NOT that it was any excuse. Ernest went into his first marriage with reasonable enthusiasm and optimism. Any doubts he may have had—and he did have several—he cast to the winds the moment they got clear of the registry office at Hammersmith. Wedding guests were a curious motley, with people like Mrs Clarkson mixed up with people like Bess, who had carefully brought the most appalling atmosphere with her, adding it to the equally careful one brought by the bride’s mother. After the ceremony, the bride and bridegroom vanished with all speed, having earlier on declined any form of communal celebration, and drove at a great pace in Mr Bisham’s new Citröen to Brighton. Seal had been as determined on Brighton as Acton; Brighton was the only possible place for a honeymoon, and you had to go to the Ship Hotel. And Ernest was so pleased to have money and a wife, even if his plan of life was vague, that he agreed gladly to anything she said. The first night went with a swing until midnight, when it was unromantically marred by the bridegroom having the most chronic toothache. The light was still on and he sat up and exclaimed: ‘You’ve broken one of my teeth and it hurts like anything.’ He started to pace up and down the bedroom holding his lower jaw. Almost at once, Seal showed her true colours. She said, well, of all things, to go and have toothache at such a time, what sort of a man was he, and blaming her, too, in that feeble way? She sat up in her very loose peach pyjamas and frowned unhelpfully. Ernest was beyond argument, due to the pain, and after a bit of a row he cried, ‘All right, all right, but the point is we must at once find a dentist. Please ring the bell.’
She flounced out of the double bed and crossly rang the bell. ‘Nobody will come at this time of night,’ she said, cross.
Mr Bisham continued prancing up and down the room with his hands tightly about his jaw.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ he cried. ‘I can’t stick this—’
‘I can’t think why you didn’t have your teeth seen to before our honeymoon,’ she said, interrupting him. ‘Instead of during it. You must have known they were faulty.’
Through the cloud of pain he managed to see her expression, and the expression of his marriage prospects. When he asked her if she had any iodine, she said he could hardly expect a bride to have thought of iodine, any more than expecting her to tour a dentist with them. He had the feeling she wasn’t awfully kind in character, but he said in a muffled voice: ‘Look, ring the bell again, will you? I shall go out of my mind!’ She again crossed the room sharply and nearly pulled the bell out of its socket. As she did so, a waiter knocked and put his head in and said politely that he was afraid intoxicating liquor could not be served to customers after midnight.
So then Mr and Mrs Ernest Bisham started looking for aspirin. Two consequential-looking gentlemen in the next bedroom answered their knock by opening their door two inches and saying was it the police? ‘No, aspirin,’ said Mr and Mrs Bisham.
They were obliged with aspirin, but by morning the bridegroom was completely exhausted, physically and spiritually. Even after seeing a dentist, on whose doorstep the pain ceased instantly in the usual infuriating way, he was exhausted by the decision that Seal was the very last girl in the world he ought to have married, just as Bess had said. As Bess said, he needed the homely type, if possible with a spot of beauty thrown in, but it wouldn’t have mattered much. Celia had just an artificial and sexual beauty of face and body, but even this faded the moment anything went wrong. For the rest, she smoked like a furnace, liked expensive clothes, adored neat gin and thought going to church was ‘just balmy, nowadays’. Every room she entered became immediately littered with things she had just bought, many of which she forgot to use at all or even undo. She just liked spending. She didn’t like the necklace he gave her, despite its beauty, simply and solely because it only cost two-and-six. He tried repeatedly to discover why she so adored Acton, but never arrived at any conclusion. It was just one of those things. We all had some little weaknesses. Ernest Bisham had always recognized that; and he recognized it as he sat thinking about his latest escapade and how much he would like to present Marjorie with the pearl necklace in his drawer. He thought again, in self defence: ‘And why should famous announcers be exempt from human frailty? The risk is their own and it is they who face the consequences—if there are any.’ Even announcers were human beings and had lived before ever being announcers. Would the public really object if it knew the double life he led? Going downstairs, he gave a little knock on the door of the little room Marjorie liked to consider her own. He thought: ‘Poor old Seal simply hated it if I knocked on her door! She thought it was indecent!’ What cards would she have played, he wondered, if she’d ever guessed he would make a name for himself? What did she think now, when she listened in? It was quite amusing! Did she switch off—or switch on?
Well, she never had guessed. She had been much too busy in her own fashion to guess anything. They returned to Acton to live the kind of life which those peace years made so inevitable to rich and poor alike, with the difference that the rich were bored and the poor desperate for work. There was no work, and anybody who said there was, if only a man took the trouble to look for it, just wanted kicking. Ernest was fortunate in having some capital on which to subsist, and he fought Celia hard in order to keep the bulk of it intact. Her mother said he was mean and the whole affair drove him frantic, though he regaled himself from time to time with his secret hobby, sometimes going to the country for it, and more often in London districts. His greatest thrill was in thinking what his mother-in-law would say to him if he did get caught; the excitement was worth it, if only for that! He only took gems of rare beauty and he never robbed from the poor-rich or the nice-rich. He could always tell from the feel of a place what the people were like. When the papers tended to indicate that he had made an error of judgment, he returned the property through the post, taking meticulous care about such delicate points as finger-prints, paper clues and postmarks. He amused himself by a continual study of diamonds and stones, as well as safes and locks. He did this because it fascinated him. He also took lessons in revolver shooting, not because he would ever shoot anybody, but because it seemed a proper part of his hobby. You might as well do a thing properly if at all. Seal thought him just queer. ‘You and that gun,’ she would mutter. Or, ‘You and those gems’; she meant illustrations of gems. ‘Fat lot I ever see of any!’ She thought him extraordinary over shoes, having so many different pairs, with what she called ‘stupidly different rubber patterns’. Seal’s hobby was to run up debts, which she did with greatest of ease, unless the shop owner was a woman. Men fell for her like flies; it wasn’t even a hobby. Women gave her dirty looks automatically, but men’s faces broke out like May blossoms the moment her quick footsteps were heard in the distance. The pink block of Acton flats, where they lived on the seventh floor, was being constantly rung up by the flats’ porter to know if Mrs Bisham was in. The porter had long since fallen for Seal, so he liked to protect her from approaching tradesmen. But if Mr Bisham was in, he sent the tradesmen right up. The porter often came up to see if the piano was tinkling, and it meant Mr Bisham was in. Ernest never knew what he had done to offend, but he felt sure Seal had double-crossed him somewhere. The porter looked at him as if he was a pimp.
As sordid weeks grew into sordid months, he started to do a bit of serious thinking. He did his thinking at the piano. He had a natural aptitude for the piano and had learnt a good deal at school. But he was not ambitious about it. He often wished: ‘Why haven’t I got a career like the piano?’ Yet, surely, everybody wasn’t born with a terrific careerist-complex?
Then it suddenly dawned on him that Seal had been unfaithful to him for ages.
A day or two later, in what he thought was a fit of pique, he brought a blonde to the flat. She was apparently an amateur, but he got talking to her in a local pub and she seemed mildly amusing in the conversational way. When she suddenly informed him who Celia was sleeping with during the daytime, as a change from sleeping with her husband at night, he started to prick up his ears. It seemed that this woman was a friend of Celia’s, and also of the man’s, because, as a matter of fact, the man was her own husband. Staggered, yet not really as surprised as he thought he felt, Ernest ordered two more double Haigs.
When they closed, that night, he allowed the blonde to come back with him to the Bisham flat, quite careless of all possible consequences. He had no interest whatever in her person, and in any case was far too fastidious, and at the flat they just sat and drank Bols gin so as to safeguard against a hangover. Then they went vaguely to bed in different rooms.
Nevertheless, standing together at the flat window next morning in their negligée, Ernest was astounded to see Seal in the street below pointing them out to a man in a bowler hat.
When the front door bell rang, a few minutes later, he strode to the door, expecting to confront Seal. But the man in the bowler hat handed him a writ and a fountain-pen, while the flats’ porter stood back a bit, grinning.
The blonde explained she did hope he wasn’t going to get sore with her, but what was the point in going on in this way; she’d always liked old Seal and always would. Looking a trifle scared, she got her red hat with the daisies round it and vanished.
Looking back, Ernest thought it by far the most undignified moment in his life. He remembered, too, being manly enough to decide upon dignity from then onwards at all cost.
He could still picture that younger edition of himself, taking on new dignity in the very face of adversity, and closing the door on that unscrupulous blonde, whose husband would now have to divorce her in the way she wanted.
He went straight to his desk, signed the writ, although he need not have done so, deciding to take his medicine. Seal appeared at the front door, even as he sat drawing cheques to settle her outstanding debts, bringing her mother with her. He soon slammed the door in their faces, whereupon his mother-in-law retired to open a flank attack from the main road—so he slammed the window. Seal banged on the door for a bit, sobbing out a portion of contrition, finally screaming out in a temper, ‘those hateful Kew Gardens’, and that was the last he heard of her.
Well, he’d been a damned fool and he must take the consequences. He packed up all his personal belongings—they went easily into two large suitcases, whereas Seal’s things would have needed eight pantechnicons—and, as a final act of purification, went and had a bath. A label of Seal’s, stuck in the soap, said ‘Fresh Lobster’. It had been an endearing hobby of hers to collect things from snackbar counters in Acton or Piccadilly when she was tight. On an old bit of sponge there was one saying ‘Fresh Caviare’. This hobby, he decided, was the only human thing about her, if you excepted her legs. He left the flat for ever, passing the porter with a great show of courtesy and dignity, and hailed a taxi. There were two things he would never, never do again: he would never talk to strange girls on buses, and he would never visit the Tropical House in Kew Gardens!
He was divorced a few months later, ‘for mental cruelty and misconduct with another woman, or women, and for habitual drunkenness’. It said so in the News of the World one cheerful Sunday morning, the report adding, fragrantly, that the trouble started on their very wedding night, when ‘the petitioner’s husband’s conduct was so extraordinary as to make the petitioner terribly unhappy’.
‘Was he cruel to you on that night?’ wondered Seal’s counsel, sympathetically.
The first Mrs Bisham burst into tears. She made a tragic figure in her black, but looked very brave.
‘He was callously cruel.’
‘Tell his lordship what happened—if it isn’t too painful?’
‘He wouldn’t come to bed. And he went up and down corridors asking people for aspirin.’
‘Was he … drunk, Mrs Bisham?’
‘He was always drunk.’
His lordship seemed to think it an extremely sad case, and a grave one. Moreover, it was undefended, which indicated that the husband’s gross depravities were admitted by him. Mrs Bisham was entitled to her divorce—with all costs against the husband. Very generously indeed, Mrs Bisham was not asking for damages. There were, mercifully, no children of the marriage.
Mr Ernest Bisham, in his new surroundings, kept calm and dignified, gently lowering the News of the World into the wastepaper basket.