The Vanishing Princess

by Jenny Diski

  The direction of her anger shifted now from her own inability to live with her doubts, to Charlie, for his deceit, his scheming, and for the way his deceit made her feel. The rage at being lied to. The energy it took up.

  There were flashes before her eyes as if chemicals surged suddenly in her body, causing a visual disturbance. She saw a picture of Rory—female—telling whoever she was involved with, “I’m seeing Charlie tonight. You remember, the girl I was at college with?” Why not use the coincidence of a pair of cunningly ambiguous names? Make up as little as possible. Always the best way. And then laugh about it together.

  Out in the street with enough empty air around her, she shook off the pressure of bodies pushing, close in, against her, and got hold of her thoughts. This had to stop. It was too painful, too awful. Charlie had told her again and again, “Listen to me, I love you. Why else would I be here? What other possible reason could there be for it? Don’t you know, don’t you feel I love you? Can’t you tell?”

  Lillian let the familiar assurance spread over her sore parts like a viscous remedy taken to line and soothe raw flesh. There was a simple logic to Charlie’s words. Truth was self-evident. Well, that wasn’t necessarily true, but in this case it was. She couldn’t, if she looked at the history of the two of them, at his behaviour, at how things were between them, doubt that he loved her. And the corollary: “I’m not interested in anyone else. I love you—I want you. You are everything I’ve ever wanted, why would I go with anyone else?”

  It was insane—well, neurotic—to give time and energy to suspicions that made no sense in the light of what was actually happening.

  She climbed the flight of stairs to the office, relieved at the calm certainty—as normal as Charlie, as anyone—she had made herself feel. It was the state of mind in which she wanted to proceed with her day and her life.

  It had lasted until lunchtime. Her emotional existence had taken on a new diurnal pattern: the second-thought rage about something said or done as the tube clattered along in time to the build-up of her anger; the coming to her senses as she walked to work, once the pressure of being underground was relieved by being back on the surface again; the simple getting on with her job until lunchtime, when she went downstairs and headed towards the park, and then the other version of “coming to her senses,” and an hour of striding rage. A daily nightmare since Charlie had moved in with her. It was unbearable—whether her suspicions were accurate or not—just the thinking, the supposing, the turmoil of one minute this certainty, the next minute the opposite. It reminded her how, as a child, she had believed in God because it was so clear, so obvious, that he existed. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could think differently. And then, ten years on, the same absolute conviction that there was no deity, no otherness, only the material world that could be seen, heard and felt. How could anyone possibly believe in God? It wasn’t until a further ten years on that she had come to the possibility of agnosticism, and the ability to live with an uncertainty. Even then, she had trouble understanding how anyone could believe firmly one way or the other. But the business of believing in Charlie was more urgent than her problems with God. The swings of conviction—he is seeing someone else—he most certainly isn’t—came around several giddying times a day. Sometimes Lillian felt as if she were going mad, but there was nothing mad about her thoughts in either state of mind. They were all too logical. It was only the persistence and the see-sawing that had the quality of madness.

  She had told Charlie it wouldn’t work. She kept on telling him, but it seemed that they had different definitions of what working meant. Lillian was at a loss to know what to do. She didn’t understand the situation, had no idea how to assess what was going on, all she knew was the vivid quality of her discomfort.

  Lillian had never lived with anyone, not until she was thirty-five and Charlie moved in. Barged in, she would have said, but she had enough respect for the truth to know it couldn’t have happened without her consent, without her wanting it. Nonetheless, it felt now more as if she had been involved in an accident, than that she had made a considered decision. She couldn’t shake off the feeling that an act of God had occurred of which she was the victim.

  This was not the truth. Lillian had very definitely made a decision, but looking back on it, it seemed to her that that moment was the root of the madness which had descended on her. It had started there: with a thought-out attempt to be . . . normal?

  There had always been lovers. Lillian liked sex, and sometimes liked to have company. After a few years of getting together with men purely for their talent in bed, she came round to the view that there might be something better to be found. She confined herself to relationships, thereafter, with men who were talented in bed, and whom she could stand to have in her flat for more than five minutes after they’d got dressed. Lillian saw this as a definite moment of growth. At twenty-six, when she made the decision, she had, she felt, matured. Sex on its own was all right, physically, but would no longer do. She felt she wanted more. So from then on she only got involved with men she liked. This caused a decrease in sexual activity, but she was able to cope with it, given her new-found maturity.

  At first, at the beginning of Lillian’s sexual history, she was no different from her friends, who had as frequent and superficial relationships as she had. They all had fun, Lillian and her friends, through college. But, gradually, one after another, the other women dropped away as each formed permanent attachments. By the time Lillian was thirty-two, most had married or were living with someone, though some had divorced by then and were on second husbands, and two had decided to be lesbians (which made no difference since both of them were in settled relationships). Only Lillian remained steadfastly single. No one stayed in her flat for more than one night at a time, and her newly discovered dissatisfaction with purely physical relationships did not mean that she felt the need to be with someone twenty-four hours a day, or to have company when she went to the supermarket.

  She still saw some of those friends and they frequently tried to persuade her of the joys of being in a committed relationship, but it was not what Lillian wanted. She didn’t argue when they called her neurotic, she acknowledged it.

  “Yes, I suppose I am, but there it is. Here I am, and neurotic or not, I live and work and function okay. So if I don’t have a problem, why not just accept that’s how I am?”

  Fair enough, but, in fact, Lillian did see a psychotherapist for a while. She went because of car tax. She found keeping her car on the road caused her terrible anxiety. For two months before the road tax was due to be renewed each year, Lillian would be overcome with fear and helplessness. The car needed an MOT, but she was somehow incapable of finding, or getting to, a garage to obtain it. She always did eventually, at the last moment, but until then she would lie awake until it began to get light, consumed with worry about how to find a garage, about making an appointment, then getting to it. All this, night after night, for months before, and then a blind panic a day before the tax was due. Afterwards, always, she wondered what the fuss was about; it had been simple, she only had to repeat next year what she had done this year, but calmly. But, of course, the following year the same thing happened. All kinds of official, required organisation left her in this state, and Lillian knew that there was something wrong about it. It made life a misery and she was aware, with one part of her mind, that it wasn’t necessary. She went to see a shrink.

  There was, in her fear of coping with everyday details, something of a hankering for a “man about the house.” So David Fanshaw suggested, and in all honesty, Lillian found herself unable to protest much at his analysis as far as it went. Very soon, though, she was confronted with the problem of transference. She was too guarded, Fanshaw told her. After a few weeks, he pointed out that not once had she made a slip of the tongue, she recalled no dreams, and her refusal to lie on the couch, as opposed to sitting opposite him in the chair, was symptomatic of a refusal to trust him, to be prepared to make hersel
f vulnerable to him. They had long since stopped talking about cars and getting domestic machinery mended. Vulnerability had become the issue.

  “But why would I deliberately make myself vulnerable?” she asked, her eyes widening in genuine perplexity.

  “Because people who refuse to be vulnerable, who refuse to take a risk with other people, are hampered in their ability to make relationships.”

  “Are you telling me that to open yourself up to being hurt and unhappy is a sign of health? You aren’t really saying that, are you? That I should deliberately lay myself open to pain? Wouldn’t your lot call that masochistic? There are some genuinely unpleasant people out there, you know.”

  David Fanshaw made a church roof and steeple with his fingers.

  “Until you take the risk, how do you know what anyone is like? If you reject everyone, because some people aren’t nice, you won’t find the other kind. You’ll never make a real relationship.”

  “But,” Lillian explained calmly, “I don’t want a real relationship. I mean, not more than I have already. I see people. I get involved with people . . .”

  “Up to a point.”

  “Well, of course, up to a point. Everything’s up to a point. Why would I change my life when it seems very satisfactory to me? I don’t have to be married to be happy.”

  “But you’re here.”

  “Because of panicking about things, not because I’m not in a cosy domestic situation.”

  They carried on for a while, but Lillian never did lie down, and it became clear that David Fanshaw felt they wouldn’t get to the bottom of things until she responded in a less rational way.

  One problem was that Lillian was not mystified about why she was like she was. She knew that her background, a pair of hopelessly inept, over-anxious parents and an older sister killed in a pointless and awful accident, made her attitude to life the way it was. She told Fanshaw that at the first session.

  “I understand why I’m the way I am, but how I am, preferring to live alone and so on, is fine by me. I don’t want to be cured of my need for independence, I just want some help with my irrational anxieties.”

  “I’m afraid that psychotherapy doesn’t work like that,” he warned her. “It’s not a matter of curing inconvenient symptoms, but of looking at underlying causes, at the whole situation.”

  She should have realised then that there wasn’t any point, but she kept on hoping that something useful would come out of it. One night, though, she had what David Fanshaw might have called an insight if it had been the kind of thing he approved of. Lillian got up early, wrote a letter to Fanshaw thanking him for his help and enclosing a final cheque, and then put a small ad in the local newspaper offering her car for sale. That was what she called dealing with a problem. She couldn’t panic about the car if she didn’t have one. She promised herself to deal with other anxieties as they arose, in much the same way. If they cause you trouble, do without them. She was only applying to machinery what she had always applied to men. Get rid of whatever areas she found intolerable. Deny the power of anything that could upset her equilibrium. Practical, was the way Lillian thought about it.

  So how did it come about that a year after she’d met Charlie, he’d turned up at her doorstep with his suits over one arm, and his stereo under the other? Because she had agreed that he should. And why, Lillian wondered as if it were an entirely new thought, throwing the crusts of her sandwich at the ducks, had she agreed to such a thing?

  Because she loved Charlie; because it was different. And because, recognising the pleasure she got from his company and wanting more of it, more of the time, she had thought why shouldn’t she take a risk, for once in her life? But if love was what she felt for Charlie, it wasn’t the blinding kind that her friends seemed to catch. She wasn’t befuddled into believing herself to be part of a fairy tale. She had no doubt that the relationship would end sooner or later, or, at any rate, peter out. She could imagine only too well the unpleasantness of separating the effects of two lives that had come together in one place. She could see with dismal clarity, when she forced herself, the misery of finding herself alone after a year or two, disoriented by the new kind of existence she had got used to; or worse, the hideous near-certainty of becoming the woman who waited at home while her man found himself more interesting fish to fry without wanting the inconvenience of packing his bags.

  Knowing all this, certain that all this applied to her and not some statistical other, Lillian had nevertheless taken a deep breath and said, “Yes,” when Charlie told her for the tenth time that he wanted to be living with her. After all, it seemed suddenly to occur to her, what was the prospect of pain, however clearly she envisaged it, compared to the excitement of doing what she wanted to do, and, for once, to hell with the consequences? Which was a curious thought, since until that moment, she had not felt that the life she chose to lead was anything other than exactly what she wanted.

  But throwing caution to the wind is a talent that comes with practice, and Lillian had none. A whim, novel though it might be, wasn’t enough to stop the cold sweat that ran down her spine when Charlie rang the doorbell on the day they had arranged he should move in. So Lillian, learning from the motorcar lesson, took things in hand.

  “Listen,” she said while Charlie filled the space in the wardrobe she had made for him. “I want to get something straight. I want to make a deal. I won’t be told lies. In return for you not lying to me, I won’t make any demands about fidelity. It’s just logical,” she said, as Charlie turned to look at her. “If I don’t care about you fucking other women, then you can’t lie to me, can you, because there’s nothing to lie about. And then I won’t have to spend energy worrying if I’m being lied to. It’s the idea of being deceived and not knowing it, not you fucking other women, that I really can’t stand.”

  “You don’t care if I have other women?”

  “No.”

  Charlie turned to the wardrobe and started taking out the hangers he had just put in.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t want to live with you if you don’t care if I’m fucking other people. I’d rather leave now.”

  Lillian stared at him. “Stop it.”

  “No. The arrangement isn’t to my taste. I am faithful to you, and that’s all there is to it. I don’t want you not to care if I fuck someone else.”

  “It’s just that I don’t want you to have a chance to lie to me. I can’t bear the idea of worrying about it.”

  “I don’t lie to you. I won’t ever lie to you. I don’t want other women, because I want you, but if I did, I’d tell you, because it’d be over.”

  “How do I know that’s true?”

  “Because I’m telling you it’s true.”

  It was the first time that pair of sentences were spoken between them, but by no means the last. Lillian recognised the essential truth of the exchange, or rather, recognised that it was as far as truth could go in such matters. She had already solved the problem: if she wanted guarantees about another person’s thoughts and acts, then she simply had to distance herself sufficiently from them, so that their thoughts and acts were not relevant, and only the actual time spent together was of concern. But something had made her want more.

  Perhaps it was simply the passage of time—being thirty-five makes you notice that time is limited and that it’s entirely possible for some things never to happen. It also had to do with what might be thought of as a pull towards democracy. If everyone else was taking risks, shacking up with someone and accepting the consequences, then maybe her fear of it was wrong. Maybe she should try it.

  Whatever it was, when she was faced with the reality, she discovered that her fears were not merely “neurotic,” as in “superficial,” but ran deep enough to take up most of her mental energies. She knew she could never know what was really going on in another person’s mind, no matter how closely they might have linked their lives, and Lillian found the inescapable reality of this fact intol
erable.

  “I want to rummage through the files inside your mind,” she had once said to a sleepy Charlie, who had smiled at the idea, not realising the deadly seriousness of the thought.

  That fact, combined with what seemed to be her congenital certainty that, after a time, all relationships became at best comfortable, and that men would inevitably look elsewhere for excitement, made living with Charlie a kind of hell, as bad as her worst imaginings.

  Lillian couldn’t understand friends whose confidence in their men seemed to her like a desperate optimism. It seemed that all of them, for the most part, intelligent, well-informed women, believed at the beginning of their involvements that their relationship was the final choice of partner that each party would make. They had found their life-long relationship, and, in spite of both the men and the women having had several other relationships, Lillian’s friends were wonderfully sure that this was it. Never mind the divorce statistics, never mind the figures showing the percentage of men (and women) who were unfaithful in relationships, never mind the fact that some of their friends’ marriages had collapsed into apathy or desertion.

  Lillian couldn’t understand the “It’s different for us” attitude that she saw all around her. She didn’t feel like that. She couldn’t help knowing that statistics had as good a chance of applying to her as to anyone else. So there was no doubt that Charlie, ardent and devoted as he might be at their relatively early stage of relationship, would end up wanting a comfortable domestic relationship with her (if such a thing were possible), and sexual excitement with a variety of someone elses. No, she didn’t really think he was unfaithful to her now (at least, for part of the time she didn’t), but she knew he would be, and she was horrified at the idea that there would be a moment when the change occurred and she would be left foolishly imagining that it was still the way it had been at the beginning. “Bastard!” she yelled at the faithless Charlie of the future. “Treacherous, lying bastard!” And sometimes, when she couldn’t stop herself, she said it to the Charlie of the here and now. It wasn’t that she wept and screamed; their discussions were no more than that. But Lillian knew, for all the apparent reasonableness of her tone, that she couldn’t believe what Charlie said, and, most awful, she knew she never would. There was nothing he could say. Her questions and accusations were more like verbal tics. They could not be answered.