Illness serves as a corrective: one emerges from it sober but diminished. One learns that one’s continuation cannot be taken for granted, or, as the poet puts it, never glad confident morning again. My brush with mortality—and it was only a bad attack of the flu—made me grateful and tender-hearted. Above all I was grateful for Angela’s care, which remained constant. I accepted the fact that she now took charge of my comfort and, incidentally, of my flat; I would arrive home in the evenings to find her scrutinising swatches of fabric and colour charts. She was overjoyed, not only to have become engaged, but to have become engaged before any of her friends had managed to do so. And I think she loved me, in her rather juvenile and utterly conventional way: I was, as men go, a good catch. And I? I loved her pretty hands and feet, the camomile smell of her hair. I loved her domesticity, the stateliness with which she presided over my household affairs.
She gave up her job immediately, although I urged her not to; I was alternately becalmed and disconcerted to think of her sitting at home all day, although she seemed to think this perfectly natural. When she was not shopping, for which she dressed herself carefully, as other women do when they meet a friend for lunch, she was lying on the sofa reading one of her reassuring novels. When I bent over to kiss her on my return from the office, the look on her face was one of purest gratitude. It disarmed me, but I could not always suppress a feeling of irritation. It seemed to me that she had abdicated her independence and thus turned her back on all the advances that women had made. It also limited our conversation. ‘What sort of a day did you have?’ she would ritually say, and when I described an interesting case I could see that I was talking to myself. She preferred to think of us in a genteel country setting, in a house called The Old Rectory, or The Old Post Office, in which she, in a flowered skirt, and one of her eternal blouses, would bake bread or entertain guests of the squirearchical class. I did nothing to disabuse her, although I liked my flat. Vaguely I envisaged a move some time in the future, but when I saw how much pleasure the fantasy gave her I quietly laid the plan to rest. Reality, I knew, would always let her down.
She spent my money freely, as if it were her birthright. I could hardly object to this, since she cared for me so well, but I was sorry when my terracotta walls became an inhospitable vanilla, and my Hessian curtains were replaced by a William Morris print. The flat became transformed into a clinic, one of the many clinics in this area of London, and Angela into a sort of superior nurse. Yet her happiness disarmed me. She regarded her new status as entirely rewarding; I was aware at times that she was a little girl playing at being grown up. To confuse the matter, she did not behave like a little girl but as an unconvincing adult, one who lives the part for which she has been cast. Being engaged, to Angela, meant acting like an engaged person, rather than like a woman who is going to be married. Indeed, she was in no hurry to get married, as if the prospect displeased her in some way; what she really enjoyed was this role-playing, which had its beguiling moments even for myself. I liked to think of her concern spreading to every corner of my domain. I was sent out every morning like a schoolboy, while Angela set to with Hoovers and dusters, before arraying herself for a morning’s shopping. This too was a semi-official activity. In order to buy half a pound of butter at Selfridges she would traverse Wigmore Street with a wicker basket over her arm, for all the world as if she were living in that market town in which she felt herself to be an honorary inhabitant. She listened fervently to The Archers, and rustic accents greeted me when I returned from the office.
But I was also greeted by a smell of fine cooking, and the meal that was produced was invariably delicious. I went out less: as Angela pointed out there was no need. On my way to work I greeted Mrs Daley at the coffee bar with a guilty wave as I hastened past. I was always early, and thus was able to work more effectively than ever. I was grateful to my professional life for posing few problems. If I was aware of anything that might eventually check my enthusiasm, it was at this stage too unformed to contain much anxiety. I too was amused by the novelty of my situation; I was touched and flattered by Angela’s admiration. Above all I felt safe with her. I looked back on my affair with Sarah as a derangement, an inconvenience. I retained an image of myself peering through the letter-box of her flat in Paddington Street and felt little more than impatience, embarrassment. If I thought about her at all, it was with antagonism. Yet in my dreams, with Angela lying chastely beside me, I saw her strange closed face, the face that could so disconcertingly change to a mask of hilarity when in unimportant company, yet remained impassive even in the act of love.
Of course comparisons were inevitable, although I did nothing to encourage them, suppressing my thoughts as best I could. Anyone could have told me that suppressing thoughts is the best way to ensure their irruption at a later date. Angela was frightened of men; her trust in me, who she knew would never willingly harm her, was undermined by a certain primitive fear of the male animal. She was docile in my arms, but she was also ineradicably embarassed by the reactions of my body. I tried to explain that these were involuntary but she would turn her head away and a few moments later brightly talk of something else. Her pleading expression, which had been turned on me at our first meeting, had an unwelcome effect on me: I found it stimulation, so that our love-making was perhaps more violent than it should have been, until I came to realise that this was precisely what frightened her, as it might have frightened any inexperienced woman.
Her lack of experience puzzled me: it was in direct contrast to her wifely or womanly activities. In the daytime, safe from the terrors of the night, she was all confidence and competence, and I found her more and more beguiling. Yet I was forced to acknowledge the fact that my value to her was primarily as the essential component in a fantasy of married life that had been lovingly cherished ever since she was a little girl. As a lover I was as good as any other, since all were unwelcome, something to be endured, the price to be paid for a position for which she had secretly planned since our two lives had collided. Both of us were preoccupied by secrets. For Angela a tense kind of emotional bargaining took place: if she consented to do such and such a thing then she might claim a reward, the reward of freedom and respectability. My own thought processes were not essentially different: if I surrendered all my anarchic longings I could successfully engineer my emergence as a prime example of conformist man, housed, fed, cared for, my continued existence successfully guaranteed.
I accepted this. I have always been fairly conventional, and perhaps that was why I found Sarah’s frustrating behaviour, her unaccountability, so intriguing. Initially I was pleased to think of myself as restored to order. In this respect I was perhaps more self-deluding than I knew. My mother, in her new realistic mood, did not really find Angela to her taste, although her manner towards her was welcoming. As a new wife herself she appeared to have a surer grasp of a couple’s secret life than Angela and I did. Angela’s fussiness, her awkward compliments, grated on my mother, who appeared to wonder why the prospect of marriage did not confer more dignity, more comprehension. She found my complacency equally puzzling, as if I had become middle-aged overnight. Aubrey was in favour of the match, not only because he wished me to be taken in charge by someone other than my mother. Angela flirted with him, as she did with Humphrey, elderly men being devoid of any kind of threat on her primitive scale of imaginings. She was wary of my mother, of her sophistication and her indulgence of the male, which she sensed, as she had always sensed another woman’s potential response; she placed herself under Aubrey’s protection when we went to Cadogan Gate, and his exquisite courtesy and basic self-satisfaction were equal to the task of putting Angela at her ease. For when she felt threatened or misunderstood, the tears would gather in her eyes and her face would lose its colour. I found this phenomenon so alarming that I perfected a whole armoury of disclaimers, so that in any situation and at all times I was able to reassure her that all was well.
The person with whom she felt most at ease was Jenny, whose initial doubts had been laid to rest by Angela’s fervid overtures. Perhaps they were true soul-mates, or perhaps Jenny was a severe case of thwarted maternity. I remembered how she had coveted Sarah, and how Sarah had shrugged off her unwanted care, so that Sarah’s visits to Humphrey had been planned to coincide with Jenny’s afternoons out with my mother. She was thus doubly duped, and some realisation of this might have made her wary of new friendships. But she was lonely for young people, and if Sarah were so long absent then Angela would be more than acceptable as a replacement. Perhaps life with Humphrey was not quite all she had been promised, although when speaking of him she was touchingly loyal; perhaps she had simply not acceded to age as successfully as her elderly husband had done. My mother had always marvelled at her girlishness, her hopefulness. Whatever the reason, she adopted Angela as her new companion. Both professed a liking for Selfridges, and before long that was where Angela was wont to spend her afternoons, in the company of Jenny, whom she seemed to regard as a surrogate mother, although she had a perfectly good mother of her own, living on the outskirts of Maidstone. I noticed that although she professed great love for this parent, she would rarely make time to visit her, too protective of her new authority to wish to see it undermined. In the end it was I who insisted that we visit Mrs Milsom, although after an excruciating weekend in her red-brick box of a house I was not keen to repeat the experience.
Her mother was a tremulous but obstinate woman who deferred to me flatteringly on every conceivable subject and who did not appear to notice the extreme discomfort in which she lived. All the rooms in her house were small, so that the dining-room was filled by the dining-table, while three chairs and a television occupied the sitting-room. This last, however, was rarely used, as the kitchen was the largest room in the house, and I guessed that meals had been taken there prior to my arrival on the scene. A steep staircase led to three tiny bedrooms and a single bathroom. The garden was large and sloped down to a small stream, and it was there that Mrs Milsom spent the best part of her days, battling with weeds in all weathers. Her dust-coloured hair and her anxious unadorned face might have prefigured what Angela would have become had she not taken refuge in another life. Oddly enough there was no love lost between them. They were perpetually on the brink of some trivial argument, and the exasperated sweetness with which Angela addressed her mother might have alerted me to the strength of certain animosities in a character which still seemed to me open, trusting, even childlike in its transparency.
Brian did not like her. This worried me, for Brian’s approval was always necessary to me. Of course he was too well mannered to say that he did not like her, nor may he have formulated his dislike in any conscious way. His dislike was entirely characteristic: he simply did not find Angela attractive. He would not have wanted to make love to Angela had they been under house arrest at the Ritz for forty-eight hours. For Brian to abstain from his usual speculations on being introduced to a woman was a bad sign; a worse one was that although he had met her before he did not remember her, or indeed had never noticed her. Yet she was pleasant to look at, fresh, artless. It may have been the artlessness that put him off. Once, when she called in at the office with her market basket over her arm, he made an excuse and left. In Brian’s simple view a woman should know how to play the great game and give every sign of that knowledge, rather than pose as Little Red Riding Hood. I think he felt genuine distaste for one so unformed, rather as my mother did. Both were more concerned for me than for Angela, which made my desire to protect her even more ardent. At the time I could not see that there was anything wrong with this, or that there was anything the matter with Angela. I told myself that Brian was used to a different sort of woman, and that both of us must abstain from criticising each other’s tastes. This caused a very slight distance between us, for the first time in our long friendship.
He did his best to enlighten me, without being so cross as to ask direct questions. Instead he said cunningly, ‘You ought to take Angela to Paris for a week-end. You’re getting set in your ways.’ To Brian, Paris was the touchstone of any love affair: if a woman did not respond to Paris, and to her lover in Paris, then she was beyond redemption. He may have thought that I shared this belief, an irony in the light of what was to come, though not one I have ever appreciated. Looking back I can see that he was maddened by my domesticity, worried by my new caution. Every morning I would treat him to an account of the previous evening’s meal, as if I had just been promoted to a normal diet. He too reflected on the length of our friendship, and dreaded to see it banished by a woman whom he rightly suspected of jealousy. I may have been aware of this; I no longer know. Perhaps I already felt that any jealousy on Angela’s part was justified. Certainly I knew and trusted Brian enough to know that he would never shame me into saying something untoward. In that way we were able to remain friends, despite an habitual reserve. To break this would have signified an infringement of all the codes by which we had been educated. I had a singular, and perhaps sinister conviction of doing the right thing at this time. I felt invulnerable because I was behaving myself. My conscience was clear, which no doubt made me complacent, insensitive to the feelings of others. Had I been in my normal state, which verges on the sceptical, I should have paid more attention.
When the invitation to Brian and Felicity’s wedding arrived, Angela decided that we must give a dinner party, so that our own status as a couple should not go unregarded.
‘Is this really necessary?’ I asked. ‘They know we’re engaged. Anything more formal tends to be embarrassing.’
‘It’s customary,’ she replied. ‘And it’s customary to offer a gift.’
I thought this was ridiculous. I had not ‘offered’ a gift to Brian; I had merely kissed Felicity warmly and gone back to work. The very faintest suspicion of melancholy stole over me as I watched Angela hauling down long-unused dinner plates and champagne glasses (‘We must have champagne’) from the top shelves of cupboards. I was perhaps beginning to regret my quiet evenings, particularly those evenings when I could slip out to Paddington Street and find Sarah, sometimes willing, more often not at home. My regret was almost abstract. I wondered if I really wanted a woman in my life on a permanent basis, let alone a woman who would turn my life upside-down. I no longer knew my own kitchen, since Angela had provided us with a servant, by dint of persuading Adelina, who did the washing-up at the coffee bar, to work for us. Secretly I was appalled by the amount of money being spent, although I could afford it. I just thought that life had been simpler when I was unattached, with the proviso that being unattached was synonymous with being available. Like most men, I contemplated affairs with equanimity, or had done before I met Sarah. The great argument in their favour was that one’s home generally remained uninvaded, so that one could return to peace and quiet and one’s own standard of living. I had been unprepared for the sheer busyness of life with Angela, particularly as she seemed to have imported so many of her clothes, and, until I threw it out, her teddy bear.
Yet I remained impressed—still—by the energy she expended on my behalf, although unwilling to acknowledge the fact that I was required to expend a great deal of energy in return. If I did not pay enough attention to the matter in hand, if, for example, I wanted to read the evening paper, there was a very slight tendency to sulk. The tears, which were quite frequent, I could cope with: they made me feel protective, but I disliked being taken over. If I thought of another woman at this time it was not Sarah but Simone, my hard-headed sunny-tempered companion in Paris, with whom it was so easy to enjoy life, who never bore a grudge, and who was even able to tolerate partings with a certain style. On the other hand, Angela would do me credit in her way, was in fact quite ambitious socially, and would see to it that this dinner party, to judge by her preparations, would impress our guests, or rather Angela’s guests, since I was merely there to acquiesce to arrangements which had been maturing in Angela’s mind for some time, and for whom Brian’s wedding invitation acted as a stimulus, or perhaps an irritant: I feared the latter, since Angela and Felicity were not guaranteed to hit it off. Felicity was a clever, sharp-featured girl, with all the right connections. Brian was her weakness: her brittle upper-class authority literally melted when he looked at her in a certain way. I had seen him look at other women like that, but I said nothing, having long ago decided that Felicity could fight her own corner. But Angela, who could only oppose softness to Felicity’s hardness, was not comfortable with her, as I had reason to observe. Nevertheless Felicity’s presence was ineluctable; indeed I rather thought the dinner was in her honour, a view which Felicity herself shared. Brian had already learned the trick of mental absence, perfected through many a tedious discussion. Only his ineffable smile would signal to me that his thoughts were elsewhere.
The other guests were Aubrey and my mother, and Jenny and Humphrey. I thought it kind of Angela to invite this couple until I remembered that Jenny was her new friend. My mother, it occurred to me, might have been a little offended at being passed over in this way, but I doubt if she knew that Angela and Jenny spent so much time together. And if she had known would she have minded? My feeling was that she would have deplored the amount of time that Angela spent in Jenny’s company, thinking back with something like horror on those afternoons once deemed so amusing and so suitable for an unoccupied woman like herself. I could not help noticing the fact that her marriage had given her a new dignity, a new assurance. She greeted Brian and Felicity warmly, and introduced Aubrey with pride; she kissed Jenny and Humphrey as if they were mere acquaintances, as if Jenny were no longer the honorary sister or sister-in-law she had once been, and her greeting to Angela was affectionate, but no more than that. It was Jenny who enthused, exclaiming rapturously over the salmon and wild rice, the tropical fruit salad, and the apple cake that was served with the coffee. It was indeed a splendid meal, worthily accompanied by the Montrachet and the Beaume de Venise which were my contribution. Only the coffee was not strong enough: it never was. I remembered Brian once saying that if a woman could not make a decent cup of coffee she was likely to be no good in bed, and avoided his eye. Fortunately he was beguiled by Aubrey, as was Felicity. They were going to Thailand for their honeymoon, and Aubrey was telling them exactly what to see.
It was a success, but the sort of success that makes one feel inordinately tired. Indeed, I tended to feel tired quite a lot about this time, not at work, but as soon as I got home. When I was tired Angela was the ideal companion, anxiously supervising my intake of nourishment, the quality of my sleep. It was precisely when I was less tired that I found her something of a problem. I became aware that my advances displeased her, though I had learned to curb my enthusiasm. She claimed that I hurt her, so that I became careful and circumspect. It was at times like these that the spectre of Sarah revived and took on flesh and blood, so that it became impossible to sleep. Sometimes I found this intolerable, though I said nothing. Finally I renewed an old prescription the doctor had once given me for a mild sleeping pill. That way we both got some rest.
I remember very little of our wedding, which took place in the village church which Angela had not frequented since early childhood. The reception was held in a marquee in her mother’s garden. The early spring sun shone fitfully through heavy cloud, but ‘At least it’s not raining,’ as the guests cheerfully assured each other. Angela, in voluminous white, had been given away by her uncle, Frank Clark, Mrs Milsom’s brother, who, to judge from his ramshackle appearance, was not a frequent visitor to the Milsom household. Her mother, I thought, had done things well, and, having seen to everything single-handed, was almost wild-eyed with the strain. She struck up a friendship with Mother, who at one point, when the celebrations were successfully under way, led her into the kitchen and made her a cup of tea. I was very touched to notice that Sybil and Marjorie had travelled up from Dorset. For a moment I wondered what they were doing at Angela’s wedding, until I remembered that it was my wedding as well. It was Jenny who took Angela up to her bedroom to change. When I was sent up to find them I discovered them both sitting on Angela’s bed in tears. The discarded wedding dress, an irreducible mountain of white taffeta, was hanging on the outside of the wardrobe, as if it might be put on again at any minute.
‘Why on earth are you both crying?’ I asked.
‘So sad,’ said Jenny, dabbing her face, a face now looking much older. ‘I had hoped that Sarah might be here.’
‘I sent her an invitation,’ said Angela. ‘I sent it to Paddington Street. Don’t cry, Jenny. She’ll be home soon. After all, I’m the one who’s going away’ Aubrey was lending us his house in Cagnes for the honeymoon. The thought of this provoked a fresh burst of tears.
‘You’re both tired,’ I said. Actually I was the one who was tired. I was exhausted. If Brian, as my best man, had not looked after me so well I think I should have stolen away to find an empty bedroom and gone to sleep. We were going back to Wigmore Street that evening and flying to France the following day.
My last sight, as we bumped off in the car, was of Sybil and Marjorie, rather more elaborately hatted than usual, peering at us through the side window and flinging a handful of confetti. Marjorie, leaning painfully on her stick, raised a hand to wave. ‘Who on earth is that?’ asked Angela, arranging her pleated skirt at its most becoming. I did not have the energy to explain the ramifications of the Miller family, which was after all Sarah’s family; too much fervour had worn me out. I longed for nothing but a cup of good strong tea, preferably drunk in complete silence. Angela, I knew, would sit up half the night dispatching pieces of wedding cake, the very cake that was giving me such unaccustomed indigestion. I wondered if there were any precedent for a bridegroom wanting to spend his wedding night on his own.
In England the weather had been uncertain, overcast days declining into soaking rain. In France it was hot, gloriously hot. The spring light was so brilliant that Angela complained that it gave her a headache. I, on the contrary, felt as if I had shed a skin, not only of winter heaviness but of conformity. I was up at six every morning, humming happily in Aubrey’s kitchen, making coffee as strong as I had always thought it should be made. I took my cup out onto the little terrace and inhaled an air filled with the sharp scents that I loved, the scents of France. I envisaged days spent wandering about the little town, until I remembered that I was on my honeymoon, and went indoors to make the tea that Angela preferred. She looked charming as she awoke from sleep, the morning light enhancing her fair colouring. Aubrey and Mother had left the house ready for us; there were enough supplies to last a fortnight. There was literally nothing for us to do, and I was impatient to go out; this however did not appeal to Angela, who had inspected the house and declared it not to her liking. She would have preferred an hotel, she said; apparently an hotel was more ‘customary’. Also she felt Mother looking over her shoulder, though Mother had scrupulously tidied all her things away. She got up slowly, although she had always bustled about in the early mornings in Wigmore Street. I offered to go out for bread for our breakfast, but she asked me to wait so that we could go out together. By this time I was hungry and impatient to begin the day, but she claimed that she had no appetite when we sat down at a café table and toyed with her coffee while I guiltily wolfed croissants.
When I suggested driving somewhere for lunch she said, ‘You go. I’m a bit tired. I’ll just go back and read my book.’ Again with a feeling of guilt, I hared off, like a child let off school. When I returned in the afternoon, after a solitary lunch, I would find her lying on the sofa in the salle de séjour, her book discarded by her side.
‘You should get more air,’ I told her. ‘Don’t waste it, just lying there.’
But she protested that her stomach was slightly upset, that France always did this to her, and that she would be all right if left on her own. She seemed oddly withdrawn, as if the paradisal place were somehow not up to her imaginings. I felt obliged to keep her company, although I craved the heat and light of the majestic day. When she consented to come out with me for an aperitif she was dismissive of the passing show which so enchanted me. ‘This place doesn’t suit me,’ she said. ‘I shall be glad when we get home.’
Aubrey had said that we could stay as long as we liked—I had thought three weeks. But at the end of the first week Angela could barely tolerate the place and was talking about our looking for a house in Sussex or Hampshire where she thought it would be appropriate for us to live.
‘But why move?’ I asked her. ‘There’s no hurry. And anyway you don’t know anyone in Sussex or Hampshire. And I should have to commute. Unless of course I spent the weeks in Wigmore Street.’
‘Oh, you couldn’t leave me on my own. After all, I shouldn’t know anyone to begin with.’
‘That’s what I’ve just said. Don’t try to do everything at once. You like the flat, don’t you? And you’ve got Jenny to go out with.’ Although I could see that Jenny’s company might pall after a time. Poor Jenny! Eternal makeshift, eternally on the margins. I thought of her in tears, in Angela’s bedroom, as I had last seen her. Her tears had seemed so heartfelt, as if she had finally realised that she had no daughter of her own, and as if she knew that Sarah would never be that daughter. And the ungrateful girl had given no sign, not to Jenny, not to me.
By the time we got ready to come home, after a mere nine days, Angela told me that she was pretty sure that she was pregnant.