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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Hilda turned the sound on the television set down without in any

  way dimming the picture, which she continued to watch. Her face did not register the hatred he had imagined in it when he rejected her; nor did bitterness suddenly enter her eyes. Instead she shook her head at him, and poured herself some more V.P. She said:

  ‘You’ve gone barmy, Norman.’

  ‘You can think that if you like.’

  ‘Wherever’d you meet a girl, for God ’s sake?’

  ‘At work. She ’s there in Vincent Street. In a shop.’

  ‘And what ’s she think of you, may I ask?’

  ‘She ’s in love with me, Hilda.’

  She laughed. She told him to pull the other one, adding that it had bells on it.

  ‘Hilda, I’m not making this up. I’m telling you the truth.’

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  She smiled into her V.P. She watched the screen for a moment, then she said:

  ‘And how long’s this charming stuff been going on, may I inquire?’

  He didn’t want to say for years. Vaguely, he said it had been going on for just a while.

  ‘You’re out of your tiny, Norman. Just because you fancy some piece in a shop doesn’t mean you go getting hot under the collar. You’re no tomcat, you know, old boy.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was.’

  ‘You’re no sexual mechanic.’

  ‘Hilda—’

  ‘All chaps fancy things in shops: didn’t your mother tell you that?

  D’you think I haven’t fancied stuff myself, the chap who came to do the blinds, that randy little postman with his rugby songs?’

  ‘I’m telling you I want a divorce, Hilda.’

  She laughed. She drank more V.P. wine. ‘You’re up a gum tree,’ she said, and laughed again.

  ‘Hilda—’

  ‘Oh, for God ’s sake!’ All of a sudden she was angry, but more, he felt, because he was going on, not because of what he was actually demanding. She thought him ridiculous and said so. And then she added all the things he ’d thought himself: that people like them didn’t get divorces, that unless his girlfriend was well-heeled the whole thing would be a sheer bloody nonsense, with bloody solicitors the only ones to benefit.

  ‘They’ll send you to the cleaners, your bloody solicitors will,’ she loudly pointed out, anger still trembling in her voice. ‘You’d be paying them back for years.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ he began, although he did. ‘I don’t care about anything except—’

  ‘Of course you do, you damn fool.’

  ‘Hilda—’

  ‘Look, get over her. Take her into a park after dark or something.

  It ’ll make no odds to you and me.’

  She turned the sound on the television up and quite quickly fin-

  ished the V.P. wine. Afterwards, in their bedroom, she turned to him

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  with an excitement that was greater than usual. ‘God, that switched me on,’ she whispered in the darkness, gripping him with her limbs.

  ‘The stuff we were talking about, that girl.’ When she ’d finished her love-making she said, ‘I had it with that postman, you know. Swear to God. In the kitchen. And since we ’re on the subject, Fowler looks in here the odd time.’

  He lay beside her in silence, not knowing whether or not to believe what she was saying. It seemed at first that she was keeping her end up because he ’d mentioned Marie, but then he wasn’t so sure. ‘We had a foursome once,’ she said, ‘the Fowlers and me and a chap that used to be in the Club.’

  She began to stroke his face with her fingers, the way he hated. She always seemed to think that if she stroked his face it would excite him.

  She said, ‘Tell me more about this piece you fancy.’

  He told her to keep her quiet and to make her stop stroking his

  face. It didn’t seem to matter now if he told her how long it had been going on, not since she ’d made her revelations about Fowler and the postman. He even enjoyed telling her, about the New Year’s Day when he ’d bought the emery boards and the Colgate ’s, and how he ’d got to know Marie because she and Mavis were booking a holiday on the Costa Brava.

  ‘But you’ve never actually?’

  ‘Yes, we have.’

  ‘For God ’s sake where? Doorways or something? In the park?’

  ‘We go to a hotel.’

  ‘You old devil!’

  ‘Listen, Hilda—’

  ‘For God ’s sake go on, love. Tell me about it.’

  He told her about the bathroom and she kept asking him questions, making him tell her details, asking him to describe Marie to her. Dawn was breaking when they finished talking.

  ‘Forget about the divorce stuff,’ she said quite casually at breakfast.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to hear no more of that. I wouldn’t want you ruined for my sake, dear.’

  *

  *

  *

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  He didn’t want to see Marie that day, although he had to because it was arranged. In any case she knew he ’d been going to tell his wife the night before; she ’d want to hear the outcome.

  ‘Well?’ she said in the Drummer Boy.

  He shrugged. He shook his head. He said:

  ‘I told her.’

  ‘And what ’d she say, Norman? What ’d Hilda say?’

  ‘She said I was barmy to be talking about divorce. She said what I said to you: that we wouldn’t manage with the alimony.’

  They sat in silence. Eventually Marie said:

  ‘Then can’t you leave her? Can’t you just not go back? We could

  get a flat somewhere. We could put off kiddies, darling. Just walk out, couldn’t you?’

  ‘They’d find us. They’d make me pay.’

  ‘We could try it. If I keep on working you could pay what they

  want.’

  ‘It ’ll never pan out, Marie.’

  ‘Oh, darling, just walk away from her.’

  Which is what, to Hilda’s astonishment, he did. One evening when

  she was at the Club he packed his clothes and went to two rooms in Kilburn that he and Marie had found. He didn’t tell Hilda where he was going. He just left a note to say he wouldn’t be back.

  They lived as man and wife in Kilburn, sharing a lavatory and a bathroom with fifteen other people. In time he received a court summons, and in court was informed that he had behaved meanly and despicably to the woman he ’d married. He agreed to pay regular maintenance.

  The two rooms in Kilburn were dirty and uncomfortable, and life

  in them was rather different from the life they had known together in the Drummer Boy and the Great Western Royal Hotel. They planned

  to find somewhere better, but at a reasonable price that wasn’t easy to find. A certain melancholy descended on them, for although they were together they seemed as far away as ever from their own small house, their children and their ordinary contentment.

  ‘We could go to Reading,’ Marie suggested.

  ‘Reading?’

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  ‘To my mum’s.’

  ‘But your mum’s nearly disowned you. Your mum’s livid, you said

  yourself she was.’

  ‘People come round.’

  She was right. One Sunday afternoon they made the journey to

  Reading to have tea with Marie ’s mother and her friend Mrs Druk. Neither of these women addressed Norman, and once when he and Marie were in the kitchen he heard Mrs Druk saying it disgusted her, that he was old enough to be Marie ’s father. ‘Don’t think much of him,’ Marie ’s mother replied. ‘Pipsqueak really.’

  Nevertheless, Marie ’s mother had missed her daughter’s contribu-

  tion to the household finances and before they returned to London
that evening it was arranged that Norman and Marie should move in within a month, on the firm understanding that the very second it was feasible their marriage would take place. ‘He ’s a boarder, mind,’ Marie ’s mother warned. ‘Nothing but a boarder in this house.’ There were neighbours, Mrs Druk added, to be thought of.

  Reading was worse than the two rooms in Kilburn. Marie ’s mother

  continued to make disparaging remarks about Norman, about the way he left the lavatory, or the thump of his feet on the stair-carpet, or his fin-germarks around the light-switches. Marie would deny these accusations and then there ’d be a row, with Mrs Druk joining in because she loved a row, and Marie ’s mother weeping and then Marie weeping. Norman had been to see a solicitor about divorcing Hilda, quoting her unfaithfulness with a postman and with Fowler. ‘You have your evidence, Mr Britt?’ the solicitor inquired, and pursed his lips when Norman said he hadn’t.

  He knew it was all going to be too difficult. He knew his instinct had been right: he shouldn’t have told Hilda, he shouldn’t have just walked out. The whole thing had always been unfair on Marie; it had to be when a girl got mixed up with a married man. ‘Should think of things like that,’ her mother had a way of saying loudly when he was passing an open door. ‘Selfish type he is,’ Mrs Druk would loudly add.

  Marie argued when he said none of it was going to work. But she

  wasn’t as broken-hearted as she might have been a year or so ago, for the strain had told on Marie too, especially the strain in Reading. She natu-

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  rally wept when Norman said they’d been defeated, and so for a moment did he. He asked for a transfer to another branch of Travel-Wide and was sent to Ealing, far away from the Great Western Royal Hotel.

  Eighteen months later Marie married a man in a brewery. Hilda, hearing on some grapevine that Norman was on his own, wrote to him and suggested that bygones should be allowed to be bygones. Lonely in a bed-sitting-room in Ealing, he agreed to talk the situation over with her and after that he agreed to return to their flat. ‘No hard feelings,’ Hilda said, ‘and no deception: there ’s been a chap from the Club in here, the Woolworth’s manager.’ No hard feelings, he agreed.

  For Norman Britt, as the decade of the 1960s passed, it trailed behind it the marvels of his love affair with Marie. Hilda’s scorn when he had confessed had not devalued them, nor had the two dirty rooms in Kilburn, nor the equally unpleasant experience in Reading. Their walk to the Great Western Royal, the drinks they could not afford in the hotel bar, their studied nonchalance as they made their way separately upstairs, seemed to Norman to be a fantasy that had miraculously become real.

  The second-floor bathroom belonged in it perfectly, the bathroom full of whispers and caressing, where the faraway places of his daily work acquired a hint of magic when he spoke of them to a girl as voluptuous as any of James Bond ’s. Sometimes on the Tube he would close his eyes and with the greatest pleasure that remained to him he would recall the delicately veined marble and the great brass taps, and the bath that was big enough for two. And now and again he heard what appeared to be the strum of distant music, and the voices of the Beatles celebrating a bathroom love, as they had celebrated Eleanor Rigby and other people of that time.

  m o u c h e

  R e m i n i s c e n c e s o f a R o w i n g M a n

  g u y d e m a u pa s s a n t

  This is what he told us:

  ‘I saw some funny things and some funny girls in those days,

  when I used to go boating on the river. Many’s the time I’ve felt like writing a little book called On the Seine, describing that carefree athletic life, a life of poverty and gaiety, of noisy, rollicking fun, that I led in my twenties.

  ‘I was a penniless clerk at the time; now I’m a successful man who can throw away huge sums to gratify a passing whim. I had a thousand modest, unattainable desires in my heart which gilded my existence with fantastic hopes. Today, I really can’t think of anything that would induce me to get out of the armchair where I sit dozing. Though life could be hard, how simple and enjoyable it was to live like that, between the office in Paris and the river at Argenteuil. For ten years my great, my only, my absorbing passion was the Seine, that lovely, calm, varied, stinking river, full of mirages and filth. I think I loved it so much because it gave me the feeling of being alive. Oh, those strolls along the flower-covered banks, with my friends the frogs dreamily cooling their bellies on water-lily leaves, and the frail, dainty lilies among the tall grasses, which parted suddenly to reveal a scene from a Japanese album as a kingfisher darted past me like a blue flame! How I loved all that, with an instinctive passion of the eyes which spread through my whole body in a feeling of deep and natural joy!

  ‘Just as others remember nights of passion, I cherish memories of sunrises on misty mornings, with floating, drifting vapours, white as ghosts before the dawn, and then, as the first ray of sunshine touched

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  the meadows, lit with a lovely rosy glow; and I cherish memories too of the moon silvering the rippling surface of the water with a radiance which brought all my dreams to life.

  ‘And all that, that symbol of everlasting illusion, was born for me on the foul water which swept all the refuse of Paris down to the sea.

  ‘Besides, what a gay life we led! There were five of us, a small group of friends who are pillars of the community today. As none of us had any money we had set up an indescribable sort of club in a frightful pothouse at Argenteuil, renting a single dormitory bedroom where I spent what were the maddest nights of my life. We thought about nothing but having fun and rowing, for all of us, with one exception, regarded rowing as a religion. I remember adventures those five rascals had, and pranks they thought up, which were so fantastic that nobody could possibly believe them today. Nobody behaves like that any more, even on the Seine, because the crazy fun which was the breath of life to us means nothing to people nowadays.

  ‘The five of us owned a single boat between us, which had cost us enormous trouble to buy and which gave us more fun than we shall ever have again. It was a yawl, broad in the beam and rather heavy, but solid, roomy and comfortable. I won’t try to describe my friends to you. One of them was a mischievous little chap nicknamed Petit Bleu, and another a tall, wild-looking fellow with grey eyes and black hair whom we called Tomahawk. Then there was a lazy, witty character we nicknamed La

  Tôque, the only one who never touched an oar, on the pretext that he would be sure to capsize the boat; a slim, elegant, very well-groomed fellow we called N’a-qu’un-Oeil after a recently published novel by Cladel, and also because he wore a monocle; and lastly myself, whom the others had baptized Joseph Prunier. We lived in perfect harmony, our only regret being that we hadn’t a girl to take the tiller. A woman is an indispensable adjunct to a boat like ours—indispensable because she keeps minds and hearts awake, because she provides excitement, amusement and distraction, and because she gives a spice to life and, with a red parasol gliding past green banks, decoration too. But an ordinary cox-woman was no use to us five, who could scarcely be described as ordinary people. We needed somebody unusual, odd, ready for anything,

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  in short almost impossible to find. We had tried a good many without success—girls who just played at being helmswomen, stupid creatures who were more interested in the light wine that went to their heads than in the water that kept them afloat. We kept them for a single Sunday and then sent them packing in disgust.

  ‘But then one Saturday evening N’a-qu’un-Oeil brought along a

  lively, skinny little thing who was always hopping and skipping around, a young tease who was full of that skittishness which passes for wit among the street arabs of both sexes who have grown up on the pave-ments of Paris. She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, o
ne of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that.

  ‘On that first evening she astonished and amused us, and was so

  unpredictable that none of us could make up our minds about her. Landing in the midst of a bunch of men who were ready to get up to any kind of prank, she was soon in command of the situation, and by the next day she had conquered us completely.

  ‘She was absolutely crazy into the bargain. She told us that she had been born with a glass of absinthe in her belly, which her mother had drunk just before giving birth to her, and she had never sobered up since, because, she said, her nurse used to keep her strength up with tots of rum. She herself always called the bottles lined up on bar-room shelves “my Holy Family.”

  ‘I don’t know which of us christened her “Mouche,” nor why that

  name was given her. But it suited her perfectly, and it stuck to her. So every week our yawl, which was called Feuille-à-l’Envers, would travel along the Seine between Asnières and Maisons-Laffitte with a load of five light-hearted strapping young fellows, steered by a lively, scatterbrained creature under a parasol of painted paper, who treated us as if we were slaves charged with the duty of taking her for a row, and whom we all adored.

  ‘We adored her, first of all for a variety of reasons, and then for one in particular. She was a sort of little word-mill in the stern of our boat,

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  chatting away in the wind blowing over the water. She babbled incessantly with the continuous sound of those winged toys that spin in the breeze, trotting out the most unexpected, amusing and astonishing things. In that mind of hers, which seemed like a patchwork of rags of all kinds and colours, not sewn together but only tacked, there was fairy-tale fantasy, bawdy, immodesty, impudence, jokes and surprises, and a sense of fresh air and scenery such as you would get travelling in a balloon.

  ‘We used to ask her questions just to hear the far-fetched answers she would produce. The one we fired at her most often was: “Why are you called Mouche?”