Constance by Patrick McGrath Read Free Book Online Page B

inferred it, then asked the question that had obsessed her for years. I saw her sudden alarm. Then she looked down at the table and shook her head.
    —I don’t know. I wouldn’t study medicine but I guess it’s more complicated than that.
    So I asked her if she resented the loss of her childhood. In fact I said
theft.
She’d had to take on her mother’s role when she was barely in her teens and look after Iris.
    —Daddy never appreciated me, that’s what I resented.
    Not even as a small child had she enjoyed anything like the gruff affection Iris apparently got from him. He was crazyabout little Iris. He’d lunge for her and lift her high, holding her in his big hands, and shaking her as she shrieked with pleasure. Constance saw a softness in his face then, and a warmth in his cold pale eyes that she’d never known.
    —Is that why you hate him?
    I was on what Ed Kaplan would call a fishing expedition here. It was unfair of me but she didn’t seem to mind.
    —I do hate him. Whatever I do, I feel I’ve failed. He never tries to hide his contempt.
    —Contempt! I cried. Isn’t he a doctor?
    Suddenly she was angry.
    —Yes, he’s a doctor, so what?
    She practically shouted it. Heads turned. She lowered her voice.
    —You think doctors don’t know about cruelty? You think they’re
benign?
    I sat with an elbow on the table, my chin in my palm. I gazed at her. I enjoyed seeing her all stirred up like this. I liked that the impeccably constructed facade could be so easily disordered by a stray remark from out of left field. She thought I was accusing her of exaggerating the whole thing, of saying, in effect, she only hated him because he held her to a higher standard than her sister. She said it was more complicated than that. Sometimes she thought he wanted to kill her and she didn’t know why. Feelings like that don’t come from nowhere, she said.
    She stared at me with fierce intensity. She lifted her chin.
    —I’ve read Freud, she said.
    —Oh you have, have you? Shall we get out of here?
    There was a third date, and this time she wasn’t abandoned,inflamed, in the lobby of her building. She let me take her home. It was a memorable night for many reasons. I think we pleased each other, I know she pleased me. Very late that night, in the darkness, in my bed, she told me she didn’t know what love was but it occurred to her that this might be it. She’d never expressed her feelings so plainly before. But me, I
did
know what love was, and I knew that this was it, oh yes, this was it all right, so the next morning I made a bold suggestion. I told her I had to go to London for a few days and did she want to come with me? I said that since she’d read so many English novels I could use her help as an interpreter. It wasn’t altogether a joke. She worked in the editorial department of a publishing company called Cooper Wilder, which had its offices in one of the old Madison Square skyscrapers. She needed no persuading.
    —Sure, she said.
    So we flew Pan Am to the UK. I was doing research for the book and I needed to look at some papers in the Bodleian. I planned to stay in the small hotel in Pimlico I always used and make side trips to Oxford. Constance had been to London once, in her junior year, but on a tight budget. I won’t say I wasn’t anxious about the trip. Despite growing up over there I still found it difficult at times to penetrate the bland curtain of conformity behind which my countrymen like to conceal their true selves.
    But I didn’t want to sour Constance on the place. She claimed to love London, or she loved the idea of London, and I feared I’d have to pretend to be the same, and admire everything as though I’d just got in from Pittsburgh.
    It didn’t work out that way. For once it wasn’t raining. It was springtime, there was color in the streets, daffodils in Hyde Park,love in the air. London seemed a different city from the one I’d known. This was due to Constance. From the