Annette moved into Elspeth’s job.
One day when I happened to see Barbara – it was a day when I was going to the office by Tube and we met on the station platform – I asked her how Annette was getting on at the school.
Barbara was going down to her Bethnal Green clinic. ‘I suppose you see Annette quite often now,’ I said.
‘Yes, we’re getting to be quite friends.’
‘How’s she doing?’
‘Very well indeed.’ Barbara looked down the railway line. It was a cold June morning and there was a drift of mist in the cutting. ‘I think she’s made an excellent adjustment.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘What has she adjusted?’
Barbara smiled. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘You mean she’s adjusted herself to the children,’ I said, modelling my tone on that employed by Robert on such an occasion – that tone of a bright boy successfully taking part in a guessing competition.
Barbara said: ‘She’s made an excellent overall adjustment.’
‘Over all what?’ I burst into laughter. ‘All right. I won’t go on. You mean that you think her “moral choice” has made her feel cheerful.’
‘I do.’
‘And what about poor old Robert?’
Barbara began to say something, but I did not hear it because the train came into the station. We got in and sat down side by side. After a while I could not resist teasing her.
‘I suppose it was “adjustment” you had in mind when you warned me that it was easier to get married than to be married.’
She nodded her head.
‘What does it mean,’ I shouted, ‘actually?’
She thought for a moment. We were crossing the river: it looked pretty in the morning light.
‘Learning to live with each other. Making allowances for each other’s different desires.’
‘Most of the time we seem to have the same desires.’
Barbara looked at me. The train stopped in the next station.
‘Do you really find that?’ she said.
I thought about it. It was true. I said:
‘I suppose we must be easy-going, that’s all.’
Barbara was smoothing a crease in her skirt – she was wearing an expensive-looking dark grey suit. Just before the train started again she said:
‘And you have no feeling that you’re missing something?’
‘Well, no …’ What could we be missing? Children? There was not time yet for us to have had any. I was at a loss. I said: ‘Missing what?’
Barbara leaned towards me.
‘Have you had many quarrels?’
‘No.’
Instantly I knew that I had failed to recognize a key question, and as a consequence, worse still, had truthfully given the wrong answer.
‘You mean,’ I shouted, ‘we ought to quarrel?’
‘It’s very unusual not to.’
‘Why ought we to quarrel?’ I put my ear close to her mouth to be sure of hearing her anwer.
‘It’s one of the commonest ways of relieving the tension of marriage.’
I was confronted with the possibility that my marriage had no proper tensions.
I was silent. I got out my newspaper. It was The Times. Since getting married I had started to take The Times and to wear a bowler hat. I felt that such a radical change in status as getting married ought to be marked in my case by an appropriate change in outward habit. Elspeth did not mind my taking The Times, but she hated the bowler hat, on the explicit grounds that it did not suit me. I suspected that implicitly she considered it was a symbol of tamedness. Actually I thought I looked ridiculous in it. (Come to that, I thought all other men looked ridiculous in bowler hats. Just think detachedly of a human face, and then of a bowler hat on top of it!)
Throughout the day I considered the fact that Elspeth and I did not quarrel. If there were tensions in our marriage we were not releasing them. And if there were no tensions there must be something seriously lacking. I meant to discuss it with Elspeth when I got home.
When I got home – delightful experience! … Elspeth was there – Elspeth opened the door for me. A delicious smell of cooking came out. I realized exactly, now, what it meant in romantic novels when it said ‘He kissed her hungrily.’ Elspeth, by a marvellous combination of instinct and intelligence, was turning herself into a first-rate cook. The time was just long enough after the war for food to be getting varied and plentiful again, even though some of it was still rationed. Publishers were racing each other to bring out new cookery-books: I used to give them to Elspeth as presents.
After dinner we sat on the sofa, enjoying the pleasures of digestion before we did the washing up. I was holding her hand.
‘Men are carnal,’ I said, as a more highbrow way of expressing the fact that the way to a man’s heart was through his belly.
Elspeth stroked my hand consolingly.
‘I must say it’s wonderful being married,’ I said.
Elspeth gave me a quick look.
‘It’s specially wonderful being married to you.’ Luck had come my way after all, and all at once.
Elspeth said: ‘You never asked me.’
I was caught. I could not think what on earth she meant.
‘You never asked me to marry you.’
‘No more I did.’
She looked at me closely. ‘Don’t say you don’t remember!’
I frequently got into trouble for not being able to remember cardinal events in our married life. ‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘You were washing up, and I was in this room.’
She relaxed. ‘Near enough …’
I touched the wedding ring on her finger. ‘Ought I to have asked you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Didn’t you know I was going to ask you?’
‘I wasn’t sure …’ She faltered. And then she picked up. ‘I thought it was getting time.’
I laughed and then kissed her.
I touched her wedding ring again. ‘Poor baby, you didn’t get an engagement ring, either.’
She blushed.
‘When I get the Book of The Month in America, I’ll buy you a great big diamond.’
‘I don’t want a great big diamond.’
We were silent. Suddenly she laughed. I asked what was the matter.
‘I just thought of you buying yourself all those new clothes before you got married.’
I thought the best thing I could do was to laugh.
And then I picked up. I kissed her cheek. ‘You’re not doing so badly.’
She turned quickly and kissed me.
We were silent again. ‘It is wonderful …’ she said.
At that moment I recalled my conversation with Barbara, Was it wonderful? Was it?
I said: ‘Darling, do you think we ought to quarrel?’
Elspeth looked at me in some stupefaction. ‘What for?’
I then reported my conversation with Barbara. Elspeth listened with attention, and at the end said:
‘I don’t agree.’
I was relieved. In fact I was pleased, terribly pleased. I confided:
‘I don’t like quarrelling.’
‘Nor do I,’ said Elspeth.
I said: ‘I don’t quarrel easily, and when I do, I mean it. Unfortunately I can’t make up and forget it. I remember it.’
‘I’ve hardly ever quarrelled with anyone. And when I did it upset me for months.’
I said: ‘In that case, I think we’d better go on as we are. It seems all right to me.’
‘I don’t want to quarrel with you, darling, ever.’
I said: ‘Then, don’t let’s!’ I was very happy about this outcome.
Elspeth sat quietly, thinking about it. After a little while I became discursive. I explained to Elspeth a fact which had first occurred to me several years ago, that some people seem to need to quarrel. ‘It seems to provide the friction, the stimulus,’ I said, ‘which makes them feel they’ve really been brought to life.’ I recalled one of Robert’s former loves – the one who hit him with the whisky bottle.
‘In fact,’ I wound up, ‘it seems as if, for some people, a clash of wills is inseparable from sexual excitement.’ I paused. ‘I should have thought it must be very tiresome for them. And tiring …’
We were silent. I was thinking that my generalization was profound and that the tone in which I had stated it was admirable.
Elspeth said: ‘I’ve remembered – I think that book was by an Indian …’
I was caught again. I simply could not work it out: I had to say ‘Which book?’
Elspeth said: ‘That one that gave you and Robert such a shock. What did he call it? Daunting?’
‘An Indian!’ I said. I suddenly thought of millions of bright-eyed, birdlike little Bengalis, perpetually on the boil. But I was not willing to give an inch. ‘An Indian woman,’ I said.
Elspeth laughed. She looked at me sideways. Her eyes were sparkling.
I jumped up. ‘Come on!’ I said. ‘It’s time to wash up.’
Elspeth got up. ‘I’ve been waiting for you all this time.’
We went into the kitchen and did the washing up. If our marriage was missing something, we still had plenty to keep us satisfied.
The following morning, whom should I meet, as if by chance, but Harry. I was sure he had been lying in wait for me somewhere on the route to my usual bus-stop. He fell into step with me.
‘Lovely morning, Joe,’ he said.
I agreed that it was. The lilacs and laburnums were in flower in people’s gardens. It was some time since it had rained, and the dust on the road gave out a faint familiar scent – it reminded me of being somewhere abroad, where roads were always dry – the South of France on a dazzling spring morning, in the days long before the war … Some little girls in purple blazers passed us.
Harry said: ‘It’s nice to see you again.’
I nodded my head.
It was difficult to say whose fault it was, that we had seen so little of each other recently.
Somehow Elspeth’s and my getting married had estranged us from Harry and Barbara. ‘You could scarcely think it really could be that, when it was they who brought us together,’ Elspeth had said.
‘The movements of the soul,’ said I, ‘are not necessarily to be explained mechanically.’
As this speech had a somewhat dowsing effect on Elspeth, I added: ‘Actually, it’s one thing to bring people together, and another to know how you’re going to take the outcome.’
The light had come back into Elspeth’s eyes.
So, when Harry said it was nice to see me again, I felt it as unintended reproach, and yet there was nothing I could do about it.
‘Why don’t we have lunch together?’ I said, doubting if it would do any good. Harry and Barbara, in their married state, had looked at Elspeth and me in ours, and something had – well, made them turn their heads away.
‘Yes, we will,’ said Harry.
He swung along beside me – he walked with short steps, seeming, compared with me, to be balancing forwards on his toes.
‘I hear you saw Barbara yesterday morning,’ he said.
I smiled, ‘Yes,’ I wondered if it was to discuss this that he had waylaid me, and decided not. Harry was too innately wily to come straight to the point, even when there was not the slightest reason for not doing so.
‘She’s a strange girl,’ he said, looking in front of him.
I was touched.
‘I’m very attached to her,’ he said.
I was touched again.
He turned his head – I was aware of an odd glance coming round his snub nose – and said: ‘She has a good deal to put up with from me.’
I said mildly: ‘Yes.’ It seemed fair enough.
‘Even if I didn’t see myself as others see me, I should realize that,’ he said. He seemed to be laughing.
‘Yes,’ I said again, now completely mystified.
Harry said nothing else. In a little while we came to the bus-stop.
We climbed to the upper deck of the bus and settled ourselves in two seats at the front.
‘Well,’ said Harry, speaking now in his high, fluent, conversational tone. ‘What do you think of Robert’s new novel? I’ve scarcely seen you since it came out.’
The scales of mystification fell from my eyes. Though there had been a break in our conversation, and though Harry’s tone was different, the subject was still the same. Before I could answer, he said:
‘I enjoyed it tremendously.’
I knew what he had waylaid me for.
You may remember that although Robert did not see much of Harry – in my belief because he had not found Harry for himself – he used to question me about Harry with such interest that I suspected he must be thinking of someone like him as a character for a novel. Well, there was a character in Robert’s new novel who resembled Harry in some important respects, in particular being globe-shaped, whirling, and impelled by curiosity – while differing in others, such as social origins, profession and so on.
‘I enjoyed it tremendously,’ Harry repeated, just to make sure the point had gone home.
I said nothing. I should have loved to question him about what he thought of Robert’s character – it would have taught me a lot about Harry and a lot about literary art. For Robert’s vision of Harry, as far as it actually was of Harry, was different from mine. I tended to see Harry as a sort of non-sexual voyeur, whose ferreting out of details about everybody’s lives somehow fed his sense of power. Robert saw his own Harry-like character in a more Dostoievskian light, as wildly whirling in the flesh and pretty wildly whirling in the soul as well, held in control only by a strong will – a will stronger than I would at first sight have given Harry credit for. Yet every so often the will of Robert’s character failed him, and an act of a most peculiar kind so to speak escaped him. It was an act of what Robert chose to name ‘motiveless malice’.
The vision fascinated me, partly because I had seen nothing of such acts in Harry’s conduct of recent years, partly because it evoked an extraordinary recollection from my boyhood. Harry had told a school-girl whom I was going out with that I was writing love-letters to another girl. It was untrue: there was no basis for it: Harry had absolutely nothing to gain. The girl dropped me, refusing to tell me why, and I was unhappy for weeks – during which time Harry had listened to my confidences and gone to great lengths to console me!
Such an act of ‘motiveless malice’ provided Robert with a dramatic turn – completely invented, of course, since in life his own path and Harry’s scarcely ever crossed – in the central plot of his novel.
Suddenly I heard, to my stupefaction, Harry saying:
‘I enjoyed it most of all for the portrait of that young economist.’ This was the character I was thinking of.
‘It was splendidly done,’ Harry said. ‘I know what it’s like to be that sort of man.’
I turned to look at him and in his expression saw strong emotion. His eyes were shining. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Robert understands us very well …’
Then, just as suddenly, his mood changed. His shining glance shifted obliquely and his tone of voice went up.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘Robert understands me better than you do, Joe.’
I looked through the bus window as if I had noticed something specially interesting about the traffic.
‘Don’t you?’ he asked triumphantly.
‘I think that’s for you to say.’ I went on looking through the window.
For a little while Harry looked through the window, too.
‘Yes, Joe,’ he said. ‘Let’s have lunch together – let’s make it soon!’