Althea came back, the children came back, Henry came back, life went on, and Frederick almost at once fell violently in love with a girl of twenty who had applied to be a receptionist in the surgery. And Muriel felt exactly the same, but on the emotional plane, as a virtuously frigid wife felt—so we are told—when her husband went to a prostitute: If I had only given him what he wanted, he wouldn’t have gone to her!
For she knew that her Frederick would not have fallen in love with the girl if she had allowed him to be in love with her. He had had an allowance of “love” to be used up, because he had not understood—he had only said that he did—that he was wanting to fall in love: he needed the condition of being in love, needed to feel all that. Or, as Muriel muttered (but only very privately, and to herself), he needed to suffer. She should have allowed him to suffer. It is clear that everybody needs it.
And now there was this crisis, a nasty one, which rocked all four of them. Althea was unhappy, because her marriage was at stake: Frederick was talking of a divorce. And of course she was remembering her lapse with the young doctor four years before, and the living lie she had so ably maintained since. And Frederick was suicidal, because he was not so stupid as not to know that to leave a wife he adored, and was happy with, for the sake of a girl of twenty was—stupid. He was past forty-five. But he had never loved before, he said. He actually said this, and to Henry, who told Muriel.
Henry, who so far had not contributed a crisis, now revealed that he had suffered similarly some years before, but “it had not seemed important.” He confessed this to Muriel, who felt some irritation. For one thing, she felt she had never really appreciated Henry as he deserved, because the way he said “it had not seemed important” surely should commend itself to her? Yet it did not; she felt in some ridiculous way belittled because he made light of what had been—surely?—a deep experience? And if it had not, why not? And then, she felt she had been betrayed; that she was able to say to herself she was being absurd did not help. In short, suddenly Muriel was in a bad way. More about Frederick than about Henry. Deprived in a flash of years of sanity, she submerged under waves of jealousy of the young girl, of deprivation—but of what? what? she was in fact deprived of nothing!—of sexual longing, and of emotional loneliness. Her Henry, she had always known, was a cold fish. Their happiness had been a half-thing. Her own potential had always been in cold storage. And so she raged and suffered, for the sake of Frederick, her real love—so she felt now. Her only love. How could she have been so mad as not to enjoy being really in love, two weeks of love. How could she not have seen, all those years, where the truth lay. How could she …
That was what she felt. What she thought, and knew, was that she was mad. Everything she felt now had nothing, but nothing to do with her long relationship with Frederick, which was as pleasant as a good healthy diet and as unremarkable, and nothing to do with her marriage with Henry, whom she loved deeply, and who made her happy, and whose humorous and civilised company she enjoyed more than anyone’s.
Frederick brought his great love to an end. Or, to put it accurately, it was brought to an end: the girl married. For a while he sulked; he could not forgive life for his being nearly fifty. Althea helped him come back to himself, and to their life together.
Muriel and Henry re-established their loving equilibrium.
Muriel and Frederick for a long time did not, when they found themselves together, make sex. That phase had ended, so they told each other, when they had a discussion: they had never had a discussion of this sort before, and the fact that they were having one seemed proof indeed that they had finished with each other. It happened that this talk was taking place in his car, he having picked her up from some fete given to raise funds for the local hospital. Althea had not been able to attend. The children, once enjoyers of such affairs, were getting too old for them. Muriel was attending on behalf of them all, and Frederick was giving her a lift home. Frederick stopped the car on the edge of a small wood, which was now damp and brown with winter: this desolation seemed a mirror of their own dimmed and ageing state. Suddenly, no word having been spoken, they were in an embrace—and, shortly thereafter, on top of his coat and under hers in a clump of young birches whose shining winter branches dropped large tingling lively drops tasting of wet bark onto their naked cheeks and arms.
But, the psychologically oriented reader will be demanding, what about those children? Adolescent by now, surely?
Quite right. The four had become background figures for the dramas of the young ones’ adolescence; their passions were reflections of their children’s; and part of their self-knowledge had to be that Frederick’s need to be in love and the associated traumas were sparked off by the adults being continually stimulated by their five attractive offspring, all of whom were of course perpetually in love or in hate.
It goes without saying too that the parents felt even more guilty and inadequate because they worried that their lapses, past present and imaginary, might have contributed to the stormy miseries of the children. Which we all know too well to have to go through again—but what violence! what quarrels! what anguish! Adolescence is like this, we all know, and so do the children. The Jones and Smith youngsters behaved exactly as they were expected to. Oh the dramas and the rebellions, the leavings of home and the sullen returns; oh the threats of drug-taking, then the drug-taking and the return to caution; the near-pregnancies, the droppings out and in, the ups and downs at schools, the screamed accusations at the parents for their total stupidity, backwardness, thickheadedness and responsibility for all the ills in the world.
But just as the script prescribes crisis, so it prescribes the end of crisis. Those five attractive young people, with benefits of sound middleclass background and its institutions, with their good education, with their intelligent and concerned parents—what could go wrong? Nothing did. They did well enough at school and were soon to go to university. Could they have any other future beyond being variations on the theme of their parents?
Twenty years had passed.
There came an opportunity for the two doctors to join a large doctors’ combine in London. It was in a workingclass area, but the senior doctors had consulting rooms in Harley Street. Doctors Smith and Jones had continued idealistic, conditionally socialist, and were shocked by the thought that they might also succumb to what they thought of as a Jekyll and Hyde existence.
The two families decided to buy a very large house in North London, and to divide it. That way they would all have much more space than if they each had a house. And the children were more like brothers and sisters and should not be separated by anything as arbitrary as a move to a new home.
Soon after the move to London Henry died. There was no sense in him dying in his fifties. He had thought of himself as healthy. But he had always smoked heavily, he was rather plump, and he had always worked very hard. These were reasons enough, it was thought, for him to have a stroke and for Muriel to be a widow in her forties.
Muriel stayed in the shared house with her two children, a boy of eighteen and a girl of fourteen. After discussing it thoroughly with Althea, Frederick made arrangements to help support Muriel, to be a father to the children, to support this other family as he was sure Henry would have done for Althea and the three children if it had been Frederick who had had the stroke. As it might have been: Frederick’s habits and constitution were similar to Henry’s. Frederick was secretly frightened, made resolutions to eat less, smoke less, work less, worry less; but he was doing more of everything because Henry had gone.
In order to support his greater responsibilities, Frederick attended two days a week and a morning in Harley Street—Muriel acted as his receptionist there, and for the two other doctors who shared his set of rooms. He also worked hard in the combine’s clinics, making up by evening sessions and night visiting for time spent in Moneyland. So Frederick and Muriel were now working together, as well as seeing each other constantly in the much-shared family life. Muriel was m
ore with Frederick than Althea was.
And now that Muriel was a widow, and the opportunities were more, the sex life of the two had become as stable as good married sex.
Muriel, thinking about it, had decided that it was probable Frederick had deliberately “stepped up” his sexual life with her because he knew she must be feeling sexually deprived. This was very likely the kind of sexually friendly consideration that would happen in a polygamous marriage? What made her come to this conclusion was that now they would often cuddle as married people do, for instance staying an hour or so after time in the Harley Street rooms, their arms around each other, discussing the day’s problems, or perhaps driving off onto Hampstead Health to discuss the children, sharing warmth and affection—like married people.
For Fred could hardly be missing this sort of affection, far from it, and that he was giving it to her must be the result of a conscious decision, of kindness.
They sometimes did say to each other that what they all had together—but only they two knew it—was a polygamous marriage.
When in company, and people were discussing marriage, the marriage problems of Western man, the problems caused by the emancipation of women, monogamy, fidelity, whether one should “tell” or not, these two tended to remain silent or to make indifferent remarks that sounded in spite of themselves impatient—as people do when entertaining inadmissible thoughts.
Both of them, the man and the woman, had found themselves thinking, had even heard themselves exclaiming aloud as the result of such thoughts: “What a lot of rubbish, what lies!” meaning, no less, these intelligent and sensible ideas we all do have about the famous Western problematical marriage.
Muriel had only understood that she was married to Frederick when she started to think about marrying again: but it was not likely that anyone would want to marry a forty-five-year-old woman with children at their most demanding and difficult time. She could not imagine marrying again: for it would mean the end of her marriage with Frederick. This was probably how they would all go on, into their old age, or until one of them died.
This was Muriel’s thinking on the situation.
Frederick: Muriel was right, he had indeed thought carefully about his old friend’s loneliness. She would probably not marry again; she was not after all of the generation where there were more men than women. And there was something too independent and touch-me-not about her. Her silences were challenging. Her green eyes were outspoken. A tall rangy woman with bronze hair (she dyed it), people noticed her, and called her beautiful or striking: of her, people used the strong adjectives. The older she got, the dryer and cooler became her way of talking. Enemies called her unkind, or masculine; friends, witty. He enjoyed these qualities, but would he if they were not the other half, as it were, of Althea? Whom people tended to call “little.” So did he. Dear little Althea.
He would give Muriel as much warmth, as much sex as he could, without, of course, giving any less to his wife. For years his relations with Muriel had been all jam, nothing to pay, a bonus. Now he felt her as part of his sudden increase in responsibility when Henry died, part of what he must give to the two children. He was fond of Muriel—indeed, he was sure he loved her. He knew he loved the children almost as well as his own. It was an ungrudging giving of himself—but there was something else in him, another worm was at work. For what was strongest in Frederick now neither his wife nor Muriel knew anything about. It was his longing for the girl Frances—married with children. Neither of his women had understood how deep that had gone. He had not understood it himself at the time.
Now, years later, it seemed to him that his life was divided between dark, or perhaps a clear flat grey, and light—Frances. Between everything heavy, plodding, difficult, and everything delicious—Frances. Nothing in his actual life fed delight or sprang from it: somewhere else was a sweetness and ease which he had known once, when he had loved Frances.
By now he did know that Frances, a lovely but quite ordinary girl, must be a stand-in for something else. It must be so. No small human being could possibly support the weight of such a force and a fierceness of longing, of want, of need. From time to time, when he straightened himself morally, and physically, for it was like a physical anguish, from a pain that swept all through him, or when he woke up in the morning out of a dream that was all pain of loss to see Althea’s sleeping face a few inches away on the other pillow, he had to tell himself this: It is not possible that I am suffering all this, year after year, because of a girl I was in love with for a few crazy months.
Yet that was how it felt. On one side was the life he actually led; on the other, “Frances.”
His intelligence told him everything it ought, such as that if he had been fool enough to leave Althea for Frances, or if Frances had been fool enough to marry him, in a very short time Frances would have been a dear known face on a shared pillow, and what Frances had represented would have moved its quarters elsewhere.
But that was not what he felt. Although he worked so hard—it was virtually two jobs that he had now, one with the poor and the ignorant, for whom he remained concerned, and one with the rich; although he maintained with the most tender love and consideration the emotional and physical needs of the two women; although he was a good and tactful father for five children—he felt he had nothing, lacked everything.
Althea … we move into the shoes, or behind the eyes of, the innocent party.
These three people had all taken on loads with the death of Henry. With Muriel working, Althea’s was to run all the large house, to do the shopping, to cook, to be always available for the children. She did not mind it, she had never wanted a career. But it was hard work, and soon she felt herself to be all drudgery and domesticity, and just at the time when, with the children older, she had looked forward to less. But this strain was nothing compared to the real one, which was that she had cared very much about being so attractive, and cherished for it. Cherished no less, she demanded even more of her vanishing looks. She could not bear to think that soon she would be elderly, soon Frederick would not want her. Comparing her tragic sessions in front of her mirror, and her feelings of inadequacy, with her husband’s affection, she knew that she was unreasonable. Well, it was probably “the change.”
She read many medical books and consulted another doctor—not one her husband knew—and got pills and came to regard her emotional state, all of it, everything she thought and felt, as a symptom without validity.
For she knew that her relationship with her husband was warm, good—wonderful. While other people’s marriages frayed and cracked and fell apart, hers, she knew, was solid.
But when she looked at her life, when she looked back, she too divided what she saw into two. For her, the sunlit time lay on the other side of the affair with the young doctor. It was not the physical thing she regretted, no; it was that she had not told her husband. Time had done nothing at all to soften her guilt about it. Frederick and she had known a time of perfection, of complete trust and belief. Then she, Althea, had chosen to destroy it. It was her fault that he had fallen so much in love with the girl Frances. Oh, he was likely to fall in love with someone at some point: of course, everyone did—hadn’t she? But so violently? That could only have been because of some deep lack between them. And she knew what it was: she had told him lies, had not trusted him.
She was left now with much more than she deserved. If she had to share him now—a little, with Muriel—then it was what she deserved. Besides, if she, Althea, had been left a widow, then she would have leaned as heavily on Henry. On who else?
Sometimes Althea had wild moments when she decided to tell Frederick about the young doctor; but that would be absurd, out of proportion. To talk about it now would surely be to destroy what they still had? To say: For more than a decade now I have been lying to you—she could not imagine herself actually doing it.
Sometimes she listened to other people talking about their marriages, and it seemed to her that they were
able to take infidelities much more lightly. Lies, too. Althea kept telling herself that there was something very wrong in her, that she kept brooding about it, worrying, grieving.
For instance, there were these people who went in for wife-swapping. They thought nothing of making love in heaps and in bunches, all together. Some of them said their marriages were strengthened—perhaps they were. Perhaps if she and her Fred had shared each other with other couples … who, Muriel and Henry?—no, surely that could be too dangerous, too close? Surely they—the wife-swappers—made a rule not to get involved too close to home? But that was not the point at all; the point was, the lying, the deception.
The fact was, the only person in the world who knew all the truth about her was Muriel! Muriel had known about the young doctor, and knew about the years of lying. How odd that was, for your woman friend to be closer than your own husband! It was intolerable. Unbearable. Althea found it horrible to say to herself: I trust Muriel more than I do Frederick; my behaviour has proved that I do.
Of course she had sometimes had her thoughts about Frederick and Muriel. She had recently been jealous—a little, not much. This was because Muriel was working with Frederick now.
Often, when the three of them were together, Althea would look at those two, her husband, her closest friend, and think: Of course, if I died, they would marry. This was not envious, but her way of coming to terms with it. She even thought—though this was the sort of thing Muriel said, the kind of thing people expected from Muriel: This is a sort of group marriage, I suppose.
But Althea did not suspect a sexual tie. Not that he hadn’t often said he found Muriel attractive. But one always could sense that sort of thing. Of course in all those years there must have been something: a kiss or two? A little more perhaps after a party or something like that? But not much more; these two would never deceive her. She could trust Muriel with anything; her old friend was a well into which confidences vanished and were forgotten; Muriel never gossiped, never condemned. She was the soul—if one could use that oldfashioned word—of honour. As for Frederick, when he had fallen in love, not only his wife, but the whole world had known of it: he was not a man who could, or who wanted to, conceal his feelings. But the real thing was this: the three of them had made, and now lived inside, an edifice of kindliness and responsibility and decency; it was simply not possible that it could harbour deception. It was inconceivable. So much so that Althea did not think about it: it was not sexual jealousy that she felt.
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