Victory

by James Lasdun

  The phone rang early the next morning. I was awake, just, but still groggy from the night before. I dragged myself into my mother’s study, which we’d stripped almost bare, and picked up the flimsy plastic receiver with its coiled white cord that twisted itself back into the same tight knots each time, however often one unravelled it.

  ‘I’m so glad I caught you. Listen …’

  It was Julia. She spoke with a nervous fluency, as if she’d been rehearsing her words.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that nonsense about the fifteen-year-old girl. I made it up. It was stupid of me and I’m sorry. Not that I think you believed me. You didn’t, did you?’

  I tried to be diplomatic.

  ‘The part about Marco being banished was a little hard to believe …’

  ‘I know. Banished! What a ridiculous idea! I don’t know why I came out with it. Well, I do. It’s one of those stories you make up when you’re really furious with someone. I’ve been cooking it up in my head for ages, imagining telling it to the police, or a judge, or another newspaper editor. It helps me deal with the absolute hatred I feel towards Marco for trying to shut me up. Sometimes I get so lost in the fantasy, I believe it myself. Anyway, when you told me he’d try to stop me self-publishing I was so upset and angry I just blurted it out. I wanted you to take my side. But I didn’t realise how completely mad it would sound till I said it out loud. I’ve been up all night tormenting myself for being such an idiot.’

  ‘Ah, I’m sorry to hear it …’

  ‘Everything else I told you was true. That I can promise you.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I felt you believed what I was saying, up until then …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you still do … right? I mean, nothing’s different there …’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  There was a longish pause in which the brevity of my answer seemed pointedly emphasised. I braced myself for a more concerted interrogation. But she just gave a soft, surprised laugh.

  ‘All right. Well, goodbye.’

  She hung up, and for a moment the bareness of my mother’s office confused itself in my mind with the bareness of Julia’s apartment, so that I seemed to be back there, seeing the dazed expression on her face again as I left. I stared down at the phone, wondering why I’d withheld the reassuring phrases she clearly wanted to hear. Was it that I felt I’d been put through one hoop too many? Possibly. Nobody likes being jerked around. I certainly sensed I’d become entitled to that feeling, if it should prove in some way useful. Calling me up to admit to the lie hadn’t exactly cancelled the lie out. In a way it seemed to have made things even murkier. The word ‘tainted’ came into my mind. Julia’s entire testimony, I told myself, had become ‘tainted’. It was a powerful formula, I realised. It allowed me to detach myself from her version of events without committing myself to the position of outright disbelief. Why I should find this desirable, I couldn’t have said precisely, and yet I did. It seemed to offer obscure advantages.

  9

  I flew back to the States two days later. I’d missed a couple of classes and scheduled a make-up for a Monday in October. On the drive home from the airport I called Marco to ask if I could stay an extra night.

  ‘Of course. In fact, why don’t you come on the Sunday? I’m having some people over to watch the debate. It’s going to be a blast. Disguster’s last stand!’

  He sounded like his old self again: cheerful and expansive. I thanked him, accepting the invitation.

  ‘And don’t forget you and I have some celebrating to do. We’ll go out after your class. My treat again.’

  I began to protest, but he insisted.

  ‘I owe you! You’ve been an incredible friend. I wouldn’t have got through this without your support.’

  I was debating, as we continued chatting, whether to mention my visit to Julia. I didn’t want to risk spoiling his mood. On the other hand I was going to have to tell him eventually, and it might seem odd that I hadn’t done it now.

  The traffic was slow on the throughway – weekenders heading upstate for the foliage. Fall had arrived, making its usual splashy entrance of pinks and magentas, as if it wanted you to think some season of vigorous growth was coming in, rather than just the prelude to winter.

  ‘See you Sunday then,’ Marco said. ‘Eightish, or come early if you can. Lots to catch up on!’

  ‘Marco, listen, I have to tell you something. I saw Julia in London. Your Julia.’

  There was a brief silence on his end.

  ‘Oh?’

  I explained how her invitation to tea had come about. ‘Obviously I could have made some excuse, but I have to admit I was curious … For your sake as well as mine.’

  I thought he might object to the last part, but he didn’t seem to.

  ‘Of course. What did she have to say?’

  I described the meeting. Marco listened with uncharacteristic restraint; not interrupting to dispute Julia’s version of events, not snorting incredulously as he usually did when he disagreed with something, not reacting at all to Julia’s candid admission that she’d only recently come to regard the episode in the hotel as an assault. The only sound he made was when I told him she was still determined to publish her memoir – self-publish if necessary – at which point a long, anguished groan escaped from him.

  ‘No …! No, no, no …!’

  I was surprised at the strength of his reaction. Not that I expected him to be indifferent, but the self-publishing idea had seemed fairly unthreatening to me; a very minor setback in the context of his overall victory.

  ‘I told her you’d still try to stop her,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure she isn’t going to do it. But even if she does, who’s going to see it? Nobody reads those vanity press things, do they?’

  ‘Oh, it’ll get read. She’ll put it online, start some kind of social media campaign or whatever …’

  I hadn’t considered that. All the same, I thought he was overreacting.

  ‘It would still be libel, though, wouldn’t it?’ I said. ‘I mean, you could still sue …’

  ‘Sue what? The internet? Even if I could, she clearly doesn’t give a fuck. She obviously has nothing to lose.’

  The exuberance had sluiced out of his voice. Clearly I’d wrecked his mood.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ I said feebly.

  ‘Ah, God, I am so tired of this! I am sick to death of it! She’s like something out of a zombie movie. Every time you shoot her down she bounces back up.’

  ‘I do think I might have scared her off, Marco,’ I said. ‘I mean, she definitely got the message that you’d go on fighting to the bitter end.’

  ‘Thanks. But in all honesty I don’t think I could face another round. I’d rather just … throw in the towel, I guess.’

  I’d intended to tell him the business about the fifteen-year-old girl, thinking he’d appreciate hearing that Julia had admitted fabricating at least one story. But I decided that on balance it could wait.

  ‘Speak to your dad,’ I said, as soothingly as I could. ‘I’m sure he’ll have some ideas.’

  He muttered some vague response, thanking me again for my support, and we said goodbye. The conversation left me feeling uneasy and dimly at fault. The whole situation seemed to have reached a point where it gave a duplicitous cast to everything that entered its orbit. I didn’t want to think about it. I turned on the radio. The election coverage was in full spate. There’d been fresh allegations about the Republican candidate’s treatment of women, this time on the set of his TV show. It was impossible, of course, not to relate this to Marco’s drama. He must have been thinking about it himself, given his interest in all the stories of sexual malfeasance floating around in the press. The candidate’s spokeswoman came on: these outlandish, unsubstantiated, and totally false claims … I thought of the formula I’d adopted for Julia’s account of what had happened in their hotel room: that useful word ‘tainted’ … I was aware of something suspiciously con
venient about it. I could see, a little too clearly now, how it allowed me to preserve my friendship with Marco without having to struggle with my conscience. I don’t claim to have a particularly fine conscience. ‘Well trained’, perhaps, in Julia’s acid phrase, but not especially active. I don’t dream at night about human betterment (mostly I dream about getting my hair back). But I’d have trouble accepting the hospitality of a man I believed to have committed rape. Easier to believe Julia’s story was ‘tainted’, or at least to suspend judgement, and she’d handed me an excuse for doing just that.

  Three or four days passed; end-of-summer days, with the asters straggling a dusty blue along ditches, goldenrod turning ochre on patches of open ground. Caitlin was in talks with our old editor about the possibility of another travel book, this time in northern Spain. I had work of my own to catch up on. We’d go our separate ways in the morning, reconvening on the terrace at mealtimes. I made a point of cooking things we never had when the children were around. Tempeh, wholewheat pasta; broccoli raab: minor consolations of the empty nest.

  One evening, a flock of wild turkeys came out of the scrub in the meadow, crossing the lawn below us as we ate dinner. There were four or five adults, with a dozen-odd lighter-coloured poults stepping cautiously in single file behind them like novices behind a group of black-shawled nuns. Caitlin gripped my hand as they passed, watching with the rapt look these visitations from the animal kingdom always produced. I remembered the smashed eggs we’d seen that spring, and my own role in that calamity. The hen must have had another brood, or perhaps these were the offspring of a different bird. Skirting the feeders without investigating the pools of spilt grain, they entered the colonnade of white birches at the edge of the meadow and disappeared into the forest beyond. They were of a size, already, to be safe from all but the larger, rarer predators that still prowled around in these woods: coyotes, the odd solitary bobcat.

  ‘We should catch one for Thanksgiving,’ I said – an old joke that always made the kids squeal when they were little. Caitlin gave a tolerant smile, squeezing my hand.

  We talked about my meeting with Julia. Some faint but persistent qualm had been nagging at me – a sense of having missed or glossed over something. I trusted Caitlin’s reactions more than my own. Her instincts, unlike mine, had an intact purity about them. The life she’d made for herself since we moved to the country and had children had left her comparatively unmaddened by the toxins that seemed to have saturated public discourse on every subject these days. Crucially, she’d been preoccupied with other things during the years when our friends took en masse to social media, and she’d never acquired a taste for that neurotic activity. Also, though she was thoroughly American (Minnesota farmers on one side, Chicago professionals on the other), she was free of that paradoxical and – to my mind – quintessentially American combination: the love of scolding and the hatred of being scolded. If anything she had it the other way around: she rarely set herself up in judgement of anyone, but she actively sought out people’s criticisms of herself, and listened to them avidly. I knew that whatever she might have to say about Marco and Julia would spring from a clean source.

  She heard me out – patiently, though also, I felt, somewhat unwillingly. She was fond of Marco: I knew that, just as I knew that the convolutions of an Englishwoman like Julia Gault were unlikely to engage her sympathies. At first I put her slight air of impatience down to a reluctant but growing conviction that Marco had in fact committed a grave wrong. But I was mistaken. It was apparently Julia’s role in the story, not Marco’s, that troubled her. Julia’s revisions of her own feelings about the past, far from conveying a complicated authenticity (as they had for me), struck her as highly suspicious. The candour that I’d found so compelling merely seemed expedient to her. That absurd lie about Marco’s ‘banishment’ was plainly damning, while the phone call the next morning was self-evidently manipulative.

  ‘She must have realised she’d overplayed her hand. That’s all that was about. She was just trying to get you back on her side …’

  I didn’t entirely disagree with her, and yet I felt an obligation to play devil’s advocate.

  ‘You don’t think she could have been telling the truth about the other stuff, even if she was lying about that?’

  Caitlin shrugged. ‘She’s someone who lies. What else is there to say?’

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was by her verdict. I knew from her policy with our children that she had no tolerance for lies, so perhaps I should have foreseen that she’d react the way she did. And it’s possible I had foreseen it in some way; that I was counting on her to give me the permission I couldn’t quite give myself, to put Julia’s accusations into a permanent moral quarantine, and continue my friendship with Marco as if nothing had changed.

  At any rate the conversation brought a change of mood that continued through the weekend. I felt calmer, less inclined to torment myself about possible ulterior motives for what I did or didn’t believe about Marco, and increasingly able to think of my coming reunion with him that Sunday without misgivings.

  It was the kind of liberated mood that, in my case, often builds towards a state of mild euphoria, feeding on any stimulus that strays into its orbit. The burned-out beauty of the Indian summer with its rustling bracts and burrs, its sweet, pervasive scent of dried grasses and leaf-mould, became a part of it, as did the dawning realisation that Caitlin and I were not after all going to be spending all our days and nights grieving for our departed children. Even my work fed into it. I’d put Mallarmé’s Afternoon of a Faun back on the syllabus for the literature seminar I was teaching, and remembering my conversation with Marco earlier in the year, I’d tracked down a film of Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet based on the poem. The ancient footage was grainy, ghostly; fragmented to a point of near-abstraction, with phosphorescent images of the faun and nymphs flickering in and out of focus. It was hard to follow, even knowing the story of the faun’s dreamlike encounters with the nymphs. But purely as spectacle it captured some quality of delight that made a powerful impression on me: Nijinsky in his dappled skin moving like a reclusive forest animal; his gestures, at once cryptic and familiar as some language one had always known but never heard spoken, seeming to arise out of a wellspring of elemental joy. I remembered something D. H. Lawrence, that maligned genius, had written about the figure of the faun. It was in his book on the ancient Etruscans, an account of a civilisation dedicated to a celebratory vision of life, utterly unlike that of the lugubrious Romans who supplanted them. I looked it up: ‘They can’t survive, the faun-faced men, with their pure outlines and their strange non-moral calm. Only the deflowered faces survive …’

  They can’t survive, the faun-faced men … The words were in my mind as I drove down to New York that Sunday afternoon. Inevitably, in the mood gripping me, they seeped into my thoughts about Marco. Was it possible, useful, to look at him, as his old tutor had, through the lens of the faun, that mythic incarnation of a masculine sensuality radically unlike the militaristic ‘Roman’ version that had replaced it, marching down through the generations in its heavy muscled armour all the way to the pornographic ideal of our present era? I thought of Tarquin, that archetypal Roman, with his ‘rage of lust’ as he forces himself into Lucrece’s bedchamber in Shakespeare’s poem. Was that Marco? Or was he one of the faun-faced men who don’t survive? Perhaps he was both; had been one, had become the other. In any case the question brought in its wake the sense of a hunted, hounded innocence that I found hard to shake off.

  It struck me that I hadn’t, for one second, believed Marco unreservedly, and that this placed me among those doing the hunting and hounding … I remembered my wariness when he first told me about his troubles; that triangulating impulse of mine, which instantly added to the two of us a third figure in the shape of Public Opinion, wagging its finger and warning me: Be careful. I remembered my hesitation in rejoicing with him at his moments of apparent victory; my lukewarm words when I
finally did … The memories displeased me. I didn’t like the portrait they painted: a study in craven equivocation. Marco himself seemed, by contrast, magnanimity incarnate. I thought of his insistence, from the beginning, that he didn’t expect me or anyone else to take him on trust: ‘You can’t not have doubts …’ Even his subdued response the other day, as I’d described my meeting with Julia, seemed, in this new light, a part of that same tact, which itself appeared positively heroic as I considered it now. No hint of reproach for my evident belief that there really must be two sides to the story; no attempt to influence me against Julia’s version of things, or even ascertain whether I found it credible. Only that poignant gratitude for my ‘support’ …

  How little I’d done to earn that gratitude! How little ‘support’ I’d actually given! True, I’d sympathised with the public aspects of his situation; the various kinds of ruin and disgrace threatening him, but I’d never considered the peculiar private agony of being innocent and not being believed. For a moment I seemed to see it squarely, feel on my own nerves the pain of realising that not even the one friend he’d chosen to confide in could give him the assurance of unqualified belief. I remembered my refusal of empathy when he showed me that gun; the grim look on his face when he saw I wasn’t going to take him seriously. I felt ashamed of myself, and then immediately a little worried too. What if he really had been thinking of blowing his brains out? And what if my report from London the other day had pushed him over the edge? I heard his voice again, thick and low: Ah, God, I am so tired of this! I am sick to death of it! … An image came to me, of him staging some terrible act of self-immolation in front of his guests tonight. Unlikely, I told myself. Marco wasn’t the histrionic type. All the same, in the flux of this restless, remorse-filled enthusiasm, it seemed to me that some gesture of solidarity was called for.