“Yes, yes. I’m fine. Sorry. What did you say?”
“I was saying that we could go into town instead? Or drive out to Ambleside, to one of the hotels. Daffodil, perhaps?”
“Isn’t it a little far away in this weather?”
“Oh, it’s not far, besides, the lounge area there is very nice.” It came as a surprise to me that she would consider it, my need not to be near the lake. I know she thought about the Daffodil hotel because it has a lounge that fails to benefit from any view of the lake. Perhaps it was some sort of self preservation method, that if she had to go out with me, the least she would do was to ensure she had done all she could in advance to make sure it went well. And without incident.
“I think the lake is quite beautiful today. I can barely see it.” I laugh and she seems a little uncomfortable but offers a pathetic effort of a smile. “I’ll see you at Lakeside at four.”
With the exception of Gregory and Dr. Abrams people are very anxious around me now. They are over friendly, eager to please, as if my mental stability all depends on their latest meeting with me and should it fail now the burden of blame will fall at their feet. They are desperate to appear happy, bright, accommodating. Only last week Dana Sedgwick cancelled an appointment with her hairdresser so that she was able to fulfil my invitation to help me arrange the winter roses that I had asked Ishiko to cut. At first she said she couldn’t make it, but quickly realised who she was talking to and within ten minutes she was in the house, flustered and out of breath from the dash up the private road as if my life, or perhaps hers had depended on it. Admittedly, I may have sounded a little anxious on the telephone but it is true that flowers start dying from the moment they are cut and she is the chair of the horticultural society and of all people I would expect her to realise the urgency even though she was going to ignore such a responsibility and go to the hairdressers anyway like what I had asked of her was some sort of casual afternoon activity. I had already washed the stems and cleaned the leaves in anticipation and if she hadn’t attended it would have been a waste and surely have resulted in a complete devastation of the roses and I honestly don't know how she would have been able to forgive herself but I know I would have been OK. Marianne must be wondering what she has done to deserve a coffee break with me at the side of the lake. She’ll learn.
Coming back inside, it was a complete accident that I brought leaves in on my shoes, and most convenient. I called to Ishiko and she came through with a brush and dustpan to clean up. I moved into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Inside, I found the soup that had been planned for our lunch, Winter Vegetable, and with a gloved hand and a cup I ladled a portion out. I waited for Ishiko to return to the kitchen, and as she did I passed her with the cup hidden in my coat and headed upstairs. It was ten minutes until two o’clock. Gregory would be home in less than that, according to Ishiko. I crept into the bedroom, listening for the sound of tyres over gravel. I poured some of the soup into the toilet in our bathroom and some into the sink. I threw the soup like an artist might throw paint at a canvas, splattering it against the ceramic white bowls. I washed the cup in the shower, and tucked it behind the lamp on my bedside table. I removed my soaked leather gloves and threw them in the bin.
“Ishiko!” I screamed. Loud and shrill like the scream of a victim. A call for help. It sounded desperate, and she came running. I heard her feet gaining up the stairs.
“Mrs. Astor?” she said as she knocked and opened the door simultaneously. I was sat on the edge of my bed, a tissue held up to my mouth, a finger wiping away a false tear.
“Ishiko, I am sorry but I have been unwell.” I pointed to the bathroom and she peered inside, seeing the soup stained sink.
“I will clean it up,” she said, but I was already on the way out of the bedroom. I moved as quick as a rat, downstairs and straight into the kitchen. The lamb chops were cooking and smelt delicious. There was a small bowl of mint sauce prepared at the side. It smelt like Sunday, and family, and I almost felt sorry for what I was about to do. I turned up the flame to full. It didn’t take long before the edges started to burn and the first signs of smoke appeared. I closed the doors behind me and took a seat in the television lounge next to the conservatory.
It was Gregory that I heard first. I closed my eyes and rested my head down onto a pillow. I allowed my facial muscles to slacken, my cheeks sinking inwards, mouth turning down. Asleep.
“Ishiko!” I heard him scream. It was a scream mashed together by rage and concern, the kind you might utter when you drown under a wave of utter disappointment. “Ishiko!” I sucked in a few deep breaths to ensure that I could not smell the burning meat, the smouldering of herb and fat. I heard feet on the stairs, a pitter-patter of urgency and then the muffled anger of a voice under restraint as he asked for her version of the truth.
At this point I cannot hear what is being said. I can only hear Gregory and his voice is controlled and hushed, trying not to billow over into the anger that his first cries of Ishiko promised. With no other sound around me I think only of her name leaving his lips. Ishiko. Ishiko. I wonder how many times he has said her name aloud, screamed it at her when I have been out of the house, whispered it into her ear in the middle of the night. I remember the first time he said my name. I heard him say Charlotte, his eloquent voice making me sound like something. Like anything. Charrrrrllllotte, he said as if testing it out for the fit. After that, even a simple task such as passing the newspaper brought with it a formal address and the use of my name. Pass the newspaper, Charlotte. I am going to kiss you now, Charlotte. I love you, Charlotte. How could you, Charlotte. I’m sorry, Charlotte. Forgive me, Charlotte. Breathe Charlotte, for God’s sake Charlotte, breathe!
I hear the door open and then I feel the concern as he gives me a shake. I imagine his eyes popping open in desperation and I have to put all my effort into not cracking a smile.
“Wake up, Charlotte. Are you alright?” I pretend to rouse from a deep afternoon nap, and I pull up my eyebrows in theatrical fashion as if I am trying to pull open my obstinate eyelids. I take a deep breath pretending to yawn and then wince, my mouth screwed up tightly as I take in the smell of my own creation.
“Whatever is that smell?” I ask.
“Burnt lamb chops. Why was she upstairs when she was cooking lamb chops, I'll never know.” It wasn’t really a question for me to answer, just flippant exasperation as his arms flung up in the air before freefalling for his palms to slap against his thigh. “I have opened the windows to let it air. What will we have for lunch now?” Not even this question was for me. Gregory often does this, asks questions with no particular audience. Half of his life is rhetorical. It is his way of demonstrating that the world doesn’t understand him, that he was forced into the unwelcome situation of asking questions of nobody because there was nobody capable of answering. I think it makes him feel superior.
“There is soup. I will ask her to prepare it. Here,” I say, standing up, “take this off and warm up. It is freezing out today.” I helped him out of his coat and ran the palm of my left hand down his left cheek. He stared at me for a moment, complete surprise at what he had arrived home to find. He looked around the room, placing objects and cross referencing them with his memory, asking himself if he had arrived in the right house. He looked back towards the front door, to see if everything was as he expected. It was. It was only me that was out of place. As I step out of the room I look back to him and he is watching me. I smile, my eyes meeting his. He doesn’t manage a smile, but his face twitches a little, the corner of his mouth turning upwards, and I feel at least it is a start.
I can feel Ishiko’s brown eyes upon me as I walk into the kitchen and close the door behind me with Gregory’s coat in my hand. We are both well aware that this little fiasco is my creation and it brings me great joy to feel her eyes boring into my back as I walk through to hang up his coat. I return to the kitchen to find her stood over the bin, depositing the now cooled and crusted lamb chops. It is free
zing in here because the window is wide open and it smells like the inside of a barbeque pit. As she tips the meat away she is watches me with complete audacity, her eyes running all over me like a colony of ants.
“Make the soup, Ishiko,” I say quietly, my eyes fixed on hers. I walk over to her to say, “And remember this lesson.” That’s all I say before returning to the conservatory.
Chapter nine
“Gregory, I believe it could have been my fault.” I say this and try at the same time to look as innocent as I can, so I dip my head and widen my eyes like a doll.
“What could have been your fault?” He looks up as he steadies another spoonful of soup towards his mouth. He is holding his soup spoon with the same elegance that a fairy might carry a flower, just as he was taught so many years ago in this very same room, betraying the capabilities of his man-sized hand. The soup dribbles away from his thick lips, spilling back into the bowl and displacing a few drops on his shirt. For the second time today he picks up his napkin from his lap and dabs at the distracting spillages, leaving me no option but to consider what a pathetic bastard I married.
“The lamb chops,” I say once his attention has returned. There is a small carrot-orange mark on his white shirt, like the crest of a sunrise, the rays of which have been smeared across his shirt in the style of Monet.
“What?” he says looking up, his napkin now back across his knees.
“The lamb chops. The fact they were burnt.” I see him begin to panic, wondering if this is a misfortunate show of paranoia, which we both know would not be a good sign. “I was sick. I asked Ishiko to clean up after me. I had no idea that she was cooking. I really do feel bad for her.” I could almost feel the judgment of Ishiko, her cries of innocence from within the creases of my pocket. I reached into my pocket and scrunched her up, strangulating her efforts to halt my progress.
He reaches a hand over to my side of the table. It wasn’t expected. He places it on top of my hand and says, “It’s not your fault.” Words I love to hear. I smile and eat a mouthful of soup.
“I’m going out for coffee with Marianne this afternoon.”
“Oh?” He seems surprised and I can understand why. The clatter of plates echoes from the kitchen, and it distracts us both. Ishiko seems in a bad mood for which I feel both entirely responsible and satisfied in a way that I have not felt in a long time. Sometimes, the most vindictive of actions elicit an entirely positive response within oneself. This merciless route to self preservation is often an art lost to polite society, a misplaced belief that it is wrong. But I see that within the act of retaliation comes a sharp lesson, not for me, but for the perpetrator whose actions have lead to harm. Ishiko has learnt something valuable today. She will remember this lesson with much greater clarity than a thousand thanks.
“Yes, we will go somewhere in the town, sit in the warm and have a little chit chat. Perhaps she will know a charity for me to get involved with.” Marianne would in fact be the only person I would not ask such a question. Marianne has both a job and a life outside of Wexley and therefore has no time for charity work. He knew this too and smiled at my adorable naivety.
“Well, have a wonderful afternoon.”
“What are you planning to do?” I need to know where he will be, what he is planning, and what time he intends to meet with his little handmaid.
“I will stay here for a little while, and then I will go back to the hotel. When are you leaving?”
“I’m not sure. What time are you planning to leave?” He fidgets in his cushioned chair before resting his spoon in the bowl in the three o'clock position. He wipes his mouth, and squares up his knife alongside the central axis of his side plate. Before he can answer Ishiko arrives and he beckons her forth to clear the plates. She can’t look at me but I stare at her with a smile on my face that might look creepy but which I think I get away with. I realise now that I have eaten almost nothing. I take a piece of bread and tear at it and he seems startled by the crumbs falling onto the table and I can see his skin contracting across his body, but due to my good mood and apparent sanity he lets the atrocity pass. “I will leave when you leave, I think. That way we can spend some time together.” He nodded and stood up. Lunch was over. I could see the hassle I had created, the disruption to his plans. I wondered what he expected of me. Did he think I would make it easy for him? Did he really think that I could just roll over and play dead, and let the hunt carry on around me? Is this what I am trying to hang on to? I am degrading myself for this. For him.
This is who he is though. This is how he was raised. Privileged and entitled. After the accident, in the months when he still loved me, I asked him why I never returned to my old home. He told me that I stayed because we fell madly in love, that I told him that I couldn’t face leaving, that to sleep without him at my side had become an impossible task. I doubt this to be true, but I accept that it is possible I said these things. I have always been, and remain hungry for the love and care of another. He also chose to remind me that his parents were mortified by my continued presence. He told me about one of their last visits to the house. They brought a photograph of a lovely young blond woman. It was a head and shoulders shot but she was tall and slim, you could tell from the neck. A swan’s neck, long and elegant was how she described it. Beatrice, whose Rolex I am wearing, showed me the girl in the photograph. Wouldn’t she be perfect for Gregory, she begged of me. I had been living in the house for three months at the time. He had proposed the week before. Beatrice had cried, his father remained silent. He insists that he threw them out after this but I doubt it very much.
Beatrice cried at the wedding too, and Mallory held her up compassionately, steadying her when her feet gave way at the horror of what she saw. He patted her head and stroked her hair whilst she took some deep breaths as if she was giving birth. It was a hot day, some said. It was the humidity, said another. One even suggested the food. None of these things were true. It was me. I could feel her eyes upon me like I can Ishiko’s. She died a week later, and some blamed the shock. I do recall that I took a great deal of pleasure in arranging her funeral. I created the most delightful day, an appropriate mix of wealth and mourning. The casket was oil black, adorned with gold handles and so heavily set that it needed six pallbearers. I chose it to weight her down, so that her hateful spirit could never grapple its way back to the surface. I chose the music of the only classical composer not in her collection, Mozart, who she disliked and claimed to be overrated. I chose his requiem Lacrimosa. Its haunting and gothic choral verse rang out through the church, and the crowd loved it. A perfect end of. They all congratulated me on the arrangements and I thought of how disappointing she would find it that in her death I would find praise. I did not try to cry, and neither did Gregory or his father. They would not miss her, and the rich do not worry what others will think. Lacrimosa wept for us, and did our mourning. It wept for everybody. We threw in the soil and that was that. Mallory died only a month later. Stroke. We performed as expected, just as we had when she died, and privately celebrated our freedom, Gregory by renovating the hotel, me by introducing the pink roses in the conservatory. They were the least painful deaths I have ever known and I remember them as clearly as I remember the sight of Ishiko entering her bedroom last night and whispering goodnight. Dr. Abrams told me that he believes the human brain remembers everything, but that we do not have the capacity to recall it. But to have forgotten so much of the life which has delivered me to this point in time would suggest an utter lack of symbiosis between myself and my mind. I believe we remember the important things, and I know why I have not forgotten these deaths. I thank his parents for their impact on my life. For it was these deaths that taught me that a passing to the other side, a place where I have teetered for so long, does not always have to cause pain. Sometimes it can be celebrated, a relief, a cherished beginning for which many have longed. Sometimes it can lead to freedom. Sometimes it is exactly what you need.
His car is last on the dri
veway, so he reverses out and drives away first. There is a small coating of frost on the windows and I am sure the light is already fading. I turn up the heaters in my car and the frost melts. I follow, and flash my lights as he pulls away at the end of the private drive. I watch as his charcoal Mercedes E Class slips away, snaking into the streets towards town, waiting for the first admiring eyes to fall upon it and follow its path. I pull out behind him and drive in the same direction. It’s 3:30 PM. I have time.
I pull the car out onto the road and drive behind him far enough away so that I can see him, but so that he will not notice me. I must stay hidden like a lioness in the hunt if I want to catch my prey. I watch his car travel past the lake, and for once I barely notice it at my side, the great mass of emptiness, water filling it so we do not see the ugly depth of secrets at the bottom. If I could drain it I might be able to find what I am looking for. Perhaps everything would be easier if I could just complete this impossible task.
I watch as he pulls up outside of the hotel, parked on the road, hazard lights blinking. I drive past, unable to stop without being seen. I watch as he walks in, coat flapping in the breeze behind him, his cheeks pink from the sudden slap of the cold against them, like the red buttocks of a scorned little boy. He dips into the hotel and I glide past, before taking a series of left turns, completing an almost perfect circle, which ejects me right behind the hotel. I cannot see his car from here, but it is pointing in my direction. I lie in wait, the nose of my car just in view, but unexpected enough that even if he passes me he isn't likely to see me. If he does, I doubt it would even matter. Something unexpected is what he has come to expect from me. There have been many words used at different times to describe my behaviour. Unusual, strange, odd, unpredictable. Sometimes people called me difficult, or weird. But the polite word was quirky. It implies that one’s differences have been embraced, that the quirks to which they refer have been accepted. Gregory does not describe me as quirky. He reserves it for eccentric types, artists, street performers, the ramblers who set forth from Glenridding towards the unforgiving ridges of the Helvellyn mountain beyond. He uses it for those who do it on purpose, who play a role, a character, or who dress for an occasion. He uses it for himself. His favourite word to describe me was unwell. I heard it until I began to believe it may in fact be my name. You are Unwell, he used to say to me. He doesn’t say it anymore, but I know it sits on the tip of his tongue. I haven’t heard it for a few months. For a while he started to use the word recovering. You are Recovering. He hasn’t said this for a while either, but only because generally, he doesn’t really speak to me at all anymore.
PSYCHOPHILIA: A Disturbing Psychological Thriller Page 8