A Sense of Guilt

by Andrea Newman

  Felix said mildly, ‘Shall I go and collect Sally?’

  Reality, sanity, made a dim reappearance. ‘Oh, Felix, would you? I’m in no state to drive.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, but you might like some time on your own with Lizzie.’

  ‘Thanks. I would.’ It was a new sensation, not pleasant, to feel gratitude towards Felix.

  ‘You’d better give him the address,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Oh – yes. It’s in the High Street. The Sick Parrot, it’s called. You can’t miss it. There’s a bloody great drooping bird in neon lights outside.’

  ‘Just like Inge really,’ said Felix, and she almost liked him. They all laughed and he left the house. Helen was shocked that she had forgotten about Sally until he reminded her.

  * * *

  As Richard was parking the car the front door opened; Inge had obviously been watching for his arrival. She ran down the garden path and flung herself into his arms, starting at once to cry. He led her back into the house and poured whisky for her; he did not want a drink himself. She was wearing a dressing-gown, which he hoped she would not remove, and she smelt unusually clean. He felt he had been comforting her for most of his adult life and yet he knew that was unfair: when he had loved her, she had been cheerful. He remembered that clearly. There was an open and shut case against him: his departure had destroyed her happiness. He was responsible for the wreck she was now. If Helen chose to condemn her for being feeble, that was simply a moral judgment and had nothing to do with the facts.

  ‘You should report him, you know,’ he said, thinking of this unknown stranger who had injured his ex-wife but far less severely than he himself had done.

  She shrugged. ‘What for? I ask him in, I make use of him, then I throw him out, so he robs me and hits me. It’s fair. We both got what we wanted.’

  ‘Inge, this is crazy.’ There were no visible marks on her to indicate a struggle, but even if the attack had not taken place at all, the effect was the same.

  ‘I upset him,’ she said, almost with pride. ‘I talked about you. I always talk about you, I can’t help it, but they never like it. If they talk about their wives I listen and I don’t mind, but it doesn’t work both ways. It’s funny, how can they be jealous when they don’t even know me? It must be their pride. D’you think that’s it?’

  ‘I think you should stop picking up strangers who treat you badly.’

  ‘How can I, if you won’t come back to me? I must have someone, I can’t lie here masturbating for the rest of my life. Is that what you want me to do?’

  ‘Oh, Inge,’ he said helplessly.

  ‘Am I embarrassing you? Why don’t you like me to speak frankly, Richard? You know I love you. I’ll always love you.’ She got up and poured herself more whisky; he was alarmed at the speed with which she drank. ‘But I must have a man while I’m waiting for you to come back. If they treat me badly, it really doesn’t matter. They can’t hurt me the way you hurt me when you left. Not even if they kill me.’

  He said, as if she didn’t know it already, just to be clear that they both acknowledged reality, ‘You’re just trying to make me feel guilty.’

  ‘Doesn’t it work?’ she asked in a curiously innocent, practical, almost child-like way.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said bitterly. ‘It works.’

  * * *

  Helen said, ‘I think we made a mistake getting married, actually.’

  Elizabeth was startled. She and Felix had left England shortly after the wedding, having taken credit for introducing them and seen them through all the mess of the separation and divorce. It was one thing for her to speculate in private as to whether they were happy; another thing to hear from Helen that they were not. She saw Helen noticing her shocked face.

  ‘Oh, not like that,’ said Helen, smiling. ‘I mean from Inge’s point of view. I think we should have just gone on living together.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ Elizabeth felt a fool, caught out, wrongfooted. She tried to rearrange her expression, remembering that Helen had always had a knack of making her feel uncomfortable.

  ‘I wanted to,’ Helen said carelessly, ‘but Richard said getting married would make it more final and she’d give up. I think it was the last straw. She’s been much more difficult over the last three years.’

  Elizabeth thought Helen sounded smug. Was the success of the marriage measured by Inge’s distress? ‘I suppose she’s very lonely,’ she said. She didn’t like to think about Inge too much, feeling she had ratted on her, following Felix so blindly as he endorsed everything Richard did.

  ‘Yes, of course she is, but we’ve all been lonely.’ Helen somehow made it sound like having a cold. ‘When Carey and I split up, I thought it was the end of the world. But you come to your senses eventually.’

  Elizabeth hesitated, torn between honesty and tact. ‘I’ve always been afraid I might behave like Inge if Felix left me.’ She felt better once it was said. Like standing up to be counted. Like rows of extras calling out, ‘I am Spartacus’. Why should Inge be crucified all by herself?

  ‘Oh God, surely not,’ said Helen, looking shocked at this unliberated attitude. ‘Anyway, he never would. He knows when he’s well off.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Elizabeth said, meaning it. She could feel herself and Helen moving further and further apart from their original meeting point, like scissors opening.

  ‘If she’d only make an effort,’ Helen said, ‘try to get a job, even part-time, then she might meet someone else and she wouldn’t be lonely and she wouldn’t be such a bloody financial burden.’

  But I could never meet anyone else like Felix, Elizabeth thought, no matter how many jobs I took. And if I met them, I couldn’t love them. Loving Felix is a life sentence. Maybe Inge feels the same about Richard. ‘I do see it must be very difficult for you,’ she said.

  Helen poured herself another drink without offering Elizabeth one. ‘Well, I support Sally and myself and Richard supports Inge and the boys. There’s no shared money – in that sense we might as well not be married at all.’

  ‘I suppose it’s quite hard for her to find a job. I don’t think she’s worked since she was an au pair.’ Elizabeth was beginning to wonder how she had ever got into all this. She hadn’t even particularly liked Inge when she knew her and yet eight years later here she was defending her and upsetting a friend. It would be so much simpler just to agree. She wasn’t sure why she couldn’t do it.

  ‘God, she can cook, type and drive, and she speaks three languages. She’s more qualified than I am. Why does she imagine that having two children entitles her to sit on her arse for the rest of her life?’

  It must be like stealing, or borrowing money, Elizabeth thought. You grow to hate the person you have injured, or the person who has done you a favour. It’s simply too much to go on feeling guilty or grateful. She poured herself another glass of wine and Helen said absently, ‘Oh – sorry.’

  Felix would have to drive tonight, Elizabeth decided. She needed to drink if Helen was going to make her feel uncomfortable. She stared round the room, as the silence went on: it had hardly changed in the time they had been away. Helen had knocked down walls long ago, when she first bought the house, merging the hall with the living-room and creating an L-shaped space leading into the kitchen which Richard seemed to use more than she did, but it was still undecorated. The sofas and rugs were shabby from ten years’ wear and the few paintings of her own that Helen had hung seemed incongruous, too stark and professional for such an unfinished room. It looked as though Helen had just moved in and did not intend to stay. Elizabeth marvelled that someone so visual could care so little about her own home. Clearly all Helen’s energy went into her work.

  * * *

  They came out of the disco into the street and the comparative silence revived Felix as much as the fresh air. All the same, he regretted complaining about the noise: he was sure it would brand him as boringly middle-aged.

  He said, ‘Richard’s gone to see her.
Apparently some man beat her up.’

  ‘How awful. Poor Inge.’ Sally sounded genuinely concerned.

  Under the street lamp, getting into his car, he noticed the purity of her profile, the healthy gleam of her uncreased skin beneath all the absurd paint. The cheap silly clothes could not disguise how lovely she was, but he caught himself thinking that dressed by him she would be really beautiful. He liked to take women over and change their image; he envied their potential. It would be fun to play Pygmalion to Sally’s Galatea.

  ‘Is Mum furious?’ she asked as they drove off.

  ‘You could say that, yes.’ He had found it exciting to witness Helen’s agitation; short of going to bed with her, which he knew, regretfully, would never happen, there was no other way he would ever see her lose control.

  Sally said, ‘She thinks Inge does it all on purpose to get Richard to go round there. And she is awfully accident prone. But I don’t see how she could get someone to beat her up on purpose.’

  Felix glanced at her swiftly, but she looked quite serious. Were the young really so naive? he wondered.

  ‘It must be awful for Richard,’ Sally went on. ‘I’m sure he feels guilty.’

  It occurred to Felix that she was talking a lot, as if she were nervous. ‘D’you think he was wrong to leave her?’ he asked. It would be interesting to get a teenage view of the subject.

  ‘Well, he couldn’t stay with her, could he? Not once he’d fallen in love with Mum.’ She made it all sound very simple: obviously the young were still very romantic. ‘You knew Inge, didn’t you?’ she added after a pause.

  ‘Yes. Long ago. When they were first married.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  Felix thought about it: how to sum up all the hours, amounting to days, weeks, maybe even months of his life that he had spent with Richard and Inge, talking, laughing and getting drunk; loving Richard, lusting after Inge, then tolerating Elizabeth as an intruder, a passenger and, later, an umpire in the rows before the whole thing split apart. ‘Very intense,’ he said carefully. ‘Small and dark and thin and slightly mad, I think.’

  Sally didn’t appear to notice the emotion in the pause. ‘I always imagine her like the Lady of Shalott,’ she said, ‘sitting there weaving and watching for Richard in the mirror.’

  Felix liked the image and admired Sally for coming up with something so appropriate. He felt at once very tired and very randy, two states that for him often went together, and he wanted to prolong the evening, although he knew that nothing could come of it. He suggested they should stop at a nearby coffee bar and Sally agreed at once, sounding pleased and surprised. When he added, to cover himself, that he thought Helen wanted to talk to Elizabeth for a while, Sally said, ‘Of course,’ with a noticeable chill of disappointment in her voice that made him long to kiss her.

  * * *

  But the coffee bar proved only marginally better than the disco. A steady thumping beat with no discernible tune blasted out of the speakers and assaulted him; young people who looked as though they should have been in bed hours ago were sprawled at nasty formica tables in pairs and groups, smoking and attempting to talk to each other; a curious red glow from the lighting made everyone look as if they had spent too long on the beach. It was, Felix thought, the sort of place that would have made even Dante revise his ideas about hell.

  ‘Whatever happened to Mozart?’ he said. There seemed no point in trying to appear trendy or whatever the current word might be: his appeal lay in other areas.

  ‘I think he died,’ Sally said innocently, straight-faced.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  They sank down at one of the nearby tables into seats that Felix knew would give him backache if he remained too long.

  ‘Anything to eat?’

  She looked shocked at the very idea. ‘No, I’m much too fat.’

  ‘God, you women and your weight,’ he said without thinking (Elizabeth was always attempting to diet). He caught her looking pleased to be called a woman and then trying to conceal her pleasure in case it made her seem gauche.

  ‘Don’t you like this sort of music?’ she said, meeting the problem head-on. ‘It’s number one.’

  ‘Is it really?’ said Felix.

  ‘I like Mozart as well,’ Sally said.

  A waitress arrived, a badge pinned on her left breast announcing that her name was Shirley.

  ‘Two coffees, please,’ Felix said, deciding to be bold. ‘And could you possibly turn down the music?’ He achieved a fractional hesitation before the word music to register his distaste, but he thought the subtlety was probably lost on Shirley, who merely looked amazed and went away.

  ‘Well, it was worth a try,’ he said to Sally, adding, ‘Oh dear, my age is showing,’ because he knew it did not matter.

  ‘Mum plays the Rolling Stones sometimes,’ Sally said, placing him firmly in her parents’ generation and gently sending him up. They both laughed and something eased in their conversation: it shifted into another gear.

  ‘You must be very pleased about Sussex,’ he said, feeling at once more comfortable with her.

  ‘Yes.’ She traced a pattern on the formica with her finger nail and he studied her profile: she had a straight, blunt nose and a short upper lip. ‘Well… Mum and Richard are.’

  Here was his chance to be understanding, a different sort of adult. ‘I see. Like that, is it?’

  ‘I am pleased, of course.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Oh…’ A long sigh. ‘Feeling I didn’t really have a choice. Everyone expected me to go, so I’m going, and I know I’m lucky, and I’m grateful not to be looking for a job that isn’t there.’ She looked up at him, her eyes pure and child-like behind the ridiculous orange make-up. ‘Did you feel like that about Cambridge?’

  ‘Not really,’ Felix said. ‘I was excited.’ But not half as excited, he thought, as he now was about Sally’s mouth. It was a rather large, firm mouth that looked somehow also delicate, as if it had hardly been used, the lips unpainted and sprinkled with freckles. It was the same shape as Helen’s mouth, which he had always found extremely erotic. He imagined exploring it with his tongue, imagined it opening up to him, letting him in, then imagined it wrapped round his cock.

  Their coffees arrived. Shirley put them down rather heavily, slopping them into their saucers, and went away. She had done nothing to moderate the music and Felix lacked the courage to ask her again. Once showed spirit, he thought, but twice was pernickety.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit special, isn’t it, Cambridge? I know Sussex is supposed to be very good but… the way you wrote about it, Cambridge sounded so wonderful.’ She stirred her coffee, rearranging the froth on top but making no attempt to drink it. ‘I’ve read all your books, you know. Not just the Tony Blythe ones, the early ones as well. I liked The Heartbreak Merchant best. Especially the part about him and his mother. It made me cry.’

  She was behaving like a groupie and he was flattered. ‘Yes, I don’t think I’ve done anything better than that,’ he said, remembering. ‘But it was a long time ago.’

  ‘D’you prefer writing thrillers?’

  Now she was interviewing him and the novelty of it reminded him how long it was since he had been interviewed. ‘No. But it’s a different sort of challenge. And it pays the bills. Not as satisfying as a straight novel though.’

  ‘Can’t you do both?’ Sally asked, elbows on the table now as she gazed at him as if he were the most fascinating man in the world. Felix felt himself warmed by her attention; he had not realised how deprived he was of adulation, much as a hungry man might not realise the extent of his hunger until he began to eat.

  ‘I’ve lost my nerve,’ he said truthfully, something he had previously admitted only to Elizabeth and Natasha.

  Sally said, ‘Oh, Felix,’ in a tone of such amazed tenderness that it was all he could do not to kiss her. Then he realised it was the first time she had used his name as one adult to another. He saw fr
om her face that she was aware of this too and a little silence fell between them as the music blasted out.

  * * *

  Driving her back to the house, he was aware what a short journey it was, how little time he had to consolidate or make a move, how they might never be alone together again. It seemed like fate – Richard summoned by Inge, Elizabeth and Helen having a drunken chat: he had a strong sense of urgency and predestination mixed with ordinary sexual excitement. But he was also aware of the ridiculous aspect of the whole thing, that he should be allowing himself to get into such a state about someone he had vaguely watched growing up for the last eight years. The bit of his brain that monitored his behaviour nearly all the time these days made a note of the fact that he had not lusted after someone this young since he was young himself. But it was not simple lust: there was a lot of romance and yearning and fantasy wrapped up in it. That probably makes it a male menopausal crisis, said this part of his brain severely. What, already? said Felix, pushing it away. But I’m only forty, for God’s sake. Elizabeth’s fifty-one. We can’t both be having the menopause at the same time, surely.

  There was silence in the car after the easy conversation in the coffee bar. It reminded him of dinner parties where moving from the table to the sofa could ruin the whole thing. He had to be brave, summon up all his resources of age and experience, to plunge into a silence like this.

  ‘We should really celebrate your getting into Sussex,’ he said, before he lost his nerve. ‘Even though it’s not Cambridge.’

  ‘I’m not there yet,’ Sally said, sounding remote.

  Neither am I, Felix thought, plunging. The cold-water swimmer risking a heart attack. ‘Would you like to have lunch with me one day?’ There was no time to be subtle: they were already at the house and he was parking.

  ‘Yes, I’d love to.’

  He could hear her surprise and pleasure, and the effort she put into trying to sound casual. It made him smile, made him want to put his arm round her, but he thought it was too soon for that. He scribbled his number on a piece of paper and gave it to her.