Scissors, Paper, Stone (18 page)

‘I’m glad, darling. He’s a very lucky chap.’

And the funny thing was, she had meant it absolutely. She had spoken with a complete lack of guile, an unthinking, almost clumsy, admission of her own good fortune. Although there had, on occasion, been the infrequent moment of quiet anxiety over the last few weeks, she had attributed such thoughts to the stress of arranging seating-plans and hymn sheets. On the day itself, she felt no qualms. She felt utterly calm, safe in the knowledge of her own radiance and certain of her future.

In the porch of the church, she stood for a few seconds rearranging the train of her dress and she could hear the murmured anticipation of the congregation, the half-spoken conversations, the muffled laughter, the atmosphere of something being about to happen, at once both heavy with expectancy and light with excitement. She felt a tremor of satisfaction that they were all here to see her in this moment. In one hand she held a bouquet of blotted blue and dusty pink spring flowers. She lay the other hand gently on her rib cage, pressing her palm down on the comforting rough-smooth texture of the raw silk bodice. She could feel her heart beating out a frantic rhythm. Her dress was buttoned so tightly she could hear a small gravelly wheeze every time she breathed in.

‘Ready?’ asked her father.

She smiled and nodded, holding the bouquet carefully in front of her with both hands. The organ started up.

They drove to Normandy in her parents’ ancient black Austin for a week’s honeymoon. It rained almost every day: a thick, clouded sort of wetness that saturated the landscape until the fields seemed to liquidise and evaporate into the sky so that the horizon was smudged into nothing and the surroundings became an endless flat streak of grey. At first, Anne had thought that the ceaseless tapping of rain on the slate roof of their stone cottage might be romantic. Their bedroom was situated up a rickety wooden staircase, squashed under the eaves so that Charles hit his head every time he got up in the night to go to the loo. The windows weren’t watertight, so the whole place smelled of damp curtains and the mustiness of mothballs.

‘It’s our very own impoverished writer’s garret,’ said Anne as cheerfully as she could.

‘Yes,’ said Charles. ‘Impoverished is the word.’

But he didn’t sweep her up in his arms or take her to bed in a fit of unbridled passion or any of those things that she expected. Whereas previously, Charles had always been the instigator of sex, Anne now found herself in the uncomfortable position of neither receiving his advances nor wanting to ask for them. She didn’t feel confident enough to question him and so she dismissed her vague dissatisfaction as a pointless worry. Perhaps everyone felt like this on their honeymoon, she told herself.

On the third morning after their arrival, Anne woke up to find that Charles was no longer beside her. There was a hollowed-out shape in the mattress where he had been sleeping, but the sheets were cool enough to suggest he had been gone for some time.

‘Charles?’ she said, sleepily.

There was no answer. She slipped on a pair of socks and walked gingerly down the staircase. Downstairs, there was a single room with a small brown sofa in one corner, surrounded by a bookcase stacked half-heartedly with thin paperbacks. The newspaper they had brought with them from England lay messily folded on the seat of a threadbare armchair, the front page dominated by headlines about the conviction of six IRA men for a pub bombing in Birmingham. At the other end was a square table covered with a waxed red-and-white checked tablecloth. The front door just beyond it opened straight on to the tiled kitchen floor. There was no sign of Charles.

She crept back upstairs, telling herself there was nothing to worry about and yet still feeling a rising tide of panic. She realised that she had no idea of how to act. Here she was, suddenly adult and married, on her honeymoon with a husband who had turned out to be more of a mystery to her than she had ever imagined. She felt foolish, like a child trying on her mother’s high heels with no notion of how ridiculous, how naive she appeared to the outside world.

Why had no one told her what to expect after the wedding? Why had no one said that marriage was a strange new world where you had to forge your own way with no advice, no parents to hold your hand and guide you through? Why did no one talk about how anti-climactic it was, how very depressing it was to feel so . . . so . . . Anne searched for the right word in her head and realised that what she most felt was not blissfully happy or perfectly content but trapped. Why hadn’t she imagined she might feel like this? she asked herself hopelessly. She had been so focused on the engagement, the build-up and then the wedding itself that she had forgotten to think about what might come afterwards. Now here it was and she didn’t know how to deal with the change in circumstance.

She got back into bed, keeping the socks on to warm up her frozen toes. She drew the eiderdown over her head and shut her eyes tightly in the hope that she could trick herself into going back to sleep. She remembered those nights as a child when her parents would come in late from a party and she would pretend to be asleep as they kissed her goodnight, and she felt tears sting her eyes. When she noticed she was about to cry, Anne gulped loudly in shock. This should be one of the happiest weeks of her life and here she was, miserably missing her parents. It was quite ludicrous, she admonished herself sternly. Charles was bound to be back soon – he had probably just popped out to find some croissants and coffee for breakfast.

The thought of breakfast was strangely reassuring – the sound of greaseproof paper being unwrapped, the smell of freshly baked bread, a pot of apricot jam the colour of amber, the gentle steaming hiss of the coffee pot. Her stomach rumbled. She was sure that was it. Charles had gone to get breakfast. Pacified, Anne went back to sleep, thinking that the noise of the front door opening would wake her up to Charles’s imminent arrival.

He didn’t come back all day. A thick dusk was settling over the dampened fields when the front door clicked open. Anne, lying on the bed upstairs, trying to read her book, tensed in alertness. ‘Charles?’ she said, and she realised it was the first word she had spoken for hours. Her voice sounded scratchy in the gloom.

‘Yep,’ he said loudly, and there was the sound of drawers being opened noisily, the banging of cupboard doors and a chair squeaking against the floor.

Anne didn’t know what to make of it. She came downstairs, wondering if he had been held up in an accident or had got lost somewhere – anything, really, that would reasonably explain his lengthy absence.

Charles was sitting at the table, leaning back with his legs splayed out untidily. Half a baguette lay on the tablecloth, its crumbs scattered over the floor. The other half had been jaggedly torn off, and Charles was eating big chunks of the fluffy white dough, chewing with his mouth open and tearing off another bite before he had swallowed the first. He appeared ravenous.

‘Hello,’ he said, through a fine haze of spittle. Bits of bread were lodged in his cheeks: lumpy protrusions pushing through the tautness of his skin. He smiled and Anne felt instantly calmed. It was all right after all.

‘Where were you?’ she said, walking up behind him and putting her hands tentatively on his shoulders. He made no motion to turn and look at her. She could smell a combination of tobacco smoke and grease on his clothes, as if he had been sitting in a stuffy little café. The faint crenellations of his upper lip were stained red. It looked like wine.

‘I went out.’

‘I gathered that,’ said Anne, with a jauntiness she did not feel. She could hear herself slipping into her mother’s voice, as if she could find a sort of safety, a sense of how to act from simply adopting someone else’s intonation. ‘Where did you go, darling?’

Charles finished off the half loaf of baguette and licked his fingers. He got up without answering her and poured himself a glass of water from the sink. Anne felt foolish, standing there in her socks, unsure how to proceed. She twisted her hands together, clenching and unclenching fists, digging her fingernails into her palms. He looked at her levelly, lifted up the glass as if toasting her and then laughed, a low, dry sound like the put-put of a motorbike starting up in the distance. He brought the glass to his lips and tilted it back so that he downed the water in one single succession of noisy gulps.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said, finally. ‘So I thought I’d explore.’

‘Oh,’ said Anne, after a moment. ‘You should have woken me and I could have come with you.’

He snorted. There was a perceptible sneering curve to his upper lip. ‘It wouldn’t have interested you – tramping around the countryside. Besides, I know you like your sleep.’

Anne sat down at the table, attempting to hide her own bafflement. Should she be angry or understanding? Was this normal or was this unfair? What was her response meant to be? She decided to be conciliatory, almost jovial. This was a triviality. He had gone for a walk and left her to sleep. If anything, it was evidence of a degree of thoughtfulness on his part. All right, she might not have acted in exactly the same way and she had expected that they would spend every minute of their honeymoon together, but perhaps that was unrealistic. Not everything could be the romantic idyll one hoped for. She shouldn’t make such a fuss.

She smiled at him. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m glad you’re back now.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, nodding his head exaggeratedly. ‘I’m back. That’s the important thing, isn’t it? Back to my wife, waiting here for me patiently like the good little spouse she is.’

There was something mildly threatening about his tone and yet he was still smiling, walking towards her, his arms outstretched as if nothing had happened. She didn’t know what to make of this confusion of signals – the aggression of his voice combined with the apparent affection of his gestures – but she fell into his arms with a relief that bordered on gratefulness. He took her chin in one hand, pushing her face roughly to one side before kissing her cheek, pressing down on her so strongly that she could feel his stubble bristling uncomfortably against her chin. She forced herself to giggle. ‘Ouch,’ she said, trying to release her face from his grasp. She found that she couldn’t. After several seconds, he let go of her. She started back towards the stairs. ‘I’m just going to put some decent clothes on,’ she said, finding suddenly that she had to control her voice to keep it from shaking.

‘I don’t think you should bother with clothes.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, lightly.

‘I mean, I don’t think you should bother with clothes when I’m only going to take them off.’ He glared at her. Much of his face was in shadow but his eyes were accentuated by the fading light, glinting like glassy blue marbles in the half-dark.

She didn’t reply, but turned and walked up the stairs, each step creaking under her footfall. He followed close behind, putting one hand in the small of her back so that it felt as if he were pushing her forwards.

Upstairs, Anne sat mutely at the edge of the bed, the mattress springing softly beneath her. She took off her socks and the sight of her bare feet struck her as both pathetic and slightly absurd. She focused on the curved outline of each pink-white toe, pressed against the caramel-brown floorboards as Charles got undressed. She could see his erection poking through the thin cotton of his underpants as soon as he stepped out of his corduroy trousers, folding them with incongruous neatness and placing them carefully on the top of the chest of drawers.

‘Turn over,’ he said, tonelessly.

Anne turned over so that she was lying flat on her belly, her arms splayed out like a sacrifice.

‘On all fours.’

She pushed herself up by the palms of her hands, the bones in her knees clicking loudly in the gloom. He positioned himself at her rear end, placing his cold hands on either flank of her buttocks. Quickly and without warning, he shoved his penis deep inside her, groaning as he moved deeper towards her core. Anne heard herself whimper. For a brief moment, she told herself this was what she had wanted – at least they were having sex like honeymooning couples were meant to – but then, with each new thrust, she felt herself switching off her thoughts one by one. There was no point in thinking any more. She just had to accept. Accept and survive.

Charlotte

Charlotte had agreed to meet Gabriel after work for a drink in their pub. She knew it was a conscious effort on his part to re-inject their relationship with its early sense of thrilling opportunity, to ease the silent strain between them so that they could get back to normal. Whatever normal was, she thought dryly as she ordered a glass of the house white.

‘Chardonnay or Sauvignon?’ asked the barmaid, a careworn forty-something with dyed blonde hair and a purple T-shirt that revealed a baggy expanse of white marbled midriff.

‘Erm,’ said Charlotte, weighing up which one would be comparatively less awful. ‘Sauvignon, please.’

The wine, when it came, cost £3.80 and smelled of glue. She took a sip and went to sit in a corner table, sliding into the dark wooden bench as carefully as she could so as not to spill any. She always seemed to be carrying too many bags and it was as she was trying to rearrange them under the table that she heard her phone beep with a text message. ‘Running a bit late. Be there soon. Sorry. I love you x G.’

She looked at her watch. It was already 7.30 p.m. and she had been late herself. Annoyingly, she had just finished the novel she had been reading on the Tube and now had nothing to look at apart from a crumpled, slightly soggy copy of the
Evening Standard
. She flicked through the pages in a desultory fashion, the smell of stale beer rising unmistakably from the newsprint. There was a story about a minor royal on page three talking about a charity trek up Kilimanjaro. There was some of the usual boring news about Tube strikes and planning disputes. Soon, she was reduced to completing the quick crossword on the back page. When she had done that, she started on the Sudoku panels but didn’t get very far as her mind was wandering. She checked her watch again. 7.50. Charlotte felt her frustration mount and she knew this wasn’t a good sign: if she didn’t talk herself out of this impending gloomy mood, the evening would be blighted from the start. She knew what she was like: soon her mind would be playing tricks on itself, deliberately thinking the worst, purposely making herself feel insecure and untrusting and sad and angry all at once. At five to eight, Gabriel walked in the door accompanied by a cold gust of evening air, his eyes frantically scanning the room with a harassed expression, his hair windblown and his raincoat dishevelled.