The Benefits of Passion

by Catherine Fox

Tim did not demur. ‘But supposing . . . um . . . he heard from a different source?’

  Shit. Camilla. Isabella wouldn’t put it past her. She’d developed a real dislike of Barney, for some reason. ‘I’ll write to him. I can’t phone.’

  Tim gave her a hug and she went back to her room.

  The results of several hours’ work read as follows:

  Dear Barney

  I’m afraid I’ve done something really stupid. I went to a party last night and got drunk and ended up in bed with someone. I’m really really sorry. You can’t possibly hate me as much as I hate myself. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life and I’ll totally understand if you never want to see me again. I still love you, but I can hardly expect you to believe that now.

  Isabella

  Being a complete coward Isabella posted it second class to defer the moment when he’d read it and respond. She went in dread of him phoning or calling round unexpectedly before he’d received it, but term ended safely and she crept miserably home to her parents.

  On the second evening she was at home, the rest of the family went out to see a local production of Iolanthe. Isabella wasn’t up to Gilbert and Sullivan and stayed at home on the sofa reading a Georgette Heyer and eating chocolate Christmas-tree decorations in deep self-loathing. At about nine o’clock the doorbell rang. Isabella went to answer it.

  There on the doorstep in a towering rage stood Barney.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this train will shortly be arriving in King’s Cross . . .’

  Annie stared out of the window, pondering again her night with Will. It had been enough to show her that he was capable of treading a very fine line; teetering, pausing, teetering again on the brink of what was bearable, yet finally coming down on the side of pleasure. She shivered and collected her things together. What if he pushed too far? Would she protest? Or collude? And finally enjoy?

  The train slowed to a stop. Tubby had sent her to Bishopside to find the ‘edge’ that Coverdale Hall lacked. She had the feeling that this was not the edge he had in mind.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘New underwear, I see,’ said her mother, watching Annie unpack. ‘I’m surprised you can afford it on your grant.’

  ‘My fancy man bought them for me,’ replied Annie, knowing that the truth was sometimes the best deception of all.

  ‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, Anne.’

  Well, you’re the lowest form of company! Damn had once yelled in reply. Annie continued putting things in drawers and wishing her mother would stop tutting and twitching around the room and leave her in peace.

  ‘What did you do with the old pairs?’ demanded Mrs Brown.

  ‘I threw them away.’

  ‘Hmph. You could’ve used them for dusters.’

  Annie was forced to turn away and pretend to arrange her books. She had accurately predicted this conversation to Will that morning to make him laugh. It saddened her to think that the only useful function her mother served was as a source of awful anecdotes. Annie watched her furtively. She always went about with her head and neck thrust forward like an angry hen. A permanent frown had scored three vertical furrows between her eyebrows. Her grey hair was tugged back in a bun and she wore old-fashioned spectacles that looked too heavy for her face, as though she were a child borrowing Grandma’s glasses and scowling in an effort to focus through them. She forked aggressively about in Annie’s new underwear and snapped, ‘Pretty.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Annie noncommittally. It sounded like a shorn-off condemnation: Pretty extravagant, I call it! Or was her mother attempting a conciliatory gesture? Mrs Brown closed the drawer with a thump, pecked her way across to the window and glared down at the street below.

  ‘Your father’s working late,’ she said, managing to give these words an ominous ring. ‘Again.’

  Is your life really so small, Annie wanted to ask, that you have to wring drama from non-events like these? Why don’t you do something? Go on a course, join a club, see a film? Read a book, even?

  ‘Hmph,’ said Mrs Brown again. ‘Well, they’ve been married nearly seven years and still no sign.’

  Annie saw that the conversation had rattled over some idiosyncratic set of points in her mother’s mind and was now lurching towards her brother Colin and his wife. ‘It’s her, you know. Colin wants to start a family. But she can’t bear to lose her career. Or her figure!’ added Mrs Brown derisively.

  ‘Perhaps they can’t have children,’ suggested Annie.

  ‘Pah!’ snorted Mrs Brown, as though conception were simply a matter of knuckling down. ‘And Dawn’s no better. It’s all work work work with her. Not that she could fall pregnant if she wanted to. They can’t, you know.’

  ‘Actually, I don’t think she’s –’

  ‘She’s got that slimmers’ disease.’

  Annie tried again, ‘No, I don’t think –’

  ‘Oh, yes, she has, Anne. I know these things.’

  Annie waited miserably for her mother to point out that she, Annie, could have had three or four children by now, if only she’d married Graham.

  ‘Still,’ said her mother, as though summing up the main points of the conversation, ‘I always said he wasn’t right for you.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Annie, alerted by this totally new departure after eleven years of blame. There would be worse to come.

  ‘Some of us just aren’t cut out for marriage, that’s all. No point shedding tears over what will never be. You’re thirty-one, Anne,’ she concluded heartlessly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’d better get the potatoes on.’ Mrs Brown pulled out a duster (a pre-war vest?) from her apron pocket and began fidgeting it along the mantelpiece long enough to enjoy her victory.

  Annie listened to her impatient tread on the stairs. I’m her daughter. Why doesn’t she wish me well? It was ridiculous to be so wounded by the words of an unhappy woman, but Mrs Brown’s utterances still had all the potency of a malevolent curse for Annie. It will never be. You’re not cut out for marriage, Anne. Men may sleep with you, but they’ll never marry you. Will’s going to use you for a couple of months, then dump you. She sat in the ugly room until the sound of her father coming home roused her.

  Their evening meal was dreary. Mince, carrot and boiled potato. Mrs Brown’s cooking seemed to reflect an opinion that eating was a vice to be discouraged. Annie wondered what she would say in condemnation of Will who distinguished between butter and cooking butter, and who did his food shopping at Italian delicatessens – or Marks and Spencer, if all else failed. Last night as he’d cooked Annie had been obliged to hide her smirks.

  ‘Fuck. I’m out of crème fraîche.’

  She forced down the last mouthful of slimy mince and tried to study her father objectively. He had greeted her cordially and was now eating in neutral silence as his wife stabbed away at this subject and that. How had he put up with her all these years? Had he ever loved her? Annie poured some evaporated milk over her bowl of orange jelly.

  After dinner – or tea, as the Browns called it – Annie helped her mother with the dishes. Mr Brown had vanished with the newspaper.

  ‘I’d get one tomorrow, only your father doesn’t eat frozen food,’ announced Mrs Brown, without warning.

  ‘A deep freeze?’ hazarded Annie.

  ‘What do you think I mean? A lawn-mower?’ This manifestation of wit’s lowest form silenced Annie. She wiped the last plate and hung up the tea towel.

  Mrs Brown sat down with a library book. She only ever read as an act of aggression: Oh, well, if everyone else is lazing about doing nothing then I’m going to sit here and read my book. Except she seemed to be about halfway through her novel and engrossed.

  ‘And a microwave,’ added her mother combatively.

  ‘Mm.’ As usual this seemed the safest response. ‘Good book?’

  ‘Not bad, I suppose.’ Her mother surveyed the cover with a sneer then went back to reading. Annie was tiptoeing away when the telephone rang.
/>   ‘I’ll get it,’ she said.

  The house had only one phone – in the draughty hall to militate against long calls. There was an egg-timer beside the directory. Three minutes was all the Brown children had been permitted. Annie picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hi, honey child.’

  ‘Will! How . . .’ Annie stopped short. Her mother would be listening.

  ‘Last number redial. How about some aural sex?’

  ‘What?’ she clamped the earpiece hard to her head as though his words might escape and echo round the quiet hall.

  ‘Come on. Talk dirty to me.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s . . . that’s not possible right now,’ she said, trying to sound businesslike.

  ‘Mother prowling about?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He chuckled, then began to detail with alarming anatomical frankness what he had on his mind and – more alarmingly still – in his hand.

  ‘Um, could we discuss this later?’ she bleated, as his husky voice drooled and lingered and caressed. Mrs Brown had emerged into the hall on some pretext. Annie burned as though he had stripped her bare and was violating her under her mother’s gaze.

  ‘Look, I’ll . . . I’ll call you back, then. ’Bye for now.’ She put the receiver down on his panting with a clatter.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Mrs Brown, pretending to straighten the coats on the pegs.

  ‘Oh, someone from college.’

  She escaped from the house a moment later. ‘Just off for a walk,’ she called, slamming the door before her mother could interrogate her.

  You horrible sick pervert, Penn-Eddis, she muttered, as she strode along. Had he really been lying in bed playing with himself and her old underwear? Well, at least her discarded knickers were serving a useful purpose. Mrs Brown would be gratified. Annie was struck by a wave of dreadful mirth at the thought of telling her mother this. Before long she was hooting and whinnying out loud as she hurried along the empty street.

  She reached the edge of the town and followed the path out to the woods. It was dark. The moon was nearly full as it rose above the hill. A fox barked in the distance. Annie had fled up here many times over the years to lie in the low drooping branches of the chestnut tree and watch the leaves against the sky. Cows swished in the grass as she crossed the field and searched for her tree. She came to the place. It had gone. She stood for a long time staring at the stump in the moonlight. The sky above was sprinkled with stars where the leaves had been.

  When I survey the wondrous cross

  On which the Prince of Glory died.

  It was Good Friday. Annie was standing beside her mother in the market place at the open-air ecumenical service. Shoppers hurried past or stopped for a moment to listen. Mrs Brown tutted at the secular world serving Mammon on Good Friday. It was a warm morning. As she sang the familiar words Annie looked up at the cherry trees that lined the graveyard behind the marketplace. Their sugared-almond blossom was clustered thick against the blue sky. The hymn ended. The Salvation Army band lowered their silver instruments and the Baptist minister began reading the story of the Crucifixion. The young man who had carried the rough wooden cross now shifted it slightly where he stood in preparation for the long reading. Annie gazed at it. Graham had helped make it fifteen years earlier in school woodwork classes. Each Good Friday it was carried out of the parish church for this service.

  What sort of wood had the Romans used for crosses? Annie asked herself. There must have been a brisk and grisly timber trade in first-century Palestine. She pictured centurions placing orders and carpenters sawing and planing, knowing what their planks were destined for and somehow justifying it to themselves. She called her attention back guiltily to the Gospel.

  ‘. . . And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”’

  Annie gazed at the cross. Look what you’ve done! cried her conscience. How can you go on sinning and making a mockery of his suffering? Annie stood helpless, knowing she should repent, knowing she would not, could not. The Salvation Army band began to play softly, ‘There is a green hill far away . . .’

  We do not know, we cannot tell

  What pains he had to bear,

  But we believe it was for us

  He hung and suffered there.

  Your sin nailed him there. He had to die in your place, Anne. Suddenly she wanted to kick aside this idea like an empty old can. What kind of a god was incapable of forgiving without first exacting bloodthirsty justice, without requiring the death of an innocent victim? She knew she must be misunderstanding. Something deeper must be at work. All the oceans of human suffering – her own droplet in there somewhere – must be gathered up somehow in that bitter passion.

  Annie began to cry and hunted around in her pocket for a tissue. Mrs Brown palmed her a handkerchief. It was frayed, but her mother had carefully ironed and folded it. Annie recognized the faded Minnie Mouse print from her childhood and the sight of it made her want to sob wildly. She blotted her eyes and joined in the last words of the hymn.

  . . . And trust in his redeeming blood

  And try his works to do.

  ‘Let us pray,’ said an unmistakably Anglican voice. The vicar led them in a few brief prayers and the service ended.

  Annie walked back up the high street with her mother. The band was playing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’.

  ‘What on earth came over you, Anne?’

  ‘Oh, um . . . I don’t know, really. The Cross and everything . . .’

  The Browns were a staunch Bible-believing family, but talking about religious experience was taboo.

  ‘Let’s buy some hot cross buns,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘He’ll never know.’

  They went into the baker’s. Annie didn’t know whether ‘he’ signified God or just the pastor. Mrs Brown bought two buns. ‘There you are.’ She thrust the paper bag into Annie’s hand abruptly.

  ‘Thanks,’ choked Annie. Her mother had no vocabulary to express affection. This was the best she could do.

  That afternoon Annie sat with a fat book on the atonement hoping to sort out the Cross once and for all. Her mother was washing windows and polishing them violently with old newspaper. The afternoon passed slowly. Her father came in and they had tea. (Shepherd’s pie with yesterday’s leftover mince followed by Arctic Roll.) The house was oppressive. Annie longed to escape, but could think up no excuse. It was just as it had always been. The only escape was mental. She sat staring at the words on the page and thinking of Will, just as she had sat with her French vocabulary at the age of thirteen and lain in Sherwood Forest under the spreading oaks with Robin Hood himself. If only she could harness the impulse and use it to rescue Barney and Isabella from their dilemma, but the stifling atmosphere of her parents’ home crushed the creativity out of her.

  Annie jumped. The phone was ringing. She darted to answer it, but her mother was quicker.

  ‘Hello?’ There was a pause while Mrs Brown listened. ‘Why don’t you phone the Samaritans?’ she snapped. ‘They can help perverts like you.’ She put down the receiver abruptly, but not before Annie recognized a voice saying, ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Sick in the head,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘That’s what they are, these heavy breathers. Sick.’

  Annie did not trust herself to reply.

  CHAPTER 18

  Term started. It frightened Annie how easily she slipped into living a double life. She was a hopeless liar, but she made an extremely good hypocrite. After all, she had spent years perfecting various types of deception to foil her mother. It might all have been preparation for her affair with Will. Her friends only remarked that she was her old self again this term. Annie occasionally caught Ted staring at her thoughtfully, but he made no comment.

  God knew, however. Annie was avoiding him, although she still went to chapel every day and attended her lectures and seminars. She felt like a tenant in arrears with the rent. Sooner or later
there would be a knock at the door – the Landlord demanding his due. There was no way she’d be able to pay, and she couldn’t stop running up bigger and bigger debts, listening fearfully all the time for that soft footfall. Behold, I stand at the door and knock knock knock. One night she dreamt she had died and was in hell. There were no fires or demons, just a silent, empty blackness. She couldn’t move. She called out to God to help her, but knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was gone for ever. When she woke it took her a long time to shake off that desolate terror.

  And yet the days were bright. April pressed on her window. Each unfurling leaf or rapturous bird song seemed charged with a personal intensity. It invaded every corner of her life. To her amazement she found she could study and concentrate as never before. Her creativity was restored and her notebook filled up rapidly as she cantered towards Barney and Isabella’s honeymoon.

  *

  Barney came in and shut the door. Isabella stood wringing her hands in fear at the expression on his face.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘No.’ He took her arm and steered her into the sitting room. ‘Why? Why did you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whimpered. ‘I was drunk.’

  ‘Why did you get drunk? You knew what would happen.’

  ‘I –’

  ‘To punish me?’

  ‘No! I’ve told you it was just a stupid stupid mistake.’ She wept.

  ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  ‘I’m not! I wasn’t trying to punish you.’ But now she came to think of it . . . ‘It’s just that you’re so bloody undemonstrative. You’re completely unromantic, Barney.’ His stony-faced silence unleashed a flood of complaints she’d been suppressing all term. Pub lunches. Hand-holding. Too busy to visit her. Sanctimonious killjoy. ‘And another thing!’ she sobbed in conclusion. ‘You never give me flowers!’

  ‘Flowers!’ he exploded. ‘Flowers!’ He strode from the house slamming the door behind him. Isabella flung herself on to the sofa and sobbed bitterly.

  Half an hour later the doorbell rang again. She ran to answer it.