An Evil Streak

by An Evil Streak (retail) (epub)

  Darling, please forgive this scrawl but I’ve had to write all over the place, mainly in the loo as there’s nowhere else I can lock the door and be alone, especially at Xmas. That’s another awful comment on marriage. Do you think we should introduce Chris and Cathy? They might get on fine and all our troubles would be over. I ache to be with you and I don’t know how to wait till the next time. I did a silly thing the other night after I’d had my bath, I got a brown towel and put it between my legs and stroked it and pretended it was your head. I wasn’t going to tell you but now I have. It didn’t feel right, velvet would have been better but I haven’t got any brown velvet. Anyway it gives you an idea how much I want you.

  Darling my love, please be extra careful crossing roads and do let’s meet soon. Now we’ve got our own special room it all seems so lovely and private.

  All my love,

  Gemma’

  January

  It should have been the happiest time of my life but something went wrong. What went wrong (for me) was that nothing went wrong (for them). They were too cosy; they got highly organised very quickly; they dug themselves in. David bounced back from the Christmas recess demanding twice or thrice weekly meetings under the banner of my employing Gemma to type. (They had not managed New Year’s Eve, which made them both rather twitchy.) When I reminded him of the howls of rage that had greeted that idea when it came from me, he actually laughed. I was most offended by the laugh. He said it was different now, surely I realised that. Monday, Wednesday and Friday would be just about right. I said I hoped he wasn’t expecting me to cook and he said no, she could do that or they could go without or get takeaway Chinese, there was no problem, they could even have a cold picnic on the floor. The fact of there being no problem enraged me. There ought to be a problem, so that I could solve it. I had made everything too easy for them and now they had rendered me impotent. When would the work get done? I asked. Oh, before or after her visit; I wasn’t to worry. Everything would be all right. And where was I meant to be, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, walking the streets? Well, I might be lucky, even at my age. Then he saw my face and rearranged his own: of course they were grateful and of course they realised they were inconveniencing me, but I could always go to my club or the British Museum, couldn’t I? In fact, he wouldn’t mind if I stayed in the flat but he thought Gemma might be embarrassed.

  I watched them together, the next time they met, steeling myself to have a drink with them. They were both extremely high, as if they had arrived drunk, only I knew they had not. A feverish excitement burned between them. They fed on each other; they laughed overmuch at one another’s jokes. The glances they exchanged were hot with longing but they were also sure enough of themselves to enjoy the delay before they could touch. My presence was a tantalising aphrodisiac. I toyed briefly with the idea of announcing I would not go out, I was ill, it was too cold, but decided to keep that possibility for another time: it was useful to hold something in reserve. But I accepted another drink, for the fun of seeing anticipation turn to anxiety. They instantly became very solicitous, assuring me that Gemma would really type while David cleaned; it was so kind of me and they were so grateful (and now would I please go, I could see them longing to say, so they could fall into each other’s arms and my spare room bed). I mentioned maliciously that I could not afford to pay Gemma for typing as well as David for cleaning. Instantly they both offered to work for nothing. And that, I suppose, is love. Defeated and triumphant, I went out and found it really was cold. (One of the few disadvantages of living with central heating is that you do not form any impression of the temperature outside). At my age it is positively dangerous to wander about in the cold, but the B.M. and my club were not attractive alternatives. On an impulse I went into a phone booth and looked up Meredith, D. There were not as many as I had expected and I found it easily, Meredith, David, printed in full through vanity, no doubt, vainly hoping to be plagued by fans. I jotted down the number and dialled. It rang for a long time. Finally, when I was about to give up, the unforgettable voice answered.

  ‘Hullo?’

  I hung up. I did not have the correct small coins and I was not certain what I wanted to say. Instead I went to the cinema, my favourite place for thought, as I have mentioned before. Besides, once you have decided what to do, you do not have to do it immediately.

  I sat in the dark and considered the matter, while the screen antics moved in front of me like comforting shadows. I was disappointed in Gemma’s letters: they were so ordinary. The stolen-fruit quality was still pleasing, but unfortunately the quality of the stolen fruit was not very high. If the letters had been handed to me open, I doubt if I would have bothered to read them. Beatrice had been right all along: Gemma was not clever. She had no special talent. Her ideas were commonplace; she dealt mainly in feelings and even there she had no originality. David had also been right all along: she was lonely and she wanted someone to talk to, someone to hug. She had fallen into my trap only because it was so exactly the trap she would have set for herself, had she had the intelligence. She was beautiful, spontaneous, affectionate – and rather stupid. Well, that was probably enough. They were all qualities I lacked conspicuously, and so far her life had been far more rewarding than mine.

  My other complaint was more serious: I had done myself out of a job. Like an impresario, I had succeeded too well. My protégée was launched, and all that remained for me to do was make the bookings and collect the percentage. Only the percentage was not high enough, and I had noticed before in biography and autobiography how boring the story becomes once the early struggles are over and before the doom and destruction begin. The halcyon plateau of success is delightful for the protagonist but infinitely dull for the observer. In Troilus and Criseyde it comes as a shock when we are told that the affair has lasted for three blissful years. Time has passed imperceptibly: there was nothing for Pandarus (or Chaucer) to do while the lovers disported themselves in ecstasy. But as soon as the liaison is threatened, he is as busy again as when he first acted as their go-between.

  Happiness, then, is not very interesting – unless, of course, it happens to be your own. You cOuld, I suppose, put my dissatisfaction down to simple envy, but I happen to think it was a little more subtle and complex than that.

  * * *

  When I got home at half past four they were both still there, drinking tea and gazing foolishly at each other across the table.

  ‘Oh, you’re back,’ they said. I had the impression they spoke as one, though that is probably not factually true.

  ‘Yes, I live here.’ I smiled to soften the words. I was surprised (in view of how well I thought I knew myself) at how angry I felt: rage spilled out of me like the semen that was doubtless trickling down Gemma’s legs.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  They were so happy, they had more than enough kindness to spare for the ugly, bitter old man they had exiled from his own home. Gemma poured me the tea, with lemon and no sugar, just as I like it. She smiled at me. She looked like pictures of the Virgin Mary, young and innocent.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I sat at the head of the table as was proper, forming the apex of a triangle with them.

  ‘I’ll have to be going,’ she said to David.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  She didn’t move. Their hands met and clasped across the table. They were quite oblivious of me. I drank my tea, watching them avidly, against my will. Gemma’s make-up was smudged, nearly gone, and she looked exhausted; but not, I felt, merely through sexual excess. It seemed like the exhaustion of spent tenderness, of giving out emotion, like a mother when her child’s bedtime finally comes. David looked exhausted, too, but in a different way, as if he had had a long and exciting day and been kept up too late: he looked young and vulnerable, as I had never seen him before. They had made the difference in each other’s faces, something I could never do.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘can I
give you a lift?’

  ‘Thanks, just to the tube station.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ She smiled at him: a few more golden moments together. Again no one moved.

  ‘How was the typing?’ I asked unkindly.

  ‘Oh.’ She flushed. ‘I did it all. I’m a bit rusty, I had to do some of it twice. But I think it’s all right.’ She was talking to me but her eyes were on him. He looked at her tenderly as she described her exertions, as if she had spent the afternoon down a mine.

  ‘Come on, love,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to go.’

  She got up obediently; she kissed me on the forehead while he fetched her coat and helped her into it, an amazing courtesy, I thought, for him.

  ‘Day after tomorrow,’ he said to me curtly, shepherding her out with an arm round her shoulders as though she might break.

  When they had gone, I poured myself a large drink, got into their stained and rumpled sheets and made love to myself, since there was no one else to do the job. A lonely enterprise. Was it perhaps that one did not value what was so easily gained? Or did the very certainty of success detract from the anticipation? Anything, anything, rather than dwell on the fact that one had been rejected by the entire world. Here, in their sheets, where they had been two, I was one. There were no miracles.

  * * *

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you again,’ Catherine Meredith said. ‘Not so soon.’

  We were eating some rather disgusting moussaka in a Greek restaurant in the back streets of Camden Town. She had selected the restaurant because it was cheap, thinking of her own poverty rather than my relative affluence, although I was paying. She had also selected it because it was convenient – for her, not for me. When I rang up she had sounded immensely surprised; I treasured the sound of surprise in her voice: Catherine Meredith, whom I had thought never to take unawares.

  ‘I got bored,’ I said. ‘They’re using my flat three days a week.’ I paused. ‘They’re there now.’

  She crammed her mouth, chewed, swallowed and drank. ‘I imagined they must be,’ she said, ‘when you asked me to lunch.’

  ‘They’re in love,’ I said.

  She smiled and poured herself some more retsina. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they would be. It’s about time. Her letters are very sweet, don’t you think?’

  I was nonplussed. ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ she said vulgarly. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t read them.’

  There was a long, long silence. I avoided her eyes. Finally, deciding to laugh, I forced myself to look at her.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I used to steam open letters. They look different, that’s all. If you’ve ever done it, you can tell. Other people can’t, don’t worry. David doesn’t know. He doesn’t look at details like that.’

  ‘Why aren’t you jealous?’ I said, much too abruptly, riveted by her unconcern.

  ‘Oh.’ She swallowed a lot of wine. ‘I’m past all that. That was a long time ago.’

  ‘You mean you were jealous once.’

  ‘Yes, of course. In the beginning, like God. But it passes.’

  ‘He told me,’ I said, overcome by our proximity in the scruffy, steamy restaurant, her pale face and pale hanging hair, the black jersey I vaguely recognised as belonging to David, our sleazy intimacy in this unlikely spot, ‘he told me you threw a vase at him and his clothes out of the window when you found Mrs Salmon’s photograph.’

  A frown creased the smooth forehead.

  ‘Photograph?’

  There was a pause, during which I felt a fool. ‘There never was one? Nor a vase? Nor a scene?’

  She smiled gently. ‘He has fantasies. Like everyone else.’

  ‘He says you’re frigid.’ I was getting more reckless.

  ‘If I don’t fancy him I must be frigid.’

  She spoke with such calm, amused contempt that I stared at her, fascinated.

  ‘Why don’t you divorce him?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  She made it sound like a genuine question.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t sound as if you’re very happy together.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t, does it?’ She swallowed another huge mouthful of moussaka. For someone who never ate during the day, she seemed to have an enormous appetite. ‘But then I’m not sure marriage is meant to be happy. I think it’s a twentieth-century fallacy.’

  I thought of Gemma and her pathetic idealistic hopes, and I could see Catherine’s point.

  ‘But might you not be happier with someone else?’

  ‘I don’t see why. After the first few years I’d probably be just as bitchy, whoever I was with.’

  ‘You could live alone. Like me.’

  ‘Ah, but living with David I can feel superior all the time. I like that.’

  ‘You’re very honest,’ I said.

  ‘Am I?’ she said. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, at least you don’t say you stay together because of the children.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘At least I don’t say that.’

  There was a silence. She did not help me to break it, merely drank more retsina and looked at me. Challenging me to continue? I wondered how old she was. It was an unlined face.

  ‘That’s what David told Gemma,’ I said. ‘About the children.’

  ‘What else could he say?’

  ‘You mean it’s not true?’

  ‘If I said he couldn’t live without me, would you believe me?’

  Black made her look younger than the pallid colours she had worn to my flat. And she had plaited her hair so that it hung like two ropes framing her face. Thick fat plaits held with rubber bands, like a little girl in the school playground.

  She said, ‘Well, anyway, he’s got to support his children, he wanted them, I didn’t, so he might as well support me too. He certainly can’t afford two homes. I think it serves him right, don’t you?’

  I said, ‘I didn’t think you’d come to lunch. After all you said about not eating in the daytime.’

  She laughed. ‘So now you’re wondering if I’m just as big a liar as David. Poor Mr Kyle. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to us. I told you it would take time.’

  Afterwards we walked by the canal. The temperature was unpleasant for sightseeing but I was reluctant to let her go, and she did not invite me home. Indeed I was proud to be seen with her in her black flowing cloak, as I had been proud of being seen with Gemma when she was a conventionally pretty child, and later Miranda when she went around with pre-Raphaelite hair smelling of incense. It seemed a privilege to have some of their incongruity rub off on me: there is little enough beauty or mystery left in the world. Catherine was better equipped for the weather than I was, with David’s sweater and some bisexual jeans tucked into seven-league boots that seemed made for striding along river banks in winter.

  ‘I don’t know this part of London,’ I said to break the silence that had iced over our conversation.

  ‘No, I didn’t imagine you would.’

  She tried pointing out landmarks to me while I tried steering her back to David and the children. She seemed bored with the subject now: all she would say was that David simply loved her being pregnant but he wasn’t so keen on the actual children. (This was awkward, since one stage lasted so much longer than the other.) Whereas she quite liked them once they were here, but found the nine months very tedious. I pressed her for reasons.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, sounding cross, ‘I think it’s feeling my body doesn’t belong to me, it’s been invaded. Which is probably why David loves it.’

  She seemed more vulnerable in the open air: altogether gentler and softer once exposed to the elements. I wanted to put my arm round her.

  ‘So I just hope your niece is on the pill,’ she said lightly. ‘There’s nothing he likes better than impregnating women all over the place. He won’t admit it but I think he gets a kick out of seeing them swell up and knowing it’s all due to him.’

  ‘That’s all right,�
� I said. ‘Nothing to worry about. Her husband’s a doctor and he’s very keen on family planning.’

  She smiled. ‘I wish I could say the same for my husband.’

  * * *

  That night I could hardly sleep. The idea of Gemma pregnant by David excited me beyond measure. Her other pregnancies had taken her away from me because they were Christopher’s, but this one would surely bring us closer together. If David and Gemma were to have a child, the three of us would form an unholy trinity, united beyond the grave, and I would be revenged forever on Christopher. He would be condemned to support another man’s child till he died. Longer: he would surely make bequests.

  Moreover, it would be a supreme test of my ingenuity.

  The letters stopped: the two of them were too much together even for Gemma to have need of letters. But I panicked, plunging into a paranoid fantasy. They had discovered me and were being clever, playing it carefully, covering their tracks. I knew this was not true, but the idea roamed, like an animal escaped from the zoo.

  Their room became full of objects: scent, hairbrushes, make-up, dressing-gowns, things for the bath. Another life went on in there, just through the wall from my room, where no life went on. They were more than visitors: it was like being dispossessed by squatters, disguised as charming children. I had the feeling that everything was gaining momentum, rushing out of control. Had I not said at the start, no, before the start, that we were set on collision course?

  He sang her praises as if he had invented her. Week after week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, he talked about her non-stop from ten till twelve while he dusted and polished – that is, if I stayed in the room with him. But he did not tell me anything about her because he talked in generalised superlatives. She was magic. She was so giving. She was so warm and gentle. She transformed him.