by Jill Dawson
‘But that’s your particular talent, isn’t it? To have us root for the criminal?’
Now Ronnie was asking about Virginia Smythson-Balby:
‘So what is your beady-eyed spy up to? Have you found out anything further?’
‘She promised she’d be cautious with stuff passed to that old witch. Small mercies. Haven’t heard from her in a while. The crazy way she drives that car, in this filthy weather. I keep expecting to read of her driving off the road in some god-awful accident, and learn about it in her obit.’
Ronnie glanced at her in a puzzled way, but patted her shoulder and smiled, the wind making brief jabs at their faces and whipping some long strands of hair across his. Beside them the sea hissed over the shingle.
‘Such intrusion of privacy, biography. Although I did help Forster write an index for his biography of his great-aunt, long, long ago.’
‘You’re full of surprises.’ Pat laughed.
‘Well, I know there are writers whose books are intensely autobiographical, about their bodies and sex and things like that. I think that’s perfectly all right. But not for all of us, no. Writers must be allowed our privacy if we choose it.’
‘Sure.’
‘Mrs Dalloway said that love and religion would destroy the privacy of the soul. A lot of people in my stories say things like that,’ Ronnie said.
She hadn’t known Ronnie wrote stories. He was indeed surprising. Yesterday he had said, with great tenderness, out of nowhere: ‘All loathing is a trick done with mirrors. Someone has annihilated you, you now despise yourself and you try to fling the darkness away from you.’
And now he produced a book shyly, from his duffel bag, and said: ‘Happy birthday, darling. Administer at random. Whenever you are next in a bleak mood.’
John Clare. A slim volume. Pat turned it over, mumbled a quiet ‘Thank you.’ She was thinking of his own book, the manuscript Ronnie was working on. The voices of farm labourers, blacksmiths, teachers, the district nurse. How he described it as simply his ‘listening to my own world talking’. And how restrained he was, because she thought the book read like an angry lament to a passing way of life, yet Ronnie’s voice was never insistent or biased. He was, as Joyce said, the true artist, off to the side, paring his fingernails, letting the work speak.
They stood on the shingle and she thought of the colours of the longhorns being driven through the Stockyards in Fort Worth – every shade of rust, pinky-cream and biscuit – just like the pebbles on the beach. The wind was strong and plucked at the pages of the book as she tried to open it. Her nose and ears stung with cold; the sound of the masts tinkling reminded her of other times she’d heard it, always like someone nervously jingling change in the pocket of their pants. She picked a page, began reading:
Then off they start anew and hasty blow
Their numbed and clumpsing fingers till they glow . . .
‘Clumpsing?’ she asked.
‘Numb with cold, like today. He’s a Fen man. Not too far from here. And he – well, famously he had rather a spectacular breakdown.’
‘Ah.’ Ronnie’s kindness again, his tact. Like an arrow to the heart: this will be his only reference to whether she was all right in the head. Guilt, shame, all the undeservedness, awareness of her own wickedness welled up again. Perhaps, she thought, she should avoid the naturally good because their condition brought on hers more powerfully.
‘For those moments when you tell me life is meaningless,’ Ronnie said. ‘I know you don’t believe that—’
‘Matter of fact, I do. I wrote it only yesterday.’
‘But, darling, acceptance of death when it arrives is one thing, but to allow it to upstage the joys of living is surely ingratitude.’
She slid the book inside her coat, and they linked arms to continue their walk along the shingle. After a while it became too tiring to keep picking their feet out of the stones, twanging their hamstrings painfully, so they continued by walking along the built path towards the tower. The tide was high, a tumbling, broiling grey broth with occasional spurts of white, like bursts of fireworks – like a great spray of white feathers – as it hit the jetty beside them. Ejaculations. Joy, or anger. The sea a prowling beast, its rumble persistent beneath their conversation, like distant, rolling gunshot, like a war going on always somewhere else in the world.
Thoughts of Gerald, of Gerald’s pale limbs, flopping like pastry, drifted into Pat’s mind. A seagull gave a long and haunting wail. Did that really happen? she wondered. And the answer rose up.
‘Isn’t meaning to be found in your work?’ Ronnie was saying. ‘I don’t altogether mean the novels themselves but simply in the doing of it, day after day, the application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair, the belief, the absolute belief, in the sustained, vivid dream you’re creating on the page.’
The dazzling winter sun bounced off the icy puddles and the windshields of the cars parked on the wide sea walk. There it was: the Martello tower. Squat and stumpy, like a building cut off at the waist, maimed. Ronnie said: ‘Look, darling, there it is! Splendid!’ But Pat did not agree.
Gerald again. How could he have stepped into that sea? Icy, chilling, a monstrous grey beast . . . The sound was agitating, exhilarating: as if inside the blood, like being a screaming child, picked up and flung out, out into the icy surf, over and over. And out of the corner of her eye Pat saw a familiar figure: a young woman who was always, always near to her. She refused to look in her direction.
To change the subject she said: ‘Matter of fact, I’m thinking not Switzerland but France. Fontainebleau. I’ve looked at a place called Samois-sur-Seine, too. I wish I had your rootedness. But, as you see, I don’t.’
They walked a little in silence, then Ronnie said:
‘I won’t pretend that it’s some great romantic thing. It’s simply the countryside. I take it very much for granted. I’m not infatuated with it or anything like that. It’s a normal place to live. If you go for walks with a friend in the countryside, that is a lovely experience. But if you live as I live in the middle of nowhere by yourself, that’s another experience. There’s nothing mystical about it, but it makes me dream. Surrounded by fields every day, something happens to you. I don’t know what it is.’
‘Yes,’ Pat said. She doubted they were thinking of the same thing. And now they were at the tower and staring at it.
‘It’s a quatrefoil, you know. For the four heavy guns. To protect us from Napoleon,’ Ronnie told her.
‘It’s exactly the shape of a sandcastle,’ Pat said. And then: ‘You know, I’ve had creepy ideas since I was very young. I gather you haven’t. The countryside doesn’t cure me. It rather stokes them. And the one that interests me most is what goes on in the mind of someone who has . . . killed somebody.’
Ronnie nodded, matter of fact, as he always did when her thoughts took a turn like this. She was picturing the sandcastles she’d made as a girl, turning the buckets upside down, the fat shapes, close together. Then kicking them, making the whole thing crumble.
‘You’re quite wrong about your little friend, her wretched driving being the death of her. She’s very much alive,’ Ronnie murmured. He gestured to the figure approaching.
And the girl waved, a huge wave, pretending spontaneity; affecting surprise at seeing them there. She wore the rabbit fur hat and the pink bell bottoms. She was smiling, and waving, and Pat thought: She exists. There was nothing she could do about this.
On the way home, for a ‘birthday treat’ Ronnie wanted to show her the church of St Michael in Framlingham, a church he’d talked about often. ‘If you’re moving on soon, you must take a look. It has the most extraordinary tombs.’
It was cool and echoey in the church, after the tight coldness of the day on the beach; a relief to be out of the wind. She stared without interest at the marble tombs, dutifully read the little plaques explaining, ‘To the right of the Glory is one of the finest pieces of sixteenth-century monumental sculpture . . .�
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A middle-aged woman, hair tied up in a knotted scarf, swept a corner and called out: ‘Don’t mind me!’
Pat stood close to Ronnie, feeling a little shy. ‘You should have been a priest. There’s still time – don’t you think?’
‘No – nonsense,’ he replied quickly.
Pat thought he looked alarmed, and so for devilment, she persisted.
‘Why not?’
‘I actually think the laity is enormously important. The laity means the people of God,’ Ronnie said very quietly. They were almost whispering, self-conscious because of the sweeping charwoman at the other end of the church. Pat wished they were alone. She wanted to ask him again – she longed to; she could no longer bear not asking him.
‘Have you ever done anything really wicked, Ronnie?’ The powerful desire rose in her once more, the desire Ronnie alone elicited, the desire to confess – to what? – and be absolved.
Ronnie froze, one woolly gloved hand about to reach out to touch the pale-veined tomb of Mary Fitzalan. Sunlight latticed her marble deathbed in an exquisite leafy pattern. In the marble was carved the most charmingly serene face. Looking at it, Pat grudgingly concluded that, if anyone could be said to be at peace, it might be Mary Fitzalan.
‘You know, darling, you alarm me when you start talking like this,’ Ronnie murmured.
Yes, she thought. Books, liturgies, prayers. But not – ugliness. Not little men that no one can see. Not bloodied dishcloths and semen-stained carpets. She trembled for a moment and didn’t know if it was anger. To disguise it she made herself read a little leaflet about Mary Fitzalan: died at the age of seventeen, after a hasty marriage and a stillbirth. Ha! So. Matter of fact, the sculptor of the peaceful tomb was lying, like everybody else.
Ronnie was standing now in the chancel, batting his gloved hands together and admiring the great east window. Pat stared at his figure, his back in the navy blue wool duffel coat. She wanted to thank him then. She had never met anyone like Ronnie, and now she would be going away and probably never see him again. She would write him; that was all.
‘It’s a very beautiful thing to be holy,’ Ronnie was saying, as she came to stand beside him. ‘It’s aesthetic as well as sacred. It means whole. Completion. It shouldn’t be cut off from ordinary existence. Everybody should be holy, really.’
She knew he was speaking to her, no matter how delicate, how tactful he was. It reached, for a moment, and she was grateful. She knew, whatever his protestations, that he might just as well have been standing in the pulpit.
The novel is finishing itself, writing itself, teeming at me, creeping into my dreams and seeping into my sleep. I dream I’m a man, walking in jeans and brogues, then suddenly an old woman with a strange shape, like a fat ball. Then all at once I’m aware that I’m me and saying to myself I’m having a dream about being myself, how banal! The words of the novel keep steaming at me, like a racing train I can barely fling myself onto, scarcely catch as it thunders by. I need to run beside it and at the perfect moment jump, grab on – longed-for and hard-won, a mesmerised, drugged dream-state. Waiting and working, service. Until the time, the next time, I can feel this alive: the next time it happens.
Ginny Smythson-Balby. Here she is, frisking about the place, tossing her long hair and whinnying. Now she’s making up a fire in the living room, next she’s opening with a pop some very good red that she says she ‘nicked from Daddy’s cellar’, and handing me a glass, saying, ‘No, no, let me!’ She’s humming and trotting back and forth between living room and kitchen where she’s cooking us a meal, something she calls a ‘pasta dish’. Two words that make me shudder. ‘No steak?’
‘No, silly.’ She bats me with the dish towel. Steak doesn’t go with pasta.
She’s wearing a fluffy pink angora sweater with turtle neck and short sleeves, and her creamy arms are covered with smuts from the fire, her ass wiggling as she bends in front of it. I sip the wine and watch her. She’s absolutely charming, like a little pink show pony.
‘Come on, Ginny. You can tell me now. We have met, haven’t we? Long ago. Was it New York?’
She turns around. That perfume she wears, the smell of a girls’ locker-room, fuggy and feminine. I’m not hating it as much as I did at first. She sits beside me on the sofa, and we both glance at the spot on the floor – the carpetless spot – where Gerald’s head was caved in. She glances away first.
‘Paris, 1952. I was sixteen. I think I told you I was older,’ she says quietly.
I find I can’t speak. I stare at her.
‘Daddy had sent me to a finishing school in Paris. You know, hoping to sort me out after I’d fallen in love with a girl. And I read The Price of Salt and someone said you went to the club we called La Petite – you remember it?’
I can’t move to nod, or reply.
‘And I went to seek you out. Yes. The one novelist who had given us a happy ending. I had to meet you and tell you how much I loved the book. But then I lost my nerve and . . .’
‘Did we go to bed?’
Now she pouts and pretends to be annoyed.
‘Of course we did! You don’t remember? You were my first and . . .’
Thirteen years ago. There were a lot of girls. And a lot of alcoholic fugue states. I would have been thirty-something and . . . The one I’m thinking of – could it have been her? – was the runaway child. Like something in an Ann Bannon novel. The Beebo Brinker type. La Petite bar. I had a certain fame there, which I briefly enjoyed. Hitchcock was making a film of my first novel. The Price of Salt had just been published and plenty of people knew that the pen name was mine. I do remember a crazy girl. Could that have been her? A creepy feeling even then. Too keen. A girl I was happy to romp recklessly with in the hours of darkness (she was noisy: her orgasm, I remember now, was one of the rather alarming sort, too loud, bucking and feral; why didn’t I remember this when I took Smythson-Balby to bed? But, of course, the girl has matured by now, had other lovers and learned to be more temperate); in the morning her hot limbs around me felt like the snaking limbs of Medusa. Girls who were too keen on me always made me edgy. Dark eyes that didn’t seem right with her hair. Which wasn’t long and chestnut like this but a blonde crop.
‘Did you have different hair?’
‘I was a bottle blonde for about six months. Daddy was furious – made me wear a wig when he caught up with me. I went back to school in the end. But I felt better. You helped me. And my first time! With the author of The Price of Salt! I—’
‘Did you follow me about? When we met here at Earl Soham—’
‘Well, there’s no need to take that tone! You must have followed women – you write about it often enough.’
She reaches out to stroke my hair but I pull away.
‘Novels. You’re confusing my writing with me again. I have no wish to be adored,’ I say. My voice trembles with anger.
Sure, I once drove to the house of the – the woman I think of as Carol and watched her come out to her car and leave but I could never have let her see me, know me. What kind of person wants to be seen? Or watched? Only a snail. To be adored is to be eaten alive, sucked in. Being pulled, pricked out of its shell with a pin, stretched towards a waiting mouth. I put my glass on the floor and sit up straight.
‘I think you should go,’ I say.
‘Oh, no, please. I’m sorry. Please, don’t . . . The pasta is just about ready. Come into the kitchen and see how pretty I’ve made the table.’
I allow myself to be led to the kitchen. She has found a way to pull the sprigged curtains – which never quite met – completely closed, securing them with wooden pegs. A candle shoved into the wooden candlestick, sprigs of holly around the base and a silver-sprayed pine cone resting on white linen napkins. Like something a very young girl would do. But she must be . . . nearly thirty? And what kind of vortex have I stepped into? Keeping that candle burning – I glance at it as she lights it now – for thirteen years?
‘After dinner you should g
o,’ I say. I pause, then nod as she holds the spoonful of pasta over a bowl and gazes at me.
‘And . . .’ a new, sudden thought so piercing in its clarity ‘. . . did you, were the letters – they were you, too?’
‘Please, sit down. Let’s eat, shall we? I wish I’d never told you. You liked me yesterday – you liked me last week!’
Last week I was trying to figure out how to tamper with the brakes on your car, I think.
I pull out the chair and sink down. The letters float in front of me. Brother Death. Didn’t Ginny admit to knowing all my novels? Doesn’t she show a knowledge of my work, a kind of scrutiny and close-reading that Mother never did? And Brother Death is my own phrase, the way that Jenny Thierolf – the suicide – thinks of it in The Cry of the Owl. Mother would never remember that. Mother wouldn’t care to read me that closely. Mother: in the end I thought Mother confessed during our fight but didn’t she merely quit denying it? Is it possible she had no idea what I was accusing her of? ‘Letters from me and Stanley? What’s your problem? I don’t get it,’ she’d said. And maybe she didn’t.
What kind of girl is Ginny? I’m in a spot now – I know that much – but how bad is it? What sort of creep keeps up a vigil for this long? She must be nuts. An oddball. A blackmailer? What’s her plan?
‘Ginny. You know that – we can’t carry on like this. I’m much too old for you. And I already have plans to move on. It will – I don’t want to hurt you. I can tell your feelings for me are—’
‘Don’t say it! Don’t say it,’ she squeals. ‘Please let’s eat. We can be friends, can’t we? There’s no reason for you to be – scared of me. I’ve given up all of that! Letter-writing! They weren’t so bad, were they? Not threatening. I wish I’d never told you. I just want to, you know . . . Be your friend.’
* * *
But there is another, much more powerful, reason for me to be afraid of her: Ginny comes downstairs from the bathroom after dinner and makes me a gift of it.