The Adulteress

by Noelle Harrison

  Minerva was never a rash goddess. She is as wise as her father, Jupiter, and she presides over learning, and all the arts, but most importantly she is patroness of those feminine crafts of spinning, sewing and weaving. Did my sister possess some of the qualities of her ancient namesake?

  My mind flashes back to summers we spent in Devon. For hours my sister sat in the harbour in Brixham, watching the women making the fishing nets for their husbands. When we got home Min could not help but pull apart old woolly jumpers and weave them into loose nets. Then we would wear them on our heads and, standing on the beds, with wooden spoons in our hands and a saucepan lid each as a shield, we would imagine ourselves Greek goddesses, tiny Athenes. Bounding between the beds we re-enacted Olympian adventures.

  Daddy said to me, ‘The world of the Ancients will never be dead.’

  He showed me pictures of the ancient buildings in Greece: the Parthenon, and Athene’s palace, and the Colosseum in Rome. Picture after picture of the time when he visited Pompeii. The amphitheatre, the forum, the Temple of Isis. Just looking at the perfect symmetry of these structures made me feel calm inside, as if all was in order. Daddy was like the Classics, impermeable through the flood of time, although his wife was a harpy.

  I heard Daddy call Mother that. Once.

  Have you ever felt the pull of another century? Did you ever consider you might have been born into the wrong age? When I was a girl, I was convinced I was living in the wrong era. I was sure I had fallen into the wrong period. I shirked everything modern. When I was tiny, I thought clothes were stupid and ridiculous. I was forever trying to take mine off, much to Mother’s annoyance. The Hebrews wore too many clothes, as did the Christians, but the Romans and Egyptians ran around naked. As a small child, it made a lot of sense to me.

  When I was older, my sister and I found our secret little cove, where no one could see us or find us, and this is where we danced, emboldened by symphonic crescendos from the foaming sea. We shed our layers, until we were both naked. The challenge was to stop dancing then. To stand facing into the sea, on our pointy toes, held up by the wind, and let it wash over us. Liberation.

  Are we our mother’s daughters?

  How can we know? Mother never let us near her when we were little. She was rejected by her own mother. She was never loved as a little girl, and so how could she know how to love us? The only time I remember her touching me was to correct me – pull my clothes straight, do up a ribbon, brush my hair and scrub my soapy scalp in the bath. But surely there were other times when she caressed?

  I believe Daddy loved Mummy, but she never loved him. She could not sit still. Like a moth around a light she fluttered about him, criticizing everything he said and did until he spoke less and less, until you would see his sorrowful look of compassion turn cold and redden into rage. She forced him to take to the bed to hide from her. It was her fault he could not get up out of it. When she left him for Giovanni Calvesi, he finally knew for sure that she could not love him, and so he took to drink for comfort. And soon alcohol usurped her place in his heart. Isn’t this what happened? Don’t you think it was my mother’s fault?

  Yet if my father had loved Mother, don’t you think he should have fought for her? What do you think, Nicholas Healy? Could a man like my father forgive an adulteress?

  Daddy had us, his daughters, but he forgot about our love. Yes, the love of your child is a lot, but it is still not enough. You can have a hundred children, all loving you, all needing you, and still feel terribly alone.

  I sit in your damp house in Cavan (it is still damp despite all your renovations) looking out at a dead day, so grey it seems the sun never got up. I think about Mummy for once. How must it have been for her when we were away at school? Those silent autumnal evenings in the house in Torquay, with Father in the study for hours, reading and drinking, or else taken to the bed, and no one to talk to, nothing to do. She never had a career, and now she was no longer needed as a mother. So what was she to do? Just fall away each year like a leaf off a tree, just hibernate inside their crumbling old house and wait for summer to come again, or would she choose to ride out into the unknown? We both know the answer.

  I close my eyes, and back to my youth I go again. Oh, sweet, sweet memories of my sister and I, blissful in our innocence and companionship. I remember the rocks in Bude. It is the first day of the summer holidays, and I drive Min and I across Devon. We park the car in Bude and climb the hill overlooking the cove. We lie on our backs in the long grass. We can see the curvature of the earth as we lie there. The dome of the sky above our heads, like a blue hood protecting us. As I lie and doze, my sister must have sat up again, because when I awoke she was painting in her little black sketchbook, using her tiny set of watercolours that Father had given her for her birthday.

  ‘See,’ she said, handing me the sketchbook.

  I looked down at the small watercolour. Min had painted two boulders, which glistened at the edge of the cove, right beneath the pink sunset. Both were donkey-grey and smooth, as if they were the backs of whales. They had similar shapes – two perfect ovals – yet one was twice the size of the other. The small stone was riding on the back of the large one. Underneath the rocks Min had written ‘Mother and Child’. We looked at each other. In a pinprick of recognition, we both knew we felt envious of the small boulder. To be carried on the back of its mother was a comfort we had never known.

  THE ADULTERESS VIII

  She doesn’t go straight home. It was so hard to leave, knowing it would be the last time they kissed until when? Possibly forever. Her throat is dry and sore at the thought she might never see her artist again, this man who treasures her in a way her husband never seems to. He told her he was infatuated with her. He dreams paintings of her. She is his muse.

  She cannot cry. Even at the last, as she walks down his rickety stairs, all the way to the bottom, and can feel his eyes on her back, she doesn’t break down. Her lips move in a wordless prayer, some magic cast from within her to protect him. He will not die because he is not a soldier. He is merely a war artist, an observer rather than a participant in the violence that will surround him.

  ‘Is this the end of our affair?’ she asked him, finally, as she put her coat back on, adjusted her hat. She tried to sound coquettish, carefree, but he saw through that.

  ‘Dear Minerva,’ he said kindly, taking her gloved hands into his. ‘I will always love you.’

  She holds these words proudly to her chest. She has to clutch them, grasp them, although she is not sure whether she believes them, because hadn’t she said the same thing to Charles the day they got married?

  The tears are caught in her throat, like small, perfectly round stones, and her face gleams with a false brightness. She walks the charred streets of London, through ruined squares full of detritus, sudden yawning chasms of light where buildings once stood, and fragments of glass littered on the pavement like particles of ice. She imagines she is no longer in this wasteland, but somewhere else, a city at the height of its power, full of life, and heaving with every exotic sight, sound and aroma from the four corners of its empire. She closes her eyes, hears birdsong again, the laughter of children, and voices of other women who live freely like her.

  She walks into the city, all the way to Euston, and then down Gower Street, straight and narrow as a Roman road. She goes to the pictures, barely taking in the film at all, but crying in the dark, blinded by tears and heartbreak.

  Afterwards she sits in a small tea shop and drinks tea. She wishes June were there, remembering the huge teas they shared in Lyons’ Corner House, competing over who managed to pile the most cream onto her scone. And it is in this moment of remembering her old self, with her better half, June, that she decides she can no longer live her deception. Once she had asked her sister whether she should leave Charles. She had followed June’s advice that day, but now she realizes her sister had been wrong. She will return home and confess all to Charles, tell him everything. It is the decent thing
to do. He is a good man and he deserves better. They will divorce, and after the war maybe she and her artist could go to America and start a new life.

  Min stops dead in the street, startled by the sudden knowledge that her mother had been a better woman than her, for she had not deceived her husband as Min had, but had left him swiftly, as soon as she had met Giovanni Calvesi. But what about all the other men, before her Italian lover: had she not played adulteress with them? She longs for her mother to explain to her the vagaries of the human heart.

  By the time Min arrives at the Underground station at Russell Square it is already dark, and people are beginning to gather on the platform with blankets and pillows for the night. She pictures Charles sitting in his armchair at home, glass of black-market whiskey in one hand, his walking stick by his side. He doesn’t need it, but he has taken to bringing it with him when they go out. Although he never admits it, she knows he is embarrassed that he looks able-bodied and yet is not in uniform. There he is. Charles staring into the fire, at the hot embers, cursing his invalidity, never seeing her, never listening.

  She turns the final corner and walks the familiar steps to her front door. It is a dark, moonless night, and the wind rustles through the ash tree in the front garden. It makes her shiver, although it is not cold.

  All the lights are on. This is the first thing she notices. Charles is so particular about keeping the house as dark as possible, as if this might save it from the bombs. But tonight the blackout curtains are not drawn. She opens the door, still missing the welcoming sound of Lionel’s barks, although he has been gone over three months now. Ever since the bombing started the animal had been terrified, shaking and whimpering in fear every night. She lost him during one of the first raids. She had been standing at the back door, watching the fireworks from the bombing down at the docks one night, and he had flown through her legs and out the back, across the garden and into the hedge. She had called and searched for hour upon hour, ignoring the sirens herself, but to no avail. Lionel had simply disappeared. It had upset her terribly, as much as one of the miscarriages.

  Min hurries into the front room, her body suddenly tense with apprehension. The grate is still full of ashes from last night’s fire, and up on the mantelpiece, instead of their wedding photograph, is the painting. She screams in shock as she stares at her portrait, the image even more ethereal and ghostlike than it had been a few hours ago in her artist’s studio. The bright electric light in the room creates a glare off the still-wet paint, so that the pink blouse now looks gaudy, and her hair is as black as a witch’s.

  Min runs up the stairs, two at a time.

  ‘Charles!’ Her voice has the same urgency as the siren.

  In the bathroom, her domain of lost babies, she finds him. She drops on her knees in front of her husband, the breath knocked out of her. She reaches up and touches his bare foot. It is still warm.

  The art of death can be as beautiful as the art of love. The doorway creates a frame around the central composition of a woman dressed in a rose-coloured blouse and grey woollen skirt, blood-red glove in one hand, the other discarded on the black-and-white floor, kneeling before the surrendered body of her husband. A Renaissance Deposition.

  JUNE

  Two letters arrive this morning. Sean Tobin brings them from the village, the tip of his nose blue, puffing out steam from his mouth, unable to look me in the eye as he hands them to me.

  It is a foggy morning, a clean white frost layering each wizened leaf, ringing the lawn, pure and perfect. You could almost think you were in a heavenly place.

  I go back into the house, and Oonagh stands at the stove, motionless, looking at me. I sit down at the table holding the two envelopes between my trembling hands. One is a letter from Robert, and one is an official envelope.

  ‘Oh, Oonagh,’ I whisper hoarsely.

  ‘Open it,’ she says emphatically. ‘Just open it, June.’

  I know which one she means.

  And this is how it begins: We regret to inform you . . .

  Robert’s plane was shot down somewhere over France. He is missing in action, along with the rest of his crew. That is all they know. There is so little information in the letter. I want to know where in France. I want to know did they bail out in time? I want to know who was with him, what he said, was he very, very afraid? I want to know did he save the others first, is he a hero? I begin to shake. Oonagh quickly hands me a cup of tea. It is strong for once, hot and sweet, and although it scalds the inside of my mouth, it brings me back to life, a little.

  ‘He is missing in action,’ I say to her, fingering the other letter between my hands. ‘His plane was shot down over France.’

  ‘So he could be all right?’ she asks hopefully.

  ‘I suppose.’

  I look away from her face, and her expression of optimism. I cannot bear it. I stare out of the window at the orchard, the fog still heavy and dense, and feel a dreadful sense of fate. Have I brought this on myself? Is this my punishment for not loving my husband enough?

  I put the other letter down on the table and get up.

  ‘Are you not opening Robert’s letter?’ Oonagh stands guard over it at the table.

  I walk to the door and take my coat off the peg. ‘I can’t, Oonagh,’ I say, my voice trembling. ‘I couldn’t bear to, not at the moment.’

  ‘Of course.’ She nods her head sympathetically. How can I tell her it is the lack of emotion in Robert’s letter that will break my heart. It will be what he doesn’t say, rather than what he does. I do not think I could stand to read another short, bald page on what they were eating and the dances he had been going to, not now I know they are possibly the last words he wrote to me.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Oonagh asks nervously, watching me put on Robert’s old coat.

  ‘I need to go for a walk.’ I turn around, shoving my hands into the pockets.

  She looks at me, and I can see her concern, and it surprises me how close we have become, although we have only known each other a few months.

  ‘Don’t worry, I think Robert will be fine,’ I say slowly, to convince myself as well as her. ‘I can feel it.’

  But I can’t, not really, and there is a howling face inside my belly, and I know I have to get outside, just breathe in the stiff, tart air of the frozen woods.

  I go to Robert’s orchard first. His field of dreams, and I touch each apple tree one by one.

  ‘Tell me,’ I whisper, ‘is he alive?’

  But the orchard is dying. Most of the trees are bare, looking older than their years, twisted as if they would wish to crawl back into the earth. The fog refuses to rise and draws me into its void. I pick one lost apple off the ground, ringed in frost, and put it in my pocket. I open the gate and enter the woods.

  Another wife might go to church, light a candle, get down on her knees and pray. But I have never believed much in God. I was reared to follow the Catholic religion, and was always aware of being different from most people in England. I was proud we were not like the others. But our religion made our sins bigger, and although I went through the motions, I felt I had never had a conversation with the Christian God. When I began to study the Roman gods and goddesses, then I could begin to understand divinity. My awe of the ocean as a child was veneration for Neptune, and so nature was the means by which my spirit could be inspired, and the answer to my prayers.

  I go to my little valley in the woods, what Oonagh calls a fairy ring. She says there are nymphs that live in the woods, tiny celestial beings. I prefer to think the magic one feels are the tree-souls themselves.

  I sit on a fallen tree, shivering with cold and shock, holding my sides, my eyes squeezed tight. I try to summon a picture of Robert in my mind’s eye. Wouldn’t I just know if he is dead or alive? Wouldn’t I feel it? I have never wished so hard for my sister Min to be there with me, holding my hand, and comforting me. I believe I have never felt so completely alone in my whole life. I put my hand on my stomach. Inside me is a
part of Robert. I gulp, terrified, for if I cry I might never be able to stop. Instead I open my eyes, focus on the intricate lacings of cobwebs, bejewelled with dew. Such spinning takes my breath away, the beauty of it, and nowhere a spider to be seen. I think about Arachne’s weaving contest with Minerva, and how this mortal hanged herself in shame at challenging a goddess. Minerva brought her back to life and made her a spider, spinning for all eternity. I think our lives are like spider’s webs – each lifetime we experience one more loop. Could we scamper along the sticky thread and move between the ages? I touch the fragile net, for here I am at one point on the web, and if I touch it over the other side, here I am nearly two thousand years earlier. Sometimes I think we live our future lives first, only to return to the past.

  A twig snaps, and for one ridiculous moment I think it is my sister Min, come at last. I turn round and Phelim Sheriden is standing before me. I start, looking at the vision of him above me, his red hair vivid against the white sky, as if the sun is beginning to break through the fog.

  ‘June,’ he says softly, ‘I heard.’ He sits down next to me on the tree.

  ‘I thought you were joining up,’ I say flatly, looking away.

  ‘You asked me not to.’

  I turn on him angrily. ‘I am a married woman, what in God’s name do you think you are doing?’

  He takes my gloved hand, but I pull it away.

  ‘I know what it’s like,’ he says gently.

  I look at him, comprehending. He is thinking of Claudette, but it is not the same thing.

  ‘Robert is not dead!’ I stand up and shout at him, immediately afterwards bursting into tears. It should be Phelim who is crying, I keep thinking, but his face is serene and his eyes are the colour of liquid mercury as he steps forward, puts his arms around me. I cannot pull away.