* * * * *
Through the classroom windows Christine watched the students, the younger full-time ones, scampering past the gallery’s incongruous Gothic bulk. So unsuitably dressed for this weather, she thought. The snow was falling still and making little crusts where it drifted into the corners of the windows. Christine thought to herself, with a small shudder of disdain, that no daughter of hers would ever have been allowed to dress like that in weather like this. No way. But then she thought that she might, no, would have had no control over the matter, would she. And that, besides, that her daughter, Grace she had called her, would have long since left university, if indeed she had ever gone. Surely, Christine mused, she would have done so. Surely.
Grace had been born at the turn of the New Year when her mother was seventeen. Christine had retired, with an adequate redundancy package on offer, when she was sixty, over a year ago and after forty years of service. Grace would be, and the number came up automatically as it had year on year, forty four years old. Christine had long since put an end to any impulse she might have had to cry on that birthday. The wrench which had occurred could not be undone. Her mother and her father, though him less forcibly perhaps, had insisted it would have to happen. So it did. But, year by year, she worried away in her mind at the choices she had been made to confront. More ruefully the choice she had, was it in despite of herself, made. He had claimed his hands were tied but that he would support her in whatever choice she made. Abortion in a private clinic or a discreet adoption. Beyond that, Tony was not able to go. There was no other choice they told her. Mother.Father. Tony. Oh, Tony. Christine had known he was married but not, she swore, that he had two children under the age of ten. She had not meant for it to happen the way it did. “Ha,” said her mother, “and even so, my girl, you can’t claim to be innocent, can you? Just stupid.”
Stupidity. A mess. What had she been thinking about. She had not been thinking at all, she said. Precisely, she was told. She must have led him on then. Need to be responsible. Stupid. Too young to have a baby. Too stupid to have a baby. To be a mother. And they, after all, could not be expected to take on another child. A baby. Not at their age. Christine had been made to contemplate, over and over, her stupidity. It only made her feel more stupid. Then, and since. Then, because she had been pulled and pushed into thinking herself selfish,and stupid,so she had, herself, actually chosen to let Grace go. Since, because she knew, even then, that she had indeed chosen.Not them.Her. Just as she had chosen to let Tony do what he wanted with her, despite her protests, because he, too, had wanted their love to happen. Or rather, since the love it seemed had only been on her side, their love-making. Sex, yes. But not, for her at least, only the sex. There had been passion. She had been suffused with it. She remembered all of it. Stupid, maybe. But passion, nonetheless, and without apparent limits to its power. Until it stopped, so abruptly, in deceit and despair. Then, as it played out and re-played in her memory over the years to come, she recognised it, or rather related it to herself, as something interchangeable, not unique at all. In its frame and in its detail it was of the kind of banality she would instantly register, identify with, in the novels she borrowed avidly from the public library.Always the same shelves, the same writers. Once outside the passion, just looking in, the cardboard cut-out characterisation and the cliché of Romance, stood in for the fate and the destiny passion had once promised her.A colleague had once flicked through a paperback she had been reading in her break.He was her age.He had been to university. He gave it back,with a smirk,and told her it was banal. She had looked up the meaning of ‘banal’ in the pocket dictionary she took to work. Its characteristics seemed to fit all her own circumstances all too well.
Girl leaves school at sixteen with modest but decent ‘O’ Levels. Girl joins local Council as a junior in the Planning Office. Girl lives at home with Father – a typesetter – and Mother – a housewife. Girl is tall(ish), for a girl. Girl is demure, awkward(ish). Girl is not pretty, plain(ish). Girl is uncertain, how not. Girl is young, and vital. So, untouched, unformed, open to life beyond her shelter, the girl is, naturally, enticingly attractive and utterly unaware. Enter older (just) man from adjacent office. He is not pushy, nor boisterous, nor overwhelming. He is neither a Lothario nor a Joker. Chance, apparently chance, encounters, over coffee, in the park at lunchtime, in the corridors, will and did, follow. Along with a spark, a scintilla, of friendship. This was Christine’s new found friend, and adviser. This was, soon, to be Christine’s first, and only, lover. Tony. He had a car. She lived on his way in to work. No need to catch a bus anymore. He would wait at the end of her street. Out of sight. Take her home, too. No problem. He was twenty-four. Married too young, he said. No kids, though, just the misery of a marriage to the mistake he’d made. Especially mistaken now that he’d met Christine who, whenever she thought back to the detail of her affair and of its consequences, shivered at how banal she had made her life. Until that is, she had read Anna Karenina. Oh, how instantly she understood Anna. Oh, how she feared for Anna. Oh, how she despised Anna. Oh, how Anna fascinated her.
In the classroom the ornate ribbed clunky radiators throbbed with heat, a mix of fuggy steam and metal paint. Christine took off her heavy, grey woollen coat and undid the knot with which she had tied her olive green, hand-knitted scarf around her neck. She smoothed down her black-and-red checked skirt and tugged her loose, beige pullover down into place. She scuffed her blue ankle-high wellington booties on the floor where they had dripped and made small puddles at her feet. The door opened from the corridor. Four others came in together and said “Good morning” and, in unison, stamped the snow off their Ugg boots. They sat down, behind Christine, and chatted to each other. Not to Christine. It was almost time. No others would come in this weather was the opinion voiced behind her. Christine opened the novel to the pages she had marked and wished to discuss. She went over the question she wished to ask. She had put it to herself in any number of ways. It would not come out quite in the way she wanted it to do , in the right and measured way, and she was stuck with it as it was, no matter how much she tried to move it around. The door opened again. Two latecomers joined them. Late by five minutes now. Traffic, they said. Chock-a-block in town. The snow. Delays everywhere. Perhaps the class would be cancelled. No one knew, or had had any message.Disappointed now, Christine moved her heavy shoulders,almost imperceptibly, in a kind of helpless shrug.
Outside the snow was coming down harder, thicker, in flurries, and it was sticking in granulated rifts spreading out from the recessed corners of the windows to the indentations made across the panes by the Victorian leaded bars which held the glass together. No undergraduate students could be seen any longer. The campus was all white by now and even the ugliness of its modern,blocky buildings was softened by their half-disappearance into the snowstorm. At 11.15 the class members, apart from Christine, began to shuffle their feet, finger the heavy coats they had draped over the back of their chairs , and begin to wonder if they should leave. The classroom door clattered hard against the wall. Derek Holdsworth had thrust it open with his left hand still on the handle and his right in the small of Diana Lewry’s back as he held it open for her and ushered her inside. Snow flakes clung to them and they shook them off like dogs do, and laughed.
“Sorry, sorry, everyone,” the Tutor said. The class nodded, and smiled forgiveness. “My damn car wouldn’t even start, and I had to walk. No buses going down our hill at all. No gritters been out. Of course. This Council, eh? And thank God, at the bottom, Diana, Mrs Lewry, four-wheel-drive naturally for a Doctor’s wife, spotted me and very kindly…well, here we are!”
The snowflakes scattered in Diana Lewry’s hair were turning into jewelled melt – water droplets,silvery beads amongst black strands. She ran her fingers through her wet hair and flicked the strands to make them separate. She waved, an all-embracing wave, to the group. She unzipped a black, leather bomber-jacket with silvery zips and studs, worn over a cherry red angora swea
ter and a calf-length chocolate brown suede skirt, and she crossed her legs in her knee-length black boots as she sat, to the front, in the chair left for her by the others. Derek Holdsworth had watched the mini-performance even as he’d taken off his own duffel coat, wet and damp above the brown corduroy trousers and charcoal grey polo neck he had worn all through the winter. Somehow the sameness of it comforted the class in the same way Diana’s colour and flamboyance added to their own pleasurable sense of being there, all of them, as a group.
Suddenly, within this tableau, without any expectation of understanding, Christine was taken by surprise. Pain, almost a physical pain coursed through her. It flooded in with no barriers of defence, no prior sense of its coming to forewarn her. Stupid. Christine looked up and across. At Diana and Derek. And she knew, all too soon and too clearly, that she was irretrievably stupid. Again. Of course. They’re a pair,she thought. A couple. Lovers. She clutched her copy of the novel tight between both her hands. She stared, startled by her insight, the last to have it she now supposed, and she watched, dazed, as Derek Holdsworth unpacked his briefcase and scattered his notes, and all four of the novels to be studied, onto the table. He sat, motionless for a second, in front of his class and when he spoke, their attention all his, it was the pleasure of being there with them, again, which was audible in the tone of his voice, beyond the redundancy of words.
“Right, then,” he said. “And of course with my thanks, ladies for your patience this morning. Well, here we are again, with our very own leading ladies before us once more.” Derek Holdsworth touched each of the paperback novels on the table in turn and, one by one, held them up to show the covers. “Bovary ? Dead. Dorothea. Daunted, or was it dauntless. Did we agree? And the transparent, or is it enigmatic, Karenina to come, along with the whore, or is it the saintly, Nana. We will see, won’t we? We will see.”
Dr Holdsworth took another fifteen, well-honed and well-rehearsed minutes to offer them a resume of Tolstoy’s narrative. He blended in the counterpoint story of the author’s doppelganger, Levin, and rounded it off with a series of observations that came delicately couched as possible lines of enquiry. It was a skilful gutting of the plot and a helpful portal into its key themes. Dr Holdsworth gave his remarks the added frisson of both his professionalism and his scholarship by dropping in some arcane critical phraseology, and then concluded with a clap of his weather-reddened hands and a shouted cheery, “Voila!”
There was to follow, they knew, the silence he had induced in their collective response. Then he would smile encouragingly, and wait. The class, in turn, half-inclined as a body to see how and when, as usual, Diana Lewry would break ranks, grateful to her for being willing to be so forward. But the voice that came first this time was not that of Diana, in front and to his right but that of Christine on the side and to his left. She had, in truth, not expected her own voice to sound so harsh, the timbre so challenging, but she knew, of a sudden, that it was the unexpected tone of her voice which was, in fact, dictating the question. It came out in a rush and unprefaced by any preamble. “How could Anna just up and leave her son?” she asked.
Dr Holdsworth put on his bemused, but yet encouraging face. “You don’t mean it quite like that, do you, Christine, uh, Miss Verity, do you?” he said, and went on, “I mean her motivation is reasonable beyond reason, is it not? The answer is love. The answer is lust. The answer is passion. The answer is Vronsky.” A murmur of pleasure rippled through the group. Of course it was? How compelling was his answer. Yet not the answer Christine could accept. ? Miss Christine Verity answered in turn.
“No, Dr Holdsworth, uh Derek, that’s not what I meant, your answer is to a different question. I mean, yes that’s why she did it and that’s why everything goes wrong for her. In the end. But it’s always wrong, isn’t it? And she knows it.”
This time Derek Holdsworth decided he needed to take charge or else, he could see, they would never begin to unpick the novel – its structure, its multi-vocal effects, its radical use of stream of consciousness, its contextualisation of the 1870s, its critical reception, and all the wonders that came from this ur- text – in the manner he had envisaged, and needed.
“Look,” he said, throwing a sidelong glance at Diana Lewry but leaning in friendly fashion towards Christine (“Ha! bloody verity – seeker,” Diana had called her after one tortuous session on Middlemarch) “Look, Anna, a good and beautiful woman, in the throes of an uncontrollable feeling for Vronsky, with her loveless marriage to the desiccated bureaucrat Karenin, sees a door open into a life of sexual love, a Nirvana if you will, through which she must go. Now, admittedly, in that Russia, then, without an arranged divorce, one in which she must be presented, deceitfully of course, as the innocent party she will be ruined, socially and reputationally , to the point of complete exclusion from her class, from her friends, from society. That, as the tale unfolds will indeed be her tragedy. But, Christine, we must begin, mustn’t we, in accepting the depiction of her…obsession, shall we say, with the adorable Vronsky?”
The word ‘adorable’ brought on some snickering of worldly knowledge amongst the group. “And now,” said Dr Holdsworth, let’s consider, someone please, the counterpointing narrative of Tolstoy’s presence in the novel as Levin? Diana?”
Diana Lewry uncrossed her booted legs which the melted snow made shine beneath the fluorescent light. She raised a magenta coloured fingernail to her open mouth. The voice, though, was again that of Christine Verity.
“I see that, of course I do. That’s still not my point, though. The point is, I’m saying, that to give in, as she does, almost from the beginning, is, well, wrong. And she knows it. Because Tolstoy knows it. And he never forgives her. She never forgives herself. It’s why she throws herself under the train.”
The tutor knew, in depth now, that there was only one way to deal with this rambling. He acted. “I don’t want us to be led down this side path at the moment, Christine. I’m concerned, for the class, with the bigger picture. Let me spell it out for you again. Anna Karenina is de-socialised by her perfectly understandable actions, her love affair, with the sexually voracious and sexually magnetic Vronsky. Right? None of us would have any trouble with that in this day and age, right? But this unfortunate woman is, in a sense, denied her full humanity, her social being, because she follows her heart, and more than her heart, eh, to her destiny. Romance meets reality. Only one winner, there. That, Christine, is our kicking-off point, not the whole shebang , ok?”
Christine Verity sensed the group willing her now to let this go, to let the expertise of their teacher take them to a better place. Instead, she said, “That’s still only description. I asked about her reasoning not her motivation. She had a choice, didn’t she? It wasn’t between her husband and her lover, it was between Vronsky and her son, Sergei Seryozha as she calls him. It’s her son she abandons. And when all else goes wrong, too, it is that guilt which torments her.”
Christine Verity opened her paperback to the passage she had marked in Chapter 23 of Part Two of Anna Karenina. She read it out aloud as if she was quoting a Biblical text, one she might have learned by heart. “What about this?” she asked the class, “Where Vronsky tries to persuade her to abandon her home, and succeeds. So you really think I ought to run away and become your mistress do you?…become your mistress and ruin everything…she wanted to say “ruin my son” but could not bring herself to utter the words. Vronsky could not understand how she, with her strong and truthful nature, could endure this state of deceit, and not long to get out of it. But he did not suspect that the chief cause of it was the word—son, which she could not bring herself to pronounce. When she thought of her son, and his future attitude to his mother, who had abandoned his father, she felt such terror at what she had done, that she could not face it; but, like a woman, could only try to comfort herself with lying assurances that everything would remain as it always had been, and that it was possible to forget the fearful question of how it would be with her son.
And then this, said Christine, and continued to read. She could hear the sound of her son’s voice coming towards them, and glancing swiftly round the terrace, she got up impulsively. Her eyes glowed with the fire he knew so well; with a rapid movement she raised her lovely hands, covered with rings, took his head, looked a long look into his face, and, putting up her face with smiling,parted lips, swiftly kissed his mouth and both eyes, and pushed him away. She would have gone, but he held her back.
Christine closed her book.
“Yes?” said Derek Holdsworth. “This is indeed your point, I see. But it is the kiss, her kiss to him, that makes my point for me, isn’t it?”
“It is what we are told. What we are made to see. It isn’t, is it, what we are necessarily supposed to approve?” Christine said.
“Approved?” said her tutor. “Approved, Christine? We’re getting a bit maiden-auntish now, aren’t we? They can’t keep their hands off each other, can they? That’s the point, love.”
Christine felt her mouth go dry. Outside the windows the snow was falling so steadily that nothing other than its falling and setting could be seen. In the classroom the students shuffled their feet, uncertain if the dialogue had come to an end. Given the way it was now being phrased, they hoped it had. It had not. Christine Verity could not stop now.
“They could have finished. Or Anna could have held fast, to the deceit. For her son’s sake. Or Vronsky could, should, have restrained himself. For her sake,” she said.
“Oh for Chrissake,” Derek Holdsworth said with a tetchy exasperation. He had grown tired of this. “We can’t moralise this away. Tolstoy is confronting us with the individual choices we sometimes make despite all of convention, all expectation, all consequences.”
“No,” said Christine. “Vronsky just wants to have her, that’s all.”
Diana Lewry laughed out loud. Derek Holdsworth smiled at her. “Ok, since you put it like that, I’ll put it like this,” he said. “Yeah, he wants to fuck her. Badly. Why do you think he wants to do that, Christine? He wouldn’t want to fuck you would he?” This time Diana Lewry said, “Derek!” and he said, “Oh, sorry. Sorry” and opened his hands, palms up, to the class of women. The faculty wives smirked their forgiveness. They waited. It was Christine’s turn, they knew. Christine Verity looked down at her own, large hands. She envisaged her face as he must see it, as her mirror showed it to her at home. Her down-turned mouth, her thin lips, her sharply pointed nose, her lank, graying hair. Even when she was young the mirror had never encouraged her. Only Tony had ever done that.
All That Lies Beneath Page 13
