SANCTUARY
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Lisa Appignanesi
First Published by Bantam Books 2000
©Lisa Appignanesi
Other Books by Lisa Appignanesi
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Novels
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Memory and Desire
Dreams of Innocence
A Good Woman
The Things We Do for Love
The Dead of Winter
Sanctuary
Paris Requiem
Unholy Loves
Kicking Fifty
The Memory Man
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Non-Fiction
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All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion
Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800
Freud’s Women (with John Forrester)
Losing the Dead
Simone de Beauvoir
The Cabaret
Femininity and the Creative Imagination: Proust, James and Musil
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Edited Volumes
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Free Expression is No Offence
The Rushdie File (with Sarah Maitland)
Dismantling Truth (with Hilary Lawson)
Postmodernism
Ideas from France: The Legacy of French Theory
For Adam Phillips
Truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde
Contents
Copyright
Prologue
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
PART TWO
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART THREE
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART FOUR
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
About the Author
PROLOGUE
The madness buzzed round and through her with all the vehemence of flies fighting over a fat corpse. She wanted to kill him. She had never wanted anything with quite such force. For three days and three nights the desire had swarmed through her obliterating everything else. Yet she named it madness, which meant that she couldn’t be - not altogether, not yet - despite the repeated dose of poisons.
Beneath her, the sea beat against the base of the cliff in a torrent of white foam. She could picture him there, his head a white football bobbing amidst the waves until they picked him up with indignant force and crashed him into the boulders. Over and over again. It would have to be over and over; so that she could wave to him from the cliff and smile sweetly as he shouted ‘Help’ into the void.
She wanted his dying to be slow, an eternity of fierce deaths, one for each of the months in which he had been dead to her. One for each of the early days of muteness and inexpressible pain. A revenge killing, that’s what it was, with herself as the avenging angel, a bright creature emerging with the evening star from the gathering indigo clouds to orchestrate an unhurried end. His small, preening smile would go first. The cheeks would wobble and sag. Horror at his own fate would spread across that smug face. She wanted him aware, begging for mercy.
Last night she had imagined him in a huge bubbling cauldron. They had all danced round him, proud cannibals, glowing in the heat and light of the fire, plucking off bits of him and throwing them to the dogs while he was forced to look on at his own dismemberment. She had kept the penis for herself, had stamped its shrivelled skin and sinew into the dust. A morsel not fit even for the dogs.
Could it have been only six days ago that she had confronted him? Not so very far from where she now stood. She had chosen the point beneath the crooked windswept tree where the grounds of the house merged with the steep footpath. The surveillance cameras of this mind-bending establishment didn’t reach beyond that, she presumed, though there was no evading their baleful gaze at either end of the headland. He walked here every day just before the sun set. She had watched him, certain of his movements, the junctures at which he would slow or stop.
When she had told him, he had patted her on the shoulder and chided her as if she were a patient in the midst of a delusion. He had fobbed her off with some waffle about all of them being his sons and daughters. Yet something had shifted in his eyes. Both of them knew the truth.
She had been prepared for anything except outright denial and the hairy ringed hand moving round her shoulder to her breast, caressing, as if he were unaware of it, as if that were all women ever wanted, a palliative for any wrong. For a moment, she had been so surprised by the nature of the touch that she hadn’t moved away. In the time that it took for her to recognize his growing heat, the contempt she had kept at bay all week had catapulted into loathing. With it came that overarching desire for vengeance.
That very evening, in the stillness of her room, she had written the letter and stolen away to post it. She wanted to see what he would say to her now.
The setting sun spangled the sea in silver. She imagined blood tipping the waves. ‘A wine dark sea,’ Homer had said. Darkened by light or sludge or perhaps by the blood of heroes. No heroes here. Just him. Him and the moaning wind.
He was right on time. He walked slowly towards her along the path, an ugly man puffed into bigness by his own lying self-importance. He wasn’t expecting her and his brow creased into his glistening pate as he spied her.
She raised an arm in greeting and wished the Furies to her side so that together they could do their worst.
PART ONE
1
Manhattan was all rain. Not the usual kind of grey drizzle polite to umbrellas, but rain that pounded against roofs with the vehemence of a thousand demented drummers, made whirlpools of potholes, rivers of gutter streams, a swamp of Central Park. Rain impervious to the windscreen wipers of both chequered cabs and sleek limos, let alone macs and hats and the fashionable hairdos beneath. Rain that seemed not so much to want to wash the city clean as to wash it away.
The woman who stood with her forehead pressed to the penthouse window of an upper West Side apartment thought of portholes in torrential seas and Noah’s Ark beneath an obliterated sky. She thought of impenetrable fog and of her daughter when she was still a child and safely at home, singing ‘Rain, rain, go away’ in a high-pitched voice which mingled desire and anger.
Now it was Becca who was away and the rain looked as if it had come to stay.
She was a small woman, no more than five foot three in her flat shoes, though she went by the imperious name of Leo and sometimes lived up to it. Today, a baggy, white, ink-stained shirt floated round her jeans and her slenderness giving her a street urchin’s air. Her face, naturally pensive with its downward cast of lips and shadowed eyes, openly displayed the marks of her thirty-eight years. When she bothered to pay attention, she rather liked the tinge of melancholy newly prominent bones and lines added to an earlier bland prettiness. It made her face more familiar to her, gave it a semblance of the internal image she had of herself which was of a practical, matter-of-fact woman, one who was nonetheless occasionally prey to the force of intuition.
‘Rain, rain, go away,’ she sang, so loudly that she surprised herself, then remembered that last night she had dreamt rain. Odd rain, brown rain, because she was underground and it was coming from the roof of some sort of vast cavern which encompassed a labyrinthine city, though its buildings and paths were
all deserted.
She pushed the unsettling image away and glanced at the clock perched high on the white wall. She paused to decipher the time. Had to pause because the clock’s hands and numbers moved backwards. Anti-clockwise. ‘For your dream time,’ Jeff had joked when he had given the clock to her all those years back. ‘Just imagine time moving into the past. It’ll minimize your pronounced sense of deadline.’
Like some prop out of the Hitchcock films he adored, this overblown obscenity of a clock had tickled her one-time husband’s fancy. Not hers. She had grown to hate it. Yet it was still here, well over two years after he had slipped into the past. In fact, the only object she had managed to shed from what she liked to call that second period of her life was the marital bed. For a reason she could no longer comprehend, she had replaced this with a purple divan, a scream of colour in an otherwise white and minimal bedroom.
Bristling with the energy of left-over irritation, Leo strode back to her desk. She straddled the stool, picked up one of several pens and bent to her drawing. Swift, certain strokes produced the long, frizzled hair and capacious girth of a scowling figure seated at a café table. Across from her, a slimmer shape took form, an elegant woman in a good suit, a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in her well-manicured hands.
A bubble blossomed out of the head of the first figure. ‘Ya say “family” these days and what d’ya think of? Eh? Eh?’
A second bubble. ‘Ya think politicians. Ya think problems. Yes ma’am, Big Problems. Ya think joint credit cards, abuse, beating, mental cruelty, bullying, adultery, delinquency, divorce, revenge!’
A third bubble bloomed as the sizeable figure reached for the book and opened it: ‘I say it’s time to bring Tolstoy up-to-date for modern Manhattan. I’m gonna begin my next opus with the timely sentence…’
A big satisfied close-up smile: ‘All unhappy families are alike, but a happy family is happy after its own fashion.’
‘Leonora H’ - the signature grew with a flourish at the end of the strip.
Leo stretched and arched her back. She permitted herself the quasi-secret indulgence of a cigarette and puffed deeply as she re-read the strip. She was pleased with her Wife of Wrath today, pleased with all her Merry Wives of Manhattan, their moans and groans about former husbands and really existing mothers and lazy children energetically vying with each other for subtlety or grossness. She was even more pleased that four strips were nearly ready and she had bought herself four weeks of time. There would be no happy or unhappy families for her over the coming weeks. She and her friend Isabel Morgan were about to play out their very own road movie.
A heroic road movie it would be, too, given that Isabel was in the driver’s seat. When they had talked about it before Christmas, Isabel had evoked mythic expanses - ribbons of roads disappearing into sky and weather, small town cafés with screen doors and suspicious men, desolate motels, lonely desert and jagged mountains. In her last e-mail, she had specified a white convertible, adding, ‘Make it big. Savannah, Georgia, here we come.’
Never mind the deluge. Isabel would relish its danger and the rain was bound to clear as they headed south, then slowly west: ultimate destination, California, where they would see Becca, newly at Stanford University - though not her father, Jeff, and his partner.
All too youthful partner, Leo added to herself. So youthful that in the first weeks of their separation, she had thought of sending him the anti-clock with a little acerbic note to underline his banal desire to make time move backwards. But the gesture had seemed to lack dignity. And the dirty ring the clock left behind on the wall evoked other grimy absences. It hadn’t been the moment for a whitewash. So the clock had stayed.
Leo glanced at it again. Isabel should have been here by now. Her flight from London was due at four and it was almost seven. The rain to blame. She stared out the window. Manhattan’s famous skyline had vanished into a blur of looming shapes punctuated only by out-of-focus lights. Closer to, her wooden tubs and terracotta pots, with their array of fluttering pansies and stiff daffodil shoots looked as if they might float away.
On impulse, Leo pushed open the sliding window and stepped out onto the roof. She walked to the iron rail and peered down to the street. A single bobbing mushroom of an umbrella moved between the canyon of the buildings and turned the corner. A car splashed along the street, but failed to stop at the entrance of her building. She stepped back from the edge and raising her face to rain and sky, let herself be drenched through. It made her feel like a child, unafraid, open to weather, defying the elements. It felt wonderful, the rain dripping over her eyelids.
The noise began somewhere behind her. A muffled droning coming closer and louder until it blotted out the pounding of the rain. A hideous mechanical whirr, which for some reason reminded her of a sound in her dream. She opened her eyes to see the black predatory shape of a copter moving directly above her, so low she could make out the pilot’s silhouette, so low she could feel herself being sucked into its rotor power.
Her breath came with sudden inappropriate quickness. The fear again. She could taste it in the dryness of her mouth. For a moment she stood frozen into position. Then, with an effort, she fled into the safety of the apartment. The menacing drone was still there, echoed now by the screech of street level sirens.
A shudder went through her, a bodily intuition of disaster.
Hair streaming, she accessed the two-week old e-mail from Isabel which noted her arrival time. Simultaneously she dialled Kennedy Airport.
The flight had landed with only a fifteen-minute delay.
Leo took a deep breath, hesitated, then punched out her former husband’s number. Becca should have arrived at Jeff’s house in the Berkley hills last night. She had chosen to spend her brief Easter break there, rather than fly back to New York and now she was there again. If Leo was in luck, the daily would pick up the phone. She crossed her fingers behind her back.
It didn’t help. Jeff picked up the phone, his tone changing from breezy charm to stilted politeness as he heard her voice.
‘Yes, she’s here. Out in the garden with Tip. Want me to get her?’
‘No, don’t bother. I was just checking that…
‘We won’t eat her or beat her, you know.’
‘I wasn’t…’
‘Good. I’ll tell her you called.’
‘OK.’
‘By the way, Cora’s pregnant.’
‘Oh? That was quick.’ The edge crept into her tone, despite herself.
‘I’ve always been a fast worker. In that department, at least. You remember that.’
The line went dead.
‘Bastard,’ Leo muttered into the receiver. She sat very still for a moment and then wiped the conversation from her mind. She wouldn’t think about that. Not now. Becca was fine and Isabel would be here any minute.
Isabel wasn’t, not even after Leo had showered and dried her hair. Nor after she had donned black trousers, a satin lined black jacket and a crisp white shirt free of ink stains - suitable attire for a visit to the deco chic of the Rainbow Room where Isabel had said she wanted to stop off on the first of her two evenings in New York.
Waiting was not one of Leo’s more pronounced skills. She poured herself a finger of whisky, swallowed some nuts, skimmed an article in The New York Times on cloning, skipped through several others on the juridical, presidential and everyday meanings of the term ‘sexual relations’, plumped the cushions on the striped blue and white sofa for the tenth time, put on a Steely Dan track she had loved since she was fifteen, danced across the wide parquet floor, pulled some yellowing leaves from the giant fern which adorned the far corner of the room-long stretch of window and pressed her forehead to that once more.
By nine o’clock, the trickle of anxiety had flowed into full tide. She imagined pile-ups on the freeway, cars toppling over the Triborough Bridge, lunatic drivers pulling knives which ever-heroic Isabel refused to acknowledge as threat, bodies….
She picked up
the phone again and as she waited for a response from the airport, she told herself she should have gone to meet her friend. But they had a policy about that, had had it ever since that year in London when their friendship was seeded - neither was ever to bother meeting the other. Now, each had a key to the other’s apartment, so they needn’t even make a point of being in when they landed in each other’s cities. Life had little enough time in it, as it was.
‘No, ma’am, we can’t check on individual passengers.’
‘But…’
‘Rules, ma’am. Can’t do it.’
‘But my step-daughter…’ Leo heard herself lying. ‘I’m so worried.’ A sob came inadvertently into her voice.
‘Sorry ma’am.’
‘But what do I do? How do I…’ the sob was there again. ‘Who can I call?’
‘Your step-daughter? Just a minute Ma’am.’
There was silence for a moment and then the man came back. ‘What’s your name, ma’am?’
‘Morgan,’ Leo lied. ‘My step-daughter is Isabel Morgan.’
She listened to the clacking of keys.
‘No passenger by that name on the flight you mentioned.’
‘No passenger by that name,’ Leo repeated dumbly.
‘Maybe she caught herself a later flight.’
Leo imagined Isabel stuck in a traffic jam on the way to Heathrow. ‘Can you check?’
‘No, ma’am. Have yourself a good evening, hear.’
He hung up with too much alacrity, as if he were afraid she might ask his name or make more trouble.
Leo paced - past the blue and white sofa, past the curving velvet chaise longue, past the glass dining table with its six distempered chairs, through to her work space and by ingrained habit into Becca’s room, as if her daughter might still be there, curled into her bed, her lips puckered in the snuffles of sleep. Instead there were only Becca’s old posters and photographs crowding the walls, a host of stuffed animals parading across the bed, lolling in a cushioned wicker chair. Becca’s childhood was waiting for her should she ever want to return to it, now that she herself had left it far behind. Stifling a wave of nostalgia, Leo closed the door softly and went to check on the spare room, once Jeff’s study, and now neatly arranged to receive Isabel.
Sanctuary Page 1