“I didn't start anything. Nothing has started.” I was lying.
“It has started. If you want it to stop, then say stop. But you can't just pretend nothing has happened.”
“Then stop. I want it to stop. I'm sorry, Ludo. I shouldn't have got you into this. Good-bye.”
I put the phone down. He called again five minutes later.
“Can I please see you, just to talk.”
I know I should have said no, but I didn't.
“When?”
“Anytime. This evening? Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Where?”
I wanted somewhere open, innocent.
“What about the park, St. James's?”
We met on a bench, beneath a tree, with pigeons strutting about. St. James's is probably the prettiest park in London, with its ornamental trees and cute bridge over the lake and black swans and outrageous, impossible pelicans and intricate flower beds. But it has always felt a little fake to me. The others—Green Park, Hyde Park, Regent's Park—have that sense of being leftover bits of the countryside that were simply forgotten as the city grew around them. By comparison, St. James's is a carefully planned work of art, intricate, neat, and delicate, and a little soulless.
We looked out over the fountain blowing fine spray into the lake waters. Most of the leaves on the trees hunching over the banks had turned red or gold. Another week and the bare branches would reveal Buckingham Palace in the distance.
People hurried by on their way home, taking shortcuts to Charing Cross or Victoria. Some lingered by the water. One old woman fed the ducks, but they didn't seem very interested, gorged as they were on a full day of tourist sandwiches. Ludo was talking about the pigeons, trying, I think, to be lighthearted.
“You see the male pigeons? They're the ones sticking out their chests and cooing. Handsome, aren't they? See the funny turny-roundy dance they do—round and round, round and round, and then more cooing and more sticking out their chests. But the females keep walking away. They want to make sure that the cocks are up to scratch.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
He looked at me, stung. “I'm sorry, I was just—”
“No, I'm sorry. I never thought I'd feel like this.”
“Like what?”
I think he hoped that I was feeling overwhelmed with love for him or something.
“So guilty, so sick.”
“Oh.”
“Don't you?”
“Perhaps I should, but no, I don't. I think I'm—”
“Please don't say it; it'll only make things worse. It always makes things worse.”
The sun was getting lower, dappling the bench and the water and us with light. I felt a chill and shivered. Ludo took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders.
“Thanks,” I said. At the touch of his hand on my shoulder, I felt another shiver, but not from the cold. Damn it. It was still there. I'd half hoped the desire would have gone.
He'd moved closer to me on the bench. The pigeons danced more frantically and then fluttered away.
“Is it Katie you feel bad about?”
“Katie? God no.”
“Oh, I see. It's just Harry.”
“No, not just Harry. Harry and Sean.”
“Shit, of course.”
“I better go.”
“Okay. I'll walk you to the station.”
“I'd rather you didn't.”
I shook his jacket from my shoulders and passed it back to him. My wrist brushed against his crotch.
“My God,” I said, “how long has that been there?” I couldn't stop myself from smiling.
“I'm really sorry,” he said, trying to keep a straight face. “It's just seeing you again. I keep thinking about the other night. The first one. What you did.”
Thinking about it, and touching him, and seeing him so aroused, began to turn me on. This wasn't what I'd planned. I had to shift on the bench. Somehow Ludo picked up on it. You would never have guessed the acuity of his sexual instincts from the way he looked, but he understood. I don't even know if it was conscious.
“You want it, don't you?” he said. He leaned toward me as he spoke, murmuring the words in my ear. I felt his breath and then his bristles and then the touch of his lips.
“Yes.”
“Here in the park.”
“Yes.”
“You want me to fuck you here in the park.”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“I want you to fuck me here in the park.”
“Are you still bleeding?”
“I don't know. It's near the end. Do you know a place?”
“I know a place.”
He stood up and took my hand. It was getting darker, but surely it was too light to just do it, here on the grass? We stepped over a low fence, and suddenly the world seemed years away. He led me between the trees. The grass was dry and springy.
“Where are we going?”
“It's here, just here.”
We came to a willow tree, its branches reaching almost to the ground. He parted the leaves, like a seventies bead curtain, and we were in a private room. Even the sound of traffic disappeared.
“You've done this before?”
“There was a woman who showed me this place.”
“Your girlfriend? Katie?”
“No. She was a teacher at my school.”
“Was she your first?”
“Yes.”
“What was it like?”
“It was tragic.”
He put his jacket on the ground. I lay down on it. I was wearing stockings again, so I must have known, at some level, what was going to happen. I took my shoes and panties off, and he unfastened his trousers. He touched me, opened me, entered me. It was a silent, slow fuck, each stroke deliberate, heavy. After a time—five minutes, perhaps—I felt myself slipping into a kind of trance. The wind shushed in the willow leaves, and the pale last light seeped and dried and then vanished.
Now it was black, and he was heavy as lead on me. I couldn't feel him inside me at all, but his brutal, conscienceless mass was everywhere. Then he stopped.
“Turn over,” he said.
“Don't hurt me,” I said, and my voice was like a little girl's. But the trouble was that I did want him to hurt me.
“Do you want this?”
I didn't say anything, but I turned over onto my hands and knees. I heard him spit onto his hand, and he rubbed it into me. Then he entered me again from behind. I didn't know what he was going to do, and I was frightened. I couldn't decide if it was pleasurable or not, but I didn't want him to stop.
“Harder,” I said, and I wanted to say “Hurt me,” but I'd have hated myself for that. And then I wanted to hate myself, and so I said, “Hurt me.”
“What?”
“Push me into the dirt,” I said, and I don't know where the words came from.
“Celeste …,” he said, the concern in his voice undermined by his steady thrusting.
“Hurt me now.”
But he wasn't a hurting kind of man. I kept telling him, and in the end he tried, but in a halfhearted way, and I despised him because of it.
SEANJOURNALFIFTEEN.DOC
SPEAKING ILL OF THE UNDEAD
Celeste's parents’ house out here in Amersham is huge. It has Gothic turrets, pre- Raphaelite stained glass, a leaking roof, a gargoyle, a grotesque modern conservatory, a billiard room without a billiard table (but with a stag's head and a very well stocked drinks cabinet), at least two sets of stairs, an intact system of ropes and bells to summon the ghosts of servants, a pet cemetery (in the garden, not the house), and a statue of a dead man (in the house, not the garden).
Harry loved it. Here was endless opportunity for lethal and near-lethal play. Swords could be found. He could squeeze between the balusters and dangle over forty feet of space. The electrics fizzed and sparked excitingly. Best of all, there was Dander.
Celeste's paren
ts. I suppose I must always have known that there was a risk of something like this happening as soon as I began to look for sexual partners outside the impoverished housing estates of my hometown, Leeds. There you were deemed to be a bit odd if you got semiskimmed milk or called your pit bull anything other than Spike. But they were still a shock.
Bella first. Celeste never warned me. “We're having lunch with my mother” was all she said. I was like one of the raw recruits in the First World War, expecting jolly japes and finding barbed wire and machine guns. We'd been living together for a couple of weeks, and all she'd said about her parents was the kind of thing anyone might say. I'd imagined a couple of ordinary home-counties types. Mother with hair, father with voice. One of those lawn mowers you ride around on. Probably some embarrassing art on the walls. A horrible suggestion of pottery somewhere in their past.
And then, with a clap of thunder and a howling of wolves, Bella arrived at the restaurant. She was wearing a flowing black cape, attached to some clingy (also black) undergarment by a kind of webbing. Her eyes, below the straight black fringe, were huge and dark and her lips a ghastly red. She looked like one of the sexier vultures. The blood froze in my veins, and I lost the feeling in my legs. Celeste stood up, and I tried to push myself up with my arms on the table.
“Mum, Sean; Sean, Mum.”
She put out her hand, which was, like the rest of her, long and thin. The fingers appeared to curve back slightly, as if she were preparing a good slap. Her nails were the same vivid red as her lips. The hand was cold and dry as an Inca body found preserved in a mountain cave. She spoke with an accent I couldn't even begin to place, although it was sure a long way from Leeds.
“Ah, at last, the charming young man who has moved into your apartment.”
I couldn't think of anything at all to say in return. “Sorry” seemed most appropriate, but even that stuck in my throat. Celeste seemed unfazed by the monster and got to work on the menu as her mother folded her leathery wings and sat down. I felt that I should have done something with her chair: pull it out, push it in, lay my face on it, anything. But I just sat down and carried on being horrified.
There followed the worst two hours of my life. Questions were fired obliquely, and by the time I worked out what she was getting at, she'd moved on to the next. It ended up as a comedy sketch in which I was always answering the question before last. I tried to counter by obsequious flattery, which she saw through instantly. I might have said how young she looked (from bathing in virgins’ blood?), but she looked at me as if I'd suggested she squeeze the blackheads on my butt. She'd obviously, in her time, been flattered by experts, and my naïve approach savored too much of a beggar offering a queen a piece of bread to dunk in his running sore.
I did manage to absorb that Bella was a Hungarian aristocrat, possessing a title “for which there is no English equivalent—like a duchess, but much, much younger” was how she put it, smiling to indicate the possibility that she was joking, but not about the “duchess” bit. Or the “much younger.” She had fled Hungary in 1948, “a child, a tiny baby.” However, she also claimed to have been “the champion at shuttlecock in Budapest.” Perhaps she'd been the champion of the under-twos. The shuttlecock issue loomed large in her conversation. It seems she was destined for Olympic glory, “without Stalin, the monster,” and there was a strong suggestion that the dictator's greatest crime was robbing her of her sporting triumphs.
No matter how much I drank, it was never enough to take away the pain. I've since noticed that it's always difficult to get drunk with her about, and I'm beginning to believe that she has a special power: the ability to inflict a kind of witchly induced hypersobriety. I shouldn't whine: I'm not the first boy to fail to live up to his mother-in-law's ambitions for her daughter. But perhaps I am the only one to come away from the parting handshake (no question of kissing, then or since) with the deep imprint of her nails deliberately inflicted on his palm.
It was a long time before I met Celeste's dad. We'd spoken a couple of times on the phone, but the interaction of our two nervous stammers made communication almost impossible. In the flesh, he was small and shabby, with broken spectacles and a preposterous, foot-long rim of frizzy gray hair issuing horizontally from halfway down his head. It looked like a halo, improvised from steel wool and fiberglass for a school play. He was, Celeste informed me, wearing her most bored expression, a leading herpetologist and had written the “standard work on geckos.” It seemed, then, that he had failed to pass on his enthusiasm to his daughter. He'd been at Cambridge and still held an honorary position there, but he'd had some kind of breakdown and no longer taught. Apart from geckos, his conversation largely concerned his bowels. I liked him right away, as did Harry, who dubbed him “Dander” (Harry for “Granddad”), but his human name was Magnus.
We arrived late on the Sunday evening. Harry was asleep. Magnus opened the door.
“Lovely chap, lovely chap,” he said, reaching to take Harry from my arms. “Dander got you.”
Bella stood behind him, smiling like Ivan the Terrible. She was wearing a richly embroidered dressing gown, like one of Tennyson's moodier poems, in fabric form.
“You'll be hungry,” she said to Celeste, and kissed her. She offered me the hand. “Come into the salon. Shoes first.” We took our shoes off.
“Hope we haven't kept you up,” I said, thinking about the dressing gown.
“Do I appear to you to be in bed?”
“No, I just meant that—”
“I've prepared the red room for you, Celeste.” Where was I to be? In the stables?
The “salon” was Bella's space. The furniture all had animal legs, and there was much in the way of Meissen china and curly silver things, without obvious function. I usually managed to break something, and I could sense Bella's tensing for a smash or tinkle. There was no TV, here or anywhere in the house.
Magnus came back after putting Harry to bed, bearing in his place a tray with sandwiches. I hoped he hadn't made them. I hoped even more that she hadn't. I prayed silently for a girl who came in specially to make their sandwiches. Nancy, I decided to call her. Not quite all there, but very clean hands. I took one. Thin white bread, its crusts extracted under torture.
“Mmmm, Spam,” I said, genuinely surprised. Was it part of a wartime cache? Luckily I was up to it. If Bella thought she could get the better of me with Spam, then she didn't know how tough we can be in Leeds. The claggy, metallic taste of cheap margarine, the sort made from chicken fat and hydrogenated horse jism, was a bit harder to take. The tea helped, as tea so often does.
“Sherry?” offered Magnus.
“Please.”
The sherry was good, but stale and dusty. Celeste was flicking through a magazine, oblivious to any difficulty I might be in.
“How are you, Magnus?” I tried. Mistake. He shook his head sadly.
“You remember how I was trying linseed?” I nodded warily. “Well, if anything, it has done its job too well. It leaves me no time to catch up with the journals. Who knows what's happening in the world of newts? And I've fallen behind on my reviewing.”
“Enough,” said Bella, quietly. She was also reading a magazine and didn't look up.
“But Steve—”
“Sean,” said Celeste.
“Sean, I beg your, er … ah, Sean, wanted to know how things have been going. So I told him about the linseed. The lady,” he said, turning back to me, “in the health shop recommended it. Apparently it swells in the colon rather than the stomach and so does not give you the bloating or the wind.”
“I said, enough.”
But Magnus now was unstoppable.
“The problem is that now I'm finished in a matter of seconds. Sometimes I can barely arrange myself in time. And as you know, my custom had been to read the journals, and the books I'm reviewing for The Times Literary Supplement, in the bathroom. I suppose I could stay, but that would seem, seem perverse. But I can't settle to it anywhere else now. It's been m
y habit for too long. I don't think things have been this loose since 1962 or thereabouts. I remember because that was a cold winter, and we didn't have heating installed in the lavatory until 1963. There's a monograph on the axolotl, and the young chap at the TLS is clamoring for it. I may have to take some caline and morphine.”
“Couldn't you just cut down on the linseed?”
He looked at me as though I had suggested he cut down on his air.
“But, dear boy, I've been waiting for something this effective for years.”
“He's just like you,” said Celeste later in bed. She cuddled up to me under the heavy covers, made from the same stuff as Bella's dressing gown. Mariana of the moated grange, I thought. “With blackest moss the flower-plots / Were thickly crusted, one and all.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing, just some poetry.” I didn't mind the thing about being like her dad. I knew it had some truth in it. “Is that why you married me?”
“Mommy thinks it is. She says she should have taken me back to Budapest as a child or given me to the Gypsies to save me from my fate.”
“Seems a bit extreme.”
“That's Bella.”
“Why did she marry your dad?”
“He wasn't always the way he is now. There are some pictures of when they were young together. And then there was this house. I think she perhaps loved it even more than him.”
Celeste was still cuddled up. “I don't suppose you … ?”
She looked up and smiled at me. She seemed softer than usual, nicer.
“I'd like to, but it's the end of my period, and there might be some mess. But soon.” She kissed me on the nose. “I love you.”
“You, too.”
PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 16
Afterward, I lay curled on my side. He was hunched over, facing away from me. I'd never felt such desolation.
What I'd always most enjoyed about sex was the bestial freedom of it, the escape from my civilized, humane, cosmopolitan self. But somehow, what we'd done had none of the joyful, releasing animality of sex. It seemed more like the kind of cruelty, depravity, that only people are capable of. As if the line were continued not back through evolution to the time of innocence but forward, to a place where all the generous, warm, stinking, animal side of the human had been scientifically obliterated.
The Marriage Diaries Page 18