“No. No. I would never even have told you about her, but she said she’d tell you that lie. She’s been pursuing me, harassing me since the stabbing.”
“I’m dying here, Richard. You have to tell me the truth. I have to know the worst now or I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“I didn’t sleep with her. That’s the truth.”
“But what she’s doing, that’s crazy. Did she know she was your daughter?”
“She was pretty sure. Then she got the confirmation. Just a short while ago.”
“God, it’s too awful to contemplate, to do something so … so … unthinkable.”
Carol paced across the room and back, bumped into a chair, walked again in what seemed like a trance, and when she looked at Richard once more, her eyes were bright with revelation, wide and accusatory. She spoke slowly, with menacing emphasis. “You kissed her, Richard. I saw you — don’t forget.”
“I could never forget that.” He thought of the torment Carol’s letter had caused him after that kiss.
“Something more must have happened,” Carol said. “To make her want to lie like that. To make her want to ‘pursue’ you. You must have done something to encourage her. Yes, you must have.”
“Carol, no, I didn’t encourage her. I’m telling you the facts.”
She moved closer, put her face an inch from his. “You’re lying. I can tell when you’re lying.”
He smelled the sourness of her breath, the smell of her anguish. He grasped her shoulders and she pulled away sharply.
“You did sleep with her. Tell me, goddamn it. Tell me.”
“I kissed her. Once. That was all. Before I knew who she was.”
“Once. Once more, you mean? Besides the kiss I saw at your apartment? I don’t think once was enough for you. You wanted her, didn’t you?” She looked at Richard so fiercely that he turned away, and then she let out a wail that brought Frances running in. “You wanted her!” Carol screamed, dashed at Richard, and pounded her fists against his chest.
Frances pulled her away with some difficulty as Carol tried to hit Richard again, and took her to the kitchen. Richard went out into the garden.
When Frances found him he was leaning his head against the garage wall. It was raining and his shirt was soaked.
“You should really be on a blasted moor, roaring and tearing out your hair,” Frances said. “More Shakespearean. Come now. Come with me.”
He let Frances guide him back into the house and upstairs to his bed, let her help him out of his wet clothes, accepted a sleeping pill. He felt as limp and passive as a sick child, all the fight gone out of him.
When Frances returned to the kitchen, Carol said, through hiccups, “What am I going to do?”
“Nothing, for now.”
“How can I live with this?”
“You will.” Frances poured them each a cup of tea, sat down. Both women were quiet for a while. A drop of snot was about to run into Carol’s mouth. Frances reached for a paper towel, leaned across and wiped Carol’s face.
“Stop treating me like a child!” Carol said.
They were both quiet again. Carol took a gulp of tea.
“Are you still seeing that psychologist?” Frances asked.
“Yes.”
“Go and talk to her.”
Carol gaped, eyes wide. “Talk about this? To a stranger?”
“I’m sure she’s heard worse.”
“Shit, who do you think you are: Mother Teresa? I have to get out of here. I can’t stand this, can’t stand your fucking reasonableness. Couldn’t you just cry with me or something? Fucking hell.”
Carol charged to the front door, Frances following. “I’ll call you a taxi; you’re too upset to drive.”
Carol slammed her car door, shouted from the window, “Fucking leave me alone!”
March 2012
Carol,
Michel Houellebecq, the French writer, had a character called Michel Houellebecq in one of his novels, whom he killed off. I decided to do the same, to kill off Richard Wilson for your delectation. Hence the following short story, set in Victorian England, which I’ve written just for you. Perhaps you’ll know why I chose this setting. Do you remember telling me you’d heard about a Victorian feminist who’d talked of a particularly dire consequence that could befall a man if he were to regularly, and for many years, frequent the same prostitute?
Here, then, is my story:
My Dire Transgression
My name is Richard Wilson and the story that follows is true. I am what my friends and acquaintances would have deemed a respectable citizen, a merchant in the city of London. I thought myself such a man as well, until the very foundation of my pride was shattered and my moral self was darkened with the foul stains of sin and shame.
I’ve had the usual habits, the same ones as most of my peers, which none of us thought of as vices: the occasional overindulgence in wine; the card games in which reckless losses sometimes occurred. And most of us visited ladies of pleasure regularly, some more frequently than others. I’ve not been excessive in this, but I became a widower when I was thirty-five and never had the inclination to marry again, so I sought satisfaction elsewhere.
Many a pretty lady had attended to my needs, and I treated each one with kindness. O, dear reader, I meant no ill. “How atone, Great God, for this which man has done?” Thus Rossetti spoke in his poem to the fallen Jenny, and thus I speak to those I wronged.
I fear atonement is not possible for me, only a cowardly escape.
My great sin against two of the fair sex (for it’s false to say these women of the night are any less fair than their luckier sisters) and my sin against all that’s holy began with my visits, eighteen years ago, to a house in Notting Hill, to a room as warm and welcoming as its lovely occupant, Mary. Over the course of six months, I saw her several times, taking to her wine and sweetmeats, and once a lovely piece of jonquil silk for her to have fashioned into a gown — this silk from my own warehouse, for I’m an importer of fine fabrics.
Then one night when I went to her lodgings, her landlady greeted me, saying, “Oh, Mr. Wilson, sir, I’m afraid Mary has gone of a sudden to the country, having taken poorly.” She had left no forwarding address.
I see now that I should have looked for her, but it wasn’t something a gentleman would do. She was neither my mistress, nor my betrothed, and had left me no message of farewell.
I enjoyed the company of other women over the years, some almost as beautiful as Mary, but none as gentle or as sincere in word and gesture. But I soon ceased to think of her. One of my paramours, plump, with coarse hair and a ruddy complexion, was nevertheless inventive in her art. Step by step she drew me up, taking me ever higher to a perfection of release. Words, sometimes sweet, sometimes rough, were her scaffolding. A clever architect of love. Then, after I’d known her for a year, she too left the brothel, and I heard a few months later that she’d died delivering a stillborn child.
I learned what had happened to Mary these many years later from the sad, broken lady herself. I would wish that I had never learned it, but not knowing would have heaped sin upon sin, and so I must be, in a small way, grateful, for it makes possible this confession.
Mary found herself with child and wrote to her sister to beg for help. Her sister’s husband, a farmer, agreed to take her in on the condition that she give her baby away as soon as it was born. “I’ll not have your bastard child here,” he said. Mary was to earn her keep by cooking and cleaning and tutoring her niece and nephew, for she was clever with reading and sums.
Delivered of her baby girl, whom she named Ida, she was most heartbroken at the prospect of giving her away. She pleaded with her brother-in-law, but he was adamant, saying he wouldn’t have the evidence of her debauchery in his house. “Leave her at the church door or drown her,” he said.
Mary had a small, secret stash of money she’d brought with her, and seeing an advertisement in the village apothecary’s window that a “widow w
ith children of her own would accept charge of an infant for fifteen shilling a month,” Mary decided this was a lesser evil than those suggested by the farmer. She contacted the widow and tearfully handed over to her the baby and a month’s fee. She told her sister and brother-in-law that she’d given the child away, outright, to an eager couple who couldn’t have their own.
“You charged them nothing?” was the farmer’s indignant response.
Mary was sickly after the birth but hoped that within two or three months she could reclaim her child and return to London. What she would do when her money ran out, if she didn’t regain her health, she dared not think about.
One night, a month later, “by the grace of God,” Mary said, she dreamed her baby was dying. The next day she rushed to the widow’s house and found Ida painfully thin, with bruises on her arms and legs. She snatched her up and ran, the child grey faced and weak in her arms, and the widow following her to the gate, shouting curses.
The widow, Mary found out later, was one of the “baby farmers” who were responsible for the monstrous abuse and slaughter of countless infants. Some — like Ida, if Mary hadn’t rescued her — were left to die slowly of starvation so that the monthly fee could be collected as long as possible, while thousands of others were killed outright, for a flat “adoption fee.” (The government has finally acted to stop these monsters, shockingly late.)
Back at the farm with Ida, Mary took the last of her money and threw it on the table where her sister and brother-in-law sat, and said, “Here, this is for enduring my child, and feeding and caring for her until she’s well enough to go to London with me.” The farmer, shocked by the terrible condition of the child, and somewhat cowed by the fierce, powerful look in Mary’s eyes, agreed.
In London, Mary turned a closet into a room where Ida could be shut safely away when Mary was with a “customer.”
When Ida was five, Mary’s sister, still ashamed of what had transpired, asked her to send Ida to live on the farm. “I’ll suffer no more vile nonsense from my husband,” she said. So Mary sent Ida there, and visited her from time to time.
When Ida was seventeen, she ran away. Mary, distraught, looked for her in London, not even knowing if that had been her destination. A year later, she still hadn’t found her.
It was at that time that I met a lovely girl with eyes the blue of forget-me-nots and hair only a little less bright than the yellow of daffodils. It was springtime and it seemed to me she carried about her the scented air of that season. She worked in one of the finest brothels in London, a place furnished with oriental carpets, crystal chandeliers, and golden silk curtains that I recognized as made from silk I myself had imported.
When, one night, Mary entered the downstairs parlour on her ongoing quest to find her daughter, I was just kissing my inamorata goodbye until my much-anticipated next visit.
Mary saw us, cried out, and fell to the floor. The girl in my arms ran to her, calling out, “Mother!”
When Mary had recovered enough to speak, she looked at me with eyes such as the Angel of Death might possess and said, “Richard, Ida is your daughter.”
“How can you possibly know that?” I said, and immediately felt ashamed.
She paused for a moment, anger upon her still lovely face, and said, “Have you not seen the birthmark, that strange mouselike shape on her arm, exactly like the one on yours?”
“No,” I said, still not believing, not wanting to believe.
Mary pulled Ida to her and pushed up her sleeve, revealing the mark. I should have cried out, should have fallen as if struck by hammer blows, but I was frozen to the spot, dumb with horror.
Some time later, I found myself sitting with the two of them, not remembering how I got there. Was I led to the settee, blind, my legs as heavy and clumsy as those of an automaton?
Ida cried quietly as Mary held her hand. And so the three of us, three pale souls withdrawn from the fleshly scene nearby, sat in a corner of that gaudy, falsely comforting, falsely embracing room, as Mary told the story I’ve just recounted.
And, gentle reader, you are no doubt gentle no longer. (If I am to have a reader at all.) Mary was indeed the proclaimer of my death, which I shall in a moment accomplish with the pistol on the table in front of me. My penultimate act is to put this account in an envelope addressed to the Times, in the hope that they will publish it as a warning to other men, and as an opportunity for condemnation of men’s misuse of women.
I have used my own name, but changed those of the two innocents.
Goodbye, and shed no tear for me, but only for the girls and women who have suffered from the likes of me, that whole monstrous horde of men.
END
Carol,
This Richard Wilson could be a previous incarnation of me, or a surrogate pound of flesh. Except that I didn’t sleep with Jacintha. That brief moment on the beach was far from a consummation, and I’m thankful I never went any further.
Love,
Richard
Carol,
I had hoped you would send me a response to this story, but you seem to be sticking to your resolution. Maybe you will relent.
Still hoping,
Richard
THIRTY-SIX
CAROL SAT WITH Frances over tea in the kitchen while Richard rested upstairs. Last night she’d dreamed Jacintha was a little girl and Richard was molesting her, and woke thinking, No, it’s not as bad as that. But the reality was awful, unheard of. No, not unheard of; it must have happened before, a father and daughter thinking they were strangers. But had it happened like this, a daughter attempting to seduce a man she knew to be her father, and he ignorant of the fact? And what if it had gone further than kisses? Sometimes she couldn’t help picturing them together and would groan with pain.
“I’ve been doing some research on incest,” Frances said.
“Mother, please, no.” Carol gulped her tea down the wrong way and coughed frantically.
Frances patted her back and waited for her to get her breath back.
Carol, lifting her hand to wipe her mouth, knocked over her cup. She watched the tea flow across the polished table, watched as it began to drip into her lap.
Frances grabbed a tea towel and wiped the table and dabbed at Carol’s skirt. Carol pushed her hand away. “It’s all right. I don’t care about my skirt. I don’t care about anything.”
“Will you just listen for a couple of minutes? I found out some interesting facts. It gave me some perspective on Richard’s situation, to learn about actual incest.”
“‘Richard’s situation,’” Carol said, watching the stream of hot tea Frances was pouring into her righted cup. Frances pushed a plate of digestive biscuits toward her.
“Have you been eating at all?”
“No, just drinking.” Carol had been eating very little and had been unable to sleep. She was lonely, too, and had thought once or twice that she might go to Nick for comfort. But she hadn’t done so, and her body was numb now, with not a whisper of desire. She hadn’t told Nick that Richard wouldn’t come home to be with her, only that he was going through a bad time because of the stabbing and she needed to be there for him. That had been true; she had realized she still loved Richard as much as ever. What she felt for Nick, she wasn’t sure about. After all, she had known him for such a short time.
Nick had been disappointed and told her if things didn’t work out with Richard, he would be waiting for her.
“Carol,” Frances said, “I’m talking to you. You need to eat. I’ll bring you some bread and cheese. And I have some nice tomatoes, last of the harvest.”
“Please, please, don’t fuss. I can’t stand it. I don’t want anything.”
“All right,” Frances said and dropped down into a chair opposite Carol. “Listen, I’ve discovered in my reading that the taboo against incest had some almost comically practical reasons in earlier times and in primitive societies.”
“Oh, comical, I’ll bet. I guess if I don’t want to hear thi
s, I’ll have to leave,” Carol said. But she made no move to go; instead, avoiding Frances, she looked out the window at the intense green of the rhododendron leaves, kept staring at them as though to memorize the particular shade for all time while Frances continued.
“Really. Let me make it clear I’m not talking about the use and abuse of children. That, of course, is universally repugnant. So. Practical reasons. Plutarch said if a girl married her father, she’d have no family to run to in case of a quarrel. Seems unbelievable, doesn’t it? And in New Guinea, when Margaret Mead asked a man of the Arapesh tribe about the idea of marrying his sister, he objected only on the grounds that if he did that, he wouldn’t have a brother-in-law to hunt with and to visit. But, of course, in ancient Egypt, kings and queens married their sisters and brothers, and at least one pope had relations with his daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, and —”
“Stop. I don’t want to hear any of this. What makes you think history could help me deal with this pain? Just shut up.”
“All right. Sorry.”
Carol stared out at the cold rain that had begun to batter the windowpane as unrelentingly as tears of rage or mourning. When she turned, she caught a look of pity on Frances’s face, and became acutely aware of what Frances must be seeing: her tangled hair and her baggy and crumpled clothes. Her body smelled, too.
She started to cry and Frances went to her, pulled her up and held her tight. They stood swaying together for a full minute.
“He didn’t know. Christ, Mother, he didn’t know.”
“I know, darling. He really did nothing wrong.”
“You can’t say that. Wanting her was wrong.”
“You are being illogical. He thought she was a stranger.”
“He desired her.”
“He says he didn’t.”
“Oh, shit, I’m so confused.”
“I know. But listen. It’s rare but not unheard of for a father and daughter who’ve been separated since the daughter’s early childhood to meet and be attracted to each other, and knowing they’re related, to still go ahead. And Richard didn’t know and didn’t go ahead. No matter how he felt, that’s a couple of degrees away from culpability.”
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