Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

In the morning it was as if it had never happened. He made no comment about my bruised and cut face except to suggest that I did not go out until my appearance had improved. His manner indicated that I was to blame, although he did not say so. Indeed, I wondered if it was in some way my fault. I was in total shock and I had no one to turn to. I had no friends. The nearest to that were the people I knew within the church and Robert was the head of our church, the man they all respected and looked up to.

For several weeks life went on just the way it had before. I already knew about bad dreams, and I came almost to think of that one brutal outburst as just a nightmare. The sex continued in just the same way it always had, except that I never again reached an orgasm with Robert, although I frequently pretended in order to appease him.

It was almost two months before he attacked me again. This time it was before demanding to have sex with me, almost as if it were some kind of foreplay.

As Robert’s drinking became more and more excessive – I discovered that there were bottles of alcohol, usually vodka, hidden in every room of our house – his physical abuse settled into a pattern. His worst drinking sessions were in bouts that lasted four or five days and occurred maybe every three weeks or so. It was amazing that he managed to continue to function so effectively, both at work and in bed, during those times, but he did. And it was then that he was at his most violent. However, he never again hit me in the face. Appearances are important for a clergyman, I suppose.

I had nowhere else to go and no money. I knew that Gran had left me everything including the house that had been our home but Robert had handled the settlement of the will and I had simply signed all the papers he put before me. That is the way I had been used to leading my life. I had never even had my own bank account. Most of our household bills were settled by Robert on account and the only money I ever had were the few pounds a week he handed me in cash.

Yet I planned and plotted ways to leave him. I even rang up a hostel for battered wives, which I had read about in the local paper, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to run to them. Then, a couple of weeks after I made that call, the telephone bill arrived. Routine itemising of calls had just begun. I had not given a thought to my panicky call becoming a matter of record and, although Robert was a meticulous man, pedantic about detail, I had no idea that he had taken to checking up on me.

That night he gave me the worst beating of all.

He told me he knew whom I had been phoning. He punched and kicked me until I begged for mercy, although I accepted by now he was capable of none. It was extraordinary to sit in the chapel on Sundays and listen to him preaching. He was a charismatic man. I think many of his congregation regarded him as a kind of stand-in for God. How could I tell them that to me he had become a devil?

I heard a rib crack as he kicked me. I heard it go almost before I felt the sharp searing pain. Afterwards he bound me tightly around the middle with strips torn from a sheet, and told me that the ache as my ribs healed would remind me of what would happen again and again if I ever betrayed him.

‘If you leave me I will find you,’ he said. ‘I will find you and I will bring the wrath of God upon you.’

Looking back, I think he was mad, I just didn’t realise it then. I believed every word he said, every threat he made.

And it was about three weeks after that particularly vicious attack that I met Carl in the Isabella Garden. All too often Robert was working, and drinking, at home in the manse. I was confined to barracks then, always fearing that something, almost anything, might spark one of his dreadful rages. But two afternoons a week he devoted to parish visits and on a third he took Bible classes in the chapel. It quickly became a habit that on those occasions I would meet Carl.

I lived for those afternoons. Often we met in the Isabella; all through that first winter after I had first encountered him, we regularly shivered together in the beautiful little wooded park. We never did make the Kandinsky exhibition at the Academy, but occasionally we visited local art galleries, or Kew Gardens, or went for a walk along the riverside. Cafés, restaurants and pubs seemed far too dangerous. Wherever we went I was always terrified that we would be seen together and that someone would tell Robert. My husband was well known in the area. That went with his job.

It was six months before I let Carl take me back to the small flat he rented off the Sheen Road. I had told him already about Robert and what he did to me. I suppose I had needed to and the release helped me to bear it. Carl begged me to leave my marriage, but it was not that easy. I didn’t know how to run. Since the death of my parents, and I could barely even remember them, I had only really known two people well before Carl – my gran and Robert – and they had both overwhelmed my entire being. Also my fear of Robert remained as great as ever. I believed that he would find me wherever I went. And I believed him capable of far greater violence than he had so far inflicted on me. I believed him capable of anything.

The first time I went to Carl’s flat – one large room in which he ate, slept, cooked and painted, with just a bathroom tagged on, but light and airy and beautifully kept – he fussed over me wonderfully, treated me to a lovely tea he had prepared and eventually kissed me, just once, and for the first time on the lips. That was all. Then he took me home, dropping me off a few streets away from the manse where I had left my bike chained to some railings.

The second time we made love. It began when he played me the song for the first time. The song ‘Suzanne’. It was then that he had first told me about his hippie parents and how little time they had for him when he was a kid, and that his earliest memory was of this one song, a classic from another age, a Sixties leftover, played again and again, a crackly LP on a not very good record player.

I had never even heard Leonard Cohen before. I wasn’t sure what I made of him at first.

Carl chuckled. ‘You’re in good company,’ he said. ‘I can only barely sing in tune myself and when I was in college they told me that was why I loved Cohen.’

None the less there was something mesmerising about the moody Sixties singer. And strangely soothing, too.

When Carl unfolded the sofa, which doubled as his bed, and we lay down together, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. It was a beautiful June afternoon and the sun poured in through the big bay window, embracing us in its brilliant warmth.

He undressed me very slowly and his eyes filled with tears when he saw my bruises. My body was almost always covered with them. I had got used to it. Carl was distraught. I think that was when I first began really to love him. He covered my poor battered body with kisses. I had never known such tenderness. My gran had loved me and been kind to me, but never tender. Robert did not know the meaning of the word except from the pulpit. Maybe I thought that all men were at best coldly efficient in bed and at worst brutal. My only experience was with the monster I had married. Carl was so gentle.

He stroked me and kissed me in every secret place, and all the while he whispered softly and repeatedly the chorus of ‘Suzanne’: