‘It’s your life, Helen,’ Guy went on in a reasonable tone. He could afford it. He was in the driver’s seat for the moment. ‘Has been for years. I’ve had little to do with it. I’ve told you — settle up about the children and leave any time you want. I don’t own you. That’s terribly obvious. And, yes, I tried to. But that’s over. You wanted it once, remember? But for a long time you’ve wanted both — security and freedom. And we’ve not had the patience or the temperament to manage both, have we? But you’ll have to choose now.’
‘You’ve spied on me,’ she said with wide eyes, staring at him, pouring an intense hatred into him, ‘and had your fill. And now I can go, can I? I’ve performed for you, fulfilled your dirty fantasies. And now I can just fuck off? Well I won’t. This is my house, our house. The fucking off is for you, Guy. Not me.’
‘Is it? You really think so? Use your head, Helen. Reason. Or you won’t survive anything. This will be the last of your nine lives. I am the “loose end” between you two. It’s not just our marriage we’re talking about or the children: it’s our separate professions. Don’t forget that.’
‘Blackmailer as well as voyeur.’
‘And you’re a promiscuous cheat, Helen. And a traitor.’
She was terribly pained, as if an all-absorbing illness had reached a terminal stage in her; and his frail reason was foundering on the tide of a returning jealous mania — the two of them gouging out the carcase of the other, knowing exactly where the maggots lay.
‘You knew all about her politics?’ I put in, trying to divert them, sitting down on the steps of my brownstone. ‘Why didn’t you ever say anything about it?’
‘All the rope I needed to hang myself, that’s why,’ Helen said. ‘That would have been the final thrill for him: seeing me put away for ten years — the climax of his joyous punishment.’
‘I would have gone as well,’ Guy laughed, edging back into calmer water.
‘Why should you?’ I asked.
‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘I’d never have wanted to see you in prison. Never. You forget that, Helen — there was always love enough for that. And it’s not blackmail. I want to see us all out of this safely, if it’s possible. That’s why you must reason, Helen, not fight. It’s not just us. There are others.’
‘Fine,’ she said, still fighting. ‘And all these years you’ve just sat and watched me — me and the real George Graham. And never told me. That was very reasonable, wasn’t it?’
‘What else? I should have told my department about your political affiliations with Graham? Or simply stopped you sleeping with him? I couldn’t do either.’
‘You got pleasure in doing neither. That’s what I can’t stand. You lower everything, make everything stink.’
‘Of course you were so fine with your infidelities, weren’t you? Perfectly marvellous. It was such a good, proud thing, wasn’t it? — deceiving me. And your country. You had it both ways, of course, didn’t you? There was idealism too — sucking him off for the good of the party.’
I listened to them, tearing each other apart, both right and both wrong, both stamping the seals of irretrievable failure viciously on their marriage.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Graham at the time?’ he added. ‘Who knows, but we might easily have sorted things out, when it was beginning. When it was all beginning.’
‘That would have hurt you. And I didn’t want to. I had love enough for that then too.’
‘You had so much of it. The loaves and fishes — for a multitude. The Miracle-Worker you are. With men. But not with me.’
‘You fell down a hole in yourself a long time ago.’
‘“Do it. But don’t tell me about it.” That’s what you wanted me to say, was it?’ he asked.
‘No. I just wish you’d taken a proper look at the world. Had been an ordinary man instead of playing the feudal Lord with a chastity belt.’
‘Ordinary men just let their wives sleep around, do they? I hadn’t heard.’
‘No, but they grow up. They get to see themselves as not being unique and indispensable. Because women aren’t. And can’t be made that way.’
‘The lecture is too late, Helen. I might have made it before, sharing you around —’
‘— Instead of making me into an exhibition —’
‘But I don’t think I would have done. That’s the pity. But there you are. A bad flaw.’
‘You thought the two of us would look at each other for ever — no other world but ours. No growth, no change, no decay?’
‘No, Helen. But that was the direction.’
‘What idealism! What perfection! A touch of the poet there, not the spy.’
‘What’s the point, Helen?’ I said, angry now myself. ‘You don’t have to make a book and print the hurt —’
‘She will,’ Guy said, a hopeless edge coming into his voice. ‘She will. The bitch is on wheels now.’
He wanted properly to commemorate the pain too, I realised now — make this last scene a very good one, a final climax worthy of all the gradual hurt that had gone before. They had worn each other slowly away over the years, two acids dripping on the other’s ego. Now they were pouring it straight from the bottle.
The two of them paused for a moment — a moment’s half-time. And in the pause we heard the twins shouting, happy and strident and splashy, in the bath on the floor beneath us, their excited cries barging into the angry silence of the attic. Helen came out of the little doorway, straightening her skirt and blouse. Then she started up again, a skilful player getting the ball off straight away in the second half.
‘Could you really have thought that — that I was to be your little woman forever — houseproud and bound: a showpiece in the Ideal Marriage Exhibition? That I was to live in your hand and mind, for ever and ever, Amen; by courtesy of you, and you alone, and nobody else? all absorbed — in your absorptions? My thoughts just the left-overs of yours? My life just a satellite round you? — living in the gate lodge of your grand estate: you set me up in your world with such certainty didn’t you, Guy? — like a museum piece. “Please do not touch. Only one owner” — trying to keep me and sell me at the same time. You couldn’t bear my happiness. But really all I wanted was something apart from you a little, something quite my own — to be recognised by others, to recognise myself. And instead of liking this, and being happy for my happiness, you got a lot of men to spy on me, so that you could destroy me, kill the person who’d escaped, the good thing I’d become.
‘You possessed me all right in the end, Guy — to extinction. You ate your way right through me — the old me. And there’s nothing left now but another me, a different person altogether. And I’m here in front of you. And that you won’t touch, Guy, not a bit of it, not a morsel.’
Guy walked slowly up to the end of the little street, passing above the miniature gas lamps, until he was a shadow against the shadows of Brooklyn Bridge. He cackled, a dry, throaty rattle, like a pantomime ogre. Then he cleared his throat nervously, and spoke carefully but without any feeling, a judge trying to pronounce on impossibly conflicting claims.