Pat Barker - Double Vision

There was great insight into the small rituals of middle-aged female loneliness — remarkable in a young man. Insight, yes. But compassion? Stephen looked back at the description of James noticing the shorter skirt, the brown spots on the back of Andrea’s hand, the leaking of lipstick into the lines around her mouth. Peter was inhabiting James’s mind with disconcerting ease.

The second story, ‘The Odd Job Man’, was about a widow who employs a man to do the small jobs around the house that she’d always relied on her husband to do in the past. There are a great many odd jobs to be done — it seems no sooner has Reggie (a rare false note) mended one thing than another breaks down. Eventually Reggie declares his passion, and she refuses him, saying she’s not over her husband’s death. The next morning, setting off for work, she finds her husband’s decomposed body on the doorstep with a note, saying, ‘What’s he got that I haven’t got?’

Christ . Stephen put the book down. That was one story he wouldn’t be reading twice. Again the emphasis on female helplessness, the detailed observation that always implied empathy, and yet, somehow, mysteriously failed to deliver it. The stories kept slipping into sympathy with the predatory behaviour they attempted to analyse. There was no moral centre. That was Stephen’s final verdict, and it was this ambiguity in the narrator’s attitude to predator and prey, rather than the actual events, that made the stories so unsettling.

He read them over breakfast. They recurred throughout the morning in that second life of fiction that generally confirms the first impression, though in this case his estimate of the skill involved went up. It was the setting that gave the writing such authority. The smells on the landings, semen, socks and stew; the sour smell of chicken shit from the man trusted to work on the farm; the smell of dried urine from the cells of inveterate bedwetters; the grey cruds of chewing gum stuck to the undersides of the top bunk; the iron taste of the mist that hangs over the prison, the only tangible evidence that there is a world outside.

Of course, it’s amazing what research could do to suggest that first-hand experience was being used. Saul Bellow wrote Henderson the Rain King without setting foot in Africa.

But that was Saul Bellow.

He left the book lying on the coffee table in front of the fire, where that evening Justine found it. She said nothing, but curled up on the sofa to read, a fuzz of golden hair visible under the T-shirt, which was the only garment she wore. He watched her brow furrow in that elusive expression of pain that was, he realized suddenly, the thing he found most erotic about her. She was so strong, so full of energy and hope. What did it say about him that it was her capacity to feel pain that aroused him?

She closed the book with a snap. ‘Thank God I did Science.’

‘They’re good, don’t you think?’

He assumed she’d been reading Peter’s stories, and she didn’t contradict him. ‘They’re horrible.’

She was quiet for a while. At last he went across to her and held out his arms as one does to a sulky child, and she came into them and cried. Rubbing her shoulders, he tried not to get excited by the smell of their earlier love-making and to focus simply on consoling her, but she pushed him away. ‘How long have you known about me and Peter?’

‘Kate mentioned it.’

‘Kate Frobisher?’

‘Yes.’

‘How the hell does she know?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps she saw you together.’

She was wiping her eyes fiercely, her chest too tight to support her voice. ‘Typical. You can’t do anything in this sodding place without being spied on.’

‘I’m sure she wasn’t spying. Did your father know?’

‘Of course he did.’

‘Did he approve?’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

She tried to stare him out and failed. ‘Actually, Dad was a bit of a hypocrite about it. You know, he belongs to this Fresh Start initiative that tries to help people who’ve just been released from prison? That’s how he met Peter. Years ago, this is, and then he showed up again last summer and asked if he could stay for a few weeks. And as long as he was just doing the garden, it was fine, great, we were all doing this great Christian thing, but then I started going out with him — and that was a bit different.’

‘So he was actually living with you?’

‘Yeah, for a few weeks.’

‘And you fell in love with him.’

‘He made the running, not me.’

‘You’d be still a child the first time you met?’

‘Yeah. Which is what you think I still am. I don’t know what that makes you .’

‘Of course I don’t think you’re a child. C’mon, don’t take it out on me, I’m only trying to help.’

‘Sorry.’ She smiled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. He got up and found her some tissues.

‘What was he in for?’

‘I don’t know. Except it wasn’t sex offences, because Dad said he couldn’t take those, not with me in the house.’

‘He didn’t tell you?’

‘Peter or Dad?’

‘Peter.’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t that surprise you?’

‘No, and it wouldn’t surprise you either if you knew Peter.’

‘I don’t see how you can have a relationship with somebody and not tell them something like that.’

‘Don’t you?’ Her mouth was pursed as if she’d been sucking lemons. ‘He didn’t. He didn’t talk about the past much and when he did… I learnt to avoid the subject.’

‘Why?’

‘Because there was never any depth. It was always one-layer thin. You could poke your finger through it — and I didn’t want to because I didn’t want to know what was on the other side. But I did think one day…’ She was struggling for composure. ‘When we went out — that night, the night we finished — I thought it was going to happen, I thought he was going to tell me, because he obviously had something on his mind. Instead of that, he cut my head off.’ An attempt at a laugh. ‘Chalk it up to experience, I suppose.’

‘Was he cruel?’

‘I don’t know.’ She was staring into the darkness beyond the ring of firelight. ‘I don’t know if cruel’s the right word.’

‘They’re cruel stories.’

‘Yes, but he isn’t James. He certainly isn’t Reggie.’

‘He created them.’

She shrugged.

‘Did he hurt you?’

‘Of course he did.’

‘I mean physically.’

‘You mean was he violent? Oh, for God’s sake, do you think I’d put up with that?’

‘Some women do.’

‘Not me.’

He could sense that in her. ‘So how?’

‘I don’t know. It was… like everything was turned against you. Sometimes I’d open my eyes when we were making love and he’d be just staring at me and… It felt like being an insect on the end of a pin…’ Unexpectedly, she chuckled. ‘You know, not coming, but going. But I was in love with him. None of it mattered. And I thought it was going really well, and then… chop .’

‘Do you think your father had talked to him?’

‘No, I don’t think so. If he went in for that kind of heavy-handed father stuff, he’d be talking to you . No, I think Peter always intended it to be just for the summer. Because I was going to university, I think he thought it was limited, off I’d go, and that’d be that. Only I got ill, and suddenly there was no obvious end-point. I think he was afraid of saying too much.’ A pause. ‘He did love me.’

‘Are you sure?’

Again that baffled, groping look. ‘No.’

‘Would you have wanted it to go on?’

‘Yes.’