Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

It was a dream, however, that had lost its definitive clarity on the afternoon fi ve years ago when her fifth form biology mistress had invited her to tea and, along with the cake and scones and clotted cream and strawberry jam, had offered seduction, rich, dark, and mysterious. For a while on the bed in that cottage near the Thames, Rosalyn had felt the contradictory powers of terror and ecstasy driving the blood through her veins. But as the other woman murmured and kissed and explored and caressed, soon enough fear gave way to arousal, which prepared her body for its most acute delight. She hovered on the cutting edge of pain and pleasure. And when pleasure finally took her, she was unprepared for the power of its accompanying joy.

No man had ever been an intimate part of her life since that moment. And no man had ever been as devoted, as loving and concerned as was Melinda. So it had seemed like such a reasonable request, really, that she should tell her parents, coming forward with pride instead of dissembling through paralysis and fear.

“Lesbian,” Melinda had said, enunciating each syllable with especial care. “Lesbian, lesbian. It doesn’t mean leper.”

Entwined in bed one night with Melinda’s arms round her and Melinda’s slender, splendid, knowing fingers making her body ache with increasing desire, she had made the promise. And she’d just spent the last thirty-two hours at home in Oxford, living through the consequences. She was exhausted.

At the top floor, she paused in front of her door, groping in the pocket of her jeans for the key. It was time for formal dinner-she’d missed the earlier meal-and although she gave a moment’s thought to donning her academic gown and joining the others for what was left of the meal, she dismissed the idea. She didn’t feel like seeing or talking to anyone.

For that reason primarily, when she opened the door, her spirits drooped further. Melinda was coming across the room. She looked rested and lovely, and her thick sienna hair had been recently washed, for it lay round her face in a wavy mass of natural curls. Rosalyn noted immediately that Melinda wasn’t dressed in her usual garb of mid-calf skirt, boots, pullover, and scarf. Instead, she wore white: wool trousers, cowl-necked sweater, and a long gauzy coat that reached just above her ankles. She looked as if she had dressed for celebration. Indeed, she looked disturbingly bridal.

“You’re back,” she said, coming to Rosalyn’s side and grasping her hand as she brushed a kiss across her cheek. “How did it go? Did Mum have apoplexy? Was Dad rushed to hospital clutching weakly at his chest? Did they shriek out dyke or just settle for pervert ? Come on. Tell me. How did it go?”

Rosalyn slipped the haversack from her shoulders and dropped it to the floor. She found that her head was throbbing, and she couldn’t remember exactly when it had begun to do so. “It went,” she said.

“That’s it? No tantrums? No ‘How could you do this to your family’? No bitter accusations? No asking what you think granny and the aunts are going to say?”

Rosalyn tried to block from her mind the memory of her mother’s face and the look of confusion that had pinched her features. She wanted to forget the sadness in her father’s eyes, but more than that she longed to dismiss the guilt that accompanied her realisation of how her parents both were struggling to dismiss their own feelings in the matter, in the process making her feel only so much worse.

“I should think it was quite a scene between you,” Melinda was saying with a knowing smile. “Lots of weeping, lots of hair pulling, lots of gnashing of teeth, the requisite blame, not to mention the predictions of hell-fi re and damnation. The typical middle-class thing. Poor darling, did they abuse you?”

Melinda, Rosalyn knew, had told her own family when she was seventeen in a matter-offact, take-it-or-leave-it announcement so typical of her, made during Christmas dinner, sometime between the crackers and the pudding. Rosalyn had heard the story often enough: “Oh, by the way, I’m gay if anyone’s particularly interested.” They hadn’t been. But that was the sort of family Melinda had. So she couldn’t imagine what it was like to be the only child of parents who dreamed among other things of a son-in-law and grandchildren and the fragile line of a family continuing into the future for just a bit longer.

“Did your mum push every guilt button there is? She probably did, and I hope you expected it. I did tell you how to answer when she trotted out the ‘what about us’ line, didn’t I? And if you used it properly, then she must have-”

“I really don’t want to talk about it, Mel,” Rosalyn said. She knelt on the fl oor, unzipped the haversack, and began unpacking it. Her mother’s “goodies from home” she set to one side.

“They really must have gone after you, then. I told you to let me go with you. Why didn’t you let me? I could have held my own with both of your parents.” She squatted next to Rosalyn. She smelled fresh and clean. “They didn’t…Ros, they didn’t get physical with you, did they? God, your dad didn’t hit you?”

“Of course not. Look, I just don’t want to talk about it. That’s it, all right? It’s nothing more than that.”

Melinda rested back on her heels. She shoved a thick mass of hair behind one ear. She said, “You’re sorry you did it, aren’t you? I can tell.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. It had to be done, but you were hoping you could avoid it forever. You were hoping they’d just eventually think you’d become an old maid, weren’t you? You didn’t want to take a stand. You didn’t want to come out.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Or maybe you’ve been hoping to take the cure. Wake up some morning and whoopee, you’re straight. Shove Melinda out of bed and make room for some bloke. Mum and Dad wouldn’t ever know anything then.”

Rosalyn looked up. She could see the bright shining in Melinda’s eyes and the high gloss of colour in her cheeks. It always amazed her that someone so clever and beautiful could also be someone so unsure and afraid.

She said, “I’m not planning on leaving you, Mel.”

“You’d like a man, wouldn’t you?” Melinda said. “If you could have one. If you could go straight. You’d like it. You’d prefer it. Wouldn’t you?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Rosalyn asked. She felt terribly weary.

Melinda laughed. The sound was high and giddy. “Men have only one use and we don’t even need them for that any longer. Just fi nd a donor and inseminate yourself at home in the loo. They’re doing it, you know. I read about it somewhere. In a few more centuries, we’ll be generating sperm in laboratories and men as we know them will be completely extinct.”

Rosalyn knew it was wiser to say nothing when Melinda felt the spectre of abandonment hovering round her too closely. But she was tired. She was disheartened. She had just endured a marathon session of guilt with her parents largely to please her lover, and she was feeling as most people feel when they have been manipulated into acting in a fashion they might otherwise eschew: resentful. So she replied, against her better judgement:

“I don’t hate men, Melinda. I never have. If you do, that’s your problem. But it’s not one of mine.”

“Oh, they’re peachy, men are. They’re real bricks, the lot of them.” Melinda got to her feet and went to Rosalyn’s desk. From it she took a bright orange piece of paper, waved it, and said, “These are all over the University today. I saved one for you. This is what men are all about, Ros. Take a look if you like them so much.”

“What is it?”

“Just look.”

Rosalyn pushed herself to her feet, and, rubbing her shoulders where the haversack had dug into them, she took the piece of paper from Melinda. It was a hand-out, she saw. And then she saw the name in large black letters underneath a grainy photograph: Elena Weaver . And then another word: Murdered .