An Evil Streak Read online

  I interrupted him savagely. ‘I really don’t want to hear about Gemma’s hormones, thank you all the same. Nor do I particularly care how many millions of other wretched women have the same reaction. It’s Gemma we’re talking about and Gemma we’re supposed to be caring for. One person. An individual. Not a load of statistics in the Lancet. Your wife. My niece. Your daughter,’ I added, rounding on Beatrice.

  She flushed angrily. ‘Really, Alex, there’s no need to get so heated.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that there is every need.’

  ‘You may find it satisfying,’ said Dr Clark, icily calm, ‘but the fact remains that it does no good and may even do positive harm. Gemma is going through an uncomfortable but perfectly normal reaction to the experience of childbirth. Giving her all this excess sympathy is simply self-indulgence on your part and likely to make her feel a freak. If you really care for her as much as you claim, you’d make some effort to control yourself in her best interests.’

  ‘I notice you have no difficulty in controlling yourself,’ I said.

  He stared at me and finally could not resist the provocation. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  I lit a cigarette, partly to prolong the moment of confrontation and partly to offend him. He loathed people smoking in his presence.

  ‘I notice a considerable change in your attitude to Gemma,’ I said. ‘Over the past year, that is. I can remember a time when you were metaphorically on your knees, desperate to marry her. Once she was actually your wife and certainly after she became pregnant, you allowed yourself to be positively casual, even complacent about her.’

  We looked at one another, straight in the eyes, two enemies on a battlefield. There was no pretence left. Beatrice was breathing heavily, shocked but afraid to speak.

  ‘That simply isn’t true,’ he said at length, calm as ever. ‘But even if it were, I have no need to explain myself to you. Gemma and I, as it happens, have a perfect understanding. You remind me very much of a man who can’t believe in anything he doesn’t see. No wonder you have no religion. Well, not everyone cares to parade their feelings in public. The deepest feelings, in fact, are naturally private. You have no idea of our relationship because it is no concern of yours. Why should we show it to you? So kindly don’t speak to me of things you don’t understand.’

  ‘I’d rather not speak to you at all,’ I said without premeditation.

  He smiled, and I realised the extent of my error. ‘That’s easily arranged,’ he said. ‘I simply shan’t invite you to my home again. Gemma is of course free to visit you as often as she wishes. I imagine that arrangement will suit us all very well.’

  Beatrice, to my amazement, burst into noisy tears.

  Thirteen

  ‘Chris has been marvellous,’ Gemma said. ‘I really don’t know how he put up with me. I was so awful.’

  I smiled politely.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘I know. I’m so sorry you had that stupid row. But it will blow over, really it will.’

  ‘Probably.’ I was secretly hoping it would not, enjoying the stolen-fruit aspect of Gemma’s visits to me. Sometimes Beatrice was willing to babysit; on other occasions Gemma was obliged to bring the child with her and I had to endure his snuffling presence, the carry-cot on my bed, the discreet nappy-changing in the bathroom, the frequent bouts of screaming hysteria. Gemma’s patience amazed me: she seemed so loving with him, so unperturbed.

  ‘I’m working on him,’ she said now.

  She meant Christopher, of course.

  ‘Please don’t,’ I said. ‘At least not on my account. I’m perfectly happy with things the way they are.’

  ‘But it’s so silly,’ Gemma said. She frowned: it was clear that we were marginally spoiling her happiness. Two people who loved her must necessarily love each other; it was part of her simple code. ‘He’ll come round,’ she said with confidence.

  ‘And suppose I don’t?’ I said to tease her, although in a way I meant it.

  ‘Oh, but you will,’ she said. ‘Won’t you? For me? When you’re ready, I mean.’ And she gave me one of her irresistible smiles, nearly the old Gemma again, the carefree enchantress I remembered.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said, beguiled.

  She leaned back in her chair, making herself thoroughly comfortable. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘you don’t really understand Chris. He can’t show his feelings in public, so naturally you think he’s being tough and cold when you see him. But he’s only being self-contained. When we’re alone he’s lovely to me. Really.’

  I let it go. She was, after all, only two years married, still intoxicated by her presumed complete knowledge of another human being.

  ‘It was my fault really,’ she went on, pouring out generosity and also power. ‘I shouldn’t have been so neurotic. I really went to pieces – that’s why you both got so upset. I think it was the awful responsibility of it that struck me, once I got home. When Chris was out and if I rang up Mummy and she wasn’t there, I felt completely alone with Jonathan. It was terrifying. Like a nuclear disaster. As if there was no one else alive except me and Jonathan, so I was entirely responsible for him. If I did anything wrong he might die. That’s why I just couldn’t stop crying.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. But I didn’t, and I grudged her the experience.

  ‘Anyway, it’s all right now,’ she said happily. ‘I can cope. It’s easy. Honestly, I look back sometimes and I really wonder what all the fuss was about.’

  ‘You look very well,’ I said with tactful truth.

  ‘Oh, I feel marvellous. Really, it was so ridiculous cracking up like that. Poor Chris. He had a dreadful time.’

  ‘It will help him to understand his patients.’

  ‘Miaou.’ She grinned at me cheerfully. ‘You are naughty. He’s really so nice and you just won’t give him a chance. Can’t you be friends for my sake?’

  ‘Give it time, Gemma.’

  ‘Oh, all right. But it really is awkward for me. I want to invite you to dinner. It’s not the same without you. Chris’s friends are awfully dull.’ She stopped, flushing slightly, having caught herself out in a disloyalty. ‘No, that’s not true, they’re nice, but they’re too clever for me. I can’t think of anything to say to them.’

  ‘So you need your idiot uncle to play buffoon,’ I suggested.

  ‘Something like that.’ She smiled, clearly not in a mood to let me get away with anything. ‘No, you know what I mean. You and I could be frivolous and they could talk shop. It would balance out.’

  ‘Yes, Christopher does seem a trifle serious,’ I said, greatly daring. ‘As far as I remember.’

  ‘Well, he’s got a very responsible job.’ She eyed me sternly. ‘You can’t expect him to be… well, like us.’

  The word sang in my heart. We were a unit again, two against the world, alien and irresponsible. Even dangerously provocative, with a bit of luck. A law unto ourselves. Yes? Oh Gemma, are you coming back to me? Are you sliding within my orbit again, my love, my child, my creation?

  ‘The only thing is…’ She frowned. ‘Oh, I probably shouldn’t ask.’

  ‘Ask.’

  ‘Well, I was just wondering. Are those two students still with you?’

  ‘Oswald and Miranda?’ I said unnecessarily. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hm.’ She considered this, turning her glass in her hand, suddenly, I felt, in need of a forbidden cigarette. I lit one, to exacerbate her need.

  ‘I wish you’d get rid of them,’ she said. ‘I mean, isn’t it awfully unethical, fraternising like that? Having them in your home, isn’t it a bit dangerous?’

  I rejoiced I had got her on the raw at last. ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It depends on your point of view. They need somewhere to live. Why shouldn’t I take them in? I’m too old to be cautious.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘It just seems unhealthy somehow.’

  Her intuition amazed me. ‘Really, Gemma, now you’re being ridiculous.’
r />   She considered this; she always tried to be fair. ‘I can’t help it,’ she said at length. ‘I just don’t like them.’

  Fourteen

  Oswald and Miranda left me about the time of Gemma’s second pregnancy, although the two events were in no way connected. They were in love, they said. They required to be alone. They found my presence suffocating and intrusive. They considered I was poisoning their love. They compared me to a vampire sinking its fangs into their necks and sucking forth blood. They lacked privacy: I had seduced them into my home by offering them free accommodation which I knew they were in no position to refuse. I had therefore taken advantage of them by giving them what they most needed; in return I expected their lives; I demanded their innermost thoughts to feed my diseased imagination; I was exploiting them as human beings, like someone keeping animals in a cage and requiring them to mate for his own amusement. I was evil, and they were lucky to escape from me, yet they still found it in their hearts to pity me because they had so much more than I.

  All that in a letter which I have kept but do not care to reproduce verbatim, as I find its hysterical tone offensive. Written by Oswald but signed by them both, the product, no doubt, of one of their pot-smoking orgies which I had missed while visiting Beatrice. A letter left harmlessly lying on the kitchen table with the keys to the flat, but which, after studying the venom it contained, I was surprised not to find pinned to my pillow with a mediaeval dagger. They lacked the courage to face me, of course, and so ran away in the night when I was not there.

  Fifteen

  The child clung to Gemma’s left breast, which was grotesquely swollen with milk and traced with blue veins like a road map; she cradled its elongated head in her hand and encouraged it to suck, although it did not seem to need much encouragement. ‘Aren’t I lucky she’s a girl?’ she said fondly.

  I had not considered this before but now that she mentioned it, it did strike me as vaguely familiar, so presumably everyone else, such as Beatrice and Christopher, had already told me so, only I had not been listening. ‘Yes,’ I said, trying to sound a note of real enthusiasm. ‘Very lucky.’

  She had not asked me if I minded the breastfeeding. With the first child, there had been a certain reticence; now, total maternal confidence had taken over. How could I be offended by something she found so natural? Not that there would have been much point in her asking: had I told her, she would only have been hurt. But I felt I was an involuntary intruder on a private ceremony, and besides, I did not care, aesthetically, to see Gemma’s breasts in that condition. I tried to look away, but there was something obscurely fascinating about such intimate exposure; I pondered the strange fact that in a few months Gemma’s breasts would be back to normal, a state in which I could appreciate them, and I should never be permitted to see them again.

  ‘One of each,’ she went on, ‘what marvellous luck. When you’re only allowed two, I mean. Oh, I pretended I didn’t mind, all the time I was pregnant I kept telling myself and everyone else it really didn’t matter a bit, in fact two boys might even be easier in the long run – but oh, the relief when they said she was a girl. And I couldn’t think of any boys’ names this time – that was a bad sign, wasn’t it?’

  She smiled at me, completely unaware that I had absorbed only one remark. ‘Are you only allowed two?’ I asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked away, then back at the child. ‘Chris has got a thing about population. He thinks we should all keep it down. I suppose he wants to set a good example to his patients. Oh, he’s right, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I mean I agree with him, really.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, nearly.’ She gave me a guilty smile.

  ‘Would you like to have more?’

  ‘It’s not that, exactly, I mean it’s not as definite as that, it’s just the feeling that I can’t. That I mustn’t.’

  ‘Yes, I do see. Any prohibition increases temptation.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She had clearly not considered the matter in these terms. ‘No, it’s not just that.’ She stroked the baby’s bald head; it clutched at her breast with its crinkled hand. ‘She was so easy to have, so much easier than Jon, and she’s so much more placid already than he ever was. I don’t know, maybe it’s me, maybe I’m just more confident with her, I know what to do this time, I’m relaxed. That’s why it seems such a pity, giving up something as soon as you learn how to do it well.’

  ‘Like never dancing Giselle again once you’ve got it right.’

  ‘Yes. What made you say that?’

  ‘You wanted to be a ballerina when you were a child.’

  ‘So I did. I’d almost forgotten. Why do you remember more about me than I do?’

  ‘Perhaps I’m more interested in you than you are.’ And than Christopher is, I thought.

  She laughed. ‘You can’t be. I’m not very interesting.’

  ‘There you are, that proves it.’

  ‘Oh, you. Why can’t I ever outwit you?’

  ‘Probably because I am old and full of low cunning.’

  ‘You’re not old. But full of low cunning, well, maybe you are. I don’t know.’ She smiled at me.

  Hard to describe and impossible to exaggerate how much these conversations meant to me. Moments of tender, inconsequential intimacy such as I had once feared we might never have again. At the same time, not panic exactly, but that warning voice: now that she is back, after her long excursion, make sure that you keep her close to you. Don’t let her escape again.

  ‘There’s another thing, though,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘About children, I mean. Once you’ve had them, if you’re not going to have any more, then what do you do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Bring them up, I suppose.’

  She sighed. ‘Yes, of course. I was just being silly.’

  Sixteen

  We were all hideously reconciled at the christening. I say all, because during the estrangement Beatrice had shown signs of discomfort, as well she might, at being forced to straddle such a tricky social fence: loyal to me in private but still persona grata at Christopher’s boring dinner parties. Now, in church, we were forced to reassemble as one family. I had often pondered the mystery of Christian forgiveness but had not before experienced the element of compulsion that went with it. I was there to be forgiven, whether I liked it or not. Oh, nothing overtly tasteless, of course; it was all very British. Christopher coming up to me, a strong handclasp, to be manly, and a pat on the shoulder, to be condescending. ‘Good to see you, Alex; glad you could make it,’ was all he said. In other words we were to pretend we had never insulted each other. A splendid tradition. I even allowed myself to wonder frivolously if at least one of Gemma’s motives for having the baby had been to bring about this rapprochement. A pity it had to take place in church, though, since I am never at my best on alien ground. A pity, too, that it seemed the function of my family to drag me willy-nilly nearer, my God, to Thee. No doubt they would do a first-rate job on my funeral, too, when the day arrived. Christopher might even deliver an oration for the dear departed, suggesting a life misguided rather than misspent, and Beatrice would murmur what a pity it was I had never married, I had been like a father to Gemma, you know, such a shame I never had children of my own, it might have made all the difference.

  We assembled afterwards at the Clark residence, the first time I had been admitted under its sacred roof for several years. Gemma gleefully pointed out various domestic improvements to me: she had turned into quite the talented little… homemaker is I think the word for it. I admired her efforts; Beatrice fussed round us, helping her with sherry and small things to eat; Christopher and a gaggle of medical cronies discussed professional matters in loud voices. Gemma and I concentrated on each other and Jonathan: he was not a particularly engaging little boy but even so I could see he was profoundly disturbed by the new baby, so I thought he deserved some attention. What Gemma and I called jeal
ousy, Christopher referred to as sibling rivalry, which was of course normal (his favourite word). Beatrice in her turn said his nose was out of joint and chucked him under the chin. The new baby began to scream its dislike for the entire occasion and was put away early for the night.

  ‘The joys of family life,’ I remarked as I drove Beatrice home. She wanted me to stay the night but I was pretending an early appointment in town.

  ‘Oh, you.’ She laughed; she was a little drunk. ‘Why do you always want people to think you’re cynical?’

  I said nothing. How like Beatrice, I thought, to make believe that unpleasant facts are not unpleasant after all but merely false.

  ‘What makes you think I’m not cynical?’ I said at length, as she seemed to expect an answer.

  ‘I know you.’ This extraordinary statement left me entirely speechless. ‘You’ve got a soft heart underneath. Look at all you’ve done for me and Gemma. I’ll never forget how you gave us that money when Mother died.’

  She was like a highwayman praising the generosity of his victims after they had handed over their valuables at gunpoint.

  ‘And today,’ she went on, ‘it was so nice to see you and Christopher together again.’ Suddenly she made a most peculiar noise and I realised she was actually crying.

  ‘Beatrice,’ I said, ‘whatever’s the matter?’

  The noise was repeated, a cross between a sick cow moaning and water running out of the bath. ‘I’m so happy.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘I’m very glad.’ The sherry had obviously been stronger than I thought.