I remember Min’s twenty-first birthday. I was surprised my sister wanted to spend it with me rather than her husband. I had hoped we might all go out to dinner. Robert and I, Charles and Min. We would make a happy foursome. It was a dream of mine. This harmony between couples. For what could be better than sisters married to best friends?
But Min had not mentioned the possibility and, besides, Robert didn’t like socializing. I put it down to shyness, and self-consciousness because his background was very different from that of his friends and colleagues. Sooner or later, he said, it always came up. Once they found out he was an Irishman, no matter how English he sounded, they behaved a little differently with him.
Min and I met during the day for a matinee showing, because I had to be home by six o’clock to prepare Robert’s dinner. Min made no mention of similar duties.
The picture was called Nothing Sacred and was a comedy starring my favourite Carole Lombard. I adored her. She was able to combine Garboesque beauty with lightness, and humour. But what astounded me about the picture was the fact that it was filmed in Technicolor. It was the first time we had seen a colour picture, and I found it particularly unsettling. I was used to applying colour myself. Now this autonomy had been taken away from me. The picture appeared gaudy; the colours garish and jarring. My picture world was in black and white, detached and removed from the real world. The grey tones of my favourite films gave them an ethereal quality, and a mystery. Technicolor ruined all of this. I thought it far too vulgar. The images were not those I liked to dream about. But Min disagreed.
‘How thrilling,’ she exclaimed as we came out of the cinema into the sunshine, ‘and exciting, to be able to create moving images in colour. This is the way forward, June.’
‘I prefer the old pictures.’
‘Oh, how could you? For a picture to be in colour is bringing it as close to the real world as possible. Soon they will be able to make mirror images of us, and the world will be able to look at itself. I wonder what we will all learn then.’
‘But I love making up the colours myself. Remember when we saw Jezebel. We both knew she was wearing a red dress, even though the film was in black and white, but I am sure my shade of red is different from yours.’
‘I suppose.’ Min skipped a step and then, linking her arm through mine, she said, ‘Let’s have a quick cup of tea and a bun, before you have to get back.’
We two sisters walked past Leicester Square Tube station, the dark and the fair. Min had cut her hair recently, and thus we both sported bobs. Min’s was waved into soft black curls at the nape of her neck, whereas my mousy bob was tucked behind my ears, thick and straight, with a heavy fringe hanging above my eyes. Min always knew which colours suited her best. She was wearing a dress the colour of bluebells, a seductive shade halfway between purple and blue, and as she moved it gave off a shimmer like a haze of flowers in a woodland glade. The day was hot, and she had her jacket – blue as well – slung over her other arm as we walked along. I stuck to muted shades. I was wearing a pale-grey sweater and a brown skirt, which were both too warm for the weather. The wool of the sweater stuck to my body. I longed for a cool breeze to soothe my prickly skin.
Min paused and looked into the window of a bookshop on Charing Cross Road. I glanced at our reflections. How different we looked now.
‘I cannot be only twenty-one! I feel so old,’ Min suddenly exclaimed, squeezing my hand. ‘It should be exciting to be twenty-one, but instead it’s boring. I can see each year just the same. Day in, day out.’
I glanced over at my sister’s profile. What had brought on this outburst? It was Min’s birthday and we should be celebrating. But then birthdays were difficult times, especially when it was a reminder of past birthdays as a small child. The sense of anticlimax because Mother would never quite make you feel she cared, and Daddy would forget. I searched for something to talk about that would cheer Min up and make her sparkle again.
‘What about painting? I thought you loved studying art.’
Min brightened up. ‘Yes, of course, that is something which keeps me going.’
We proceeded up Charing Cross Road until we came to a small tea house, with tiny latticed windows, like one that you would expect in the middle of a country village, not in the centre of London. I went first, pushing the door open. It was packed, and the air was thick with cigarette smoke and noisy chat, but we pushed into the throng and were able to find a table for two in the corner. We sat down opposite each other, and a waitress came over and took our order. Although the place was busy, the service was extremely fast and within a few moments we had our pot of tea for two and a selection of cakes, sticky buns and pastries on a plain white dish. I unfolded my napkin and placed it on my knee.
‘Shall I be mother?’ I picked up the teapot. Min nodded, and I filled our cups with steaming brown tea.
Min opened her bag, took out a little mirror and, looking at herself, she sighed. ‘All those people in the film. They are so glamorous.’ She produced a lipstick from the bottom of her bag and repainted her lips plum-red. ‘Imagine living in America, Juno, and being a rich divorcee!’
She put her lipstick away and pursed her red lips together, arched her eyebrows and put on a face like a femme fatale. She made me laugh. The idea of going to Hollywood was as ridiculous an idea to me as flying to the moon.
‘Will you ever go to America, do you think?’ Min continued, dropping her act and looking normal again, one eyebrow raised, her smile asymmetrical.
I shook my head. ‘I haven’t really thought about it. If Robert wanted to go, I would.’
‘Maybe we might go together one day,’ Min said dreamily, stirring her tea. ‘We’ll sail to New York, and then we’ll drive across the whole country to California and Hollywood. We’ll get spotted on the street, and next thing you know, we’ll be watching ourselves in the pictures! Oh, what glamour-pusses we will be.’
‘Oh, how silly you are, Min!’ I bit into my sticky bun, but the idea appealed to me somehow. There was so much space in America.
‘Will we do it, June?’ Min’s eyes were gleaming.
‘Oh, yes, let’s go ahead and book our passage today,’ I answered sarcastically.
‘I mean it, June, let’s run away,’ Min said urgently, her lips quivering and her cheeks flushed.
‘But, Min, we would be away for months. What about Charles? What about Robert?’
‘Yes,’ said Min, shaking her head. ‘I couldn’t ask you to go, not now you’ve met Robert. I shall have to do it on my own.’
I felt my heart quicken. Min was actually serious. ‘This is one of your fantasies, Min. What on earth would you be doing in America, and without Charles?’
‘I would paint the Wild West desert. I would go somewhere so wholly different from here. A big, blank canvas. I want to burn the soles of my feet on the red earth, and my soul on the sizzling orange sun. I would look up into a gigantic sky, watch the eagles circling, and feel free.’ She raised her arms and spread them wide, causing a few glances in our direction. ‘America is the new world, June, and I want to be part of it.’
‘But Charles . . .’ I stuttered, reddening with confusion. ‘You are married to Charles.’
Min dropped her arms and bowed her head over her teacup. ‘He doesn’t love me,’ she whispered.
I bent my head down, close to my sister’s face. I could see a tear trail down her cheek. Her lashes were laced with them. ‘Oh, Min, of course he loves you, how could he not?’
‘I stole him from Mother, and now this is my punishment. I am always to be compared to her.’ She shook her head, and took her handkerchief out, began to dab her eyes. ‘What good did it do anyway? For she left Father all the same.’
‘Min, that was a bad reason to marry Charles.’ I was appalled that my sister would do such a stupid thing, but at the same time I had always known deep down it was the reason why Min had married so young, and to Captain Sanderson.
‘I know, I know, but I did believe
I loved him. Why, Juno,’ she said, a twisted smile on her lips, her eyes watery, ‘he was always my Prince Charming, remember? It’s just that he can be so cruel.’
I looked at my sister in alarm. She was so delicate, more so every time I saw her. I looked at her slender white arms and shoulders, the soft-capped sleeves of her blue dress making them look even more delicate, like narrow white stems. She had no strength whatsoever.
‘Does he hurt you, Min?’ I spoke sharply, anger rising in my belly.
‘No, not in the way you mean – no, Charles would never touch me. It is just that he makes me feel so frivolous. I am an artist, June, but he doesn’t take me seriously. He thinks it is my hobby and that I should just be his decorative wife, hanging off his arm. Sometimes I wish I were ugly, because then if he really loved me, it wouldn’t matter how I looked.’
‘Only someone with a face like yours could say such a flippant thing,’ I replied crossly. ‘I have always wanted to be as pretty as you.’ I softened, tucking one of Min’s black tendrils behind her ear. ‘You have no idea how very fortunate you are.’
‘It is a curse, Juno, believe me,’ Min said bitterly.
We sat in silence for a moment. I poured another cup of tea and spooned one sugar into it, stirring the spoon round and round, watching the brown liquid swirl.
‘When you have a baby, it will be different, Min.’
‘Oh, but even that is not easy.’ Min’s voice shook. She looked away from me, out of the steamed-up window of the tea rooms. ‘We have been trying for so long, and . . .’ She hesitated, and seemed unable to say any more. Tears flooded down her cheeks again.
I took my sister’s tiny hands and squeezed them within my own. ‘It will get better. It will, I promise.’
‘Should I leave him?’ Min asked suddenly, turning her face and looking straight into my eyes.
She sniffed and dabbed her nose with a handkerchief, and although she had been crying, she looked pale and tragic, rather than red and blotchy. Her dark eyes were deep violet, and her gaze was a plea, haunting and brimming with the pain of her question. I winced. I knew my sister was so lost she would do whatever I told her to do.
But this is what marriage is, I convinced myself, a veteran of a mere year. There are ups and there are downs, but it is for life. I had seen the way Charles looked at Min. He was devoted to her. Min could be very demanding. Maybe Charles wasn’t actually being cruel, but was just standing up for himself. I considered Min lucky, for Charles had allowed her to go to the Slade. When I had mentioned the possibility of returning to university to complete my degree, Robert had appeared stunned I would think of such a thing now that I was his wife. Min was a little depressed because she had still not had her longed-for first child. Soon she would be pregnant. I felt sure she would be happy then, and would laugh at the idea of running off to America to be an artist, or a film actress. How could she possibly survive over there, so far away from me? I couldn’t bear for her to be all that way from me.
‘No,’ I said emphatically. ‘You oughtn’t to leave Charles.’
NICHOLAS
Charlie takes a kitchen knife out of the drawer, rips the bubblewrap off the painting and slashes it right across the middle.
‘What are you doing?’
Nicholas tries to grab her arm, but the knife blade sparkles in the light and she attacks her canvas again.
‘Stop,’ he shouts. ‘Charlie, stop.’ He sobs.
She drops the knife. ‘You’re crying.’ She stares at him. Her eyes look wild, the pupils dilated.
It has started again, the crying that has attacked him over the past few weeks, unforeseen, without warning. All the years he never cried – with repressed grief from losing the babies and, before that, the loss of his father – are now being documented down his cheeks.
‘Nicholas!’ Charlie is horrified. She rushes to him and, even though he is so much taller than her, she manages to hold him in her arms and let him cry.
‘Don’t destroy it,’ he manages to say.
She holds him cradled in her arms for a long time. Nicholas feels the breeze through the window falling on their faces, brushing the sorrow away.
‘Please, Charlie, don’t rip up your painting.’
‘I have to,’ she says tightly.
‘Why?’
She releases him, picks up the picture and holds it up. ‘Look!’ she commands him.
He wipes his eyes, and stares at the painting. It is the same one he saw on the easel the day he broke into their flat. Yet she has done a little more work to it. There is a figure moving slowly through the fog. It is walking away from the viewer, he can see that clearly now. And there are tiny little leaves floating about the figure. They are red, the colour of blood, and they stand out against the grey, white and blue swirls of paint. The picture is bleak.
‘I was going to give you this, to make you feel bad,’ Charlie blurts out. ‘I was doing it again. Hiding behind my art. I wanted you to know how much your rejection hurt me, and to tell you that you rejected me first.’
Nicholas looks at the picture and he can see how it would have tortured him to have it on his wall, in his lonely house in Cavan, looking at it night after night. He is the figure in the painting, and he is walking towards a void – he is becoming nothing.
‘Is that what I am to you?’ he asks her. ‘Am I nothing now?’
‘No!’ Charlie says vehemently. ‘Oh, no!’
Nicholas can smell the baking again, and he knows June Fanning is in the kitchen with them, busy cooking, trying to bake love into her apple pie so that they can eat it.
No one is nothing if they are loved.
The phantom whispers in his inner ear, until her words become a song, binding his heart.
Have no regret.
This is their moment of truth. Nicholas and Charlotte Healy have been married for over ten years, but it is only now, in her husband’s Cavan kitchen, that Charlie can see who her husband is and what she has lost. She asks him with her eyes. Does he still want her?
Nicholas considers his anger, his pride, his betrayal, and how hurt he has been by what Charlie did. Could he ever trust her again? But if he lets her go out of the door today, he knows he would regret it. They have too much love between them to desert it. He steps forward and embraces his wife, and Nicholas knows he has made the right choice. For a second he wonders what Geraldine was going to say just before she met Charlie, but he is glad now she never had the opportunity to say it. It had just been that one time between them in the orchard. Geraldine had waited for him to say something to Charlie, but he had placed himself beside his wife at the stove and then she had known. She had left. He wishes her well. He hopes she meets someone one day with whom she can share the same kindred connection that he and his wife have. It is a rare and precious thing. He is a man who is going to learn to forgive his wife, as long as she can forgive him.
JUNE
Here the water rises up from beneath the land to create small lakes. It is a sorrowful place. The water is always there, no matter how dry it might be. It emerges from within the earth’s crust, making small, still pools of cool blue, dips in the green land, which swell around me like the sea. Up and down. I can never see too far. The land and trees shelter the house, so that I have to walk out onto the road to get a sense of distance and see the Iron Mountains, their top the flat back of a crouching lion, their ginger mane of reeds visible even from here, in the wet, grey Cavan mist.
We are on the borders of Leitrim and Cavan, and never have I lived in such a melancholy landscape. Robert told me many people suffered here in the last century, particularly at the hands of the English, and many people have left. There is a sense of abandonment in the very fibre of the place. The air is heavy, particularly at this time of year, when the leaves fail to defy gravity and turn to mulch. I can smell the decay all around me, filling my nostrils, making me sense the heavy, cloying world that I live in. Will I remain here for the rest of my life?
I can�
�t help remembering the light and air in Devon. So different from here. Bright, sparkling sunshine, like fresh lemonade, the sea air tasting fizzy on my tongue, and even though it was not actually hot, like in Italy, it was still warm enough to brave the frothy sea, wilful and excited as my sister and I were.
I am trying to follow the war on the wireless, but in the end I turn it off. I tremble at the images that are conjured inside my head when I think of Robert, in the middle of it, and my sister too. When I go walking in the woods I manage to calm my beating heart, and think of other things. How my body is feeling, and how it is changing. My breasts are even fuller, and my belly is a tiny little dome. I feel a sense of something else taking over my body. Sometimes I resent this.
The earth is almost black here, and our woods are full of beech trees with crisp red leaves, a valiant few still clinging on, fluttering in the breeze. My favourite place is a small dip in the middle of the wood like a miniature valley. It is completely covered in leaves, yellow and brown, with a ring of beech trees around its circumference, and one huge upturned root slightly off-centre. I could look for hours at those roots, and the intricacy of their interlacing. It gives me as much pleasure as looking at a painting.
I come here most days and sometimes I just let my mind wander free, and daydream. I close my eyes, sitting on the edge of the root, and I fantasize. The trees whispering around me highlight my longing, because that is what it is, a deep ache to be touched, caressed. I pick up a couple of twigs and curl the lichen under my fingers, pulling it away. It is soft, and fuzzy, too fragile to leave in the woods, and I wish I could make a small nest of it and hibernate here. Hide inside the woods until the war – no, my temptation – is over.
As I am sitting in my tiny valley it begins to rain. That is how it is here. No warning whatsoever. You never say: it looks like rain today, because it always looks like rain every day. Bands of grey clouds lock out the sun, apart from a rare hour or two, and sit aloft the mountains. The rain comes down like a cloak, shrouding the land, the houses and all the people. Sometimes it can be gentle. A comforting drizzle, its tiny drops separate particles, which glisten in your hair. But some days it comes down in sheets, suddenly and with an intense chill that cuts into your bones. It begins to rain like this. So I run.
The Adulteress Page 27