‘You’re crying,’ said Carolyn, touched.
He did not bother to correct her. He stood by the window and looked out across the tops of the leafless trees to the few windows still left glowing in the houses on the other side of the square.
‘We all stole a car, once. Well, it wasn’t so much stealing, more like taking and driving away, they told me I was too timorous for authentic stealing. I opened the glove compartment and found a leaflet that promised you a thousand destinations. Think of that.’
Carolyn, mystified, could not see the point.
‘What happened then?’
‘We couldn’t decide where to go,’ said Lee and laughed.
Annabel glimpsed the nacreous shimmer of Carolyn’s dress intermittently through the shoulders of the dancers. The music continued to play extremely loudly. Buzz, magnificently painted, sat briefly beside her.
‘All right, are you?’
She nodded. They both watched Lee’s leonine left profile bent over the head of the girl in white.
‘She’s done up like a bride,’ said Annabel softly, so that nobody could hear her.
‘Sure you’re all right?’ demanded Buzz, quivering in the expectation of disaster.
‘Give me your ring.’
He slipped his father’s silver ring on to her thin forefinger, the only one it would fit, and she allowed him a ghostly smile.
‘Now I’m invisible,’ she said with satisfaction. Since they often played inscrutable games together, he thought no more about it but smiled and kissed her before he went away. She drew the shawl around her shoulders and set her feet on the ground. It is hard to say if she actually thought she was invisible; at least, she felt as if she might be. She picked her way delicately towards the window, drew aside the curtain and pressed her face against the cool glass. She saw, in the most immediate, domestic terms, a recreation of the sun and moon in appalling harmony.
Carolyn had become so obsessed with Lee that she had lost all sense of discretion or any sense at all. The landlord had replaced the rusted wrought iron of the lower part of the balcony by some graceless wooden boards so they were concealed from the street but Annabel gazed through the window at them like an infatuated spectre. The spectacle was as silent as if it took place under water and the arrangement of interlocking lines was familiar enough in itself; but this girl’s face was vividly contorted, not bland and impassive like that of the whore in the photograph and Lee was lost to her in a secret, ultimate privacy. She could not incorporate this manifestation of his absolute otherness anywhere into her mythology, which was an entirely egocentric universe, and she felt a grieving jealousy of the act itself, which she understood only in symbolic terms.
‘If you deceive me, I’ll die,’ repeated Annabel as if it were a logical formula. If she felt relief and even pleasure each time she herself evaded real contact with him, knowing the magic castle of herself remained unstormed, she thought perhaps he kept the key to the castle, anyway, and one day he might turn against it and rebel. But when she saw rebellion in action, she was forced to desperate measures to disarm him for she might, possibly, perhaps, hopefully, be able by these means to turn an event that threatened to disrupt her self-centred structure into a fruitful extension of it. She let the curtain fall back into place and turned from the window. The party went on as if nothing had happened and Buzz was deep in conversation with a Black man in dark glasses so she could get no help from him. It was practical help rather than comfort she wanted. Because she went stealing with Buzz and they shared the secret of the ring, she did not regard Buzz as too much separate from herself but it was Lee she loved and Lee she now intended to wound.
She went immediately to the bathroom to kill herself in private. Fortunately it was unoccupied. After she locked the door, she remembered she should have borrowed one of Buzz’s knives and stabbed herself through the heart. She was irritated to realize she would have to make do with an undignified razor blade but quickly cut open both her wrists with two clean, sweeping blows and sat down on the floor, waiting to bleed to death. She had always bled very easily. She guessed, however, it would take some time to bleed to death. Her wrists ached but she was as content as if she had won another game of chess by unorthodox means.
‘They’ve locked us out,’ said Lee.
Carolyn pulled the white dress around her shoulders and laughed.
‘I’m absolutely filthy,’ she said luxuriously. To be discovered locked out with him in a state of erotic disarray was as public an announcement of their liaison as she could wish and she thought how simple things would now become, a face-to-face confrontation between the Wife and the Other Woman, a certain victory. She wound her arms round him as he tapped at the pane until a blonde girl let them in. Carolyn was too preoccupied with the management of her satin skirts to take any notice of this amazing young woman, whose sullen face, round and white as a saucer of milk, seemed to float in an enormous cloud of peroxide hair, and Lee was too sunk in thought to recognize her until she said: ‘Good evening, Mr Collins,’ giggled and added, ‘sir.’
She was dressed as an incipient tart in a tight, white poloneck sweater, stretch denim trousers and high-heeled boots; only her fat, pale, discontented lips and the startling fairness of her skin hinted at how young she was, the beauty queen of the evening paper, Lee’s pupil, to whom he taught current affairs and who now discovered him in a compromising position amidst scenes of drunkenness and drugged debauch.
‘Dear God, who brought you, Joanne?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I won’t breathe a word.’
So he was trapped into complicity with a schoolgirl. Carolyn, looking round, was disappointed to see none of her friends left in the room. Even Buzz had vanished, although the music still played. Lee became edgy and nervous.
‘I’ll take you home.’
She found her fur wrap on Buzz’s cot, beneath some offensive pictures of Lee and Annabel. They left the remains of the party and, as at their first meeting, walked through the quiet streets together as if alone in the world. Suddenly she emitted a rich, low chuckle and pressed his hand but he was by now quite sober and in a state of great agitation for he had behaved more foolishly than he would ever have believed possible.
‘The last time my mother communicated to anyone, it was to say she knew she was the Whore of Babylon,’ he said, but he was thinking mainly about Annabel. Carolyn turned wide eyes to him; he had never mentioned his mother to her before and she thought this must be the beginning of a further stage of intimacy.
‘Tell me about your mother,’ she said encouragingly.
‘She’s locked up,’ said Lee. ‘Certified.’
She had not expected him to sound so bored.
‘Poor Lee,’ she said tentatively.
‘We was better off with the aunt, wasn’t we. You don’t want to live with a mad woman, do you, not at the impressionable age.’
A few days later, Buzz showed him the pictures he had taken on the hill. He could never have imagined such terror in her face for he had little capacity for metaphysical dread himself; otherwise, he had foreseen exactly how she would look for the woman in the playground and the girl on the hill were already superimposed on one another in his mind so that to speak of his mother was to speak of Annabel. He noticed his grammar-school accent had given way entirely so he knew he was under stress. Besides, his eyes burned.
‘Your aunt . . . your aunt brought you up?’
‘Yes. Both of us. She –’
He could not finish the sentence and left it hanging in the air. Carolyn grew sad and a little apprehensive to find no increase but a diminution of intimacy, for he had suddenly become unresponsive to her and she shivered, sensing, perhaps, the imminent loss of a little of her marvellous assurance. She lived in a terrace built out on a cliff over a river, a silent place.
‘Are you coming in?’
He gave her a curious look of mild reproof and she felt a premonition of sorrow.
‘Lee?’
She stood and beseeched him in the cold midnight in her pretty, silly clothes. But Lee knew he walked some kind of tightrope above a whirlpool, though he believed that the knowledge itself might be enough to avert a fall if he walked carefully and, even if he now intended to break with Carolyn, he was sufficiently sentimental or else, perhaps, vain enough to go upstairs with her. But her room made him vertiginous and he had to keep from the window in case he jumped out. Then he knew he could no longer live at everyday altitudes and had been deceiving himself. He succumbed to guilt immediately.
‘What have I done wrong?’ she asked like a miserable child, confronted with an indifference which flowed with the magic speed of a Japanese water flower, and now Lee oscillated sickly between two focuses of guilt, his mistress and his wife. Yet all he had wanted from Carolyn, in the first place, had been a little, simple affection and she, from him, pleasure, although now she was in such a tranced and helpless state she thought she would be lonely without him for the rest of her life.
‘I don’t know you,’ said Lee. ‘I don’t know you at all, do I?’
It was an excuse or an attempt at an explanation rather than a complaint but she was cut to the heart for she did not realize they had only intersected by chance upon one another and exchanged spurious, self-contradictory falsehoods as if flashing lights in one another’s faces.
Lee saw the ambulance from the top of the street and broke into a run. He was in time to see them carry Annabel from the house, wrapped in a blanket, and then Buzz spat at him. Buzz was still painted like a fiend and fixed at last upon a situation which fired all his histrionic opportunism.
‘I broke the door down and you was off screwing and she dying, wasn’t she?’
Lee felt nothing but surprise. Perhaps one of the ambulance men held Lee off him; anyway, soon he found himself in the casualty ward of the hospital giving Annabel’s name and address to a nurse. He spelled the name ‘Annabel’ twice out loud and then found he could not stop repeating the letters unless he kept his hand in front of his mouth. Annabel was nowhere to be seen. A man whose face had been smashed by a bottle lay on a bench, swearing. A pale child inserted sixpence in a machine and withdrew a paper cup of coffee. Another nurse (though perhaps it was one of the first two or one of the onlookers or, indeed, another nurse altogether) offered Buzz a sedative. Lee continued to feel nothing but shock. Annabel on a stretcher, covered up with blankets, vanished through a pair of swing doors. Somebody was trying to inject Buzz with something. What was the child doing here; she could be no more than twelve years old, sitting on a bench, swinging her legs and giggling. Admitted to a night ward without flowers, Annabel would wake in the worst of fears and think herself still dead, if she woke at all, that is.
Once out in the hospital yard, bundled outside by who knew how many nurses, orderlies and extras, Buzz attacked his brother again but Lee broke free and ran for it. The hospital was perhaps a mile and a half away from the quarter where they lived and Lee made his way up the hill by short cuts and back alleys, glancing behind him from time to time, but he soon shook Buzz off and at last found himself in front of Carolyn’s house as a church tower somewhere in the city below struck three. He rang Carolyn’s bell and she opened the door. Her tawny hair hung down the back of a crimson satin kimono but the yellow light of the street lamps took all her colours away. She saw such misery in his face she grew breathless for she had lain on her narrow bed all the time since he had left her, staring into the darkness, imagining him beside her.
‘I knew you’d come back,’ she said. ‘I just knew.’
‘Oh, my love, it’s not that,’ he said, ashamed. ‘Let me in for a while, I can’t go home.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s very melodramatic,’ said Lee. ‘You would hardly believe it.’
They went up the stairs to her room and the lights switched off automatically behind them. Once inside her door, she was startled to see him so grotesquely smeared with Buzz’s greasepaint and filthy from the chase through the streets. He dropped his jacket on the floor and lay down on her bed. She did not know what to do and moved about her room uneasily; she was not dressed properly for receiving bad news. Lee found and lit a cigarette, unpleasantly aware that everything he did or said could not fail to breathe stale cliché for he had seen so many scenes of this nature in ‘B’ feature films, it seemed, in reality, second hand. How was he, then, to invest the horrifying with dignity?
‘She . . .’
‘Pardon?’ she said.
‘She tried to end it all, love, she almost did it. My Annabel, that is, Annabel to whom I’m married, that is.’
She lay down beside him and he stroked her hair. She had no vocabulary to deal with the event, either; besides, she had thought of herself only as the Other Woman, never as a Femme Fatale. ‘Good heavens,’ she thought. ‘I must be dangerous.’
‘Can I sleep here? I want to keep away from my brother, he’s in a homicidal mood.’
‘Yes. Of course.’ She found she was crying a little and thought Lee must also be crying when it was only the scalding of his hypocritical eyes. As soon as they were in bed together, he did something he could never afterwards explain away or justify to himself; he performed an act which was, in the strictest sense, gratuitous. Because she was female, naked and available, he fucked her while she continued to cry, aware of some gross impropriety but quite unable to resist it. He appeared to be behaving in a perfectly involuntary way, as if to prove to himself he was indeed a villain untouched by any normal human sentiments, and thus extracted from himself a false confession to convince himself, in retrospect, he was immoral although, at the time, he was not thinking of anything at all. Then he fell into a profound sleep from which he was awakened by the insistent ringing of a bell.
‘It’s the post, I expect,’ she said. ‘I won’t be a minute.’
He could scarcely tear his eyes open but he felt the inrush of cold air into the bed when she left it and heard the rustle of her kimono and the pad, pad, pad of her bare feet. His reactions were extremely slow and he did not say: ‘Don’t go, it’s my brother,’ until she had left the room. After a moment, he heard her scream.
The light of early morning flooded the hallway for the front door was wide open and Carolyn leaned against the porch cupping her face in her hands. Blood poured through the cracks between her fingers. Buzz, oddly shamefaced, stood on the doorstep with his hands dangling loosely by his sides, and though he carried his camera, he had not taken any pictures.
‘I hit her,’ he said. ‘I think I broke her nose.’
‘We’ll have to take her to hospital,’ said Lee and began to laugh.
‘If you had come down first, I would have killed you.’ Buzz showed the knife he held in readiness. He regained a little of his eldritch composure as he did so, cloaked, dark, menacing and fully armed. All the tenants of the rooms in the house peered from their individual doorways to witness the amazing scene and Lee was suddenly exasperated.
‘Ah, come off it,’ he said. At that, Buzz flung the knife down at his foot as in the old game of daring-with-a-knife they used to play at primary school. The knife stuck quivering in the wooden door jamb. Lee, stark naked, turned and offered to the spies on the staircase the appalling brilliance of his most artificial smile before he pulled out the knife, offered the hilt back to Buzz and shut the front door on him. Carolyn, bleeding profusely, preceded him back up the stairs.
‘Please don’t call the police, it’s a family matter,’ said Lee to a woman in a dressing gown.
Carolyn jumped when he touched her but dressed herself and he went to telephone a taxi. He took her into the casualty ward and they attended to her at once. The wounded man and the child had gone but the nurses were the same as before.
‘I see you left your brother behind this time,’ said the sister, folding her white lips sternly. She was an austere, grey woman of about fifty.
‘Annabel,’ he said. ‘Please?’
‘
Your private morals are nothing to do with me,’ said the sister.
‘What the fuck do you mean?’ demanded Lee. ‘Let me see my wife, won’t you?’
‘She’s awake,’ said the sister. ‘I must say,’ she added with distaste, ‘you do have a high casualty rate among your women-folk, don’t you?’
Her slight Scots accent lent a steely precision to her speech.
‘Tell me about Annabel. I’m legally married to Annabel; doesn’t that give me any rights?’
‘She had a little breakfast; a boiled egg, toast.’
‘Can I see her?’
‘She refuses to see you,’ the sister replied with an air of grim satisfaction.
Lee sank down on the bench where the bottled man had lain.
‘Point-blank?’
‘She threatens worse if you persist in trying to see her.’
‘I see,’ said Lee heavily.
‘We’re going to move her to a very pleasant psychiatric hospital as soon as it’s possible, Mr Collins. You must realize your wife is a very disturbed girl, very sick. Your wife is a girl in need of care, of loving care . . .’
Lee knew the woman judged him and found him wanting and this seemed only fair and just. The nurse reminded him of his aunt, who would have forgiven no act which seemed to her immoral. At that, Lee was convulsed by the knowledge of sin and guilt. Nothing in his education had prepared him for such ravagement and he could guess at no absolution. Besides, his aunt would have mocked the notion for to forgive is only to obliterate and what good does that do?
A changed girl, Carolyn came out through a pair of swing doors. Her reddish brown hair was caked and spiked with dried blood and a muzzle of bandages obscured her pretty face completely. She would not look Lee in the eye and hardly spoke to him as she brusquely brushed past him towards the open air. It was now about eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. Lee had nowhere to go but back to the flat and nothing to do there but clean the bathroom of blood before the rest of the residents in the house, who all shared the bathroom, discovered it had become an abattoir overnight. His clothes were spattered with Carolyn’s blood, also, and soon he saw himself as a red-handed butcher to whom both women seemed no more than curious meat. He had no equipment to deal with abnormal states of mind and his composure utterly deserted him. He entered a delirious state of wilful self-abandonment.
Love Page 6