You were shouting your head off about your ‘conjugal rights’. I think it’s a rule, don’t you, that whenever the ‘rights’ of marriage are invoked, by either one, then that’s the end of that marriage. I don’t know, this may only be true of the bedroom. In the last five years we have done a million things for each other that perhaps felt like duties or obligations or sacraments, but I never felt that either of us was asserting a right.
Our marriage is not over. But Xan, my dearest – you are scaring the shit out of me. And to think that there are supposed to be women who love to live in fear; no woman worth anything would put up with it for an instant. Shall I tell you what it’s like? It’s the desire, more intense than any you’ve ever felt, for something to be away from you. It’s the tearing desire for something to be over.
Our marriage is not over. It is not over. Last night was an utter disaster for us, and it will take an incredible effort to recover from it. I know – who wants an incredible effort, in matters of the heart or anywhere else. But that’s what lies ahead of you, beginning with hours and hours of Tilda Quant.
This is what I think has happened. Your past is your past, and you escaped it or evolved out of it. Over the years you wore down your prejudices and developed a set of rational contemporary attitudes – remember my saying that you were more feminist than I was? You were a little bit pious, if anything. Then, after you were hit, I thought at first you’d slipped back a generation or two. I now think it’s more basic, more atavistic than that. Your attitudes and opinions aren’t attitudes and opinions any more. They’re beliefs, and primitive beliefs at that. If, today, you were to show me around your past, as you once did five years ago, you wouldn’t be showing me Kropotkin’s clubhouse on Worship Street, or Mother Woolf’s spieler, or the pub called the World Upside Down. You’d be showing me your cave – or your treetop.
Two more things. You have started being different with Billie. And I don’t mean all the incomprehensible rules and regimens you tried to impose on her (no one could work out what she was supposed to do with that apple every day: give it to her teacher? give it to you? eat it?). No, it’s more serious than that. Remember, before, when she used to do her ‘exercises’, or when she did them for too long or too often, you’d get embarrassed or irritated and say ‘Oh stop that, Billie’ or ‘Go and do that in your room’. Now you’re transfixed by it. You practically pull up a chair. This is a qualitative change in you. What can I say? You give me the creeps, man. You give me the fucking creeps. See it from my side. If I started giving you the creeps they would be woman creeps, not man creeps. Women (I read) very rarely show a sexual interest in their children (and very rarely try to rape their husbands). You are a man and you always have that at your disposal – male heaviness.
Change back. Please change back. Oh please, please. Please become again the big, calm, slow-moving, encouraging, approving, protective, affectionate man you were before. Until you do that, and it is what you’re going to do, you and I can have only one kind of intimacy. Remember that word we loved: epithalamium. (I’ve just looked it up and burst into tears.) I was faithful to you and you were faithful to me. Fidelity is all we’ve got. Take that away, now, and there’s nothing. Fidelity is epithalamium. Epithalamium.
The last paragraph concerned itself with such matters as his packed case, the keys to the flat across the road, the fact that Imaculada had prepared the bed and lightly stocked the fridge, and so on. When he first read the letter (it was half past one the day after) Xan’s first impulse was to do about fifty thousand pounds’ worth of damage to the house. Fifty thousand pounds would be about right. The presence, in the kitchen, of Billie, Sophie and Imaculada was just enough to restrain him. Instead, he asked Imaculada, ‘How can a man rape his wife? She’s his wife. And you were going to nick me. Where is Russia? Where, where, where?’ And he stood there with his fists raised and tensed …
He made an effort to reconstruct the night before, and achieved some tinkertoy success with a credit-card receipt from a nearby Indian restaurant, a temporary tattoo on his forearm (presumably allowing his reentry into some joint or dive), a beermat from the Turk’s Head, and a coupon for an inexpensive cologne. Also, in his notebook, he had written: ‘In black and white!! (a little bird told me).’ Apart from a four-day hangover, this was all the evidence he had, and it meant nothing to him … The head-injured person cannot remember the moments leading up to the head injury; and this is perhaps a strategy of the mind, sparing you the pain of reliving it. Xan wondered whether the amnesia of inebriation was also self-protective: if strong and pure enough, the memory of how you were last night would kill you instantly. Why remember the time you lost everything you had?
The flat he now occupied was a garden flat – a basement flat. Even in summer it was sepulchral. And it wasn’t summer. Xan stood up, now, and went into the kitchen, where it was brighter (and also colder). For a moment he thought he saw a human figure stir on the stone steps leading up to the neglected, the unloved back garden. It was not a human figure. It was a black rubbish-bag, in the process of shifting its weight: a very low thing, really, in the scale of existence – and keeling over further now like a tramp in his oilskins to be quietly sick after the usual incorrigible reverse.
Xan was obliging himself to reread Russia’s letter at least twice a day. Its penultimate paragraph (oh please, please) he reread almost hourly. He was in treacherous psychological territory, but this he fully assented to. It was intimate, it was exclusively intimate: the thought that Russia, whatever else she was doing, was being faithful to him. Denied Russia, he himself wanted infidelity – he craved infidelity more ecstatically than ever. But he did accept that what she said was true. Fidelity was his lifeline, and without it he would be a man in water, without connection.
She called on the eighth day.
‘Hello?’
‘Xan?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well I’m here,’ said a comfortable voice – educated, accentless. ‘And I’ve kept my promise. I’m lying on the sofa in a rather grand and rather warm hotel room, and I’m all dressed up as a little girl. What that means is that everything I’m wearing is much too small. These panties, in particular, are ridiculous. So when would be good for you?’
‘And you are?’
‘And I am? I’m Karla. Idiot.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘Oh come on,’ said Cora Susan.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. We will go quietly
After a couple of days on his own, batching it in the basement down the road, Xan Meo slowly realised something. Before, he had lived in a house full of girls: two that were women, two that would be women thereafter. And now? Now he was living with a man – himself: he felt denuded, and hideously revealed. Xan didn’t know the lines (and, in his present disposition, would have rejected them as unmanly), but he was sharing Adam’s agony, after the Fall: ‘… cover me, ye pines, Ye cedars with innumerable boughs, Hide me …’ He had fallen. He was a Septembrist, not a Decembrist, but he found it very ageing, his exclusion from the house with its women a hundred yards away – a minute’s walk; yet Russia had sent him on a much longer journey through time.
Standing with one foot up on the toilet seat, Xan clipped his toenails – so kippered and curled. The nail of the big toe cleaved with a crackle; its immediate juniors each gave a defiant tick as he lopped them. But the nail of the little toe made no sound at all. How tactful, how very discreet. The nail of the little toe came quietly.
Reading the instructions on the packet of a store-bought meat pie, he noticed that an ampersand of eye-dreck jumped from word to word – like the bouncing ball above the nursery rhyme on the television, there to help the children sing along.
Passing the mirror, naked, he seemed to see a Rubens in the glass. That thickened, tightened feeling around the gut and saddle, making him feel that he was, to say the least of it, a couple of hundred bowel-movements behind the game. There was nothing wrong with Xan that a ye
ar in the lavatory wouldn’t cure. But where would he find that year? Did he have that year?
Waking, and rubbing his face, he felt a pillow-crease like a duelling-scar on his cheek. He had just shoved himself out of a dream of kitchen chaos – buckets and coffee-grounds and upended rubbish-bags. No need to tidy up, not after dreams, he thought; no need to leave dreams as you’d expect to find them. But this was a dream about a man alone. So don’t allow that room to let itself go: you’ll be back. The duelling-scar was still on his cheek as he stood by the fridge and ate lunch. He caught himself in the glass of the garden door. Like a Junker: brainwashed, paranoid, talentless.
Climbing from the straightbacked chair, he gave voice to a groan. Sitting back down again, he gave voice to another. Anything and everything made him groan: bending, turning, wiping his brow. And the very old—they didn’t groan all the time. They trained themselves not to; and so would he. We will come quietly, like the little toenail. We will go quietly. We won’t make a sound.
On the fourth day he was allowed home for a probationary half-hour with the girls. Russia greeted him with a cousinly hug and then withdrew, but only tactically: she would look in, pass by, she would clump about on the stairs and on the floor above. This was meant to fortify Imaculada, whose sickened glances suggested (to Xan at least) that domestic disharmony was quite unknown in the slums of São Paulo … Billie was the kindest to him, consenting, after a while, to be lifted on to his lap for a book; then Russia appeared and loudly and brightly suggested that they sit on the sofa (side by side). Although Sophie burst into tears the instant she saw him, she recovered surprisingly well. Thereafter she cried only when he coughed. And Xan’s cough had come on a bit in recent days. He coughed not in helpless reflex but with purpose and method, hacking the ragged edges off the soggy presence in his throat.
With Russia he tried to look the very picture of contrition, which was the best he could hope for, because contrition was not what he felt. He was perhaps open to intellectual persuasion about the solecism, the regrettable typo, of raping your wife. But a persuasion is not a conviction; and it would in the end be countered by the argument, or the unadorned encyclical, that your wife is your wife. Besides: everyone knew that a special indulgence should always be extended to men who, through no real fault of their own, happened to be unusually drunk. Yet Xan was making the effort. He was making the effort to be or at least seem reasonable, to bow to reason, as hereabouts interpreted. For instance, with Russia, he never succumbed to the ever-present temptation to ask (or order) her into the bedroom. The work of controlling or dissimulating these urges and grievances caused him to tremble, sometimes for a minute on end. During one of those minutes Russia looked at him and fleetingly imagined that he was trying not to laugh.
But nothing openly terrible happened, and his visits became longer, looser, laxer. Russia’s patrols further receded; Imaculada would sometimes leave him briefly alone with Billie; and he was soon permitted to look in on them as they bathed … Observing the girls was now part of Xan’s schedule, like his morning hour with Tilda Quant, and his first cautious sessions at Parkway Gym; but there was nothing routine about it – about observing the girls. Indeed, the experience was hallucinogenic, uncannily vivid and unstable: he never knew what it was going to do next. Why was it such a savage pleasure to watch them eat? Why was it of desperate importance to him – the volume of water they displaced in the bath? And why did they so often remind him of pornography: the lewd contortions, the self-fingerings, the slurping ingestions with chin and cheek dripping with milk or vanilla icecream? Why did he always expect them to die, every day, every night?
There was one time when Sophie fell apart early on, having been deprived of her afternoon nap, and was asleep in her room by a quarter to six. On his way out, Xan asked Russia if he might take a last look at her, and in he went. The blanketed figure seemed quite inert as he reached down and placed the flat of his hand on her spine. There elapsed an evanescent eternity before he felt the soft push of her breathing; and then he heard his own quiet retch of deliverance.
‘She’s down,’ he said. He stood in his overcoat at the door of the small half-landing sitting-room, where Russia was watching the news. ‘Dead to the world,’ he added.
‘Oh well. She’ll wake at five.’
Russia continued to look up at him from her chair. The aerodynamics of her face: its angled gauntness, in the present light, made him think of hunger, of famine.
‘Answer me something,’ she said. ‘Why do you think Billie has stopped “exercising” when you’re in the room? She masturbates in front of Imaculada and me – still. Why not you?’
‘Maybe because I’m a man.’
‘She didn’t mind before. You’ve made her self-conscious about it. And then the fox.’
‘I told you about the fox. The vixen. It was nothing. I just hugged her too hard.’
Xan was in the shed, stowing the garden hose, when Billie joined him. They heard the scrape on the skylight – and there above them was the weight of the fox, its underside, its crusty rump, its coat with its spines and quills. Billie cried out (‘Look!’), and Xan snatched her into his arms as the animal tensely swivelled and stared. He had expected a moment of feral severity – a snarl, a show of teeth – and not the entreating frown with its depths of anxiety. An anxiety that no human could have borne for an instant. Then it fled, its nails scratching the glass, and Billie was struggling and cuffing his hands.
‘I just hugged her too hard. I hurt my knee too.’
‘Yes, she said. “Daddy hurt his knee too.”’
He swayed backwards a couple of inches and said, ‘With the girls, I don’t know, I’m just generally het up about them. As though they’ve just come in from being lost. After dark. It’s part of it. I’m trying. I’m trying.’
‘This last week. It’s gone okay.’
‘Has it? I’m glad you think that. I know I’ve got a long way to go. My guidance systems … Anyway. Goodnight.’
Her eyes had flicked back to the television screen. His eyes followed. He was subliminally prepared for some footage of the modern world: the scorched chassis of a bus or truck, a bandaged shape being wheeled at speed down a hospital corridor, a woman wailing, with subtitles … What he saw seemed simpler: a phalanx of American soldiers – grunts, jarheads – crunching across a sandswept airstrip, each of them fantastically overequipped, like a one-man band. He thought: the jihads of the jarheads. He said, sounding surprised,
‘Semper ft. Yes. Semper fidelis.’
‘You know,’ she began, staring full ahead, ‘you’re a lot more uh, gamesome than you used to be. In your speech. You used to be much more step-by-step. I liked it.’ She looked up at him. ‘I miss it. Still, yes: semper fidelis. At all times faithful.’
‘Epithalamium.’
‘… Epithalamium.’
But it was when he was alone in the flat at night that he really did his work with the little girls. He lay there twisting, arching, squirming, seeing them hurt, harmed, taken, their flesh pierced, their bones snapped, the shells of their skulls meeting concrete or steel. What he saw when he closed his eyes had the power to lift him off the sheet and flip him over, to double him up, to flip him back again. He thought: something’s coming for them and I can’t protect them, I can’t protect them. And there were their faces showing fear, then terror, then horror, forcing more convulsions on him, causing him to writhe and thrash and seethe … He had read about a woman who said she felt ‘a profound calm’ as her daughter was attacked and knifed before her eyes. Similarly, sleep appeared only when the thing had already happened in his mind, and their ruined bodies lay before him; he was afloat on a glazed lake of detachment, drenched with the chemicals that come at such a time – that come to take you to the other side. I can’t protect them. They’re mine, and I can’t protect them. So why not rend them? Why not rape them?
You can live as an animal lives, and he thought he knew, now, why an animal would eat its young. To p
rotect them – to put them back inside.
That little girl I see, walking past the window. Is that her, or is it just the ghost of my child?
2. Weird sister
It was on the eighth day that she called.
‘So when would be good for you?’
‘And you are?’
‘And I am? I’m Karla. Idiot.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘Oh come on,’ said Cora Susan. ‘Wait. There’s someone at the door. It’s open! … Just put it there, please … Thank you. Thank you … Champagne. To celebrate my arrival. There’s a half-bottle in the fridge but I don’t like the brand and it’s never quite enough, don’t you find? Now look. I was under the impression that we had an understanding.’
‘I’m sorry. “Karla”?’
‘Yes, Karla. Christ. With a k.’
‘Uh, wait. The thing is I had an accident about a month ago. And I—’
‘An accident? What kind of accident?’
‘A head injury. My memory’s not what it was.’
‘You have no memory of a woman called Karla? This is a grave disappointment. You seemed perfect for me. Poor you and all that, but you’re probably no longer suitable.’
‘Suitable for what?’
She sighed and said, ‘I’ll start at the beginning then. I’m a wonderfully rich, young, sane and pretty businesswoman who adores loveless sex. All right, I’m petite, but I have a superb body and I’m marvellously fit and brown. I pass through London twice a year. You were supposed to come to my hotel one afternoon and do whatever you liked to me. Then I get on a plane and put five thousand miles between us. Till next time. Now I suppose I’ll have to keep an eye out for someone else. I’ve just seen the bill for the champagne. I love spending money but this is madness.’