The Only Story(32)

Of course, that bruise on her upper arm had not just been the size of a thumbprint, it was the imprint of an actual thumb as he forced her to sit in a chair and listen to his denunciations. There had been grabbings and slappings, and more than a punch or two. He would put a glass of sherry down in front of her and order her to ‘join in the fun’. When she declined, he would grasp her by the hair, pull her head back and hold the glass to her lips. Either she drank, or he poured it down her chin, and throat and dress. It was all verbal and physical, never sexual; though whether there was anything sexual behind it … well, that is beyond my competence, or, indeed, interest. Yes, it was usually connected to his drinking, but not necessarily; yes, she was frightened of him, except that mostly she wasn’t. She had learnt to manage him over the years. Yes, every time he attacked her, it was of course her fault – according to him; she drove him to it with her airy bloody insolence – that had been one of his phrases. Also, her irresponsibility; also, her stupidity. At some point after he had smashed her face against the door, he had gone downstairs and bent Prokofiev’s third piano concerto until the record broke.

It was, I suppose, ignorance and snobbery on my part which had hitherto made me assume that domestic violence was confined to the lower classes, where things were done differently, where – as I understood from my reading rather than from a close familiarity with backstreet life – women would rather their husbands hit them than be unfaithful to them. If he beats you, it shows he loves you, and all that crap. The idea of violence being inflicted by husbands with a Cambridge degree seemed to me incomprehensible. Of course, it was not a matter I’d had reason to think about before. But if I had, I would probably have guessed that violence among working-class husbands was connected to inarticulacy: they fell back on their fists whereas middle-class husbands fell back on words. Both these myths took some years to dispel, despite the present evidence.

Susan’s dental plate caused her constant trouble; there were many drives up to town for adjustments. The dentist had also made the four new prosthetic teeth better aligned than the original ones, and shortened the central pair by a millimetre or two. A subtle change, but one always manifest to me. Those teeth I used to tap so lovingly were gone for ever; and I had no desire to touch their replacements.

One thing I never swerved from was the certainty that Gordon Macleod’s behaviour was a crime of absolute liability. And his responsibility was also absolute. A man hits a woman; a husband hits a wife; a drunkard hits a sober spouse. There was no defence, and no possible mitigation. The fact that it would never come to court, that middle-class England had a thousand ways of avoiding the truth, that respectability was no more shed in public than clothes, the fact that Susan would never accuse him to any authority, not even a dentist – all this had no relevance to me, except sociologically. The man was as guilty as hell, and I would hate him until the end of his days. This much I knew.

It was about a year after this that I went to see Joan and announced our intention of moving up to London.

You are an absolutist for love, and therefore an absolutist against marriage. You have given the matter much thought, and come up with many fanciful comparisons. Marriage is a dog kennel in which complacency lives and is never chained up. Marriage is a jewellery box which, by some mysterious opposite of alchemy, turns gold, silver and diamonds back into base metal, paste and quartz. Marriage is a disused boathouse containing an old, two-person canoe, no longer water-worthy, with holes in the bottom and one missing paddle. Marriage is … oh, you have dozens of such comparisons to hand.

You remember your parents, and your parents’ friends. They were, on the whole, and without giving them too much credit, decent people: honest, hard-working, polite with one another, no more than averagely controlling of their children. Family life meant for them much what it had meant for their parents’ generation, though with just enough extra social freedom to let them imagine themselves pioneers. But where was love in all of this, you asked. And you didn’t even mean sex – because you preferred not to think about that.

And so, when you had come into the Macleod household, and inspected a different way of living, you thought first about how circumscribed your own home seemed to be, how lacking in life and emotion. Then, gradually, you realized that the marriage of Gordon and Susan Macleod was actually in far worse shape than any marriage among your parents’ circle, and you became all the more absolutist. That Susan should live with you in a state of love was obvious; that she should leave Macleod was equally obvious; that she should divorce him – especially after what he had done to her – seemed not just an acknowledgement of the truth of things, not just a romantic obligation, but a necessary first step towards her becoming an authentic person once more. No, not ‘once more’: really, it would be for the first time. And how exciting must that be for her?

You persuade her to see a solicitor. No, she doesn’t want you to come with her. Part of you – the part that imagines a free, and freestanding, Susan in the near future – approves.

‘How did it go?’

‘He said that I was in a bit of a muddle.’

‘He said that?’

‘No. Not exactly. But I explained things to him. Most things. Not you, obviously. And, well, I suppose he thought I’d just bolted. Done a bunk. Maybe he thought it was all to do with the Dreaded.’

‘But … didn’t you explain what had happened … what he did to you?’