Faithless Read online

  About the Book

  Set between India and England, Faithless is the story of Cressida, a writer and translator, and her consuming love for Max, an enigmatic older writer – and married man.

  Cressida’s passion for Max engulfs her from the first giddy rush of sensation when she is eighteen and meets him in the mountains of southern India. It is a desire so potent it delivers great stunning blows to her heart. And yet she can share it with almost no one.

  Then Cressida meets Leo, and she is forced to choose: between a life of passion or a desire for some peace of mind; between her romantic idealism and the possibility of a steadier, attainable happiness.

  As the years unfold with both these men, a fragile young child, Flora, also finds her way into Cressida’s life and heart, and it is Flora who forces Cressida to confront her own capacity for love and deception, and to accept the compromises life forces on us; the lies we tell in service of those things we cannot live without.

  Faithless is a passionate love story and a profound reflection on the nuances of attachment, the nature of desire, the different connections and relationships that sustain us, and the ways that we deceive ourselves and others in the hope that, finally, we can reach stumblingly towards one another.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Faithless

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Alice Nelson

  Imprint

  Read More at Penguin Books Australia

  For Barbara Hewson-Bower

  I think, if you have lived through a war or have made your home in a country not your own, or if you’ve learned to love one man, then your life is a story.

  If you love a man who’s not your husband, your life becomes the story everyone else tells.

  Anne Michaels

  Writing is a questionable business.

  W. G. Sebald

  Even in the summertime the sea here glistens a chill, leaden blue, the late afternoon shadows darkening the water. The gloaming, they call this hour. Though that is altogether too mild and warm a word for this slow leaching of light. It’s a golden word, something liquid and magical about it. Something fey and friendly. In Suffolk the sky is grey and close, the light salt-washed and cold. The sea today is flat, its surface barely marred by wind. No sign of what swells and moves beneath it. No pealing bells from Dunwich’s famous drowned churches. No sound at all but the quiet lapping of the waves against the shingle beach.

  Further up the shore Flora crouches by the water’s edge, her hands full of small stones. Her shoulder blades move under her dress like tiny wings. She is a child who has never seen the sea. If there is fear of it, or wonder, none of this is visible. Only a quiet watchfulness. Sometimes she cries out at night, high, warbling calls that startle her out of sleep. I keep the door between our bedrooms open so that I can listen out for her, but she never calls for me. If I go to her she gazes up as if from a great depth; as if she has been somewhere very far away and it costs her enormous effort to return. There is something unfocused and full of terror in her eyes in those moments and I think perhaps she does not recognise me when I come to sit beside her. She rarely cried when she was a baby. Perhaps she knew, even then, that crying would not get her anywhere.

  The small waves creep further up the shoreline and Flora steps hastily back beyond the water’s reach. A lone seabird wheels and calls above her, but she doesn’t turn her face to look up. In the weak sunlight, her pale hair looks almost translucent. It’s so long now, reaching nearly all the way down her back, but I don’t dare to ask her if I can trim it. If I narrow my eyes, she is just a shadow. A small shimmering smear at the sea’s edge. Some ocean sprite. A changeling child. Which she is, in some ways.

  Sometimes, Max, I imagine that I see you in her. Not in the sense of any physical inheritance, but a fleeting essence. Something wary and remote. Haunted, you might say. Though her ghosts are not yours.

  You wrote once that you did not believe in time, but in spaces that interlocked according to a higher order of stereometry and between which the living and the dead could move back and forth at will. A kind of ghostly curtain, perhaps. It was those of us who were still alive who might appear the more unreal in the eyes of the dead, you said. Only rarely, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, were mortals visible to those who had slipped to the other side. I look at Flora’s tiny silhouette by the sea’s edge, staring at the horizon in a vacant reverie. Just one step and it seems she might slip quietly beneath the water.

  Can you see her from wherever you are now? Can you see me, sitting here on the hard stones of the shingle beach, my arms wrapped around my knees, my linen coat too light for the strange chill of the autumn afternoon? Forty-one this year, almost the same age you were when we first met. Too thin, a few strands of white in my hair, a little greyness creeping into the skin. ‘She remains in possession of her formidable beauty,’ an earnest journalist wrote rather obsequiously in a magazine profile last summer. As if beauty were something that might be carelessly misplaced and I should be commended for holding onto mine, however diminished. Still, a little thrill of satisfaction on reading that line, a little quiver of vanity. Formidable, though. It hardly seems the right word. My shaking hands, my pounding heart.

  You gave me a stone from this beach, pale blue and perfectly oval. A parting gift, pressed into my hand like a coin or a key. We are so accustomed to leave-takings, you and I. So many departures and farewells, trains rolling out of station after station. India, London, Suffolk. I can never stand on a railway platform without a pang of remembered desolation, a sharp little stab of abandonment. Your hand on the glass of the window, your figure disappearing into the crowd, hurrying back into your real life. Sometimes it felt that I was always watching you walk away, Max. That even when I held you in my arms you were on the brink of departure, a part of you poised to go. I remember once thinking desperately, as I lay in bed watching you dress to leave, that if you were to die, if you were to no longer be in the world, then perhaps eventually it would be less painful than this. That then I could turn you into a memory, make you become the cleanly grieved past rather than a wound pressed on again and again. Something as simple as sorrow would surely be easier to withstand than this welter of pain and pathos and jealousy and yearning. But now you are gone and I cannot bear it. I cannot bear it. Since I have been in Dunwich, the reverse haunting you wrote of has come to seem entirely possible; our solid earthly lives rendered insubstantial and precarious. Because it is you, Max, dead these last three weeks, who seems the most potent of any of us.

  So many times, over the years, in the minutes after you left me, I would imagine that you might return. A door banging or the sound of footsteps in the hall and I would be sure for a moment that, halfway down the stairs, or reaching the corner of the street, you had changed your mind and come back. That you had not been able to leave me.

  How pitiful I make myself sound, how passive and lovelorn. A woman waiting. But still, my hopefulness would hang in the air, as potent as the scent of you on my pillow. It was a hopefulness that always had something sickening and desolate about it, because I knew it was false. Even as you sat on the edge of the bed to tie your shoes, you had already left me. Your mind was already on the journey ahead, the journey home. Home. Strange how that one small word, spoken by you, always held the power to turn me queasy with loss. It was a word that slammed a door in my face.

  Long ago in Holland, in homes where there had been a death, it was customary for all paintings depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field to be covered. This was so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be
distracted by a last glimpse of the world it was leaving forever and refuse to depart. The ambush of longing. The stubbornness of desire. Sometimes I think that we never stop wanting what we can’t have. Did you glance back, Max? Did you want to stay? Even for a moment, did you want to stay with me?

  The legends here in Dunwich are all of grand losses and epic disappearances. A whole city swallowed by the sea. A merchant town, a trading town, second only to London in the Middle Ages, full of churches, convents, monasteries. Slowly, year after year, the city slipped into the sea. The storm tides, the crumbling cliff face, the relentless incursions of the ocean. Every kind of defence was built; stones and sand shovelled away furiously, elaborate sea walls constructed and reinforced. But none of it was any good and the townspeople were forced to retreat inland, their city sleeping under the water like a lost Atlantis. Now the town is just a placid seaside village; a handful of shops, tea rooms, a gloomy pub. There is a little museum on the main street with detailed maps of all that has been lost, tales of tempests and floods, careful inventories of what the sea has taken. And the many ghoulish legends; graveyards sliding into the ocean along with the churches, fragments of bone scattered among the smooth stones of the shingle beach. And the old story about the sound of church bells pealing beneath the waves on stormy nights. I wonder if that’s what drew you here, the sense of living in a place only precariously lodged. Where everything important is hidden below the surface.

  We swam here, you and I. It seems impossible to imagine, but we floated on our backs together one summer, and then sat in the shadow of the cliffs rising sharply up from the beach. Such a strange, sultry August day it was, the sky high and scrolled with clouds, a shimmer of heat above the water. It didn’t feel like England to me at all, though I knew England so little in those days. There was a lightsomeness I sensed in you that made me think of those first days in the gardens at Rajakkad.

  ‘I envy you, Cressida, your inviolable Rajakkad,’ you said when I told you this. Your hand was resting on my waist, your wet hair falling across your forehead. ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to fully belong to a place like that.’

  I had never felt that I fully belonged to India; I only ever lived on its edges. And while it was true that I loved my father’s old coffee plantation in Tamil Nadu, my connection to the place I had grown up in was fraught and often painful. A certain order had been broken apart when my father died and my mother turned the estate into a hotel. Now when I went back to India there was the strange sensation of being a guest, in the same way that my life in England still had the uncertain feeling of an extended holiday. But I didn’t say this to you. Instead I asked you where it was in the world that you felt yourself most at home. Was there a particular place, a stretch of coast or view from a window that you had taken into yourself?

  You thought about this for a moment. ‘Well,’ you said at last, staring out at the water. ‘I suppose I’m a bit like Goethe. “Everywhere a stranger and everywhere at home, letting my life run its course where it will.”’

  So often you did this, Max. People say. Freud says. Some philosophers say . . . Faced with a personal question, you reached into that endless trove of European literature for a line of poetry or Latin quotation, some perfect aphorism or anecdote. Herodotus, Dante, Walser, Hölderlin, your beloved Goethe. You never had to search for very long. In those first years I knew you, I was dazzled by the vastness of your knowledge, your easy summoning of the right words, the illuminating reflection, the obscure but essential detail. I wanted to take notes when you spoke, like the diligent student I was back then. Though never your student, you would have hastened to say, as if there were a hierarchy to transgression, an order of moral failings. For so long I felt I contained so little in comparison to your extraordinary interior universe. But it was a rather ruinous depository, this storehouse of history, full of human wreckage. I think that you saw yourself as Benjamin’s Angel of History, looking ever backwards into the past and perceiving not a chain of events but a single, unending catastrophe. History, you once wrote, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark.

  There were times when I hated this in you, this retreat into anecdote, into history. But later I realised that it was part of your habit of keeping people on the periphery. You used the words of others as a form of deflection, a way of distancing people from the truth of your own thoughts, your own heart. It struck me sometimes as a kind of dishonesty, but I find myself doing it more and more as the years have passed. Faced with a probing question, I reach for someone else’s words. Virginia Woolf about human happiness being found only in small daily miracles, matches struck in the darkness; or Paul Valéry on the way that a work is never finished, only abandoned. Sometimes I quote you, on the most important appointments being those we keep with the past, or on how history changes direction at the crucial moment because of some tiny, imponderable event. Little scattered clues, though clues too obscure for most people to notice, and too impersonal to incriminate even if they did. No earring left slipped between the bedsheets.

  It shames me faintly sometimes, to read back over interviews and to realise that I’ve parroted the same lines again and again. A young American journalist caught me out once during an interview for my last novel. ‘Yes, you’re fond of that line,’ she said to me, when I quoted Simenon on writing being not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. ‘And Nabokov, too, on sorrow being the only thing in the world that people really possess.’ I thought she was parading her cleverness, but then she closed her notebook, leaned back in her chair and regarded me across the table. ‘All these references to sorrow,’ she said quietly. ‘Are you very unhappy?’

  I came away from that interview feeling uneasy, as if I had been tricked into revealing more of myself than I had intended to share. It was the same sensation I often experienced with you; that you looked at me and saw me as I really was. That some protective outer layer was flayed away. Sometimes when we were in bed together and I tossed my head to the side or closed my eyes, you would turn my face to look at you, my chin in your hand. You wanted to see my pleasure, yes, but it was more than that. You wanted me to show myself to you. And I did. From the very first with you it was as if some effort of performance could simply dissolve. I could hold your gaze with an unabashed directness I’ve never experienced with anyone else in my life. I felt myself to be so clarified, so enlarged in the light of your attention. And someone beyond the person I knew myself to be. Someone wanton and hungry. Desire is like a mirror, you said to me; the really urgent questions it asks us are of ourselves. From the first time you touched me all those years ago in India, such a jolt of recognition, a surge in my veins. Everything I had judged at first to be courtly and contained in you fell away and in myself I recognised a ferocity that startled me. Because there was a violence to it, the way I wanted you. There were moments when I felt that it wasn’t love at all that resided in the room with us, but something raw and obsessive, some enormous wanting and taking, some necessary emptying and refilling of ourselves.

  Occasionally, at certain times of emotion or difficulty, you would stutter slightly. It was just a faint stumble, a momentary tripping over your words, as if you were wrestling to bring to the surface what you wanted to say. Or you did not know what to say and your body betrayed your uncertainty. It happened rarely, but I could see how much it unnerved you. You who set such store by your command of language, your command of yourself. It felt the same to me, that occasional stutter, as the times when you would cry out when we were making love. Something uncontrolled and guttural in the way you would signal your pleasure, something instinctive. I felt triumphant then; when you collapsed onto my chest trembling, or when I felt you in my mouth, the hot gush of you and your loud cry. That I could bring you to this. No hesitancy, no defence. The spell of our bodies. And the way that you would reach for me afterwards, sometimes clinging to me
so tightly that it was hard to breathe. So many letters, so much talk, everything draped in language, and yet perhaps they were the only times we were truly honest with each other, those hours in bed. Though honesty is not a word I think you or I have ever had any true claim to. All the secret lives we have stepped into, the lies we have told ourselves and others. All the times we have turned our faces away.

  I was hopeful, blithe, in those early years; I still believed that I could find the key to you. I studied you in the same way I studied the poems you sent me – trying to crack them like a code. I wanted you to unspool your secret, unmediated self to me. We want so much of a lover. We want everything. I wonder sometimes if that was the real reason you would never leave your marriage – because it demanded much less of you. For all the pressed-together dailiness of your life with Clara and Ellen, all the quotidian intimacies, it left an enormous space around you. They loved you, but their focus on you was blurred rather than painfully sharpened in the way that mine was. They did not scrutinise you, study you, force you to meet their gaze. And perhaps it is more sustainable to live like this. Later, in the quiet years of my own marriage, I came to see the kind of liberty that is to be found in this arrangement. A lonely freedom at times, but freedom all the same.

  But I pushed you that day on the beach here in Dunwich. ‘No, I want to know really. If there was a place that you could choose. Just one place. A view. A house. A room, even. Tell me something true. Your words, no one else’s.’

  ‘A place I would choose . . .’

  I was terrified you might say Suffolk. That would bind you to your life here, to Clara and Ellen. To a life where there was no place for me.