Read Online Sin by Josephine Hart - Free Book Online

lay on the floor, and he moved over me on all fours and grabbed my hair. As though to eat it. And then we separated and stood at either end of the narrow room. An image of my father flew across my sodden mind. And was lost. For I remembered that before I was even born it had been too late for us. The old anger crushed the pain that rose in me. And I acknowledged that it was now too late for everything.
    My eyes beat Charles down and broke his resistance, as he walked, hypnotised, towards me again.
    I took Elizabeth’s pristine black shoe and licked the heel. I gave it to him. And quietly lay down. My eyes fixed on his face above me. Slowly he traced down the lines of my body with the gleaming heel of Elizabeth’s shoe. Then he hesitated. I raised my back from the floor, for I saw the fear in his eyes. I wished to give him courage. Carefully, as though in a trance, he did what I wanted. And for the first time I wept for what I had become. Falling further away from myself, trailing Charles in his terror and delight towards the hidden face in the rock, which, unknowingly, he had begun to carve.
    It was as I believed it would be. Elizabeth lay defeated beneath her black slip. Which I would not let him remove. A line long forgotten, came back to me. Je est un autre.
    I bathed and dressed—in Ruth’s clothes. We drove to the hospital in silence. I kissed my mother. She was as noble in grief as one would have expected. Elizabeth opened her arms to me, held me tight and consoled me. Perhaps an acknowledgement that he was my father, my real father. And not hers. Too delicate perhaps, to mention it.
    Charles sat with my mother, held her hand and did not look at me. Finally, we all left for Lexington. Charles drove us. The widow, and two wives. One of them his.
    An adult family mourning its patriarch is not stricken by grief so much as grieving. Even the sudden death of the old has about it the knowledge that it was foreshadowed.
    As I stood in church my sadness was pierced by the light of an endlessly playing internal film of Charles and me. And of our bodies. I looked at Charles secretly, intensely. Hadn’t Dominick once told me that gazing at certain objects alters their composition? Are you the same man, Charles? Am I the same woman? Is there a persistent self? Somewhere?
    I stood beside Dominick, who was exhausted after his night flight from America. And thought of the lie of the body and of the mind.
    At dinner my mother told us of her decision to stay on at Lexington. “This is where I spent my life with him. This is where I feel closest to him. Remember, John spent the week in London for many years, only coming home at weekends. I would love to see you all at weekends. Yes, that would be lovely. You know what joy the children bring me … brought us.”
    We knew her to be well cared for by Alice and Ben, who had been with us for years. With promises to carry on “coming home” for weekends, we left Lexington. Dominick went back to America for another week. He would return with William. We had considered a sudden trip back to bury “Grandpa” too traumatic for William, who had stayed with his grandparents. Elizabeth and Charles left for Frimton.
    I waited in London. It was Charles’s move next.

TWENTY
----
    Two days later his face appeared on the intercom screen. Distorted, almost disguised as himself, he seemed like a robot on a grey canvas. Then he stood framed in the doorway.
    â€œI have a key, you know. For the main door. And for … Elizabeth’s …”
    â€œStudio?”
    â€œYes. Elizabeth is in Frimton. Ruth, I won’t demean what happened between us with apologies or explanations. It’s now a fact of both our lives.”
    I nodded.
    â€œRuth, I have thought a great deal about what I am going to say to you.”
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œIt was essential to think, Ruth. These are grave matters.”
    â€œAnd we have full knowledge. But