“These things pass,” he said.
“Do they? Does one ever forget?”
“No, you’re right. We can forget for periods at a time and then our guilty secrets raise their heads when we least expect them and we are caught unawares to discover how vulnerable we are.”
“I must go,” I said. “Give me the laudanum and I will leave. It is better so.”
He shook his head. “What harm is done by your staying awhile? Jean-Louis is sleeping. He would not know if you returned. Stay awhile with me, Zipporah.”
He came toward me but I held him off. I was afraid of my emotions. I felt again that familiar desire which I had known with Gerard. It was there, I knew, ready to flare up and consume my resolutions. I knew that if I were not on guard all the time I should be swept away into the overwhelming need to slake my passion as I had done before.
There could not have been two men more unlike than Gerard and Charles and yet they both had this effect on me, this demanding, seering passion which I had never felt with Jean-Louis. Gerard had been so lighthearted, so ready to laugh, treating life as a joke. Charles was somber, weighed down by secrets, a man of deep passions when they were aroused, I was sure. Gerard’s I fancied could be easily aroused but Charles would give long consideration to such matters and would not lightly fall in love.
I must be careful. I could not believe that I would be caught up in a whirlwind of passion while Jean-Louis lay ill—and yet thinking about it over the years I could feel the same irresistible impulses.
I was in love with Charles. I had been in love with Gerard. I loved Jean-Louis, too; I was weak, I realized that. So I must tread very carefully.
He said: “I want to talk to you. I have never felt for anyone before what I do for you. I had a wife once. You knew that, did you?”
I shook my head.
“I thought perhaps Isabel had told you.”
“Isabel has talked of you a good deal … but she never really told me anything about you which I did not know.”
“Zipporah, I want you to know about this part of my life. Come and sit down. I’ve wanted to talk to you so often. I’ve wanted to tell you … to explain why these moods come upon me at times. I can never, never escape from my guilt. Whatever I do … it is there. I want you to know everything about me. Zipporah … I want to take you into those secret hiding places because I want you to know me for what I am. There must be no secrets between us.”
I sat down beside him.
He went on: “It happened a long time ago … ten years to be exact. I was young and ambitious then … rather different from what I am now. Events change us more than time, perhaps. I was a doctor in fashionable London. My patients were among the rich; my reputation was growing, and then I met Dorinda. It was at the theater. She was a passionate theatergoer, and so was I. I was constantly at the Haymarket Theater and Dairy Lane or Covent Garden. It was during a performance of King Lear, with Garrick magnificent in the leading role, that I was introduced to Dorinda.
“She was very beautiful—fair-haired, blue-eyed like an animated doll. She was high-spirited, full of vitality. I was completely enchanted. She enjoyed the company of actors and as I discovered later helped many of them financially. She had inherited a large fortune from her father, who had doted on her during his lifetime. Her mother had died soon after her birth.
“You can imagine what happened. I must have seemed something of an oddity to her. I was serious, the ambitious doctor; her life had been spent among stage people or those who never worked but were intent on the pursuit of pleasure.
“I could not understand why she accepted me, but she did. I think it was a sort of novelty. It was only after our marriage that I discovered my wife was one of the greatest heiresses in the country and her upbringing had made her highly unsuitable to be the wife of a doctor. She could not understand my desire to work. There was no need to work, she declared. She had never thought of money. It was something which was just there. As for work … My patients, she said, were all malingerers. They fancied being ill for a while and thought it made them rather interesting. She found my absorption rather a bore.
“I realized within a month or so that I had made a great mistake. I used to go for long walks in the evenings into the poorer districts. That was when I went into Whitefriars. I told you about that. I had the feeling then that I wanted to get away from my work in fashionable London. I wanted to do something worthwhile.
“I tried to explain to Dorinda. She was skeptical. I had been noticing for some time strange things about her. And there came one night … I had been out looking after a poor woman … one of the servants of a wealthy family who had called me in. The woman was suffering from an incurable disease and I had been with her some time so that I was too late for the theater performance to which we had arranged to go.
“When Dorinda came back that evening she was in a bad mood and it was then that I had the first real glimpse of the violence in her nature. She abused me in a loud and hectoring manner. Then she threw a statuette at me. It missed and went into a mirror. I can still hear the sound of cracking glass as the splinters fell over the carpet. Then she picked up a paper knife and came at me. It was not a sharp weapon but there was murder in her eyes. She could have killed me. I was stronger than she was and managed to get the weapon away. She collapsed suddenly and I gave her a sedative.
“I was so disturbed that I went to a cousin of hers—her nearest relation—and he told me that I would have to take care. Her mother had had to be, as he said, “put away.” There was madness in the family. Her grandmother had committed murder. There was a long tradition of insanity which seemed to be passed down through the women. They had hoped Dorinda had escaped because the violence had not begun to show in her until she came into her teens and then the attacks were not frequent. They had thought marriage would cure her.
“I said: ‘Why did no one warn me?’”
“The cousin was silent. I think they had wanted someone to take the responsibility from them. Dorinda had a large fortune and I think they believed that that would be the compensation.
“You can imagine my feelings. I had already begun to know that my marriage was a great mistake. What I had felt for Dorinda was infatuation and I was not experienced enough to recognize it for what it was. And now to learn that I was married to a mad woman was the greatest blow imaginable.
“‘You are a doctor,’ the cousin had said. ‘We had thought that marriage with you was the very best thing that could happen to Dorinda. We thought you would be able to treat her and she would be under your constant supervision.’
“I cannot tell you the terrible depression I suffered at that time. I saw myself as a prisoner bound to this woman … this mad woman … for the rest of my life. Then I was presented with the most fearful dilemma. Dorinda was going to have a child. I pondered this; I spent sleepless nights asking myself what I should do. If Dorinda bore a girl that baby would be tainted … doomed to madness if the pattern persisted as it had for generations.
“I was a doctor. I had it in my power to terminate Dorinda’s pregnancy. I wrestled with myself. It was in a way taking a life, but surely that was better than allowing some maimed creature to come into the world. What was I to do? I had means at my disposal. I knew how. …The right dose of a certain medicine and the chances were that I could bring about a miscarriage.
“Well, I made the choice. I terminated the pregnancy … but I must have made a mistake for, at the same time, I terminated Dorinda’s life.
“That’s my story, Zipporah. I can never forget it. I could not let that child live. And yet … has anyone the right to take a life? I thought at the time I was doing what was best … what was right. I did not know that there would be complications … that Dorinda was not fit to bear children. … I tell myself that had the child been allowed to be born in the normal way its birth would very likely have killed Dorinda. I don’t know. All I do know is that the child died, that Dorinda died and that there was a scandal concerning her death.”