‘I’ll just look under the mat first. To make sure she wasn’t lying.’
He enjoyed marriage – so much that he blamed himself for not having married before, forgetting that in that case he would have been married to Josephine. He found Julia, who had no work of her own, almost miraculously available. There was no maid to mar their relationship with habits. As they were always together, at cocktail parties, in restaurants, at small dinner parties, they had only to meet each other’s eyes . . . Julia soon earned the reputation of being delicate and easily tired, it occurred so often that they left a cocktail party after a quarter of an hour or abandoned a dinner after the coffee – ‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry, such a vile headache, so stupid of me. Philip, you must stay . . .’
‘Of course I’m not going to stay.’
Once they had a narrow escape from discovery on the stairs while they were laughing uncontrollably. Their host had followed them out to ask them to post a letter. Julia in the nick of time changed her laughter into what seemed to be a fit of hysterics. . . . Several weeks went by. It was a really successful marriage. . . . They liked – between whiles – to discuss its success, each attributing the main merit to the other. ‘When I think you might have married Josephine,’ Julia said. ‘Why didn’t you marry Josephine?’
‘I suppose at the back of our minds we knew it wasn’t going to be permanent.’
‘Are we going to be permanent?’
‘If we aren’t, nothing will ever be.’
It was early in November that the time-bombs began to go off. No doubt they had been planned to explode earlier, but Josephine had not taken into account the temporary change in his habits. Some weeks passed before he had occasion to open what they used to call the ideas-bank in the days of their closest companionship – the drawer in which he used to leave notes for stories, scraps of overheard dialogue and the like, and she would leave roughly sketched ideas for fashion advertisements.
Directly he opened the drawer he saw her letter. It was labelled heavily ‘Top Secret’ in black ink with a whimsically drawn exclamation mark in the form of a girl with big eyes (Josephine suffered in an elegant way from exophthalmic goitre) rising genie-like out of a bottle. He read the letter with extreme distaste:
Dear, you didn’t expect to find me here, did you? But after ten years I can’t not now and then say, Good-night or good-morning, how are you? Bless you. Lots of love (really and truly), Your Josephine.
The threat of ‘now and then’ was unmistakable. He slammed the drawer shut and said ‘Damn’ so loudly that Julia looked in. ‘Whatever is it, darling?’
‘Josephine again.’
She read the letter and said, ‘You know, I can understand the way she feels. Poor Josephine. Are you tearing it up, darling?’
‘What else do you expect me to do with it? Keep it for a collected edition of her letters?’
‘It just seems a bit unkind.’
‘Me unkind to her? Julia, you’ve no idea of the sort of life that we led those last years. I can show you scars: when she was in a rage she would stub her cigarettes anywhere.’
‘She felt she was losing you, darling, and she got desperate. They are my fault really, those scars, every one of them.’ He could see growing in her eyes that soft amused speculative look which always led to the same thing.
Only two days passed before the next time-bomb went off. When they got up Julia said, ‘We really ought to change the mattress. We both fall into a kind of hole in the middle.’
‘I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Lots of people change the mattress every week.’
‘Yes. Josephine always did.’
They stripped the bed and began to roll the mattress. Lying on the springs was a letter addressed to Julia. Carter saw it first and tried to push it out of sight, but Julia saw him.
‘What’s that?’
‘Josephine, of course. There’ll soon be too many letters for one volume. We shall have to get them properly edited at Yale like George Eliot’s.’
‘Darling, this is addressed to me. What were you planning to do with it?’
‘Destroy it in secret.’
‘I thought we were going to have no secrets.’
‘I had counted without Josephine.’
For the first time she hesitated before opening the letter. ‘It’s certainly a bit bizarre to put a letter here. Do you think it got there accidentally?’
‘Rather difficult, I should think.’
She read the letter and then gave it to him. She said with relief, ‘Oh, she explains why. It’s quite natural really.’ He read:
Dear Julia, how I hope you are basking in a really Greek sun. Don’t tell Philip (Oh, but of course you wouldn’t have secrets yet) but I never really cared for the south of France. Always that mistral, drying the skin. I’m glad to think you are not suffering there. We always planned to go to Greece when we could afford it, so I know Philip will be happy. I came in today to find a sketch and then remembered that the mattress hadn’t been turned for at least a fortnight. We were rather distracted, you know, the last weeks we were together. Anyway I couldn’t bear the thought of your coming back from the lotus islands and finding bumps in your bed the first night, so I’ve turned it for you. I’d advise you to turn it every week: otherwise a hole always develops in the middle. By the way I’ve put up the winter curtains and sent the summer ones to the cleaners at 153 Brompton Road. Love, Josephine.
‘If you remember, she wrote to me that Napoule had been heavenly,’ he said. ‘The Yale editor will have to put in a cross-reference.’
‘You are a bit cold-blooded,’ Julia said. ‘Darling, she’s only trying to be helpful. After all I never knew about the curtains or the mattress.’
‘I suppose you are going to write a long cosy letter in reply, full of household chat.’
‘She’s been waiting weeks for an answer. This is an ancient letter.’
‘And I wonder how many more ancient letters there are waiting to pop out. By God, I’m going to search the flat through and through. From attic to basement.’
‘We don’t have either.’
‘You know very well what I mean.’
‘I only know you are getting fussed in an exaggerated way. You really behave as though you are frightened of Josephine.’
‘Oh hell!’
Julia left the room abruptly and he tried to work. Later that day a squib went off – nothing serious, but it didn’t help his mood. He wanted to find the dialling number for oversea telegrams and he discovered inserted in volume one of the directory a complete list in alphabetical order, typed on Josephine’s machine on which O was always blurred, a complete list of the numbers he most often required. John Hughes, his oldest friend, came after Harrods; and there were the nearest taxi-rank, the chemists’, the butcher’s, the bank, the dry-cleaner’s, the greengrocer’s, the fishmonger’s, his publisher and agent, Elizabeth Arden’s and the local hairdressers’ – marked in brackets (‘For J. please note, quite reliable and very inexpensive’) – it was the first time he noticed they had the same initials.
Julia, who saw him discover the list, said, ‘The angel-woman. We’ll pin it up over the telephone. It’s really terribly complete.’
‘After the crack in her last letter I’d have expected her to include Cartier’s.’
‘Darling, it wasn’t a crack. It was a bare statement of fact. If I hadn’t had a little money, we would have gone to the south of France too.’
‘I suppose you think I married you to get to Greece.’
‘Don’t be an owl. You don’t see Josephine clearly, that’s all. You twist every kindness she does.’
‘Kindness?’
‘I expect it’s the sense of guilt.’
After that he really began a search. He looked in cigarette-boxes, drawers, filing-cabinets, he went through all the pockets of the suits he had left behind, he opened the back of the television-cabinet, he lifted the lid of the lavatory-cistern, and even changed the roll of t
oilet-paper (it was quicker than unwinding the whole thing). Julia came to look at him, as he worked in the lavatory, without her usual sympathy. He tried the pelmets (who knew what they mightn’t discover when next the curtains were sent for cleaning?), he took their dirty clothes out of the basket in case something had been overlooked at the bottom. He went on hands-and-knees through the kitchen to look under the gas-stove, and once, when he found a piece of paper wrapped around a pipe, he exclaimed in a kind of triumph, but it was nothing at all – a plumber’s relic. The afternoon post rattled through the letter-box and Julia called to him from the hall – ‘Oh, good, you never told me you took in the French Vogue.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Sorry, there’s a kind of Christmas card in another envelope. A subscription’s been taken out for us by Miss Josephine Heckstall-Jones. I do call that sweet of her.’
‘She’s sold a series of drawings to them. I won’t look at it.’
‘Darling, you are being childish. Do you expect her to stop reading your books?’
‘I only want to be left alone with you. Just for a few weeks. It’s not so much to ask.’
‘You’re a bit of an egoist, darling.’
He felt quiet and tired that evening, but a little relieved in mind. His search had been very thorough. In the middle of dinner he had remembered the wedding-presents, still crated for lack of room, and insisted on making sure between the courses that they were still nailed down – he knew Josephine would never have used a screwdriver for fear of injuring her fingers, and she was terrified of hammers. The peace of a solitary evening at last descended on them: the delicious calm which they knew either of them could alter at any moment with a touch of the hand. Lovers cannot postpone as married people can. ‘I am grown peaceful as old age tonight,’ he quoted to her.
‘Who wrote that?’
‘Browning.’
‘I don’t know Browning. Read me some.’
He loved to read Browning aloud – he had a good voice for poetry, it was his small harmless Narcissism. ‘Would you really like it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I used to read to Josephine,’ he warned her.
‘What do I care? We can’t help doing some of the same things, can we, darling?’
‘There is something I never read to Josephine. Even though I was in love with her, it wasn’t suitable. We weren’t – permanent.’ He began:
How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark autumn-evenings come . . .
He was deeply moved by his own reading. He had never loved Julia so much as at this moment. Here was home – nothing else had been other than a caravan.
. . . I will speak now,
No longer watch you as you sit
Reading by firelight, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Mutely, my heart knows how.
He rather wished that Julia had really been reading, but then of course she wouldn’t have been listening to him with such adorable attention.
. . . If you join two lives, there is oft a scar.
They are one and one, with a shadowy third;
One near one is too far.
He turned the page and there lay a sheet of paper (he would have discovered it at once, before reading, if she had put it in an envelope) with the black neat handwriting.
Dearest Philip, only to say goodnight to you between the pages of your favourite book – and mine. We are so lucky to have ended in the way we have. With memories in common we shall for ever be a little in touch. Love, Josephine.
He flung the book and the paper on the floor. He said, ‘The bitch. The bloody bitch.’
‘I won’t have you talk of her like that,’ Julia said with surprising strength. She picked up the paper and read it.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she demanded. ‘Do you hate memories? What’s going to happen to our memories?’
‘But don’t you see the trick she’s playing? Don’t you understand? Are you an idiot, Julia?’
That night they lay in bed on opposite sides, not even touching with their feet. It was the first night since they had come home that they had not made love. Neither slept much. In the morning Carter found a letter in the most obvious place of all, which he had somehow neglected: between the leaves of the unused single-lined foolscap on which he always wrote his stories. It began, ‘Darling, I’m sure you won’t mind my using the old old term . . .’
CHEAP IN AUGUST
* * *
1
IT was cheap in August: the essential sun, the coral reefs, the bamboo bar and the calypsos – they were all of them at cut prices, like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain-sale. Groups arrived periodically from Philadelphia in the manner of school-treats and departed with less bruit, after an exact exhausting week, when the picnic was over. Perhaps for twenty-four hours the swimming-pool and the bar were almost deserted, and then another school-treat would arrive, this time from St Louis. Everyone knew everyone else; they had bussed together to an airport, they had flown together, together they had faced an alien customs; they would separate during the day and greet each other noisily and happily after dark, exchanging impressions of ‘shooting the rapids’, the botanic gardens, the Spanish fort. ‘We are doing that tomorrow.’
Mary Watson wrote to her husband in Europe, I had to get away for a bit and it’s so cheap in August.’ They had been married ten years and they had only been separated three times. He wrote to her every day and the letters arrived twice a week in little bundles. She arranged them like newspapers by the date and read them in the correct order. They were tender and precise; what with his research, with preparing lectures and writing letters, he had little time to see Europe – he insisted on calling it ‘your Europe’ as though to assure her that he had not forgotten the sacrifice which she must have made by marrying an American professor from New England, but sometimes little criticisms of ‘her Europe’ escaped him: the food was too rich, cigarettes too expensive, wine too often served and milk very difficult to obtain at lunchtime – which might indicate that, after all, she ought not to exaggerate her sacrifice. Perhaps it would have been a good thing if James Thomson, who was his special study at the moment, had written The Seasons in America – an American autumn, she had to admit, was more beautiful than an English one.
Mary Watson wrote to him every other day, but sometimes a postcard only, and she was apt to forget if she had repeated the postcard. She wrote in the shade of the bamboo bar where she could see everyone who passed on the way to the swimming-pool. She wrote truthfully, ‘It’s so cheap in August; the hotel is not half full, and the heat and the humidity are very tiring. But, of course, it’s a change.’ She had no wish to appear extravagant; the salary, which to her European eyes had seemed astronomically large for a professor of literature, had long dwindled to its proper proportions, relative to the price of steaks and salads – she must justify with a little enthusiasm the money she was spending in his absence. So she wrote also about the flowers in the botanic gardens – she had ventured that far on one occasion – and with less truth of the beneficial changes wrought by the sun and the lazy life on her friend Margaret who from ‘her England’ had written and demanded her company: a Margaret, she admitted frankly to herself, who was not visible to any eye but the eye of faith. But then Charlie had complete faith. Even good qualities become with the erosion of time a reproach. After ten years of being happily married, she thought, one undervalues security and tranquillity.
She read Charlie’s letters with great attention. She longed to find in them one ambiguity, one evasion, one time-gap which he had ill-explained. Even an unusually strong expression of love would have pleased her, for its strength might have been there to counterweigh a sense of guilt. But she couldn’t deceive herself that there was any sense of guilt in Charlie’s facile flowing informative script. She calculated that if he had been one of the poets he was now so closely studying, he would have completed already a st
andard-sized epic during his first two months in ‘her Europe’, and the letters, after all, were only a spare-time occupation. They filled up the vacant hours, and certainly they could have left no room for any other occupation. ‘It is ten o’clock at night, it is raining outside and the temperature is rather cool for August, not above fifty-six degrees. When I have said good-night to you, dear one, I shall go happily to bed with the thought of you. I have a long day tomorrow at the museum and dinner in the evening with the Henry Wilkinsons who are passing through on their way from Athens – you remember the Henry Wilkinsons, don’t you?’ (Didn’t she just?) She had wondered whether, when Charlie returned, she might perhaps detect some small unfamiliar note in his love-making which would indicate that a stranger had passed that way. Now she disbelieved in the possibility, and anyway the evidence would arrive too late – it was no good to her now that she might be justified later. She wanted her justification immediately, a justification not alas! for any act that she had committed but only for an intention, for the intention of betraying Charlie, of having, like so many of her friends, a holiday affair (the idea had come to her immediately the dean’s wife had said, ‘It’s so cheap in Jamaica in August’).
The trouble was that, after three weeks of calypsos in the humid evenings, the rum punches (for which she could no longer disguise from herself a repugnance), the warm Martinis, the interminable red snappers, and tomatoes with everything, there had been no affair, not even the hint of one. She had discovered with disappointment the essential morality of a holiday resort in the cheap season; there were no opportunities for infidelity, only for writing postcards – with great brilliant blue skies and seas – to Charlie. Once a woman from St Louis had taken too obvious pity on her, when she sat alone in the bar writing postcards, and invited her to join their party which was about to visit the botanic gardens – ‘We are an awfully jolly bunch,’ she had said with a big turnip smile. Mary exaggerated her English accent to repel her better and said that she didn’t much care for flowers. It had shocked the woman as deeply as if she had said she did not care for television. From the motion of the heads at the other end of the bar, the agitated clinking of the Coca-Cola glasses, she could tell that her words were being repeated from one to another. Afterwards, until the jolly bunch had taken the airport limousine on the way back to St Louis, she was aware of averted heads. She was English, she had taken a superior attitude to flowers, and as she preferred even warm Martinis to Coca-Cola, she was probably in their eyes an alcoholic.
May We Borrow Your Husband & Other Comedies of the Sexual Life Page 7