The Adulteress

by Noelle Harrison

  Nicholas gets up, flings his cold dregs of coffee into the bushes and goes back into the kitchen. A bee struggles to get out of the window, and Nicholas opens it for him. It is a warm day, the sun coming out from behind the clouds, so he leaves the window ajar while he packs the last few bottles of home-made cider into the box. He is proud of his produce. He wouldn’t have been able to do it without Geraldine’s help. She had actually found out how to make cider and had gone up to Dublin and bought the equipment. It had been a joint venture. They called the cider ‘Fanning Orchard Home-Made Cider’ in honour of the Fanning orchard. Nicholas has been selling it at local farmers’ markets. He probably needs a licence, but it is only a short-term thing. They have nearly run out of apples now. And he isn’t sure if the orchard will ever recover, or even if he will be here next year, although he has never said that to Geraldine.

  Nicholas glances at the clock. It is still early and he doesn’t need to leave quite yet. He goes into the back room and opens the curtains. Sunlight enters this room in the evening, so the light is still dusky in here. He sits at the piano and flicks on the lamp. He strokes its glossy lid, looks at the reflection of the lamp on the wood and opens it. He touches the keys. He has always had a piano to play ever since he can remember. The first couple of years in Dublin they had been too poor to afford one in their flat and it had nearly killed Nicholas. He used to go to a friend’s parents’ house twice, sometimes three times a week so that he could play, much to the amusement of the couple, who saw Nicholas more than their own son. When Charlie had got her first big grant, she had bought him a piano as a surprise. It took up the whole of their tiny flat and left her hardly any room in which to paint. When she did that – put him before her art – he knew she had really loved him.

  Where had all that love gone? How had he lost her love?

  Nicholas thinks back to the terrible fights that blighted the last year of their relationship. Days of not talking, and avoiding each other, and then some little thing would spark it off and, before they could stop themselves, they would be rowing. They would say things to each other that no two people should ever say to one another. They had crossed boundaries you should never cross; stomping roughshod over their hearts with less consideration for each other than they would have for a stranger. And whereas previously they would always make up, make love and regain their harmony, those last few months neither of them could make peace. What did Nicholas think would happen? That suddenly Charlie would stop being angry, would shut it all up and not expect him to talk about being childless? He had become afraid of sex, because it had lost its spontaneity and he felt she didn’t desire him any more, just wanted him for a purpose. He was afraid she would get pregnant again. He didn’t think he could bear one more miscarriage. So he kept walking away, ignoring her attempts to reach him, and her tears and her loneliness. No wonder she found herself in the arms of another man.

  Nicholas presses his middle finger firmly down on A, boom, and his ring finger on G, boom, and his index finger on B, boom. Boom. Boom. He bangs on the piano, his fingertips thrumming with emotion.

  Of course. It is so much clearer now. Charlie hadn’t slept with someone else to hurt him. Whoever that man in London was, he had offered something that Nicholas hadn’t been able to give Charlie at that time. Comfort. And she had taken it because she needed to.

  Nicholas enters the universe of his music, and he plays his regret on the ivory keys. What an insane institution marriage is. He had prided himself on being the faithful husband, the injured party, but hadn’t he more or less pushed Charlie into the arms of another man so that it was her fault, not his, that their marriage ended? He and Charlie had been on the rocks long before she had been unfaithful. What Charlie did was not the cause, but a symptom of their failed marriage.

  Nicholas can hear a car pull up. It must be Geraldine. He continues to play. He can’t stop. He closes his eyes and lets the music elevate him, the notes articulating his heartache in a way that words never could. He senses the door open, a gentle summer breeze on his face, and knows Geraldine must be standing there, looking at him. But he cannot stop. He continues to play, following his instincts and at last finding an ending for his song.

  He opens his eyes, and jumps up from the piano in surprise. Standing in front of him is not Geraldine, but Charlie. She is holding a large canvas wrapped in bubblewrap and is looking at him in astonishment. She looks so different, yet it is her. It is Charlie.

  ‘Did you write that?’ she asks him.

  ‘What . . . what are you doing here? I . . .’

  ‘Did you write that music?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She steps into the room, leans the picture against the wall below the window. He walks forward. They stand just a few paces from each other. She is the colour of honey, from Greece, with more freckles than ever spattering her nose, and her black hair has strands of red in it. She looks nothing like a witch.

  ‘It’s stunning, Nick. Please play it again.’

  ‘I can’t . . . I . . . what are you doing here? How did you find me?’

  She smiles. ‘I got your message. And Kev told me where you lived.’

  ‘Why didn’t you text back?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to say. I decided I should come to see you. I was bringing you a painting for your new house. It’s taken a few weeks to build up to it. Sorry.’ She looks down at the floor, pushes her foot across it. She is wearing flip-flops and Nicholas can see she has painted her toenails azure. She has such tiny feet, and he longs to hold them in the palms of his hands.

  ‘I’ve missed you.’

  The words are dragged from him, but he has to speak. He can’t let his pride betray him now. Charlie looks up at him. He feels a warm hand pressed over his heart (could it be June Fanning? ), pushing in and out, making him feel. He begins to see a delicate thread between Charlie and himself, a faint connection. It gives him hope.

  ‘Please, play the music again,’ Charlie says.

  June Fanning takes his hand and leads him back to the piano. Play for her, play for her. The phantom’s breath tickles the back of his neck. Charlie walks further into the room and stands by the side of the piano, looking down at him. He breathes in and summons the notes back to him. He has only played it once before, and yet the music rushes into his heart and pours down his limbs. His fingers begin to stretch across the keys and he lets his body sway with emotion. Charlie stands quite still, but he knows she can see it. All of what he wants to say, but can’t in words, and so he lets the music communicate his loss, his regret, his love for her. When he has finished, he sits with his hands in his lap, breathing deeply, looking down at the piano keys. They look different to him, iridescent and powerful. Charlie leans forward and gently cups his chin in her hand. She forces him to look at her, and at the tears that glitter in her eyes.

  ‘Nicholas,’ she demands, ‘forgive me.’

  JUNE

  What are kindred spirits? Is it possible that every single person in the world has a soulmate? How do you know? How do you know if it is the man you have married?

  I cannot stop thinking about love since I have been researching Julia, and I am confused. She had so many lovers that it is hard to like her, and easy to judge. Was she really such a lascivious creature? And yet maybe it wasn’t sex that Julia craved, but love. Every time she let a man fornicate with her, maybe she wanted a piece of his love, but she never got enough and was never satisfied. Could it be that all she was looking for was intimacy? In her age, in her society, such a thing was as a rare as an exotic bird. It makes me think possibly I have been too hard on Mother.

  The last time I saw her she said to me, ‘You know, June, your father broke my heart first.’

  This enraged me. How could she say such a thing when it was she who left Daddy, and only after years of humiliating him, carrying on with every available man in Torquay. I imagined I could see quite clearly how it was when we were little: our mother so vain, and caught up in the adulation
of other men, no time for her small children, or her husband.

  ‘Remember how he used to be,’ she persisted, and I shook my head, trying to deny her words. ‘The way he used to shut himself away in the dark, and not get up for days.’ She reached over, across the table and took my hand. ‘I felt like he was burying me alive.’

  We were in Fortnum & Mason’s having tea. Mother had insisted on bringing me here as a treat to celebrate my marriage. She had finally come round to the idea that I was now a wife. I had been relieved not to have to go to Maidenhead and see her with Giovanni Calvesi again, and I did not want her coming to visit us in Hampstead. I did not want Robert to meet my mother. Just in case he fell under her spell, too. It was ridiculous to think such a thing when we had only been married for three weeks.

  I pulled my hand away. ‘No wonder he hid away from society,’ I said hotly. ‘He must have been so ashamed of you.’

  ‘No, June.’ Mother’s forehead creased into a frown. ‘You must understand that your father was always that way, from long before. Periodically he used to turn his back on us all and sink into this awful, dark lethargy. No matter what I said to him – whether it was affectionately, compassionately, angrily, even screaming sometimes – it seemed to have no effect. His melancholy was impenetrable to me, and after a while I found it unbearable. You girls should understand this. It was he who broke my heart, for he never loved me as I did him.’

  I put my hands over my ears and squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t want to hear her. It was preposterous for her to say such things. All lies.

  Why had I agreed to meet my mother? I am the soft one. Min is right to refuse to correspond with Mother, for all it brings is pain. I regretted that we were now in such a public place, because I wanted to stand up on my chair like an angry child and point my finger at her, screaming, ‘Harlot! Jezebel! Adulteress!’

  ‘June,’ I heard her urgent whisper. ‘June, please open your eyes and look at me.’

  But I shook my head and through clenched lips said, ‘Mother, I think you should go.’

  ‘Please, June.’

  I opened my eyes reluctantly. It is true her Italian lover had changed my mother. If I had not been her daughter, I would probably have liked her now. The flint in her eyes was no longer there, and her Ice Queen heart had melted. The light in Fortnum’s was golden and warm, and seemed to wrap her up in its glow. Her red dress matched a small pendant of a red heart, brilliant against her pale skin, as if this was what she stood for now. The heart. Her lips were full and curved in a gentle smile and her cheeks were flushed the colour of the cherry blossom I had passed in the street. She looked anxious, as if she did care what I thought of her. I had never experienced such power before in the company of my mother. I looked at her long and hard, and my glare must have been fierce, for she recoiled as if hit.

  I put my gloves on, stood up and, without a backward glance, strode out through the door. I heard the last words she said to me. They were the flotsam and jetsam of my departure. ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I am so very sorry.’

  But for whom? For my sister, whom she beat; or for me, whom she could not love; or for Father, whom she betrayed? Or maybe she was sorry for herself, in her belief that Father broke her heart.

  Now I can’t help wondering: how many times is a heart supposed to be broken in one lifetime? Should it be broken at least once? What if it never happens to you? Does it mean you do not deserve to be loved?

  Robert was the only man I have loved. We are married, and our love is supposed to last forever. This should mean that my heart will never be broken, for it will always belong to my husband. He will keep it safe and sound.

  Yet I remember how I felt when Robert left to join up. On the morning he walked out our front door he did not even hesitate. He didn’t come back, not for one second to kiss me again and reassure me. Were the feelings I experienced that morning heartbreak? It felt physical. A tight pain in my chest so that I could hardly breathe. I was drowning in the bed, gulping to come up to the surface. Something broke.

  I have a picture in my head of a pretty porcelain figure of myself. She is dewy-eyed Juno on her wedding day in her fawn two-piece, and brown velvet hat, holding a bunch of yellow daffodils with a pure, wide-open heart. The day my husband left to fight she cracked, right through the middle, and I am afraid she might never be fixed.

  There is something else, too. When I am reading about Julia it makes me think about sex. I shouldn’t. I am a married woman, pregnant, yet I can’t stop wondering: is there more to making love than what I am used to with Robert? Min told me things about her marriage bed, and I wished she hadn’t. I was too embarrassed to say so at the time, but I have never experienced those physical sensations my sister described to me. Will I ever? Are Mother and Min different creatures from me? Are they two sensual divas satisfied by sex, and I the frigid one? Or are we all the same? Are we cast from the same stone and it is just that I am with the wrong man?

  Phelim Sheriden. I am trying not to think of him, but often during the day he just pops into my head, and I imagine him painting in his studio, and I wonder what it would feel like if he were to hold my hand. Would it feel the same as Robert? Or, if he kissed me, how would his lips feel? Then I am all hot and bothered and try to do something else – work with Oonagh in the house, sweep the yard ten times, anything to banish these awful thoughts from my mind. Is this what pregnancy does to you? Turn you into a creature that craves something beyond all morality? It is dreadful, really.

  Yet when I think about it, my feelings for Phelim Sheriden are not purely physical. Yes, he is attractive. But there is something else we share. It is a sort of kinship, an understanding of each other, with no effort required. I find it so easy to talk to him. Sometimes sharing a conversation with Robert makes me nervous because he is so quick to criticize. He wants to talk about politics, and farming, economics and the war. The damn war. He thought he was marrying a college girl, with a mind of her own, who could discuss these things, but really I have no interest. I love classical literature, art, music, and so does Phelim. None of these things can I share with Robert.

  The other day I was working in Phelim’s study, writing my story about Julia, slowly piecing her life together like a jigsaw, when I heard music. It lured me out into the hall and, astounded, I realized Phelim was playing ‘Clair de lune’ by Debussy, one of my most favourite pieces. I followed the magical sounds down to the back of the hall and pushed a door open. Phelim was sitting at a tiny grand, playing the music I play, swaying the way I do, engrossed in the poetry of the keys, his heart capitulating the way mine does, fallen on its knees by the expressive power of the music.

  He did not see me watching him play or, if he did, he pretended not to. He looked like a god to me, with his rich golden hair, blazing on his head. I closed my eyes and let the music wash over me. Oh, it pierced my heart so, because it brought me back to my sister’s front room in Highgate and playing the piano for her. I could see her face clearly, and the tips of my fingers tingled as I saw myself playing the keys, holding each note long enough, tantalizingly, until I tip onto the next one, vibrating into our souls, so that my own eyes and Min’s lock and we are speechless with emotion. I dug my fingers into the paintwork of the Sheridens’ sitting-room door and quelled my raging heart. I pulled back and stood in the dark shadows of the corridor, holding my sides and crying with such longing for my sister. Phelim had finished playing ‘Clair de lune’ and was now playing Arabesque No. 1, and I remembered how Min loved me to play this also. We were other girls then.

  I took a handkerchief out from the cuff of my pullover and wiped my eyes, tucking it back in. I shuffled back down the narrow corridor and into the Gothic hallway. I wondered at the transcendental nature of music, the closest thing to heaven that man can make. I was not thinking where I was going, for I was surprised to find myself suddenly at the top of the staircase, with no memory of having walked up it. The landing was as dark as the hall. The long, narrow windows were
shuttered, with tiny slithers of daylight scattered about the dark rug. If I had a house with such grand windows, I would pull back the shutters and open them wide, let the light flood in. I realized this was one thing I missed so much in Robert’s house. The tiny windows kept the place perpetually in a dull half-light. It was depressing. If I were mistress of the Sheriden house, I would try to steal as much as I could of the dreary Cavan daylight, and I would paint the walls ivory, and have tawny carpets on the floors. I would not mind if it were cold, for my furnishings would make it feel warm. I would fill vases with honeysuckle and apple blossom, and the place would smell sweet, and fresh. I stood on the landing, sucking in the smell of Phelim’s house. It was musty, and damp, but beneath that there were other smells, medicinal and stuffy. Intuitively I knew which door Claudette Sheriden slept behind. I stood and faced it. The white door was greyish in the gloom.

  It opened. I gave a tiny yelp, jumping back in surprise. Claudette Sheriden faced me. She was hanging onto the handle of the door, and was dressed in a voluminous white nightgown. She looked more like a ghost than anything I could have imagined. She was even thinner than when I was with her in the orchard, and her eyes were huge, like a sea creature’s, glimmering and pearly. She looked as if she had no strength at all, as if she might crumple to the floor at any moment.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I asked her, stepping forward.

  She did not appear surprised that I should be standing on her landing, a virtual stranger, and nodded.

  I took her arm. ‘Shall I take you back to bed?’

  She nodded again.

  I led her back into the bedroom. Unlike the rest of the house, there was an open window, and I could hear the birds singing in the trees outside. The room was not one you would expect a lady to appreciate. It appeared to be decorated to the taste of a bachelor gentleman, with heavy dark furniture and dark-green drapes.