The Woodcutter (14 page)

Watch out that you don’t find yourself touching something nasty!

But that’s what turns you on, isn’t it?

That’s what turns you on!

Elf

i

When she was thirteen Alva Ozigbo’s English teacher had asked her class to write about what they wanted to be when they grew up.

That night Alva sat so long over the assignment that both her parents asked if there was something they could help with.

She regarded them long and assessingly before shaking her head.

Her father, Ike, big, black and ebullient, was a consultant cardiologist at the Greater Manchester Teaching Hospital. Her mother, Elvira, slender, blonde and self-contained, had been an actress. She’d left her native Sweden in her teens to study in London in the belief that the English-speaking world would offer far greater opportunities. For a while her Scandinavian looks had got her parts that required Scandinavian looks, but it soon became clear that her best future lay on the stage. The nearest she got to a film career was being screentested for a Bergman movie. She still talked of it as a missed opportunity but the truth was the camera didn’t love her. On screen she became almost transparent, and by her mid-twenties she was resigned to a career of secondary roles in the theatre. She was Dina in
The Pillars of the Community
at the Royal Exchange when she met Ike Ozigbo. When they married six months later, she made a rare joke as they walked down the aisle together after the ceremony.

‘I always knew I’d get a starring role one day.’

To which he’d romantically replied, ‘And it’s going to be a record-breaking run!’

So it had proved.

Thirteen-year-old Alva was proud of her father, but it had always been her mother she pestered for stories of her life on the stage. Now, after vacillating for a good hour between the two main exemplars in her life, it was not without a small twinge of disloyalty that she finally wrote that what she wanted to be was an actress.

At the time she meant it. But somewhere over the next few years that urge to get inside the skin of a character had changed from interpretation to analysis. She discovered that wanting to understand was not the same as wanting to be. The actress had to lose herself in the part; Alva found that she wanted to preserve herself, to remain the detached observer even as all the intricate wirings of personality and motivation were laid bare.

Psychiatry gave her that option, but she soon discovered that the observer had to be an actor too. When she read Hadda’s account of his first encounters with Imogen, she felt a great surge of excitement. To be sure, there was a deal of hyperbole here. The bolder the picture he painted of himself as the victim of a grand passion for one woman, the dimmer his sense of that other degrading and disgusting passion became. But in his effort to stress that his love for Imogen was based on some collision of mind and spirit rather than simply a natural adolescent lust, he had fallen into a trap of his own setting.

What did he say? Here it was . . .
there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen . . .
Yet he’d been sexually roused by this prepubescent figure, and sexually satisfied too. This was probably what he saw in his fantasies thereafter, this was the source of those desires that had brought about his downfall.

She recalled a passage in the first piece he’d written for her, when he was in his best hard-nosed thriller mode.

Imogen was sitting up in bed by this time. Even in these fraught circumstances I was distracted by sight of her perfect breasts.

Stressing his red-blooded maleness, trying to distract her attention, and his own, away from the fact that it was unformed new-budding bosoms that really turned him on.

And now she knew she would need to call upon her acting skills when next she saw him. She must give no hint that she saw in this narrative anything more than an honest and moving account of first love. Indeed, it might be well to give him a quick glimpse of that Freudian prurience he was accusing her of. He was, she judged, a man who liked to be right, who was used to having his assessments of people and policies confirmed. No way could she hope to drive such a man to that final climactic confrontation with his own dark inner self, but with care and patience she might eventually lead him there.

Another spur to caution was the fact that he’d obviously got the writing bug. She’d seen this happen in other cases. The people she dealt with were more often than not obsessive characters and this was something she liked to use to her advantage. Her guess was that he’d have another exercise book ready for her, but if she annoyed him, he’d punish her by not handing it over.

That was his weapon.

Hers of course was his desire that what he wrote should be read! Withholding it might punish her, but only at the expense of punishing himself.

So she prepared for her next session with more than usual care.

ii

‘Wolf,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your father.’

‘What?’

She’d wrong-footed him, she could tell. He’d expected her to home in on that first sexual engagement on top of Pillar Rock.

‘Fred, your father. Is he still alive?’

‘Ah. I see where we’re going. Oedipus stuff, right? No, I didn’t blame him for my mother’s death; no, I didn’t want to kill him; and no, just in case you’re too shy to ask, he never abused me in any way. Unless you count the odd clip around the ear, that is.’

‘In some circumstances, I might indeed count that,’ she said, smiling. ‘I was just wondering about his attitude to what’s happened, that’s all. You do indicate that when it came to your marriage with Imogen, he wasn’t all that keen.’

That got the flicker of a smile. The smiles, though hardly regular, came more frequently now. She took that as a sign of progress, though, paradoxically, in physical terms her goal was tears, not smiling.

‘That’s putting it mildly,’ he said. ‘He was even more opposed than Sir Leon. He at least in the end gave his daughter away. Dad wouldn’t even come to the wedding.’

‘Did that hurt you very much?’

‘Of course it bloody hurt me,’ he said angrily. ‘But I was ready for it, I suppose. He wasn’t exactly supportive when I started bettering myself. I thought he’d be proud of me, but he made it quite clear that he thought I’d have done better to follow in his footsteps and become a forester.’

‘Did he have any reason to think that was what you were going to do?’

Hadda shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, I suppose so. I’d always gone along with the assumption that I’d leave school as soon as I could and start working under him on the estate. I mean, why wouldn’t I? I loved working with him, I’d been wielding an axe almost since I was big enough to pick up a teddy bear without falling over. And working outdoors in the countryside I loved seemed the best way of carrying on the way I was.’

‘So what changed?’

‘Don’t act stupid. You know what changed. I met Imogen.’

‘You carried on meeting after that first time?’

‘Obviously. All that summer, whenever we could. She needed to keep quiet about it of course. Me too. It was easier in my case, I just went on as normal, taking off in the morning with my walking and climbing gear. She had to make excuses. She was good at that, I guess. She couldn’t manage every day, but if three days went by without her showing up, I started getting seriously frustrated.’

‘You continued having sex?’

‘Why wouldn’t we?’

‘She was under age. And the danger of pregnancy. Did you start using condoms?’

‘No, she said she’d taken care of all that. As for her age, I suppose I was under age too to start with. Anyway, it never crossed my mind. We were at it all the time. Always out of doors and in all weathers. On the fellside, in the forest.’

He smiled reminiscently.

‘There was this old rowan tree that had survived among all the conifers that had been planted commercially on the estate. We often used to meet there early morning or late evening if one of us couldn’t manage to get away for the whole day. Imo would slip out of the castle and I would go over the wall behind Birkstane, and be there in twenty minutes or so. We didn’t even have to make a special arrangement. It was like we both knew the other would be there under the tree.’

‘This was the rowan you had dug up and transplanted to your London garden?’

He said, ‘You remembered! Yes, the very same. They were harvesting the conifers in that part of the forest and it looked as if the rowan would simply be mowed down to give the big machines access. So I saved it. A romantic gesture, don’t you think?’

‘More sentimental, I’d say. Men in particular look back fondly on their adolescent encounters. Pleasure without responsibility, I can see its attraction. So you’d meet under this tree, have a quick bang, then go home?’

This was a deliberate provocation. The clue to what he’d become had to lie in this first significant sexual relationship.

He looked at her coldly.

‘It wasn’t like that. We drew each other like magnets. I felt her presence wherever I was, whatever I was doing. She was always with me. Under the rowan we were in total union, but no matter how far apart physically, she was always with me.’

She was tempted to probe how he felt now, whether he still believed that Imogen had genuinely shared that intensity of feeling. But she judged this wasn’t the right moment. Concentrate on getting the facts.

‘So when did it end?’

‘How do you know it ended?’

‘Because it had to. From what you say of Lady Kira, she wasn’t going to be fooled for ever. Also that first piece you wrote, the one about living in a fairy tale, in it you talk about the woodcutter’s son being given three impossible tasks and going away and performing them. That implies an ending – and a new beginning, of course.’

‘Did I write that? Yes, I did, didn’t I? It seems a long time ago, somehow.’

‘Three weeks,’ she said.

‘Is that all? We’ve come a long way.’

He spoke neutrally and she was tempted to probe but decided against it. The more progress you made, the more dangerous the ground became.

‘So, the end,’ she said.

‘It was in the Christmas holidays,’ he said slowly. ‘We’d both gone back to school in the autumn, her to her fancy ladies’ college in the south, me to the comp. I couldn’t wait for the term to finish.’

‘You didn’t think she might have had second thoughts about your relationship during those months apart?’

‘Never crossed my mind,’ he said wearily. ‘Not vanity, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just a certainty, like knowing the sun would rise. But when we met in December, it was harder for us to get whole days together when the weather was bad. I mean, a teenage girl wanting to go for a solitary stroll in the summer sunshine is one thing. In a winter gale it’s much more suspicious. We met more and more often under the rowan tree. A blizzard blew up, it was practically a white-out. We sheltered among the trees till things improved a bit, then I insisted on accompanying her back through the grounds till the castle was in sight. Sir Leon had got worried and organized a little search party that included my dad. We met them on the estate drive. I’d have tried to bluff it out, say I’d run into Imogen somewhere and offered to see her home, but she didn’t bother. I think she was right. They weren’t going to believe us. I went home with Fred, she went home with Sir Leon to face her mother.’

‘What did Fred say?’

‘He asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him we were in love, that I was going to marry her as soon as I legally could. He said, “Forget the law, there’s no law ever passed that’ll let you marry that lass!” I said, “Why not? There’s nowt anyone can say that’ll make a difference.” And he laughed, more snarl than a laugh, and he said that up at the castle the difference had been made a long time back. I didn’t know what he meant, not until the next day.’

‘You saw Imogen again?’ guessed Alva.

‘Oh yes. Sir Leon brought her down to Birkstane. They left us alone together. I grabbed hold of her and began gabbling about it making no difference, we could still do what we planned, we could run away together, and so on, lots of callow adolescent stuff. She pushed me away and said, sort of puzzled, “Wolf, don’t talk silly. We never planned anything.” And she was right, I realized later. All the plans had been in my head.’

‘And was this when she set you the three impossible tasks?’ asked Alva.

‘Who’s a clever little shrink then?’ he mocked. ‘Yes, suddenly this girl every bit of whose body I knew as well as my own turned into something as cold and distant as the North Pole. She said she was sorry, it had been great fun, but she’d assumed I knew as well as she did that it would have to come to an end eventually. I managed to stutter, “Why?” And she told me. With brutal frankness.’

His face darkened at the memory, still potent after all these years.

Alva prompted, ‘What did she say?’

‘She said surely I could see how impossible it would be for her to marry someone who couldn’t speak properly, had neither manners nor education, and was likely to remain on a working man’s wage all his life.’

Jesus! thought Alva. They really do bring their princesses up differently!

‘So these were the three impossible tasks?’ she said. ‘Get elocution lessons, get educated, get rich. And you resolved you would amaze everyone by performing them?’

‘Don’t be silly. I had a short fuse, remember? I went into a right strop, told her she was a stuck-up little cow just like her mam, that I weren’t ashamed to talk the way everyone else round here talked, that a Hadda were as good as an Ulphingstone any day of the week, and that my dad said all a man needs is enough money to buy what’s necessary for him to live. She smiled and said, “Clearly you don’t put me in that category. That’s good. I’ll see you around.” And she went.’

‘She sounds very self-contained for a fourteen-year-old,’ said Alva.

‘She was fifteen by then,’ he said, as if this made a difference. ‘And I was sixteen.’