Unfaithfully Yours (23 page)

What do I feel for you?

Well, that we have allowed each other to see our good sides, I suppose. I am not in front of you so you do not have to look at the cast in my left eye, the unfortunate hair that is the colour of a British battleship, or listen to that terrible upper-class drawl that I learned at Oxford as a defence against all those posh girls and am now unable to lose. Oh and the smoking. You can’t smell the tobacco on me. That must, perhaps, mean that we were only meant to write love letters to each other, never to do the things that lovers are supposed to do, even as they crawl so horribly close to threescore and ten.

There is one thing I have to tell about me that I have never told anyone. Curiously enough, I got close to confiding it to a total stranger the other day – a funny little man called Gibbons, who is, of all things, a private detective. He called on me – quite why I do not know – and looked as if he was about to tell me something of terrible importance; he asked me a great many questions about Pamela Larner and seems sure that she was murdered. I really can’t believe Mrs Larner was capable of doing anything as interesting as getting murdered.

I did start to tell him about Julia – but I could see he wasn’t interested. People are never interested in Julia. That, in a sense, is why I am writing this letter.

You never saw much of how Julia and I were together. Not, anyway, after primary school and, if you remember, she left St Jude’s very early. She was one of those children who, everyone agreed, would be ‘better off at a private school’. They didn’t say this in a tone that implied that only there would her natural talents be recognized. It was much more that well-informed people thought that that might be the only scholastic environment in which she would not have the shit kicked out of her until she was old enough to leave.

I never liked Julia.

I know you have just written me a sweet letter in which you seem to be saying that you fell in love with me because of my wonderful talent for mothering but the fact of the matter is that I have never really liked my daughter. I don’t think I have ever admitted that to anyone before.

I didn’t really notice her at first. Conrad was a very demanding baby. He cried almost all the time for the first four years of his life. We never really found out why. General disenchantment, I think. Julia was a very quiet and easy baby. She slept through the night from the beginning, and even when she was awake she did not seem very interested in the world around her. Music seemed to puzzle her. Small objects hung over her cot – giraffes, lions and smiling teddy bears – only produced a slow, suspicious look. She seemed to prefer sleeping face down and when she first smiled – at about eleven months – it was more a slight twist of the mouth that never really reached her eyes.

You are supposed to bond with babies if you breastfeed them successfully, and Julia was quite efficient at milking me, but it certainly didn’t bring us closer. I think I felt slightly exploited by her. She was surprisingly aggressive about the whole thing, and occasionally she would grab at my tits with such force while she was feeding that I found myself wincing. She always went to sleep immediately afterwards – something Gerry always did after we had had sex. She also snored from a very early age.

I don’t know why but I was abnormally aware of this noise. I could hear it even if I was downstairs in the kitchen and she was upstairs in her cot. I remember once passing her nursery – she must have been about eighteen months – and peering in to check on her. Most parents do that because they are worried their loved one might have stopped breathing. It wasn’t like that. I really did think she might secretly be doing something she was not supposed to be doing. It’s a crazy thing to say, I know, but there were times when I felt she was deliberately concealing new developmental skills from me – that, when I wasn’t there, she was walking and practising phonemes.

She actually didn’t walk until she was nearly two and scarcely said a word until she was well on the way to being three years old.

It was about this time of the year, in dull November when there is neither morning nor afternoon but only a dismal grey followed by total darkness. She was lying on her back. Her eyes were wide open. She wasn’t looking at anything when I opened the door but when she saw me her eyes slowly focused on my face. She just stared at me – as if to say, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ She didn’t smile. I tried to smile but the smile froze on my face. She was thinking something – but I was never going to find out what it was. Then I tried one of those encouraging, high-pitched sentences that mothers try on babies, although, I have to admit, they were never my strong point. ‘Hel –
o-oh
-oh-oh!’

Julia just continued to stare at me. There was no one else in the house. I stood there, looking at her. I didn’t try any more cheerful mummy stuff. I found myself wondering what it would be like to walk slowly over to the cot and hold a pillow over her face. She wouldn’t struggle much. You would hardly notice. It would be as if she had never been there – but, then, that was how it was anyway. She won’t be happy, I thought. She won’t find anyone to love her because I can’t love her enough and Gerald can only think about himself. So why don’t I? Why don’t I save us all the trouble?

I am told mothers quite often have murderous feelings about their children. What was particularly frightening about this urge of mine was that I knew I was lying to myself. I didn’t really want to get rid of her because I was worried about her future. There was no genuine concern in the desire I had to hold a tiny pillow over her face and press it down until she stopped moving. There was nothing crazy about it either. It was a cold, rational sort of feeling. I just didn’t like her. I didn’t want her there. She bothered me.

Julia lay there, looking at me, her face blank; after a while, without even bothering to pretend to talk to her, I went on upstairs.

I was very correct to her after that. All through St Jude’s when, as you will remember, she hung at the corner of the playground, whispering quietly to the kind of girl she always befriended – Smelly Annie (as she was called), Lonely Lorna or Spiteful Sarah Smith – I was as impartially polite to her as I was to the Swedish au pair or the man who came to look at the drains. She always did what she was told. She never shouted or lost her temper. She hardly ever argued with Conrad. But she was always there, in the corner of the room, looking at me with those big blank eyes of hers, and I could never forget that afternoon when I had stared at her in her cot and thought, seriously, about what it would be like to kill her.

I sent her to Dame Veronica’s pre-school, as I said, against my will. That was Gerald. I couldn’t bear the idea of having her anywhere near the building where I was teaching. Later, when she passed the exam for the senior school, without any real help from me, I was terrified she would end up in a class of mine; but by this time she knew what I thought of her and had got very good at letting me know she reciprocated the feeling. ‘I don’t want to do Latin,’ she said, in that frozen little voice of hers. ‘There is no point in Latin. Why would anyone want to do Latin? It’s for stupid people.’

‘Mummy does Latin!’ said Gerald, in the laborious voice he always uses for children.

She just looked at him.

‘I noticed!’ she said, in those grim, flat tones that always made her sound as if she had been taken over by an alien intelligence.

I tried not to notice her adolescence. It was impossible to avoid it completely. Think she gave a party once. Not many people came – mainly girls of about fifteen. She was nearly eighteen at the time. I think there was a boy but he didn’t make much of an impact. She spent much of the evening looking at me reproachfully. ‘You didn’t buy enough wine, Mummy!’ she said, when it was all over, although she had not drunk anything but Coca-Cola all night. I hated being called ‘Mummy’, but she seemed to enjoy using the word. She put a babyish lilt into it that always made me feel slightly sick.

Then there was university. Exeter ‘Probably the Best University in the World’, said the car-window sticker in a fairly effective parody of the advert that claimed Carlsberg had achieved a similar status in the world of lager. It was about the wittiest thing that ever came out of Exeter University as far as I could see. The lecturers communicated by email and seemed incapable of writing a decent sentence. Julia found a boy called Stephen but lost him shortly before her finals. She got a 2.2 in English. She works as a secretary in a law firm (Gerald found her the job) and lives with a girl called Philippa in a flat near London Bridge. I have never liked anyone I have ever met – no matter for how short a time – who was called Philippa. This one is a pretty standard Philippa. Thinks she is prettier and cleverer than she actually is. Overworks her boyish charm horribly and manages to make Julia even more invisible than she is already.

I never see her. She usually manages to avoid Christmas. If she comes, she sits in the corner with her head hung low and her ridiculously long blonde hair drooping over her face. She looks at me reproachfully from time to time but rarely says anything at all – apart from ‘Happy Christmas, everyone!’ in tones that suggest she is announcing a death in the family. She has got a pair of glasses that make her look like a low-grade worker in the People’s Republic of China. She has taken to wearing dungarees, which enhance the Gang of Four look. Maybe she is a lesbian. It would, at least, be a sign of initiative.

So – there it is, John. I may look as if I have a heart of gold but I am afraid I don’t. We are all supposed to have hearts of gold, aren’t we? I am a naturally cautious person and caution has made me somewhat cold. I am afraid of being carried away by emotion. I am intolerant, too – much more so than I seem in public. I find it very easy to withdraw my affection if I think I’m going to get hurt. Perhaps that is the real reason why Gerald has left me.

I am lonely without him. I am frightened of getting old and spending Christmas alone. I sit in this big empty house and think that, if you could stand it, it would be nice if you called when you get back to London. I am assuming you are coming back, John; and, if you do, there is a room here where you could stay if things between you and Barbara are impossibly awkward.

With all my imperfections, dear John, I am waiting for a letter or a phone call or, even better, for you to call without warning one day and for me to open the door and see you smiling there on the doorstep. We used to call on people, didn’t we, when we were younger, and didn’t feel the need to warn them that they might have company?

With much love

Elizabeth

From: Michaela Larner

‘Chez Moi’

24 Lawson Crescent

Putney

19 November

To:

Orlando Gibbons

The Great Detective

12 That Funny Little Road in

Putney

Dear Orlando,

I know, from talking to Mary, that you have at last come to terms with your first name. I do understand. I had a similar problem about coming to terms with the fact that I was gay.

I will not always be Michaela but felt like Michaela this morning, so here I am!

You never seemed like a Roland to me. Rolands are phlegmatic and thoughtful and quite dark. They have a dash of chivalry, of course, and always make me think of chain-mail and those brooding woods above Valdemossa but you are lighter, more nimble. I have never seen you as someone who has to watch their weight – although I know, from talking so intensely to Mary, as I have done over the last few weeks – that it is something that concerns you!

Isn’t it amazing how we have all sort of blended? How my deep love for Sam and your similar feelings about Mary have brought us all together so that we can share those feelings with each other and our children and with anyone who will listen. Although we may be running out of people who come into that category!

Sam says I am a bit of a bore about being gay and would prefer I did not advertise it quite as much as I do but I am afraid I feel like doing just that. People should be told. Most of them are so horribly prejudiced, they should be forced to confront it, even if they do not want to do that. Political speech over.

Anyway, the purpose of this letter is not to drone on about my new-found sexuality. Although it is amazing how it has totally transformed my view of the world and my attitude to music, for example, especially my fondness for the music of the 1920s – no, not all gays like Barbra Streisand,
actually
, although I do not
dislike
her. I suppose working on my big new project about gay animals has focused my mind in that direction and I cannot these days, look at a squirrel without thinking, Is he one of us? and have spotted an Alsatian in Richmond Park that is obviously struggling to come to terms with his feelings for a dachshund called Victor that has serious issues and just needs to own up to what he is but . . . But.

Ididntcomeheretotalkaboutbeinggay.

I am writing because you said that before you began your enquiries into the death of my late wife, Pamela, you would need a formal letter setting out my desire to have you go forward with this investigation. I appreciate, too, that as you are not formally licensed to investigate murder this is, perforce (don’t you love that word?), an informal inquiry. I am also, as you requested, using this letter as an opportunity to re-state some of the circumstances surrounding Pamela’s demise.

As a gay man I am obviously very aware of the difficulties she faced in her later years, especially in respect of my need to wipe the surfaces in our home. I have always been a devil with the Hoover (who was, by the way, also gay), even in the days when I was deluding myself that I was a heterosexual, something that obviously came about because of the intense conditioning in our society, which is reflected in such words as ‘poof’, ‘fairy’ and other terms so offensive I will not even bother to repeat them here, although ‘light on the carpet’ and ‘bowls from the gasworks end’ come to mind as phrases that are constantly in casual use by people who ought to know better. Gerald Price – that murdering adulterous bastard – to name but three!