Harry’s wife, Barbara, was a doctor, too. She was intelligent, good-looking, and well-disposed towards me. In manifestation of the latter she had a way of giving me a look that indicated I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself.
I told myself I could have taken it more readily from a man than a woman. After all, I conceded, I actually had taken it from at least one man over a period of twenty years, namely from Robert. Of course you may think there was something wrong with me rather than with Barbara – you certainly may if you happen to be a woman. But that does not alter the fact that I found the look hard to take, above all when Barbara gave it me while declaring:
‘You’ll never get married.’
You see what I mean?
Harry had married slightly above him, both socially, which may or may not be all to the good, and financially, which is beyond all doubt beneficent. Harry and I were quite simply petty bourgeois: Barbara’s father, now dead, had been a provincial lawyer of considerable substance, and a portion of this substance had already come down to Barbara – that was how she and Harry came to have such a large house. Her mother, who stayed with them sometimes, was even slightly grand in her manner: she used to take Barbara to race-meetings, which to me, in spite of seeing the Irish dregs of Shepherd’s Bush pour out of trains from Newbury at Paddington, always smacked of the idle rich.
At this particular time Harry and Barbara had been married eleven years and had begotten three children. Barbara was about the same age as Harry – they had first met when they were medical students. She was a brisk, energetic woman, with the sort of trimness of body that active women often have, though she was now thickening at the middle. She had a longish face, whose length she enhanced by sweeping her hair up at the sides. Her complexion was unusually fine and very fresh in colour, slightly freckled, and her eyes were a clear, light hazel. They were large, clear, knowing eyes.
‘Barbara’s a strange girl,’ Harry used to say to me.
The first time he said it I was amazed. Active, strong-minded, confident and direct was what she seemed to me. Above all, direct. But when he had said it to me on several occasions, I got over my amazement to the extent of being able to note what his emotion was. The look in his eyes was not as usual shrewd and inquisitive: it was sentimental, indulgent … Barbara seemed strange to him, I realized, because he wanted her to seem strange.
The explanation? Harry was, I think, born to be a faithful and devoted husband – I had in my time come across quite a few men who were clearly born to be the reverse and Harry reminded me of none of them. I turned over in my mind the idea that Harry’s curiosity played the absorbing part in his life that sexual adventurousness played in theirs. His wife, to Harry, had simply got to be someone around whom his curiosity could play. Whereas to me she looked like a woman destined to be a local councillor and a Justice of the Peace, to Harry she had got to look as mysterious and enigmatic as the Mona Lisa.
‘Barbara’s a strange girl,’ he said. He was always looking away from me when he said it, clearly meditating on goodness knows what subtleties of mind and convolutions of temperament in his loved one.
I nodded my head. The revelation was mad, but oddly appealing to me. I could not help liking him all the more for it.
So there you have Harry and Barbara. Oh yes, I have not told you yet that Barbara, as well as running a house and being a mother, also had a part-time job at a children’s clinic on the other side of London. I had a feeling that although she found no difficulty in knowing adults better than they knew themselves, children did present her with certain problems. Whether that made things better or worse for the children was a question upon which I used to speculate.
The occasion when Barbara gave me her I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself look and simultaneously said ‘You’ll never get married’ was the first time I went to dinner with her and Harry after I had gone to live at Putney – uprooted from dilapidated Pimlico, mark you, with her exhortation and Harry’s assistance, in order to rebuild my dilapidated life. Even if Barbara did know me better than I knew myself, might not she spare me, I wondered, the knowledge of my doom? Might not she and Fate keep it to themselves, as Fate did when operating on its own? Apparently not.
Still, I liked Barbara. And I liked her cooking. I really looked forward to dinner with her and Harry.
The next time I went to dinner at their house, after the night Harry asked me if it was true that Robert was going to resign from the Civil Service, Barbara was going to cook a duck. I was very partial to duck. All previous looks and questions were forgiven and forgotten.
Over dinner Harry and I got down, as usual, to a fine professional discussion about classifications of physiques and temperaments. We were recently completely épris – if you can use that word about scientists – by the ideas of an American named Sheldon. He seemed to us a master man, not without reason: he had got over the two hurdles which had previously floored everybody else at the start of their operations in ‘typing’ physiques, namely how to measure up a physique reliably, and how to cope with the obvious fact that it was not a ‘type’ anyway but something in between.
Harry and I could scarcely wait to start trying out the ideas for ourselves. You cleared the first hurdle by photographing the physique you were proposing to ‘type’ in a pre-defined posture from the front, side, and back, and then you made your comparative measurements from the photographs. You cleared the second by regarding this individual physique as a blend, in different proportions, of your chosen ‘types’ – the rounded fat man, the cubical muscular man, and the linear skinny man. From your comparative measurements you could make a quantitative assessment of the blend. Quantitative! The thing was beginning to look like a science.
But that was only the half of it. The same idea was paralleled on the side of temperament: in the particular temperament you were proposing to type, you made a similar quantitative assessment of the blend of three ‘type’ temperaments, these ‘type’ temperaments being the temperaments that characteristically went with the ‘type’ physiques. The whole thing tied up, was our verdict.
‘It’s maddening,’ said I, ‘that we didn’t think of it.’
‘It’s like all the best revolutionary concepts,’ said Harry. ‘So obvious, so simple!’
You can see how épris we were.
At Harry’s dinner-table we were concerned not so much with the phon and antiphon of praise as with the prospect of getting down to business on our own. We were agreed that we had got to devise some means of trying out Sheldon’s ‘somato-typing’.
‘If only you could get the M.R.C. to set you up with a research unit!’ I said to Harry.
Harry looked at me with baggy bright eyes.
‘But surely you,’ he said, ‘in your job, have all the people we need for it. You’ve got them all there, simply on tap.’
I looked back at him. And well I might! You see, when one refers to physiques in medical society, one is not thinking of their being clothed. I imagined our engineers and scientists being invited, after I had questioned them on their technical life-stories, to go into an adjoining room to be photographed in the stark – from three view-points!
‘Do you want to get me hounded out of the Civil Service altogether?’ I said. I was not thinking what would happen if the Daily Pictorial got on to it. I only needed to go as far as thinking what would happen if Murray-Hamilton and Spinks heard of it.
For a moment Harry held his large round head on one side. Barbara intervened.
‘Couldn’t it be combined with a medical examination?’ Sometimes Barbara, instead of saying the most peculiar thing, baffled one by saying the most sensible.
‘Not in this set-up,’ I said firmly.
Barbara gave Harry a glance, but I did not feel inclined to explain to her.
We had finished our dinner and Barbara said: ‘Shall we have our coffee in the drawing-room?’
We went into the drawing-room. The house was Edwardian, massive and ugly, but spacious. Harry and Barbara had done it up very agreeably in the first post-war fashion, which was called ‘contemporary’. This evening a fire was sparkling in the grate; lamps were glowing in the right places for comfort; and Barbara, wearing a black dress and a big topaz and diamond brooch which set off the colour of her eyes, looked unusually handsome. I said to her:
‘That roast duck, Barbara, was simply –’ and I made a gesture such as I thought I had seen Italians make in restaurants to indicate that food was delicious.
Barbara laughed. And then she blushed.
I drank my coffee thinking how pleasant life was.
In a desultory way we began to gossip. I scarcely noticed it when Harry first mentioned Sybil. He said he supposed she was coming up to London at Christmas, and I was feeling too relaxed to tell him he was a few days wrong. He was sitting fatly in an armchair whose legs splayed outwards. He was smiling.
‘I suppose Robert asks you if you’re going to marry her,’ he said.
I grinned.
Barbara leaned forward and said to him:
‘Does Robert really ask that, do you think?’
‘I was saying I supposed he did,’ said Harry. ‘After all, Joe’s mother asks me every time I see her.’ He glanced at me sideways to see how I took this gambit.
I took it with stupefaction: I knew that it would be unlike Harry not to go and see my mother whenever he went to his own home, but that he was on these terms with her was something that I had not even considered.
Harry was quick to see the effect. He went on with a happy smile:
‘Only last week she asked me if you were going to marry “your Sybil”.’
This instantly conveyed verisimilitude. The prefix ‘your’ conveyed without a doubt that my mother had said it, since it evoked the particular tone – unintentional, I ought to say – with which my mother always seemed, to my sensitive ears, to refer to any of my young women.
‘Did she think I would marry Sybil?’ I inquired.
Harry shook his big, globe-shaped head. ‘I think she’s thought for some time now that you’ve missed the boat.’
‘Missed the boat!’
Harry leaned his head against the back of his chair, and said nothing. Barbara said nothing: there was clearly no need for Barbara to say anything.
After a while, Harry said pensively:
‘I like Sybil.’ He paused. ‘I never understand her.’
I said: ‘Nor do I, for that matter. I don’t really know her even after fifteen years.’
‘And that,’ said Barbara promptly, ‘doesn’t affect your relationship with her?’
You will recall my predicament as I saw it on that night of self-revelation in the bar at Euston. I said to Barbara:
‘Not an atom!’
Barbara regarded me.
‘There’s a very definite split, there,’ she said, ‘between comprehension and function.’
‘I see what you mean,’ I said. Suddenly I was delighted, as a lewd transformation of her words occurred to me. ‘You mean between knowing and doing.’
Barbara looked mystified. ‘Perhaps,’ she said firmly.
I turned to Harry. I could see that he was thinking about something else. He said:
‘I suppose Robert has in mind whether you’re thinking of marrying Sybil –’
I interrupted: ‘I’m not thinking of marrying Sybil!’
‘ – because of his plans to marry Annette.’
‘Is he going to marry Annette?’ said I.
Harry looked at me triumphantly and sympathetically. He said, in a high sweet voice:
‘Well, isn’t he?’
I said nothing now. You see, when Harry told me Robert was going to leave the Civil Service, I was disturbed for the practical reasons that I have since explained. When he told me Robert was going to marry Annette, the disturbance was just as serious but much less worthy of a decent man. Robert and I were comrades in the unmarried state, and my first response to Harry’s remark was to foresee another kind of desertion.
I picked up my coffee-cup and held it towards Barbara, asking if I could have some more coffee. And I looked at Harry, wondering if he knew exactly what sort of dismay his inquisitiveness caused me. He was a clever man, and I had a strong suspicion that he did know. By nature Harry was generous, kindly, devoted – a good man. Yet I could not help thinking that he was also a devil.