by Clare Clark
I wish I could tell you this instead of writing but it is too soon. This way is better, I think. When a mother dies, her child’s father is his next of kin. Until he marries. When he marries, that person is his wife.
In the summer of 1899, I met Joachim. You know this part of the story. I loved him, or wanted to. Joachim was so stubbornly, unyieldingly free and I wanted to be free too. You see, for a long time I had loved a man who could not love me back and I was tired of it, angry with myself and with him. Anger made me reckless. When I told him Joachim had proposed marriage he asked for a week. One week to say goodbye. When it was over he went back to his wife and I went to Paris.
I never regretted it. How could I? There was you. And no one was hurt. Joachim never knew, never even suspected. Why would he? You were like him in so many ways. You were like them both. They say a mother has an instinct for these things. Perhaps some do. As you grew up there were times when I believed that I knew, that I knew beyond doubt, but I have noticed, as I grow old, that what we see depends mainly on what we look for. Truth alters with the light. The only certainty is that we can never be certain. We must choose what to believe. In my mind you will always have two fathers.
And you? It is for you to decide. Perhaps you will choose to choose, perhaps like me you will find you cannot. It is nobody’s business but yours. Joachim is dead. As for the other, he is married with children of his own and a master at seeing what he wants to see. We have never spoken of it, not once, but I wonder if he wonders. He has been very kind. There would be worse fathers to have than Aubrey Melville.
38
The knock on the door was tentative, a maid’s knock. He groaned, drawing the covers over his head. His head ached and his eyes felt raw beneath his eyelids. He turned over, trying to burrow back into sleep. The motion made his stomach pitch. He thought he might be sick. He pulled the pillow over his head, willing himself back towards unconsciousness.
All night the thoughts had squirmed and coiled, swallowing their own tails. Joachim Grunewald was his father. Fatherhood was not biology. Fatherhood was shaving soap in the bathroom and German lullabies and the same unlaced pair of boots tipped on their sides at the bottom of the stairs when you came down in the mornings. It was Oscar’s first conscious memory, reaching up to hold his father’s hand as they crossed the road, the impossible size and slipperiness of his leather-gloved fingers. His father’s hands were square with thick fingers and square nails, a potter’s hands, not a pianist’s. Oscar had inherited his mother’s narrow palms, her long tapered fingers. The rod-shaped structures in a cell’s nucleus known as chromosomes were the basis for all genetic inheritance. The association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reduction division constituted the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.
His mother was wrong. You could not choose. Dr Mallinson, who lectured on human biology, had been very clear on that. Chromosomes were independent entities that retained their independence even in the resting nucleus. He had written it on the blackboard. The genes they contained could not be altered. A single sperm fertilised an egg to form a zygote and within that zygote were contained all the patterns and parameters of the infant’s essential self, the blueprint for the person to come. A foetus did not alter because another man stroked the swelling belly and called himself Father. The cells divided and multiplied as they were determined to do, in strict accordance with the genetic code laid down inside each nucleus. A single sperm. You were your biological father’s son. And sexual relations with a sister, even a half-sister, was incest and morally repugnant. The children of incestuous relationships were born deformed, idiotic, mad.
There would be no children. Phyllis did not want children and she knew how to make sure they did not come. Phyllis, whose touch convulsed him with desire, who moaned softly, her back arching, as he ran his tongue over her neck and her breasts and her belly, as he slid his fingers between her legs. Who smiled very slowly, her grey eyes on his as she pushed him backwards on to the rug and sat astride him, engulfing him in electrical currents of such intensity that he thought he would die of it. The aftershocks echoed in his pelvis, at the root of his cock, and immediately he hardened, swelling and tightening. He closed his eyes, fumbling with the cord of his pyjamas, imagining pushing his cock inside her, so deep inside her that they neither of them existed without the other and there was no knowing where he ended and she began. Cock was Phyllis’s word. Fuck too. The bluntness of the words aroused him. His hand moved more frantically as he sucked his fingers, smelling her, tasting her. He was so hard he thought he might split. Tasting his sister. With a strangled cry he turned over, crushing himself painfully in his fist. There were tears in his eyes.
His sister. What kind of monster wanted to fuck his own sister?
His half-sister. Perhaps not even that. A week, his mother said. A single week, but she had gone to Paris with Joachim Grunewald. They had spent months there together. Phyllis was not his sister. If Phyllis were his sister, he would have known. It would have changed things. He could never have loved her as he loved her if he were her brother. Or Jessica, he thought, a fragment of the old dreams flickering faintly in his memory, but he stamped it out. He would not think about that. To love your sister, to desire her, it went against nature, against all that was right. He was not a wicked person.
Besides, they would have looked alike, wouldn’t they? He did not look like Phyllis, not in the least. Just as Phyllis did not look in the least like Jessica. Theo and Jessica had always resembled one another with their tilted eyes and their long limbs and their goldenness, but Phyllis did not look like either of them. Every human child carries two copies of the same gene, one from each parent, but in many cases only one copy produces a trait while the action of the other is masked. Mendel’s ratio is three to one. Sir Aubrey’s brother was a great scientist. Joachim Grunewald was a composer. Oscar had shown no aptitude for the piano but there was a strong correlation, long documented, between music and mathematics. Oscar had loved mathematics once.
In the darkest part of the night he went downstairs for whisky. A light burned outside Sir Aubrey’s room but the door was closed. He took the stairs at a run but the thoughts still came with him, coiling and twisting in his head. He could not make them stop. They could still make a life together, couldn’t they? Phyllis would not care. She did not want to be married. They could live in separate houses, in separate cities. They could meet as they had always met, secretly, in hotel rooms and under willow trees. No one would ever have to know. Phyllis would never have to know. When he was at school a man had been discovered living in wedlock with his sister. The other boys were almost as outraged as the halfpenny newspapers. They declared him disgusting, perverted, desperate, no better than a dog. When the man was sentenced to three years in prison they were furious. They wanted him hanged.
He drank his whisky in the dark, one hand on the drinks table to steady himself. The taste made him gag. He poured himself another. For as long as he could remember Eleanor Melville had surrounded herself with admirers. People murmured about her, when they thought the children were not listening. They said she should be more discreet. Who was to say that she, like his mother, had not had her affairs? Was that why Phyllis was not like them? Perhaps Phyllis’s father was not Sir Aubrey at all but someone else entirely. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
The only certainty is that we can never be certain. His mother had invited him to choose and he would choose. He would choose to forget. He would burn his mother’s letter and turn back the clock to a time before, when there was no letter and his father was Joachim Grunewald. This time he would not go to London. He would not sit in Mr Pettigrew’s office and ask him for the poesy rings. Mr Pettigrew would do whatever it was he did when Oscar had not come to see him and the letter would remain where it was, fastened with a paper clip to the cover of his file in its envelope with his name typed on the front.
He was Joachim Grunewald’s son.
That was how it was, how it had always been. Oscar Greenwood. Oskar Grunewald. Times changed. His father was dead, his mother too. It was no business but his own. I wonder if he wonders. He has been very kind. Sir Aubrey knew when he was born. He had mastered the principles of basic arithmetic. Was that why he had sent Oscar the letters, the photographs of Ellinghurst, why he wanted him here as he was dying? Was that why he had given Oscar his brother’s books, because somewhere in his heart he believed he was his son? Well, he could believe all he liked. He could not know. No one could. You might as well toss a coin, heads or tails. Best of three. Of five. Of nine hundred and ninety-nine. Unless there was something in Oscar he recognised, some trait or distinction that revealed him, that gave him away.
What would Sir Aubrey say if he knew about him and Phyllis?
He sloshed more whisky into his glass and swallowed it down. Forget the letter, he told himself, but he already knew it was hopeless. There could be no forgetting. The possibilities wormed through the white noise of the alcohol and into the lobes of his brain, devouring, defecating, depositing their disgusting eggs. Multiplying and multiplying, a slimy white writhe of grubs burrowing into the dark folds, fattening themselves on his fears. Sir Aubrey was his father and Phyllis, Phyllis whom he loved with every cell in his body, Phyllis was his sister. It was not love. It was genetics. Every cell in his body was marked with her because contained in the nucleus of every cell was his father’s chromosome. His father’s and hers.
Two fools in a tub.
His bedroom door opened. He heard the faint protest of the hinges. He did not know how long he had slept. It felt like only moments but perhaps it was days. Perhaps the maid had been sent to see if he was dead. He was not dead, not yet. His brain was waking and already the thoughts were stirring, stretching their snake bodies, darting their venomous snake tongues. He pressed his face against the pillow. He heard the pad of feet.
‘Oscar?’
He lifted his head. The movement hammered through his skull, sending a wave of nausea through him. Phyllis stood beside the bed in her nightdress, her hair rumpled, her face pale in the curtained gloom.
‘May I get in?’ she asked. He did not answer. The sickness churned in his stomach, oily waves rising in his throat. Throwing back the blankets he pushed past her and vomited violently into the basin on his washstand. He swallowed, his head throbbing, the lumps catching in his throat before it convulsed him again, vomit splashing against the porcelain. She murmured to him, her hand on the back of his neck, stroking his hair. His stomach heaved a third time. Exhausted and empty, he leaned over the basin. The pain pounded dully in his skull and clamped the back of his eyeballs, digging in its nails.
‘Here,’ she said, putting a tooth glass in his hand. ‘Drink this.’
The water tasted of metal and dust. She took the glass from him. Then, covering the vomit-spattered basin with a towel, she carried it to the door and slid it out into the corridor. There was a key in the keyhole. She turned it and, taking his hand, led him gently back to bed.
‘Shove up,’ she murmured. He knew he should not let her do it, that there was a raging mob of reasons why she should not be allowed to do it, but they were too many and too loud and his head ached so that he could barely swallow, so he only closed his eyes as she climbed in beside him, pulling the blankets up over them, and when she tucked herself into the curve of him his arm moved reflexively to encircle her, holding her against him like an amulet, to ward off evil.
When he woke she was lying propped on one elbow beside him, watching him. She had drawn back the curtains and in the pale grey light of morning her eyes were almost blue. She smiled at him tentatively, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, and his heart dropped inside him, like a stone dropped in a well. He closed his eyes, pressing his hand to his forehead.
‘Good morning,’ she said softly. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I . . . I’m not sure.’
‘You deserve to feel awful. How much did you drink, anyway?’
‘I don’t know. Lots.’
‘I thought you didn’t like whisky.’
‘It was . . . medicinal.’
Her laugh was rueful, like a sigh. ‘I’m sorry. I avoided you yesterday, I know. I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t know what to do, what to say. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.’ She reached across the bed and took his hand, plaiting her fingers in his. He did not resist. He looked at their hands, their entwined fingers, and he thought of Jessica and Phyllis at the lunch table, Phyllis weeping silently, her shoulders hunched away from him like a shield.
‘What time is it?’ he asked.
Phyllis glanced at the alarm clock on the bedside table. ‘Half past eight.’
‘We should get up,’ he said but she shook her head.
‘Not yet. We have to talk.’
A sudden surge of panic swept through him. He twisted around to see his mother’s letter lying where he had dropped it, among the clothes strewn on the chaise at the bottom of the bed. He wanted to leap up, to bury it, burn it, to cram it in his mouth and swallow it whole. He made himself look away.
‘You’re not going to be sick again, are you?’ Phyllis said, making a face. He shook his head. ‘Look, I want to say this, I want to say it all, and I want you to promise you won’t interrupt me until I’m finished. Do you promise?’
His head throbbed, too heavy for his neck. Even his breath was cement, weighing down his lungs. He thought of Sir Aubrey in bed, his mouth sagging open, his too-big tongue lolling in his mouth. ‘All right,’ he said.
Phyllis took a deep breath. She did not look at him. ‘It may be too late, I mean, I understand if it’s too late, but I was wrong. When I said I wouldn’t marry you. You see, the thing is, well, you know I never wanted to be married, the idea of being someone’s wife, it’s always felt like a kind of death, a terrible slow lifetime of dying, but coming back here, seeing you, for the first time I really understand what it means, that I would have to live my whole life like this, without you, pretending it doesn’t matter, and, you see, that’s a kind of death too, or anyway a deadening, and I . . . I’m not sure I can do that.’
She faltered but before he could say anything she shook her head. ‘Let me finish. When you asked me to marry you it terrified me. I know you thought it was because of you but it wasn’t. It wasn’t even the marriage part, or not only that. My father . . . a few months ago, my father told Jessica and me that he wanted to leave Ellinghurst to one of us. The title would go to Cousin Evelyn but the house, the house would go to whichever one of us married first. When you asked me to marry you all I could think of was Ellinghurst, of the walls rising higher and higher, incarcerating me. The thought of it . . . it was impossible. It was as though I couldn’t breathe. But marriage isn’t Ellinghurst. I see that now. I don’t want to be married, I never have, but I want to spend the rest of my life with you. And if that means marrying you, then all right, yes, I’ll marry you. I’ll be your wife. There’s only one condition, my father cannot know. You have to promise me that. I can’t be happy here, Oscar, even with you. If we are stuck here I will suffocate, I’ll make us both wretched. I have to be able to go on with my work. You know that, don’t you? You’ve always understood that, you would never expect me to be a housewife arranging flowers and plumping cushions, I know you wouldn’t, it would make you as miserable as it would make me. We can be ourselves, can’t we, and still be married? Ourselves, separately and together. Marriage itself isn’t anything, it’s the stupid conventions that make it so, and neither of us have ever given a straw for conventions, have we? So, yes, Oscar, I’ll marry you. You can’t tell anyone, not a soul, but when Father is gone and all this business of the house is finished and done with I’ll marry you. If you still want to, that is, if I’m not too late. Tell me I’m not too late?’
He stared at her. There was a pain in his breastbone, as though someone had split it with a knife, but it was a good pain, a strong pain, and when he swallowed, the muscles of his thro
at and his oesophagus contracted, compressing the wild horrors of the night until they were nothing but a sharp black stone inside him. Joachim Grunewald was his father. He had chosen. It was nobody’s business but his own.
‘You’re shaking,’ she said, smiling awkwardly, and he realised that he was. ‘I don’t suppose a marriage proposal is the best cure for a hangover.’
‘I don’t know.’
Her smile spread, pushing up into her cheeks, creasing the corners of her eyes. ‘So what do you say? Will you let me marry you after all?’
Tears prickled his eyes. He blinked them back. ‘Only if you promise never to tell anyone,’ he said and she laughed and he seized the silk counterpane that covered the bed and flung it back so that it fell over the chaise. Then he held out his arms.
‘Come here,’ he said and he wrapped his arms around her, holding her against him, and all that mattered was her mouth and her tongue and the warmth of her against him, the softness of her.
He had never loved her so much or so completely. She was his, to have and to hold, for ever and ever. He closed his eyes as she wound her fingers in his hair, mashing his face against hers, her tongue urgent, her teeth catching his lips. When she turned her head, her tongue tracing his ear, his jawbone, the side of his neck, he touched her cheek, guiding her mouth back to his, but she slid downwards out of his embrace, her fingers tugging at the buttons of his pyjama jacket, her tongue circling his nipples, tracing the raised curve of his ribcage.