If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out! Now there’s a desperate doctrine, a right dollop of lateral thinking, a fine biblical recipe for preserving thy view of thyself as a fine and upright person. Kill the bearer of the bad news, would you; much good may it do you. The enemy still advances over the hill. If thine eye lusts, sever the optical nerves; chop off your hand if it strays where it shouldn’t: destroy your ears to keep out the seducing voice: eyeless, earless, legless, armless, roll around in the mire: you will still be in the valley of desire. Just unable to function. After the inquest, after I, Joanna May, had perjured myself and betrayed the memory and love of Isaac King, the better to protect the interests of my husband Carl, I walked back to Eton Square, to the big pillared house which was Carl’s and my home. I walked up the steps, put my key in the lock, and found it would not turn. The key was the right key – it was the lock that had changed. I banged the knocker and rattled the handle but no one came. Yet I’d seen Anna’s pudgy face at the window, just a glimpse of it, or thought I had.
I believed that by perjuring myself I would win Carl’s forgiveness, that it would be over: it could be forgotten. That Isaac’s death was sufficient punishment for me. I stamped and shouted and banged upon the step, and I expect I screamed and cried, I can’t remember. The solid door stood between me and my marriage, my home, my friends, my clothes, my possessions, my past, my future, my life. Those strong upright houses of Pimlico are built to keep the poor out; to keep the rich secure, the noise of riot at a distance. Carl had cast me out of his life; I had become a supplicant: I belonged the wrong side of the door. I knew it was no accident. It bore the hallmark of Carl’s vengeance. The sudden shock of horrid surprise which he knew so well how to deliver, the lightning stroke out of an apparently clear sky. First he lured you into complacency; then, clap, snap, he got you.
I went to the phone box on the corner and rang my own number but no one answered. I wondered what Anna was thinking as it rang and rang, and she knew it was me: poor Anna, straight from the Philippines, witnessing this cruelty, obliged to be part of it. Carl paid her wages. Would she be horrified, or would she just think this is what happens, always happens, always will happen, to women when they cease to please or, worse, step out of line. A plain girl herself, stocky and puffy-eyed, bad-complexioned, hesitant in English, used and abused, fleeing one set of harshnesses to run into another, still thinking herself lucky, allowed to pick up the crumbs of Carl’s and my life. Poor Anna. She’d know whose side she was on: whichever hand had the power, held the food, would be the one she licked. I went back and stood on the step: it began to rain a little: I didn’t know what to do: to go to friends would be to start a scandal: I was still Carl’s wife.
And then the garage door whirred and opened, and the big Volvo backed out, black and shiny and somehow ordinary, with the dent still in the wing which had been the death of Isaac, and in the back was Poudry the solicitor, and in the front was Philip the murderer. And Poudry held the door open for me, and I got inside, because I didn’t know what else to do. And while we drove to a small and rather grimy hotel in Paddington – where someone or other who needed their wages no doubt, and knew which side their bread was buttered, and that it wasn’t my side, had unkindly booked me a room – Poudry told me Carl was divorcing me, that I would be bought a house and given an income, that I was not to set foot in Eton Square again, that I was to think myself lucky.
That my clothes had been destroyed, my papers and my books and my family photographs shredded, and my parents’ marriage certificate and my father’s death certificate too; and no sign of me was to be left in the house, all trace of me was to be destroyed. I was free to begin life again as he would be, without evidence of the past, and I should think myself lucky.
‘Do you think I’m lucky?’ I asked Mr Poudry.
‘Yes, I do,’ he said, after thinking about it for a little. We were, I think, both very conscious of the dent in the Volvo’s back wing, and of Philip the chauffeur in the front. Mr Poudry hummed a little in a nonchalant way that reminded me of Pooh, in The House at Pooh Corner, singing a little song the better to sound at ease: ‘How nice to be a cloud, floating in the blue. It makes me very proud, to be a little cloud.’
As it happened my husband was generous. Not that ‘as it happened’ is a phrase that was much bandied about in Carl May’s life. It suited him, for reasons of his own not immediately plain to others, to be generous, or appear to be.
I moved out of the Suffolk Ease hotel only when the decorators finished in the King’s House. I could have left at any time, but the hotel was a desperate place and suited me. I had a room to myself: others, immigrants, lived twenty-five to a room, in a stench of urine and cooking, refugees from one horror or another – flood, famine, persecution, torture, war. Carl, booking me in here, meant to tell me something. So I sat it out, recovering from my own desolation, my own sudden loss of home. I had no one. The other lodgers had each other. Night after night I sat alone in a room, sitting on a bed – damp stains on the wall, the murmur of human grief around, crying children – staring at television: a woman of more than fifty, whom even money couldn’t save. And I wanted to see Carl, and he wouldn’t: I wanted to talk to Carl, and he wouldn’t. How could he do it? How could he wrench us apart? If it hurt me, surely it hurt him? I mourned Isaac but I mourned for my marriage more.
And all Mr Poudry would say, when I visited him in his office, was, ‘You are very lucky, Mrs May,’ and one day he added, ‘It might be a good idea to move out of the Suffolk Ease: you’ll forgive me for saying so, but there is beginning to be about you the pong of the underprivileged.’ And I looked at him closely for the first time and saw he was not more than thirty: it was the weight of authority had aged him in my eyes. I wouldn’t go. The hotel was where Carl wanted me to be. I was obedient. Only when I moved into the King’s House did I begin to find my will again, or some of it. I washed, I dressed, I looked after myself: I became accustomed to life without Carl. Sometimes I even enjoyed it. I began to like the vision of myself, the drama of a woman lonely and alone, living in isolation, rejecting the world which rejected her.
Then I employed Oliver as a gardener: and one day he took out his guitar and sang some folk song to me, some wispy song of lust and longing, and asked me if I’d like to play the guitar, and I said yes, and he put the guitar in my arms, and stood behind me and put his arms round my arms, and that was that. I no longer thought about Carl. I was cured. I assumed he was cured too. I thought I was safe from Carl.
I thought all would be well if I did not love Oliver: I could not let myself love him. I knew quite well what would happen if I did. That if I cared when it ended – and it must, it must, I knew in my heart it must though my head pretended otherwise – the pain this time would kill me. A lump in my breast, a swollen lymph gland under the arm and that would be that. And who would there be to come to my funeral? Gerald (reluctantly) and Angela (weeping: if only for the loss of a good gossip) and Mr Poudry and the accountant, and a nurse from the hospital if I’d remembered to smile while dying; and Carl would not come, or if he did, it would be so the press didn’t pick up the fact that he had not. The funeral was not worth the dying for: let Oliver be a nightly visitor to my bed, let him return me, little by little, to the fullness of the world, but that must be all. It should not be difficult. I had loved Carl May: having loved Carl May, I could not easily fall in love with, become emotionally dependent upon, sexually infatuated with, addicted to, a gardener who played rock guitar.
Oliver died and I found it was true. I had not loved him. You only know what you’ve got once it’s gone, and it wasn’t much. Trevor the butler gave an account of Oliver’s death, his murder – and how could it be anything but murder: a man doesn’t easily hang himself by his feet – and I heard the account with equanimity. I winced, for it was a horrid thought that a life which could bring me to life, purply-red, strong and pulsing, had changed suddenly and permanently into limp white rotting tissue. I wept a little, because Oliver had been cut down in the spring of his life, and of the year, with the whole blossoming, blooming, fruiting season yet to go. I was saddened because now my evenings would have to be spent alone, the forbidden pleasure, the companionable calming marijuana joints no more. I was shocked, pale and shaking – a physical reaction, I imagined – but the roots of my being were untouched, steady, compacted in dry earth. I surprised even myself.
If thy love offend thee, pluck it out.