Victory

by James Lasdun

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by James Lasdun

  Title Page

  Feathered Glory

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Afternoon of a Faun

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Love and hate, desire and guilt, friendship and betrayal form the coordinates of these two intensely dramatic stories of men and women caught between their irrational passions and the urge for control.

  In Feathered Glory the seemingly happy marriage of a school principal and his artist wife reveals dangerous fault-lines as an old lover reappears in the husband’s life and the wife, fascinated by a charismatic wildlife rehabilitator, brings an injured swan into their home. The poignant denouement leaves every character irreversibly transformed.

  The past also haunts the present in Afternoon of a Faun, where an accusation of historic sexual assault plunges Marco Rosedale, an English journalist in New York, into a series of deepening crises. Set during the months leading up to Trump’s election, this is at once a study of our shifting social and sexual mores, and a meditation on what makes us believe or disbelieve the stories of other people.

  These gripping, darkly comic novellas are free-standing and self-contained, while reflecting and complementing each other, offering a sharply observed vision that will resonate with anyone interested in the clash of power and desire in our embattled contemporary lives. Victory is a triumphant examination of how we fail.

  About the Author

  James Lasdun’s books include The Fall Guy and Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University and reviews regularly for the Guardian. His work has been filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci (Besieged) and he co-wrote the films Sunday, which won Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance, and Signs and Wonders, starring Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgård.

  ALSO BY JAMES LASDUN

  FICTION

  The Silver Age

  Three Evenings and Other Stories

  The Siege and Other Stories

  The Horned Man

  Seven Lies

  It’s Beginning to Hurt

  The Fall Guy

  NON-FICTION

  Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked

  POETRY

  A Jump Start

  The Revenant

  Landscape with Chainsaw

  Water Sessions

  AS EDITOR

  After Ovid: New Metamorphoses

  (with Michael Hofmann)

  Feathered Glory

  1

  The train pulled into the quiet riverside station. A large man climbed out, carrying a battered suitcase. He was alone, a fact observed with puzzlement by the person waiting for him on the platform.

  ‘No Audrey?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘How come?’

  The large man sighed.

  ‘I moved out.’

  ‘Oh, Victor!’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it in the car.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call us?’

  ‘Let me smoke one of these, Richard.’

  Victor had taken a small cigar, a cigarillo, from its box, and as the train heaved itself off, he stood inhaling the pungent tobacco while his host for the weekend, Richard Timmerman, waited patiently by his side.

  The two were old friends. They had grown up in the same small Massachusetts town and had remained close despite the divergent paths of their adult lives. Richard was now the principal of a private elementary school in Aurelia, a hundred miles north of New York, while Victor lived in Manhattan, on the Lower East Side, patching together a living from music journalism – mostly on esoteric jazz of one kind or another – while leading the disorderly and, in Richard’s private opinion, increasingly depressing life of an ageing bohemian.

  Recently, however, Victor had married. Audrey, his wife, was fifteen years his junior: an executive at a fashion company; very chic and pretty and efficient. Victor seemed to attract such women. They saw him as a challenge, Richard supposed; a gauntlet thrown down before their powers of cleansing and redemptive orderliness. Few ever lasted more than a couple of months, however, and although Richard had been glad to hear that this one was planning to stay the course, he had also been apprehensive. Now it seemed his fears had been justified.

  The story Victor told in the car was brutally simple. He’d met another woman. They’d decided they couldn’t live without each other. Victor had abandoned Audrey and their baby daughter, renting an apartment where the new woman, Oxana, was to join him as soon as she’d broken the news to her husband, who was travelling in Asia on business.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘My God, Victor. What does Audrey have to say?’

  ‘She’s devastated.’

  ‘I would think! You don’t seem too happy yourself.’

  Victor looked away, saying nothing.

  Sara, Richard’s wife, had lunch waiting for them when they arrived at the house. She made no comment on the absence of Audrey and the baby; merely looked questioningly at Richard as Victor carried his bag up to the spare room. Richard explained the situation.

  ‘What a shame,’ she said. ‘I liked Audrey.’

  She removed a setting from the dining-room table and took away the old spindle-backed high chair which she had brought out for the baby. Daniel, their ten-year-old son, filled the water jug, and the three of them sat, waiting for their guest to reappear.

  Fifteen minutes later he still hadn’t come down. Richard called up the stairs. Getting no answer, he went up and found Victor asleep, sprawled on the sleigh bed in his shoes, saliva dribbling from a corner of his mouth onto the antique quilt.

  He slept till late in the afternoon, and then came down looking worse than before: his eyes bloodshot, his face blotched pink and red.

  ‘Are you all right, Victor? I mean physically?’ Richard asked him.

  ‘I’m fine. Is one permitted to have a drink yet, or are the new rules still in force?’

  This was evidently an allusion to his last visit, when Richard, in an effort to keep the drinking from getting out of hand, had said that he and Sara didn’t usually start before six in the evening. He’d also asked Victor not to smoke in the house because the smell lingered in Sara’s weavings. Victor hadn’t seemed to mind at the time, and his caustic tone now startled Richard.

  ‘Of course you can have a drink.’

  He poured his friend a Scotch.

  ‘Let’s go out for dinner,’ he said impulsively, handing him the glass. ‘Just the two of us. Sara won’t mind. I mean, she’ll understand.’

  Victor brightened a fraction:

  ‘I’m broke …’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  They drove to the Millstream, a restaurant at the edge of town with quiet, wood-panelled alcoves.

  ‘All right,’ Richard said after they had ordered, ‘now tell me the whole story again, from the beginning.’

  ‘It’s what I told you.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s something missing. You fall madly in love. You’re about to start living with the woman. Why are you so unhappy?’

  Victor shrugged, turning away.

  ‘You want to go back, is that it?’

  ‘What?’


  ‘You want to go back to Audrey?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because that’s what I’m thinking. You want to go back to her but she won’t have you.’

  ‘Well, you’re wrong.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Don’t be a pain, Richard.’

  Their dinner arrived.

  ‘Listen,’ Richard said. ‘I wasn’t planning to lecture you, but I’m wondering if that’s maybe what you want me to do.’

  Victor wiped his lips with a napkin.

  ‘You can lecture me.’

  ‘All right. Look. You’re fifty now.’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Almost. You’ve gone from woman to woman your entire life. You leave them or these days more often they leave you. True?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Either way, as soon as you’re alone you’re miserable and immediately go out looking for a replacement. So now finally you’ve found someone you love – Audrey, I mean – who by a miracle appears to be able to put up with you. She’s attractive, smart, sweet, capable of holding down a job … You marry her, you have a child together … Then you just walk out? Aside from anything else what are the chances things are going to work out long term with this … Oxana? I know I can’t speak from experience but it must be quite a negotiation at our age, setting up house with someone new. All kinds of little foibles have to be addressed in the treaty, don’t they? Little fine-print details about the snoring, the bathroom habits, all that stuff … And you’re going to put yourself through that – for what? The only thing you can rely on is the law of diminishing returns. You know that …’

  He continued in this vein for some time. Victor heard him out in silence. He seemed to be absorbing Richard’s words like a chastised and penitent child. But when Richard had finished, he gave him a look of such curious impassiveness that Richard wondered if he’d inadvertently offended him. Even when the large features relaxed into a smile, there was something aloof in it.

  ‘Not bad,’ Victor said. ‘Not one of your best, but not bad.’

  In the small hours Richard was woken by sounds from the back of the house. Going down to investigate, he found Victor slumped across the doorway of the rear porch, his head outside on the stone step, a cigarillo in his mouth, the bottle of Scotch on the floor beside him. He was making a low moaning sound and when he turned around, Richard saw that he was weeping.

  ‘Vic! For Christ’s sake! Tell me what’s going on.’

  Victor gave a groan, raw and loud, like an animal in pain. Richard helped him to his feet, stubbing out the cigarillo on the step. Holding him gently, he steered him into the living room and sat him on the couch.

  ‘Come on now. You have to tell me or I can’t help you.’

  ‘Jesus, Richard, do I really need to spell it out?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘No. Tell me!’

  ‘She dumped me.’

  ‘Audrey?’

  ‘No, you jackass. Oxana. When her husband came back from China. Instead of dumping him she dumped me. Changed all her goddam numbers. Won’t answer my emails. Hilarious, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not smiling at that. I’m just – listen, Audrey’s willing to take you back. Right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well. So nothing’s lost. You go back. Start again. Try to keep things on track.’

  Victor blinked.

  ‘But it’s Oxana I want.’

  Richard tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice:

  ‘Yes, but … you can’t have her. So …’

  Tears welled up in Victor’s eyes. And yet Richard found it hard to sympathise: the suffering seemed to him perverse, childish, self-inflicted and utterly unnecessary.

  He stood up.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get some sleep. We’ll talk more tomorrow.’

  He woke the next morning with a sense of having been a little hard on Victor. From his experience in the classroom he knew that guidance was best swallowed when the guide was willing to show some kinship with the miscreant: similar desires; a common human fallibility.

  That afternoon, he took Victor on a walk along the trail that led into the forest from the end of their road. It was almost April; no leaves or blossoms yet, though the snows had melted and the smell of spring rose from the forest floor.

  ‘I had a similar experience to yours,’ Richard began. ‘Not the same – I wasn’t actually married – but similar. I didn’t tell you about it at the time because frankly I was too ashamed.’

  Victor gave a grunt of polite interest.

  ‘It was when I was at Ryden College, training teachers. I’d been living with Sara for a year and we’d decided to get married that fall, after she finished her textile classes. I was very much in love with her, just like you and Audrey – that never changed. But I got blindsided by this student. Not one of mine, and not an undergraduate, but a student nevertheless. She was from Ireland, Cork. Francesca Sullivan. She wanted to be a music teacher. She had a lovely voice, played all kinds of instruments – dulcimer, flute, mandolin. I still played the guitar in those days and we met through a group that got together a couple of nights a week to play folk and bluegrass. She was extremely warm and lively, always laughing, joking, making fun of herself. Very attractive, I thought, and in those days I guess I still had the instinct to try to make an impression on any attractive female who came into my orbit.

  ‘So that’s what I did, and maybe because there wasn’t much competition, or maybe because she was lonely in New York, or maybe, God knows, because she actually found me appealing, it worked, though with a much more powerful effect on me than I’d bargained for. I was half in love with her before I knew it. I’d told her about Sara, and that acted as a brake, though it was also a lid under which all kinds of illicit feelings were able to simmer away in secret. First we’d just walk to the subway together, then we started riding the same train downtown even though that meant one of us would have to transfer, then we started grabbing the odd coffee or drink …

  ‘One evening I stayed on the train with her all the way to her stop. We went to a bar and while we were sitting opposite each other I realised I’d started stroking her hair. I mean, as if that was just the normal thing I did. She had beautiful long brown hair, very thick and wild, and I was just plying my fingers through it without being aware of what I was doing until she started laughing. The next thing I knew we were kissing like a couple of teenagers …

  ‘At the end of the semester she went back to Cork to spend the summer with her family. We still hadn’t, you know, slept together, and we told ourselves the separation would be a good thing – force us to figure out what we really meant to each other, and for a few days I felt almost sane again. But then she sent me a letter, an actual letter, saying, among other things, that she was missing me more than she expected, and I started hankering for her with an intensity that was new to me. I couldn’t get her out of my head for a single second of the day. Her hair, her scent, her voice, her face, her mouth … I started sneaking out of the apartment while Sara was asleep to call her from payphones. I’d never felt anything like this in my life, not for Sara or anyone else. It wasn’t enjoyable exactly, but it was extremely powerful.

  ‘I did something I shouldn’t have done, though in fairness to myself I was barely conscious of doing it. In one of our phone calls I mentioned that Sara was going away for a week. I told Francesca I’d had a fantasy of spending that week with her, renting a car and heading out of the city at random, staying at motels … I didn’t intend it as an invitation: it was just a way of expressing my feelings. But the morning after Sara left, the phone rang and there was Francesca’s voice saying: ‘Hi. It’s me. I’m in New York.’ She’d flown in from Ireland! I was stunned. I’ve never thought of myself as someone who has that kind of effect on women. But there she was!’

  ‘Let’s have a rest,’ Victor said, panting from the uphill climb.

  They’d come to a
clearing in the woods where a farmhouse once stood. Slabs of bluestone from the old foundation had been set up by passing hikers to form a pair of throne-like seats. Victor sat on one, angling his face to a shaft of sunlight. Richard sat next to him, tucking the hem of his jacket beneath him on the cold stone.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well. We spent the day in her hotel room consummating our affair and it was everything it could possibly be. I didn’t even feel guilty, strangely enough. I was in a state of, I don’t know, elation, or—’

  ‘You were getting laid.’

  ‘Well, it was more than just that. But that evening, when we went out to eat, I had an abrupt change of heart. I can still remember the exact moment: it was when the waiter came and lit the candle on our table. Something switched gear inside me. I tried to hide it, but by the end of the meal I was aware that I’d made a serious mistake. I felt terrible. There was this beautiful woman staring at me adoringly across the table, but all I could think was how to get back to my own apartment, alone, as quickly as possible. Somehow the prospect of spending the night with Francesca seemed a much greater betrayal of Sara than what had already happened. Or at least I managed to convince myself that if I didn’t spend the night with her I’d be able to salvage something as far as my relationship with Sara was concerned. So …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I walked her to her hotel, and then … told her it wasn’t going to work.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘But it was for her sake also. I was from another world, Victor. She was young, nowhere near ready to settle down whether she realised it or not, and my idea had never been to throw away everything I had with Sara for the sake of a fling. That sounds calculating, but it was purely emotional. I wasn’t the right man for this woman – I saw that suddenly very clearly, even if she didn’t.’

  ‘You’re a piece of work, Richard!’

  ‘It was appalling, what I did, every part of it. I know that. That’s why I never told you about it at the time. And she – she understandably didn’t take it all that well. There was some serious anger. Not screaming and yelling, but some real bitterness. Which I fully deserved. But that’s pretty much it. I was offered the job up here that summer. I quit Ryden College, and never saw or heard from Francesca again. Sara and I got married that fall. And that’s something I’ve never regretted. Not for one second. Which is the reason I’m telling you this.’