by James Lasdun
‘Wait – who is she?’ Sara had said.
Audrey seemed not to understand.
‘Huh?’
‘I mean, who is she?’ Sara repeated.
‘You must know who she is!’
‘I don’t.’
‘She’s the woman your husband introduced to Victor. It’s who he left me for. The second time. Though I think she dumped him pretty quick. I assumed you knew, Sara.’
Two bright patches of red had appeared at Audrey’s cheeks.
‘No,’ Sara said. ‘I had no idea.’
‘I can’t believe she came. Anyway, I’m leaving.’
Abruptly she’d gathered her kids and led them off.
Sara had turned back towards Richard, but he was standing with Victor’s brother now and the woman had disappeared.
An elderly man had come up to her as she was trying to remember where she’d seen her before.
‘Wasn’t that a moving tribute?’ the man said. ‘I thought that was the most moving tribute …’
She’d had no idea who he was, but tried to look politely attentive as he spoke to her, though in fact it was impossible to pay any attention at all. The things she had just heard and seen seemed to require urgent processing, as certain dreams do on waking. Nodding and smiling, she’d found herself probing blindly into fifteen years of memory for the woman’s image.
Then Richard had come up, looking agitated.
‘We should get going,’ he’d interrupted unceremoniously.
Not wanting to offend the old guy, she hadn’t immediately responded, and Richard had stood there looking increasingly impatient while the other man rambled on. After a couple of minutes, Richard had interrupted again, this time too forcefully to ignore, and they’d made their way out.
She hadn’t liked being hustled out like that, and did what she did when she was annoyed, which was to retreat into herself. It wasn’t exactly characteristic of Richard, to order her around, though she’d noticed recently that he was more focused on her than he used to be. More attentive, she had to acknowledge, as well as more demanding, which was nice, she supposed, though occasionally she couldn’t help feeling oppressed by it. He’d started accompanying her on her afternoon stroll in the woods if he was home, something she’d always taken for granted as a solitary interlude in the day, and she’d found herself resenting the intrusion.
By the time they’d reached the car, he seemed to have gotten over whatever was bothering him.
‘You okay?’ he’d asked.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re very quiet.’
‘Just thinking.’
She’d been about to ask him about the woman he’d been talking to, but had stopped herself, not wanting him to ascribe her taciturnity to some fit of possessiveness.
They’d driven in silence for half an hour, when she felt his hand on her knee and, ever obliging, she’d laid her own hand over his. She could ask him now, she thought. But still she held back; silenced by a foreboding that he might lie to her. In a sense he’d lied already by volunteering nothing about this woman, either today or back whenever it was that he’d introduced her to Victor. But an omission wasn’t quite the same as a direct lie and she realised she very badly didn’t want him to lie to her directly.
What am I afraid of? she wondered, lifting her hand from his. She thought of that other time he’d lied to her, pretending he’d caught the early-morning train when she’d seen his car next to Bonnie Fletcher’s in the municipal parking lot. She’d never confronted him, waiting instead for him to explain himself. Even when it became clear that he wasn’t going to, she’d refused to allow herself to speculate or interrogate him. Accustomed to her own privacy, she was wary of probing other people’s. It wasn’t that she couldn’t imagine the questions another woman might have asked. God knows she’d had plenty of general guidance on that front, from Carla. She’d even picked up what had seemed a more specific hint one afternoon near the end of that summer when she’d overheard one of the Rainbow girls in Carla’s barn saying something that included the phrase ‘Sara’s husband’, only to be shushed by the other girl as Sara immediately made her presence known. Bonnie had just driven off somewhere. She’d wondered even then about this reluctance of hers to probe. Am I afraid of what I might learn if I push too hard? Is that why I don’t question him? But no sooner had the thought articulated itself than a vehement, almost bodily repudiation of it along with all its demeaning implications had risen in her, and she’d angrily closed the subject.
She stared out through the passenger window. Had she been deluding herself? Was it possible, after all, that there’d been something going on between Richard and Bonnie? Merely coupling their names seemed to entail an act of violence against her own sense of reality. Richard, pushing fifty, sensible, responsible, wryly amused by people who differed in any serious way from himself – and Bonnie, barely thirty, with her patchouli scent, her silver feather earrings, her iPod in its moccasin case at her hips, her look of being permanently a little high on something …? No, it wasn’t plausible. Too much that seemed solid and incontrovertible would have to turn out to be pure illusion for that to be conceivable.
Anyway, she wondered, puzzled by the turn of her own thoughts, why was she even thinking about that now? What did Bonnie have to do with this other woman, Francesca, or whatever her name was? She seemed to have caught herself in a curious labyrinth of things past and present, remembered and forgotten. Again, more concertedly now, she tried to recall where she’d seen the woman before, struggling to light up the dimmest of distant occasions for some clue; rummaging through Richard’s professional acquaintances, his more distant relatives, the handful of people he kept in touch with from his home town …
‘Who was that woman you were talking to?’ she asked him at last, exasperated by her memory’s refusal to cooperate. ‘The one in the leather jacket?’
Richard frowned, as if trying to think who she meant.
‘Oh, her. She was one of Vic’s girlfriends from way back. Before he married Audrey. I only met her once or twice but I guess I was the only person she knew there. I couldn’t remember her name though …’
He’s lying to me. Sara felt the knowledge enter her: sharp and hard.
‘She looked familiar,’ she said, still unready to challenge him more directly.
‘No, not possible. This would have been before you and I met.’
She sat very still, staring forward.
And then, as if the reverberations of the lie had removed an obstruction from some delicate mechanism full of gears and springs and flywheels, she felt the memory of Richard’s abrupt, unexplained wish to get out of New York all those years ago shift inside her, and with a quick sense of things uncoupling and regrouping, she realised where she had seen the woman.
It was at Ryden College. She’d gone there to meet Richard, who was practising with his folk group. Hearing music she’d wandered down a corridor from the lobby and seen them through a glass panel, six or seven of them strumming and plucking and singing, among them the woman with that unmistakable head of hair, sitting over a dulcimer with a look of dreamy absorption in her instrument.
‘Well? Do you know it?’ Richard’s voice cut in. He had been talking to her.
‘I’m sorry – what?’
‘Baucis and Philemon. Do you know the story?’
‘No.’
‘This old couple who love each other so much the gods turn them into two trees intertwined around each other when they die.’ He smiled at her lovingly in the mirror. ‘I was thinking of it for some reason.’
She looked away, unsure whether the fear gripping her was of the future or the past.
‘Are you okay, Sara?’
‘She was at Ryden College, wasn’t she?’ she said, turning back to look at him. ‘In your folk group.’
Richard’s face tensed.
‘What? Who are you talking about?’
‘I saw her there. Audrey said you introduced her t
o Victor. He had an affair with her, just after their second child was born. Her name’s Francesca. You must have kept in touch with her over the years.’
Richard frowned exaggeratedly, opening his mouth as if to ask again who she was talking about. But he closed it instead, swallowing.
‘All right’, he said. ‘All right. I was just trying to make a complicated story simple.’
‘You told me a lie.’
‘Christ almighty! All right. I’m sorry. But it’s totally innocent. Good God, Sara! I’d be happy to tell you the whole story in all its extremely boring detail if you really want to hear it.’ He gave a sidelong glance.
She turned away.
‘Do you want to hear it?’
‘I want to know why you told me a lie.’
‘All right, I’ll tell you. It’s very boring, so be warned.’
Richard paused, and then sighed, rather theatrically. ‘I mean, okay, it’s embarrassing too, mildly, as well as complicated. Because it does have to do with me having been vaguely attracted to her at one time, ages ago, so there’s that. But it’s innocent; I give you my word. Do you want me to tell you, Sara?’
She said nothing. The thought of that other lie had brought back the whole episode of the swan, and the creature was in her mind again, brightening there, drawing her inward like a source of some mysterious strength.
‘Okay, I’m going to tell you the whole thing. I don’t want you having any suspicions about me …’
Through the window the forested grey slopes flanking the throughway were tinged with gold light at the top. She thought of the day she and Carla had driven with the swan to the river. They’d arrived late in the afternoon. A handyman had unchained the gate and they’d continued down to the boathouse, where a wooden dock jutted into the water. A few hundred yards out into the mile-wide expanse of the river was a long, thin island with a fringe of cattails where other swans nested. She and Carla had carried the swan out of the car in its basket and set it down at the end of the jetty, stepping back to let it free itself when it was ready. For several minutes it had sat in the basket, not moving. Sara had wondered if it wasn’t after all going to seize the opportunity to free itself. She’d half-hoped it wouldn’t.
‘He’s taking the measure of things,’ Carla had declared. ‘They do that.’
Beside her in the car Richard had launched into some convoluted story to which she was barely listening. Something about not wanting to tell her he’d known Francesca from Ryden College precisely in case she did get the wrong idea, a fear he seemed to be attributing to the fact that, yes (he kept saying yes, as if strategically conceding some point in a legal argument), he had been attracted to her, and yes, he might even have been tempted to have a fling with her if he hadn’t already been head over heels in love with Sara, and that, yes, on the basis of this attraction he had irrationally feared that Sara wouldn’t believe he’d run into Francesca years later entirely by chance while he was walking down Third Avenue with Victor. None of it seemed real to her. She let herself slip back into that summer afternoon.
‘You see?’ Carla had said, when the swan stood up at last in the basket. And in spite of herself, Sara had felt a sharp joy travel through her. With a brief shudder of its wings as if awakened suddenly to the memory of freedom, it had stepped out of the shallow basket, and hobbled to the edge of the jetty. Holding its wings forward it had let itself fall into the water with a soft splash and glided off towards the island.
Richard was talking more calmly now; the story he was telling having apparently settled into a congenial form in his mind. ‘So yes, I was attracted to her. I’ll admit it. But there was never any possibility of my getting involved, even though she’d made it clear she wanted … you know, that she wanted that. But it wasn’t easy and it certainly wasn’t comfortable seeing her every day in the classrooms and corridors. And yes, that’s frankly why I quit. I never told you about her because telling you would have made it seem as if there was something for you to be concerned about, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. I only wish for Audrey and the kids’ sake I hadn’t been with Victor when I ran into her on Third Avenue. I introduced her to him, just to be polite, and I think she said something about working as a singer, maybe even mentioned a club where she was performing. I wasn’t paying any attention myself, though I guess Victor was. But that’s Victor, right? Of course, he never told me anything about it. Anyway …’
It was the image of the creature moving away from her that had lodged itself in her mind. Moving away as effortlessly as if it had let go of something and was free-falling into its own future.
Richard was still talking, though his words might have been in a foreign language, for all the effect they were having on her. Something seemed to be crystallising inside her; something clear and bright though not yet ready to put in words, its form as yet indistinguishable from that of the swan gliding away from the shore; cutting a wake of light as it moved further and further out across the river, undaunted by whatever lay ahead.
Approaching the island it had merged into the glare of sunlight, becoming invisible. A few seconds later the sun had sunk behind treetops on the far shore and the glare had gone, but by then the creature had vanished into the reeds.
Afternoon of a Faun
Part One
1
‘What he appears to have done – and I’ll admit I’m as astonished as everyone else – is turn this election into a referendum on whether it’s okay to objectify women and, frankly, assault them. I can’t help noticing how frighteningly well he illustrates a phenomenon many women who’ve been assaulted describe, which is the double nature of the attack. First there is the physical assault, and then there is what I would call the epistemological assault, by which I mean the brazen denial that anything untoward took place. It isn’t enough to violate the woman’s bodily autonomy. Her version of events must also be seized and subjugated. In many cases it is this secondary attack, the seizing of a woman’s reality, so to speak, that proves the most traumatic in the long term …’
The speaker, a woman in mauve tweed, was giving the lunchtime talk at the Irving Foundation, to which my friend Marco Rosedale had brought me. Her subject was rape, specifically the relationship between rape and memory. She herself had been raped thirty years earlier (she told us this in a tone of studied neutrality that seemed intended to spare us from having to react), and recently she’d curated a travelling exhibition consisting of several installations in which the circumstances of her own and other women’s assaults were reconstructed in whatever detail memory could supply, and with whatever distortions of scale memory lent those details.
The striking thing about most of these exhibits, judging from her slides, was their seeming innocuousness. No scary dungeons or sketchy back alleys, no vans with blacked-out windows; just ordinary domestic spaces. There was a student dorm room with ashtrays and plastic cups; a pool house with tiny people swimming in the pool outside; an office mail room with a frozen waterfall of huge envelopes spilling from a box. There was a comfortable-looking bedroom in which a man’s suit and shirt were folded neatly over a chair. The man was in bed asleep while the woman lay beside him with her eyes open, staring at a crack in the ceiling. The two had matching wedding bands on their ring fingers.
The speaker mentioned a trend reported by therapists in a recent newspaper article. ‘It’s purely anecdotal,’ she told us, smiling pleasantly, ‘but it interests me greatly.’ Large numbers of women patients had apparently begun talking to their therapists about long-ago episodes of harassment that they’d either forgotten or considered too insignificant to be worth discussing.
‘It appears to be a kind of spontaneous collective impulse …’
Marco glanced up from his lunch plate, catching my eye. He’d become interested in these subjects lately – harassment, memory, the public reverberations of private conduct – ever since getting caught up in a drama of his own in which these topics featured prominently. The drama had en
ded before any serious damage was done, but he was still unnerved by the experience, and hungry for any kind of elucidation.
I knew what his glance meant, more or less. Imitation had become a topic of particular interest to him, and it was predictable that he’d seize on the speaker’s anecdote as proof of his theories about his own accuser. ‘Why did she only come out with it now?’ he’d begun asking in recent weeks. ‘Why not thirty years ago? Why not forty, for Christ’s sake, when it happened, or rather didn’t happen? Was it just because suddenly everyone else was doing it? Was it some copycat cultural meme thing she’d succumbed to? I’d have thought Julia, of all people, would do anything to avoid seeming unoriginal …’
I’d make some non-committal noise. I wasn’t required to answer Marco, mainly just to listen, and not irritate him with comments suggesting he perhaps didn’t acknowledge the full extent of the wrong done by men to women over the centuries, because he did acknowledge it; he’d just never considered himself one of those men, and even now, when his ordeal appeared to be safely over, resented the threat of being stigmatised as one when he’d done nothing to deserve it.
At any rate the speaker’s anecdote about women suddenly discussing harassment en masse with their therapists clearly played straight into his suspicions about Julia’s timing, even though that was hardly the point the speaker was trying to make. She was actually offering the report as a sign of newly awakening female strength (and I’m sure Marco understood this as well as I did): a silver lining to the cloud threatening the country in the form of a serial harasser of women having won the Republican nomination for the upcoming presidential election.
Marco had grown up in the same London world as I had. His father was a barrister and the family belonged to the same circle of professionals and artists as mine; left-leaning bourgeois bohemians with large houses in Islington or Holland Park or Notting Hill Gate. He was a few years older than me, which meant we weren’t friends as children, but I was always aware of his existence: he was one of those boys who exude a magical charisma of good looks and easy confidence that marks them in the consciousness of their generation as people to watch. He had a striking face, hawkish but epicurean, with eyebrows coming in at an angle like arrow fletchings, giving his eyes the mira fuerte – ‘forceful gaze’ – of macho movie stars from that distant era, and strong lines either side of his slightly abbreviated-looking nose, curving out in a belling flourish around a firm-set but sensual mouth. His mother had been a model in Milan before she married, and his looks came mainly from her. From his father came the ruddy colouration of his cheeks, which added an appealing look of wind-blustered vigour to the general effect. We overlapped for a year or two at the same school in London, after which he went off to Cambridge, emerging a few years later as a precociously assured young talent in British television. Longish news features were what he first became known for, usually about political conflict and almost always pervaded by an atmosphere of danger that, intentionally or not, cast him in a glamorously intrepid light.
