Howard had trouble remembering names. Faces were easy enough, especially if in a familiar setting, but putting a name to that face was often quite beyond him.
It seemed a minor enough fault in an otherwise pleasant and agreeable man – a good father and a good husband, doing well in his chosen sphere of business. A secretary and a card index helped him with the names of his customers, and if the names of his neighbours on their executive estate sometimes eluded him it was perhaps hardly surprising.
‘We’re all so alike, that’s what it is,’ said his wife, Alice, a little sadly. She felt herself to be unexceptional, and sometimes wished it were not so. ‘Try to cook something new for dinner – like liver and avocado – and you find the whole estate’s done the same thing, on the same day!’
Howard was thirty-eight, broad-shouldered, fair, not particularly tall, not exceptionally good-looking, but presentable enough. He was Area Sales Manager (North-West) for a firm which made agricultural machinery. Alice was four years younger, plump, short, with carroty red hair and a freckled, everyday kind of face, and legs she preferred to hide. They had three children – Samantha, Thomasina and Sylvester – shortened, of necessity, to Sam, Tom and Silv. Howard sometimes couldn’t remember their names, either. He offered, as an excuse, the notion that the sex change which went with each abbreviation was enough to confuse anyone.
‘Perhaps you should put their names on your card index,’ said Alice, a little tartly. ‘Or perhaps you should try and spend more time with them, and a little less in the office, or at the pub.’
Well, everyone complains. Little hurts and reticences pass between couples and get swallowed up in the great flood of togetherness. Alice and Howard were happy enough, and so were their children until, one day, when they had been twelve years married, Howard went to the doctor to complain of recurrent headaches, met the doctor’s wife Elaine, and fell in love.
Elaine was bending over the T–Z section of the filing cabinet when Howard came up to the desk. He coughed; she turned, straightened, and as she came up looked him full in the eye. Neither smiled – their regard was intensely serious – and in those few moments the lives of both changed. It was as if, they told each other later, they recognised each other. That is to say, they knew in advance what was to come: how they were to move into the light, leaving others in the shadows.
When she had filled in the appointment he required he said, ‘Can I see you after work? It’s our wedding anniversary, so it can’t be for long, but never mind.’
She replied, ‘Of course. I’ll tell my husband I’ve gone to see a friend.’
He knew she would accept; she knew he would ask. Neither felt obliged to tell lies to each other, only to the rest of the world. And what a delightful conspiracy that turned out to be – the mixture of agony and excitement, shame and thrill. Alice believed lies, and Elaine’s husband Brian accepted excuses. Two lovers, pitted against the world, fighting for light, the escape from the dark. Love at first sight – full, powerful, sexual, forbidden love!
‘We were destined,’ said Elaine.
‘Two halves of one whole,’ said Howard, ‘that somehow got split.’
They slept together the day after they first met.
‘Will you come to bed with me?’ Howard asked, quite straightforwardly.
‘Of course,’ she had replied.
They went to an hotel for the night. He said he was away on business: she said she was visiting a friend.
‘This isn’t lust,’ he said, halfway through the night. ‘It’s love.’
‘I know,’ she said. She was taller than he was, with large dark eyes and a soft, tremulous mouth.
There seemed nothing they couldn’t do, or shouldn’t, and everything they wanted to do, with the light on and their eyes open.
‘I’ve never known anything like this before,’ he said.
‘Neither have I,’ she said.
And yet they were just two quite ordinary people, not particularly beautiful, or romantically inclined, or given to this kind of behaviour. Howard had been unfaithful once or twice, but discretely; Elaine, never. Nor did custom diminish their attraction for one another. The more they had, the more they wanted. The more they knew, the more there was to discover.
And how they talked! They could say anything to each other, without fear of being thought foolish. Every detail of their individual lives they could hand over to the other, in the knowledge of safe-keeping.
And every moment they were apart was terrible: restless, scratchy, miserable – they were addicts deprived of their drug.
As for Alice, Sam, Tom and Silv, and Brian, William and Frosty – they inhabited a dim world, where people mouthed and gaped and spoke words which could not be heard.
‘Perhaps I’d better label the children,’ said Alice, sadly. ‘They’re beginning to feel quite upset. And Howard, you’re looking so pale! They work you too hard.’
‘We can’t go on like this,’ said Howard to Elaine. ‘It isn’t fair to anyone.’
‘We have to be together,’ said Elaine to Howard. ‘Surely they’ll understand.’ Elaine had confessed to Howard that she’d never really loved her sons, not as she felt a mother ought. Now she understood why. She had never really loved their father Brian. She’d liked him well enough, and found him not unattractive, and felt safe in his company, and mistaken these feelings for love. Were she to have children with Howard, how different her feelings would be! As it was, William and Frosty would be better off with Brian. Wouldn’t they?
Her mother had gone off and left her when she was eight, and the neighbours had been very shocked – as they wouldn’t be these days. It happened all the time – but that was about all. She, Elaine, had been happy enough to be left with her father; she was all right now, wasn’t she? So would the boys be, and do Brian good to have a taste of what she’d been putting up with without any help from him all these years. No; no one would suffer – except her, as usual. She’d miss the boys, of course she would, far more than they’d miss her. But they’d come and visit.
‘I can’t go on living a lie,’ said Howard to Elaine. ‘It’s not fair to Alice for me to go on living with her, when I’m in love with you. I love Alice: she’s done nothing wrong: she’s been a good wife and mother within her lights – but I’m in love with you.’
Within her lights! What a dim, feeble glimmer they gave off, compared to the incandescent flame that was Elaine. She would close his eyes with her lips, and his whole inner world be ablaze with light and certainty.
He thought it was best to do it suddenly: simply not to come home one day, but leave a letter to be found later. It would save arguments, recriminations, bitterness.
‘I don’t think I’m being cowardly,’ he said to Elaine. ‘I just think it’s the best way. Of course she’s going to be upset, and I’m truly sorry. But, you know, she never asked me if I wanted children. She just assumed I did, and went ahead and had them.’
‘Poor Howard! There seemed to be so little communication between you and your wife,’ lamented Elaine, and already she used the past tense. That was the weekend before the notes were left and the new life started.
They didn’t like to plan too much. Somehow it took away from the magic of everything. All the world loves a lover, and the gods help those who help themselves, and destiny was on their side – matters of mortgages and money and matrimonial homes would sort themselves out in time.
They left their notes, packed suitcases, and went off to a hotel in Blackpool, where they toasted their future in champagne.
‘He’ll have to get a relief receptionist and pay her a proper wage,’ said Elaine, ‘and that’s going to upset him more than anything.’
‘I think her mother will understand,’ said Howard. ‘She gave up everything for love, after all.’
Alice’s mother, as a girl, had been to Dartington Hall (a fee-paying school for the children of the musical intelligentsia) but eloped from there, at the age of sixteen, with a long-distance truck driver. (Alice, rather disappointingly, after all that, had inherited her father’s looks and temperament.) Alice’s mother had once said to Howard, ‘The reason you can’t remember names is because you don’t believe in anyone else’s reality, only your own,’ and Howard had felt there might be some truth in it, and had wanted to discuss it with Alice, but she’d been changing a nappy.
Alice’s mother didn’t understand. Nor did Alice’s father, or Alice’s children Sam, Tom and Silv. Nor did Alice. No one seemed to understand true love.
Alice went to their solicitor and had their joint bank account stopped, and rang up his boss at headquarters, and would even have got through to Howard himself had he not sweet-talked the switchboard girl. (She’d been one of the discrete infidelities: the only thing he ever kept from Elaine – who now owned his heart, his soul, his future.)
A private detective turned up at the Blackpool hotel and Howard and Elaine were asked to leave. Howard marvelled.
‘The institution of marriage is an amazing thing,’ he said. ‘Everyone cheats on it, but defy it openly, as we did, and see how the ranks close. Solicitors, bank managers, employers, hotel-keepers – all turn against the hapless renegades.’
But he thought all was well lost for love of Elaine.
‘Look here,’ said his boss, ‘I hear you’ve been taking this woman round the farms, on business trips. And not just leaving her in the car but taking her round the fields, holding hands, that kind of thing.’
‘We’re in love,’ said Howard. Somehow the simplicity of it all rang slightly false.
‘I don’t want anyone disloyal on my staff,’ said the boss. ‘And this is what this is. Rank, heartless, disloyalty to a good wife. I’m very fond of Alice.’
He’d come to dinner once, saying ‘take no trouble, please.’ Alice had served rabbit, which he couldn’t eat, being an Australian, but he seemed to have forgiven her. At any rate he fired Howard.
Howard responded by threatening to sue under the Unfair Dismissal laws, but Elaine dissuaded him. ‘We’d have our names in the paper,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to the children.’
Elaine had telephoned Brian, just to see how the boys were, but he’d put the phone down on her. She’d called round to collect a few things but he’d shut the door in her face and a neighbour told her, anyway, all her possessions were down on the rubbish dump, being picked over by all and sundry. Brian had put them there.
‘So it really has to be a new life,’ Elaine said.
‘Of course,’ said Howard.
They held hands all the way down to London.
‘How wonderful,’ said Howard. ‘Journeys used to seem so long; now they seem so short.’
They felt alive: felt their own selves both within the other and within their own bodies. There were no children to deflect emotion and delay response, or spoil the strange stillness that sometimes hovered in the air between them, as if the whole universe watched and waited, attending the joining of two bodies. Momentous! Love at first sight. True love!
They took a room in London and were surprised and rather aggrieved by the rent demanded, and by the dinginess of the street. Elaine feared lead poisoning. But she got a clerical job in an estate agency next to the Underground station. She was older than the other girls, and felt strange without the protection of her wedding ring, and shocked by the language they used.
‘They’re so crude,’ she complained to Howard. ‘I feel quite sorry for them. They can’t know what sex is like or love is all about, or they wouldn’t talk about it the way they do.’
Howard applied for thirty-two jobs and got none of them. Well, there was a recession. Alice, contacted by letter, declined to sell the grandfather clock and send Howard the proceeds via a poste-restante address as he suggested.
‘It’s my clock,’ he observed to Elaine. ‘She is nothing but a heartless, mercenary bitch.’
‘We have each other,’ she said, her leg warm and soft across his, at night. ‘And you’ll get a job soon and we can live on my money until you do.’
Alice’s uncle, of all people, managed to trace Howard and turned up to reproach him, and demand money, almost with menaces.
‘People amaze me,’ said Howard, having sent him away with a flea in his ear. ‘Anyone would think we were back in the fifties! What is marriage, after all, but a scrap of paper? Surely these days it’s recognised that a man has a right to fulfil his emotions – to follow his destiny through?’
Elaine, having few people to chat to, confided her story to the landlady. True love plus sacrifice – equals real romance! Surely?
‘Five children between you!’ was all the landlady said, disappointingly. Then she gave them notice. They humped their suitcases to another similar room. It didn’t really make a great deal of difference which end of the street they looked out on, and in fact the bed in the new place was a little wider, and a little less squeaky.
‘It’s all right for Alice,’ said Howard, signing on at the Job Centre. ‘She can stay snug and secure in the matrimonial house and live off social security because she’s got the kids. But a man has to labour for the rest of his life and pay out God knows what in stamps, and never see a penny return.’
Did God know what? Perhaps. Elaine telephoned Howard from work to find out how he’d got on at the Job Centre.
‘Darling!’ she said.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
‘Elaine, of course,’ she replied.
‘Who did you say?’
‘Elaine.’
There was a silence. Then—
‘Oh, sorry, darling. I was dreaming.’
Nevertheless it had been said, and was the beginning of the end. He knew that she knew, and she knew that he knew, and so forth, that although love flowed out of him, freely and passionately, it was the love itself that mattered, and not the object of the love. They were both, when it came to it, strangers to each other.