Stephen finishes his tea and I sit lifelessly whilst I allow Gregory to bandage my fingers in an over elaborate display of affection. He has Stephen hold the pin after sending Ishiko away. I can feel Stephen staring at me. I look up at him, his face above me, his jaw square and dark hair falling foppishly over his right eye as he looks down pretending to watch the dressing of the wound. He watches as if he is waiting for me. Waiting for anything. Anything besides apathy.
“That’s it,” says Gregory, holding up my hand for an inspection of his bandaging technique. “Much better. What shall I do with you?” he jokes as he pinches the tip of my nose. I force out an appreciative smile and take a look at my over elaborate wound dressing that is more suitable, I think, for an amputee. “Don’t I look after you properly?”
“If you don’t, you should, Gregory. She is a lucky find,” Stephen says, still, I think, looking at me before his gaze shifts to Gregory.
“Oh I will, especially now.”
“Oh,” Stephen says, more out of politeness than anything.
“Now that she is pregnant.” As my chin drops and I stare up at Gregory’s smug face it was as if I had just found out the news myself. As if I am nothing but a vessel with no clue about my fate until now.
“Pregnant?” Stephen looks back at me. I sit in stunned silence. Of all the times he chooses to announce it, it is now. I have waited for this moment, the chance to become the woman who is with child. The woman who is something other than crazy. I have encouraged and hoped that Gregory might accept our impending parenthood, and yet now as he does so it hits me like a brick in the face. Square, sudden, and painful. I would have liked some warning, some preparation. I would have liked it not to be on the back of a conversation that made me feel like I was still covering up the crazy that lurks beneath my swelling surface. Dr. Abrams told me to avoid surprises. How can I when I live with them? The scored lines that adorn my body pulsate as if they themselves are breathing life into me as living entities. They are screaming crazy, crazy, crazy, and I feel my hands wrapping themselves against my stomach to quieten them. My head is throbbing and I want to release the blood flow from it, fearful of another seizure.
"Yes, that's right," says Gregory.
“You never mentioned it,” says Stephen looking at me, but Gregory is already guiding him out and there is no requirement on my part to answer and for this is am grateful. I can hear Gregory opening the front door, walking Stephen through it. He mutters a goodbye and I too say the same but it gets lost within the first seconds after leaving my lips and I know it will never find its way to Stephen. I get up and walk through the hallway, joining Gregory just as Stephen is closing his car door. They are both looking at me, but I pay them no attention. My mind is already on the car parked outside the Wexley’s house. It is Marianne’s, and she is sat in it.
Chapter twenty two
Gregory has closed the door on the winter temperature and has no interest in the activities of our neighbours, as indifferent to their actions as the frost to the surface which it covers. I’m not even sure that he registered Marianne’s presence. He turns to me and pulls me in a bit closer, shaking off the chill of the cold like a wet dog might shake himself dry. He is all smiles, but I cannot think straight because there is a swirling mass of unanswered questions that fill my mind like the scattered fragments of an immature solar system, colliding without purpose.
“Well, it is official now,” he says, his sickly grin instigating a wave of deep nausea from my stomach. It is as if he believes in this moment of honesty that only now something has changed in our lives, now that he has decided to speak about it. Forget the conception, the morning sickness which had passed, or the growth of my stomach which he knows nothing about or has any interest in documenting. Yeah, he told my ex boss. Now it’s real. Big fucking deal. “Listen," he says as he pulls my hips towards him. "Today I have a treat for you. No more secrets, no more lies. Just us and the future, and this little thing growing inside of you.” His words were much sweeter than they might sound here. When he said this little thing, it was with a twinkle in his eye that no amount of lies could muster. It was as if he finally caught up and now sees the beauty in what we have created. “Get your coat on.”
“Can’t we just have a nice day together at home?” I say as I finger the hairs at the side of his temple next to the pulsating vein with my un-bandaged left hand. I am trying to feel something for him so that my words sound genuine and unscripted.
“But I had made plans.” His head drops to his chest and his words sound babyish. “I thought that we could go to the hotel, have a nice lunch, maybe,” he pauses, rocks his body left and right, “go up to one of the rooms.” He might as well nudge me, flash me a wink. “I want to scatter rose petals on the bed.” So he got Ishiko to cut the roses for him to scatter on the same bed where he wants to do things to me. No wonder she looked angry. She must have known what she was cutting them for. Maybe the last time she was the one lying on the rose petals. But this time it is me. He plans to create a scene of romance, a post-orgasmic daze, so that I don't think about dying or get caught up on his mistakes. He thinks he can fumble his way around my body in a way that will make everything better and that I won’t need anything else. That on this day he will stick his fingers inside me in a way that I have never yet been able to describe as pleasurable, and that it will make up for the fact that only last week he was doing the same to Ishiko. Instead of feeling treated, I feel like I have become the one he has to get out of the house, like my presence here makes life harder for him. He wants to take me to a restaurant, a hotel, a rented bed. Like a couple on a dirty weekend who leave behind an unsuspecting wife. I bet there was a time he took Ishiko to the hotel and did the same things to her as he now wants to do to me, but now instead it’s her that he argues with in the kitchen before he leaves for work. Now she is the one putting up, gritting her teeth, waiting for answers. Beware the truth, that’s what she told me.
His incredulous suggestions push me to the window and my breath starts fogging up the glass. Gregory joins me, perturbed that his idea for a romantic escape up the road didn’t render me weak and speechless like a 1940’s movie heroine.
“You know, we really shouldn’t be watching this,” he says as we both glare out of the window in the direction of Marianne’s car. Gregory chooses to walk away, puts on some music, and I hear the light strumming of violins that signify the beginning of a concerto. He sits down on the settee where we sat yesterday and picks up the newspaper, pretends to read it. It was from last Sunday. I see Dana walking up the road, huffing and puffing her way up the pavement in Everest sized strides. When she sees Marianne’s car she stops for a few seconds. She crouches down on her good knee the best it would permit her and leans into the car to speak to Marianne. She doesn’t hang around though, and within minutes she is knocking on the Wexley’s door. I lean in closer and Gregory can sense something has changed. “What? What happened?” I hear him say, walking over to me through a crackle of ruffled broadsheet. I knew he wasn’t really reading the newspaper.
Gregory joins me at the window in time to see John Wexley stepping out of the house, Mary just behind him. Dana soon joins Mary at her side and offers a supportive arm. Mary latches on to the offer and holds her like a walking frame. Wexley taps the driver’s window and speaks to Marianne. Eventually Marianne gets out, takes his hand in hers, perhaps gives him a gentle pull, but I could have made that up to suit my own desires. He extends his other hand in Mary’s direction, who is holding her head in her hands, shaking uncontrollably, unable to look at what was unravelling before her. He looks like a referee about to start a boxing match, or split one up because of unfair play. I guess all isn’t fair in love and war, after all. I look at Gregory who is shaking his head like he can’t quite believe it.
Voices were raised and tears were shed. Mary’s, and then Marianne’s, but the words remained inaudible. Whatever was said, the finale was Marianne driving away, Dana helping Mary back in
the house, and Wexley following them like a sad child who had been scolded by his parents, his head hanging low, his shoulders hunched and with one hand on his forehead like it was just all too much to bear.
“Oh dear,” Gregory said. “I wonder what happened?”
“Honestly, are you surprised?” It was much more rhetorical than he had hoped for. I didn’t give him any time to answer. “This is what happens, you know. This is what happens when you mess around and shit on your own doorstep.” He is standing there with his first taste of consequence thick on his tongue. Both Wexley and Gregory have now seen what hurt and betrayal leads to. I left him there next to the table that still had my birthday presents on and which we both seem to have forgotten about. I went to get my coat so that he could take me out and so that I could get his planned day of treats over and done with.
Chapter twenty three
By the time we reach the hotel I find myself feeling angry rather than satisfied and it played on my mind throughout the dinner, the one which Gregory had ordered in advance on our behalf and that I had not chosen any part of. The table on the private section of deck that offered no view of the lake was laid with white linen and polished glass, but the details were lost on me. I was replaying the scene from earlier over and over in my mind, an unfortunate version of Groundhog Day that was in no small measure entirely my own creation. Throughout the mental replaying of events I was surprised to see that I morphed into Mary, taking her place on the arm of Dana, and Gregory more often than not became Wexley. But what seemed much less surprising to me was that in any version that played out in my head, Ishiko always played the part of Marianne. And in my versions, the mental retellings that played out in my head Mary never returned to the house in tears, and Ishiko/Marianne always came off a lot worse than in the actual event.
“What do you think of the scallops?” Gregory seems determined that he fill the empty silence hanging over our table with inane chatter. This is another reason I know that we have drifted apart, because he can no longer tolerate silence. When you are in love, truly in love in the way that the harsh details of life fade to become nothing more than trivialities of problems, silence doesn’t matter. Flaws and silence are two markers of true love, and he cannot tolerate either.
“They are very nice,” I say. They are from the sea, rather than the lake, and therefore he considers it a safe menu option. We were invited to a local restaurant a couple of months back by the Lovells. The restaurant had an excellent reputation for local trout, caught from the lake on one of the small fishing boats by a man who had grown a beard to keep his face warm during the early frosty mornings. We didn’t go. He told me he dislikes trout, but I do not believe him. I know he feared the conversation, the inference to the body of water in which I had nearly died and left most of my memories. “They are delicious,” I say when my first compliment seems inadequate and unpalatable.
Gregory seems keen to steer the conversation away from this morning’s events, and on the two separate occasions that I have tried to mention it he has batted my conversation in a different direction. The first time he did so by mentioning the break in snow across the mountains and how grateful he is that the Kirkstone pass has reopened. The second time was his question about the sea caught scallops. He seems to think if we do not talk about it, it never really happened. I have raised it twice, and twice he cut me off like a landslide, a swift shift of land in my path so that I am forced to take a different direction. But I will reach my destination. I try a new approach.
“Perhaps we should call on Marianne, see how she is?” He positions his knife and fork on his plate on the eleven and five o’clock axis. I am sure he is holding the last bite in his mouth, buying time so that he doesn’t have to answer me. The waiter comes and takes his plate. Gregory dabs at his lips, each corner twice with the napkin he has taken from his knees like a well mannered child at boarding school.
“Why?”
“Why? Isn’t it obvious? After what happened this morning, she must be feeling terrible.”
“I’m sure she will be alright. She understands the situation. Anyway, I think it’s a private matter.”
“She looked like she was crying.” Another waiter brings our main courses. Chicken covered in some sort of red sauce and organised on the plate in a fashion as elaborate as my bandaged fingers. “She must be sad.”
“Do you feel sorry for her?” He looks surprised, as if I am incapable of compassion, that the thought of my feeling empathy was incomprehensible.
“Why? Should I not?”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it? Why should I not feel sorry for her?” I ask.
He admires the plated food, angles it left and right as if he is appreciating a sculpture which he himself has created. Eventually he stops fingering the plate and the smile he was sporting fades as he looks up at my expectant face and realises that I am still waiting on an answer. “It’s just,” he begins, before clearing an imaginary obstruction from his throat, “that I can see why there are tensions.”
“So what, she deserves to be miserable? That she reaps what she sows?” He rolls his eyes as if he is trying to think of a better way to put it. Something less harsh. Something where John Wexley doesn’t come off as the bad guy perhaps, even though without him none of this would have ever happened.
“No. Rather, that they had to expect it. Their relationship was bound to upset a few people.” I eat a mouthful of the chicken listening to the dull sloshing of the lake striking the wooden posts upon which I sit, like flames dancing towards a witch’s foot. “The mother had been ill for some time now, they knew it was on the cards. Marianne should have known it was coming.”
“And John?” All I can hear is blame being heaped at Marianne’s feet, and I don’t like the way he is causally shrugging his shoulders at the mention of John’s name. He curls his lips as if he is contemplating what to say, his arms pleading with me to try to see his point, whatever that was about to be.
“He needed somebody. He is allowed a life.” I was expecting some sort of argument in John’s favour, but not one that was so explicitly ignorant of the fact he has a wife. In his eyes it was Mary’s fault. Mary’s and Marianne’s. “Mary isn’t around now. Marianne is. But, it’s a bit quick for people to understand.” I have taken only a few mouthfuls of food, but I place my knife and fork down and push my plate away. He notices it and his eyes follow my outstretched hand, but he doesn’t say anything and instead inserts another small mouthful of food into his mouth, grinds it about against his huge tombstone teeth.
“So what, as soon as she is gone you think it reasonable for him to do what he did. You think when somebody isn’t around it is acceptable for their partner to do anything he likes?”
“I’m not saying that,” he says after a moment of contemplation, “but you have to try and see it from his point of view. The mother dying is at least one less thing for them to worry about now, if you really want to look at it from Marianne and John’s point of view. It will be easier for them now.”
"She died?" I ask.
"Yes."
"When?"
"Last night," he replies without so much as a glance in my direction.
"Why didn't you say anything?" I ask. He doesn't offer me a reply.
Whilst he sits eating the dinner that he ordered, I can do nothing more than think about what he has just said. Not acceptable, but an explanation. This is the way he thinks. He thinks that some things happen, irrespective of their appropriateness or acceptability, and that the death of a sick mother will at least, thank the Lord, help out in terms of facilitating their liaisons by easing grief and guilt. As long as actions are explicable, they are OK. This is the way my husband thinks. This is how he justifies his actions.
By this same standard, he should have had no problem with my chosen route of suicide. He should have understood without question when I chose to take his boat, set fire to it, watch it burn until the point that I couldn’t stand the h
eat of the flames any longer, and so slipped myself over the edge with the intention to drown. Even Dr. Abrams described my behaviour as understandable in the light of the circumstances. To watch your father slip beneath the surface of the lake, his eyes rolling back in their sockets before he disappeared underneath the blood stained waves, was enough in my doctor’s eyes to explain my choices. But I know that Gregory finds my behaviour unacceptable. Just as I do his.
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Charlotte. It’s just, well, it isn’t really any of our business, is it? How they live their lives, it’s up to them.” He has looked at the almost untouched food still on my plate several times, but he remains quiet about it.
“Hum,” I smile through pursed lips and fight the urge to tell him that my interest is not about them, but rather about us, and him, and his bitch back at our house.
“I want us to start thinking about us again. Our future.” Very convenient of him. “We have the baby to think about.”
“You haven’t shown me a scrap of interest in the baby Gregory. What has changed all of a sudden?”
“Maybe you don’t remember how much you wanted a child. But you did, and finally it is happening for you. After everything that we have been through, I was scared of any more changes. But I remember how much you wanted a child. You don’t, but I do. There is so much you don’t remember.” Try to remember, I hear Ishiko say. Beware the truth. He reaches over the table and his fingers, cold and white tipped like snow capped mountain peaks stroke at my gloved hand to the point that I can almost feel the cold through them. “I was scared, Charlotte. But I am here for you now.”
“Did I really want a child?”
“Yes.” He looks anywhere but at me, pulls at his throat to cover up how hard he has to swallow. “There is a lot you cannot remember.”
“Like what?” There is a desperate part of me that wants to believe he is going to fill in the blanks, to tell me all the things that Ishiko is prompting me to remember. I am certain in this moment that he is about to provide the missing link, when finally we understand how man came from monkey and how the earth was built from particles of dust. Maybe he is about to tell me what Ishiko means to him and I will feel sympathy and understanding because of one fact that I have forgotten, and that in this moment my life will suddenly make sense. He could stop everything right now if he just says the right thing. I would throw away the tablets and put the next one in my mouth. I would scrap my plans. In these few moments of impending revelation I am willing to hand him the power to show me that which I have forgotten. In my willingness to believe that there is an answer, a solution, a way forward, whatever he tells me I think in this moment I might believe it, just for the ability to say that I have a past that has something to do with anything but death and the willingness to die.
PSYCHOPHILIA: A Disturbing Psychological Thriller Page 23