Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  They picked up their rumpled clothes and slowly put them back on. In the kitchen Claire poured them each a glass of white wine and made plain ham sandwiches. She placed a tray with the bottle, the glasses and the sandwiches on a low wicker table under the dappled shade of the wisteria arbour. The flowers were past their glorious prime, and the wind moved their shadows beneath the vine. They sat in the creaking wicker chairs. Without preamble, her hands in her lap, not looking at him, Claire told him that eight months ago, in the autumn, she had gone to the Ashmolean to listen to a famous photographer speak. She had met a man there. He worked for the Ashmolean. She had got to know him. Got to know him well. Quentin found himself watching the wisteria blossoms tumble from their woody stems, and he wondered why they were each making such a thud when they landed on the grass. Surely something so infinitesimal should make no sound at all.

  ‘He’s going on a long dig, two sites, Turkey and Greece. He’s asked me to come with him. As a photographer.’

  Quentin waved his hand. ‘Do you mean to say … Is this why you got rid of the dog?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He stammered, ‘Are you telling me you’re going with him?’

  ‘Yes. As a photographer.’

  ‘And screwing the boss.’

  ‘Don’t be crass.’

  ‘Have you been to bed with him?’

  She thought about this, as if waiting for the waning wisteria to float down with an answer wrapped in purple petals. ‘Yes.’

  With one swift brush of his arm he set the glasses and plates flying and they landed in the grass.

  The wine bottle gurgled its last into the lawn. ‘What’s his bloody name?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It matters to me.’

  ‘Please, Kanga—’

  ‘Don’t call me that! Have there been others? Besides him. Others?’

  ‘I haven’t come to this lightly. I am sick of my own life. I want to be part of something larger than this house, than Oxford, than Frank’s reputation. I’m—’

  ‘Have. There. Been. Others?’

  ‘No.’ She was silent for a long while, and he did not break it, though he thought surely the pounding of his heart was shaking the earth beneath his feet. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Two,’ she answered after a long silence. ‘They didn’t matter.’

  Quentin reminded himself he had not cried when Robert died. He called on that stoicism, that misplaced manly reserve he had so often regretted having, to keep him dry-eyed and upright, the instinctive, inveterate, inherited stolidity of his people, his mother as she brushed imaginary lint from his lapels. There there, that’s better, there, that fixes it, there there. ‘And this man. This Ashmolean bastard. Does he matter?’

  ‘I’ll always love you. My leaving doesn’t change that, doesn’t change my loving you.’

  ‘It changes everything! This is a complete and utter betrayal of … of …’ A betrayal of worlds and time, the past and future, the wind and sun and stars, the moon, and the planets in their orbits. But words failed him; he could not wrap his mind or his lips around so vast a betrayal.

  ‘This is my chance and I’m taking it! I’m forty-five years old, and what would you have of me? That I should spend my last thirty years pondering seed catalogues, doing the occasional edit, waiting for you on Tuesdays and Fridays—’

  ‘I told you years ago I didn’t want that! I wanted to get married. You’re the one who wants things as they—’

  ‘Pretending that I have a use or a purpose or something important to do in life? A calling.’

  ‘A calling? Are you barking mad? Are you taking up holy orders?’

  ‘I mean a calling like photography, something that will take me out of myself, and place me in the larger world with new people, and new things to learn, to travel, to put my mind and my hand to work in digging up someone else’s world, what’s left of it.’

  ‘What’s left of it. …’ He gave a harsh, rueful laugh, and there ricocheted painfully through his mind jumbled bits of memory, like flotsam after a wreck, washing up on a beach, broken, shattered. He moved his glasses down, and pinched the top of his nose till it hurt. ‘Are you telling me we have reached the end of our tether? That’s what you said about Frank the first time I met you. Were you going to leave him?’

  ‘I couldn’t. I had three children with him.’

  ‘And you and I have nothing? After fifteen years?’

  ‘We have two books.’

  ‘Ah. Yes, we are the parents of two bastard brats that we’ve passed off as Frank Carson’s.’

  ‘If I’m leaving anyone, it’s Frank.’

  ‘God! Will you stop! He’s dead! You can’t leave him! Don’t you see? Don’t you know that? Are you mad? He’s already gone! I’m alive! Screw Frank! I hate Frank! I’m talking about my heart! Not Frank’s work! My heart is broken.’ He thumped his chest, which seemed to echo dully as though his heart had already fled.

  ‘I don’t want to represent him any more.’

  ‘You don’t! I represent him! He’s an author and I represent his work!’

  ‘But I represent his life. I always have. I’m sick of it. I want my own life.’

  Quentin’s vision seemed to blur, though he could swear he wasn’t crying, but the pink and green of her summer dress seemed to lift off the wicker chair and spin before his eyes, the green spindling, the pink shrivelling to tiny points, and the voice of Louisa returned to him as she smashed the black fig in half, the fruit rolling open, the green threads and pink seeds, the black-clad widow teeming with possibility. That was Claire. Certainly that’s how Claire had seemed to him fifteen years ago, the bright fruit of desire offered to him in a world that was grey with austerity. Shards of verse and lyric battered at his brain without ever coalescing into understanding till the image faded and the pink and green of her dress dissolved into black shadows at her feet.

  ‘I am leaving,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry you’re taking it so hard.’

  He stood, unsteadily, but erect. ‘How else is there to bloody take it?’

  ‘You could be more mature and understanding.’

  ‘You’re not a girl leaving home. I’m not your father. You can’t just walk out on me,’ he said, knowing very well that she could, knowing from the letters he had read that her love for him had never had the pitch and intensity, the passion and bravado, the depths of despair and affection she had felt for Francis Carson. After reading her letters to Frank, he knew that her love for him, Quentin, was by contrast staid, secure, sustaining. Sustenance at best. Sustenance she clearly no longer needed. Now she sought appetite. He called on resources he wasn’t sure he had. His every inner organ seemed to pucker painfully, and his throat sprouted a lump the size of a pear. ‘If you leave with this man, this bearded bastard in a pith helmet, I am severing all contact with you.’

  ‘You can’t. There’s Frank’s work, for one thing.’

  ‘I will hand it over to a younger agent,’ he lied, knowing he’d do no such thing.

  ‘Give it to Pennypacker for all I care,’ she retorted. ‘I won’t try to tell you what to do, even though you want me to obey you and stay around just to make you comfortable.’

  ‘Comfortable? Comfortable! Christ almighty, Claire! You can’t really think that! To make me comfortable? When have you ever made me comfortable? You sound as though you sit around darning my socks, and sugaring my tea. I’ve loved you because we’ve prized the same things, and stultifying comfort isn’t one of them! I’ve loved you because you’ve always had a sense of adventure and freedom, because you were honest about what you felt, because you were candid, because you are bright and expansive, because you knew how to laugh and you knew how to cry, and you knew how to love …’ Sweat beaded at his brow. He continued more calmly. ‘We have been together in every meaningful way a man and woman can be, two sides of the same coin for fifteen years. We have loved each other. We have something unique and wonderful.’

>   ‘Love shouldn’t bind you. It should free you.’

  ‘Oh, Christ! What’s happened to your intelligence? You sound so vapid, so shallow! Like reciting from one of those aphorism books Florence keeps beside the toilet!’ He drew a deep breath. ‘You want to be free? Go. Be fucking free, but don’t paste a bunch of tawdry, vulgar sentiments over it and ask me to agree and be happy for you!’

  ‘I hate it when you swear. I’ll only be gone a year.’

  ‘A year!’ He felt the blood rush from his head.

  ‘I’ll come back. This is my home. I will always love you, Kanga—’

  ‘Don’t call me that! Never call me that again!’

  ‘Please … don’t make this …’

  ‘Make it difficult? Are you really asking for my blessing before you go off to Greece with some barrel-chested bastard? Well, you can’t have it. You can’t.’

  ‘I’ll always love you, no matter what you say.’

  ‘And no matter what you do? Really, Claire. Is that supposed to comfort me while you’re gone off with someone else?’ He choked back a sob, hearing in his heart the fiction of memory, the memory of fiction implanted into his own experience. Some of these days oh you’re gonna miss me honey, some of these daaaaays you gonna be so lonely, just for me only … The heartbreak that had drained down Elsie Rose’s face, blackened with mascara, smeared across Quentin’s mind, and despite the blue light spilling through the wisteria arbour, he saw the grey-green face of Mrs Rackwell and the ignoble pain in her eyes, the sadness that could never be assuaged, and he choked back a bitter laugh to think that he, Quentin Castle, a successful man in the prime of his life, should share his heart-rent grief with two such old bawds as Elsie Rose and Mrs Rackwell. He understood at last the love that drove people to despair without dignity, that made them give up everything, even knowing they had nothing of value to give. Quentin would have given up everything, anything, but he had nothing the woman he loved wanted, nothing she valued or wanted. He sucked air into his collapsing lungs, his collapsing life.

  ‘Please,’ she implored, ‘try to understand.’

  ‘Understand why you would leave me? Oh, I understand that. You are betraying, false-hearted, and disloyal. You never loved me.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘I’ll say it again,’ he vowed, though he didn’t. Like a drowning man – he knew suddenly how Frank must have thrashed in the Garden of Allah pool, drowning, casting about for some last hope to keep him alive – he flailed to find his voice. ‘If you leave me, leave here and go off with this bastard, whoever he is, if you leave, we are finished forever. You might come back here, but I will not come back to you. There’s no waffling and wailing about that. I am quite clear on that.’

  She neither agreed nor argued with him. She folded her hands in her lap. She played with the sapphire ring. Time passed in pregnant silence save for some sparrows on the lawn squabbling over the remains of the sandwiches.

  At last he said, ‘I see. You knew that’s what I would say.’

  ‘Of course. To me you are transparent.’

  He clutched his own hand so he would not suddenly lash out and shake her senseless, till her teeth chattered, an impulse so foreign to him he seemed suddenly to have become someone else. ‘Have you told Michael?’ he asked with cruel delight. ‘What fun for him. He’ll get to call you a whore again, and this time he’ll be right.’

  ‘Michael is the Presiding Secretary of Great Dane Enterprises, a wealthy man. Of what possible interest to him would my travels be?’

  ‘He broke your heart, Claire! He and Frank! They left you! I never left you. I loved you true and faithfully as they never did. I’m here! Think of all we’ve been to one another! All we’ve shared! The years, the days and nights. In sickness and in health. For better or for worse. How can you leave me? Is this my reward for all these years we’ve had together?’

  ‘Who said you get rewards? That anyone gets rewards? If you love me, I am begging you to love me enough to let me go. Let me go and do and discover and have some life for myself that isn’t totally wrapped up in you or Frank.’

  ‘ARE YOU BLOODY BLIND? FRANK’S DEAD. How can you not know that? I’m bloody here!’

  ‘Please keep your voice down, Quentin. Everyone will hear you.’

  ‘Almighty God! Claire Carson worried about the neighbours! You’re worse than Florence! Quick, where’s the vicar? Does he know?’

  ‘Stop it. You’re being cruel.’

  ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘Why can’t we try something new and different?’

  He was speechless as if she’d asked him how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Was this the same woman whose talents and intelligence, and imagination, whose unconventionality added to her beauty? Whose depths only grew more alluring with time? Try something new and different? He’d always believed that Gigi was shallow, but Claire? ‘New and different? Are you trading me in for a new pair of shoes? New and different? Am I out of style? Or am I like the old horse you had knackered when you left Harrington Hall? You know, that spavined nag you kept around to amuse everyone till you moved out and moved on? Is it really that fucking simple?’

  ‘I hate it when you swear.’

  ‘You swear all the time. My father used to call you the Foul-Mouthed Bitch.’

  ‘I am going to Greece and Turkey.’ She bit her lip. ‘I’m taking this chance now that I’ve got it.’

  He collapsed back into the wicker chair that seemed to splinter under his weight. ‘When?’

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘Next week! As soon as that!’ Some of these days, you’re gonna be soooo lonely, some of these daaaays. The future swirled before him, murky and uncertain, as drear as the garden before him was bright. With every passing day and year the fundamental juices of his life would parch, in his heart, his groin, his very soul. The future was too dry and terrible to contemplate, but the past was tainted, ravaged beyond any reclamation. She had betrayed him with three different men. Even if she stayed, their love was ruined beyond redemption. An explosion burst in his chest, and he could hardly breathe. His breath came in scraping gusts. He knew what it would be like one day to die. He took off his glasses, and rammed his palms into his eye sockets till colours burst forth. He rose, paced, and laughed bitterly. ‘You know your favourite phase, Can you imagine? Today you have finally given me something I could not imagine. Is this what writers call irony?’

  ‘Oh, don’t give all that tripe about writers. I hate it.’

  ‘When were you going to tell me?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks, to have the courage to tell you.’ Her blue eyes gleamed with tears.

  ‘Don’t you dare cry. What about the girls? I know you haven’t told them or I would have heard.’

  ‘I had to tell you first. I thought if I could tell you first, it would be easier to tell them.’

  He gulped and snorted and coughed, and retched all at once. ‘How very bloody kind of you. Or no, wait. Did you think I’d make it easier for you to tell the girls? That I’d be there, backing you up? Singing the praises of Greece and Turkey?’

  ’Don’t be—’

  ‘Oh, of course! I could be the music-hall bloke in the funny suit and big shoes and the Cockney patter: “Gwon, girls, tell Mum to ’ave a fine old time woile us old chaps stays here and minds things, keeps ’em all proper, makes sure the old royalty cheques are on time, and old Frank’s literary knob gets hisself polished.’

  ‘I’ll be back in a year.’

  ‘Not to me, you won’t.’

  The phone rang and rang, harsh, insistent clangs.

  ‘Hear me well, Claire. No matter what you do in Greece or with the rest of your life, you will never have the chance to destroy me again. I know that for certain. Nothing else is clear. But I know that much. I’m telling you this, as a vow. A sacred vow. On my life, Claire, I swear if you leave me now, we are finished forever.’

  Claire looked as though she migh
t speak, argue, but finally she rose, and her bare feet made soft sounds as she went into the kitchen to answer the phone. Through the open door and the open window, her voice floated out to him, though he paid it no heed, once he was certain it wasn’t the bloody goddamned Ashmolean bastard.

  He turned away from the house, and tried to concentrate on the line of apple trees. He seemed to stand at the horizon of his own life, equidistant between what lay behind and what lay ahead, looking back to the known shores from whence he’d come and that amorphous shore that yet lay ahead, death. Between that horizon and this moment he saw only exile: exile from love, from joy, from fulfilment, exile as clearly as if he had sailed away from a country no longer his own.

  When she returned to him, her face pale, she searched his eyes. She put her hand on his chest. ‘The call is for you.’

  ‘Me?’

  Claire licked her lips and whispered, ‘It’s Miss Marr.’

  ‘Miss Marr? Miss Marr? Calling me here? How does she know I’m here?’ He grew faint, his brain pulling away from his skull. His heart beat in his chest, as though flinging itself against the barricade of his ribs, like a sparrow battering against a skylight. ‘What does she want?’

  ‘Your wife is looking all over for you.’ Claire’s voice trembled. ‘Your mother’s had a stroke. Oh, Quentin!’

  He moved through a murk towards the kitchen, resisting the urge to create a path of destruction, overturning chairs and smashing photographs and crockery. He picked up the phone, cleared his throat. ‘What is it, Miss Marr?’

  ‘Your mother’s had a stroke, Quentin. She’s dying. They are taking her to hospital.’

  ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘I have always known, Quentin. I’ve sent young Mr Pennypacker to the London Library to look for you. For the sake of appearances.’ Her voice was full of triumph and hiss. ‘Did you think I was a fool?’

  As the wires crackled in the distance between them, Quentin envisioned Miss Marr as she had appeared yesterday, framed in the doorway, enraged, her cane upraised, discord, brutal envy, soul-shrivelling fury painted all over her plain face and burning in her eyes. How could he not have seen her truly before? How could he have thought her simply sour and dry? The scope of her betrayals threatened to take his breath away. How had he so totally misjudged everything? Everyone. ‘Tell them I’m leaving immediately.’