A Gift of Poison Read online

  A Gift of Poison

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Part Seven

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  A Gift of Poison

  Andrea Newman

  Dedication

  To N.S. with love

  Prologue

  Sometimes they are almost happy.

  Watching television in the evenings, sitting in separate chairs, or reading and glancing up now and then, each with a look of such tentative hope that the other is forced to smile back in reassurance while the boys’ heavy feet and heavier music thump above their heads. This is normal life, he thinks. Or in the supermarket, wheeling a trolley full of drab necessities and loading them into the car; or round the kitchen table at supper, Inge ladling soup into their plates while the boys chatter or grunt. They are doing what other people do: this is how families behave. At times like these Richard can nearly convince himself it is going to work. He is back where he ought to be, if not where he belongs, and he is willing to make the best of it. He has the satisfaction of knowing he is doing the right thing. He wants it to work, or else all this pain has been for nothing. And Inge is desperate for it to work; he can see the desperation in her eyes, her smile, her patience. They are allies in hope, fellow-conspirators. If it doesn’t work, they have nowhere left to go. They will have tried everything, and what do you do after that? So they have made a decision not to put pressure on each other and he can feel the weight of that decision pressing on him every day.

  It presses at bedtime most of all. She has been patient with him while he left the probation service, patient while he found a job supply teaching, patient while he tried to readjust to the old discipline of marking and preparation, staffroom politics and classroom control. So much patience. She knows it’s not easy for him. Living with her and the boys again, teaching again, he has gone back ten years; he is surprised to see a middle-aged man in the shaving mirror and his sons behind him, taller than he is. She understands all that. In return he has hugged her a lot, kissed the top of her head, bought her bunches of flowers from street vendors, told her she looks pretty. It is true: she does indeed look pretty, even beautiful, but it doesn’t make him want to make love to her and they both know it.

  So they both ignore it. At night he wears pyjamas and she wears a nightdress where long ago they both slept naked. They behave like conventional strangers: it would be indecorous rather than exciting to let their skins touch. Safely dressed for sleep, he feels it is permitted, even essential, to cuddle her, feels she is a child to be comforted. They hug each other politely in the darkness and turn their backs, settle down for the night. Another day gone, another crisis averted.

  At first he wakes forgetting where he is, expecting to see Helen beside him. In a few seconds he remembers Inge, what has happened, what he’s done. He dreads that moment, so he doesn’t want to sleep and he doesn’t want to wake. His doctor gives him pills to perform these tasks for him and more pills to calm him down when he feels great surges of panic wash over him during the day, battering him like waves in which he might drown. Temporary measures, his doctor calls them with a reassuring smile. Everyone treats him like the invalid he feels himself to be. Everyone means Inge and the boys and his doctor, even his colleagues at work, all circling round this sick man in their midst, handling him delicately, as if he were a dangerous device that might suddenly explode.

  Everyone except Helen. She doesn’t react to him at all, greeting him stony-faced at the door when he goes round for suitcases full of clothes and small, insignificant possessions, feeling like a refugee. At first he went when he knew she’d be out at the studio or college, then found a note on the kitchen table saying R, could you leave your keys please, H. Who are these people who know each other only by their initials? He doesn’t recognise them.

  Anger fuels him for a while, then to his alarm he feels it beginning to ebb. They both have white marks where their wedding rings used to be. She looks pale with fatigue, dark shadows under her eyes, and he wants to comfort her, wants her to comfort him. He is terrified by these feelings which have come too late. He tries to coax the anger back into life like someone struggling to revive a fire that has nearly gone out: he meditates on her treachery, her selfishness, her deceit. It doesn’t work. Instead he feels a great flood of pity for her and for himself. She is so beautiful. What has he done? The terror fills his throat, making it difficult for him to breathe.

  ‘D’you want a divorce?’ she asks one day as he is leaving.

  The word is a profound shock. He realises he has never thought of such a thing. He shakes his head. He longs to touch her but he does not dare.

  ‘I thought you might want to marry her again,’ she says, and slams the door.

  * * *

  Sally is like two people now: the seductive child he remembers, who used to adore him, and a new tough person who uses swear words to shock. She says fuck a lot where previously she said make love and he is both excited and repelled. It had been erotic fun for him to coax a shy teenager to use forbidden words in bed, but he finds it oddly alarming to hear them flung at him by a woman who is out of his control. It is as if she is beating him about the head with words. ‘Please fuck me, Felix. Now. Fuck me to death, can you do that? Please. Just go on fucking me till I pass out or something.’ It unnerves him. It sounds like desperation not desire. It sounds like anger.

  He has to admit the first time after the abortion is supremely exciting. Putting back what was taken out. Going into that place where all the damage was done. Sliding into her body with the terrifying thought that it could all happen again (and remembering the mistress in his past with whom it did) both shocks and arouses him, though in reality it’s the last thing he wants to happen and they’ve already discussed how careful they must be. It’s a harmless useful fantasy, he tells himself, that’s all, but Sally seems to pick up the thought. ‘What if I got pregnant again? I’d have to have another abortion, wouldn’t I? Now we know how easy it is.’ He can see fear and disgust in her eyes but her body feels already more open to him. ‘What about all the other times, Felix? How many were there, d’you know? All your unknown sons and daughters sluiced away or bunged in the incinerator. I wonder what they do with all the bits – I never thought to ask.’ The only way to shut her up is to kiss her.

  ‘I screwed around a lot last term,’ she says when he stops kissing her. ‘I just wanted people to fuck me. I didn’t care who they were, I just went on a sort of binge. Sometimes I didn’t use anything, just did it. It’s more exciting that way, isn’t it? I mean the risk makes it more exciting. I expect you find that too. Then I’d be so scared till I got the curse. But it was all right. I got away with it.’ She starts to cry. ‘We must have been really unlucky that weekend in Cambridge, don’t you think? Or d’you think it means I’m infertile now? They say that can happen after an abortion, not often though, they’re so expert, well, think of all the practice they get, isn’t it sad? If you got me pregnant again, Felix, at least we’d know I’m not infertile. But I’d only have to have another abortion, wouldn’t I, and then I’d start worrying all over again, so what’s the point? D’you ever want children, Felix? I do. I want a baby so much sometimes I don’t know how long I can bear to wait. And other times I think not ever, how revolting, and God, what a burden, twenty years of having to be responsible for someone else.’

  Perhaps she’s making it all up, he thinks, just a fantasy to annoy or excite him. He remembers the mis
tress who had the two abortions and then, mercilessly fertile, couldn’t face another so had the baby next time and passed it off as her husband’s. She got herself sterilised after that but the affair was never quite the same and she and Felix drifted apart. He felt sad about it for quite a long time: he had been fond of her.

  Sally comes violently now, clawing at him, sobbing and screaming. Making love, which is oddly how he thinks of it now that she calls it fucking, is more like a fight than it ever was. Sometimes it turns him on, but it can repel him too, making his mind stand back and watch her while his body does its work, looking at this wild animal in his arms, fearing perhaps she’s gone past him and he’ll never be able to satisfy her again. She comes over and over again like a revenge while he waits and holds on. Then she comes again with him, when he finally comes. ‘Yes, now. Come now. Fill me up. Oh Felix. Oh God.’ Giving him orders. She’s a changed person.

  He’s not sure if he likes the new Sally but he doesn’t want to believe he’s corrupted the old one. Sometimes she cries like a child in his arms and nothing he can say or do will comfort her. Then she starts to laugh. Gets up, says she’s hungry or thirsty, puts on her clothes while he’s still lying there exhausted, makes a sandwich, opens a can of some disgusting fizzy drink, says, ‘Oh God, look at the time, I’ve got a seminar in ten minutes, I’ll have to throw you out.’

  She doesn’t want the champagne he’s brought. Hasn’t even bothered to put his flowers in a vase, just left them in the sink. Surely she can’t still be that upset about the abortion, he thinks, not really; it was last September, for God’s sake. Has she been saving all this rage just for him? When she came to see him in hospital she was sweet and forgiving, said it was all worthwhile and she’d never be sorry. How can she blame him when she brought it on herself, letting him think it was safe when it wasn’t? If he’d done that to her, she’d have good reason to be angry. Then he might deserve to be treated like this.

  ‘It would have been born in April,’ she says. ‘Did you think of that, Felix? You should have come to see me then. I’m very popular with guys here, you know, especially when I suck them off the way you taught me. You’d be proud of me. They’re not so good at sucking me as you are, though, not nearly. I have to train them but I can’t always be bothered.’

  She’s beating him up with words again. He doesn’t want to listen. He hasn’t driven all this way to be abused for something that was not his fault.

  ‘It’s a funny business, isn’t it, Felix?’ she says. ‘You can get so close to people, sucking them or fucking them, bits of people inside other people and nobody feeling anything except pleasure, and sometimes not even that. I mean, getting right inside someone doesn’t make you feel anything for them at all, isn’t that odd? Only sometimes it does.’

  He wants to hold her, comfort her, but she’s pulling on more clothes, some of them quite disgusting and not very clean, leggings and T-shirts and layer upon layer of strange stringy garments. Even her hair isn’t newly washed. She’s changed, how sad, though nothing can mar her beauty and her youth. ‘Don’t hug me now, I’m late,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll wait for you,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t you like that?’ though he also longs to run away.

  ‘No, I’ve got to lock up, a lot of stuff gets nicked around here, and I’m sure you don’t want to be locked in, do you?’

  ‘I could guard your stuff for you.’

  ‘I’ve got to go to a rehearsal afterwards, didn’t I tell you?’

  So now he can run away with a clear conscience and they are both relieved. Yet such a tender kiss in the doorway, it nearly breaks his heart.

  And at other times it’s all caution and you must use a condom, I’m so frightened; and she doesn’t come at all, just lies there tensely saying, ‘Oh, it’s not the same, I want to feel you splashing inside me, I really need that. It was lies about those other people, I wanted to make you jealous, I haven’t had anyone, I’ve been too scared, oh Felix, hold me, just hug me, please hug me.’

  Safe sex always seems to him a contradiction in terms. If sex isn’t dangerous, it hardly counts as sex. He can’t bring himself to use the word condom: it is as ugly as the wretched thing itself, somehow sounding both leaden and soggy, which he supposes is appropriate, rather like wet concrete. It could be a term from the building trade. Sheath is slightly better: at least it suggests a sword and a scabbard. There is a touch of danger there, he thinks, reminding him of the swashbuckling films of his youth. But he does whatever she wants. Uses a sheath or doesn’t. Comes or doesn’t. Screws or hugs. Or both. Or neither. Sometimes she just wants to talk. Sitting cross-legged on her bed or the floor. What does he think of Blake? Reading aloud from a paperback in a self-consciously serious voice:

  ‘O Rose, thou art sick!

  The invisible worm,

  That flies in the night,

  In the howling storm,

  Has found out thy bed of crimson joy;

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.’

  ‘I think it’s all about you,’ he wants to say, as she recites with a solemn face, in her poetic voice. ‘You and me.’ But he doesn’t speak.

  ‘Words are there,’ she says. ‘People come and go, but words go on for ever. Or nearly.’ She laughs. He wonders if she is taking drugs. ‘Words last. The last shall be first.’ He feels out of date. Is she on something?

  ‘No more than anyone else,’ she says when he asks her. And then: ‘Oh, don’t be silly, of course I’m not, I don’t even smoke. I’m just a bit crazy, Felix, aren’t you? Aren’t we all? You people think we’re all on dope but we’re not, you just think that because maybe you all were twenty years ago.’

  By you people she means older people, middle-aged people. She’s never called him that before. People of his age. She’s finished abusing him with sex and now she’s hitting him with the generation gap. Their bodies a bridge but her arrow-words zinging across the gulf, aimed at him. He’s wounded, as he was meant to be. Realistically he’s in his prime, of course, isn’t he? He knows that really. Doesn’t he? But all the same… Twenty years. The blissful sixties. Pot and the Pill. No Aids. Short skirts and happy faces.

  She’s not his Sally any more. And yet he still wants her. And he also doesn’t. He goes home to Elizabeth, who is comfortable and real and eleven years older than he is, and he feels restored. He feels young again, the way Sally used to make him feel. He knows who he is, as they say. Leaving Sally to return to Elizabeth is sometimes more satisfying than leaving Elizabeth to return to Sally. There is no challenge to meet. And he can get on with his work.

  It’s confusing. The girl in the book is young and adoring like the old Sally, but crude and outspoken like the new Sally. It’s as if Sally is imitating the girl in the book without even knowing about her. So now there are several Sallys: the one he used to know and the one on the page, the angry swearing one he visits and her doppelganger who cries in his arms. He doesn’t want so many.

  ‘They made us stop just like that, didn’t they?’ she says. ‘Mum and Richard. Well, they can’t win. If we want to be together we will be. Till we’ve had enough. Till we’re ready to have our own ending.’

  She doesn’t talk about love or permanence any more; she knows it will end again. He should be relieved at her realism but instead he feels disappointed, even slightly insulted. He wonders who will have enough first. He’s tired. Well, perhaps not so much tired as over-stimulated. It takes a lot of energy writing the book and keeping Elizabeth happy and driving up and down to Sussex. The campus depresses him, although Sally seems to like it. It’s filled with the young in their ugly clothes; they all look grubby and about fifteen. The red-brick buildings offend his sensibilities. The greenery is pleasant, of course, but he can get all that and better in Richmond Park. And the journey is a drag. To Brighton and back in a day, eating and drinking and screwing and still finding time for work. It’s too much. Her room depresses him too. He didn’t know she was so untidy. Seeing her
only in his flat or Helen’s house or the hotel in Cambridge, he had no way of knowing. The heaps of clothes piled up on the floor, in a chair, on the bed. The posters blu-tacked to the wall, including one of Helen’s ghastly show. Unwashed coffee cups and glasses on the table along with books stacked high and unfinished essays. The wash-basin with a ring of grime around it. Did he ever live like this as an undergraduate? He must have done. He doesn’t remember. He can’t have done, surely.

  * * *

  Elizabeth knows. She’s quite shocked by her own certainty, as if she had diagnosed a fatal illness by intuition and didn’t need to go to the doctor. She doesn’t want such an advanced skill.

  She knows there is someone again and she knows it’s Sally. Even before she checks the milometer on Felix’s car. She’s never done such a thing before and she feels soiled by doing it, guilty of going through his cheque stubs or his wallet, searching his desk or his pockets, looking for evidence. She never used to behave like this: it would have been beneath her dignity. Now she has no dignity left. Not since she saw Sally in her hospital corridor, that child who wasn’t a child after all, but Felix’s mistress (that old-fashioned word), blushing and telling lies, pretending to be there on behalf of Richard.

  So she looks at the milometer. She doesn’t need proof but she wants it. Yes, there are days when he does over a hundred and twenty miles, just right for Brighton, and comes home late, complaining of long hours at the word processor. The knowledge makes her feel quite numb, as if she’s beyond pain, like a dead person. She doesn’t want to feel like that. She doesn’t want to be someone who searches for clues. She doesn’t like her new self.

  She waits. She doesn’t want to believe it. She so much didn’t want to believe it the first time that she managed not to, a considerable achievement. But now she must: she has no choice. This is the second time. This is real.