Chapter 30

I awoke in the late afternoon. Margaret was fully dressed, lying on the duvet facing me, watching for the moment I woke up. When I opened my mouth to speak she put a finger to my lips just like she always used to, and then put her arms around me. We lay like that for a long time. When I rose from the bed and followed her downstairs, the gun was no longer on the table. Still without speaking, we began to clean the house.

I called the office and in a curiously calm voice told my colleagues that I was with a sick friend, I was sick myself, and we were going to try and put each other right. Felicity wheedled out of me that the friend was Margaret, and a brief explanation. She gave me her reserved blessing and said she'd look after things at WOOP for as long as was needed, and wished me luck.

It took a patient week to pull Margaret back from her personal brink. Her body recovered remarkably well, but the mental scars would take longer. It didn't matter, we had time, no Steve or Sarah would erupt in our midst, and anyway, many of the scars were mutual. We didn't talk much at first, just essential information to survive. I drove into Cambridge a couple of times for supplies, anxious for every minute I was away that she would relapse and I would find her corpse on my return, but she was improving by the day; there was no doubt about that. First we restored the house to its pristine condition; then expanded into the clearing and the woods. Just keeping occupied seemed to be the secret. When I saw Margaret beginning to get twitchy, I would send her outside to the woodpile, which grew in testimony to her returning strength. As she dried out from her rock-bottom drinking, I began to see fragments of the Margaret I'd known before.

We came returned from a long walk to a cold but spotless house. Two weeks had now passed since I'd crawled into Margaret's bed. When we looked at each other at the front door, there was life in our eyes, a flush on our cheeks. I knew we were strong enough to talk at last. I nodded, and so did she. It was time. Sarah was at the heart of it, the rogue planet around which we had consciously or unconsciously orbited for much too long. I feared and yet wanted, needed the Sarah-tinted spectacles to be plucked from my eyes, to be made to see her as others had. I was already aware that my seductive, impetuous, charismatic, luscious lover had a much darker side, of which I had never seen more than a hint. After our forced separation she had turned her anger outwards, while mine went in. First, I heard how she had come out as a lesbian, shamelessly and proudly at her school's Christmas assembly. No university for her after that revelation, as she had left home and her family's support shortly afterwards, but she found a place in a commune, amongst students, graduates, musicians and poets, mostly a little older than her.

Margaret put a match to the paper in the grate, and we watched the flames lick sullenly at the kindling.

"Next she joined a more political commune with a mix of feminists, anarchists, and gays. Sarah used her physical assets straight away. They had one of those hippy-dippy policies of free-love - still very popular in 1970, and she seduced the women, and occasionally the men as well, if it served her purpose. She knew she could use sex to manipulate those around her - after all that's what she learned with us - to reach the higher echelons in the collective, and to steer them towards direct action. There always was a mix of self-love and self-loathing in the way she acted. What happened to her, how she was, her size, feeling she was too big for the world - you know how she hated that - her rejection of the norm, knowing from so young that she was different to other girls, all added up until she needed to take reprisals, against her parents, the establishment, society."

"I was so fucking weak ... I should have gone back, I shouldn't have let Eric and Susan drive me away like that!" I sobbed.

"What could you have done? She was seventeen they would have had the police on you over the drugs if nothing else; you'd have only gone to jail much sooner, but knowing you, you probably still think she was worth it. You must try to understand Jill, that even then, or soon afterwards she might very well have felt otherwise. Ask yourself, honestly, would she have done the same for you? "She was a girl of brief intense passions; so charismatic she could infect and enthuse almost anyone if she gave them her full attention. But she was chimerical; you never had long enough with her to find that out. She needed change, frequently, but she would rarely abandon a lover completely, she strung us along like a harem because for those whom she had loved, there was always the tug, the longing to have her back again, which she could foster with a glance or a caress. She really was ... promiscuous ... with her body, her affections, and her beliefs. The jealousies she created were too much for many. For others, it was all part of her mystique; the confusion just seemed to make her more powerful ... And ... she always was an accomplished liar."

I hated this. I hated finding out everything I had never wanted and still didn't want to know about Sarah. I wanted to hate Margaret for telling me, and blame her for everything, but I couldn't. I didn't know the truth yet, wasn't even sure if what I was hearing was the truth, but I had to listen. She seemed to be waiting for me to contradict her, but I held my tongue.

"I don't think she meant to tell lies, not maliciously or even deliberately, but she would invent, and believe in her own inventions, and persuade you that it was the truth. I ... I loved her terribly much too, you see. When Edie brought her to me, I felt something incredibly powerful for her, not just desire, though that seemed paramount at first.

"How old was she then, really, it's very important..."

"She was sixteen. I thought you knew that. Why?"

"First she told me she was sixteen, and when I met her again she said she was fifteen ... I think ... I think that was the first time I didn't want to believe her. It didn't add up."

"Oh Jill, I'm really not someone who runs around after underage schoolgirls, however bad it looked. Edie was the youngest girl I'd ever been with, and that was wrong, and I'm still a bit ashamed that I let it happen. But understand that I'd been alone for several years, just hadn't met anyone who was right for ages. There were things I had to do, and they didn't make me feel like I even wanted anyone. But Edie was sharp as a tack, a sexy, vicious little kitten; I was more than a little bit bedazzled by her. My other girlfriends had all been older than me, and I suppose I was flattered that such a pretty little creature found me attractive, and she was a complete lesbian femme from an early age; I didn't make her that way. She gave me the look first, honestly, at a cocktail party given by her parents. He father's a barrister, and a mutual friend took me along. I admit I went a bit crazy for a while, like I'd never been before. Edie opened my eyes to a lot of things, she definitely affected my old moral beliefs. I was in my late twenties, and it was like she liberated something in me that my other girlfriends had never reached ... She was my 1960's, if you like.

"We'd been seeing each other for a while when she told me there was a girl at her school, in the year below her, who had a crush on her and showed all the signs of being ... well ... a live one ... I must have been mad, but Edie could be almost as persuasive as the girl I would shortly meet. I knew that if I said no to her ... um ... seducing Sarah, I might lose her, and I just couldn't bear that, so, I ... well I suppose I sanctioned it in the end. Then I met Sarah, and even then I didn't think she wasn't the kind of girl I'd fall for, not like Edie ... or like ... well ... you. She wasn't my type, too much like me, actually. But one thing led to another, and it was weird, I hardly had to teach her our ... ways; she had an amazing instinct for sex, our kind of sex; like she was already my equal. And later, when the honeymoon if you like, was over, and she blithely took charge in bed one day ... I tried to fight her, but she was so strong, mentally and physically. Eighteen years old and she found she could dominate me, like that!" Margaret snapped her fingers. "And when she used her power..." She shivered at the memory. I was stunned. Even with doubts about the details, I had always believed the core of what Sarah told me, that Margaret had always been the one in charge.

"She turned me into something I had never ever been, found a weakness, and exploited it ruthlessly, she took me to places I had only ever sent others. I'd never been dominated by a woman before - or since. It went completely against my nature, or so I thought at first. I had no idea that ... I'd find some kind of ecstasy under her lash, but I did, which was not what had I expected at all. Even then, I thought I would know my limits, but Sarah pushed them back again and again. I was so ... disorientated by her; in awe, I suppose. Soon I couldn't fight back at all. I'd never been whipped and she did that, never tied up, and she took enormous pleasure in making me helpless as a babe. I'd never been fisted for so long or as hard as when she did it to me ... It was Sarah who first did me with two, and it was her own idea, not mine. And you know how much she loved to give and receive that way. Or did you ever... ?"

I remembered something Sarah had said on that incredible first night on the run, in the stable with young Mark. Words that had echoed Margaret's - "I need two." Even then it had given me a frisson of doubt about the truth.

"When did you start doing that with her? Because when we first fell in love I swear she didn't ... hadn't ... she didn't try ... but when we on the run there was..."

"No Jill. It was later, afterwards. Around the time you began to visit me." "Oh dear God..."

"Please don't cry Jill ... please ... listen, oh do listen."

She touched my shoulder and I flinched away from her, but no further than the end of the sofa. I would listen.

"Did she ever know I was ... seeing you?"

"No, I never told her, and I swore Edie to secrecy. Will you allow me to say why?"

"Y ... yes."

"Thank you. Perhaps it's because I can be very selfish, perhaps it was more than that. Of course it was more than that ... First, about you ... I'd wondered for a long time what the girl she'd fallen in love with was like. To take Sarah's heart so totally meant that you had to be special. And then, unbelievably, you came to me. And I could hate you for what you meant to Sarah, and because loving you had given her the strength to dominate me. I could do to you all the things I could never do with Sarah, because she did them to me. That's the way it was. Believe it or not, I became her sub, every bit as much as I was your Mistress.

"Edie never really understood. I was such a mess, such a bitch to the poor girl, she deserved much better than me ... She learned a long slow bitter lesson; that threesomes really don't work, in the long run. Someone always gets left out... "Why do you think you never saw my body in those days? Sure, in some ways it suited my purpose to remain as remote as possible, but far too often I looked like you after a heavy session, and I don't heal half as quickly. The only time I was ever naked with you was one afternoon in the Punishment Shed when you were blindfolded. I nearly lost it that afternoon. I couldn't stop myself coming. You and Sarah were the opposites that match. A total top, and a total bottom, and I was caught in between. Slave to one and Mistress to the other.

"And ... but ... she was changing, she met new people, and became so radicalised that she began to hate everything I respected and held dear. She became The Group's un-crowned leader, and still used her body as much as her rhetoric to rule them. I'd been fighting with my conscience about keeping you two apart, but when Edie left me ... dear little Edie, I was never so harsh to her as I was to you ... the reason she went ... I encouraged her because ... she just didn't excite me as much any more, and intellectually she'd never been on my wavelength, really. With Edie on the way out, and as Sarah began to distance herself and become ... dangerous for someone like me to know, I found to my complete surprise that there was someone in my life whom I had misjudged very badly.

"God knows I was hard on you, anyone would have thought I was doing my best to put you off. And you just ... soaked it all up, and came back again and again and again, even though I was charging you a fortune. I thought at first making you pay would be a deterrent, part of me wanted that, but still you came back, right through my psycho-dramas with Sarah, my realisation that Edie and I were playing out the slow end of our relationship. Other things were happening too, unpleasant ... but necessary ... And then, every few weeks, you would call, and I could let out all my frustrations on you. It was better than any therapy Jill, much better.

"It must have been about two years before I realised that each time you left I felt more and more of myself leaving with you. The real turning point was when you brought that girl ... as if you had to show her that ... you wanted me more than her, and she was so beautiful. I thought ... well, it sort of brought my feelings into focus, and I found that you had crept into my heart, little by little, step by step, but oh so deep." I had never heard Margaret talk like this, with a trembling passion that shook me.

"Go on," I whispered.

"I was very down that day, everything felt bad, I was so unhappy ... You were just what I needed, and you were incredible. I'd never gone so far with any woman before, I know I really hurt you more than you wanted, but instead of hating me or fearing me, when I pulled myself together enough to stop, you made me come so hard that afterwards I went upstairs and cried for hours. That very night I wrote to Sarah, and Edie, long letters, telling then I didn't want to see either of them anymore. Edie and I were pretty much over already, but Sarah ... I didn't know how much she would resent it. Not then."