‘June,’ he whispers into my hair, ‘I never thought I would be able to love again.’
I am almost unable to stand, and he leads me by the arm, through the woods towards his house. We live either side of the trees. This is our common ground of discovery. This is our mutual way through. It is nature that connects us.
I am sobbing, and he holds me gently, yet firmly, whispering that everything will be fine. He says he will take care of me, and the baby.
We walk as the fog shrouds our steps, sucks us into its obscurity. I am invisible as we walk up the stone steps to his house and enter its dark haven. He brings me upstairs to his studio.
‘It’s the only warm room,’ he whispers.
Inside everything glows. I look outside the window at the blank white world, while in here the fire crackles and flickers merrily. Phelim is in the middle of working on a painting, a large canvas, full of soft organic shapes, orange, red and gold melding into a decorative icon.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I say, attempting to dry my face with a damp handkerchief.
‘It is about you.’
I understand the picture instantly, how he sees my glory as a woman and lets it shine through the undulating curves of his composition. I am shaken by this picture, stunned that a man could want to paint me, could love me so.
I sit down on a small sofa by the fire while Phelim takes out a bottle from behind some books.
‘I think you need something stronger than tea.’
He hands me a glass of clear liquid.
‘What is it?’
‘Poitín. It’s strong, but it will do the trick.’
I knock it back, cough and splutter. He smiles at me. ‘Are you all right now?’
‘Yes,’ I say, sniffing and blowing my nose.
‘You are in shock,’ he sighs. ‘It has been a terrible day. Did you hear about Pearl Harbor?’
I shake my head, and he tells me about the Japanese attack on the American warships in Hawaii. It is a horrendous catastrophe, and yet I feel removed from what he is telling me, all the time thinking about Robert and wondering whether I will ever see him again.
‘Do you think I should have hope?’ I suddenly ask Phelim. ‘Or would that be foolish . . . should I expect the worst?’ I stutter.
Phelim considers my question. ‘You must always have hope, June, for I do believe in the power of prayers. It can make the difference for Robert, between life and death. Claudette’s prayers have been answered. Although too late, too late.’
I raise my eyebrows, take another sip of the poitín, which second time around doesn’t taste so bad.
‘I have heard from Danielle,’ he says, smiling.
‘Oh, Phelim, that’s wonderful.’
‘They are in England, safe and sound.’
I get up and hug him. He squeezes me tightly, ‘I am so happy for you,’ I say into his shoulder, yet shaking at the thought I might soon meet Robert’s child. Will I see him in her face? I wonder if she looks like him. I wonder should I confide in Phelim, but it is a fact I want no one to know, not even him.
‘I have not told her about Claudette,’ he says, pulling back. ‘I think it will be better if I tell her when I see her face to face.’
We stand like this, looking at each other, neither of us knowing what to say. Phelim breaks the silence.
‘Well then, will I walk you home?’
I shake my head. I cannot bear to go back to the cottage and read Robert’s letter. I dread it.
‘Not yet. Can I just sit here for a while and watch you paint?’
He looks pleased. ‘Of course.’
He throws more peat on the fire and then puts a record on the gramophone. Piano music fills the room. I recognize it as Chopin and I slip my shoes off, tucking my feet up under my legs on the sofa. Phelim takes off his jacket and sits on a stool in front of the painting, staring at it for a long time. I watch him, and at first he keeps looking at me out of the corner of his eye, nervously, but as he begins to paint I sense he forgets I am there. He is lost in the total absorption of his creation. It comforts me, to sit wrapped up in a rug by his fire, like a little girl, depleted of tears, unable to cry any more, and surrendered, just letting be.
I fall asleep, for when I wake later the room is dark and I am being carried out of it, down the stairs, along a dark corridor and into another unlit room. Phelim lays me on the bed, gently. I open my eyes to see the back of him walking out of the room.
‘Phelim!’
He turns around, his hand resting on the door knob. ‘You slept all day. I told Oonagh you should stay here.’
I nod, and he opens the door. A shaft of light spills in from the landing. I feel dizzy, as if I am drifting towards the light, although I am still lying on the bed, fully clothed.
‘Phelim.’ I reach out with my arms, as if I am welcoming an old friend.
He walks towards me, with no hesitation, and folds me into his arms. I do not know who begins first, but suddenly we are kissing each other, and it is so tender, and sweet. The touch of his lips on mine sends a shudder through my being. He lies down next to me on the bed and holds me in his arms. We kiss some more, and then we get under the covers. Slowly we take our outer clothing off so that we are just in our underwear. I am shaking with fear and desire.
‘It’s all right, June,’ Phelim whispers. ‘You can sleep. I will hold you.’
I lie in Phelim Sheriden’s arms and I have never felt so safe in my whole life. I begin to relax, knowing that this love is beyond anything physical. He kisses the back of my neck as I drift off to sleep. The last thing I see before I close my eyes are the curtains in his room. They are deep crimson, the same colour as Min’s Jezebel dress, the same colour as her mistress gloves.
MIN
Min crawls out of the bathroom, no tears and no hysterics. Her body propels her down the stairs, and she stands in the hallway, her heart pounding, her head swirling in fear.
How did Charles get the painting?
This is all she can think of, her lover.
She runs back out of the house, leaving all the lights blazing. She doesn’t care if the house is bombed, for she never wants to go back. She runs coatless, down the empty streets, her shoes clattering, her whole being shivering with shock, or is it the cold? She runs all the way to her lover’s house. By the time she gets there her blouse is drenched in sweat and her legs are as heavy as lead. She stops outside, looks up. The building is completely in darkness.
Up the stairs, something she does every day, had done only this morning, but now they seem to be the staircase into the sky. Why does his studio have to be on the top floor? She pounds on his door. But no one answers. She calls his name, all discretion pointless now. But still the door does not open. She tries the handle and, to her surprise, the door is unlocked.
The room is empty. For a moment she thinks she is in the wrong house, but then she sees the things he has left behind. The marks of paint on the table, a pair of brown lace-up shoes under the bed and the Michaelmas daisies she had brought him that morning in a glass on the table by the bed. She calls him again, but she knows it is useless.
She sits down on the bed, stripped now of its clothes, and looks at the stains on the mattress. Were they the marks of their love? She takes off her red gloves and holds them tightly in her hands. She walks the circumference of the room, fingering everything she always pictured in her head, when she was at home in bed with Charles, reliving making love to her lover, while her husband held her in his arms.
She looks with wide eyes at the debris of her affair, and the wave of her lost love hits her, but it is not for her artist – the man who transformed her and made her feel beautiful – but for her husband, the man who did not need to change her.
What have I done? she whispers in horror to a crack in the wall.
Her adultery has killed her husband. Like her mother killed her father.
Daddy had been drunk, and shot himself with one of his shooting guns. Officially it w
as an accident. But Min knew otherwise. She had been with Daddy the night before it happened. He had been out of control, raving, fuelled by whiskey rage. He was yelling that he was a failure, and this was the reason why their mother had left him. He kept saying it again and again. It was his fault. Min had tried to reassure him, tell him it was Mummy who let him down, but it had been useless. Only their mother could have saved him. Min had stayed the night, she had been so concerned, and she remembered now that Charles had offered to come down and stay with her, although he didn’t like her father. But she had refused. And while she slept in the tiny spare bedroom of her father’s house, he had stumbled out into the woods, behind the playing fields, and shot himself. He was found, with Lionel by his side howling, by a sixth-year the next morning on his way to rugby practice. Min would never forget the shame, the humiliation and the guilt of that dreadful day. All along she blamed her mother.
Min walks out of the artist’s room, leaving the door wide open, for what is the point of shutting it? He is never coming back. She knows this. What has passed between her husband and her lover she will never find out; all she does know is that her husband is dead, and her lover alive, and if she had to choose she would wish it the other way round.
She steps out into the street, and it feels like a tomb. She looks up into the sky, its utter void, and then closes her eyes and searches deep inside herself.
I can cry now. And even before she thinks it, she can feel the tears cascading down her cheeks and her gulping, raw pain, the heavy weight of shame, dragging her down into a cave where all she wants is to sleep and never wake up again.
She sees the searchlights crossing in front of her, like an X branded in her mind, and then the sirens begin to wail. She drags her heels slowly down the street, as a few stragglers run towards her. A warden grabs her arm.
‘The station’s this way, love.’ He tries to drag her with him, but Min shakes her head, refusing to move.
‘I want to walk out of this city,’ she says to him. ‘I want to sail down the river. I want to go home.’
He looks at her as if she is crazy. ‘Suit yerself.’
The warden lets go of her arm and runs on. There are others who want to be saved. He has no time to coax this odd white-faced woman. Min walks steadily away from him, putting on the blood-red gloves her mother gave her, finger by finger, pushing each one in, so that she feels ready for action.
The scene is set. The night sky is illuminated by white searchlights, and artillery. The planes are coming, and the sound of them mirrors the sound in her head, the tension of her heart and mind. The bombs drop, and fires spring like holy wells out of the smashed buildings. Min walks towards them. She has no choice, because they are on her way home.
‘Fire and water,’ she whispers.
JUNE
Dear Nicholas, I talked to you not because you were lonely too, or because you play the piano, but because you remind me of him, and when I first saw you in my attic my heart gave a little jump and I thought at last he has returned. But you live in a different world. Maybe you are my loved one in the future and you will come back to the past one day, come back to me, and then there could be a happy ending to my story. We should choose whom we love the most, whether it be our husband or our lover. It should be that simple. But how do you know? And what if you love them both the same? It is only hindsight that helps us see.
My sister Min, an adulteress, walked into the fires of London in 1941 and was never seen again. Her adultery killed her husband and her. My mother, an adulteress, lived a long and happy life with her lover, Giovanni Calvesi. After the war she moved back to Italy with Giovanni and a newborn baby. She wrote to me often, but I never saw her again. And what about me? I will show you a scene from the past, a point on the cobweb of my destiny, a fantasy scene that I pray will become real. Here, in my lonely haunting, I return to it again and again like one of my favourite old movies. I wish for it so hard that it could be the truth.
See a large oak tree in the garden, standing majestically all on its own, its wizened branches twisted and gnarled, but nevertheless it reaches up towards the blue sky, in hope. Despite its great age it is still strong, and since he doesn’t wish to disturb the other fruit-laden trees, this is where my husband has hung a swing for the children. They are too small to use it properly yet. The baby is only a few months, one just three, and the eldest a tiny five-year-old, but she likes to be put upon it, along with her sister. I think they enjoy the sense of suspension in the air, their feet dangling above the ground, so that they are somehow free from what binds them to the world.
Push! they command me, but I only rock them back and forth, gripping the rough rope, letting it chafe my palms.
After the children have gone to bed, I come out to the swing on my own. It is still light, but there is a slight chill in the air, telling me August is nearly over and soon it will be autumn, soon the apples will be ready to pick. I sit on the swing for a moment and let my heels drag back and forth on the mossy ground. Perfect red-apple hearts and pale green pears hang in the canopies of our fruit trees. I breathe in and push off, kicking my legs out straight, then bending them as I swing backwards, out and in, out and in, higher and higher I climb. I let my cardigan flap open and push my face forward, adoring the exhilaration of my ascent. Each time I think I will reach the clouds with the tips of my feet as they scamper across the lowering sun.
Over the wall of our garden I can see the dark treetops of the wood, and the roof of the other house. It is in an even worse state since last winter’s storms. I remember how it looked in February, when the snow was so high it went up to the tips of the telegraph poles in town, and that house looked like a hoary old wreck abandoned in a blanket of pristine pure-white. I shiver. How cold it must be, wrapped in its abandonment.
Thinking of the snow reminds me of the frozen lake, so thick with ice that everybody went skating on it. It makes me laugh to remember Patrick Tuite twirling Oonagh on the ice in their black boots, her legs skidding out beneath her, clinging onto him as they fall backwards in slow motion, but looking radiant nonetheless, in the arms of her new husband.
I hadn’t been able to go on the ice because of the baby, so my husband drove me across it. It had been a strange sensation, like pushing out to sea in a boat, and yet we weren’t carried by water, but floating on its solid counterpart. There was an incredible sense of stillness, of peace, as we slid across the vast expanse of shimmering ice. It had been a sunny day, a low winter sun, bouncing off the frozen lake, almost blinding us, but still so icy cold that there was no thaw. It was a celestial moment, our black car frosted and silvery, slowly and steadily entering chalky oblivion. We were all quiet in the car, even the children awed and held back, our breath puffing the air, so that I could not help thinking of all the loved souls I have lost.
I relax my body, drop my head forward and let the swing rock back down to earth. I look at the skeleton leaves, snapped twigs, broken cobwebs and little black beetles below me, and close my eyes. I summon a tiny part of my sister Min. It is the space behind her earlobe, on her neck, and I press my lips against it. For although she has been dead over six years now, I can still smell her just the same, and touch her as she was. And the sensation of her presence beside me inflames my heart, and makes me grateful that I can still hold the pain that makes love. Is it Min who has brought all these fluttering little girl souls into my womb?
A gentle breeze lifts the hair off my forehead and I open my eyes, knowing she is gone. I rock softly back and forth, thinking about my husband’s touch, how we still desire each other.
I look across at the tall grey house and think, not for the first time: this is my home.
Phelim comes out of the door, holding the baby in his arms.
‘She’s hungry,’ he calls.
NICHOLAS
Nicholas is up in the attic clearing a space for Charlie. His wife has gone back to Sandycove to begin packing up. They cannot believe it sold so fast. Now they have the
money to hire people to restore the cottage properly, and enough left over for a second honeymoon. Maybe they will go back to Hawaii?
He can feel the fluttering presence of June beside him. He wonders if Charlie will sense her, and knows that of course she will. In fact he is quite sure she will embrace the phantom, make her part of her, the way she is able to with most people. No one wants to let Charlie go.
‘Thank you, June Fanning,’ Nicholas says because he feels that somehow the ghost helped him get back his wife. How different he feels now that his months of exile are over. Everything looks new to him. The house is full of possibilities rather than being a daunting task, and the land around him is all theirs to do whatever they want with it. They can grow vegetables. Charlie wants to get chickens and more animals, abandoned dogs and cats, even a horse. They can create somewhere so private, hidden away from the rest of the world. He cannot wait to see Charlie again, and make love to her under the rustling eaves of the attic.
I have only one regret.
Nicholas feels as if he is being tugged to the other side of the attic, over by the chimney breast. Instinctively he bends down and puts his hand behind the brick, his fingers touching something hard. He stretches his hand in and manages to pull something out. It is a dusty old notebook with a red cover. He opens it and a letter flutters out. He picks it up. It is addressed to June Fanning. Nicholas’s heart begins to beat faster. He opens the notebook. Inside the front cover, handwritten in black ink, are the words: The Secret Loves of Julia Caesar by J. C. FANNING.
Nicholas sits back on the floor and stretches his legs out. He flicks through page after page of sloping black writing. It seems to be the story of a Roman princess called Julia Caesar. He goes back to the front and reads the first page.
Note from the Author
Julia II, daughter of Octavius Caesar, the Emperor Augustus, and wife of Tiberius, was exiled to an island for life for committing adultery.
The Adulteress Page 32
