My Place in the Bazaar

by Alec Waugh

  There was no note of triumph in her voice, not a suggestion of vindictiveness, of resentment that her own name had been dragged into a scandal; for she was sufficiently a woman of the world to realize that some measure of scandal would attach to her for ever.

  ‘I’m so glad you were all in court,’ she went on. ‘You know how it’s going to be. People always say that there can’t be smoke unless there’s fire; I suppose that the younger generation, who’ll never have a chance to get the facts right, who’ll just have heard backstairs whispers, will soon be referring to Reggie as ‘the wicked baronet’; of course, one only had to look at the girl to realize that there couldn’t be anything in it, or for that matter,’ she paused and laughed, ‘for that matter one only had to look at my dear sweet Reggie.’ She raised her hand and gave his cheek a pat. It would have been impossible for her, we all agreed, to have carried the thing off better. And when we learnt later that not only had Susan Carter found a post in a school in Wales but had become the wife of the headmaster, it was generally conceded that what had promised to be a tragedy and a disgrace could not have turned out more satisfactorily for everyone.

  But that was in the summer of 1939; within a few weeks not only had every trace of such a scandal been washed from memory, but the whole way of life typified by Winchborough had been relegated to the past. ‘The power of “the big house” ‘—all such feudal survivals as ‘the Lord of the Manor’ and ‘the squire’ had become anachronisms. I have not been to Winchborough since. I heard sometime in late 1940 that the house had been requisitioned by an evacuated ministry. But the following September I was posted overseas to Syria, and in the vast concentration camp of the Middle East I heard no Winchborough gossip. By the time I eventually returned to England it was as a kind of Rip van Winkle to find that I had lost touch with more than half of my friends.

  That, indeed, is one of the minor tragedies of the war. For six years we were isolated by the particular kind of war work we were doing. It was almost impossible to pick up the threads.

  But melancholy though it has been to lose touch with so many friends, there has been, in compensation, the surprise every now and then of meeting an old friend in a totally unexpected place, and it very certainly was all of that to meet Reggie Thayne in St. Thomas on the veranda of the Harbour View Hotel.

  I hurried over. ‘My dear Reggie, what a surprise,’ I said.

  He took my outstretched hand, but his stare was blank. He had not the least idea who I was. Which is another of the melancholy things about that eight-year gap: you do not realize how much you have changed yourself until an old friend fails to recognize you.

  I introduced myself. ‘Of course, the writing fellow. Sybil kept telling me I should read your books. Never quite got round to it. You had McCartney’s, hadn’t you?’

  I hadn’t. But I let it pass. I asked him about Winchborough.

  He shrugged.‘I couldn’t afford to keep it on. A place like that has to be run properly or not at all. And if I wasn’t running Winchborough, what was there for me to do in England? I couldn’t just sit around in White’s all day. Besides, England’s no place for a wife, washing up dishes all day long.’

  ‘Where are you living now?’ I asked.

  ‘In St. Kitts of course.’

  The ‘of course’ amused me. There is a certain type of person who expects his friends to be informed about the details of his own career at every stage of it, though he himself is completely indifferent to their doings; St. Kitts happened to be an island in which, at that time, I had never spent more than half a day. I recalled it as a plain of cane-fields, backed by hills. I asked him how he liked it.

  ‘Grand. Just the life for me.’ He had a schooner-type yacht, he told me. One of his guests was an American. That’s how he happened to have dollars to spend in a hard-currency port. He raised sugar and was trying experiments with secondary crops. He sat on the Legislative Council. He was clearly leading in the Caribbean a life of public responsibility very similar to his former one in Wessex.

  ‘Does Sybil like it as much as you?’ I asked.

  ‘Sybil? How does she come in?’

  ‘Didn’t you say something about not wanting to have your wife wash up dishes all the time?’

  He roared with laughter.

  ‘I don’t, but my wife’s not Sybil.’

  ‘You’re divorced, you mean?’

  He nodded. It was the first that I had heard of it. But then that was not surprising. With newspapers reduced to four-sheet dimensions during the war, only the most sensational cases had been reported.

  ‘Who’s Sybil married to?’ I asked.

  ‘No one, as far as I know.’

  ‘How did it all come to happen then?’

  He shrugged. ‘The war gave me a good excuse: having to give up Winchborough, I mean to say. It made a break and the break once made … I knew I never could go back.’

  I looked at him interrogatively. When I had come across to him, he had been in a group, but the others, seeing that we were talking ‘about old times’, had moved away. We were alone and out of earshot.

  ’You mean that you broke it up?’ I asked.

  He nodded. I was astounded.

  ‘I always thought you were so happy.’

  ‘So we were till that damned case came on.’

  ‘But I thought she was so marvellous about it all.’

  ‘That was the trouble. She was too marvellous.’

  Then I understood, or thought I did. I had read once a restoration comedy called A Woman Killed by Kindness. This was that drama in reverse; the case of a man, or rather of a marriage, that kindness killed. Sybil had been too marvellous, too gracious, too forgiving. It was more than a man’s dignity could stand …. Yet if Sybil had been too forgiving, there must have been something to forgive; or at least Sybil had thought there was.

  ‘Then she didn’t believe your story, after all? She pretended to in public, but when you were alone …’ I checked. No, no. That couldn’t be the explanation. Under these conditions the question of magnanimity could scarcely have come in. Wasn’t there another explanation? Had Reggie really made this insane assault, had he confessed to Sybil; and had she accepted his guilt with a graciousness that he had found humiliating? Was that the explanation? I waited, curious, expectant.

  He shook his head.

  ‘She never doubted my word for a single instant. That was what I couldn’t stand, living with a woman who just couldn’t believe that it would be possible for me to behave like that.’

  ‘Then you really did …?’

  Again he shook his head. ‘Was it likely—with a station only five minutes off! But when I got up to let than window down … it was a warm June day, there was a scent of summer in the carriage, she was wearing a loose cotton blouse. It was low cut. I was standing over her. She looked so cool and white and soft. It took me off my guard. At college I’d knocked about a bit. But since I married … well, that kind of thing dies down in marriage. I’d been completely faithful … that’s why it knocked me off my guard. I stared. She look up and our eyes met. I could see at once that she knew exactly what was in my mind. Sybil was right, no doubt, about her being pathological. She was hysterical and inhibited. She stared at me, dazed, hypnotized like a rabbit with a snake. I had the feeling I could have done anything, any damned thing I wanted with her. I can’t begin to tell you what I felt. It was the most violent sensation that I had known for years. Then suddenly she screamed, dived across the carriage, and before I could stop her she’d pulled the cord and was screaming her head off through the window.

  ‘Yes, that’s what happened. But could I explain to Sybil? Could I hell! You saw how she behaved in public. She was just like that with me. “How tiresome for you. That poor silly girl. I wonder who’d be the best counsel to defend the case.” She scarcely listened to what I had to say. “But of course you didn’t; no one who knows you could possibly doubt that, for a single instant.” That was what the trouble was. I had learnt mo
re about myself in those two minutes than in all the twenty years that I’d been adult. I felt I’d been a stranger to myself all my life. I felt I’d been living with a stranger all those years. But to Sybil I was the same person that I’d always seemed. I stood it as long as I could for appearances’ sake. But I couldn’t keep it up. My whole life was a sham. I was pretending to be something I was not. I couldn’t be myself with Sybil. I couldn’t help remembering that that girl in that one moment had read right into my very soul. She learnt more about me in that one minute than Sybil had in a dozen years.…’

  He paused. He looked away. He drew a long, slow breath.

  ‘I hadn’t anybody else in mind when I insisted on that divorce. I didn’t expect to marry again. But I knew that if I did, I’d want a wife who’d know without my telling her the kind of person that I really was or could be. I never knew I’d have the luck … but look, here is Diana.’

  He had risen to his feet and his eyes were shining in a way that I had never seen them shine before. A tall and youngish woman had just come on to the veranda. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a dead pale skin. She must have been nearly six feet tall. She moved in akind of glide—there was something of a panther’s quality about her.

  ‘Isn’t it nearly time that you were thinking of buying me a drink?’ she said. Her voice was a deep contralto. It would have been hard to find anybody more unlike Sybil.

  1950

  Circle of Deception

  For one who has led as I have done, a scattered, travelling life, middle age has its own special compensations. I have, for example, acquired by now so wide an acquaintance that I never board a boat, check in at a hotel, disembark at a foreign port, without the thought, “Whom out of the past shall I run into here!’ It is fascinating to see how people change over the years.

  One of the most exciting encounters of this kind came my way in the spring of 1950. I had been commissioned to write a series of articles on the smaller British West Indian islands. I was already familiar with them, but there were several that I had not visited since the war. I went to St. Kitts, Montserrat, Antigua, then I booked a passage for St. Vincent. I boarded the boat in the late afternoon; by the time I had unpacked it was close on six and I went into the bar. In the doorway I checked, delighted. There are few people I could have been more glad to meet unexpectedly than Lily Martyn.

  I had seen her last in Baghdad, in the last year of the war, when we were both employed in Military Intelligence. She still looked twenty-four, but that did not surprise me. She was the type—tall, slim, dark-haired, clear-skinned—that does not alter between eighteen and forty; I was, however, surprised to see her drinking Coca-Cola. In Baghdad, though she took wine with meals, she refused cocktails. She did not trust hard liquor, she explained; she might give away State secrets. It was a wise precaution. Whisky was in short supply and Cyprus gin and Persian vodka were a lethal mixture. But that was wartime and in Baghdad. This was peacetime in the Caribbean.

  She was alone and I sat beside her. ‘Still on the wagon, then?’

  She smiled.

  ‘It’s as hard to break yourself of a good habit as a bad.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘My mother died. I came into some money. I’d an idea of coming out to settle. I thought I’d have a look and see. I’m trying Dominica first.’

  That meant she would be getting off next morning. We would only be fellow passengers for half a day.

  ‘We must make the most of it,’ I said. ‘Let’s dine at the same table. Tell me about yourself.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell. I stayed on in Baghdad another year after you’d left. Then Daddy died. I came home to look after my mother.’

  ‘You’ve not remarried?’

  ‘No.’

  It was strange she hadn’t. She was the type that attracted men and her husband had been killed on the Dunkirk beaches. She ought to have got over it by now. But then from the start she puzzled me.

  From the very start.

  As the liaison link between my branch and hers, I had met her at the Baghdad Airport.

  ‘Tell me about this place,’ she said.

  It was then late April and I described the long, hot, arid summer that lay ahead, with the temperature hovering between 100° and I20°, one day like the last and no hill station, the desert on every side.

  ‘How about the flies?’ she asked.

  ‘There are none after June. The heat kills them off.’

  ‘What about the people?’

  ‘Baghdad’s a large Arab city with a small British community living on its fringe. There’s the Embassy and the men in oil and the men in trade. At the moment it’s a G.H.Q. with all that goes with that.’

  There was plenty of social activity, I told her. There was the Alwiyah Country Club with its tennis courts and swimming pool and Saturday-night dances. The British residents were hospitable and most weeks one of the messes threw a party. ‘The males outnumber the females by thirty-five to one,’ I added.

  She let that one pass.

  ‘What do you make of it yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve been here twenty months. I loathed the first three weeks, but the place grows on you. You are so far from everything. It gives you a sense of comradeship, like shipwrecked sailors.’

  ‘An island in the desert. That might suit me very well.’

  It was a strange thing to say; it was said too in a strange tone of voice. I started to feel curious.

  I felt more curious as the weeks went by. I saw quite a lot of her. My office hours were long, eight to one and half past four to eight, and I was always glad of an excuse to leave my desk. She worked on the east bank of the Tigris in a dignified old Turkish house. It was pleasant to row across the river in the late afternoon when the heat of the day had lessened and a sun-shot, dust-laden haze lay over the mosques and minarets, over the low ochre-brown mud-houses and the blue-tiled domes; and it was more than pleasant when our ‘shop’ was finished, to sit gossiping on her veranda in the cool of a shaded courtyard in which a fountain played. She was agreeable company, even-tempered with an occasional unexpected flash of wit. We soon became good friends. I went there oftener than our work required. One way and another I met her on an average three times a week. Yet when a year later I left Baghdad, I knew her no better than I had when she arrived.

  I was not the only one she puzzled. To the many young and eligible officers who had been deprived for upwards of two years of feminine society, she was a cause of considerable concern. She was not shy. She seemed to have no inhibitions. There was nothing spinsterish about her. She was after all a widow. Yet her many suitors were given very clearly to understand that ‘that’ was ‘not her game’. I rather fancied indeed that she showed such a flattering preference for my company largely because I was neither young nor eligible.

  Several of my friends brought their perplexities to me.‘I can’t make head or tail of her,’ they’d say. ‘She was only married a few weeks. Her husband has been dead four years. She ought to have got over it by now. One ought to be resilient at twenty-four, particularly in wartime.’

  They all made the same complaint. She didn’t look cold; they didn’t believe she was cold. She was just not interested. What did I make of it?

  I was as much in the dark as they were. On the surface she was a straightforward person. The facts of her life were in Who’s Who: her father an admiral who had been knighted, her mother the daughter of an Indian civil servant; two brothers and a sister; a place in Devonshire; no scandal, no divorce. But I could not forget that first remark about ‘the island in the desert’. Surely it could only have been made by someone with something on her mind.

  She was also, I suspected, on her guard. Did she really refuse cocktails on grounds of military security or was she afraid of giving herself away.

  I only caught one clue as to what might be worrying her. At the time that England was being attacked by buzz-bombs, someone made a remark at a mess party
about wishing the Germans would fight clean. She flared up instantly.

  ‘Fight clean! We aren’t living in the days of the Crusades and the Knights of the Round Table. War’s filthy. Let’s accept the fact. Let’s win by any weapons we can find: bomb hospitals, poison drinking wells. Use everything that’ll end it quickly. Thank heaven the Germans are realistic. Let’s hope we follow their example.’

  It was said indignantly, and there was an awkward pause. She recovered quickly.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s the heat,’ she said, ‘and that’s a hobby-horse of mine. I’m off it now.’

  It was an unexpected outburst. But the mess discounted it. ‘No wonder she feels bitterly,’ they said. ‘She’s lost her husband. She loathes the whole idea of war, thinks of it as a crime. That’s why she’s the way she is. She lives on the surface, friendly but not more than friendly. Now and again the surface cracks.’

  I nodded in agreement. It sounded plausible. Yet somehow I did not feel the explanation was so simple. The outburst had been so very vehement and I could not forget that phrase, ‘an island in the desert’. I could not rid myself of the feeling that she was trying not only to get over something but to escape from something. It would be interesting, I felt, to see what she did after the war. It was surprising to discover now that she had spent four years buried in the country with an ageing mother.

  ‘Wasn’t it very dull?’ I asked.

  ‘There was no one else to do it.’

  Or rather there was nothing else she thought more worth doing. People don’t sacrifice themselves unless they want to. I watched her as we talked. There were lines now between mouth and nostril. In a way it was a more interesting face, but there was an air of strain. She refused a cigarette. ‘I only smoke after meals,’ she said. Was that in self-defence to stop being a chain-smoker? Because her hands were idle she had developed a trick of twiddling a curl of hair behind her ear. A sudden gust of wind blew a plastic ashtray on to the floor; she started. Her nerves were definitely on edge.

  We had champagne for dinner. ‘This is like old times,’ she said. We chattered about mutual friends, reminding ourselves of this and the other joke. She was gay and friendly. By and large she was the friendliest person I have ever known. It is easy to explain why you dislike a person, it is not difficult to explain why you’re in love with someone, but it is very hard to explain what it is that makes you really like a person. I think that in her case it was that warm, fresh friendliness. I wished that I were disembarking in Dominica.