Piranha to Scurfy (21 page)

The door was open, but as he came to it two hair dryers started up simultaneously. He walked in. All the women had their backs to him: Angela Burns, the hairdresser, and her assistant, Debbie Kirkman—he learned their names later—plus two older women, with their gray hair wound up onto pink plastic curlers, and Gillian Atkins, whose long blond curls were at that moment being liberated from a battery of rollers by Susannah herself. He was beginning to see Gillian Atkins as some kind of evil genius who dogged his steps and appeared at crucial moments of his life. Aphrodite or Hecate.

Although the windows were open the place was very hot, and when Susannah turned around her cheeks were flushed and her hair curled into tendrils around her face like one of Botticelli’s girls. He thought she had never looked more beautiful. In front of them all she came up to him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him. Over her shoulder he could see five pairs of eyes watching them, heads all turned around to see. In front of them he couldn’t speak, but she could.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s going to be fine.Trust me. I’ll come to you tomorrow evening.”

Someone laughed.The five women started clapping.They clapped as at a play or a show put on for their benefit. Horribly embarrassed, he muttered something and ran down the stairs and out through the shop. But she’d restored him, he was better now, she had told him to trust her. He could see it all: the arranged marriage, the established engagement, two sets of parents and a bunch of siblings all wanting the marriage, everyone set on it but the promised bride, who was set on
him.

That evening he managed to do some good work. The French was about sacrifice as propitiation of the gods, Agamemnon’s killing of Iphigenia and the sacrifice of Polyxena on Achilles’ tomb, and the subject demanded a similarly elegant grave prose. He worked upstairs in that room that had a view of the forest, not the lake, and when he reached Polyxena’s burial, a wind sprang up like that which had risen while the Greeks waited to embark from Rhoetea. The forest trees bent and fluttered in this freakish wind, which blew and howled and died after half an hour.

Once he had the Greeks embarked for Thrace, he abandoned the translation and turned to write in his diary instead, the diary that had been untouched for almost a week. He wrote about Susannah and how she had reassured him and about the dark forest too and the strange sounds he could hear as he sat there with the dark closing in. “A yelping like a puppy,” he wrote, unaware that what he heard must have been the cry of the little owl out hunting.

He slept soundly that night, and the next day, at lunchtime, on a whim, he walked down to the pub. Have I mentioned there was a pub? I don’t think I have, but there was one and it was kept by Jean and David Stamford. It should have been called by some suitable name in that village, the Cupid’s Bow, perhaps, or the Maiden’s Prayer, Ben said, but it wasn’t, it was called the Red Lion. Like almost every house along the village street and around the green, it was a pretty building, half-timbered, with flowers climbing over it and flowers in tubs outside. Ben went in there to lunch off a beer and a sandwich for no better reason than that he was happy.

You could always tell strangers from the village people. They looked different. Ben said brutally that strangers were fat or dark or ugly or all those things together. There were several couples like that in the bar. He had noticed their cars parked outside. They were passing through—all they would be permitted to do, he said, though in fact the Red Lion did have rooms available, and visitors had been known to stay a few nights or even a week.

The farmer from Lynn was sitting by himself up at the bar. It’s a measure of the way the village people regarded him and had for quite a long time regarded him that no one ever uttered his name or called him by it, which is why even now I don’t know what it was. He sat in miserable solitude while the rest of the clientele enjoyed themselves, greeting Ben enthusiastically, the old man he had seen holding hands with Mrs. Fowler actually slapping him on the back. No doubt, the farmer had come in there out of defiance, refusing to be browbeaten. He drank his beer and, after sitting there a further five minutes, staring at the bottles behind the bar, got down from his stool and left.

To Ben’s astonishment everyone laughed and clapped. It was like the scene in the hairdresser’s all over again. When the applause died down Jean Stamford announced to the assembled company that a little bird had told her the Old Rectory was sold. Everyone seemed to know that the little bird was the village’s resident agent and her brother-in-law. Mrs. Fowler’s friend asked how much the farmer had got for it, and Jean Stamford named a sum so large that the customers could only shake their heads in silence.

“Who’s bought it?” Ben asked.

They seemed to like his intervention. There was a kind of hum of approval. It was apparently the right inquiry put at the right time. But no one knew who had bought the Old Rectory, only that it was nobody from the village.

“More’s the pity,” said the old man.

“And a pity for them,” David Stamford said strangely, “if they don’t suit.”

Ben walked home. All this talk of houses as well as the prospect of his reunion with Susannah prompted him to ring up the estate agent and make an offer for Mrs. Fowler’s house.The agent assured him it would be accepted, no doubt about it.

The combination of the beer, the walk, and the sunshine sent him to sleep. It was gone five before he woke, and he immediately set about putting wine in the fridge and preparing a meal for Susannah and himself, avocados and chicken salad and ice cream. He wrote all this down in his diary the next morning while she still slept. It was the first time she had ever stayed a whole night with him.

From his bedroom window he’d watched for her to come. She hadn’t said a time and he watched for her for an hour, quietly going mad, unable to remain still. When at last she arrived it was in her father’s van, which she was driving herself. The sight of it filled him with joy, with enormous exhilaration. All the suspense and terrors of the past hour were forgotten. If she could come in her father’s own car this must mean that, miraculously, her parents had given their approval, minds had changed, and he was to be received, the accredited lover.

She was wearing nothing underneath her thin, almost transparent silk trousers and a loose top of lilac-colored silk. He had never been so aware of the beauty of her young body, her long legs and very slightly rounded belly, in which the navel was a shallow well. Her loose hair covered her breasts as if spread there from modesty. She lifted to him her warm red lips and her tongue darted against the roof of his mouth.

“Susannah, I love you so. Tell me you love me.”

“I love you, dear Ben.”

He was utterly consoled. Those were the words he wrote down the next morning. She shared the wine with him, she ate. She talked excitedly of Sandy Clements’s wedding to Rosalind Wantage, the present her parents had bought, the dress she would wear to the ceremony. And Ben must come with her—they would go together. He would, wouldn’t he? Ben laughed. He’d have gone to the ends of the earth with her, let alone to the village church.

His laughter died, and he asked her about Kim Gresham. She was to tell him there was nothing in it or at least that it was over. He could bear an old love, a love from the past.

She said seriously, “Let’s not talk about other people,” and, as if repeating a rule, “We don’t. Not here.You’ll soon learn, darling Ben.”

They made love many times that night. Ben wrote that there had never been such a night in all his life. He didn’t know it could be like that; he had read of such things and thought they existed only in the writer’s imagination. And one of the strange things was that those actions of hers he had previously thought of as adventurous, even as shocking, weren’t indulged in, or if they were they became
unmemorable,
for something else had happened. It was as if in the midst of this bodily rapture they had somehow become detached from their physical selves; it was sex made spirit and all the stuff of sex transcended. They were taken from themselves to be made angels or gods, and everything they did took on the aspect of acts of grace or sacred rituals, yet at the same time made a continuum of pleasure.

He wrote that in his diary in the morning. He couldn’t have brought himself to tell it to me in words.

She slept with her head on his pillow and her hair spread out—“rayed out,” was how he put it, “like the sun in splendor.” He watched her sleeping and he remembered her telling him to trust her. He couldn’t therefore account for his terror, his awful fear. What was he afraid of?

Teresa Gresham came at eight-thirty to clean the house, and at nine Susannah woke up.

7

Dodging Teresa, avoiding knowing glances, he made coffee for Susannah and set a tray with orange juice, toast, and fruit. But when he took it up to her she was already dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed combing her hair. She smiled at him and held out her arms. They held each other and kissed and he asked her when they could be married.

She gave him a sidelong look. “You’ve never asked me to marry you.”

“Haven’t I?” he said. “I’ve told almost everyone else it’s what I want.”

“Anyway, darling Ben...” She always called him that, “dear Ben” or “darling Ben,” and it sat oddly—charmingly to him—with her rustic accent. But what she had to say wasn’t charming. “Anyway, darling Ben, I can’t because I’m going to marry Kim.”

He didn’t believe he’d heard that, he literally didn’t believe his ears. She must have asked if he’d thought she was marrying Kim. He asked her what she’d said, and she repeated it. She said, “You know I’m engaged to Kim. Carol said she’d told you.”

“This is a joke, isn’t it?” he said.

She took his hand, kissed it, and held it between her breasts. “It’s nice that you want to marry me. Marriage is very important, you only do it once, so I think it’s lovely that you want to be with me like that forever and ever. But that’s the way I’m going to be with Kim. Live in the same house and share the same bed and bring up children together. It can’t be changed, darling Ben. But I can still see you, we can be like we were last night. No one will mind. Did you think they would mind?”

She was his dear love, his adored Susannah, but she was a madwoman too. Or a child who understood nothing of life. But he knew that wasn’t so. She was eighteen, but the depths of her eyes weren’t; they were as old as her grandmother’s, as knowledgeable, in her own way as sophisticated.

He took his hand away. It didn’t belong there. She picked up her coffee cup and repeated what she’d said. She was patient with him, but she didn’t know what it was he failed to understand. It seemed as clear as glass to her.

“Look, I’m not good at this,” she said. “Ask Teresa.”

The last person he wanted at that moment was Teresa Gresham, but Susannah went to the door and called her, and Teresa came upstairs. She looked quite unembarrassed; she wasn’t even surprised.

“We all do as we please here,” she said. “Marriage is for life, of course, just the once. But lovemaking, that’s another matter. Men go with who they like, and so do women. There’s only been one divorce in this village in thirty years,” she said. “And before that no one got divorced, anyway. No one outside here—in the world, that is.”

It made him shudder to hear the village talked of as if it were heaven or some utopian planet. “In the world,” out there, two miles away . . .

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said to me. “Human beings wouldn’t stand for it, not as a theory of life. It may be all right in a commune, a temporary thing, but for everyone of all ages, a whole village community in
England?
I asked her about jealousy. Teresa, I mean. I asked her. She said they used to say jealousy wasn’t in their blood, but now they thought it was rather that a gene of jealousy had been left out of them. After all, they were all more or less the same stock, they came out of the same gene pool.” He asked me, “Did you know about all this?”

“I? No, I didn’t know.”

“Not the green-eyed monster,” he said, “but the blue-eyed fairy. You didn’t know when you came down for that weekend?”

“I knew there was something. I thought it was because I was a woman, and it wouldn’t happen to a man.”

“We sat in that bedroom, Susannah and Teresa and I, and Teresa told me all about it. She’d known it all her life, it was part of everyone’s life, and as far as they knew it had always been so, perhaps for hundreds of years. When new people tried to live in the village they judged whether they’d be acceptable or not, did they have the right physical appearance, would they
join in.
”

“You mean take part in this sexual free-for-all?”

“They tested them. John Peddar passed the test. If they didn’t pass they—got rid of them. Like they were getting rid of the man from Lynn. He wouldn’t, Teresa said, but his wife would, and naturally the poor man didn’t want her to.”

“And I wouldn’t,” I said, “and you wouldn’t.”

“They knew enough to be aware that new genes ought to be introduced sometimes, though no defects ever appeared in the children. As to who their fathers were, it just as often wasn’t the mother’s husband, but he’d have children elsewhere, so no one minded. If a man’s children weren’t his they were very likely a brother’s or a cousin’s.”

“How about accidental brother-and-sister incest?”

“Perhaps they didn’t care,” he said, and then he said, “I’ve told you all this as if I believed it when I was first told. But I didn’t believe it. I thought Susannah had been brainwashed by her parents and Teresa roped in because she was articulate, a suitable spokeswoman.You see, it wasn’t possible for me to take this in after—well, after the way Susannah had been with me and the things she’d said. Teresa hadn’t been there, thank God—what did she know? I thought the Peddar family had instructed Susannah in what to say and they and Teresa had concocted this tale to make me back off.”

“It was true, though, wasn’t it?”

He said, “Even the Olympian gods were jealous. Hera persecuted the lovers of Zeus. Persephone was jealous of the King of the Underworld.” Then he answered me. “Oh, yes, it was true.”

After Susannah had gone and Teresa had followed her, for he had told Teresa to get out of the house and never to come back, he shifted the blame from the Peddar family onto Teresa and onto Kim Gresham.Wasn’t she, after all, Kim Gresham’s aunt? (Or cousin or second cousin or even sister.) Kim Gresham was holding Susannah to her engagement even though she loved him, Ben. In the light of what he’d just heard this wasn’t a logical assumption, but he was beyond logic.

He would go to the Greshams’ house and see Kim, have it out with him, drive down to the village and find out where he worked. But something strange happened while he was locking up, getting the car out. It was another beautiful day, sunny and warm, the blue sky flecked with tiny clouds like down. A pair of swans had appeared on the lake to swim on the calm, glassy water among the lily pads. The forest was a rich, velvety green, and for a moment he stood staring at the green reflected in the blue.

He found himself thinking that if, as he put it, “all things had been equal,” if he hadn’t been in love with Susannah, how idyllic would be the life Teresa had presented to him: unlimited love and pleasure without jealousy or recrimination, without fear or risk, free love in all senses, something to look forward to all day and look back on every morning. Love of which one never wearied because if one did it could without pain or damage be changed. An endless series of love affairs in this beautiful place where everyone was kind and warm and liked you, where people clapped at the sight of kisses. He thought of his wife, whom he hated because she had been unfaithful to him. Here he would have given her his blessing, and they would still be together.

If he believed what Teresa said. But he didn’t. The sun didn’t always shine. Jealousy hadn’t been left out of his genetic makeup nor, he was sure, out of Susannah’s. It hadn’t occurred to him before this that she might have slept with Kim Gresham, but now it did, and the green of the forest turned red, the sky blazed with a hard yellow light, passion roared inside his head, and he forgot about idylls and blessings and unlimited love.

He drove to the village, parked the car, and went into the shop, the source of all his supplies of food and information. Anne Whiteson was less friendly than usual, and it occurred to him that Teresa might already have begun spreading the tale of her expulsion from Gothic House. She was less friendly, but it was no worse than that, and she was quite willing to tell him where Kim Gresham was to be found: at home with his parents in their house on the village outskirts. He had lost his job as a mechanic in a garage four miles away and was, until he found another, on the dole.

Scorn was now added to Ben’s rage against Kim. Those Peddars were willing for their daughter to marry an unemployed man who couldn’t support her. They preferred that man to him. He made his way to the Greshams’ house, that pretty house a little way outside the village with the roses round the door. Kathy opened it and let him in, and he found Kim sprawled in the front room in front of the television. In his eyes, that compounded the offense.

Kim got up when Ben came in and, all unsuspecting, smiling—how they all smiled and smiled!—held out his hand. He was a tall, well-built young man, very young, perhaps twenty, several inches taller than Ben and probably two stone heavier. Ben ignored the hand. It suddenly came to him that it wouldn’t do to have a row in Kim’s parents’ house, as he had no particular quarrel with the parents, and he told Kim to come outside.

Though obviously in the dark about all this, Kim followed Ben out into the front garden. I suppose he thought Ben wanted to show him something—possibly there was something wrong with his car. After all, he was a motor mechanic. Outside, among the flowers, standing on a lawn with a birdbath in the middle of it, Ben told him he was in love with Susannah and she with him, there was no room for Kim in that relationship, he’d been replaced, his time with Susannah was past. Did he understand?

Kim said he didn’t know what Ben was talking about. “I’m going to marry Susannah,” he said, and he said it with no show of emotion, in the tone he might have used to say he was going bowling or down to the pub. “The wedding’s been fixed for September. Second Saturday in September. You can come if you want. I know you like her, she’s said, and that’s okay with me. She’s told me all about it—we don’t have secrets.”

Ben hit him. He said it was the first time in his life he’d ever hit anyone, and it wasn’t a very successful blow. He had lashed out and struck Kim on the neck below the jawbone, and he hit him again with the other fist, this time striking his head, but neither punch seemed to have much effect. Unlike adversaries in films, Kim didn’t reel back or fall over. He got hold of Ben around his neck, in that armlock the police are advised not to use on people they arrest, and propelled him down the path and out of the gate, where Ben collapsed and sat down heavily on the ground. Ben told me all this quite openly. He said he was utterly humiliated.

Kim Gresham, who probably watched a lot of television, said to Ben not to try anything further or he might “be obliged to hurt him.” Then he asked him if he was all right and, when Ben didn’t answer, went back into the house and closed the front door quietly behind him.

Because the Gresham house stood alone with fields on either side of it—Greshams, someone had told me, always liked to live a little way away from the village—there were no witnesses. Ben got up and rubbed his neck and thought that, with luck, no one else would know of his defeat and humiliation. His ignorance of the village and its ways was still sublime. He still thought there were things he could do outside his own four walls and no one would know.

He walked back to the village to where he had parked. In his absence his car had received attention. Someone had printed on the windscreen in a shiny red substance, probably nail varnish: GO AWAY. Even then he knew they didn’t just mean go away for now, don’t park here. The village street was empty. It often was, but if people were about this was the time they would be, eleven in the morning. There was no one to be seen. Even the front gardens were empty, and on this fine August day all the front doors and windows were closed. Eyes watched him. No one made any pretense that those eyes weren’t watching.

Back at Gothic House he cleaned the printed letters off with nail-varnish remover he found in the bathroom cabinet. Deterred by what had happened but willing himself to be strong, he phoned the Peddars. A woman answered, Iris, he supposed, for the voice didn’t belong to Susannah or her sisters.

He said, “This is Ben Powell.”

Without another word, she put the receiver down. In the afternoon he phoned the hairdresser. Before the horrible things began to happen, on the previous evening when he and Susannah had been so happy, she’d told him she worked for the hairdresser on Friday afternoons as well. He phoned at two. Angela Burns answered, and when he said who it was, she put the receiver down.

That shook him, because it seemed to him to prove that Kim Gresham or his mother had talked of what had happened. Teresa had talked. It was one thing telling the Peddars, but the news had spread to the hairdresser. His defeat of the morning made him feel he had to be brave. If he was to achieve anything, overcome these people and secure Susannah for himself exclusively, he had to have courage now. He drove back to the village, but this time he parked the car directly outside the shop.

When Anne Whiteson saw him she said straight out she wasn’t going to serve him. Then she walked into the room at the back and shut the door behind her. Ben went to the staircase, but before he’d gone up half a dozen stairs Susannah appeared at the top. She came down and met him halfway. Or, rather, she stood two stairs above him. He put out his hand to her.

She shook her head and said very softly, so that no one else should hear, “It’s over, Ben.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “What do you mean, over? Because of what these people say and do? The rest of the world isn’t like this, Susannah.You don’t know that but I do, I’ve seen, believe me.”

“It’s over,” she said, and now she was whispering. “I thought it needn’t be, I thought it could go on, because I do love you, but it has to be over because of what you’ve done and, Ben, because of what you
are.
”

“What I am?”

“You’re not like my dad, not many are. You’re like the man who lives in the rectory, you’re like the lady Gothic House belongs to. I didn’t think you were, but you are.”

“This is all nonsense.” He wasn’t going to whisper, no matter what she might do. “It’s rubbish, it’s irrelevant. Listen, Susannah, I want us to go away. Come away with me.” He forgot about her grandmother’s cottage. “I’ve got a place in London. We can go there tonight—we can go there
now.
”