by Robin Byron
Andy stands up. ‘I think I’d like to leave now,’ he says. Muttering their acquiescence, they all rise to their feet. She is standing directly opposite him. They look at each other. She is searching for the right words but he speaks first. ‘It’s for the best,’ he says. He looks again at Izzy’s photo. ‘It’s what she would have wanted.’ Marianne takes a step forward and hugs him. He turns away blinking, seemingly embarrassed at his own emotion. And then they are all gone. Marianne sits on the sofa and hugs Callum; she presses her face into his neck and then she is also weeping, for herself and for Isabelle – but also for Andy.
Marianne knew she needed to talk to someone and so the next day she arranged to have a lunchtime sandwich at The Eagle with her friend Dorrie. The day was warm for the end of March and she and Dorrie sat outside in the yard. Dorrie sipped her lager and gazed at Marianne with her kelly-green eyes, while Marianne gave her an abbreviated version of her affair with Larry twenty years earlier and the photos which the blackmailer now had in his possession.
‘For fuck’s sake Marianne – just tell him,’ she said. ‘I mean, that long ago…’
‘It’s different for you.’
‘What – because I’ve gone off men?’
‘Not just that. I mean, you’ve chosen a different way – no commitments… Edward is just so… so moral – I don’t know how he’d react. And the pictures…’
‘Explicit, are they?’
‘You could say that…’
‘Well, my advice is to do nothing. Blackmail is a game of bluff – if the blackmailer has to pull the trigger, then he’s lost.’
‘But then so have I?’
‘Look, I doubt this guy has any experience of the world outside Russia. For all he knows the letter didn’t arrive, or more likely your husband knows all about the affair and you are already having a laugh together about it.’
‘You are probably right, but…’
‘Anyway, you don’t have a choice. If you pay him money, he’ll only come back for more. Even if you get hold of the negatives you don’t know how many prints he may have.’
Marianne looked down at the remains of her prawn sandwich. ‘So I have to sit it out?’
‘What else? Go to the police – there is nothing they can do; and the Russian police? They would probably want their cut of the blackmail price. My guess is that you’ll get a couple more letters then he’ll give up.’
Marianne contemplated Dorrie’s advice as she walked back down a narrow lane towards the river and her own college. The high walls on either side seemed to speak to her sense of entrapment. Not for the first time she cursed her cowardice all those years ago in not confessing everything to Edward. In the years after their return to England, their marriage had been rock solid and Edward was such a kind and considerate man… But now things felt different. Izzy’s death had damaged them both; she suspected that he looked back to the time he had tried to persuade her to have a second child – and the accident that had finally prevented it. Then there was the adoption. Even now he was inclined to criticise her for ‘lying’ about the extent of Andy’s incapacity. God, what a shithole I have dug for myself, she thought.
And so, she waited; and as Dorrie had predicted, another letter arrived a week later which she also ignored. A month passed without any more developments until one Saturday morning Edward walked into the kitchen, holding an envelope addressed to her.
‘No stamp,’ he said. ‘It must have been hand delivered.’
Some student wanting more time, she thought. Really, they should leave these notes for me in college. Tearing open the envelope, she watched as a folded square of paper floated to the ground.
‘Something’s fallen out,’ Edward said, but as he bent down to pick it up, its familiar shape sent a stab of adrenalin down to her fingertips and she made a grab for it first. Holding the folded square in one hand she glanced at the letter, muttered, ‘Usual student nonsense…’ and retreated as casually as she could to the privacy of her upstairs study.
This letter had a more personal flavour than the previous one. The author was arranging for it to be delivered by hand. He was poor – a former servant of the state, now unemployed. She was rich – a fellow at a Cambridge college and successful novelist (hardly, she thought). He didn’t like what he was doing but he had no choice. He would accept £15,000 but this was her last chance. She should write back to the Russian address immediately confirming her consent and she would then receive payment instructions.
The fact that a ‘friend’ of the blackmailer had been to their front door felt uncomfortably threatening and the temptation to pay up was now almost too much for her. She knew that she would be happy to pay if she could be certain that the matter would end there but – as Dorrie reminded her in several phone calls – there could be no such certainty. So once again she let time pass and gradually it seemed that she had successfully called his bluff. She congratulated herself on staying strong and thanked Dorrie for her wise advice.
It was the day before Callum’s sixth birthday and she had just put him to bed after a fraught session with his reading book. So much slower with his reading than Izzy, she thought, and yet his physical coordination never ceased to impress her. He could copy a picture with surprising accuracy and already he was able to play simple tunes using all his fingers on the piano. She was in the final stages of making his birthday cake – an elaborate structure which had to be turned into a medieval castle – when Edward returned to the house.
He looked pale, and her first thought was that he must be sick. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, but he barely looked at her as he went upstairs. She continued her cake construction and a few minutes later he came downstairs again carrying a small hold-all.
‘I’m going out,’ he said.
‘Is something the matter?’
‘Yes – something is the matter,’ and then it happened all over again. Just as the KGB colonel had thrown the photos across the desk to her, Edward reached into his bag, took out a large brown envelope and threw it onto the floor at Marianne’s feet. ‘I daresay you will recognise the scenes,’ he said, before marching out of the front door.
She didn’t need to look inside the envelope, but she did anyway – and then she ran out into the driveway where Edward was getting into his car. ‘Ed – Ed, please… Don’t rush off like this. Please talk to me – I’m sorry, but I can explain.’
‘Explain?’ he said, opening the car window. ‘What is there to explain? Except perhaps my stupidity in trusting you all these years.’
Marianne watched as Edward accelerated out of the drive. Slowly she walked back into the house, hesitated at the bottom of the stairs and then walked up to Callum’s room. Lying on his bed, she stroked his hair while her tears pooled onto the pillow beside him.
Although Edward was back in the house within twenty-four hours he refused to say anything to her and moved his things into the spare room. For days, they didn’t speak, avoiding each other in the house. Edward spent long hours at work, coming back late and going straight to his room. Marianne struggled through her working days, wrestling with her predicament. Forty-eight, getting fat, my only child dead. I have my wonderful grandson but now I may lose my husband. At night it was there again: a round face, blond hair and a squat upturned nose. The bright cornflower eyes staring at her, pale and frightened, before the face began to fade, slipping from her sight like a regretful moon behind a bank of dark and threatening clouds. The worst thing was that now the face sometimes metamorphosed into Izzy and sometimes even Callum. She would wake breathless and run to check on Callum, before returning to her bed and another long and sleepless night.
She was desperate to lance the boil with Edward. There needs to be a row, she thought. He needs to swear at me and let out his anger. Then perhaps we can be reconciled. She knew, though, that Edward was almost incapable of rowing so she had to provoke it herself.
Edward turned from filling the kettle and surveyed her calmly. ‘It’s not so much the affair – that upsets me certainly – but you lied when I asked you directly and you’ve been lying ever since.’
‘That’s a terrible cliché, Ed – it’s also a crappy argument. An affair is a lie – it’s one and the same thing. Successful day’s research, darling? Absolutely, when I wasn’t fucking Larry in the Minsk Hotel.’
‘I didn’t mean those kind – I mean…’
‘You mean when you asked me directly…’
‘Exactly.’
‘It’s all the same. I lied because that’s what people do – to avoid your anger but also to spare you pain. Anyway, it was all over by then. But look – I did regret afterwards that I hadn’t told you the truth, but my denial just spilled out, and then… well… you looked so relieved I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you…’
‘… no lack of opportunity.’
‘Sure – best part of twenty years, but…’
‘I’ve begun to see you as a different person these last few years – the easy way you lie about Andy and Callum – now I realise that’s how you are; you find it easy to deceive people when you want your own way…’
‘Is that how you really think about me – one indiscretion in twenty years and I’ve become a serial liar?’
‘How do I know there weren’t others.’
‘There weren’t.’
Edward shrugged. ‘I’m going to London for a few days,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know when I’ll be back.’
Marianne sat at the kitchen table. I am losing my husband, she thought. It’s absurd – ridiculous, if it wasn’t so tragic… how has this happened? Our perfect marriage destroyed by what? An unimportant affair so long ago it sometimes feels as if I dreamed the whole thing. And Callum; my insistence on adopting our motherless grandchild. How could we have done anything else? Surely this can’t be the end?
She called Dorrie and left a message: ‘Please, please I need to speak to you.’
14
Marianne watched as her sister Claire strolled across the airport concourse towards a fashionable clothes shop; slim, elegant and still with an unmistakably Gallic air, Marianne couldn’t help feeling a stab of jealousy. Claire had made a big fuss the previous year about becoming forty – the sort of fuss people only make when they know that they are a showcase for their age: hey, look at me and admire; still slim and sexy with barely a wrinkle; unbelievable that I could actually be forty! Marianne, on the other hand, felt all of her fifty years and had no wish to advertise her age.
Claire also had the good fortune to be rich, having married a merchant banker who had been in the right place at the right time for the Big Bang of 1986, whilst Marianne had borrowed every penny she could to buy Edward out of his share of the house at the time of their divorce, and then had to convert part of the house to a separate flat to help pay the mortgage.
As they settled into their seats for the transatlantic flight, they talked briefly about the painful circumstances of their trip – their father’s failing health – before Claire turned to the subject of Marianne’s love life.
‘Well?’
‘Nothing doing.’
‘Nothing? No sex since Edward? It must be over two years now?’
Marianne hesitated. She wasn’t about to tell her sister. It was six months after she had parted from Edward. Sunday morning. Callum is staying with his father. She hasn’t slept well, still in her dressing gown, she is sitting up in bed. Dorrie is visiting and has brought her a cup of coffee. Dorrie is comforting her – she leans forward, her red hair falling across her face, and kisses Marianne on the cheek. The kiss turns to a hug and then they are lying face to face on the bed. Dorrie moves closer and kisses her gently on the lips. Shocked by the sudden intimacy, Marianne doesn’t know how to respond. She feels the heat from Dorrie’s body and wants to pull her closer but something prevents her. Dorrie is caressing her – stroking her face, feeling her breasts through her nightie – but Marianne is frozen with indecision. Now Dorrie’s hand feels cool on her bare thigh. She knows she wants to be touched but she does nothing, and says nothing. To her immense relief Dorrie doesn’t stop.
Later that timeless Sunday morning – as it glides deep into the afternoon – she becomes more confident. The touch of skin on skin, the smells and tastes of another body, re-awaken her senses, dormant since Edward threw the manila envelope to her across the kitchen floor. Her anxiety about the scarring across her pelvis subsides – helped by Dorrie’s jokes about her own bodily imperfections. Seldom has the proximity of another person felt so good.
‘No. No men in my life at present.’
‘I still can’t believe that Edward left you because of that affair twenty years earlier in Russia.’
‘I suppose there were some other things around the edges.’
‘Like him not being so faithful himself?’
‘No, no – not at all. Edward wasn’t like that.’
‘Are you so sure? When I stayed with him that time I visited you in Moscow, I overheard some phone calls – I mean, I didn’t like to say anything with you being so badly injured – but I had my suspicions…’
‘I’m sorry, Claire, you don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘OK, if you say so.’
England may be a green and pleasant land, thought Marianne, as she gazed out of the car window, but surely nothing can match Vermont at the end of May for its multiple shades of green, its absurdly luxuriant grass populated by the ubiquitous black and white Holstein cows, the emerald green of the beech trees and the lime green sugar maples. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.’ She had always loved the opening words of that psalm. From the bedroom of her childhood home she could see the distant hills changing colour with the seasons. ‘From whence cometh my help.’ She had misunderstood the psalmist in those days. She didn’t understand why help would come from the hills but perhaps it was because they rose up towards heaven, because they were closer to God.
Sitting in the back seat beside her sister, Marianne watched as the hills gradually disappeared and the Burlington road entered the coastal strip alongside Lake Champlain. While her mother drove them to the hospital with Aunt Edith beside her, Marianne had a sudden recollection of being taken to see her great-grandmother a few days before her death. She remembered how upset she had been to be dragged away from their mountain holiday. When she thought about it now she realised Gran-gran had never been a real person to her – just something old and smelly, sometimes in a chair with a blanket over her knees, other times propped up in bed. Usually she had seemed cross and visits had been intolerably dull. Even her dolls had been more real to Marianne than this old woman.
Visiting her beloved father now would be a wholly different experience. A fit and active man of seventy-five – a retired doctor who hardly ever sought medical advice for himself – he had begun to suffer from sore throats and indigestion. His own doctor diagnosed a virus and prescribed antibiotics. The sore throats didn’t improve, he began to suffer from difficulty in swallowing, saw a specialist, had further tests, and suddenly he had oesophageal cancer; a six-centimetre tumour in the gastro-oesophageal junction.
That diagnosis had been eighteen months earlier. Marianne had flown over to visit and found him in robust spirits, but chemotherapy, an operation, followed by another bout of chemo had taken its toll. Now the only hope was deemed to be a further operation. They had been warned that despite – or perhaps because of – his medical background, he was not
coping well with being a patient. She wished she was seeing him alone, or perhaps just with her mother.
‘When will they operate?’ said Claire, leaning forward to speak to her mother.
‘Tomorrow, I think – they postponed it for a couple of days so you can see him first.’
‘Does that mean they think he won’t survive the operation?’
Marianne watched as her mother flinched at the bluntness of Claire’s question. ‘Don’t be silly, of course he’ll survive – the doctors wouldn’t do it if they didn’t think it would help him. It’s just that… well, he’ll be very weak for a while afterwards.’
The visit to her sick father proved even more difficult than Marianne had anticipated. Confronted simultaneously by his wife, his sister and his two daughters, the suffering man had looked acutely uncomfortable. It was not that he was displeased to see his daughters, Marianne later surmised, but to be seen in this state of vulnerability – hairless, shrivelled, eyes sunk in their sockets, his face a mask of pain and anxiety – was obviously torture to a man who had spent his life curing the sick and being the bedrock for his family.
Marianne longed to throw her arms around him and cry, but somehow the etiquette of the occasion seemed to preclude any overt show of emotion. They made stilted conversation – showed him photographs of their respective children and told him what was happening in their lives – while their mother and Aunt Edith talked as if he would soon be home and cured from this temporary indisposition.
After their visit, Marianne’s mother went to do some shopping with Edith while Marianne and Claire walked from the hospital, past the imposing buildings of the university and down College Street towards the lake, remembering the time when Burlington was the biggest metropolis they had known.