Her ironic intonation of the word “perfect” suggested a well-known abhorrence of the idea.
Charlie shook her long black hair self-consciously away from her face. ‘It is, in a way. But to be honest that’s a bit of an illusion too. If he ever found out what I’m really like it wouldn’t be perfect any more.’
‘God!’ cried Rebecca, so unexpectedly that the rest of us started. ‘That’s so bloody typical!’
She thumped the table top with her hand and I felt Hamish jump on my lap.
‘How do they do it?’ she asked wonderingly, shaking her head. ‘How do they do it?’
‘It’s just that he’s so good,’ Charlie said. ‘And I’m so bad that I have to lie to make myself seem better. I’ve lied about everything! So now there’s that on top of all the other things.’ She put her head in her hands and laughed. ‘Not that he ever asks me anything.’
‘That’s so typical,’ said Rebecca again.
‘No, I mean he never pries. Of course, he already knows about Sam and he doesn’t like it, I can tell. He doesn’t like the fact that I left. Poor Sam — I embellish his villainy mercilessly. You know, I’d really like to do something I could be proud of,’ she said, looking fervently at Rebecca and me. ‘I’d like to do something hard. Sometimes I even think that I should go back to Sam. That really would be hard. It would make the perfect cross.’
‘You can’t do that!’
‘Why not? I’d only be keeping all those promises I made. Think how much Mark would admire me!’
‘That’s just silly,’ Rebecca said petulantly.
‘All I’m saying is that I have a distorted nature. I’ve never felt the right sort of pain. I’ve felt the pain of being wrong but I’ve never felt the pain of being right. I’ve never suffered out of forbearance.’
‘Why should you suffer? What would be the point of that?’
Charlie laughed. ‘I have the feeling that the health of the organism depends on it.’
‘Is that what he says?’
‘Oh, it’s completely selfish! Otherwise what story do you have to tell about yourself? That all you’ve done is gorge on emotion — that you’ve just lived in yourself? The problem is that when I get close to it, virtue begins to seem like another bizarre illusion.’
‘What have you done that’s so terrible?’ Rebecca burst out. ‘I mean, really, compared to — compared to the Nazis, what have you actually done wrong? I mean, you haven’t killed anybody, have you?’
The two women looked at each other.
‘In a way, I have,’ Charlie said.
‘I don’t accept that,’ said Rebecca defiantly. ‘Everybody has abortions. I nearly had one.’
I felt Charlie’s eyes flicker questioningly over my face. To my knowledge, Rebecca had only been pregnant once. I had noticed before her growing tendency to lay claim to an identity more chequered than her own. Suddenly, it seemed, she couldn’t bear the idea that she was more straight-laced than other people: it struck me that in her thirties she was experiencing an explosion of adolescent feelings of rebelliousness. Her clothes, her demeanour, her pretence of being “bad” — she had even, I noticed, taken up smoking, a heartbreaking spectacle of ineptness that she determinedly staged two or three times each day. Rebecca had often told me how obedient and sensible she was as a child and teenager, a position she adopted in answer to her parents’ refusal to behave in a ‘normal’ way. She felt she had no entitlement to youth and irresponsibility: Rick and Ali would not relinquish them. I remembered with what rational belligerence she had wanted a baby, as though this were the next foothold, the next stepping stone in her faltering progress across the torrent of life. She was on the verge, I saw, of flinging herself into this maelstrom; which was not, in fact, life but subjectivity, was the treacherous expanse of everything pre-existing that she needed to make her way over before she could consider herself safe. I felt pity for her, and guilt that I had not helped her more, but more than anything I felt fear.
‘I was the third woman Sam got pregnant,’ Charlie said, to me. ‘He kept the identity bracelets the others were given when they went into hospital. He had them in a little box. When I came back from the clinic he showed them to me.’
Rebecca laughed. Charlie looked at her quizzically.
‘I’m not joking,’ she said severely. ‘It’s true. Do you remember that flat I lived in after I left Sam?’
Rebecca laughed again. ‘Oh God, I do remember that flat.’
‘The door wouldn’t lock properly and the armchair looked like someone had died in it and on the wall beside the bed there was this funny shaped stain, and one day I was looking at it and I realised the shape was human, that it was the outline of a person who had sat on the bed leaning against the wall for so long that he’d left a sort of imprint there.’
‘Please,’ said Rebecca, putting her hands in front of her face.
‘Anyway, I used to have these dreams when I was there and in the dreams I was always where I actually was, in that bed, in the dark, with the mark on the wall next to me. And then I’d wake up and I’d be there, in the same room. There was no difference between my dreams and reality, do you see what I mean? That was hell,’ she said consideringly. ‘I found it in that funny room.’
Out in the street, on the far side of the house, the sounds of several car doors closing came into the sedate room like a muffled volley of gunshots.
I said: ‘I don’t think you can say that you haven’t suffered.’
‘Oh, I’m just making you feel sorry for me,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s all part of my routine. This is why no one’s ever dared to hold me to account.’
‘But what have you actually done?’ Rebecca exclaimed. She looked prepared to be amused.
‘At least you’ve resisted the temptation to be honest,’ I said.
‘I’m not sure I can resist it,’ Charlie said.
‘Is it infidelity?’ interposed Rebecca, making quotation marks with her fingers around the word “infidelity”.
I was arrested by her tone, as well as by the quotation marks.
‘Why do people make such a fuss about “infidelity”?’ she repeated. She examined her nails. I noticed her hand was shaking. ‘Rick and Ali positively use it as a sex aid.’
‘Do they have a — what’s it called? An open marriage?’ said Charlie, wide-eyed.
‘They like to speculate about other people,’ I said. ‘It’s not quite the same thing.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Rebecca. Presently I realised that she was speaking to me.
‘It’s completely harmless,’ I said.
‘It’s not an open marriage,’ Rebecca said to Charlie, ‘it’s a bloody bazaar. It’s an end of season sale. Don’t tell me Rick’s never come on to you.’
Charlie shook her head. ‘Should I feel insulted?’
‘Come to think of it, you’re probably too old for him. He hasn’t slept with one of my friends for years. He’s got all Marco’s girlfriends to distract him now.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said. I wanted to put Hamish down but he had locked his legs tenaciously around the backs of my knees. ‘That is a complete misrepresentation of the facts.’
‘Don’t use that language against me!’ shrieked Rebecca, gripping the edge of the table. ‘I’m not asking for your judgement! I don’t need you to authorise my conversation!’
‘I’m only pointing out that saying things isn’t the same as doing them.’
‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ Rebecca cried. ‘No, come to think of it, it’s worse! At least there’s some honesty in doing it — at least there’s some fucking implication! They’re so fucking frightened of it happening that they can’t stop talking about it!’