The Adulteress

by Noelle Harrison

  It is a moment of exhilaration and some small release of my self-pitying pangs. I am a fortunate woman, I tell myself as I race down the path, slippery with leaves and out the other side of the woods.

  Why do I decide to come out onto the road? It is quicker to go home through the back of the woods, and the orchard, but instead I am standing on the road, in the strange grey half-light that exists most of the day being pelted by rain. I run down the road towards town, and away from Robert’s cottage.

  And then I am standing opposite Phelim Sheriden’s house. Something other than shelter propels me to his door, and before I can stop myself I am banging his knocker, catching my breath.

  The door swings open, and Phelim stands there. I have not seen him since Claudette’s funeral and he is like a bright spot of light on this dull, dark day. His hair is gleaming gold, and he is wearing a sea-green jersey, spattered with paint. It is a colour that goes straight to the heart of me.

  ‘June!’ he says in surprise, and pulls back the door.

  ‘I am so sorry to intrude,’ I begin, ‘but I have got caught in the rain.’

  ‘Come in, come in.’

  I stand on his threshold, dripping with rain and blowing the water off the end of my nose. He looks at me curiously and then, I don’t know why, I begin to giggle. I imagine how I must look. Like a drenched sea-turtle in my dark-blue coat and dripping wool beret, but I cannot help my laughter. It is so inappropriate. Is it nerves or is it abandon?

  He smiles at me, and I know he doesn’t think I am insane. ‘Quickly, come into the kitchen, the stove is lit.’

  Phelim takes my coat and hat and hangs them above the stove. Then he takes a bottle of whiskey from a shelf over the sink.

  ‘I believe hot whiskey might warm you up.’ He indicates that I should sit down by the fire. ‘I have a tiny bit left here, for special occasions.’

  I am shivering a little, and he comes over and touches my sleeve. I jump as if branded.

  ‘Apologies,’ he says hastily, ‘I just wanted to see if you were wet through. We do not want to risk you getting ill.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  He hands me a rug, which is hanging on the back of the chair. ‘Please warm yourself a little with this.’

  I thank him, wrapping the rug around my shoulders and feeling like a little girl. I am safe here. In fact I am happy. I do not care that maybe it is not so appropriate for me to call here on my own, with no real excuse other than a wet winter’s afternoon.

  ‘I have not seen you in a while.’ He pours whiskey into two glasses and places the kettle on the stove.

  ‘After the funeral, I thought you might want to be alone.’

  He doesn’t mention Claudette, and instead asks me brightly, ‘So, you finished reading all my books?’

  ‘No, of course not, but I began to think maybe my studies are all a little frivolous.’

  ‘Why would that be?’ He looks at me earnestly and continues to speak. ‘History is an essential in life. Without knowledge of the past, how can we learn to live in the present, learn from what happened before?’

  ‘But we haven’t, have we? Look at the world now – hundreds of years after the time of Julia we are still fighting each other. One empire trying to dominate another. And we are still judging those who won’t, or can’t, conform.’

  ‘So is that what you think of Julia? That she is an anarchist?’ He sits down opposite me and hands me a hot glass of whiskey, a napkin wrapped around its base to keep me from burning my fingers.

  ‘I am confused by her,’ I say, taking my drink. ‘Sometimes, when I read about what she actually did, how she ignored her children and corrupted Phoebe, and prostituted herself . . .’

  I am suddenly nervous. This is a scandalous subject, and I am not sure how Phelim will react to me saying such things.

  ‘I cannot understand how any woman would want to do what she did in the end. How could she sell her own body, unless she was desperate for the money? How could she enjoy it?’

  ‘It is surprising what some people find themselves craving.’ Phelim speaks quietly. ‘For many it is because they cannot love themselves, and so they believe this is what they deserve. Maybe, for Julia, the defilement of her body by strangers was an expression of her self-hatred?’

  ‘Or maybe she was a warrior?’ I counter, looking up at Phelim’s sapphire eyes, thinking how much I have missed him these past two weeks.

  ‘Like any soldier, she used her body as a weapon, to dig at the roots of the Roman Empire and to make a political point. She must have known she would end up exiled or, worse still, executed. So she was brave. She sacrificed her life so that she could expose the truth, the hypocrisy of Rome.’

  ‘All very good,’ Phelim laughs, ‘but it didn’t work, did it?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ I smile back, and sip the sweet hot whiskey. ‘Oh, this is delicious.’

  ‘It’s flavoured with honey.’

  We sit in silence for a while. I already feel better, warm from the whiskey and stimulated by our conversation about Julia. Robert has never been interested in my classical studies. He would often ask me: what relevance did it have to the modern world? I could not explain it to him. How it is that I can lose myself in the voices of a distant age, and then actually walk into it. That is what happened to me when I was in Italy, on the island of Ponza. I felt as if I was able to pull back the curtain and walk in Julia’s footsteps across the spine of the island, look at what she saw, smell it, feel it, completely imagine how it must be to live another life. I could feel how that parallel world felt. It is a way of escaping and at the same time coping with the present. Unlike Robert, with Phelim I sense a level of understanding.

  ‘Are you painting?’ I ask him suddenly.

  ‘Yes, it is helping me,’ he says falteringly. ‘I am working on a concerto of colour. I am trying to create music visually, it is . . . a little strange.’

  I shift my legs. Rain still lashes against the window, and suddenly I am so nervous I am afraid to speak. I do not know why Phelim says what he does next. Maybe it is the mixture of whiskey, loss and loneliness, for each word he utters sculpts itself inside my heart.

  ‘June, I must tell you, I am in love with you.’

  I start as if shot, stunned into silence.

  ‘There, it is said.’ He looks sheepish, gets up nervously.

  ‘But Claudette . . .’ I whisper shakily.

  ‘I stopped being in love with Claudette a long, long time ago. When the love you feel for someone is not returned, then it is like a plant without water. It slowly withers and dies.’

  ‘You are upset.’ I cannot look at him. ‘You hardly know me—’

  He interrupts me. ‘I know, and you are married to another man. But, June, I need to tell you I have never met a woman whom I have felt this way about. As soon as I saw you . . . everything about you: your face, your eyes, your lips are just for me.’

  He sighs and shakes his head.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says forlornly. ‘You are married and with Robert, but I have to go away soon, and it is important for me to tell you this, that I love you . . .’ His voice peters out and I stand up, the rug falling off my knees.

  ‘What do you mean, go away soon?’

  ‘I am going up North in a few days, signing up. Now that Claudette is gone, I should do my duty. If your husband is prepared to leave you, and I have no one, well then, I have no excuse.’

  ‘Don’t mention him!’ The anguish of Robert’s absence incenses me.

  Phelim stands uncomfortably, shaking his head, looking down. ‘Robert . . .’

  ‘Don’t say his name!’

  I am an inch away from Phelim’s face. I can see laughter lines around his eyes and the flat, brown freckles across his nose and cheeks. Our desperate needs rattle inside our hearts, screaming for us to touch. He steps back from me. His eyes are wide open, and his pupils dilated.

  ‘June?’

  But I am unable to speak for a moment. I s
tep towards him, take his hand, drop it, stare at the flagstone floor. ‘Please, Phelim. Please don’t go.’

  THE ADULTERESS VI

  His room is brown. Brown jacket hanging on the back of the door, heavy chestnut furniture, dusty and old, the drawers not completely pushed in, so that she can see corners of things – papers, clothes, forgotten articles. The floor is bare walnut floorboards, uneven, and there are no rugs. He says he doesn’t want to get paint on them. There is little light, strange since he works in here. During the day he raises the blind, but the window is so dirty that the light that strays into the room has a dingy, jaundiced air. At night he works by the one bare bulb, too shockingly bright, disturbing the spiders, which scurry to the corners of the ceiling, highlighting the overwhelming masculinity of the room.

  She likes to light a candle and turn out the light, for it would be impossible to make love under the bare bulb. There is something too indecent about it.

  Who is she fooling? She needs to know why she keeps coming here.

  Because she does love her husband.

  And then the thought occurs to her. Is it possible to be in love with two people at the same time?

  With her lover she shares conversations she could never share with her husband, and their lovemaking is different, more hectic, free. Yet she knows her lover is a selfish man, a self-obsessed artist, who only makes her feel loved through the inspiration she gives him. He would make a bad father.

  Her husband has a heart three times the size of her lover. She knows this. He does not deserve to be betrayed. Yet it is her lover who tells her that he loves her, and she doesn’t care that it is probably not true, she just needs to hear the words. He looks at her, notices what she is wearing, the shape of her face he finds beautiful, the tone of her skin, its touch, and every little detail about her body he looks at and relishes. Has her husband ever even looked beneath the bed sheets?

  Her lover is painting a self-portrait. She is fascinated that he is able to sit here day after day and scrutinize himself. The flesh tones are so tactile that she wants to touch the image, but resists; the paint is still wet. He is wearing brown in the painting, and it makes her laugh, the brown-and-pink colour of it, reflecting his real life, their flesh, naked limb against limb, on his brown blankets in his brown room.

  When will it stop? When the world orders it so. She senses they are close to the end now. The war, and death, frames them. They are on the brink of extinction. The streets have become smoky battlegrounds and, as she runs through them, on her way to meet her lover, she is afraid to look into the rubble, see a child’s toy or an old woman’s shoe, see the debris that war creates, making her want to weep with shame.

  Is this what makes her so desperate to conceive, so that she makes love to her lover and her husband in the same night and does not care who the real father will be? She hopes a baby will stop her, make her forget about her lover, settle as a wife. Why has she been denied the one thing she has always wished for in her life?

  But maybe she is just like her mother: of the same flesh and blood, mind and heart.

  She reaches out to touch her lover’s self-portrait, but he stands behind her, pulls her arm back.

  ‘Noli me tangere,’ he whispers in her ear.

  He lifts up her skirt, knowing she is naked underneath, for she no longer bothers with underwear. One simple movement and he is inside her, its directness taking her breath away. The sirens start to wail, but they do not even hesitate. She feels it would be impossible to part them, not even fear of death can stop them now. It adds to the intensity of their lovemaking, and as they hear the bombs dropping on London, they are exploding on the inside.

  JUNE

  Virtus, or self-discipline, was the backbone to Roman morality. It had three basic qualities: gravitas, which was a sense of responsibility, and a denial of sentiment; pietas, which symbolized the duty that a Roman owed to the gods, to his country, to his neighbour, and above all to his family; and simplicitas, which was humility, and gave the Roman his or her rationality.

  Before I met Robert I was able to study these concepts dispassionately. In my first year in college I made a modest study on the causes of marital breakdown in Rome in the first century AD. To think I thought it was a matter for academics! Without any experience from real life, I argued how the erosion of the pietas principle during Augustus’s reign caused marital breakdown. I wrote a paper on the decline of marriages as an expression of duty and obedience to the family and the Empire. Once a union was imposed upon young people, and settled by a contract that ignored their wishes, marriage had gradually become based upon mutual consent and lasted only by virtue of the couple’s joint desire to keep it in existence.

  I agreed with the Stoics. The mind must always be rational, the heart feared. Never, ever fall victim to the desires of the heart. Yet I did – all that time I was secretly dreaming of it, and it took Robert to look at me once, and for me to imagine him marrying me, for my heart to reveal itself as idealistic and naive.

  In college I put forward the thesis that one of the major causes of the eventual fall of Rome was its own lack of moral fibre. I wrote about orgies, yet I was a virgin myself. I blush to remember presenting my first paper to my tutor, and how I spoke on the demoralization of marriages, not for one instant understanding what marriage was.

  When you are little, you are taught that there is only one way to be in love. This first love is the person you must marry. Min and I played wedding days. We would dress up in our communion dresses and take it in turns to be bride, and bridesmaid. It never seemed to matter that there was no groom. The important thing was to be a wife, to be wanted.

  But look what happened to Mother.

  I remember my own wedding day and how full of expectation I was. Finally I fitted in. I was a wife. I think back to our honeymoon in Babbacombe. Even in our first week of marriage, did the cracks begin to appear?

  One afternoon it stopped raining, and we left the hotel for a walk. I imagined we were like squirrels emerging from hibernation, hungry for air, and food, yet at the same time craving our return to the bedroom, and our love nest beneath the sheets.

  As we walked down the front path of our hotel, and out onto the pavement, I felt like a tourist in my own Devon, for now I was seeing things through Robert’s eyes. It was a sparkling afternoon. The only dry, sunny spell we were to see in the whole week. A row of hotels faced out towards the cliffs and the sea. They looked grander from the outside than they really were within, with large sash windows, classical columns at the door and tall, whitewashed stone walls. Their front lawns sloped down to the road, cut up by neat gravel paths, manicured and mud-free, despite the rain. Some of the trees were already beginning to blossom, although it was still very cold. Robert breathed in deeply, looking up at the sky, and I followed his gaze, looking at the seagulls circling above them.

  ‘Do you like it here?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Yes,’ he said warmly, taking my hand in his and squeezing it. ‘It is so different from home. It is perfect for our honeymoon.’

  ‘And what is home like?’ I asked, intrigued to hear Robert’s description of his birthplace, something he had never spoken about before.

  He hesitated, and I looked at him, but his face remained in profile and he looked across the road, towards the sea.

  ‘We don’t have houses like yours, for a start,’ he said, and paused, then shook his head. ‘Not where I live, that’s for sure.’

  He began to stride briskly down the street, and I had to almost skip to keep up, my arm swinging against his, and he moved as if he had a purpose, as if we had somewhere in particular to go, although this day each moment was ours to squander as we wished.

  ‘Do you know of a nice place to have tea?’ Robert asked me.

  ‘We could go to the tea rooms in the Morningside. Sometimes Father and I would go together after Min was married. When he was feeling well, he liked me to drive him out here. He said he liked the view from Babbacombe. He
told me the beach was a place that he and Mother used to bring us to when we were small. It was also an excuse for him to give me a chance to practise driving, for Mother did not like me to use the car.’

  ‘Whyever not? I think it grand and terribly modern for you to be able to drive. I cannot think of one girl at home who can drive a car.’

  ‘I think she believed I should be able to find a husband rich enough to afford me a chauffeur,’ I said lightly, and then bit my tongue. How foolish of me to say such a thing. Robert said nothing, only coughed, and I opened my mouth to try to erase what I had said, but found I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘Here we are.’ I pointed at the Morningside. Its tall white walls gleamed in the sunlight. ‘Tea here is just the best,’ I added cheerfully.

  We had dined every night in our hotel, so it was refreshing to be eating somewhere else. We had scrambled eggs and toast, buttered and hot, followed by scones, jam and clotted cream. The tea was piping hot, and strong. We drank two pots.

  ‘Gosh, I had not realized how hungry I was.’ I wolfed a second scone.

  ‘We have been missing meals,’ Robert said quietly, and caught my eye. I licked the cream off my lips, and held his gaze. All my girlish gawkiness had disappeared. I stared back at him, unafraid. I was a wife now. I was allowed to look my husband in the eye, with desire. He was looking at me in a way that made me feel like someone else, like Min, or even my mother – beautiful, although I knew I was not.

  ‘Have you had enough tea, Mrs Fanning?’ He smiled mischievously. He looked to me like a boy of my age, not a man who was old enough to be my father.

  ‘I think so.’ I fingered my gold wedding band and felt my cheeks glow. A swirl of warmth in my belly snaked down to my groin. ‘Will we go back to the hotel?’