Elizabeth Day - Scissors, Paper, Stone

Another tinkle of forced laughter.

‘Anyway, Anne, I should let you get on if you’re driving. Did you see Charlotte at the hospital?’

‘Yes, she came after work. Turned up late, obviously.’

‘Oh . . . well. That was nice of her to make the effort.’

‘Mmm,’ said Anne, non-committally. ‘I think she had a nice holiday in France with the man, although she never really tells me anything.’

‘Well, it’s a tricky one, isn’t it, Anne?’ Janet cleared her throat, preparing to take a leap into dangerous territory. ‘Perhaps she feels you might not approve.’

‘I don’t approve of him. He’s married, for goodness sake.’

‘I thought he was separated?’

‘Separated, maybe, but certainly not divorced from what I can make out.’

‘Well, Anne, these things do take time, after all.’

‘How would you know?’

There was a small, offended pause.

‘Sorry, Janet. I’m rather at the end of my tether at the moment.’

‘Of course,’ she said, the words sounding strangulated. ‘Well, look after yourself, Anne, and I’ll call tomorrow.’

‘Thank you. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

Janet hung up and Anne sat still for several minutes, hands on the steering wheel in a precise ten to two position, glaring at the traffic jam in front of her. Then, after a few minutes, she turned on the radio and rotated the volume dial until it was almost too loud to bear.

Anne; Charles

So Charles and Anne became an item, inevitably, irreversibly and without much questioning on either side. Anne had never slept with anyone before, had never even had a boyfriend, and was always mildly astonished if a man expressed that sort of sexual interest in her. It hadn’t really crossed her mind that her friendships with boys could be misinterpreted and this made for several uncomfortable exchanges when news of her alliance with Charles trickled down through the college hierarchies.

‘But I thought you liked me,’ said a second-year undergraduate called Fred, with meek desperation. Anne could not conceal her bafflement.

‘Fred, we’re friends,’ she said, shaking her head at the sudden impossibility of it all. ‘Can’t we just be good friends?’

She couldn’t understand why her relations with men were suddenly constrained, punctuated by pockets of conversational difficulty and unease. Charles laughed at her when she told him.

‘Can you really not see the effect you have on men?’

‘But I’ve only ever been nice to them,’ she protested, feebly.

‘That’s the problem,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be too nice. It’s easy to misinterpret.’

For the first few weeks, being with Charles had been a glorious bubble of shared experience – of kissing and hand-holding and staring meaningfully at each other across a restaurant table; of buying roses and eating sticky buns for tea-time; of sitting next to each other in lectures and giggling under their breath at some inexplicable mutual joke. The sex, when it came, had been perfectly nice. It had not been the cataclysmic cymbal-clash that Anne had secretly anticipated for years. Nor had it been a painful, brutal semi-disaster of fumbling and not-quite-knowing. It had been a fleshy clasping of two bodies, a swift exchange of fluids, a brief glimpse of half-shut eyes and then, for a few seconds afterwards, a sense of tenderness, of having achieved a closeness that seemed secret from the rest of the world. He enjoyed it more than she did, if enjoy was the word. He seemed to view it as some sort of necessity or duty: a task to be performed to his best ability, without much concern for the pleasure it could bring the other person.

But, at last, Anne felt she had gained access to a tantalising adult existence that had only ever been hinted at. She assumed that other people had sex just like they did, the same physical bargain struck swiftly under the blankets. She never questioned Charles, given that he seemed so much more experienced than her. He knew what to do. She let him get on with it.

As if to compensate for the lack of physical passion, she became gently obsessed instead with the trace and curve of his body: the downy plump cushion of his earlobe, the unexpectedly ticklish patch behind his knee, the twisted purple of veins running down his forearm. She liked to kiss him awake in the mornings, starting at the tip of his forehead and running down past the fragile skein of his eyelids, meeting his lips at the last moment, the exhalation of his breath metallic against her tongue.

‘Morning,’ he would say, blue eyes lazily opening.

Frieda was unconvinced and sulky about the burgeoning relationship. ‘You spend all your time together,’ she said at dinner in hall one evening. ‘I never see you any more.’

Anne found she had no answer to this and no desire to give one. It was true that she increasingly spent as much of the day with Charles as possible, returning to Newnham only when she had to, swaying into bed with a sort of tired happiness. She could not understand Frieda’s angst or the constant background hum of her friend’s strained anxiety. Nothing in Anne’s life had ever caused her to question good fortune: it was simply there to be taken for granted and not to be worried about or overly analysed. Later, she would look back at her earlier self and be astonished by how guileless she had been, how improbably arrogant to assume that contentedness was a gift that everyone was given. She had been sheltered all of her life. By her parents, her privilege, her cleverness and her beauty.

Because although she liked to believe she never thought about it, Anne knew instinctively she was beautiful. She knew it, and yet she had no idea how to deploy it, how to use it to get what she most desired or how to subtly craft it into a knowing sort of charm. At nineteen, Anne was a girl-woman. Her sophistication was a pretence; her maturity unfinished. She was an innocent with the looks of an older woman, ill-equipped to recognise her own fatal power. She found herself on the edges of situations that she did not fully understand – with Fred, with countless other men who felt she led them on with her teasing, unwitting flirtation. Yet she was not courageous enough to admit the shortfall of her knowledge. And once she was able to, she found that she was too trapped to do anything about it.

At the start of her relationship with Charles, she ignored any faint intimations of disquietude, pushing them to the far corners of her mind and telling herself not to be so ridiculous. She spent the days in a library haze, surrounded by the open pages of books, making half-hearted notes underneath the strip-lighting of the History faculty. At nights, she would occasionally sneak him into her room to stay over, squashed into the rickety single bed, his feet barely covered by the sheets.

Once, she had woken up as the sun was creeping in through the curtain crack to find that he was no longer beside her. She put on her dressing gown and tiptoed across the uncarpeted floorboards, opening the door a crack in case the porter discovered she was entertaining an illicit male guest. She peered up and down the corridor but Charles wasn’t there. Then she heard the gentle rumble of his laughter. It was coming from Frieda’s room. She knocked and heard a sudden scrabbling and the sounds of Frieda shushing briskly. The door opened.

‘Anne,’ said Frieda, her face impassive. She was wearing a silk nightgown over a grey cashmere cardigan pulled tight around her breasts. Her hair, slick and dark, fell straight to her shoulders. Her angular face seemed to be faintly powdered and there was a smudged bruise of red lipstick on her mouth, despite it being just past seven in the morning. ‘Come in.’ Anne had immediately felt out of place in her dressing gown and thick blue pyjamas and her uncombed tangle of hair.