by Rosie Price
* * *
—
Before he left, Max went upstairs to his old room. He’d come to collect some cables so he could get the iMac working again. His room, as always, was far tidier than he’d left it, but this time it was more bare, too. The piles of paper that had been on his desk had been put away into a drawer, the books back onto their shelves. The sheets had been stripped from the bed and the coverless duvet was folded at its foot, with the pillows stacked on top, and the lampshade had been taken from the ceiling light, leaving the bulb bare. The walls might have been repainted, too. For a while, he sat on his bed. They were only small changes, and as such they elicited only a muted response in him: he wondered whether he ought to feel more sad than he did about his near-empty room.
He lay back, closed his eyes. Perhaps he should be feeling guiltier, too, about avoiding Rupert. He wasn’t having dinner with Kate: he had no plans later. But he was feeling a little tipsy from the beers, and it was a sunny afternoon. He wanted to keep on drinking, not to have to sober up for dinner so he could sit in the conservatory with his uncle, trying to keep his eyes focused. It was exhausting, seeing Rupert. He couldn’t ask what he did all day, because the answer would lead them nowhere Max wanted to go, and now Rupert was sober they couldn’t rely on alcohol to bridge any gaps between them. In fact, even before Max had turned eighteen, their adult friendship was formed next to the drinks table at family parties or during trips to the pub or to expensive restaurants, where Rupert would line up different wines and make Max blind-taste them. Max was a natural, Rupert had told him, chuckling and finishing, one after another, the glasses from which Max had sipped. One-on-one he could see him. Just not today; he wasn’t quite ready. Before he got up, he saw that on the ceiling the glow-in-the-dark stars, which William had stuck there for him when they’d first moved into this house, and which still had their glow the last time he’d slept in this bed, had been left.
29
Zara had always been the first to wake, and she had long ago given up waiting for William to stir before getting out of bed. Once awake, she couldn’t bear to lie there: the taste of a night’s sleep in her mouth, the feel of cold sweat in her armpits and between her legs; no matter how badly she had slept—and lately she had been sleeping very badly—she rose almost immediately, washed and brushed her teeth, put on loose trousers beneath her cold silk dressing gown, and went downstairs.
For the last six months or so, she had been waking just after four. When she was younger, this would usually have meant that she’d been drinking or was high. In the early years of her relationship with William, when neither of them had been able to sleep for fear of missing even a moment’s time spent with the other, they’d frequently stayed awake until sunrise, talking, fucking; but now they were only ever intentionally awake at this hour when one of them had to work.
Since Christmas, Zara had been thinking of that time more often. It had been then, in the Maida Vale flat, that she had first told William what had happened to her during the production of the first film she had worked on, when she was still a student in Paris. He was the only person other than Zara, and the rapist, of course, who knew the exact details of what had happened: the room it had happened in, the precise progression of his hands from her neck to her waist to her breasts and then her hips, the moment at which verbal coercion had turned to physical force, the angle at which he had positioned himself as he pushed himself inside her. William knew too the name of the director and the name of every award he had won and the films for which they had been awarded.
But they didn’t talk about it anymore: William understood the past to be just that, and though he had never once been unsympathetic to her, from the start he thought of the trauma as existing in some other life, since Zara had already lived with it for almost a decade when they met, and he saw her as a stronger and a better woman for having resolved herself to it. Zara had come to find it easier to mold herself to his view of her than to confront him with the reality, which was that those memories had never found a quiet place in her consciousness, and that far from being resolved, they were at once their own organism and unwelcome filter through which she experienced the world.
There had been a time when it had looked as though sex, or the lack of it, might threaten their marriage, when, a few years before Nicole was born, Zara found in William’s office the rented pornos he’d been watching the evenings she was working. It destroyed Zara to think of him as a voyeuristic male who saw women only as objects of pleasure, and after that she did not want to sleep in the same bed as him. Briefly, she moved out, and Bernadette, who, of course, knew nothing of what had happened to Zara, divulged, presumably as an attempt to reassure her, that Gregor had had many affairs during their decades-long marriage, and that Bernadette hadn’t once tried to leave him. Zara went back to William, and they found their way back to one another’s bodies, though it was never quite the same.
It had come at a cost, to live like this. Zara had been drunk when she had conceived Max, and Nicole, well, she couldn’t be sure, but in the year before her daughter was born Zara had found she was only able to feel excited by the act of sex if she had William’s hands on her neck and bruises on her body. For a while William had accepted this phase as experimental, and it had excited them both to know that although they had been together for years now, they were still impatient to discover the limitations and weaknesses of one another’s bodies. But after a while it was all she wanted, and if she was sober she couldn’t bear to have him touch her in anything other than a fraternal embrace. In time they came to the unspoken realization that what she really wanted was for him to rape her, but because it was surely impossible to want to be raped, they both began to suspect that if her fantasy of directing her own violation was an impossible one, then it followed that physicality between them was an impossibility too.
When Nicole was born, it saddened William too much to know that his daughter’s mother could only desire him as her aggressor, and he was torn apart with guilt for having made Zara see him that way in the first place. After L’Accusé won the Palme d’Or, Zara, who had been re-traumatized by a bloody and difficult birth, began to travel more for work. William meanwhile dedicated himself to nurturing the innocence of his first child, cushioning her in the love he felt that Zara had withdrawn from them both, and in so doing, he hoped, sparing her from ever experiencing the fate that had befallen his wife.
He thought himself to be doing Zara a kindness, protecting her from the destructive power of sex, but the unintended consequence was that she felt almost as undesirable, as flawed, as she had in the early weeks that had followed the rape. She withdrew further, through alcohol, through her work, requiring him to be a friend over a lover, more brother than husband, until, when Nicole and Max at last moved out, it became clear to them both that they lived their lives just as they slept and woke, in disjointed parallels, and that they were almost entirely independent from one another.
* * *
—
The appearance of Kate in Zara’s life had begun to change things, and now there was the film. When the script had come from her agent at the beginning of the summer, Zara had read the email that introduced it and then the entire script, sitting without moving in the exact spot she’d opened them, at her desk one Tuesday morning. She’d phoned the producer as soon as she’d finished, told him that she was transfixed. She’d been so giddy that her agent had called her and asked her to rein it in just a little: Zara’s eagerness was making it impossible for her to negotiate. Later that week, when they’d got the green light, Zara had gone through the script again: more slowly, this time, with a pen and notepad, and the story had moved her no less.
Strangely, it was not the rape, but the sex, which came in the latter half of the film, that Zara was most drawn to. Zara had known before this that there was still a part of her, so long suppressed, that desired to be desired. She knew that she had become more beautif
ul as she’d aged, but for years had felt that she must remain untouchable. She found it hard to touch herself even, for fear of defiling her body: the thin, moisturized legs, the nude polished nails, the naturally neat triangle of pubic hair and stomach that was slim enough so as not to reveal where her skin was beginning to sag, the long neck over which her dyed hair fell loose in the mornings. It was now so long since she had been able to bear the smell of desire, even on her own hands, perhaps particularly on her own hands, that if ever she masturbated, which she did very rarely, she was troubled for days afterward.
Lately, though, since she’d received the script, since she’d met Kate, she had begun to question whether this act of self-denial was less willful than forced. Everything Kate had said to her about her own trauma had stayed with her and was leading her to a conclusion that was painfully at odds with the rules by which she had lived since the rape. How much she had lost; how much she had sacrificed; how profoundly she had betrayed herself. Daily she had been robbed since she was attacked: of her autonomy, of her desires, of her desirability, of the pleasure of intimacy with her own body and the body of the man she had once loved, perhaps loved still.
Of course, she’d told none of this to Kate. It was not fair that she should have to bear the burden of Zara’s unhappiness as well as her own, nor did she want Kate to think of her as being so profoundly unhealed. But, in the months that they were close, as she watched Kate work through her trauma, Zara was making discoveries of her own. When she touched herself for the first time since Kate had confided in her, she was alone in her bathtub, and as she lay there trying to coax her body into a state of relaxation, the water grew lukewarm, and when at last she came it hurt her to experience it: still her body associated the sensation of pleasure with intense pain. But she was triumphant nonetheless, and for the rest of the day she glowed with the secret knowledge of her success. And, after that first time, it became easier to reexperience physical pleasure and very gradually she began to hope that she might be able to overwrite years of deprivation and of abstinence with something new.
* * *
—
The day after they’d had Max over for lunch, after she’d told him about her new script and he, in turn, had told her that Kate was seeing somebody, Zara allowed herself a lie-in. Then, when she slipped out of bed, instead of going from the bathroom down to the empty, sunlit rooms of the ground floor of the house, she brushed her teeth and washed her face and, loosening her gown from her waist, got back into bed with her husband. William smelt sweetly of sleep. In bed he wore a white T-shirt and checkered pajama trousers which she had always thought endearing, and as he turned in his sleep toward her, putting his arm around her, she moved her face closer to his so that she too might inhabit the glow of his skin in the warm morning light. It had once irritated her, the way he never quite fully closed the curtains, but at this moment she was grateful for the gap that illuminated him.
Zara moved closer still, began to slip her cold hands under the soft cotton of his shirt where his torso radiated the warmth of a night’s deep sleep, and lifted her head so that she could bury her face in the groove above his collarbone. His neck smelt of laundry detergent, of soap, faintly of cologne. When he opened his eyes, he was smiling, and he held her face sleepily in both hands.
“I missed you,” he said, looking at her as if to make sure that she was really there, and closing his eyes again. She had always thought it sentimental, when he said this to her on waking, as if he had spent his night’s sleep searching for her, but it had always filled her with blissful reassurance too, and now she kissed him with intensity that had for so long been alien to them both. William kissed her back, but she could feel as he did so that his hand was on her shoulder, that even as he pulled her to him with his kiss and his words, he was gently pushing her away.
In that moment Zara was struck by the fact of his absence; by the certainty that the man who was kissing her was not really there, and she pulled back. Almost immediately, William rolled over and reached for his phone, which he kept on the bedside table, and Zara knew then that he was not able to meet her in her desire. In stark possession of this knowledge, she could not bear to lie there beside him and she got out of bed, and went downstairs to where the light was not filtered through half-closed curtains but fell coldly and without interruption on high white walls.
30
After Kate first slept with Andrew, she had phoned Claire. This was a tradition of theirs from school, which Kate had kept through university, but had of course dropped after what had happened with Lewis. Now, she was longing to relive that old giddiness. She spared Claire the details she needn’t know: the closed windpipe, the pain. But she would at least give herself the pleasure of recounting in detail the buildup, the intimacy, the brief moments of embarrassment she had done her best to hide from Andrew but could now reveal.
“So are you, like, seeing each other?” Claire said.
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Well, at least one of us is having sex.”
“Oh,” said Kate. Clearly, things had not been going well between Claire and her boyfriend since they’d moved in together. Claire didn’t volunteer any more information, and Kate did not ask. She had been doing such a poor job of keeping in touch, and she didn’t feel she had the right to demand any details Claire did not want to give. But she promised to call again soon and told Claire—and meant it—that she should come and visit if she needed to get away.
She realized now that she needed to tell Claire what had happened to her, and she didn’t know when she would next see her face-to-face. After that phone call, though, Kate resolved to speak to Andrew. The morning after they first slept together, she hadn’t wanted to be touched, because the daylight was too bright and her body was too heavy. But the next time she saw him, she went to his flat instead, and when he started to pull her toward the bed she told him to stop, sat down beside him, and told him what had been done to her.
“Shit,” he said. “When?”
“Last summer. August.”
“Shit. So when we…”
“Yeah.”
“You’d…”
“Yeah.”
“Man.”
That was enough, for now. They were only just getting to know each other, and neither of them knew the limits of the other. That evening, instead of fucking, they made lasagna. Kate was charged with making the béchamel sauce, Andrew the Bolognese. He put on a playlist so they didn’t need to talk, and when the sauces were ready they layered them with pasta. While the lasagna was in the oven, Kate heard the front door open.
“Shona,” Andrew said to Kate, before shouting: “Shona!”
Shona, when she came into the kitchen, refused Andrew’s offer of dinner.
“You’re making her eat lasagna? It’s too hot for lasagna. I can’t believe you have the oven on. You need to widen your repertoire, we’re going on a cookery course or something.” She looked at Kate and smiled. “Hi. I live here.”
“I’m Kate.”
“I know,” Shona said, winking. Kate couldn’t remember the last time she had seen somebody wink and actually look good while doing it. “It smells quite good. But I don’t eat Italian food.”
“That’s why we’re having lasagna,” Andrew said quietly as Shona went to her room. “So she won’t have any.”
Shona came back in briefly, wearing a white dressing gown and complaining that her bedroom smelt of garlic. Before she disappeared into the bathroom she flashed a bright white smile at Kate, behind Andrew’s back.
“Is she cross with you?” Kate said.
“Nah,” he said confidently. “It’s her way of showing affection.”
They did not speak as they ate, Kate trying to decide whether she should pick up the conversation she had started earlier, and Andrew focusing on his food, sometimes pausing to inspect the mouthful he had impaled on
his fork. When he was finished, he pushed his plate away from him and folded his arms, watching her work her way through her portion.
“What does it do?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“What happened to you. What does it do to you? Now, I mean.”
Kate shrugged. “I get low. I get anxious. Panicky, really. Flashbacks, sometimes.”
Andrew nodded. “Panic attacks?”
“Sometimes.”
“I feel for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Really. I used to get those, for different reasons. But I feel for you.”
Kate was surprised by this: she hardly knew any men who had had panic attacks, or at least any men who would have admitted to having had panic attacks. Stage fright, he told her.
“What, when you were filming?”
“Acting. That was what I wanted to do, for years. Always at school, even went to drama school for a year. But when it got to auditions, stuff that actually mattered, I’d freeze up. Feel like I wasn’t in my body. It was humiliating, sweating like that over a few pieces of paper. I know it’s different, but…”
“But you don’t get them anymore?”
“No.”
“What’s your secret?”
“No secret. It passed.”
“You stopped acting.”
“I found something I was better at. I’m too fat to be an actor, anyway.”
“Not true.”
“Nah, I like food too much for that shit.”
Andrew got up now and brought the rest of the lasagna to the table, dug his fork in.
“So you remove the cause, and that fixes you,” Kate said, “but what if you can’t?”
“Then you learn to live with it.”
* * *
—
After this first conversation, Kate knew she had license to bring up the topic whenever she wanted. It was not often that she felt the need to talk about it. But the knowledge was there that she didn’t have to censor herself, that if she needed to refer to the rape then she could. With Andrew she could use it as a reference point when talking about the chronology of her life: being able to recount something minor and irrelevant that had happened “before the rape” was significant for her, because it helped her to smooth out that rupture, to incorporate it into the fabric of her existence. Sometimes, she gave him details. She hinted, more than once, that the man who had raped her was somebody she knew. She didn’t say who, or how she knew him, but she said enough for Andrew to know that although she was not in immediate danger, neither had the threat completely passed.