by A. B. King
“Only you did ask, and if I fail to answer, you will always wonder.”
“Look, I guess this must be as difficult for you as it is for me,” he answered. “As I have said to you before; it’s none of my business, and I can see only too clearly that satisfying my idle curiosity is not something you would do willingly. If you decide to say nothing, I can only repeat the promise I have already made; I will not raise the subject again, nor will I ever think any the worse of you.”
“Oh, I’ve no doubt you would keep your word,” she responded in an almost ironic tone. “Only human nature being what it is, you would always be wondering. Maybe I shouldn’t care about that, because in a very short while you will be gone from here, and we will never come across each other again, yet I do. Whether I should care or not is beside the point; as someone who has been as straight with me as Dr Marston was, I believe you have a right to know. I have thought about this a lot since you asked me, and for better or for worse, I’m going to give it to you straight whilst I still have the courage to do it. The answer you seek isn’t nice, yet there is nothing I can do about that. Perhaps I am being illogical, I just want you to try to understand about me, why I do what I do, and why I am like I am.”
He could see the effort it was costing her, and his heart went out to the woman who was proposing to bare her soul to a comparative stranger. “June, I am not judgemental, and I promise you that no matter what you tell me I will do my best to understand and to accept.”
She fidgeted in the chair, glanced around the room and then looked directly back at him. “Talking about, well, things, isn’t going to be easy,” she said in a taut voice. “All I ask is that you will allow me to finish before you say anything.”
“Certainly,” he assured her quietly. “You have my word that I will say nothing until you have finished.”
She took a deep breath, took another glance around the room and then directly back at him, and then she commenced.
“Mrs. Collins is my true married name.” She announced it coldly, as if the very name was distasteful to her. She glanced across at the fireplace as if gathering her full determination ready for something that was never going to come easy. For several moments she didn't speak, and Martin wondered if her nerve was failing her at the last moment.
“I half suspected as much,” he commented at last in an effort to encourage her to go on. “I know I promised not to interrupt, and you must forgive me if I incorrectly infer that perhaps your marriage is not as happy as you would like it to be?”
She appeared not to resent his words, instead she suddenly laughed, a short, bitter laugh that had no humour in it at all. “You might well say that,” she agreed, almost as if talking to herself, “Yes, not a bad description of it really, now that I come to think of it.”
She paused, as if still weighing up how best to unburden her mind of whatever it was that was eating away at her.
“Look, are you absolutely certain that you want to know all about me?” she blurted out at last, “I mean, do you really want to know every last sordid detail?”
“June, I repeat, you don’t have to tell me anything,” he assured her. “If it helps, I have the feeling that you have been carrying something around with you for far too long. If you decide that now is the time to get it off your chest, then so be it.”
“Even if it means that you will no longer want me in this house?”
“I’m quite sure that there is nothing you can tell me that would make me wish anything like that,” he said quietly but with firm conviction. “As far as I’m concerned, whatever is past is past; I prefer to make my judgement of people based upon what I have discovered about them for myself.”
“And all that you have discovered about me so far is that I’m living a lie,” she commented bitterly, “and people who live under a false name always have something to hide, isn’t that true?”
“Possibly.”
“I very nearly didn’t come tonight,” she continued after a moment. “If you want the truth, I was very close to packing a case and slipping away without saying anything to you. But that’s a coward’s way, isn’t it? Even now I’m not sure why I didn’t. I suppose I stayed because I knew that you were right; sooner or later I’ve got to talk to someone. I’m doing it, even though I fully expect that by the time I have finished you will never want to speak to me again. I keep asking myself why that fact should bother me; I’m only an employee, and can soon be replaced. You pointed out that we both have to be honest, and I agreed, didn’t I? So I have to tell you that it does matter; in fact it matters very much to me that you should at least know, even if you can neither understand nor accept. Whether you can understand or not it is too late to change my mind now, and you cannot say that I didn’t warn you.”
He sat there watching, trying not to show that her words describing herself as only being an employee had somehow struck deep into him. Quite without realising the gradual metamorphosis in his attitude towards her, he had come to look upon her as so much more than just a housekeeper, and that amplified the mixture of guilt and uncertainty that already seethed within him. So he just looked and waited.
She sat there, with a determined yet vaguely uncertain expression on her face, and he knew that whatever it was she wished to unburden herself of, it was costing her all of her resilience and courage to reveal it.
“Everything I have told you so far about my background is true,” she continued at last. “I have not lied to you in any respect. At the same time neither have I told you everything; no, certainly not everything.”
She eased her position in the chair, and glanced absently round the room once again.
“I suppose it all goes back to the time that I left the children’s home,” she said at last. “Thanks to the training I had received there I was taken on as a general-maid-come-general-dogsbody at one of the local hotels. It wasn’t much of a job; I was at everyone’s beck and call, yet for me it represented my first taste of freedom. Luckily, hard work has never frightened me, and at the end of the day I actually had some money of my own. It was a new sort of freedom I had never known, and it gave me a chance to see life as it really was.
I guess I was unbelievably green in those days and some of the other girls used to laugh at me, but one or two became friends of sorts and with their help I gradually settled in to the life of a lowly hotel house-maid. I imagine I must have given my employers satisfaction because I managed to keep the job, even when some of the others were sacked for various reasons. Being accustomed to hard work for as long as I could remember I automatically kept my nose to the grindstone, so-to-speak, and eventually gained promotion, and with it a bit of extra money. Working in the hotel and catering industry isn’t going to make anyone’s fortune, yet in a way I was quite happy there, and I made sure that the management never had anything to complain of. I was eventually provided with my own room in the staff quarters of the hotel, I acquired some decent clothes for the first time in my life, and for a while I even managed to forget about those long years of abuse in the children’s home.
Looking back on it, I know I was embarrassingly naïve; I really didn’t know much about anything beyond my work. I went out on my days off, yet I wasn’t one for drinking or having a good time; I wanted to save as much money as I could so that one day I could go off and search for my father.”
She paused in her reminiscence, her expression betraying the fact that in her mind she was back in those early days, reliving again what may have been one of her happiest times. Martin watched her, wondering what she was leading up to.
“That was when I met Paul,” she resumed suddenly. “I quite literally bumped into him one day as he came out of his hotel room where he had stayed overnight, and we collided right outside the door. I was knocked off balance, and would have fallen if he hadn’t caught me.”
She essayed a twisted smile, and continued; “Paul was a real charmer. He couldn’t apologise enough for what he claimed was his clumsiness, and in spite o
f all my protests, insisted on buying me a drink when I came off duty. For me, it was love at first sight. I couldn’t believe that such a dashingly handsome man would be the slightest bit interested in very plain and frumpy me. But he was, and I soon became the object of envy of many of my colleagues. He told me that he was an area sales manager for some international corporation; certainly he never seemed to be short of money, and always drove a late model car. He would sometimes disappear for days, sometimes weeks, explaining that it was the nature of his work. Maybe some of it was, but not all the time, as I only discovered very much later. It was a relationship that developed rapidly, and I never had any doubt that we would marry in the near future, and I almost collapsed with happiness when he proposed.
Like I said, I was so incredibly naïve in those days. I had stars in my eyes, and could only see what I wanted to see. Only the signs of an ominous future were there, if only I could have read them at the time. Still, love is blind or so I’m told, and I failed to heed the warnings of my own senses, and even less of my closest friends. Oh yes, I was warned; I was told by more than one person that he was not all that he appeared to be, and fool that I was I thought the girls who tried so hard to warn me were simply jealous! The stories I heard simply didn’t relate to my experience of him, because to me at that time he was in every sense a perfect gentleman. Once we were engaged, matters started to change, yet not alarming so for me because I was still blinded by loves young dream. Very gradually he became increasingly familiar with me, and because we were to be married I accepted this shift in his behaviour as being normal. The odd kiss and cuddle and hands that seemed possessed of a mind of their own, yet he never went as far as attempting to engage in full sexual intercourse. I know this sounds daft and old fashioned in an era when people sleep together at the drop of a hat, you just have to understand that having been reared in the children’s home, and even though I had been raped many times as a child, I still had very outdated ideas on the subject. In my eyes it was a mark of his character that he never once tried to force me to yield to him in this respect. I later discovered to my cost that in this belief that he was a man of honour I was totally deluding myself.
One particular piece of familiarity that should have rung loud warning bells in my mind was that he would use any excuse to tap me with his hand on my backside. It was not vicious in any way, and usually accompanied by a joke or a smile. There never seemed to be any real meaning attached to the gesture, and although at first I found it a bit embarrassing, I came to accept it as just one of those things that were part of his character. Only a matter of a few weeks before the wedding, I had what ought to have been the clearest warning of all. After we had been to a party, we were laughing and joking as we often did, and the mask completely slipped for the first time. We had both had a bit too much to drink, and maybe that was what lay at the root of things. Quite without warning he suddenly threw me over his knee and started slapping my backside, only this time it was much done harder, and it really hurt. It was no longer funny, and even though I begged him to stop he was like a man in a frenzy. Only when I finally managed to get an arm round and claw at his face did he suddenly release me.
He couldn’t apologise enough, claiming that he didn’t know what had come over him because of the amount he had drunk, that he would never willingly hurt me, that he was deeply ashamed that he had upset me, and begging me to forgive him, which of course I stupidly did. If only I had read the signs correctly and backed out while I still had the chance matters might have turned out differently, but of course I didn’t. In due course we were married, and in the run-up to the wedding he was as always Mr Charm himself. I had quite forgotten the slapping incident by the time the big day arrived. I was living somewhere out on cloud nine, culminating in the wedding itself, which was everything a girl could dream of! I thought fleetingly that it was odd that there were no members of his family present; he claimed that they were all dead and that he was as alone in the world as I was. Fool that I am, I swallowed every single lie he told me. As it turned out, I didn’t know the real man behind the charm at all.
The happiest day of my life continued its blissful passage until we finally reached the hotel in Jersey where we were to spend our honeymoon. I should perhaps stress once again that up to that point there had never been total intimacy between us. As I said, I always took it as a mark of his respect for me and my beliefs, because it had never once struck me as unusual that he hadn’t tried to get me into bed. I admit that I was secretly glad about this because the experiences I had suffered in the children’s home had made me only too well aware of the lusts that drive some men, and as much as I loved him I actively dreaded the physical side of marriage. I knew that it was something that I would have to face sometime, and I fooled myself into believing that with a loving, caring tender man, it would be blissful, and completely different from the agony of the rapes I had suffered. I promised myself that even if it wasn’t all that I had hoped for, I would simulate ecstasy for his benefit!
We entered the hotel bedroom quite late, but once the door was closed everything changed. I imagined that I was going to undress and join him in the marital bed, I was even prepared for him to take part in this; by this time I was actually looking forward to the experience, being so completely besotted with the man.”
She paused and looked at him blankly.
“Are you sure you really want to hear all of this?” she asked. “I can stop now if you want?”
She didn’t wait for him to reply before looking quickly away, continuing in a taut voice; “Sorry; guess I’m still trying to ‘chicken out’; having got this far, I have to go on. Anyway, the fairytale world of love and tenderness vanished once we were alone in that room. No sooner was the door closed than he grabbed me without warning, threw me over his knee and proceeded to beat the hell out of me with the flat of his hand. It was nothing like the playful taps he had once used when we were courting; it was hard, vicious, and using all of his strength whilst he held me in such a position that I was virtually powerless to do anything about it. In vain did I cry out with shock and pain, he just struck me harder and harder, and I was helpless in his grip, unable to claw at him as I had done the last time such a thing had happened. Suddenly, when I thought the beating would go on forever he flung me on my back across the bed, and like an animal he tore at my clothes so that he could possess me. It was far, far worse than the rapes I had experienced as a child; He was like an animal, and I thought he had gone mad and that I was going to die.”
She stopped again, and Martin, who was shocked and sickened by her tale, could see the glistening of unshed tears in the corner of her eyes.
“It was the pattern of things to come,” she resumed at last, keeping her eyes averted now. “Having exhausted himself he fell asleep still lying on top of me. I lay there in agony, not daring to move in case I woke him and he started again. Completely shocked, my brain paralysed so that I couldn’t even think of what to do and scarcely believing what had happened, I was as one totally bereft of independent thought or action. All my dreams had been shattered, and only as the shock eased did the awful truth dawn finally on me; I had married a depraved monster! I must have stayed like that for an hour, but it seemed forever, and then he rolled away from me, leaving me in agony, yet too scared to do anything. I spent the whole night frozen with the fear that he would awaken, and the violence would start all over again.
When he finally stirred into wakefulness in the morning he was like a stranger, there was no more simulated love or tenderness visible now. I was his property to do with as he pleased. He held me by the throat and told me if I breathed a single word to a soul about what had happened he would kill me. I could see in his cold hard eyes that he meant it, and from that day I became almost a slave. When other people were around, he was his original charming self, but when we were alone he either ignored me completely, or without warning he once again became a sadistic, inhuman caricature of a man, and I lived in constant fear of him
. I lived in dread of the beatings, always striving not to provoke him, and always failing.
When the ‘honeymoon’, if one could call it that, was over, we returned to a house he had bought on the outskirts of Portsmouth. I desperately wanted to leave him but he was well aware of that, and he took great delight in allowing me to think that I could get away, and each time that I tried he found me and dragged me back, and the beatings grew ever worse. In some ways he was clever, always being careful that the beatings never marking me on the face or limbs. Sometimes it was slapping with his hand across the buttocks until he was too exhausted to continue, and then as often as not I would be raped. Other times he would tie me to the bed frame and beat me across the buttocks and back with a bamboo cane, and this was always administered for what he called my sins! He beat the resistance out of me, so that I could scarcely think about anything other than how to endure the torture of it all. I became too frightened to complain to anyone in case they failed to believe me, and that he would then beat me to death. I felt that I was caught up in a nightmare that would never end. I kept telling myself that I had married for better or for worse, and that given time he might mellow. I gradually lost everything; self respect, independence, even humanity.”
She suddenly stopped talking as she once again lived in her mind the days of horror she had endured. Presently she shook her head, and in a controlled voice she started speaking again.
“As I soon learned,” she resumed, he voice taut with the effort of continuing with what she had determined to do, “people like Paul Collins don’t mellow. I soon discovered that he had a coterie of like-minded friends who shared a common interest in sadistically beating women, and whenever he was away he would arrange for one or more of his cronies to watch me, just as he in turn would watch for others. I came to dread the so-called ‘parties’ he would hold for these friends, for invariably they would end in violence culminating in rape for me once they had left. As I quickly realised, he couldn’t have sexual relations with a woman unless he had first been fully roused by beating her.