Scissors, Paper, Stone

After a moment he spoke, his voice carefully modulated, as if holding itself back.

‘Do you know what I think of you?’ he asked, and although the question seemed out of place amid the mundane to-ing and fro-ing of the morning, Anne knew that he would have a reason for it.

She kept silent, balling up her hands into tight fists so that she could feel her fingernails digging into her palms. She concentrated on the discomfort of it, on the effort of marking her skin to prove she existed. When she relaxed her hands, there would be a row of sharply delineated crescents pock-marked across the tender pink flesh.

Charles was staring at her, his eyes stained with contempt, his head tilted in a quizzical pose. ‘Well?’ he asked, slowly, as if speaking to a stupid child.

Anne felt each muscle tense and prick against her flesh. She knew she had to answer or there would be no end to it. ‘No,’ she said and she could feel her voice disappear almost as soon as it hit the air, evaporating into wisps of nothing. She stood still, braced and alert for what would come next, the damp cloth cupped in her hand.

Charles coughed gently, a balled-up hand in front of his mouth. He looked at her and his eyes seemed dulled, like the dustiness on a window-pane when it caught the light. When he spoke, his tone was unchanged, innocuous, smooth like wax. ‘You disgust me,’ he said, so softly it was almost a whisper, and she wondered, once again, if she were in fact going mad. ‘Just looking at you, at your dishcloths and your dirty aprons, at your pathetic face. Just listening to you, your incessant whining, your pleading, snivelling voice asking me pointless questions.’ He paused to take a sip of tea and for a moment Anne thought he might have finished, but just as she was about to turn away, he put the mug down with exaggerated caution and continued. ‘You.’ He jabbed a finger at her. ‘You. You, with your tired eyes and your wrinkles and your housewifely flab spilling over at the sides and your thin lips and –’ He broke off and shook his head, as if disbelieving. ‘You used to be so beautiful.’

Anne went to the sink and busied herself with the taps so that she did not have to look at him. She felt herself about to cry and wondered why he still possessed the capacity to wound her so deeply. She had become accustomed to his bouts of callousness, to the random outbursts of his bristling, restrained fury. Surely she should be inured to it by now, should be able to sweep his cruelties aside? Why did she not simply walk out of the kitchen? Why did she not walk out of the house, out of this man’s life for good? Why did she stand here, bound to him, receiving each verbal blow as though she deserved it?

There was something that kept her here, a silken thread that tied her to him, that twisted around her wrists, her ankles, her chest, so tightly she could not move.

She found herself thinking about her youth, her dried-up beauty and the effortless slenderness that Charles had prized so highly. Once, in the very early days when they had been in bed together, he had lifted her skinny arm up to the light so that the delicate webbed skin between her fingers glowed like oyster shell held against the sun.

‘Almost translucent,’ he had said, before dropping her arm softly back on to the sheets and turning away from her. And she remembers now how happy she had felt with that small, dispassionate compliment. Had she really asked for so little?

But that had been years ago: a different woman in a different time. When she looked round from the sink, her vision blurred with the imprecise fuzziness of tears, she saw that Charles had gone.

The nurse comes in to check on the drip and smiles at her with a brisk nod of the head, just as they do in hospital dramas. It adds to her notion of play-acting. Of course, she thinks, the nurse is in on it too. He has somehow paid off the entire hospital to go along with this joke of his. How typical, she thinks, that he would go to such lengths to make her feel so beholden to him. She feels a familiar surge in the pit of her stomach, a pang somewhere between hunger and pain that she recognises as the beginnings of a small but lethal rage.

She has got used to these sudden, inexplicable bouts of anger and now barely notices them until they have subsided. She seems to be able to swing from extreme sadness and self-pity one minute to uncontained fury the next. Recently, at the wedding of a friend’s daughter, she was given a sparkler from a packet and told to light it and hold it aloft as the happy couple left for their honeymoon.

‘It’s instead of confetti,’ said the mother of the bride, an officious woman who prided herself on her organisational skills.

‘Oh,’ said Anne, realising she was meant to be impressed. ‘How . . . inventive.’

The sparkler burned quickly, throwing out bright shards of flame like dandelion spores. The guests whooped and waved until it all seemed a curious facsimile of joy, and then the mother of the bride started ushering people into taxis and Anne was left with the sparkler in her hand, a limp, ashen strip that smelled lightly of sulphur. It struck her then, after too much champagne, that this is what happened to her inside when she felt that heated explosion of intense disappointment. It burned bright, and then it burned out, and no one ever knew.

She had wanted to talk to someone about this, about the feeling that her life was gradually draining itself of purpose, revolving around the same dull axes, but she could no longer share such intimacies with Charles and her limited scattering of dull suburban friends would have been shocked by her honesty. Until Charles’s accident, she had felt oppressed by the cyclical nature of her days, as though she were stuck on a roundabout in an anonymous provincial town like the outer fringes of Swindon or a place called Blandford Forum that she had been to once with Charles; a town that had sounded vaguely Roman and exotic but that turned out to be full of grubby teashops and Argos outlets.

The worst of it was that it had all been entirely her doing. She had loved Charles, loved him completely, and probably still did in spite of no longer wanting to. But instead of giving her the contentedness she had once craved, her life with Charles has left Anne with a perpetual restlessness. She finds fault with everything. She picks at the stitches of each day with a relentlessness that leaves the seams frayed and the material torn out of shape. She does not understand happiness any more, cannot remember where to look for it, as if it is something she has mislaid – a coin that has slipped down the back of a sofa. She cannot remember the last time she laughed. She feels her core has been chipped away like marble. She no longer likes herself very much and can feel herself being ground down by her own defensiveness. She wishes she could be different, but it somehow seems too much effort to try.

She hadn’t always been like this. When her mother died last year after a prolonged descent into blindness and infirmity, Anne had sorted through the overstuffed little retirement flat and come across an enormous cache of family letters. Sifting through the postcards of long-ago mountainsides and the browning edges of airmail envelopes, she had discovered a series of letters written while she was at boarding school. Each of them was so funny, covered with illustrations and jokes and witty imprecations not to forget to make her favourite flapjacks for the holidays. She had been stunned to meet this youthful version of herself: so effortlessly full of character, so unaffectedly joyful, so naively sure of who she was. There were so many exclamation marks. She never thought in exclamations any more.

The asthmatic, mechanical, barely-there sound of her husband’s breathing interrupts her thoughts. He is still a handsome man, she thinks, looking at the clear, pronounced angle of his jawbone jutting out from beneath his earlobe as if welded in place. The skin around his eyes has been marked by a series of fine, engraved wrinkles in the last few years, but the crow’s feet suit him; give him an approachable air of bonhomie and sunkissed good health. His eyes look like crinkles of paper, twisted at the ends like packets of picnic salt. His lids are closed now, occasionally twitching as if a small bird’s heart is thumping delicately just below the surface of his face. But when they were open, his eyes were the bruised blue of faded hydrangea petals: flat, pale, remote.

The door opens and a nurse – the nice one with the dimpled smile – peers round the door. ‘Cup of tea, Anne?’

She nods her head, just as she is supposed to.

Anne; Charles (#ulink_a2227a92-54cc-5ed6-a421-5137151d4a07)

Charles Redfern was what her mother called ‘a catch’. She spotted him on the first day of lectures, sitting at the back in a tangle of splayed-out limbs and slumped shoulders. He raised his head briefly when she walked into the auditorium and she just had time to make out the arch of his eyebrows, peaking like precisely pitched tents, before his attention turned back to the well-thumbed paperback in his hands.

She couldn’t read the title. She found out later, much later, that it had been James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that Charles had never read in its entirety, always giving up about a third of the way through the second chapter. But he liked to carry it around with him in those first few weeks of university in order to cultivate an impression of enigmatic intelligence; an aloofness that he thought made him both attractive and indefinable.

He was right, of course. Almost every girl had a crush on Charles Redfern by the end of freshers’ week. There would be a gentle buzz of whispered giggles when he walked down the corridor. Girls pressed their noses to the glass when he jogged past their windows on the way to an early morning training session by the river for the college rowing team. He was reported to have a girlfriend at secretarial college whom someone had once met at a hunt ball and who was believed to be astonishingly glamorous with unparalleled taste in clothes.

His was the type of beauty that lost all its originality in description. He was broad-shouldered and tall and possessed of a disarming smile that crept slowly over one side of his face when he was about to laugh. His hair was the gold of hard-boiled caramel. Once, a friend back home had asked her to describe his profile and she thought immediately of him lying next to her in the hazy light of early morning.

‘He’s like a Greek god,’ she said, totally serious.

‘What kind of answer’s that?’ shrieked her friend. ‘A Greek god? You’ve got it bad.’

‘Honestly. I think he’s the most handsome man I’ve ever met.’

‘And he’s your boyfriend? Well, I think you’re awfully lucky.’

The friendship hadn’t lasted much longer after that. There was something about Charles that made her both defensive and perpetually insecure – she feared never living up to his physical superiority, never being interesting or charming enough to keep his attention, as if his eyes would always drop, after a few seconds, back to a paperback he would never read all the way through.

But – miraculously, it seemed – he claimed to be smitten with her. He started seeking her out after that first lecture, turning up at odd intervals in the porter’s lodge of her college, a scuffed leather satchel slung across his shoulder. He would be there when she went for coffee on campus, sitting at a corner table with a group of boys in rugby shirts laughing raucously and throwing the occasional, level glance in her direction. He was there, standing in between the bookshelves of the university library, his unmistakable silhouette casting its shadow over the dusty spines. He was there at a cocktail party thrown by the German Society, an event she had gone to under duress from Frieda, her friend at the time. Frieda was a self-consciously dramatic Modern Languages student who believed that men her own age were all hopelessly immature and sought out the companionship of graduate students or professors wherever she could.

‘Come along,’ said Frieda, in that curiously mocking way she had. ‘You never know who you might meet.’

So she had gone because Frieda was too forceful to refuse. As a bribe, Frieda had lent her a greeny-blue shift dress, beautifully tailored from a length of raw silk inherited from her Parisian grandmother. It was the sort of material that was rough to the touch, yet glistened as smooth as an oil slick in the evening light. She was delighted with it.

‘It suits you,’ said Frieda. ‘I am too flat-chested to carry it off.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said, unsure whether to be offended or complimented. ‘Oh, I love it. Thanks so much for lending it to me.’

‘Pleasure. I’m glad it’s getting some use.’ Frieda stopped at the mirror above the basin in the corner of her room where she had been applying her make-up. She let the mascara wand hang in her hand in mid-air. ‘My grandmother went mad, you know. She ended up in a lunatic asylum, thinking she was Marie Antoinette.’

‘Oh,’ Anne said, because she wasn’t sure what else was expected. Frieda’s conversations were full of such brutal truths, buried strangely in the middle of a perfectly normal exchange. They would surprise her with their very matter-of-factness, their sudden bleakness bringing her up short and making her feel somehow frivolous, as if she had stubbed her toe against a half-concealed boulder.

Half an hour later, they set off, arm-in-arm, not quite intimate enough to be true friends and yet not antipathetic enough towards each other to bother much about this fact. She found that university was full of such thrown-together alliances. She planned to stay for an hour at most at the cocktail party, then walk back to her room and finish an essay that was bothering her.

As soon as they walked through the door, Frieda became engrossed in conversation with a lugubrious-looking professor who bounced up and down on his tiptoes every time he got excited. She, meanwhile, hung about on the fringes, feeling rather trivial. For some reason, as she had walked through the college gardens, she had been seized with the desire to pluck a bright purple bloom from the flowerbed and put it in her hair. Frieda had looked at her disapprovingly and she saw now that Frieda had been right: it was a studiedly whimsical gesture that all at once seemed out of place here, in this dark room, filled with earnest undergraduates in elbow-patched jackets and wire-rimmed spectacles. Along one wall, a long table was half-heartedly filled with two trays of damp mushroom vol-au-vents and bowls of Twiglets. Someone had tried to make a hedgehog shape with cocktail sticks of cubed cheese and pineapple, but the sticks appeared to be too heavily weighted, so that the display looked wilted. The desultory strains of an ana-chronistic harpsichord were emanating from a slim record player in the corner.

Anne hated clubs and groups and societies as a rule – had spent most of the first half of term avoiding enthusiastic recruiters for hockey teams or film appreciation discussions – and now here she was, feeling uncomfortable and cross with herself simply because she had been too weak to say no.

She was smiling listlessly, working herself into a gradual state of agitation, and then she turned round and Charles Redfern was suddenly in front of her, holding a bulbous champagne glass filled to the brim with a violently crimson liquid.

‘I want to take you out for a drink,’ he said, as simple as that.

‘You don’t even know me.’

‘I do. I know your name is Anne Eliott. I know you are a first-year History student at Newnham College, Cambridge. I know that you are approximately 5ft 6 and that you have –’ he broke off, leaned forwards and squinted intently at her face, ‘dark brown eyes flecked with green.’

‘They’re not flecked with green.’

‘Yes, they are. You should look at them some time.’

She couldn’t think of anything to say to that. He smiled, still looking straight at her, and she noticed that the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes but stopped at the bridge of his nose. Although she never usually blushed, she could sense an unfamiliar warmth creeping up from her clavicles to her face.

‘It’s much easier to say yes now. Otherwise, I’ll have to keep pursuing you and you’ll have to keep pretending to ignore me.’