“I can’t blame you,” she said.
Why should Veronica be blamed for this latest piece of theatre? She regretted what had happened, but it was Simon’s doing, and typical of his attention-seeking ways. Thinking about this, she became tense and defiant, and her thin young body felt as though it were bound by an iron sheath.
“Father never wanted him here,” Veronica said at last.
“What do you know about that?” whispered Mother between her teeth. “What do you know about that?”
“Father...”
Veronica looked up in astonishment as her mother went white with rage.
“Don’t call him that, do you hear? Don’t call him that!”
It seemed for a moment that she was about to strike her daughter. And then she swung on her heels and ran.
Guy
“SO YOU’RE LEAVING FOR ITALY?” Guy was saying. “Hoping to make a come back, or a go back? Well, it’s your right, and who am I to stop you? In fact, to tell the truth, I’m rather glad. A decision at last.”
He was drunk, and his white face, caught in the glare of a streetlamp, swayed against the back of her mother’s armchair like a puffball. His pale lips seemed hardly to move, and the sound emerged into the room as though seeping from an intercom. Mary was reminded of a puppet theatre she had seen outside the church of S Maria in Trastevere. The play was political, about a man of radical convictions in the hands of the Inquisition. At a certain point, the Grand Inquisitor’s great round head appeared from behind and lolled from side to side beneath the proscenium arch, while a veiled ventriloquist made threats out of all proportion to the puny figures on the stage. She had felt a sudden urge to snatch the puppets from their strings, and tell them to stop being ridiculous.
“You can’t say that you haven’t yourself to blame,” he went on. “I warned you a hundred times against me. What does it say in the Prayer Book? ‘Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him.’ Comfortable words, words like armchairs! You can snooze your life away in them. Well, here are some uncomfortable words, words like broken glass. I made you up with holy mascara. I encouraged you to believe that crap you were brought up in: God, Jesus, the communion of saints, faith, hope, charity, etcetera. Not because you needed it, but on the contrary, because I wanted one other person to live by the code I dishonoured. With you believing I could have a good time doubting, with you hooked on hope and charity I could get a kick out of being desperate and mean. And with you as the loyal wife weeping over your sins, I could run after other women. All this last year there you stood, prim with your secret reproaches, awaiting the end.”
It was Guy’s normal monologue, and Mary listened to it with only half her attention. She wondered whether the time had come to turn on the light, so that she could search for the book she had been reading, and at the same time reduce the chance that Guy would stumble and break some piece of furniture. She decided to leave the room in darkness.
“Of course, you say, it’s not the infidelities you mind...”
She had never said any such thing. But let it pass.
“After all, I’ve never put you second. I’ve never been able to squeeze out of myself a fraction more of love or tenderness or decency than was on offer to you, and God knows that’s little enough. Imagine what they felt about it—knowing that I would never disturb a single one of our arrangements in order to please them, knowing that my nights and days were sown up forever, never to be changed in the slightest particular, and certainly not because they required it. It was like having an affair with a tomb, only one in which a sepulchral voice occasionally sounded. God knows what they saw in me.”
Mary had been trying to identify the time when things went wrong. Was it those hectic weeks of Guy’s opera, which the critics had so cruelly slated that it had to be withdrawn after the second performance? Was it the closing of the music department at Corton College, after which he had been without an income, forced to depend on her to such an extent that it became impossible, in his eyes, to consider marriage? Was it the time, two years ago, when he had invented a clandestine lover—a teenage star, a creature from the gutter with a raucous voice, a criminal record and the face of a cherub—and declared that he was leaving with her for America: a fiction all the more poignant in that Mary, who knew the girl (she was the daughter of her cousin, Podge Wilmington) had just been told of Guy’s futile attempt to seduce her by the man, a fellow writer, who had not only succeeded in that enterprise, but was at that very moment flying with her for a concert tour in Singapore? Or was it the time just six months ago and still terrible to remember, when they had stood together in the Abbey church at Cirencester, breathing its vacated air, and a crowd of indecorous schoolchildren had entered—the moment when she had realized, all of a sudden and in a suffocating panic, that her Christian faith was a pretence, conjured for his sake, in order to conform to a role he wished on her, and that she must live henceforth in the shadow of an intricate dishonesty?
Perhaps it was none of those things, but only the slow steady force of infidelity, which loosened one by one the sinews of life, and made, even of the greatest hero, such a ruin as Guy now was. Mary often prayed for him to the God in whom she did not believe. At times, sitting alone in the study next to her bedroom, which had been her father’s study and her grandfather’s before him, and hearing Guy as he stumbled about the house in search of whisky, she would be acutely conscious of his failure to belong among her family ghosts, and she would pity him. She had brought him here, like a castaway, only to rouse him to a place already too much possessed, a place in which objects had been handed down from generation to generation until they were worn smooth by ownership, and retreated from the stranger’s touch. She had offered no home, but only hospitality. And the world outside had offered less.
“It’s a funny thing,” Guy was saying, “the way women accept mistreatment, once they know that no other treatment is available. It is very bad for us, very bad.” And he shook his head slowly, so that the bald patch that crowned his skull briefly caught the light from the window and glowed like a moon. Guy was good-looking still, with an angular profile, deep set brown eyes, and an expression of suffering and resolve that bore no relation to his character, but which opened door after door for him into places of failure. It was surely his face that had led to the disastrous two months with the London Bach Ensemble, during which his incompetence as a conductor had been proved to everyone save himself. It was certainly his face that had led to his being taken up by Penelope Sterndale, so that he could roam among her modernist furnishings on Thursday evenings, amid gurus and moguls and the well-heeled avant-garde. And it was his face that caused so much trouble among Penelope’s chorus of women.
“If you are stopping by at the Campo dei Fiori,” Guy said, “you must give my regards to La Berganza—you know, the old lady who used to call me ‘signorino’ and who would peel the baby onions when I bought them for your lunch. Of course, you won’t need to go there now; I expect Piero will have everything laid on.”
When she had left Piero for Guy, seven years ago, Mary had taken a calculated risk. Guy was a would-be and a might-have been, whose musical career had seen few successes; whereas Piero was the rising star of the Italian film industry, the director tipped to win the Leone prize, whose Adagio Cantabile had stirred so many Italian hearts with its portrait of the old Calabria. Piero was an accomplished lover, with an erotic fluency that filled her with renewable desire. And Piero lived freely within the confines of his ancestral religion, visiting her in the little flat by S Andrea della Valle with an easy conscience, and returning dutifully each evening to his wife, his mother and his child. But there lay the difference. For Piero, she was something expendable—a luxury that he could always discard. For Guy, who had called on her in Rome at Penelope’s suggestion, she was essential—or so he said. His first appearance had the character of a summons, like the annunciation made to another Mary, in the most beautiful story she kn
ew.
Often in those winter days, she would travel North to Florence, to stand before Simone Martini’s painting in the Uffizi. And in the retreating form of Christ’s mother, she discerned the mystery of her own existence—not what she was, but what she would have been, had fate been kind to her. Even in the tenderest embraces, she held her inner being so—curled in upon itself, compact, inviolable. She had yet to make a gift of her inner life, since she set its worth too high for easy conquest. And it was this inner life that Guy had addressed, as he stood on the threshold and directed his dark gaze towards eyes that hesitated for a moment to return his look and then yielded completely. Within minutes they were making love on the couch beside the window, the evening sunlight sparkling in his light brown hair, and the noise of the street, as the restaurant shutters opened and the cobbles squealed under home-going scooters, set them apart from humanity, as though they lived in moments, not in days.
“Take my advice though, Mary. If Piero wants to marry you, now that his mother is dead and his daughter stowed away in that convenient hospital, he will have to be fitted out with a mistress. He is a two-woman man, which makes him five times less fickle than me, but twice as fickle as the ideal husband.”
When she got to Rome, she would sell the flat and travel. She had never seen Calabria, the Calabria glamorized in Adagio Cantabile. She wondered what had become of Piero, now that his schizophrenic daughter had been removed from him. They had learned of the tragedy from a film magazine, which reported that Piero and his wife were living apart, and that his great Life of the Magdalene had been left unfinished when the leading actress, with whom he was having the affair required by their successful cooperation, had—as a result of his attentions—swollen to an unacceptable size.
Perhaps the greatest of her mistakes had been the first one, of bringing Guy home with her. In Italy, he had lived in poverty as a would-be composer, while in England he had merely failed at more promising careers. But it was an established principle with the Durbridges that the head of the family should reside in the old house in Kensington, and upon her father’s sudden death she found herself, age twenty-five, head of the family. Her first novel had been accepted by a London publisher, and the thought of this success was too thrilling to forego the chance of enjoying it. Five novels later she saw how damaging it had been, to deprive Guy of the subterfuges whereby he had gone on believing in his creative powers. By then it was too late, and she had ceased to enjoy her own success, so much did it emphasize his lack of it.
“I don’t suppose it matters, if he doesn’t make that blasphemous film. He has had his moment of glory without spitting on the altar at which his grandmother prayed. Don’t think I’m jealous, by the way. I’ve declined beyond that point.”
He laughed quietly to himself. A faint murmur of car-tyres in the street took up the sound and carried it around the corner. Silence. To her surprise, Mary was irritated at the sight of Guy’s abandoned whisky glasses, which lay about the room, glinting in the semi-darkness, and leaving sticky rings on marquetry heirlooms. He was not an oaf, but he made himself oafish, since this was his way of showing that he did not belong. Now that she was leaving the house to him, none of this should matter. But it mattered very much, and she had to fight against her anger, lest it spill out in words. Guy was allowed everything save words, which were too precious to put where they might be trampled on.
“A funny thing about the Italians, this need for blasphemy. Their last attempt to hold on to their faith, by mocking it. You should try it some time. Are you still there?”
He turned suddenly in his chair and looked into the darkness of the house. His eyes had the urgent concentration of a trapped animal.
“Ah, there you are, loitering in doorways. Never deciding to enter or to leave a room, but poised always on the threshold. I won’t say it doesn’t suit you. You are a threshold sort of person, the sort of person who must be pushed aside by those who storm from the room.”
Once, it is true, he had pushed her. They were on the Welsh border, where Mary borrowed a cottage from Rebecca Stanton, the cookery writer—a sweet, homespun place with slate tiles and whitewashed walls of stone. A stream chuckled past in the valley, and a hill rose behind, its green gauze buttoned with sheep. Mary loved the cottage, had come here every year since university, always alone until Guy appeared. She had her own desk, which Rebecca left untouched and on which piles of paper lay from year to year, ready for Mary’s pen and yellowing beneath the dormer window. That summer she was working well; Guy had been commissioned to write a string quartet and was installed downstairs at Rebecca’s worktable. They met for walks and meals, and conversed about simple things. And the love and praise of God arose within her, like a flower. They attended the Anglican church on the hill, sang the hymns, his strong tenor resounding above the cracked voices of the old parishioners, even knelt together in prayer. They sat side by side at night, listening to the tawny owl as it lifted the flap of darkness. She held his hand and felt in his soft palm the smile she could not see. She was wife to him in all but name, and when he came one day to find her and saw the Book of Common Prayer lying open at the marriage ceremony, he gave her a yielding look. Perhaps he would have spoken but she, in her embarrassment, pushed the book away and picked up her pen. It had always been a fault of the Durbridges that they could not make conditions, but waited and waited until the time for decisions had passed.
It had happened later on the same day. She was standing at the bottom of the staircase, looking across the oak-beamed room to the table where he worked, splinters of sunlight lying on his hands. The pages of music paper were blank, save for a few black notes in a corner. His hands were still, and his face was turned from her towards the window. A faint breeze rustled the pines outside, and their branches soothed his profile like the hands of a woman. The tenderness that invaded her was not for Guy only, but for herself as Guy’s lover and for the soft growing sphere of their love. And maybe it was the hope that flowed from her that so annoyed him. For she said nothing, did nothing, as she stood observing him, was even on the point of turning back to her attic when, with a bound, he rose to his feet and sprinted towards her.
A cold-pinched anger clawed his features. The storm-trooper eyes bored through her like bayonets, and a snarl tore open his face. She shrank against the door frame. And then, with one pouncing movement, he took hold of her in both his arms and pushed her backwards on to the stairs. He slammed the door between them, and shouted “yes, yes, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” as though to drown her tears. Later she heard him pacing around the living room, muttering to himself. But when she came down for supper he smiled at her as though nothing had happened.
“You will have to become a communist, of course. There’s no advancing in Italian society without the red badge of cowardice. I would have done the same, had I stayed there. The trouble is, I’m the kind of person who merely pretends to be a phony. And because people know that I’m pretending, they take me for a phony, when I am not a phony at all, but only pretending. You, on the other hand...”
He broke off, swallowed from his glass and spluttered. The paroxysm shook his body and she noticed, as he bent backwards and forwards, how frail he was. Almost nothing remained of his shoulders save a drooping curve of bone, on which the loose grey cardigan hung like a sack. Once, she had enjoyed Guy’s careless way of dressing. Then he had seemed proud, spiritual, with a direct line to other humans that bypassed outward forms. In time, however, she had begun to resent it. As his drinking increased, Guy’s body deteriorated. His shabby clothes became the more dispiriting, since they revealed his ruin and also, in their own way, rejoiced in it. You are coming home to us, they seemed to say, joining us on the dust-heap of history.
He leaned back in his chair with a gasp, and then was still.
“No. Nobody could call you a phony. Your deceptions are not carried out against the world, but only against a few carefully targeted individuals, and of course only for their comfort and peace o
f mind. I admire that. It has a civilised feel to it. Your lies are whiter than white, soap-powder white.”
At first, she had meant to tell him about Robert. It would have cleared the air, opened the path to his atonement, by way of her own atonement. For God knows Guy needed to make amends. Not only for the obvious things—the violence, the abuse, the affairs which were not the less hurtful for being often imaginary, since it was precisely through his imagination that he chose to injure her. He needed to make amends for those things that only she had seen and suffered. The refusal, in so many ways, to make marriage into a live possibility, knowing that she craved this blessing, and that her frail faith would give way without it, as it did at last on that day in Cirencester. She recalled his habit of arriving late for her dinner parties, as though he were just another guest, one with more urgent engagements who had condescended to turn up, nevertheless, in the hope of some casual liaison. Once, sitting between Rebecca Stanton and the Philpot girl—where she had placed him precisely so as to emphasize that they were a couple and must therefore sit apart—he had entertained his neighbours in a loud and barking voice with a description of his week in the recording studio. She did not know how sincere the description was, though it cast great credit on him and prepared his listeners for the judgement that, were the CD of his symphony never to appear—which of course it never did—it would not be the fault of the composer. But she was amazed that she was never mentioned in the story—she who had come with him each day, who had sat through hour upon hour of dismal repetition, who had smiled encouragement at the most cacophonous moments, all the time suppressing her desire to run from the studio and wash out her ears with Haydn or Bach.
“In a way your life has been a work of art, as neat and smooth as your novels. Useless and perfect as a diamond. My life on the other hand—well, what has it been but a spoof? A farce on the life of Beethoven, written by the team that brought you Star Trek. You know what was the most stupid thing I tried to do? The most all-out fucking criminal act of self-destruction I ever embarked on? It was writing that Mass in C minor. A Mass in C minor, in 1988, the time of Thatcher and Gorbachev and TV soaps and heavy metal bands—a postmodern confession of faith, a requiem for God, including all his favourite tunes with due acknowledgement to the Devil, who wrote the best ones. I must have been stark fucking crazy!”
Souls in the Twilight Page 5
