The Adulteress

by Noelle Harrison

  When I think of my parents, it is Mummy who is the stern one. In my mind’s eye she looks like a column of marble, unblemished, beautiful, but too cold to touch, and Daddy is the vine wrapped around her. He needed her. But she didn’t want him.

  Here in Cavan it can rain all day, but sometimes the skies will clear by evening. A few fragile rays of sunlight attempt to break through the cloud, and the land will glisten magically. It is at this time I might take a walk. I go down to the lake to look at the two swans. Oonagh tells me they arrive every year. The same pair, to mate. Year in, year out, their offspring coming, going, but the pair beholden to each other, monogamous. So it is, animals are quite capable of fidelity, and we humans can act with animal instincts, without a thought for principles. We are capable of this. There is not such a difference between us.

  It is five o’clock. Already I can see dark shadows creeping up the fields, swallowing the land. Robert will be back soon. I stand in the yard and I can hardly see any sign of human life at all, just the slate roof of the Sheridens’ house, the woods, the fields and the lake in the distance. How the land rolls all the way down to the lake like a green ocean, waves of grass surging in the wind, drizzle like sea spray on my face. When you live somewhere like this, it is hard to imagine there is a war going on. But I do think of it every day. I think of my sister Min in London. I think of Mother.

  Yet here in Ireland people appear to ignore the war. Oonagh says the robin hasn’t come this year and this is a sign the Germans will invade, yet she doesn’t seem too perturbed by this possibility. What most people seem more preoccupied with is the fact that England won’t take our beef. Times are pretty hard here, but we are lucky, all the same, to be living in peace. Indeed, we seem to live in a forgotten world in our nook in the country, and it is hard to imagine anything disturbing it. Robert loves the solitude, but for me, I do miss company.

  Yesterday Robert finally noticed my low spirits.

  ‘I think we will call on the Tobins this Sunday night,’ he announced at dinner. ‘Great fun is to be had with the singing and the dancing at their house of an evening.’ He smiled at me, his eyes soft caramel, creasing at the corners so that I longed to touch his laughter lines.

  ‘Do they have a piano I could play?’

  His eyes widened and he laughed at me, so that I felt like a fool. ‘No, of course not, June, these people could hardly afford a piano!’ But when he saw the look on my face, he changed his tone. ‘Do you miss playing the piano with your sister, darling?’

  I nodded, a lump in my throat preventing me from speaking.

  ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘the Sheridens have a piano. They have been abroad for a few years, but I heard they were back. Maybe we could call on them as well.’ He spoke without enthusiasm, not looking me in the eye.

  ‘That would be wonderful, Robert.’ I grabbed his hand and squeezed his fingers.

  ‘There won’t be too much to do once it’s winter, so we may as well occupy ourselves, and not think of other things.’

  I knew he meant Minerva, maybe Mother even, as he spoke. I couldn’t reply at all, just nodding again, trying in vain to hold back the tears, and touched by his concern.

  Robert let go of my hand and stood up, his back to me, staring out the window. ‘The Sheridens are different from most folk around here. She is French, and . . . well . . . a little strange. Phelim is an artist, of sorts.’

  ‘Do they have any children?’

  ‘Just one, a girl, Danielle,’ he paused. ‘She’s your age. But she is married and living in France.’

  ‘So the Sheridens are quite old.’

  Robert walked away from me. ‘Well, only if you think I am. They’re my generation.’

  ‘Oh, darling . . .’

  But he left the house to go back to work without looking round, without another word, and I am not sure whether he was offended. Surely not, for he knows it means nothing to me how old he is?

  Robert. Are you still out in the fields? Tell me it is true. You have seen him, haven’t you? Tilling the land. His sure hand on the plough, walking steadily behind the dapple-grey horse, making drills in the heavy, cloying earth. Back and forth, for evermore.

  It is at night I am afraid. I am a ghost afraid of the dark. During the day I forget about time, and I live in the past. I expect any moment to see Robert returning, striding across the fields in his father’s coat, rain glistening in his hair like fairy gems, smelling of the earth and hard work. I spend daylight hours imagining I am cooking. The sweet aroma of my country baking soothing me. But at night I remember he does not come. He will never come back and I am lost in my loss. I try not to haunt you, but I am lonely, and sometimes I lie next to you on your bed and give you my dreams. This is what adultery can be – two lonely souls drawn together. This is the first lesson I can teach you.

  All that I miss. All that I long for. My family. I remember every night I used to light a candle for Minerva and her husband Charles, praying for them. I wonder will you light a candle for me?

  NICHOLAS

  Nicholas strikes the match and lights his cigarette. He has not smoked for ten years. He coughs, inhales, coughs again, and then throws it down on the grass and stubs it out with his foot. The cigarette has made him feel sick, so he takes a swig of beer. He is going to drown his sorrows.

  Oh God, why can’t he get Charlie out of his head? She had slept with someone else and he would never forgive her. He imagines her now. Where is she? He looks at his watch. It is one in the morning. She is probably in bed, but not on her own – no, in bed with someone else. He closes his eyes and sees her naked body and some faceless bastard beneath her, and she is sitting on him. He can see the dimples in the small of her back, and the curve of the side of her breast as she pushes up and down. He can hear her laugh. Nicholas throws his beer bottle and it smashes against the wall of the house. He still wants Charlie and it makes him angry. Just thinking about her fills him with desire. No, he isn’t going to let her do this to him, frustrate him. He wants to feel her. He remembers the last time he gave Charlie an orgasm.

  ‘Play me,’ she said, ‘like you play the piano.’

  She told him that his touch was like no other, because of his piano fingers, because of his dexterity.

  That night they had made music, you could say, the power of his hands making her sing. But that was nearly a year ago. When had she stopped wanting him to touch her?

  Nicholas sees another picture. A different Charlie. She is sitting up in bed, her knees pulled up close to her chest, so that the sheet falls away like snow on a mountain, and she is crying. Her face is red, her eyes swollen and her nose drips. She shivers and she sobs. She looks at him beseechingly, but he turns his back on her and says nothing. He goes to sleep in the spare room. And when he remembers this image, Nicholas knows that it is unlikely Charlie is in bed with another man. She is asleep. And in sleep there is still innocence.

  The moon is full, and it is not too cold. Nicholas walks around the house, thinking about the roof and whether he should try to restore it to its original thatch or stay with the slates. It depends on money. The house has cost him nearly all of his savings already. Really he should make Charlie sell Sandycove and split the profit with him, but he can’t bring himself to do it, not yet.

  He sits down on a ledge, which protrudes from the old stone wall, and looks at the fields that spread out before him, glistening in the moonlight. He doesn’t own the fields, and he can see the shadows of cattle, still in the darkness. A bat swoops in front of him, making him start. He doesn’t belong here. It is too far away. And yet he doesn’t want to go home. The moonlight turns the fields into a meadow of silvery water, the long grasses rippling like waves in the sea. He imagines he sees two girls jumping in the water, and he thinks of Charlie as a little girl, Charlie telling him about her summers in West Cork by the sea, and playing with her sister. How happy she was then. But the picture he sees now is from a different era, like a snapshot from the past, like looking at an
old black-and-white movie and the negative has been overpainted in colour. One of the girls runs towards him and he sees quite clearly her face, as if she is real. He blinks and the image is gone.

  Nicholas looks down at his hands. They are shaking. He fans them out on his knees, forcing them to be still, palms up to the moonlight, the skin pale, more lines and cuts on them than when he had arrived one month ago. He flicks them over suddenly and gets up, turning back towards the house. He feels pulled by something, someone. He walks through the dark kitchen and into the tiny back room, which is lit by one lamp. His piano takes up the whole room. He opens the lid and sits down on the stool. He stares at the keys. Then he lifts his fingers and begins to play. He doesn’t know what he is playing, for he is detached from the notes. All he knows is that his body is swaying and his stiff fingers are racing across the keys, and blood is beginning to pump inside his veins again. He feels like he is awakening from a deep, dreamless sleep.

  A finger traces his spine. He stops playing, tenses. The door of the room bangs open and the lamp flickers. Nicholas stands up, spins on his heels.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he calls out, but he knows the house is empty. A dog barks in the distance, he can hear a cow lowing in the field.

  I have only one regret.

  The voice is grainy and cracked like a voice from the radio. He gets up from the piano and crosses the room without thinking, the old floorboards creaking. He pulls back the curtain and undoes the latch on the window. The frame is stiff, and wood and paint break off as he pushes it free. As soon as the window swings open, he hears a sigh. And he knows it is not a trick of his mind or even the voice of his ex-wife haunting him, because in an instant he sees a woman standing, looking in. She is slender, boyish almost, with light-brown hair curling about her face in a style from a bygone era, and she wears a pale blue top and skirt that glimmers in the moonlight. She is ephemeral, all shadows, insubstantial, and shifting in the silvery light. She raises her hand to her face as if protecting her eyes from the light in the room. Her gold wedding band sparkles, hypnotizes him. He wonders if he is dreaming and if he will wake up in bed, cocooned in his own miserable loneliness for another long day.

  She speaks again and now her voice is quite clear. She has an English accent, posh, distinct, but not haughty.

  I have only one regret.

  This is the only time Nicholas sees her. It is later that he discovers who she is. But for now he sees a stranger, a fragile lady in blue, a picture from the past, a woman trapped in the memory of one regret, and appealing to him, hoping he will understand. But she has chosen the wrong person, for when she speaks again her words are inside his head and she is invisible.

  Let me tell you the story of an adulteress.

  Adultery. The word stings him, wounds him. He steps back from the window, shaking, raging inside his skin so that he is blistering, his throat dry with anger. He doesn’t want to hear this phantom’s tale for he swears he will never understand, let alone forgive, his adulteress wife’s betrayal.

  JUNE

  In the centre of our house is the kitchen. It is large, yet cosy, with an open fire at one end on which I do all the cooking. There are four bedrooms, all small, but perfectly sweet. We only use one of the bedrooms at present. It was Robert’s father’s room, which I wasn’t too keen on as the old man died in the bed, but then it is the largest room, with the nicest view. All the windows are very small in the house, but the largest one is in our room. I suggested we turn one of the empty bedrooms into a parlour, but Robert said there was not much point, as we need to conserve our fuel and we spend most of our time in the kitchen anyway.

  Then he smiled at me and, almost blushing, he said, ‘We might be needing one of those rooms very shortly . . .’

  I looked at him and his expression was questioning, hopeful.

  ‘When we start having a family . . .’

  His voice petered out and I nodded hastily, relieved that it is not now at least.

  There is no running water in the house, and this is the hardest thing to cope with. It is amazing how one takes for granted turning on a tap, and a lavatory inside, rather than in the stable, so that you can hear the horse right next to you, chomping his straw.

  Also we still don’t have electricity here. So the nights are blacker than anything, and once it is dark the house becomes full of shadows. There is a shortage of both candles and oil for the lamp, so we have to be very careful about how much we use. Sometimes we just sit by the light of the fire unable to read, or even see each other’s face clearly. Just listening to each other breathe. In this darkness I learn to understand my husband through the tone of his voice rather than the expression on his face. The fire makes shapes on the walls. I can’t help thinking about Robert’s mother and father, and whether their spirits haunt this house.

  My favourite place is the loft. It is here I will retreat to when I feel lonely for company, and lie on the bare boards, staring at the thatch, dreaming my mind away. It is like a secret hideaway, and when I am lying under the straw, listening to the wind’s hush, I feel cocooned under the eaves of my husband’s house, as if I am a little girl again. Here I feel safe.

  The place I fear is the orchard. Although it is so close to the house, it is quite a forgotten-about place. Robert told me his father planted it for his mother when she was a bride. It was his gift to her, and indeed their wedding party took place under those trees when it was just an infant orchard full of young slender saplings. Now the trees are ancient, gnarled and unpruned, huddled together in a canopy of old bark, and mottled leaves. There is a foreboding about the place.

  I asked Robert why no one uses the orchard. I can see apples on the trees, and littering the ground, and now with the emergency and food shortages it seems criminal not to pick them. He said that his parents hadn’t collected the apples for years, not since his brother died in the First World War. Apparently the orchard had been James D.’s domain and he had always made it his business to pick the apples. He made cider out of them or gave them to his mother to cook with. But since the very day James D. died, his parents had not had the heart to touch the orchard. I thought about this – how a mother could be so wounded just by eating an apple, and how the taste of it might have brought back the scent of her son.

  When I asked Robert what we should do with the apples, he made excuses. ‘I am just so busy with everything else, but we will get round to it, I know it’s a disgrace.’

  He looked very anxious then, and I felt so sorry for my poor Robert. All of his family are gone. Maybe the orchard is filled with memories for him, too.

  Sometimes in the middle of the night, when I have to go out of the house to use the lavatory, I stop in my tracks, hypnotized by the moon throwing light on those old apple trees. In the dark they could be witches and hags watching me. Some are practically bent double. They seem ancient and hostile, old sentinels of the land, reminding me that I am an intruder, and I don’t belong here. How silly to feel frightened by an orchard of apple trees!

  But Cavan is such a different world to mine. Years of city life are slipping away from me, as if they are old skins, but all the same there is so much I miss. The pictures, for instance, when Min and I sank back into those red velvet seats and entered the world of moving fiction. I imagined I shared the lives of my favourite heroines. I too would some day meet the man of my dreams. How Min and I loved Bette Davis in Jezebel – ‘half-angel, half-siren, all woman’ – and we chanted those words all the way home, arm in arm, so that we alarmed just a few passers-by. We knew she must have been wearing a red dress, although the film was in black and white. And we never mentioned her name, but of course we were both thinking of the same person: Mother.

  One afternoon I brave the orchard. I am going for a ramble inside the woods, and the only way into them is through the apple trees. I open a little kissing gate, all overgrown and rusty, and there I am in the middle of a jungle of apple trees, loaded with fruit. It is shocking to see such waste. I forge
t all about my fear of the orchard, or my walk in the woods, and turn tail back to the house.

  ‘Do we have a basket?’ I ask Oonagh as I come in the back door.

  ‘What for?’ She looks at me curiously.

  ‘For the apples.’

  ‘The apples . . .’ she repeats in a whisper, as if I have blasphemed.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply, irritated. ‘There is a glut of apples in that orchard. It’s shameful. We must pick them.’

  ‘The orchard is haunted, Mrs Fanning.’

  ‘Please call me June,’ I say to her for what must have been the hundredth time. ‘My husband and I do not believe in ghosts.’

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘No one goes in that orchard.’

  ‘Well, that’s ridiculous – the apples are going rotten. We are throwing away food, Oonagh.’

  ‘They say that not one of those apples is good.’

  She speaks quietly, but all the same opens a cupboard beside the hearth and takes out a large basket made of rushes.

  ‘All rotten,’ she adds, handing me the basket.

  But I cannot be dissuaded. I have it in my head now, and in my tastebuds. I am longing to taste apples again. I don’t care how tart they are. I want so much to smell them, and touch them, and crunch them between my teeth. It is the most all-consuming craving. Rosy red apples, solid green orbs, crisp, tangy, full of life. I am going to make my husband the most delicious apple pie he has ever eaten. For the first time since I moved to this house I feel happy, because I am going to bake a pie. I remember watching Mother bake, a talent incongruous with her glamorous image. But cooking was my mother’s best-kept secret. I close my eyes, and I can picture our kitchen at home in Torquay the winter Mother did all the cooking. There is poor Father in my picture, a crooked smile on his face, his pipe in his hand as he watches Mother whizz around the kitchen in a flurry of flour and spices. Daddy loved my mother when she made him apple pie.