People so rash as to write love-letters ought to write well. And should anyone ask what I mean by writing ‘well’, the answer is that I mean writing clearly and grammatically, with gaiety if possible, and with restraint if there’s sorrow in the air. In my list of requirements I don’t put sincerity very high, if sincerity can only use a clogged and dreary utterance, or if it expands into pomposity. I much prefer nicely mannered humbug that’s designed to please and amuse; it’s true courtesy to please and amuse the recipient of a love-letter, and if the love-letter falls into other hands, the owner of those alien hands will be moved to sympathy in gratitude for having been amused. It’s too much to hope that everyone who receives a badly written love-letter will be so sound a critic as to destroy it immediately, and the unskilful writer should always be aware of the peril he is in: the peril, that is, of exposing his passion to a third person. He must, above all, avoid pretentiousness, and he should deny himself the pleasure of referring to the anatomy of his loved one.
I write this in consequence of my discovery, in the autumn of 1947, that my wife Doris had had, during the war, a prolonged affair with George Canning, the eldest son of old Canning the tea-merchant of Mincing Lane; of whom I spoke in one of my earlier chapters. During his infatuation with Doris, George Canning wrote some fifty or sixty letters which my poor wife foolishly preserved in a cardboard box, florally decorated and brightly gilded, that had once held chocolates. A ‘gift-box’, bought presumably at Christmas or Easter.
I found it when we were in process of removing from Great Missenden to a larger and more attractive house that I had found near Arundel. The house in Great Missenden was little better than a week-end cottage, and in my semi-retirement from business I no longer had any real need for a London house. I felt, indeed, an aversion to living in London after the destruction of the big house where my angry old cook had died, and of the cherished roof under which Lilian had been killed. We were moving to a new residence in a new and relatively unknown countryside.
Doris was in London, trying to buy—quite vainly, in that time of general scarcity—carpets and curtains; and I, in Great Missenden, was clearing out cupboards, chests of drawers, and an attic accumulation of discarded but still hoarded odds and ends of furniture, old photographs, books, and broken crockery-sets. It was on the floor of a wardrobe densely covered with abandoned hats that I found the chocolate-box, and before adding it to the pile of rejected rubbish that I meant to burn, I opened it to see if there still remained some nutty, fruit-filled, or nougat-sticky sweets; which, in 1947, were rare and precious.
I found, instead, George Canning’s letters, and though I should have been shocked, appalled, and monstrously angry to see the reiterated proof of poor Doris’s infidelity, I sat down and laughed. Not immediately, of course, but after I had recovered from my surprise—which, I admit, was profound—and when I had had time to appreciate George’s literary style.
Her breasts, he said, were ‘creamy gardens of delight’. Now I have never seen a creamy garden, nor want to; and Doris’s breasts—to be honest about it—never recovered from the excellent service they gave to Robert and William. She was a good mother—a good nurse, that is—and to an eye more realistic than George’s her breasts were no more than limp memorials to duty. But George was no lover ‘with a spider’s eye’. George was either genuinely bemused—I do not exclude the possibility—or, more probably, practising his newly adopted profession of a Public Relations Officer.
He went farther than that in his exploration and description of my wife’s proportions. ‘Your thighs,’ he wrote, ‘are Ionic columns that lead to a Corinthian decoration which invites the ardent seeker to ecstasy and an endless journey. A journey which, when repeated by renewed desire, still leads through the very sunrise of life to the ineffable dark springs of time itself.’
By the postmark on its envelope that letter was written in March 1942, when George was employed at the Air Ministry. He had joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve early enough to be found incompetent for the serious business of flying before dangerous flying began; and soon enough to get a good foothold in the ever-expanding activities of administration. If he first became my wife’s lover at the beginning of 1942, he was then a wingless Wing Commander with a large car at his disposal, and the responsibility of keeping newspapers well supplied with stories of the gallantry of fighter-pilots and the ardours of long-range bombing. He said he was in Intelligence, but I always thought his job was Public Relations.
George was a tall, well-built man, several years younger than Doris. He was offensively tolerant of his father’s peculiarities, and a county cricketer. He had a long, rather melancholy face—long nose, long chin—which, since 1939, he had dramatically divided with a large moustache; and he had acquired a manner of rather noisy assurance. I had not liked him when he was a boy, or when he was an undergraduate; and I liked him less as he grew up. But with people whose judgement was less acute than mine, he appeared to get on very well, and he may have had abilities to which I was blind. Though I think that improbable.
By 1947, of course—when I read his letters—I was far beyond the reach of jealousy. For a good many years I had found Doris a very dull companion, and during four golden years I had lived in a trance of love with my dear Lilian. Jealousy did not, nor could not, touch me. So I read George’s letters with, I must admit, a bawdy pleasure that was quite untroubled by any feeling that I had been robbed of an exclusive privilege.
I have never been a voyeur, but those letters brought me close to a sensation of voyeurisme—provided, that is, I am allowed to substitute, for vulgar excitement, a malicious humour. That is all the effect they had on me.
If, in the far-distant future—if, by some wholly unforeseen accident—these random notes on the life of a man of no importance should be read by some cold and critical, some right-thinking and well-doing stranger, that admission is unlikely to commend me to his favour. But I, unlike my hypothetical reader, know both Doris and George Canning, and the thought of George busily engaged between her Ionic columns compels a remembrance of her knees—she is markedly knock-kneed—and of George’s tendency to hiccup when excited. I do not have—at least, I hope not—a dirty mind, but I cannot now, and could not then, imagine their transports without laughter. And, I suppose, my laughter was malicious.
Their first ‘occasion’ was far from romantic, and might have been thought likely to bar romance for ever. I heard of it—in slightly different versions—from both Doris and George. He, on behalf of his Ministry, had had to entertain a large number of Allied pilots and the representatives of Allied newspapers-in-exile: there were Czechs and Norwegians, Poles and Dutchmen, both fighting men of indomitable valour and newspaper-men with unassuageable thirst; and George, to maintain the fiction of being their generous host, had to drink innumerable toasts to Queen Wilhelmina and the Polish Lancers, to the ancient liberties of Prague and the Viking spirit of Norwegian airmen. He drank too deeply—he never had much of a head or stomach for drink—and when he left London to spend a quiet and recuperative week-end in Great Missenden—where he too had a cottage—he felt so ill, before his journey was completed, that he told his driver to stop at my house, which lay on the London side of his. And there, according to his story, Doris kindly gave him a cup of strong black coffee. But her account of his arrival was more circumstantial.
‘He was,’ she told me, ‘very unsteady on his feet, and when I went to hold him up, his breath—oh, it was worse than you coming home from one of those City dinners. But I felt so sorry for him. He was quite green, and hiccuping—you know, like that cat we used to have, which had to be put down. I felt quite worried, but I didn’t want to upset him, so I said, “You must have been overdoing it, George. You’ve been working too hard. You had better come in and lie down.” But all he said was, “The lavatory. Where’s the lavatory?”
‘Well, I took him as far as the door, and turned on the light, and left him.’—Doris put on a prim expression, nodded once or twice as if to approve her action, and said, ‘He couldn’t expect me to do more, could he? But after about a quarter of an hour, or perhaps twenty minutes, I felt rather anxious, and went to see what had happened. And there he was—oh, poor George!—lying on the floor with his head on two volumes of Hansard—I can’t think why you keep Hansard in the lavatory! To me it isn’t a bit amusing. It doesn’t even pass the time.—But he’d had the sense to put something under his head, and he’d been sick very, very tidily, though he hadn’t pulled the plug, and I soaked a towel in cold water and wiped his face. And when he felt a little better I helped him upstairs, and into the spare room—the smaller one—and then—well, he was still incapable, and I had to do something, hadn’t I? So I undressed him—but only as far as his shirt, of course—and got him into bed, and then I filled a hot-water bottle for him, and left him. And in the morning—oh, how apologetic he was! He was so sweet, and I used my very last egg to make him an omelette, which he couldn’t eat. Poor George, I did feel sorry for him. He looks so nice in his uniform, doesn’t he?’
We are all, I suppose, creatures of habit, and the next time he found himself in trouble—the Free French were to blame—he again stopped at my house, and again Doris put him to bed. But on that occasion he wasn’t disabled by drink; or, if he was, he made a quick recovery. In one of the letters he was most tenderly reminiscent of the kindness that Doris had shown him. ‘There was kindness in your eyes and in your voice,’ he wrote, ‘and your hands were very gentle.’—‘“You are not to worry,” she had told him. “You’ve been overworking, you’re exhausted. But you’re all right now. Sleep as long as you like, but if you want anything, call me. I’ll leave both doors open, yours and mine, and I’ll hear you. I sleep very lightly.”’
If George can be trusted—if those indeed were Doris’s words—it was she who issued the invitation; and that gave me a good deal to think about, for I hadn’t thought her capable of such boldness. I hadn’t, to be truthful, ever known her to take the initiative, in any emotional way. She had never prompted me to make love. When my ardour began to fade and dwindle—the innocent ardour on which we launched our marriage—she had made no attempt, of which I was aware, to provoke or revive my interest. But perhaps good manners had restrained her. The good manners which, until the years of my youth were over, had been instilled into girls of her sort: girls of the upper middle class. For them restraint was proper; their emotions had to be decently concealed. They had, of course, had no instruction in how to behave when they made the perilous ascent to the bedroom-floor, but the mental climate in which they lived—the climate of their class and time—had conditioned them to wait and receive, with gratitude if possible, but never to excite and encourage.
I remembered—because George’s letters prompted remembrance—a good many occasions when some display, on her part, of gentle affection might well have been her nicely hidden invitation to coitus; and equally I remembered her quick retreat when I showed indifference to her overtures. I acknowledged a sense—oh, not of guilt, but of regret for having disappointed her; yet I could not deeply blame myself for failing to respond to a woman whose sexual attraction had been nullified by her terrible capacity to bore me. She did not bore George, of course, because George did not know her well enough to be bored. But I had listened for years to her pedestrian conversation—to talk that went as endlessly, and without meaning, as the feet of anonymities on Oxford Street—and worse than that, to the gossip and anecdotes she retailed in which, by some gymnastic faculty, she turned all her facts upside-down or inside-out.
She had a tireless and insistent interest in the trivialities of life. She could talk—and did—with whole-hearted concern about the hat she had seen on an unknown head; about the wine-glasses on a neighbour’s table; about the behaviour of some small boy whose mother’s name she had forgotten. She gathered gossip with unfailing enthusiasm, and to good gossip I am always willing to listen. But hers was vitiated by an eccentric memory. When the wife of a fairly eminent physicist whom we knew was suspected of adultery with a Hungarian film-director, Doris brought home a scintillating tale in which the physicist had been seen in amorous duet at the Mirabelle with a Spanish dancer. She had once told me, with vivid detail, that a house two doors away from ours had been sold to a South American ambassador whose secretarial staff had been imported from a French brothel, when the fact was that a house at the other end of Belgravia had been bought by one of the new Arab states whose minister had acquired some notoriety by assaulting two girls from the Windmill Theatre. And almost word for word I can recall her story of a political scandal in which, according to her, the Minister for Agriculture had sold, for his own profit, a huge consignment of wheat to Soviet Russia, when what had happened was that an Independent Member, at considerable expense to himself, had acquired in Poland a new variety of sugar-beet and the secret of an improved process for extracting its juice. Doris also described, with lively disparagement, the clothes that the Independent Member’s wife had worn at the party where they met; being firmly convinced that the flamboyant lady whose dress she derided was the small and modest wife of the maligned Minister.
It took time to become fully aware of her persistent, her unerring faculty for creating a fine confusion out of what she was told. Much of the detail that decorated her stories was authentic and well described—it was only the basic facts that she muddled—and at first I had found her metamorphoses both endearing and amusing. So, perhaps, did George. He may, on the other hand, have believed her stories; and gone on believing them. In which case his mind must have been dangerously overburdened in those war-bewildered years when truth itself had turned preposterous.
I read again what Doris had said to him—‘“… if you want anything, call me. I’ll leave both doors open”’—and having learnt to accept her boldness, felt something like a perverted pride in her. If it was she who had been the seducer—and that seemed clear enough—her behaviour became almost tolerable. Forgiveness would have been much more difficult if she had let herself be tricked and cajoled by such a nincompoop as George; but to summon George when she wanted him—to make use of him because I had neglected her—was an act of some dignity, despite its immorality. Though I could not condone her infidelity, nor rid myself of the deep uneasiness it caused me, I found some comfort in recognising George as a mere pawn in the game. Not a knight, leaping boldly and diagonally into bed, but a pawn to her queen.
In the morning, it appears, she brought him a cup of tea; which doubtless he needed. George, I was glad to learn, made a blunder which—if Doris had been more sophisticated—might well have been fatal to his new-found happiness. Like the nincompoop he was, he apologised for his intrusion! ‘I feel guilty,’ he told her—and repeated the statement in that interminable letter—‘for it’s the women of England who carry the heaviest burden of the war, and what I’ve done can only increase your burden.’
With what a howling flatness that resounds! All sentimentality is off-pitch, but I prefer what’s sharp, and the falsity of George’s voice, when he sang so flat as that, would have compelled me—had I been Doris—to kick him out of bed at once. But she, poor dear, was apparently tone-deaf to an ill-tuned vox humana, for she replied, with some eloquence and equal nonsensicality. ‘“You mustn’t say that! You’ve been giving too much of yourself to duty, you’re a war-casualty like those poor men who’ve been wounded in the Western Desert, or wherever they are now, and I want to look after you. Yes, I do! I’ve been leading a lonely, useless life, and if I can help you, in any way, it will help me to regain a sense of purpose.”’
Then—and one can, perhaps, imagine a new gravity in her voice—then, as George in his tender reminiscence of the scene so scrupulously reports, she asked him ‘“Would you like an alka-seltzer?’” To which he replied, ‘That would be wonderful. You’re an angel, Doris!’ Overcome with emotion, he began to cry, and she bent to comfort him.
That sorry beginning, however, was the prelude to a long-lasting association. The letters covered a span of nearly three years, during which time George was abroad on several brief missions, and they ceased, without explanation, in the late autumn of 1944. About the time, that is, when my dear Lilian was killed and I, distraught and helpless, went down to Great Missenden and lived for some months in what I now remember, though vaguely, as a miserable abeyance of life.
I read the letters, every one of them, put them back in the chocolate-box, and replaced it under the welter of Doris’s no-longer-wanted hats. Several times, during my reading, I laughed aloud when George expressed his passion in phrases that resembled too closely the language of Air Ministry ‘hand-outs’, but I didn’t enjoy the experience, and my decision to let Doris remain in ignorance of my discovery was due, in part, to the fair, judicious, and realistic admission that I had little reason for complaint; and also, in part, to a profound reluctance to discuss the business with her. It would be much easier, and infinitely more agreeable, to say nothing about it, and try to put it out of mind.
It wasn’t until some weeks later that a possible reason for George’s sudden, unexplained silence—for the abrupt conclusion of his letter-writing—occurred to me. In November 1944 he had gone to France, and I had returned to Great Missenden. Did Doris discard her lover—did she write to dismiss him, and command his silence—when the husband who had neglected her came home and showed so clearly that he needed her? Had she been generous and self-denying? Was I indebted, for my comfort, to her magnanimity? It seemed a likely explanation. I could, indeed, think of no other, and I was forced to admit that she had, in some degree, expiated her fault. I determined, in future, to be more tolerant of her frailties and stupidity, and I took an early opportunity to buy her a brooch, set with very good emeralds, that gave her a lot of pleasure.
Towards the end of 1946 George married a tall, awkward-looking, rich girl in South Africa, but we did not go to his wedding in Bloemfontein, and since then we have seen very little of him.