When I Was Otherwise

by Stephen Benatar

  He felt mollified, although he was vaguely annoyed with himself when he realized it. “Then as long as we’ve got that settled…?” He ended on a surly note.

  “So now you can tell me about your preferences,” she suggested blithely. “You probably don’t know it yet but that must have been the reason why you telephoned. Mummy is reading a book by Sigmund Freud and over coffee this morning was giving me the lowdown. Over coffee and shortbread. And such delicious shortbread! You’ve no idea. I meant to bring you a piece.”

  29

  Yes, this whole conversation was absurd and he hadn’t got the time for it. Such things had been all right, he supposed, before they were married—even quite charming really, rather sweet, so long as they hadn’t been trotted out in public, as they so often had. But didn’t she realize life had changed? In less than six months she would be giving birth. This was hard to imagine. In some ways she was still such a baby herself. Of course—Daisy was right—her mother was to blame. Florence had never treated her as anything other than a baby: a particularly spoilt one at that. Yet this was really no excuse. It was high time she began to grow up.

  “Marsha, do you realize how long we’ve been talking and that there are now a dozen people waiting to use this box?” There was certainly one person, a disgruntled-looking woman who was holding the hand of a recalcitrant pigtailed child.

  Which of course made it two.

  “Oh, let them wait!” cried Marsha gaily.

  “And what’s more I shan’t have any time for lunch.”

  “Oh, gracious. Andy, you must eat! Hang up and go at once.”

  She had forgotten that he’d spoken of there being a reason for his call…other than the one suggested by herself! Yet perversely, now that he’d been given the opportunity, he experienced some small difficulty in getting to the point. (Any less moral man, he told himself, would have experienced no difficulty at all.) “Oh, well. Perhaps there isn’t that much rush. They can wait a minute longer.”

  “But it’s not them I’m thinking of! It’s you!”

  “Well, I daresay I shall manage to grab something.”

  “But, oh, if you grab something, you know it will only give you indigestion.”

  Perversely, too, in such a situation, he found her solicitude oppressive.

  Yet perhaps this was helpful: the sheer fact of its being irritating.

  “I’m afraid, Marsha, I’ll be home rather late this evening. Boringly I shall have to stay on at the office.”

  “Oh, you poor darling! I hate that Colonel Quinn! But do you know how late? I’ll get Mary to hold back the dinner.”

  “No, don’t do that. Don’t even wait up. I may not get in much before midnight or beyond.”

  “Oh, Andrew!”

  He was totally unprepared for such a wail. “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “But do you have to stay so long?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “There’s no way out?”

  “No. None whatever.”

  She emitted a sigh every bit as exaggerated as his had been when she had been pondering the mystery of dimples and cleft chins.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” he exclaimed, “this is the first time the Colonel’s ever requested it! The very first time it’s happened.”

  Some women’s husbands, he thought—sailors for instance—were away from home for months on end. Even commercial travellers could escape for five whole days a week. Possibly six.

  “You can’t think how boring it is,” she said, “just sitting here on my own every evening until twenty-past-seven or beyond. Sometimes I don’t even know what keeps me from screaming. Or tearing my hair out. And now you say midnight! Possibly even later!”

  Good God. Such a terrifying display of naked anguish. And over what? In the name of pity—over what? Did she really think that other husbands didn’t need to work late at the office?

  She was strangling him. She was trying to hold him in a net. To fasten him with shackles. He had never realized she was so neurotic. He had never realized she was so frankly pitiable.

  “You know how much I always loathe my own company!” she said.

  “I don’t understand why. I always love mine! On occasion I’d probably give my right arm to get a little more of it.”

  “Then it’s easy to see that you aren’t left alone for eleven hours a day.”

  “And nor are you. There’s always Mary you can talk to. Go and talk to her this evening.”

  “Oh, I keep on telling you! Mary doesn’t approve of me. She always stands so stiffly and won’t say a single word more than she has to.”

  “Then why don’t you tell her to sit down? It might make all the difference.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly! And what a change of tune that is! Last time you said that I was too familiar and small wonder she had no respect.”

  He ignored this. “Of course, you know what the real trouble is? It was Mater who found her for us. I daresay you’d have thought her quite delightful if your mother had recommended her.”

  Someone rapped on the window with the edge of a coin. He turned fiercely and scowled at the offender. It was the disgruntled woman with the child. She had an air of pleading.

  Marsha had been saying something. He didn’t ask her to repeat it.

  “Anyway, why not go and spend an hour or two with your mother?”

  “I’ve already seen her. I told you. I had coffee with her this morning.”

  “Well, what’s that got to do with it? You’re always telling me how lovely she is. Or else she’s always telling me how lovely she is. One or the other.” Yet he didn’t want them to begin on that again. Not for the minute. “Or what about going to the cinema? That Jean Harlow film you were talking about?”

  Hell. Did he really have to arrange every smallest detail of her life? At least when he’d been living with Mater that was one burden he’d not had to bear. Aimlessness was a thing he simply couldn’t tolerate.

  “I don’t want to go to the cinema. Not on my own. Not at night, that is, when it means coming home in the dark. And in the evenings there isn’t anyone to go with.”

  “What about Evelyn?”

  “I told you! About her sister’s accident! Evelyn’s had to rush off to Guildford.”

  In one way, he supposed, in one way at any rate, it would be better once they’d got the baby. She’d then have something to occupy her mind. And besides that, hallelujah, there’d be no more of this awful nonsense about looking for a job—which Mrs Quinn herself had so strongly deprecated. No wonder! Working as a manicurist or some such thing! Training as a dance instructress! Sweet Jesus! Just because she had once won a couple of medals. No. It seemed that, after all, there was actually a good argument to be made in favour of babies. A very good argument.

  “Surely,” he said, “you could catch a taxi home? After the film. Then why would you mind about its being dark?”

  “And a fat lot you’d care if there wasn’t one and I got picked up or attacked or raped or something!”

  First the sulks and then the tears. Or at least the threat of tears; he had heard it in her voice. Honestly! What could you do with a woman like that? He said quickly:

  “I’m afraid I can’t talk any longer. I’m going to put the phone down.”

  “Good!” she replied. “But I want to tell you something before you do. I would be very glad if I got picked up! Very!”

  “Yes,” he said. He couldn’t leave her to assume that it was she who had uttered the last word. “I should think you would! At nearly four months pregnant!”

  “And I do prefer dark men, tall, dark, very dark men—”

  He slammed down the receiver, immensely annoyed he hadn’t done it a moment earlier. He stood there for several seconds and tried to gather his composure. The woman and her child had left. A man in his middle twenties, with a long quivering nose and a carnation in his buttonhole, pulled open the glass door. “Here, you know, I do think it’s a bit thick…”

&n
bsp; “Oh, go to hell!” said Andrew. He pushed his way out of the box and left the other man staring after him with an incredulous expression. “I’ve a good mind to go and make him take that back,” he said to the small but sympathetic group which had gathered around. “There’s one thing, anyway. With hair like that you can tell he isn’t English.”

  “Swedish or something?” suggested an onlooker. “He was big enough to be a Swede.”

  “No. He sounded like a German to me.”

  “Well, that explains it, then.”

  Some five years later the man with the carnation—engaged in his first real, unsimulated experience of hand-to-hand combat—had a fleeting image of Andrew striding off arrogantly into Old Broad Street; the very second before he managed to lunge home his bayonet.

  30

  Andrew took a ten-minute detour before arriving at the restaurant where he normally ate lunch. By this time he had composed himself sufficiently to stave off the certainty of his meal providing indigestion. He felt a mixture of reactions: guilt, indignation, despair, resentment. But chiefly he felt the whole thing had been her fault. It served her right. This ultimate conclusion was helped along by two further circumstances. The first was that Johnson and Haley were still at their usual table, eating pudding, and that after they had recommended the steak-and-kidney pie—with full justification, he discovered, because today he wasn’t worrying about his waistline—they continued with their conversation. Johnson, apparently, was at present having problems at home and was soliciting advice. Was divorce simply the public admission of total failure and the ruin of a man’s entire life or was it in fact the lesser of two evils? Harry Johnson had been married for ten years and was nearly thirty-eight. Ironically, this was just the sort of conversation which Marsha would have revelled in, thought Andrew, and which she dreamed he engaged in every lunchtime. What sustenance it would have given her! Even for himself there was a certain balm, more than a certain balm, along with the embarrassment. Despite the steak-and-kidney pie and the crisply glistening apple charlotte Johnson’s eyes intermittently grew watery; though at least he was still enough of a man, thank God, to let it go no further than that. They heard about his wife’s selfishness and nerve-racking mannerisms and utter lack of self-knowledge. He wished, he wished—oh, how he wished, he said—that he had never got married! He had tried to make a go of things; nobody could say he hadn’t; and there were the two kids of course (although this appeared to Andrew to be a strictly neutral statement) but what would he not give—ten years of his life at least!—to find himself at twenty-five again and a bachelor? Oh, how he wished that he had never got married! “And, ah yes, I forgot. She snores. Sometimes she even snores.” They all agreed that a woman snoring was like a woman smoking in the street, or drinking to excess, or using masculine-type language. “Oh, no,” he said, “it isn’t like the films!” Well, this was a further point they could all safely agree upon and Haley even hankered a little for his own bachelor days. “I’m not pretending there aren’t certain advantages to marriage, plainly there are, and I’m not only talking here about ironed shirts or mended socks, if the two of you can get my drift, follow my meaning, eh? But all the same…” There then followed a list of buts, and Johnson, reinvigorated, snatched back the baton. “The first year was more or less okay, until she started having children, but when that happened—well, in all honesty, I’ve got to tell you this—the honeymoon was over. The honeymoon was really over!” Andrew said lugubriously, “Marsha’s expecting a baby. Next March.” “Is she? You never told us!” said Haley. “Congratulations, you old dog! You certainly didn’t let the grass grow under your feet, did you?” And Johnson said, “Yes, congratulations, Poynton! Well done! But you just take my tip and make the most of things while you still think you’ve stumbled into paradise and while she still thinks you’re the one and only boy in the world.” “Dear God,” said Andrew. They quite misunderstood his meaning. They believed he wasn’t yet ready to face their vision of reality.

  “Oh, Christ,” he thought.

  Well, that was the first thing which confirmed to him he had nothing whatever to reproach himself for, that if anything he had been a model of restraint and husbandly forbearance. The second thing occurred immediately following his return to the office. The dumpy, middle-aged spinster on the switchboard gave him a message she had taken in his absence.

  “Oh, Mr Poynton, your wife telephoned. She said did you want a cold tray left out? But only to ring and ask for Mary if the answer should be yes. She said to thank you for your kind and impulsive phone call. And…now where is it, that other thing? I wrote it down in my notepad to make sure I’d got it. Ah, yes. Here we are. ‘Also,’ she says, ‘with lots of black hair on the backs of their hands.’ That’s exactly how she worded it. Naturally I read it back. ‘Lots of black hair on the backs of their hands.’ She said you’d understand.”

  Miss Eggling smiled at him in a friendly fashion. Made little effort to conceal her curiosity.

  Andrew was furious. It was as much as he could do to thank her. It was as much as he could do not to slam his office door. It was as much as he could do not to cry out, “Oh, fuck that woman! Fuck her! Fuck her! Fuck her!”

  He might then, of course, have had a hard job explaining that—no—he hadn’t meant Miss Eggling.

  31

  They met at seven o’clock at Simpson’s. Andrew had wondered about the risk involved in bringing her to a restaurant so popular; but on the other hand, if they were going to be seen anywhere, it could just as easily, more easily, have been at one of the smaller, currently more fashionable spots and who did he know who ever came to Simpson’s? He had thought about it carefully. At the worst, he could always say, with the sort of nonchalance which arose from knowing you spoke nothing but the truth, “Oh, Jones—Smith—Robinson, this is my wife’s sister-in-law, Mrs Stormont.” And they would see at once that she was a good ten years older than he was (although, admittedly, people usually guessed him to be around thirty) and ridiculously small when set against his own height; and they would infer, of course, that it was merely the most innocent of family business at present being transacted. And in essence, anyway, would they be so very wrong? Surely, in all fairness, the FRIL Society could scarcely be classified as anything other than family business; the thought rather tickled him. And certainly, as Simpson’s wasn’t one of those candlelit and intimate places—but respectable, long-established, solid—nobody could possibly consider it at all a strange venue for the sorting out of one’s family affairs; for the necessary entertainment of one’s sister-in-law. Could they?

  And if they did, he suddenly thought, while waiting a little nervously beside the main entrance—and if they did—well, what the heck; he felt reckless; he remembered only too clearly all the occurrences of that day’s lunch hour. He wasn’t looking forward to returning home. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not ever.

  And Marsha had said she was bored. Good grief! She hardly knew the meaning of the word. She could spend all her time at the cinema; or drinking coffee; or nattering on the telephone; or doing practically any damn-fool thing she chose. She wasn’t tied to a job she hated: nine hours a day: day in day out: for the next forty years or more—yes, forty-one years, for Christ’s sake! Endless decades of endless repetition. And all for what? That was the thing. All for what? For the sake of bringing up a family he hadn’t yet got and didn’t even much want. Ten bus journeys a week, in all sorts of weather and under all sorts of conditions; five hundred in a year; five thousand in a decade. God! An annual fortnight in Bexhill or Brighton or Bournemouth. Uncountable evenings and weekends, right up to the very end of his life indeed—and on the whole his family was long-lived; and so was hers!—listening or not listening to that relentlessly unrolling saga, the minutiae of all their days… Unbearable. Unbearable. (Later, at Dunkirk, he would remember this awareness of his boredom. But by then what he remembered, wistfully and with remorse, was wholly irretrievable.) No. He thought he wouldn’t mind if he ne
ver went home again. Here I am, everybody. Come and take a good look. Ask me what I’m doing here. Go and tell my wife.

  Go and tell my mother-in-law.

  “Hello! Penny for them! Hope they’re something nice!” He actually gave a start, before he remembered to raise his hat.

  She was not only punctual, she was early. Andrew had booked a table for half-past-seven and until it was ready they sat in a spacious, comfortably appointed ante-room sipping the sherries a waiter had brought them and for which Andrew felt he might have overtipped. The worry niggled. It threatened to blight his evening.

  “I see that you did come in disguise,” said Daisy.

  “Of course.”

  “As what?”

  “I don’t know.” He was aware that this exchange, especially on his own part, wasn’t incredibly scintillating. Could almost be classified, couldn’t it, as the comeback of a poor fish?

  “Then aren’t you going to ask what I meant?”

  “No. Because I feel sure you’re going to tell me.”

  That was better. He had the suspicion it mightn’t have been wholly original—though with any luck, of course, she would believe it had—but, yes, it was certainly better.

  She chuckled. “Then you’re perfectly right, my friend! You obviously know women! I thought you’d come in disguise as… Well, don’t you want to guess?”

  “No.”

  “As the Prince of Wales.”

  “The Prince of Wales!”

  “Oh yes! You’ve got a look of him, you know. Hasn’t anyone ever said so? Of course, you’re bigger than he is, and broader, got shoulders on you, and I do like to see a man with shoulders on him, most women do—but otherwise there’s a quite uncanny resemblance. I’ve always admired the Prince of Wales. Must be a bit of a gay dog; a thoroughgoing rogue if all one hears is true! Probably leads his parents a frightful dance! And what I say is: good luck to him if he does!”