A Deep Deceit

Eight

I was certain it would be a relief to rid myself of the burden I had carried for so long. And as I walked through the Cornish seaside town I had grown to love so much, on my way to confront the past at last, irrevocably, my thoughts turned, as they so often did, to how it had begun.

Poor Gran. All she had ever wanted was to protect me, to do her best for me. When she arranged for me to marry Robert Foster she believed she had found somebody who would love and continue to protect me just as she had done. And, of course, it did not occur to her to doubt a man of God.

Until well after the wedding I suppose I never doubted him either. I was bewildered, but not afraid. I had never had reason to be afraid of those close to me – I suppose there had only ever been Gran, really, and I expected, as a matter of course, kindness from both a husband and a clergyman. The fact that I had barely ever been alone with Robert did not particularly concern me at the time. Maybe I thought that was normal for a bride and I suppose it had been once in a bygone age. I read a lot of Jane Austen in those days and had always suspected that I might have been more at home in her time than my own. I told myself that what was happening to me was all rather romantic. I knew Robert Foster only in the way Gran presented him to me – as an intelligent and apparently kindly man, a cleric respected and revered by his congregation. But I quickly found out how wrong I was – certainly about his kindness.

When we were married in Robert’s church, with what seemed like the entire congregation gathered there, I did feel some of Gran’s pride in spite of the sense of unreality about it all. The music was rousing, people said I looked beautiful. There was something splendid about the occasion and, unused to being the centre of attention, I found I quite liked it.

My wedding night – spent in the rectory that was to be my home because Robert did not have time for a honeymoon – was painful and difficult. I knew so little about sex and had had no experience. It went without saying that I was a virgin. I hadn’t even known exactly what would happen – or how, but Robert had been patient as he could, and had allowed me to take my time, and I suppose I had expected pain. It was not until much later that I learned that, had there been more love, more arousal, rather than a clinical kind of forbearance, I might have experienced no pain at all.

After the wedding he was always busy during the day. And I realised early on that while he undoubtedly worked hard he also drank heavily, although he contrived only very rarely to appear even slightly drunk and never in public. He managed to maintain the façade of being the perfect chapel cleric in an order strongly opposed to alcohol. Extraordinary, really. I had even heard him preach from the pulpit about the evils of drink. Maybe he believed what he said, I don’t know. In a curious kind of way he had good reason to, he must have known what it did to him. Maybe that gave him a crisis of conscience – although he gave no sign of having any kind of conscience at all. I certainly believed in the evils of drink by the time Robert Foster had finished with me.

Unlike most clergymen, he preferred me not to get involved in his church-work, explaining to his congregation that I was not strong enough to be a traditional pastor’s wife. Instead, I stayed in the big, ugly old Victorian manse that was our home, twiddling my thumbs and cooking his evening meal. After that he continued working or reading in his study while I sat alone in the living room. Then he would summon me to bed – and that truly was the way it was. There was always a coldness about Robert. He never expressed any love towards me, never showed any warmth, but he was an ardent and accomplished lover, and our lovemaking was at first the high point of my long dull days. To begin with, briefly, he had indeed been a surprisingly good lover, technically at any rate. He knew how to excite a woman if he cared to do so. On a good night his knowledge and expertise even made up, at least partially, for his eternal coldness. I learned to relax my body and to switch off my mind against the emotional emptiness I was somehow so aware of, in spite of my inexperience, and to enjoy the sheer physical sensation.

Eventually I achieved my first orgasm and I think that was when I maybe even began to fall in love with Robert a little. I had no way of knowing that there could ever be more. For his part he seemed to take almost a kind of pride in bringing me so easily to a climax. He once told me he thought it was what gave man the most power of all over woman.

But after Gran died things began to change for the worse. Towards the end of her life Robert allowed me to bring her into the manse and nurse her there. Looking back, I think Gran was one of the few people in the world Robert might have been genuinely fond of – if he was indeed capable at all of any depth of human feeling. Anyway, I was grateful to him for that if nothing else. Gran was weak and terribly sick in the flesh but indomitable in the mind to the end. I loved her to pieces and so hated to see her suffer, but took comfort that I was with her, which I knew would be all that she would wish for, and that she remained without any fear of death. Looking after her filled my days, but they seemed all the more empty when Gran finally left us. And it was then that the true brutality of the man I had married began to show itself.

Gran had been dead for about three weeks when Robert hit me for the first time. It was in bed. And what he did seemed to me to be the ultimate cruelty. I had yet to learn that it was merely the beginning.

It was just like the nightmare that had continued to plague me, except that I could see his face all right and the cruel glint in his eye. We had sex as we did almost every night and although I suspected from his clumsy movements, a certain slowness in his speech and a slight glaze to his eyes that he had been drinking particularly heavily, as ever it did not affect his sexual appetite nor his ability to function. He knew where to touch me, how to excite me, how to make me cry out for more, but he did so, as always, in the cold, detached but efficient way that I had grown used to, almost as if he were conducting a biological experiment. On this terrible night he brought me to orgasm and, as I felt the pleasure overwhelm me, he suddenly raised his right hand and hit me hard across the mouth. The dream had always kept it so vivid for me, my lip cut open, tasting my own blood, then being punched in the chest, my body reeling in confusion.

Years had passed, my life had changed beyond recognition, yet as I turned my back on the harbour I loved so much, the seagulls wheeling above my head, I could still feel the dreadful pain and the humiliation of it.

He had grasped my right arm and forced it back on the pillows at an angle so agonising that I believed my wrist would break. All the time I was aware of his excitement rising to a level beyond anything I had felt in him before. He kept on hitting me as he began to come and I had instinctively known that it was the most extreme orgasm he had ever had with me. By the time he had finished I felt like a punchbag.

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’:

I am English. I was entranced, but also vaguely embarrassed. ‘I don’t think my body is very perfect,’ I murmured.

‘It is to me,’ he said. And he was deadly serious. Indeed, it seemed as if there was not a square inch of me that he did not touch lightly with his fingers or brush with his lips. And all the time his eyes were fixed upon me in wonderment, as if I were some kind of work of art, as if he truly did find me quite perfect.

I had never wanted to reject him, but I had not been sure that I would be able to respond. I did, though. When he slipped into me I felt my own desire rise to meet his almost instantly. He brought me to orgasm on that very first occasion and afterwards we cried in each other’s arms. Then he led me into his tiny bathroom and we stood under the shower together while he washed me and then himself, just as he always would throughout our life together. I found it extraordinarily moving.

Robert did not seem to suspect anything. Perhaps he was too stupefied by drink. Certainly as long as I cleaned his house, was present to cook his meals and meekly allowed him to violate my body, he didn’t seem to care what I did. Once I had slept with Carl the loveless violent sex with Robert became all the more abhorrent to me. I was twenty-one years old then. My adulthood was only just beginning and yet I felt I was trapped for ever. The beatings, too, seemed worse now that I had someone who appeared to feel them as much as I did.

There came a time when I decided that I would, could, take no more.