My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  She wanted to put her arm through his.

  ‘It ’s been nice meeting you,’ he said.

  ‘A bit of luck.’

  ‘I think so too, Marie.’ He ran his forefinger between the bones on the back of her hand, so gently that it made her want to shiver. She didn’t take her hand away, and when she continued not to he took her hand in his.

  After that they had lunch together every day, always in the Drummer Boy. People saw them, Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe from Travel-Wide, Mr Fineman, the pharmacist from Green’s the Chemist ’s. Other people from the travel agency and from the chemist ’s saw them walking about the streets, usually hand in hand. They would look together into

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  the shop windows of Edgware Road, drawn particularly to an antique shop full of brass. In the evenings he would walk with her to Paddington Station and have a drink in one of the bars. They’d embrace on the platform, as other people did.

  Mavis continued to disapprove; Marie ’s mother and Mrs Druk

  remained ignorant of the affair. The holiday on the Costa Brava that May was not a success because all the time Marie kept wishing Norman Britt was with her. Occasionally, while Mavis read magazines on the beach, Marie wept and Mavis pretended not to notice. She was furious because Marie ’s low spirits meant that it was impossible for them to get to know fellas. For months they’d been looking forward to the holiday and now, just because of a clerk in a travel agency, it was a flop. ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ Marie kept saying, trying to smile; but when they returned to London the friendship declined. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself,’

  Mavis pronounced harshly, ‘and it ’s dead boring having to hear about it.’

  After that they ceased to travel together in the mornings.

  The affair remained unconsummated. In the hour and a quarter allotted to each of them for lunch there was nowhere they might have gone to let their passion for one another run its course. Everywhere was public: Travel-Wide and the chemist ’s shop, the Drummer Boy, the streets they walked. Neither could easily spend a night away from home. Her mother and Mrs Druk would guess that something untoward was in the air; Hilda, deprived of her bedroom mating, would no longer be nonchalant in front of the TV. It would all come out if they were rash, and they sensed some danger in that.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ she whispered one October evening at Paddington,

  huddling herself against him. It was foggy and cold. The fog was in her pale hair, tiny droplets that only he, being close to her, could see. People hurried through the lit-up station, weary faces anxious to be home.

  ‘I know,’ he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.

  ‘I lie awake and think of you,’ she whispered.

  ‘You’ve made me live,’ he whispered back.

  ‘And you me. Oh, God, and you me.’ She was gone before she fin-

  ished speaking, swinging into the train as it moved away, her bulky red

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  handbag the last thing he saw. It would be eighteen hours before they’d meet again.

  He turned his back on her train and slowly made his way through

  the crowds, his reluctance to start the journey back to the flat in Putney seeming physical, like a pain, inside him. ‘Oh, for God ’s sake!’ a woman cried angrily at him, for he had been in her way and had moved in the same direction as she had in seeking to avoid her, causing a second collision. She dropped magazines on to the platform and he helped her to pick them up, vainly apologizing.

  It was then, walking away from this woman, that he saw the sign.

  Hotel Entrance it said in red neon letters, beyond the station’s main bookstall. It was the back of the Great Western Royal, a short-cut to its comforts for train travellers at the end of their journey. If only, he thought, they could share a room there. If only for one single night they were granted the privilege of being man and wife. People passed through the swing-doors beneath the glowing red sign, people hurrying, with newspapers or suitcases. Without quite knowing why, he passed through the swing-doors himself.

  He walked up two brief flights of steps, through another set of doors, and paused in the enormous hall of the Great Western Royal Hotel. Ahead of him, to the left, was the long, curved reception counter and, to the right, the porter’s desk. Small tables and armchairs were everywhere; it was carpeted underfoot. There were signs to lifts and to the bar and the restaurant. The stairway, gently rising to his left, was gracious, carpeted also.

  They would sit for a moment in this hall, he imagined, as other

  people were sitting now, a few with drinks, others with pots of tea and plates half empty of assorted biscuits. He stood for a moment, watching these people, and then, as though he possessed a room in the hotel, he mounted the stairs, saying to himself that it must somehow be possible, that surely they could share a single night in the splendour of this place.

  There was a landing, made into a lounge, with armchairs and tables, as in the hall below. People conversed quietly; a foreign waiter, elderly and limping, collected silver-plated teapots; a Pekinese dog slept on a woman’s lap.

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  The floor above was different. It was a long, wide corridor with bedroom doors on either side of it. Other corridors, exactly similar, led off it. Chambermaids passed him with lowered eyes; someone gently laughed in a room marked Staff Only; a waiter wheeled a trolley containing covered dishes, and a bottle of wine wrapped in a napkin. Bathroom a sign said, and he looked in, just to see what a bathroom in the Great Western Royal Hotel would be like. ‘My God!’ he whispered, possessed immediately with the idea that was, for him, to make the decade of the 1960s different. Looking back on it, he was for ever after unable to recall the first moment he beheld the bathroom on the second floor without experiencing the shiver of pleasure he ’d experienced at the time. Slowly he entered. He locked the door and slowly sat down on the edge of the bath. The place was huge, as the bath itself was, like somewhere in a palace. The walls were marble, white veined delicately with grey. Two monstrous brass taps, the biggest bath taps he ’d ever in his life seen, seemed to know already that he and Marie would come to the bathroom. They seemed almost to wink an invitation to him, to tell him that the bathroom was a comfortable place and not often in use since private bathrooms were now attached to most of the bedrooms. Sitting in his mackintosh coat on the edge of the bath, he wondered what Hilda would say if she could see him now.

  He suggested it to Marie in the Drummer Boy. He led up to it slowly, describing the interior of the Great Western Royal Hotel and how he had wandered about it because he hadn’t wanted to go home. ‘Actually,’

  he said, ‘I ended up in a bathroom.’

  ‘You mean the toilet, dear? Taken short—’

  ‘No, not the toilet. A bathroom on the second floor. Done out in

  marble, as a matter of fact.’

  She replied that honestly he was a one, to go into a bathroom like that when he wasn’t even staying in the place! He said:

  ‘What I mean, Marie, it ’s somewhere we could go.’

  ‘Go, dear?’

  ‘It ’s empty half the time. Nearly all the time it must be. I mean, we could be there now. This minute if we wanted to.’

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  ‘But we ’re having our lunch, Norman.’

  ‘That ’s what I mean. We could even be having it there.’

  From the saloon bar’s juke-box a lugubrious voice pleaded for a hand to be held. Take my hand, sang Elvis Presley, take my whole life too. The advertising executives from Dalton, Dure and Higgins were loudly talking about their hopes of gaining the Canadian Pacific account. Less noisily the architects from Frine and Knight complained about local planning regulations.

  ‘In a bathroom, Norman? But we couldn’t just go int
o a bathroom.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, we couldn’t. I mean, we couldn’t.’

  ‘What I’m saying is we could.’

  ‘I want to marry you, Norman. I want us to be together. I don’t want just going to a bathroom in some hotel.’

  ‘I know; I want to marry you too. But we ’ve got to work it out. You know we ’ve got to work it out, Marie—getting married.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  It was a familiar topic of conversation between them. They took it for granted that one day, somehow, they would be married. They had talked about Hilda. He ’d described Hilda to her, he ’d drawn a picture in Marie ’s mind of Hilda bent over her jewellery-making in a Putney flat, or going out to drink V.P. with the Fowlers or at the Club. He hadn’t presented a flattering picture of his wife, and when Marie had quite timidly said that she didn’t much care for the sound of her he had agreed that naturally she wouldn’t. The only aspect of Hilda he didn’t touch upon was her bedroom appetite, night starvation as he privately dubbed it. He didn’t mention it because he guessed it might be upsetting.

  What they had to work out where Hilda was concerned were the eco-

  nomics of the matter. He would never, at Travel-Wide or anywhere else, earn a great deal of money. Familiar with Hilda’s nature, he knew that as soon as a divorce was mooted she ’d set out to claim as much alimony as she possibly could, which by law he would have to pay. She would state that she only made jewellery for pin-money and increasingly found it difficult to do so due to a developing tendency towards chilblains or arthritis, anything she could think of. She would hate him for rejecting

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  her, for depriving her of a tame companion. Her own resentment at not being able to have children would somehow latch on to his unfaithfulness: she would see a pattern which wasn’t really there, bitterness would come into her eyes.

  Marie had said that she wanted to give him the children he had never had. She wanted to have children at once and she knew she could. He knew it too: having children was part of her, you’d only to look at her.

  Yet that would mean she ’d have to give up her job, which she wanted to do when she married anyway, which in turn would mean that all three of them would have to subsist on his meagre salary. And not just all three, the children also.

  It was a riddle that mocked him: he could find no answer, and yet he believed that the more he and Marie were together, the more they talked to one another and continued to be in love, the more chance there was of suddenly hitting upon a solution. Not that Marie always listened when he went on about it. She agreed they had to solve their problem, but now and again just pretended it wasn’t there. She liked to forget about the existence of Hilda. For an hour or so when she was with him she liked to assume that quite soon, in July or even June, they’d be married. He always brought her back to earth.

  ‘Look, let ’s just have a drink in the hotel,’ he urged. ‘Tonight, before the train. Instead of having one in the buffet.’

  ‘But it ’s a hotel, Norman. I mean, it ’s for people to stay in—’

  ‘Anyone can go into a hotel for a drink.’

  That evening, after their drink in the hotel bar, he led her to the first-floor landing that was also a lounge. It was warm in the hotel. She said she ’d like to sink down into one of the armchairs and fall asleep. He laughed at that; he didn’t suggest an excursion to the bathroom, sensing that he shouldn’t rush things. He saw her on to her train, abandoning her to her mother and Mrs Druk and Mavis. He knew that all during the journey she would be mulling over the splendours of the Great Western Royal.

  December came. It was no longer foggy, but the weather was colder, with an icy wind. Every evening, before her train, they had their drink in the hotel. ‘I’d love to show you that bathroom,’ he said once. ‘Just for

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  fun.’ He hadn’t been pressing it in the least; it was the first time he ’d mentioned the bathroom since he ’d mentioned it originally. She giggled and said he was terrible. She said she ’d miss her train if she went looking at bathrooms, but he said there ’d easily be time. ‘Gosh!’ she whispered, standing in the doorway, looking in. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her inside, fearful in case a chambermaid should see them loitering there. He locked the door and kissed her. In almost twelve months it was their first embrace in private.

  They went to the bathroom during the lunch hour on New Year’s

  Day, and he felt it was right that they should celebrate in this way the anniversary of their first real meeting. His early impression of her, that she was of a tartish disposition, had long since been dispelled. Voluptuous she might seem to the eye, but beneath that misleading surface she was prim and proper. It was odd that Hilda, who looked dried-up and wholly uninterested in the sensual life, should also belie her appearance. ‘I’ve never done it before,’ Marie confessed in the bathroom, and he loved her the more for that. He loved her simplicity in this matter, her desire to remain a virgin until her wedding. But since she repeatedly swore that she could marry no one else, their anticipating of their wedding-night did not matter. ‘Oh, God, I love you,’ she whispered, naked for the first time in the bathroom. ‘Oh, Norman, you’re so good to me.’

  After that it became a regular thing. He would saunter from the

  hotel bar, across the huge entrance lounge, and take a lift to the second floor. Five minutes later she would follow, with a towel brought specially from Reading in her handbag. In the bathroom they always whispered, and would sit together in a warm bath after their lovemaking, still murmuring about the future, holding hands beneath the surface of the water. No one ever rapped on the door to ask what was going on in there. No one ever questioned them as they returned, separately, to the bar, with the towel they’d shared damping her compact and her handkerchief.

  Years instead of months began to go by. On the juke-box in the

  Drummer Boy the voice of Elvis Presley was no longer heard. ‘Why she had to go I don’t know,’ sang the Beatles, ‘ she didn’t say . . . I believe in yesterday.’ And Eleanor Rigby entered people ’s lives, and Sergeant Pepper

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  with her. The fantasies of secret agents, more fantastic than ever before, filled the screens of London’s cinemas. Carnaby Street, like a jolly trashcan, overflowed with noise and colour. And in the bathroom of the Great Western Royal Hotel the love affair of Norman Britt and Marie was touched with the same preposterousness. They ate sandwiches in the bathroom; they drank wine. He whispered to her of the faraway places he knew about but had never been to: the Bahamas, Brazil, Peru, Seville at Easter, the Greek islands, the Nile, Shiraz, Persepolis, the Rocky Mountains. They should have been saving their money, not spending it on gin and peppermint in the bar of the hotel and in the Drummer Boy. They should have been racking their brains to find a solution to the problem of Hilda, but it was nicer to pretend that one day they would walk together in Venice or Tuscany. It was all so different from the activities that began with Hilda’s bedroom appetites, and it was different from the coarseness that invariably surfaced when Mr Blackstaffe got going in the Drummer Boy on an evening when a Travel-Wide employee was being given a

  send-off. Mr Blackstaffe ’s great joke on such occasions was that he liked to have sexual intercourse with his wife at night and that she preferred the conjunction in the mornings. He was always going on about how difficult it was in the mornings, what with the children liable to interrupt you, and he usually went into details about certain other, more intimate preferences of his wife ’s. He had a powerful, waxy guffaw, which he brought regularly into play when he was engaged in this kind of conversation, allying it with a nudging motion of the elbow. Once his wife actually turned up in the Drummer Boy and Norman found it embarrassing even to look at her, knowing as he did so much about her private life. Sh
e was a stout middle-aged woman with decorated spectacles: her appearance, too, apparently belied much.

  In the bathroom all such considerations, disliked equally by Norman Britt and Marie, were left behind. Romance ruled their brief sojourns, and love sanctified—or so they believed—the passion of their physical intimacy. Love excused their eccentricity, for only love could have found in them a willingness to engage in the deception of a hotel and the courage that went with it: that they believed most of all.

  But afterwards, selling tickets to other people or putting Marie on her

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  evening train, Norman sometimes felt depressed. And then gradually, as more time passed, the depression increased and intensified. ‘I’m so sad,’

  he whispered in the bathroom once, ‘when I’m not with you. I don’t think I can stand it.’ She dried herself on the towel brought specially from Reading in her large red handbag. ‘You’ll have to tell her,’ she said, with an edge in her voice that hadn’t ever been there before. ‘I don’t want to leave having babies too late.’ She wasn’t twenty-eight any more; she was thirty-one. ‘I mean, it isn’t fair on me,’ she said.

  He knew it wasn’t fair on her, but going over the whole thing yet again in Travel-Wide that afternoon he also knew that poverty would destroy them. He ’d never earn much more than he earned now. The

  babies Marie wanted, and which he wanted too, would soak up what

  there was like blotting-paper; they’d probably have to look for council accommodation. It made him weary to think about it, it gave him a headache. But he knew she was right: they couldn’t go on for ever, living off a passing idyll, in the bathroom of a hotel. He even thought, quite seriously for a moment, of causing Hilda’s death.

  Instead he told her the truth, one Thursday evening after she ’d been watching The Avengers on television. He just told her he ’d met someone, a girl called Marie, he said, whom he had fallen in love with and wished to marry. ‘I was hoping we could have a divorce,’ he said.