The Mistressclass

by Michèle Roberts

  After twenty minutes of jolting along, stop and start, stifling her breath as yet more passengers rammed themselves aboard, Catherine gratefully realised she was on the wrong train and fought her cramped way off, up into the open.

  As soon as she stepped away from the sheltering sweetness of the flower stall, the rain hit her. She swore. Her new black suede shoes would be irreparably stained. A man shoving past stepped in a puddle, raising a spray of muddy water that splashed her white coat with streaks of dirt. If she’d had an umbrella she’d have wanted to hit him with it.

  A shawled woman in a long flounced skirt, carrying a sleeping child on one arm, approached her, holding out her hand, murmuring some soft plea. She had dark hair, a gold tooth. Catherine gave her a pound and dodged past. She marched up Villiers Street and turned right. Even as she gave them money, she swivelled her eyes away from the two thin, pasty-faced girls huddled under grimy sleeping-bags in a doorway. She ignored the smiled thanks of the wild-haired young man, blanket-wrapped, who accosted her feebly from a doorway, whispering hello then pointing to his sign scrawled on cardboard. She gave him her last pound coin but refused to meet his eyes.

  She wove between groups of tourists making for cafés and pubs, skipped around puddles. Alleys and courts opened off on her right, just wide enough for one person to walk through. Robert had taken her to pubs, nestled in these passageways, in the early days of her marriage, when she’d still believed she could be a go-between, put everything right between father and son, kiss it better. Robert certainly liked kissing her. He’d seize her, plant big wet ones on her mouth before she could twist her face away. She taught him to kiss her on both cheeks instead, and he taught her how to drink. In and out of all the pubs along the Strand. At the far end of these alleys: glimpses of the silver river. He rubbed his nose: Adam’s bloody lucky to have you. What a disappointment that boy’s been. Can’t make head or tail of that nonsense he writes. Stabbing a wooden toothpick into squares of Cheddar, pouring a stream of peanuts into his mouth, coaxing her to one more Bloody Mary. She’d fold her arms, shake her head at him. His peers value Adam’s work: that’s all that matters. Robert said: doesn’t earn much, though, does he? Who’s going to look after you in your old age? He took her about with him, squired her to shows and openings Adam refused to attend. People assumed she was his mistress and she let them. Guilt: was she betraying Adam? Complicit with Robert, yes, she was. Adam couldn’t manage his old man but she could. Putty in her hands. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Hugs you couldn’t escape. Hands straying across breasts, knees. He thought she’d given him the right but she hadn’t. Not now she was married. But she liked his gallantry, yes she did. She liked men fancying her. What was wrong with that? She realised it was Vinny she was talking to. She missed arguing with Vinny. They’d been too cool with each other for too long.

  Once the boys were born Robert stopped flirting so much; settled into his role as grandfather more or less. He started to treat her again as a confidante as he lay dying. Bits and pieces of tales he whispered to her as she and Adam took turns to sit by his bed in the hospice. Visits could be made at any time: the hospice was friendlier than hospital; homelier. Death could not be tamed but here you saw it for what it was; not only the great mystery; but also ordinary. It co-existed with having your hair done and swapping photos of grandchildren and watching soap operas on TV. Vinny came in to see Robert just to relieve the other two for an hour or so now and then; he wasn’t, strictly speaking, her family, after all.

  Vinny was poet-in-residence for the hospice. A pilot project. Catherine had not seen her sister at work before. She watched her. Vinny hung about unobtrusively, chatted, listened a lot, tried to find out what people might require from her. If anything. She was prepared to make herself redundant. She brought in tapes and books, read poems to individual patients if that was requested, ran a writing group for ill children and another for visitors. The resulting poems were framed and hung on the yellow walls of the corridors and in the relatives’ sitting-room. Catherine didn’t know if Robert recognised her sister. Creative writing, he whispered: fucking therapy, more like. Tell ’em to get lost. Coughing and spitting. The sputum drooled into the plastic bowl she held under his chin.

  He told Catherine stories he had not told her before. Images from wartime broke loose from his memory mosaic and clattered onto the blanket. He summoned the dead. The stinking hills of corpses he had had to clamber over at Dunkirk to get to the beach; they were squelching and soft; your boots sank into their eyes and mouths. The officers who kicked their men out of sheltering doorways and took their places and then got blown up anyway. Real as ghosts, those people packed into air-raid shelters; sleeping in the tubes, laid out in rows on the platforms; preparing to be dead. That was why he hated travelling by Underground. He breathed harshly. The air scraped in and out of his wrecked lungs. The flesh on his neck bunched in folds. Towards the end he stopped talking, had to concentrate on vomiting; on bearing the pain. He rejected pain relief as long as possible. Why? That was how he was going to do things, that was all. That was how he had been brought up. He was afraid of morphine; that he would become addicted. So what? Catherine thought. Sometimes Adam could not bear to see his father suffer so much and had to go out, into the corridor. How could you watch someone suffer like that, he said to Catherine afterwards, and know you were powerless to relieve them? Finally Robert was persuaded by the gentle staff to accept morphine.

  Sometimes, if Adam wasn’t in the room, Catherine held Robert’s hand. She wanted to accompany him as far as she possibly could into the black tunnel that was opening up. Not to die herself, but to go with him as far as she could so that he would not feel afraid.

  What a liar she was. When it came to it she couldn’t do it. She was a coward and she failed. Whenever he had begun to whisper to her about his ex-wife, about his love for her, about his affairs with all those girls, she had interrupted him, changed the subject. He had wanted to unburden his soul but she had not let him. Call for a priest if you want but don’t tell me. Do your deathbed repentance scene somewhere else. I don’t want to know.

  Now she had decided to tell Adam something of what had gone on between Robert and herself. In turn, to try and make her confession. Sooner or later, with the show coming up, with so much attention being focused on Robert’s paintings, he would work it out. She ought to tell him before he guessed. Perhaps she was simply being selfish and egotistical. She would hurt him. Perhaps she should shut up, as she had done for years. From half a mile away she heard the sonorous bells of St Paul’s boom out the three-quarter hour.

  She ploughed along the Strand. How did you find the words to say it? Open your hands and I’ll give you a present. A stream of red geranium petals? Red coral beads? No: a shower of red-hot cinders from the fire. His palms would be scarred.

  She remembered that sequence of pictures in the chapel at school. The smiling angel who seized the lance, with its glowing tip, and pressed it into the centre of the saint’s outstretched hands; then into his sides; into his feet. Pain inflicted thus was a gift from God. But I’m no sadist, not really, she whispered to Adam walking invisibly at her side: and I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to be upset, that’s all.

  Liar. She was afraid he wouldn’t love her if he knew. He was strictly moral about some things. Was it really a lie when you tried to protect someone from being hurt? She’d kept her side of the secret and she’d known Robert would keep his. He enjoyed sharing a secret concealed from his son.

  She’d played at being the arrogant, enraptured saint. Robert had desired her and she’d believed she’d been singled out; marked; set apart from other women. She was God’s chosen girl. Like Mary Immaculate. She’d believed she was both angel and woman, able to bear the Saviour’s wounds and be glad of them. Like those mystics, those hysterics who embraced the stigmata. These saints surrounded her now and chanted that she was one of them. Like the cherubim inflicting the red marks of the nails they each had
six pairs of wings. They were outlined in flames and they were laughing because they loved pain. The martyrs had welcomed pain too, going towards it with outstretched hands. At school she had wanted to emulate their heroism. Of course she had. And all she’d ended up doing was writing texts to entertain young businesswomen who believed they had to be punished for having some power. That was Vinny’s view of her writing. They’d discussed it just once, when Catherine had had one glass of wine too many. Catherine had sworn Vinny to silence. And in particular don’t tell Adam. The novellas had been a container for her secret feelings. They’d kept her good and her marriage safe. So she was perfectly justified in writing them, she said to the Vinny who lived in her head. But Vinny did not reply.

  Catherine felt plunged into endless night. Part of a procession filing towards increasing darkness. Carried along in the stream of office workers making towards Fleet Street for Blackfriars, she’d almost forgotten where she was going. Gloomy afternoon; the sun hidden behind grey clouds. The rain was easing off. Just drizzle now. People on every side. She wanted to walk forever with these people and never arrive. She wanted just to drift in this mighty current, wash up somewhere far away, where there would be no more suffering. She felt very lonely despite being part of the hurrying crowd. Adam and she seemed to have stopped loving each other. There was no love left; and she would have to go away, far away from him, unable to reach him. She was mourning the loss of her love. Nothing but darkness inside her. Nothing but emptiness. She was made of nothing but grief. Grief stabbed her in the belly and she contorted, clutching at herself, unable to still the pain. Tears burst out of her. She dissolved into the rain. Tears and rain poured down her face. So this was the end. All that love was gone. Finished. Love ran out and that was that.

  She could not stop crying. She bent her head, so that passers-by would not notice. She would have to leave Adam, as he seemed already to have left her, and go off alone somewhere and live in the desert. She was so lonely. She didn’t know what to do except keep walking.

  The old Catherine had tried to keep herself apart, a cool step away from most other people; she’d stayed safe, intact; but that Catherine was gone, melted into the rain, mixed up now with all the people around her; there was just this sad woman who wept and went on walking along. As thousands had done before her, thousands of people in all the centuries gone by. Other people in the past had walked here, crying and wretched; she was one of them, part of their company, part of a great stream of the dead; she was joined to all those other people suffering; she was not separate from them at all but merged with them; walking along the Strand and crying. The dead who had walked here before her were walking with her now and they were alive because she could feel their presence, pressing close about her. All of them going along together in the dark rain. So she did not have to be lonely and she did not have to be alone; she had to plunge in and be with all the others, and love them; it was that simple. Sorrow was a sort of knowledge; strange how grief delivered you back into the world. She discovered that her parents were beside her, walking along with her. The tears broke out of her like stones.

  * * *

  Once, aged seven or so, Adam had hidden under the table in the hall. Wintry lino. A draught snaking in from under the front door to coil around his ankles. Choking smell of hard-boiled eggs and furniture polish. First he tried the hatstand, with its drop of woollen coats, and then he crawled in under the table and waited there, hands clasping his knees. He wanted to feel enclosed, and he wanted to see out, and he wanted to have space around him. The table stood over him, sturdy as a cow sheltering its calf. He called it hiding, but he wanted to be found. He chose a place where his mother would notice him. No point hiding if she didn’t find you. A key clinked outside, fitted itself into the lock. The front door swung at him like a fist, and his mother’s high heels stepped briskly in. What are you doing there? Don’t be silly. Come out right away. She chased him into the kitchen to have his tea.

  —Adam, are you okay? Charlie asked.

  —No, but I will be soon, Adam said.

  He donned his jacket. Just let me murder my wife and I’ll be fine. Just let me grind this chisel into her lovely face.

  —Let’s go for a drink, Charlie said.

  Adam waved him away.

  He sat in a pub on Queen Victoria Street. A banal place, walled in engraved plate glass, full of young men and women in suits shouting at each other over booming music. He had a sense that Charlie had followed him, to keep an eye on him. Why? He drank large vodkas and thought about Vinny.

  In his dream six nights ago she’d held something hidden in her palm. A secret. Show me, he’d begged: tell me what it is. Now she gave it to him, cruel girl. Impossible to grasp. Spiny as a clump of newly fallen sweet chestnuts you try to pick up with ungloved hands. A crack in the thorny case shows a hint of white fur lining, silky curve of the dark brown nut. First you think beautiful then you think dangerous.

  She’d made it all up. Storyteller. She was pathetic. Mad.

  Adam had downed three large vodkas. He bought himself a fourth. He knew he must be drunk by now but he felt as coldly empty as the space under a table. He was a cube of air. The air began to collapse because there was nothing to hold it, give it a shape. He needed a covering; an outside.

  He tried to get back in control. He made a mental list. One. He was upset because his wife had wanked in front of his father, he presumed she had, and let the old goat watch. Two. He was upset because presumably she had pretended this was all in the cause of art. Three. He was upset because she’d never told him. That was lying by default. Four. He was upset because she had been writing pornography in secret and hadn’t told him that either. Five. He was upset because if she had let Robert fuck her then he was destroyed because she had held him up, held him together, sworn she loved him, yet all this time she had been mocking him.

  He hated Catherine so much that he knew his skin had been stripped off. He was raw. What you do to animals when you butcher them. Pierce them with your knife then tug off their hides. Marsyas was hung upside-down and flayed alive by Apollo. The angry god punished him; tore off his flesh; peeled him like a fruit. With your surface lost you were gone forever. Nothing but agony. Blood springing out. He was filmed all over with blood: it seeped from his eyeballs and ran down his face. He clutched with his arms to keep himself in. He tried to bandage his leaks with his hands.

  He got up and left the pub. Six o’clock on a May evening. The rain had stopped. A fresh breeze tossed the little waves on the river, which glittered in the sudden sun and reflected the blue of the sky. First of all he plunged down onto the little strip of shingle at Queenhythe where he had met Vinny a week ago. Standing on the filth-strewn beach he couldn’t decide where to go. He was supposed to meet Catherine in the Wheatsheaf, but there were no words he could speak to her and so he had to protect her from what his hands wanted to do instead. Beat her face to a pulp. It was impossible to be with anyone. He was too dangerous. He might kill anyone who spoke to him.

  He climbed up onto the walkway that went past the back of the Vintners’ Building. He left that wounded son, that poor sack of blood, behind him, at Queenhythe. Vinny could have it. Pecking bird. Scavenger. It wasn’t him, that lump of red rubbish; hacked purplish steak. He’d been disembowelled and his heart torn out, his guts and liver and spleen tossed contemptuously down onto the pebbles, where they lay and hurt because they were still alive.

  But he had been transformed. Now he was made of metal. Now he had grown a coat of spikes. Keep off. He was a clanking pylon-giant. He couldn’t fold himself up to fit inside a pub. Ridiculous.

  He walked on to Southwark Bridge. He felt he ought to stop half-way because he always did and people said life had to go on. He leaned against the parapet. Passers-by, tourists, commuters hurrying for trains dodged round him. He gazed down at the scurrying water far below. Then he climbed up onto the turquoise-painted parapet. Slightly domed in the middle. Slippery from the recent rain. He had t
o concentrate to keep his balance.

  When the bough breaks the baby shall fall. Once he’d been a baby and Robert had held him in his arms and had not dropped him but swung him to and fro and cradled him. Robert was gone. Pages torn out of his best book never to be replaced. Everything he’d ever been: offered up to Robert; oh please love me. If Robert was gone then Adam was gone too. But he was cunning. He could get Adam back. You just had to read what the river said.

  The waves rippled along like the lines of an untidy manuscript. They scribbled as fast as handwriting. A new, watery language. He could read it easily. Simple stuff, like a child’s ABC. A book of instructions written in water. How to live. You had to give yourself to life, as you gave yourself when making love. You had not to be afraid. You had to leap into the abyss of nothingness and then words would come, the angel would come. He rode upon the cherubim and did fly; he came flying upon the wings of the wind; he made darkness his secret place; and thick clouds to cover him. Adam started laughing. The clarity was as brilliant as when he used to drop acid and it burned to you: what you knew but had forgotten. You had to embrace the air, which had the angel hidden in it. The angel would catch you and you could not fall but fly.

  Someone shouted his name. He turned. Catherine was walking towards him from the northern side of the bridge. The sun caught her hair, a burning halo. She’d tried to hold him up but she couldn’t any longer she was too tired she would have to let go. Hang on Adam hang on. Charlie was striding towards him as well. Shimmering in the light. Outlined in gold. Making towards him as purposefully as soldiers or as police. Coming to arrest him. Stop, Adam. Stop. Wait.