The Rules of Engagement

by Anita Brookner

  Nevertheless I found him repellent. His activity, his humming deprived him of ordinary accessibility and removed any possibility of normal exchange of the kind practised in the circles in which I moved. I doubted, in fact, that he himself was normal. It seemed to me that for all his resplendent appearance he would not have much use for normal love or sex, for his energies appeared to be concentrated on achieving some impossible Utopian goal which might conceivably benefit the many, or at least those like himself, rather than any one particular person. And if he loved Betsy, which I had no reason to doubt, it would be as an adjunct to his wishes, ready to throw in her lot with him, less for love than for reasons of solidarity, even political solidarity. Much as I was able to admire him—but in the abstract, almost as a work of art—and to understand what that lithe frame, those effortless movements might inspire in a woman, I did not think that he would respond in the same way to that woman’s own attractions, and that his volatility would militate against the sort of exclusive closeness that would be a woman’s own wish. I even had time to congratulate myself on my own situation, which, in a way, I had contrived: my own will had not been subverted by a dangerous attachment of the kind to which Betsy had so willingly succumbed. We had both been born too soon for the freedoms currently claimed by women; we had assumed, perhaps wrongly, that safety lay in stability, that love and desire could have only one true end: marriage, and no doubt children. That this certainty was being attacked from all sides had not yet taken us over, changing us from what we had been and were still destined to be. We were innocent, like girls at school, waiting patiently for fulfilment, which would come to us in the guise of another person, and not a series of more or less random persons who might or might not have our wellbeing at heart.

  My own marriage, with its tediums, and the solitude it inevitably brought in its wake, had given me one inestimable gift: the assurance of affection. I knew that Digby would never be unfaithful, would never torment me. In a sense I had the upper hand, though I had never desired this. I had wanted what my mother had assured me was priceless: fidelity. I reminded myself of this from time to time, when I was particularly bored; there would be no unpleasant revelations. Yet I knew that women of my age were in revolt against their mothers, that it was their mothers, and not men, who were the enemy. I was even grateful that my mother was, so to speak, off the map, for her sceptical discontented attitude might have found more faults in my situation than I was willing to do. I had vivid memories of my unresolved life in Paris and the time I had to fill there, knowing that this was not the destiny of a young person, but honing my skills to endure the lack of success that I already knew was to be my lot. I had achieved the kind of stasis that my situation demanded, and if I ever again wandered haplessly through uninhabited afternoons I should do so by my own decree, and with the assurance that I could at any time call upon the sort of companionship that would assure me dignity if nothing else.

  Betsy was watching her lover with anxious eyes, as if she were his mother or his nurse. She was willing him to give a good account of himself, for to her I still represented a settled way of life, even a place in society that had been denied her. She could see that the afternoon was not going well: how could she not? Daniel made no effort to play his part, indeed made it quite clear that his part lay elsewhere, on those barricades that existed in his own mind and in the minds of others similarly convinced. I was all too clearly on the wrong side of the barricades, a bourgeoise, a member of a despised and obsolete class. He sat flung back in his chair, his teacup negligently clasped between his thumb and forefinger. I offered him a cigarette, from the silver box that I had been used to seeing at my mother’s elbow; he refused the cigarette, but examined the box, as if appraising it for its monetary value. He was so extremely unaccommodating that I could only register this as a fact of nature, or of upbringing; his origins were a mystery to me, as was his formation. There seemed to be no way in which I could bring him into the conversation, or such conversation as Betsy and I were able to sustain. ‘Would you like some more tea?’ I asked him. ‘Tea?’ he said, surprised. ‘No, no tea.’ He stood up, ready to leave. ‘Yes,’ said Betsy. ‘It’s time we were making a move. You must come and see us in Paris.’ Her tone was worldly, as if this invitation might hold some reality. We both knew that we might not see each other again.

  She took his arm, and at last he broke into a smile. The smile transformed him, so that I could understand the bond between them. They found each other’s hands, and, so joined, proceeded towards the door which I held open for them. Betsy turned to me with a smile that held a certain fatigue. I thought she must have grown thinner; either that or her eyes were wide, too wide, as if she were contemplating a great difficulty. She was faultlessly dressed; her hair was immaculate. She was becoming transformed into one of those Parisian women whose look of exigence, of stress, merely adds to their allure, and announces their readiness to deal with any possible criticism, if anyone were rash enough to offer it. Any difference of opinion would be dealt with combatively; I had witnessed this too many times to expect anything different. And I could see that Betsy would soon acquire this manner, if and when she were called upon to defend her lover, in whom hostile witnesses, such as myself, could see only idleness, wilfulness, a sort of innocent savagery, like that of an infant whose own wishes must be imposed on his surroundings. Yet as he turned to her he gave her a look of love to which she so naturally responded that I was left in no doubt that this was a genuine love affair, even if in my eyes it had little to recommend it beyond the fact that it seemed to have come about naturally, and that it therefore had nature on its side.

  As I cleared away the cups and saucers (and I seemed always to be clearing things away in what was after all my own home) I wondered whether I should ever be able to attach myself to a man who promised little more than youth and beauty, and decided that I was too staid in temperament ever to conceive of such an arrangement. Yet the afternoon had saddened me: it is a terrible thing to lose a friend, and it was clear that I had lost Betsy, or rather that we had lost each other. I told myself that I could bear this, as I had learned to bear other absences in my life, passion, joy, rapture, escape from the destiny I had sought and had congratulated myself on attaining. I wandered into the bedroom and contemplated it for a moment. Then I shook my head, as if to dismiss unseemly thoughts, thoughts which visited me when I was low-spirited. I decided to write Betsy a note, suggesting that we meet, just the two of us. I hoped that this might restore something of our previous friendship. If such a meeting took place I should not mention Daniel. I did not want to question her or to learn any more about him. To be an accessory to another woman’s love affair is an invidious position, and I had no intention of becoming such an accessory, however much Betsy might wish me to become one.

  I ran a bath, washed my hair, put the disruptive afternoon out of my mind. We were to dine with the Fairlies, in their rather grand house overlooking the river. This was the sort of entertainment I was used to, and it was very different from the sort of love in a garret which I imagined reserved for the happy few. The evening would be ponderous, and I might question my own tolerance of such ceremonies. And so it proved. I studied Constance Fairlie with some perplexity, as if newly open to her barely concealed malice. Edmund Fairlie saw my glance, and I turned to meet his eyes with a deprecating smile, as if to excuse myself. Digby’s eyes were watering slightly in the effort to keep awake. Then it was time to leave. Edmund Fairlie helped me into my coat, then stood watching me as I held the collar protectively to my face. That instant proved to me that it was not the first, almost unemotional, sighting of a potential lover that was significant, but the second, the moment not of recognition but of confirmation, so that every other consideration is irrelevant, as if it might have mattered at some point in the past but no longer had any currency in the charged wordless exchange that seals the matter for ever, regardless of the dangers thus incurred and whatever the cost.

  4

&
nbsp; I DESCENDED INTO CLANDESTINITY WITH A GRATITUDE, a relief, and an open-heartedness of which I had not previously thought myself capable. It was another paradigm shift, a change from one category to another, from the obedience I had once observed to something like a lawlessness which I found altogether more natural. I had a reason for getting up in the morning other than to make coffee, to pour orange juice, and to grill the bacon on which Digby insisted and which I had always found repulsive. All day I performed domestic tasks uncomplainingly, knowing that the days were a mere preparation for the evenings, when I should see my lover. I told Digby that I had found an evening class, a fact which he found mildly annoying but which he did not seek to check. Had he done so he would have discovered that these classes met at seven o’clock and finished at nine, and that they had moreover come to an end at the beginning of the summer, when the city began to empty and the students to disperse. From time to time I even regretted these notional classes, only to delight when the stately periods of the Victorian novel, which I still read, gave way to the crudest of language in the course of those evenings to which I now devoted my life.

  I covered my tracks by leaving Digby’s meal in the oven, having instructed him by telephone how to heat it up, and by assuring him that a friend would give me a lift home after the class. At first he demurred at this, but my expression was so innocent and so convincing that he believed me. My one cause for concern was that I might see the car, either following me or coming to meet me, but as I was in a part of the neighbourhood quite removed from the school in which the evening classes were held I thought I was safe. And, surprisingly, I was: I was protected by a new-found gambler’s insouciance which was in itself a comment on the laborious good behaviour which I had exchanged for a fulfilment that I knew to be my birthright.

  It hardly disturbed me that I was unfaithful to my husband or that Edmund was unfaithful to his wife. With eyes and senses newly sharpened I more or less knew that he made a habit of this, that he thought such adventures a legitimate part of a man’s life. Why else did he keep a rented flat for this particular purpose? I was never so deluded as to imagine that I was the first woman to visit this flat or even that I should be the last. It was enough to know that I had rights of admission, and that for one or two evenings a week, sometimes fewer, and never at the weekends, I should meet him there, should linger after he had gone home, and luxuriate in the knowledge that our intimacy was a secret enshrined in this place, which, as far as I knew, had not yet been discovered by any third or fourth party. The day he gave me a key to the flat was the happiest of my life.

  I knew very little about him. I knew that he was a welcome ten years younger than my husband. I knew that he had three children, twin girls, Julia and Isabella, and a boy, David, and that he was devoted to them. When he spoke of them, which was frequently, I felt a mild unease, a wistfulness which I tried to ignore. I was stoical enough to look the situation in the face, and at no point was I tactless enough to ask him if he loved me. His attitude was simple: his sexual confidence demanded that he employ that confidence in the most natural way. He was a man of pleasure, and I was a means of ensuring that pleasure. Nor did he give much time to rationalizing his behaviour, or indeed my own. ‘Incredible,’ was all he said. ‘One never suspects . . . That, of course, is part of the fun.’ ‘Fun’ was the only false note; it was the wrong word to describe what I was feeling. Maybe it did not adequately describe what he himself was feeling, but we did not talk about that. Our attachment was at its best when it was wordless. Fortunately, given the limited time at our disposal, it usually was.

  I loved him, while never completely suppressing the knowledge that love was something quite different, that it was steadiness, constancy, familiarity, even availability. But I dismissed this knowledge, as I had to. I had only to watch the expression on his healthy face, see his eyes widen appreciatively, to acknowledge that what I had, or rather what I was given, was enough. I no longer thought in terms of lifelong allegiance. I thought of his strength and what I now perceived as his beauty. He was tall and fair, with a slightly heavy build, the sort of man one sees jogging in the early morning and to whom one pays little attention. Now I understood the message of such exercise: it was an element of courtship, a desire to remain attractive and fit for the main business of life. Edmund put in an hour of such punishing exercise before beginning his normal working day. This was one of the few facts I knew about his life. His wife I managed to forget for most of the time. Fortunately the dinner parties were in abeyance: Constance and the children were in the habit of spending the school holidays at their house in Hampshire, where Edmund joined them at weekends. Digby had more or less given up trying to tempt me with holidays abroad. I think he thought my new-found contentment an appreciation of our life as it was. In any event he was tired, more tired than he had been at the outset of our life together, and may have been slightly relieved not to have to make further efforts to entertain me. To his tiredness I owed the relative safety of my evenings. Perhaps he was grateful for my absence, though I could never quite rid myself of the need to choose unfamiliar streets, to take unnecessary diversions, so that I was in no danger of being sighted from the car, or, worse, being subject to that stealthy and unacknowledged surveillance which had so puzzled and alarmed me and which now, thankfully, seemed to be at an end.

  The days took on a charmed quality. I would leave Melton Court when the sun was at its height, just after three. It seemed appropriate that these matters were taking place in the summer, in those long light days when nature adds its energy to one’s own feeling of wellbeing. Edmund’s flat was in a small street bounded on one side by a public garden, where I would spend the afternoon, almost innocently, with a book. There was a church, to which I turned my back, as I might not have done at an earlier stage in my life, for I knew that Dickens had married there. When the children appeared, at an hour when they were allowed to make a last use of the climbing frame in the play area, when the tired mothers wheeled their babies home after collecting them from the childminder, I would get up, put away my book, and cross the garden to the flat in Britten Street, let myself in with my key, and wait for Edmund, who would join me shortly after five. Our time together was brief, too brief, for he always telephoned his family, or was telephoned by his wife in the country at the same time every evening. He was frequently invited out to dinner: friends took pity on him for being left in town. I think that our evenings together held some poetry for him. I was careful never to let him see my rapture, except in one particular circumstance; my former secrecy reasserted itself for my protection, and for his. I knew that he must not be exposed to the depth of my feeling for him, for that would spoil the ‘fun,’ and he relied on me to accept this particular bargain. Thus he did not know that when he left I would wander round the flat, take a shower, fantasize briefly about a possible future life with him, and then slowly make my way home to my dozing husband, the television still on, the newspaper discarded by his side. He would rouse himself as sounds came from the kitchen where I would wash up after his meal, and hastily eat some bread and cheese. ‘You must ask that friend of yours in,’ he once said. ‘It’s good of her to give you a lift.’ I made noises of agreement. Even I knew, even then, that there are some limits to duplicity.

  I felt surprisingly little guilt; shame, perhaps, yes, almost certainly shame, when I looked at my husband’s sleeping face and even at his ungainly aspect as he sat slumped in his chair, oblivious to the television blaring out its multicoloured attractions. But what I mostly felt was energy, and it was true that I was never tired. I identified with the young people I passed in the street, bare-armed, bare-legged in the beautiful summer light, rather than the slow-moving and so respectable women issuing from flats like mine at an hour when I had already done my hasty shopping and was willing to sacrifice the rest of the morning to the preparation of Digby’s dinner. He complained that the casseroles I left in the oven for him were too heavy, that they gave him indigestion, but what little
conscience I had left was appeased by the care I put into the composition of those meals, as if they would count in my favour at some hazy moral tribunal which might or might not take place. I was not sure about this, although it seemed likely that at some point a reckoning would be demanded of me by a higher power, albeit one with which I had long since ceased communication.