Without Consent

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘She’ll probably recover,’ Helen said. She looked cool in the heat. Her right foot steadied a box of paper at her feet.

  ‘What a cold-hearted bitch you are, Aunty West, honestly.’

  Helen did not reply. There was clearly a better occasion to mention that the deepest and most terrifying of humiliations, rape included, did not always send a life into an inevitable downward spiral. Rose herself was a fine example of recovery. Rose, who was still so young, but had never been allowed innocence. A father from hell, a history of abuse and promiscuity, from which she had risen, like the phoenix from the ashes, frightened of nothing. Proud of her, Helen also envied that huge capacity for life which had made the transformation possible, and, while trying to ignore Rose’s comments on the frozen state of her own soul, wondered if the remarks were true and whether it really was a cop-out to make yourself indifferent to the things you could not change.

  ‘You were saying something earlier on about a favour,’ she said. The taxi bowled out into Ludgate Hill. The vast spectre of St Paul’s rose before them in majesty, the steps littered with brightly coloured people. They looked normal; they had decent lives, wore their best and most garish clothes, each with his own history. Helen wanted to go inside, feel the cool, mingle with gawping visitors and pretend superiority. Rose was fingering her hair into sharper spikes, a sure sign of determination. Hers was a life which made religion, even religious buildings, anathema. Her father had always carried a Bible, even on his way to abuse little girls. Rose now believed in a different set of gods.

  ‘Yeah. I want you to talk to this friend. Well, I don’t know. You might bite her head off and tell her to go and get a life or something.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake stop talking in riddles. What do you want me to do?’

  Rose took a deep breath of exasperation, then enunciated her words as carefully as any real lawyer on a pedestal.

  ‘Michael’s cousin. She’s doing my flowers. I like her a lot, as it happens. Eight years younger than you; nine years older than me. Work that out for yourself. Only, she’s been attacked, by a man. She told Mike’s mum, but she won’t say much and Mike’s mum says it’s been like watching someone shrivel up, but she won’t do anything about it. You met her at my engagement party, remember? You two got on like a house on fire.’

  ‘And you want me to talk to her? Forget it. There’s social services, Rape Crisis, Victim Support, all that…’

  ‘And none of it would do. Don’t ask me why, it won’t. You’re the right age, you know what it’s like to be attacked, you can pull words out of people. Will you do it?’

  ‘No. I haven’t got the skill.’

  Nor the time and certainly not the inclination. She was trying to recall the woman she had met, remembered a large girl, a midwife by profession. The taxi turned sharply, diving through a dark narrow street, throwing them together. Helen could feel the heat of Rose’s skin. Papers littered the floor, ignored. All that paper, representing nothing but loss for everyone concerned.

  ‘Typical,’ said Rose, righting herself. ‘Bloody typical. I can just hear what’s in your head. Me? Never! I just prosecute; I can’t do anything else; I don’t want to understand. I don’t want to find out what it’s like, and I don’t have time to help anyone, ’cos I’m so busy doing my duty. Like some doctor; I just inject, I just prescribe, I can’t prevent. Look, it’s because all these counsellors are such bloody experts that she won’t go. She doesn’t want psychobabble. She wants a nice, dry, sympathetic lawyer. One with my personal seal of approval, which you are about to lose.’

  ‘Why won’t she talk to you?’

  Rose turned her head away.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so silly. I’m too young.’

  Rose, you have never been young. Youthful and energetic, yes, but never young, Helen thought, slightly amused and certainly perplexed. Odd that she could withstand the bullying of a judge, the intimidation of Redwood, the vicious dislike of defendants and still have absolutely no armoury to defend an unreasonable request from Rose. She had a sudden flash of what it must be like to be Bailey, locked in his friendship with Ryan, made as malleable by it as a piece of putty.

  ‘When?’

  She meant, when was the woman attacked? but the single word was taken as acceptance of the demand. Rose was good at that. She had an angular face with a wide generous mouth made for smiling. Redwood was right to remark that Helen looked like an older, calmer version of Rose; she seemed unaware of how much the girl modelled herself on her. lf she had her hair transformed into soft curls, Helen was thinking fondly, this little devil might be able to fool even more of the people more of the time.

  ‘Triffic. I’ll give you her address. I mean, I did tell her this evening would be fine, but I expect you could rearrange.’

  There was no such thing as totally free will, Helen decided. Nor any such thing as predictability when the will was so weak.

  Much of the time, she did not like being in charge, especially of human beings. Rose could have been right. It was a dangerous state to have reached if she really did prefer to meet them on paper.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘The House of Lords have upheld the Court of Appeal in deciding that there is no implied consent to sexual intercourse within marriage, and that it is therefore possible for a man to rape his wife. The argument that “unlawful” meant outside the bond of marriage was mere surplusage … it was clearly unlawful to have sexual intercourse with any woman without her consent and the use of the word in the subsection added nothing.’

  Brigid Connor was taking tea among the friends of the parish, ostensibly to organize preparations for the visit of the Bishop, who would confirm several children in their as yet half-baked faith and inspect the church with a view to allocating funds. This seemed to necessitate a wholesale spring-clean of the church itself, although Brigid privately thought it would be better to leave it as it was, since there was little point painting over the cracks which they wanted the man to see. The episcopal visit was distant enough to take second place to gossip of various kinds; Brigid would be able to add little. She detested parish activity and had no great affection for the other ladies who approached it with the enthusiasm she was capable of assuming, but never feeling, and she disliked the uneasy knowledge that they were all in the same boat.

  They formed a sanctimonious posse of the better-off kind of matrons, who did not work, either because they did not know how or because they had no need. They were an unglamorous version of the ladies who lunch, all of them considering it poor taste to be flashy, to show off the baubles or the boobies, while each, to a woman, pretended they were poorer and busier than they were. It was the cars that gave them away rather than the clothes. Each time Brigid met one or the other, she hoped for a kind of breakthrough into friendship. Or, failing that, some kind of clue as to how it was they seemed to manage their lives so much better than she did; something she could copy, so that she could laugh as they did. But she stood on the fringes, looking in, watching intensely, making them uncomfortable, all the time afraid they might discover how much she envied their self-command.

  Did they live in a state of mortal sin? Did they fear hell and any repeat of pregnancy as she did? They were a small element of this particular parish; minimal in comparison to those parishioners at the other end of the scale. This coterie existed to give, the bulk to receive, like a vast nest of baby birds with open mouths, Brigid thought, without condemnation. She had often wished she was one of the needy poor, then she might have greater licence to trouble the priest. One of the other women, only a couple of years Brigid’s senior, married young and looking forward to grandmother status by the time she reached a well-preserved forty, was showing the others photos of her daughter’s wedding. Brigid had attended the service, without an invitation to the reception. She saw herself, skulking in the corner of one of the photos outside church, with her hat askew, and, looking at her shadowy depiction, felt shame in it.

  ‘Didn’t she look
a dream? All that lace …’

  ‘Her granny’s veil, that was, you know. Must be a hundred years old. Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  There were photos pre-ceremony, photos after, careful to include costly cars and all the best frocks, or so it seemed to Brigid. The one thing which struck her most was the picture of the bride arriving with the veil over her face, ready to float down the aisle in ghostly anonymity, although everyone knew who she was. The veil said it all, Brigid was thinking. You arrived for your wedding shrouded in complete ignorance, thinking you knew about life, the universe and everything, while knowing nothing. Least of all the fact that you were a sacrificial lamb, for whom being in love was not going to help one whit. At least that was the way it had been for her. Might not be the same for a modern girl; but eighteen, this bride, for God’s sake. How much could any girl know at eighteen?

  The photos were bringing forth a flood of reminiscence, some of it surprisingly frank by their standards.

  ‘I remember my wedding night,’ one remarked. ‘Lord, what a fiasco. I never thought I’d recover.’

  ‘Was it such a great thing, Mary? Did you have to step over it?’

  They all snorted with laughter.

  ‘Course, it’s not like that now,’ Mary continued. ‘Not that it ever really was. I was a virgin, God help me, but as for my sisters … Nobody actually produced a shotgun, but Daddy might as well.’

  ‘That was me,’ Brigid murmured, suddenly spontaneously bold. She only had to know, within rough parameters, the ages of these women’s children to know that the had-to-get-married scenario applied to more than herself. No one was shocked.

  ‘Me too,’ said another, after a pause. She was another plump one, who knitted between bites of her cake; the last thing she needed. ‘Not that I have regrets, mind: I mightn’t have got him any other way,’ she said with her mouth full and they all laughed again. ‘And surely,’ the plump one went on, ‘there’s few enough years when the sex stuff matters that much. Thank God the old man seems to have forgotten all about it.’

  ‘If only,’ Brigid said, further emboldened by the laughter. She spoke too fervently, her voice too loud. Now they were all staring at her, waiting for elaboration. She giggled, feeling herself blush.

  ‘I mean, I wish mine would forget about… it. He never does though.’

  The pause this time was distinctly awkward. The hostess stood up to refresh the tea.

  ‘Well aren’t you the lucky one?’ she said, not unkindly. Everyone knew that Brigid, even in the maturity of her late thirties, was one brick short of a load. ‘After all those years. It must be a wonderful thing to have a man who still wants you.’

  Brigid knew how she must have sounded: boastful instead of bruised. And her Aemon such a handsome man, too. Barrel-shaped, with the kind of ruddy complexion which suggested rustic honesty. A big man with vivid blue eyes and a fine crop of hair, like his brothers. And his daughters, playing with their cousins for the summer. She had failed them all.

  She went home via the church, where confetti drifted across the steps and the traffic roared by. God help her; it was only a small thing to bear, wasn’t it? Sex, marriage, her own existence.

  At the junction of the main road and the avenue which led to her home, she faltered and made an excuse to detour to the shops. It wasted another twenty minutes. The front door to the apartment block was a door of glass, which threw her own reflection back at her with warped accuracy, like a silly mirror at the funfairs of her childhood. She bent in the middle; her forehead was huge, the carrier bag enormous and the necklace round her neck too bright. Nearer the door, as she climbed up the steps, she became a small neat woman with an overlarge bosom and overtinted red-blond hair which was nothing but an artificial imitation of what it had been. She looked capable enough, but with shoulders too narrow for a body to cry upon and a dress with a pattern as busy as the confetti she had seen.

  From the windows of the apartment Aemon had built, she could see downhill to the bowl of London. In the near distance were the gasometers of St Pancras. Touches of green between rooftops; railway lines sneaking out from the vast sheds of the station, suggesting freedom. All she had to do was go, but there had been a touch of cold in the morning air, an early-warning sign of a summer on the wane. Brigid did not want to be up here; nor did she want to be down there in those streets, either. Even in those shaded areas of green which showed the coolness of a square or a park.

  Too soon for a drink, or was it? Drink, bath, warmth within and without. Ablutions and alcohol to rid herself of the dreadful guilt about taking pills and going to the doctor. Confessing things she should only confess to a priest, without hope of redemption now. No, no drinkies, not yet. She had will-power sometimes; it was the will itself she lacked.

  If Helen West was resenting the superior will-power of Rose Darvey, Anna Stirland resented it more. Rose had a talent for subversion which was nicely complemented by her appetite for conflict. Anna could see that someone might rue the day when Rose had been persuaded to train for the law, even though the day when the child would qualify was still a long way off. She could imagine Rose filling the courtroom with her own version of heavy breathing and an office with the same. The effect on her fiancée’s family was exhilarating: they were weak with love for her.

  Because of Rose, Anna had agreed to meet Helen West. OK, she had liked Helen on one meeting, but she would have preferred another context for the second. Anything to get Rose and Rose’s future mother-in-law off her back: she should have kept her mouth shut. Anna was rehearsing the lines to make this less embarrassing, such as, I’m sorry, this is all a big mistake, fuck off. The sheer lack of imagination in her own nervous anger infuriated her all the more, but at the same time, there she was, tidying in expectation of a guest who would notice. Dusting surfaces already clean, looking at the whole doll’s house with a critical eye, as if she were selling it. Some chance – she’d sell it if she could – she hoped that the sound of the doorbell was announcing someone responding to the advertisement. People might think the hasty decision to sell was the reason why she had suddenly taken to spending hours after midnight painting the walls. That was the way it went, she chanted to herself in the same singsong rhythm she used to the agent. Once you make it nice, you don’t want to leave, do you?

  If the woman on the doorstep had said hello, extended some nice warm paw for shaking and announced herself with platitudes or small talk like the estate agent, Anna might have gone into her pre-rehearsed speech, but the visitor stood sideways on to the door, looking away down the street, one hand extended in Anna’s direction, offering a bottle of wine, which, once accepted, left Anna no option but to ask Helen in. A clever ploy, she decided later; they had not even looked at one another’s faces before they were both trapped.

  She noticed again the scar on Helen’s forehead. It curled from one eyebrow into the hairline and could easily have been covered by arrangement of her long hair, but she did not seem to mind it. Anna remembered Rose’s verdict on this woman, heard Rose’s lecturing voice, telling her: she may look buttoned up, you know, Anna, and she may talk a bit precious, but there isn’t much she hasn’t done. She didn’t get that scar in a road accident and she has been known to bite people.

  ‘What a nice kitchen,’ Helen said, genuine enthusiasm taking away the polite banality of the compliment. Anna looked around; it was a more than nice kitchen, full of old pine, carefully chosen pictures, dried herbs and flowers lending it a musky smell. A door stood open, leading on to a small backyard laid out with narrow flower-beds in full bloom. Pink and white geraniums prevailed in tubs; roses climbed the wall. The glass panes in the door gleamed.

  ‘I know what I want in my kitchen,’ Helen continued, ‘just as I sometimes think I know what I want in my life, but I never quite seem to achieve it. Something goes wrong between concept and execution. I expect it always will. I’d have thought about hanging dried herbs there.’ She pointed to the wooden clothes pulley above her head, holding
pans and flowers. ‘And then I would have continued to think about it. Not done it.’

  Anna fussed, uncorked the wine clumsily, poured unsteadily, the sound of it comforting. The glass she handed Helen was unusual, heavy and old; the wine cold and pale. Nothing in the kitchen was new; all of it revealed an owner who specialized in thrift as well as taste.

  ‘I make an effort with my house,’ Anna said, choosing words carefully, ‘and I love flowers, because I can’t do much with my person. I think I do it to compensate to the world. Or myself. I’m not sure.’

  ‘I don’t think I quite follow.’

  ‘You should,’ Anna stated with a touch of impatience. ‘But then you probably live in a different world. Beautiful people do. I’m a rather ugly woman, in case you haven’t noticed. It follows that I feel obliged to create something like beauty around me, so that I can justify my own existence.’

  She was plain. Not plain enough to warrant the description of ugliness, but still a slab of a woman, apart from the eyes. The kind of woman who had never quite looked like a girl; too full a figure from the age of eleven. The type who would play wallflower and act chaperone for lovelier, livelier sisters or cousins. A face which had assumed responsibility as soon as other children shed it, but not, Helen thought, as plain as all that. Anna spoke of herself ironically, as if she were birthmarked or disabled to the degree that she was an assault on the human eye, instead of being on the wrong side of ordinary.

  ‘I think you should get a new mirror,’ Helen said honestly.

  Anna rose and placed the wine in the fridge. She had the light-footed step of the heavy woman who had somewhere learnt to dance, a grace and economy of movement which also cast doubts on her own bitter self-deprecation. She did not seem a person who accepted defeat lightly, nor one who had looked at her world without issuing a challenge. If anything, she would be obsessive about making the best of what she had, Helen guessed; not today, perhaps, but on other days. She felt uncomfortingly obtrusive, warning bells telling her to leave because Anna was right to resent the presence of anyone who could not mend her fractured self-esteem, least of all someone who did not want to try. Am I a man’s woman or a woman’s woman? Helen asked herself, remembering teenage years in which she had eschewed the company of either sex, but especially the female, for the sole unspoken reason that they were the ones most likely to expose her deficiencies. She had been a beautiful reserved child, features which, taken together, had isolated her so much she had envied the big, fat, fearless and competitive girl who led the class and was the doyen of all their opinions. Anna could have been one of the same kind, who took her bulk and her dimples and turned them into virtues, moved on to another popular persona. Becoming one of the boys; something Helen had never been.