Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  “I probably know more about banking than you think I do,” I said hesitantly at last. “And I enjoy following the stock market.”

  “Great,” said Scott. “That kind of small talk will come in useful when I have to give these goddamned dinner parties. I hope you won’t find them too boring.”

  There seemed to be nothing else to do but drop the subject. Taking a sip of coffee, I looked vaguely around the patio as I tried to think of another topic of conversation. It was cool in the garden, probably no more than sixty-five degrees, but the lack of humidity was so pleasant that I didn’t miss the heat of New York. Huge white clouds billowed across the midsummer sky, little English robins sang fleetingly from the top of the mellow brick wall, and beyond the white wrought-iron table where we were sitting, the miniature roses glowed scarlet in their tubs. It was a Saturday morning.

  “I’ve never cared much for London,” I said at last, “but I can see the attraction of the serene, leisurely English way of life. Kevin certainly seems very happy here. … By the way, Kevin wants us to have dinner with him. Is that okay?”

  Scott shrugged. “If he can make the effort to invite me, I guess I can make the effort to go.”

  This was hardly encouraging. “Maybe I’ll call him and suggest he and I have lunch à deux.”

  “That would probably be better, yes.”

  I decided that this would be the wrong moment to mention Sebastian. Abruptly I began to talk of our afternoon plans to see my mother, now happily installed in a luxurious south-coast hotel which catered to convalescents. I had decided to sail home to New York with her at the end of August.

  “My mother’s taken to you in a big way!” I said, smiling at him. “She’s thrilled we’re going to be spending the summer together. … Scott, there won’t be any difficulty, will there, about me being here like this? I know we’re in so-called swinging London, but will all those poker-faced businessmen from the City and their impeccably dressed wives approve of us living together without the blessing of the Church of England?”

  “The important thing is that you must never attempt to explain just what you’re doing here—never even refer to it. The British can accept almost anything from a couple who have the good taste to behave like hermaphrodites.”

  We laughed.

  “And besides,” said Scott, “we’re not going to spend all our time in London surrounded by businessmen and their wives. I want to take you down to Mallingham to see Elfrida. You’ve never been to Mallingham, have you? It’s an interesting place. I’m sure you’d like it.”

  I was silent. Mallingham was the one place I never wanted to visit. Mallingham was where Steve Sullivan was buried and where there was a memorial commemorating Scott’s brother Tony. Mallingham represented the past that was still trying to prise Scott apart from the future he deserved. Mallingham summed up in one word everything which threatened our happiness. I wanted to keep it at arm’s length.

  “What’s so special about Mallingham?” I said, trying not to sound hostile.

  “The time there is time out of mind.”

  There was a pause. I groped for a reply. I had a sudden picture of our two minds forming two circles which touched but never intersected.

  “I’m not sure what you mean by that,” I said.

  He looked apologetic, as if he had committed some faux pas by speaking in a language I couldn’t understand.

  “I just mean it’s very old there and very peaceful.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “As a matter of fact, my own personal vision of time out of mind is a seascape, a dark sea breaking on white sands with blue mountains beyond. Mallingham’s very different. It’s set in a flat marshy landscape about a mile and a half from the coast, yet still there’s this absence of time there; I’ve always thought of it as a place where perhaps for one brief moment one can step out of time altogether and be conscious of the vastness where time doesn’t exist. I’m glad my father’s buried at Mallingham. It’s right. For him it’s a true home where he can rest in peace. A true home can’t exist in time, because time destroys everything. A true home can only exist beyond time in places like Mallingham.”

  I had never before been so intensely aware of how inflexible my mind was. As I cautiously tried to bend it to meet his, I saw exactly why he had always seemed so mysterious to me. His world wasn’t bounded by logic and common sense as mine was. His world opened into other worlds limited only by the scope of his intellect and imagination.

  “You mean Mallingham for you,” I said slowly, “is a little like T. S. Eliot’s rose-garden, a magic place where everything comes together, and … what might have been and what has been coexist and … are.” The very effort of expressing such thoughts, which for me were so far from normality, made me feel limp.

  “That’s right,” said Scott casually, the gifted bilingual who switched effortlessly back and forth between his two languages. “Mallingham’s like Burnt Norton.” Then suddenly he was back in my world again, speaking my language. “Hey, you never told me you’d read T. S. Eliot!”

  “Oh, I’m not such a philistine as you think I am!” I retorted with spirit, but although we were at ease with each other again, I never told him who had introduced me to Eliot’s Four Quartets.

  Somehow it seemed so much more comfortable not to mention Sebastian’s name.

  VIII

  I was appalled even though I wasn’t surprised by how hard he worked. However, since I had anticipated the late returns in the evenings, the exhaustion, and the desire for solitude in order to recuperate, I didn’t complain or press him into conversation as soon as he arrived home from work. Instead I let him rest by himself for a while in the library, which was his retreat, the one room I seldom entered. He would have two drinks there by himself and read for half an hour. I privately wished we could have shared at least one evening drink together, but Scott said no, what he liked was to have two drinks on his own. Remembering the magazine articles on alcoholism which I regularly read in order to give myself a healthy fright, I was at once suspicious and started checking the levels of the liquor bottles every day, but contrary to the know-it-alls who swore that to drink alone was the road to ruin, Scott never seemed to have more than two drinks during these solitary sessions. Finally with relief I decided that he liked to drink alone simply because he liked to be alone, and that this particular preference was no more sinister than his taste for reading alone or listening to music by himself.

  Sometime around nine-thirty we would have dinner together. Scott, who was uninterested in food, apparently never suffered from hunger pangs, but I would be starving by early evening and I soon arranged with the housekeeper that I could have access to the kitchen at seven o’clock in order to fix myself a low-calorie snack. After dinner, during which Scott never drank, although I often secretly yearned for wine, we would either read in the living room or listen to records, but we never watched television because Scott had no set. To be fair to Scott, I must admit he offered to rent a set for me, but I decided it would do me no harm to live without television for a couple of months.

  At midnight we would go to bed, and very often that was all we did: undress, get into bed, and fall asleep. This prosaic end to the day disturbed me at first, but since Scott wanted to do little else on weekends except make love, I soon stopped regretting the uneventful evenings during the working week. Presently, to my surprise, I even began to enjoy this unexpected pattern of our private life, with its extremes of abstinence and excess. The abstinence made the excess more exciting and heightened the electrical tension which was always present between us but which rose to an almost unbearable pitch toward the end of the week.

  “Maybe those Victorians weren’t so dumb about sex as we now think they were,” I remarked once to Scott. “Think how exciting sex must have been when everyone postponed it endlessly until they almost went out of their minds!”

  “Marriage was postponed,” said Scott, “but sex wasn’t. It’s a myth that the Victorians k
ept sex at arm’s length. The reality was prostitutes and pornography, with everyone being scared out of their wits by venereal disease.”

  “Yes, but …” I sighed. Scott often made me feel hopelessly ignorant. He didn’t mean to; he drew on the well of his superior education automatically, but the effect was still depressing. Once I tried to talk about the course I was taking—I had selected an extramural London University course on existentialism in modern literature—but Scott’s knowledge of literature and philosophy only made me realize how vast the two subjects were and how little I knew about them. However, I was determined not to feel depressed when I had every reason to be happy, so I reminded myself how boring it had been to live with a man like Sam, whose favorite hobby had been dismantling television sets, and how lucky I was now to be able to live with a man like Scott, who could stretch my brain and exercise it daily.

  “I don’t know how you can read that garbage, Vicky,” said Scott, as he found me as usual at the breakfast table with my nose in the Daily Express.

  “I like William Hickey’s column. Anyway, darling, I must have some kind of light relief, particularly at breakfast! I can’t live on an intellectual plane twenty-four hours a day!”

  “I guess not,” said Scott, opening the Times.

  “Here’s a picture of Elvis. Maybe he’s made another of his frightful films.”

  “Who?”

  “Elvis Presley.”

  “Oh.”

  I thought guiltily: I must call Sebastian, how awful not to have called before. But then I looked at Scott and thought: Later.

  We still hadn’t been to Mallingham. Elfrida, busy winding up her school’s summer semester, had suggested we visit her later, but despite our postponed trip to Norfolk, our weekends had been busy, sailing in Sussex, walking in Surrey, and Shakespeare-watching at Stratford-on-Avon. Soon we became busier during the week. I found myself enjoying the dinner parties which bored Scott so much, and presently I made a couple of new friends and realized I was close to feeling at home in that alien city where I had been so unhappy in the past. Relaxing at last, I experimented with miniskirts behind my locked bedroom door, let my hair grow a little longer, and wondered how far I dared alter my eye makeup. Fortunately Scott’s desire for me to be chastely and conservatively dressed made me no more than a closet follower of current British fashion trends, but even behind my locked bedroom door I still enjoyed myself enormously.

  Then one day in August I suddenly thought: I can’t put off this phone call one second longer. I’ve got to talk to Sebastian, and I’ve got to mention his name.

  “Something wrong?” said Scott when we had finished making love after breakfast and were seriously thinking of getting up. It was a Sunday morning.

  “No. I was just wondering if you’d mind if I went up to Cambridge for the day next week. Sebastian wrote to me way back with an invitation to lunch, and I just feel I can’t spend the whole summer in England without making the effort to see him.”

  There was silence. Then without a word Scott got out of bed and reached for his bathrobe.

  “Scott, I didn’t think it would be necessary for me to say this, but there’s no need whatsoever for you to worry. Sebastian and I are just good friends. I know that sounds corny, but—”

  “Not just corny,” said Scott. “Inconceivable.”

  “But Scott—”

  “Vicky, just who the hell do you think you’re kidding? You lived with that man, you had a child by him, he was—and probably still is—obsessed by you. Believe me, the one thing you and Sebastian can never be is ‘just good friends’! You’ve been much too deeply involved with each other.”

  “But you don’t understand!”

  “I understand too damned well! You stay away from him!”

  “But surely you don’t believe he’d make a pass at me when he knows I’m engaged to marry someone else!”

  “Whether he behaves like a heel or a knight in shining armor is irrelevant. The point is, he’ll upset you by raking up a past which is best forgotten.”

  “You’re a fine one to give me lectures on the subject of forgetting the past!”

  Scott’s mouth hardened. I had a split-second impression of violent anger imprisoned behind the bleak blunt bones of his face.

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s just check if I have this straight.” He never raised his voice. On the contrary, his voice had a peculiarly lifeless quality, as if all emotion had been mercilessly excised from it, but he still managed to radiate an immense anger. “You’re going to marry me. We’re living right now in a trial marriage, and since this is so, I reckon I’m entitled to the rights of a trial husband; I reckon I’m entitled to tell you to stay away from a man whose one object in life is to get back into bed with you again.”

  “But what about me? Am I just a Kewpie doll with no mind of her own? Don’t you attach any importance to what I want to do? I don’t want to get back into bed with Sebastian! All I want is—”

  “All you want, apparently, is to make a complete fool of yourself!”

  “Look, Scott, if you’d ever been married, you’d know that marriage is more than issuing orders and talking about rights whenever you find yourself in a situation which is disagreeable to you. There are times when you have to trust your partner, times when there has to be give and take—”

  “Yes, but this isn’t one of those times. Excuse me.”

  The bathroom door slammed. I allowed myself a full minute to calm down, and then I went to the other bathroom to calm myself still further by taking a long hot bath. By the time I emerged, Scott had disappeared. After dressing quickly, I went downstairs to the library, but when no one answered my knock on the door, I assumed the room was empty. I turned away, but some instinct made me turn back, knock again, and look in.

  He was standing by the window with a glass in his hand. The vodka bottle, one-quarter full, was standing uncapped on the table.

  “Oh!” I said. I was so upset I could say nothing else. I went on standing stupidly in the doorway.

  He glanced around. “I wanted to be alone. If you can’t leave me alone, I’ll get out.”

  “Sure. Okay. Sorry,” I said, backing away, and closed the door very softly, as if I were afraid it might shatter beneath my fingertips. Upstairs in the living room I looked at the phone but made no attempt to call Sebastian. I merely sat down and waited, although what I was waiting for, I didn’t know.

  He went out ten minutes later. When I heard the front door close, I ran to the window and saw him walking swiftly away in the rain. In the library I found the vodka bottle. It was empty.

  The clock on the mantel told me the time was eleven o’clock in the morning.

  IX

  I waited all day for him to come back. Once or twice I started crying, but I controlled my tears and forced myself to stay calm. I could neither eat nor drink. I just waited and waited, longing only for the opportunity to tell him that I wouldn’t see Sebastian, not if it upset him, because nothing was more important to me than his belief that I loved him enough to prevent anyone dividing us.

  It was after eleven o’clock that night when he returned. Upstairs in our bedroom I was sitting at the vanity as I brushed my hair, but as soon as I heard the front door close I jumped to my feet and ran to the head of the stairs.

  I thought he might be drunk, reeling from side to side of the hall, perhaps even singing. But I was mistaken. There was no singing, no reeling. When I reached the head of the stairs he was leaning nonchalantly against the panels of the front door, and it was only when I called his name and he glanced up that I saw how far removed he was from normality.

  His eyes were like black holes. They saw me yet did not see me. Very slowly he stopped leaning against the door and straightened his back, but there was no swaying, no stumbling. As always, his self-control appeared to be immaculate, and thinking in relief that he was disturbed but sober, I rushed down the stairs to take him in my arms.

  I got no farther than the fifth
stair. Then I stopped. I think it was because he was so still. His extreme stillness made my scalp prickle, and then suddenly I could feel the violence vibrating across the yards which separated us and I knew that his immaculate self-control was an illusion, a facade which was already crumbling before my eyes.

  I called out, “Just a minute—I’ll be right with you,” and my lips were so stiff that I could hardly speak. Darting back to the bedroom, I just had time to struggle into jeans and a sweater before he burst into the room.

  What terrified me most was his incredible speed. Then, when I realized I was terrified, I was more terrified than ever. I tried to get a grip on my terror by telling myself that everything was going to be all right, but I knew now what my instinct had told me on the stairs. Everything wasn’t going to be all right. Everything was going to be very, very wrong.

  He swung the door wide, and then, using every ounce of strength in his body, he flung the door back into its frame. The wood cracked. The noise reverberated sickeningly in my ears. For a moment he wrestled with the lock, but the door must have dropped a fraction on its hinges, for the key refused to turn. In a rage he pulled the key out and hurled it across the room at the vanity. The mirror instantly smashed. The floor was strewn with glass, and my heart was hammering in my lungs.

  I tried to be calm, tried to be rational. “Scott,” I said gently, “I’m very sorry about—”

  “Shut up!” he shouted at me. “Shut up, you fucking bitch!”

  I could see now that he was blind drunk. The fact that it was so very far from obvious only heightened the horror; I had begun to think he had gone out of his mind unaided by alcohol, and I might have gone on believing that for some time if he hadn’t blundered against the nightstand and betrayed his unsteadiness on his feet. The collision maddened him. Furious that anything should impede his progress, he picked up the lamp to smash it, but it slipped through his fingers to the floor, and when he started to curse, I heard the blurred consonants at last and knew that although he was using the full force of his will to obliterate the hallmarks of drunkenness, his will was slowly slipping as the poison invaded his brain.