He went home and paced and drank whisky until Michelle got in after two-thirty in the morning. Instead of challenging her immediately with what he’d found out, he made sexual advances to see how she would react.
She pushed him away and told him she was too tired, listening to her girlfriend’s tales of woe till so late. He could smell the other man on her, the stale beer and smoke on her clothes, in her hair, mingled with the reek of sex. She hadn’t even had the decency to take a shower afterwards.
Then he told her what he’d seen, what he had watched. She went wild, flew at him, screamed that he didn’t own her and if he was no good in bed she had every damn right to find someone who was. It was like watching another person emerge from the shell of someone you thought you knew.
He called her a bitch, a whore, told her he knew she’d been at it all the time they’d been together, that she had just used him, had never really loved him. For a moment, she paused in her attack and a different look came into her eyes: hard, cold hatred. She picked up a pair of scissors from the table and lunged at him. He grabbed her hand and twisted until she dropped them.
Then she renewed the attack, kicking, scratching, flailing out wildly. He held his hands in front of his face to ward off the blows and tried to talk her down. But she wouldn’t stop. Finally, out of desperation, he pushed her away, just to give himself some space to maneuver, and she fell over and hit her head on the chair leg.
He tried to tell Shirley Castle all this, as calmly as he could. He knew it sounded thin without the whole background of the relationship, from the early innocence to the bitter knowledge that it had all been a lie.
What he couldn’t tell her, though, what he hardly dare even admit to himself, was that after Michelle had fallen on the floor, arms spread out, one leg crooked over the other, he had wanted her. Hating her even then, he had torn at her clothing, then, half-mad with jealousy and hatred, had put his hands around her throat and wanted to choke the life out of her for what she had done to him, for ruining, for defiling what he had thought was the love of a lifetime. He hated himself for wanting her, and he hated her for making him.
At that moment, the full power of his love turned to hate and overwhelmed him, and he knew that everything, her words, her gestures, her lovemaking, her promises, had all been a lie. But he let go; he couldn’t kill her. He stood up, steadied himself and went to collapse on the bed. She was still breathing; there was no blood; he hadn’t raped her.
In the morning he found her sulking in the spare room, nursing the bump on her head. She tried to make up to him, told him she would do anything he wanted…anything…and started squirming around under the thin sheet. It had always worked before, but this time Owen had had more than enough.
He knew that if he took her back, if he lived with her for just one more day he would lose his self-respect forever. When he told her to go, she screamed and begged, but he threw her out in the street with only her suitcase. The next thing he knew, he got a letter with a Swiss Cottage address to send on the rest of her things. He did so.
Shirley Castle let the silence stretch after his explanation. Owen couldn’t read the way she looked at him. He didn’t know whether she believed him or not.
“Owen,” she said finally. “Whatever the truth is, Michelle’s is a very damning statement. You can imagine the case the Crown is trying to build up. A man obsessed with pornography, especially if it features young girls, capable of sexual violence against women…You see my point?”
“But it’s not true!” Owen argued. “None of it. I’m not obsessed with pornography.”
Shirley held up her hand. “I’m not attacking you, Owen. I’m simply trying to demonstrate the spin the prosecution will try and put on the facts, given the chance.”
Owen laid his hands on the desk and stared at the veins in his wrists. “I don’t know what you must think of me,” he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper, “but I want you to know that I’m not the monster they say I am. It’s a distortion. If I knew only certain facts about your life, or anyone’s, if your fantasies were laid bare for all to see…well, I might form a picture, and it might be the wrong one. Do you know what I mean?”
He could have sworn there was an amused glint in her eyes, and perhaps a faint flush on her cheeks. “You don’t need to please me, Owen,” she said. “I’m here as a professional. It’s not my place to make judgments about your private life, only to prove reasonable doubt. You don’t need to seek my approval.”
“But I want it,” Owen said. “Damn it, I want it! You’re not a machine, are you? You must have opinions, feelings.”
Shirley Castle didn’t answer. Instead, she shuffled the papers back towards her briefcase and said, “There’s one more important question before I go, Owen. Why would Michelle do what she did? Why would she say all those things about you to the police if they’re not true? What reason has she to want you to go to jail?”
“Don’t you understand? Michelle’s a user. She used me from the start, for her education, her escape from her overbearing parents, for her living-quarters, the good life. I was her passport through college. She threw me a few crumbs and I took them for love. Even now I have a hard time believing that you can live with someone for so long and not really see them for what they are, not know them at all. But it’s true. Maybe I didn’t want to see. All the time she was with me, she was going with other men, and I admit I got jealous and possessive. But she didn’t care. She thought she could get away with everything, just take her clothes off for me and make it all right. At heart she’s a cold, calculating monster. She has no conscience. Do you understand? Sometimes, it’s only when the final piece falls into place that you see there was ever a pattern at all. That was what happened that last night. The final piece. She’d been doing it all along, lying to me, seeing other men, doing exactly what she wanted, using my home-our home-as a squat. I gave her all the freedom she wanted at first, before I started to suspect the truth. She was young after all. How can you keep the love of a younger woman if you try to put her in a cage? As soon as I became more vigilant, the cracks started to appear.”
Shirley Castle shook her head. “I can accept all that, Owen, but it doesn’t really answer my question. Why does she wish you so much harm?”
“Why? Because I found her out,” Owen answered, remembering that one calm moment in the final battle, when he had seen her for what she really was. “Because I saw through her. I saw her true face. And because I rejected her. I threw her out. Though she denied me the night before, just after she’d been with her boyfriend, she offered me her body the next morning. But I wouldn’t take it. She begged me to forgive her and let her stay. But I threw her out. She was like a spiteful child if she didn’t get her own way. She can’t forgive me for seeing the truth and having the courage to throw her out before she dumped me.”
Shirley Castle nodded slowly. “Well, Owen, that’s all very well,” she said. “But we’d just better hope, for your sake, that she doesn’t get anywhere near the witness-box.”
Chapter 11
I
Wood creaked as those present in court got to their feet one rainy April day. Judge Simmonds entered, resplendent in scarlet moire and white linen. He was a wizened old man with reptilian eyes buried deep in wrinkles and folds of flesh. His face was expressionless as he looked around the courtroom before sitting.