him dislike any human specimen of the female sex, he wondered, as he sometimes did, how he was able to dissemble so easily. Natural talent, he told himself without any smugness; perhaps one shared by this glamorous harridan. Or perhaps she really did enjoy his company; she showed every sign of it. A bar-stool percher of the old school, difficult to age unless one looked very closely to see the crow’s-feet round the ever-smiling eyes with their long lashes, or observed the lines on her forehead which were artfully concealed by the blond fringe. It was hair which resembled spun gold, looked careless and youthful in style, although he suspected it would feel like steel wool, solid with fixative. Bailey thought of the scar on Helen’s forehead and her understated, sometimes untidy, elegance. Of course, she had always been too good for him.

  The manageress had already established he was a bachelor. He had parted with several bogus particulars of his own life in order to advance the conversation and he suspected that what she had told him in return (a dreadful divorce, life so hard for a woman on her own) might have been equally contrived. They approached the subject of Shelley Pelmore obliquely, by the route of mutual flattery and three drinks each, Bailey pretending throughout that his interest in Shelley was strictly professional, while his interest in the manageress was anything but. There were times when he despised himself more than others.

  ‘Such a divine-looking girl,’ she gushed. ‘I mean, really lovely. A credit to us, but wasted in a shop, really. Should have spread her wings a bit. But I suppose, in the end, it’s best to knuckle down if life’s given you a nice man, isn’t it? So rare to find. That’s what I told her, anyway.’

  ‘But you went out together?’

  ‘Oh yes, lovely fun. Just a bit of clubbing, you know.’

  ‘He was tolerant then, her boyfriend?’

  ‘And why not? She never did anything. Far as I know. Mind, there were a couple of blokes came in the shop, liked her. A lot. Oh yes.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  Music came from the far end of the bar where the place merged into a club. She looked towards Bailey, who hated dancing and was grateful Helen had no time for it either, and had an unbidden thought that dancing with this woman would be like dancing with an easel: all sharp angles and a picture of a face in a frame.

  ‘An Arab who was rather persistent. She made him buy so much, clever girl! Actually, a couple of those – both fat. Shelley would never go for a fat man. Oh, and then there was this beautiful chap; bald as a coot, but ever so attractive. I’ve got a feeling she used to see him outside, but I never was sure.’

  ‘What did he do? I mean, for a living?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not my business to ask what anyone does … not the men, anyway. They aren’t usually buying lingerie for their wives, you know. But come to think of it, it said Doctor something on his credit-card slip.’ She gave the distinct impression that the title of doctor gave a man a touch more kudos than that of police officer. Bailey could not blame her for that; most people thought the same. Most people were unwilling to talk to police officers; they would talk their heads off to a doctor. Suddenly he felt extremely uneasy and, for the first time, smiling into th
e woman’s eyes, he also felt the first stirring of pity for Shelley Pelmore.

  The mixture of one pint and three indescribable cocktails, as well as the frozen glance of the manageress after she had conceded that, yes, it was possible to reclaim a credit-card slip and of course she would do it tomorrow, only to find that whatever she promised, he was leaving her to her lonely perch, all combined to make him feel queasy.

  The darkness was not complete; the rain began again and he was hungry and lonely. He drove, illegally he suspected, from the West End to Helen’s street and parked outside. What price pride, boy? What does it matter if she has a drink or two on the eve of her wedding and decides, in the company of some old friend, that the best thing to do is regard it as a joke? Maybe it was his fault for taking Ryan more seriously than anything else this last week or three, behaving like a bear with a sore head. No wonder she needed a little last-minute frivolity. She wasn’t the only one, he thought with a flash of irritation; what made her think he was so confident about it?

  Bailey knew as he approached the door that there was someone inside. Empty flats echo with their own vacancy; this one did not. The front windows, visible from the street, were severely curtained, showing not a chink of light; that in itself was unnatural. The phone, when he had tried en route, was permanently engaged, for which he read, off the hook, and now repeated ringing at the doorbell brought no response.

  All right, so he had his own key, but they had their own set of rules and, godammit, he wasn’t going to beat the door down to see her if she so clearly did not want to see him. If she wanted to hide, let her. He was hurt to the quick. Silly bitch; a phrase without meaning, but echoing in his head all the same as he got back in his car to drive home. Halfway there, he stopped, bowed his head against the wheel, weary beyond belief, and this time more than slightly nauseous. He felt overwhelmed by the kind of grief which had first afflicted him when he had been woken with the news about Ryan; a sense of panic about how empty life was going to be. Then, aware of the prospect of a passing patrol car, although he was confident by now, on completely unscientific grounds, that his own emotion had digested the booze at double speed, he continued. Speeding up dangerously on the final stretch as a last coherent thought occurred to him.

  Maybe Ryan was waiting at home.

  ‘Let me go,’ she was roaring, beating at his face with her fists, scratching, pulling away, tugging towards the door, going on and on long after the car engine died away and she knew he had gone. Ryan held her back with almost contemptuous ease, even though she stamped and yelled like a fractious child. Restraint of hysterical human beings, children included, was second nature to him; he knew how to subdue, exactly how to spread his fingers across her face so that she could not bite, then let her punch and kick and tug until she was exhausted. A brief slap brought all resistance to an end; the sound of it in her kitchen, unnaturally loud above the humming of the old fridge, like the announcement of the finale.

  ‘Silly,’ he said, half apologetic, half impatient as he pushed her back into the same chair. ‘Shh, be good, now. It didn’t really hurt, you know it didn’t.’

  No more than the cut on her finger had hurt. There was only the humiliation. The sting on her face was less painful than the utter futility of resisting at all; the reminder of the ultimately debilitating truth that in a straight fight with a man, a woman is no match and that is the cause of a primeval fear and anger. Helen did not want to kill Ryan; she would dream at other times of watching him being slowly and relentlessly overpowered until he begged for mercy for this simple illustration of his own power and what he had made her do: lie to Bailey, deny him access, make him believe her a treacherous fool. A silly bitch. At the back of her mind was the real terror of what he would think of her and the awful realization that she cared for Bailey’s good opinion more than that of anyone in the world. And then another realization filtered through her shameful agitation. It was that although she wished Ryan every kind of pain as she looked at him, speechless with fury, she was no longer afraid of him, and it followed, somewhere along the line, that she believed what he had told her.

  He poured the last of the wine as if he was a solicitous host, continuing an interesting conversation merely interrupted by a telephone call.

  ‘Bailey would dismiss all this as a load of nonsense,’ he said conversationally. ‘Turn me in for my own good. He doesn’t mind speculation, as long as it’s his own speculation. No point telling Bailey anything without evidence.’

  She spread her hands on the table, willing them to stop shaking. Blood seeped through the paper towel, and she wondered vaguely what Ryan would do when he needed to go to the lavatory.

  ‘The only thing I don’t see,’ he continued, ‘is where my fantasizing ladies meet their bald-headed man. Except for Shelley and her friend, there’s no common denominator, not the same backgrounds, clubs, dentists …’

  ‘A clinic,’ said Helen. ‘A women’s clinic.’

  ‘A clinic?’ he repeated stupidly.

  ‘A place where women go,’ she said, ‘and tell a doctor all about their lives. The way we do.’

  Tell me about your life, Doctor. Tell me what has made you such a gentle persuasive monster, so sure I would never complain, and would, after a time, want you back; want you until I ached in my bones. Something in the way you joked and made life deathly serious, but less than serious. Something about the hands, the eyes, who knows? Tell me I am drunk and my mind is not engaged in this, although this is what I wanted, isn’t it? Revenge? I wanted to tempt this man into my body and then cry rape, because, even if I were not ultimately believed, I should have made him feel as powerless as he made me. Humiliated by my body’s desire.

  I must let him do this the way he wants.

  He called me darling. He said, my darling, I am sorrier than I can say to have treated you so despicably, you of all people, the one I liked best, respected most, but I had to push you away as brutally as I could. You do see that, don’t you? No, I don’t, I don’t… Listen to me, my love, he said; you are the only one who forgives. Let me make love to you. Please. Beautiful.

  I am not beautiful, but I am here, obedient and waiting, nerves stretched like wire. Lying, at his invitation, on my own bed; he has resisted the casting couch. I must, repeat must, let him do this in his own way. I must pretend. I must be his slave in order to find out why, or how. Not criticize him for his failure to remove all his clothes; he has a broad chest, hairless, which is odd for a man of such dark skin, or is it, how would I know? How many men have I ever known? Only a few. Pretend enjoyment; he has promised that this, and his explanations afterwards, will make amends. Why does he wear those awful synthetic-fibre trousers? And he a man of such taste. Unbuttoned at the waist, though: when I reached to touch his nipples, he shivered. Pretend? I am not pretending.

  Kiss, kiss, kiss. Tongue going down my throat, neither too wet nor too dry, tasting of the wine. Stay still, he commands; let me do this, let me admire you, please. Whichever way he wants, let him; I could not stop him if I wished and I do not wish. Breasts fondled like rosebuds, one held while he feels how wet I am, his knuckle kneading … I feel as embarrassed as if I were producing sap … I want him, want him; he must smell desire by now. Sweet words, too: darling, darling, gorgeous darling, a word which can be such a mockery and is not, here and now. I touch his head and close my eyes against my own nakedness. Let him do it his way, that was always the plan, but I want him inside me, I do, I do, I do. Licking me like a cat with a rough tongue; I once heard a tale of a woman who made her dog do that, with a bigger, rougher tongue; it got to like the taste. Mutual release is what I want, but he told me to close my eyes and keep them closed and I do what he says. There is no light in here. The room is at the front with the curtains drawn and a bit of the street light coming through. I’ve always been ashamed of those curtains: cheap and nasty, and Christ – why call upon him at a time like this – Christ, I can’t stop … go on, go on, go on. He’s as cold as ice. Cold, cold
, cold. Enormous.

  I can’t keep my eyes closed and open them to find myself in the arms of a man who kisses and caresses while I convulse around the neck of an empty cheap champagne bottle.

  I wonder if he rinsed it first.

  When he removes it, there is the loud and hollow sound of a cork being drawn. Wroop. Louder than the normal sound; a vintage cork, pulled with an echo and a sensation in me like a plaster pulled from a raw and weeping wound.

  Breathe deep, you silly bitch. You asked for this; he knew all along and you, you … consented. Now he takes off his trousers like a man settling down for sleep, having done his duty, ready to confide, and I have never felt such hatred in my life.

  I reach out to grab what is exposed. A firm fist with the greatest possible intention to cause maximum injury.

  In my imagination, it could all come away in my hand. I handle an ugly, flaccid, unarousable piece of rubbery flesh which never ever responded to me. A brief fight for repossession, with one of my eyes drawn to the green bottle he has carefully placed on the window-ledge; him trying to speak, me trying to scream. Unable, but I frightened him. I could see the fear as I lie paralysed and he tries to slink away.