A Desirable Husband

by Frances Vernon

  Alice was wearing a man’s silk dressing-gown over a dress she had had when her daughter was a schoolgirl. To Finola, she had always looked just the same: she had looked elderly as a child, thirty at nineteen and, now, she might have passed for forty and Finola’s sister if she had bothered to dye her hair.

  Finola sobered up, but there was still, thought Winston, a new look in her eyes now she had laughed. ‘You mustn’t try to keep me sheltered from the world at this late date, Alice, really,’ she said, smiling a little and looking towards Winston. ‘Oh dear, what have we been doing all our lives?’ A little self-consciousness came back, when she had let go of this remark.

  ‘Will you change your mind about a glass of sherry, Finola?’ said Winston.

  ‘Thank you, I will.’

  Alice finished her own sherry and made a face. ‘Well, I hope you two have been talking about the weather, and good books, and things like that.’

  ‘Finola is often a great help to me, when it comes to good books,’ said Winston.

  ‘Oh, Winston, what nonsense.’

  ‘Not nonsense at all. A nice, careless reference to something unfashionable can be very effective, in a review. Finola introduced me to Scott, Alice, and Miss Edgeworth, and Crotchet Castle.’ He was leaning with his arms folded against the empty nursery fireplace.

  ‘You mustn’t tease,’ said Finola.

  ‘It’s funny, Fin’s always read that kind of thing, and not much else. Do you still have the set of Scott we gave you that Christmas, Fin?’

  ‘Of course I have! Falling to bits now. It’s a pity everyone signed Kenilworth, because that’s the one that really is in such tatters it’s unreadable. I also have all the British Girl’s Annuals that you disapproved of, Alice,’ she added.

  Alice tried to remember exactly who, apart from themselves, had been living in Bramham Gardens at Christmas, 1925.

  *

  In Grosvenor Road beside the river, where she and Alice were comfortably walking despite the heavy traffic, Finola was thinking of Gerard, whom she still loved, though it was astonishing how quickly one could become cool and sensible. As though it were all many years ago, she was remembering how perfect a lover, polite and gentle yet possessive, he had always been before they reached the bedroom: and how (though there had never been anything in the slightest bit wrong with him, and his desire had always been obvious) he had then hurried deliberately, with his eyes shut, till Finola was often left pink and shivering with pretended satisfaction. She was thinking now how easy it must surely be for any man, particularly Gerard, to improve if he were willing to put his mind to it; and Alice noticed that her daughter’s carefree expression was gone.

  If only I hadn’t been a baby myself when I had her, thought Alice, looking at the brown water, which was dimpled and dull in the quick spring wind. She had not been in a boat on the Thames since she was seven years old, and she did not suppose it would be much fun now.

  ‘Fin,’ she said, clearing her throat, ‘if I was you, I wouldn’t see so much of Winston. I know he’s interesting, and Gerard likes him, but Gerard’s too – nice to see something and, to tell you the truth, Winston’s not what he would call a good man, underneath.’

  ‘Oh, Alice, what rubbish, and I haven’t seen so much of him.’ She had rarely spoken so directly to her mother. ‘You used to condemn everyone you called conventional in no uncertain terms, and now you seem to think that the slightest – neglect of the proprieties means someone’s positively wicked!’

  CHAPTER 15

  GERARD ALONE

  The Parnells decided not to buy a television before the Coronation on the 2nd June: they feared, although they did not say so, that it might have a vulgarising effect on the children. They also disliked the idea because they had both grown to hate the clipped boom of announcers’ voices, which they had heard on the newsreels of the war years. In the end, Finola, Eleanor and Nanny went to watch the ceremony on the Van Leydens’ television, while Richard spent the day with one of his schoolfriends, and Gerard stayed at home.

  Just as the orb was placed in the hand of Queen Elizabeth, Katie observed that no doubt, when Prince Charles was crowned, the performance would be interrupted by advertisements for toothpaste so they were really very lucky. Finola wished that Gerard did not take such a lofty view of popular things: she could tell that Katie was unreasonably annoyed by his refusing her invitation, when her own husband was quietly drinking whisky in front of the screen.

  *

  Gerard had not cared to see the Coronation, not only because he disapproved of television but because he thought the attention paid to the whole affair a piece of morbid disrespect, when he considered that the monarchy was bound shortly to be abolished. He was alone in the house, because Mainwaring and Sarah were at home and Carlotta was on holiday in London. It was a slight shock to him to realise, an hour after Finola left for the Manor, that there really was nobody else in the house. He could not recall a single day in the past when there had been no servants, and no family, within call at the Cedar House.

  When he was a boy, Gerard had sometimes imagined what it would be like to be without anyone, even the dogs, and to wander undisturbed round the house, looking at other people’s things, without being questioned. The only sound would be the ticking of the clocks. In this fantasy, the house had always been wonderfully tidy, though warm and lit as if for friendly spirits; but today there was, of course, evidence in all the rooms that everyone would soon be back. Gerard had always thought that, if he could be perfectly alone in the house in this way, he would be able to work and think far better than he usually did. He found now that he could not concentrate.

  He went into the bedroom, which he still thought of as his mother’s in spite of Finola’s things being there, and glanced at his reflection in the steely glass on the dressing-table. He would, he reminded himself, be fifty next year, but he did not feel as old as that, though he knew he ought to. It was a long time since he had paid any attention to his appearance: he looked in the mirror in his dressing-room only to make sure that he had shaved properly, and that his collar was straight. Ever since he had discovered from other boys at Eton that he was a remarkably handsome creature, he had refused to think about his face, but he believed that he was vain, in spite of this. Pretty Polly, he thought, remembering that he had blushingly supposed when he was fourteen that this was a sarcastic comment on his conceit. The tutor he had had before he went to school had always told him that he was conceited, idle, stupid and deceitful: wicked in a mean little way.

  Gerard had been delicate as a child, and because of this he had not been sent to school, like Darcy, at the age of eight. A tutor had prepared him for Eton, and Gerard had always known that he had been quite extraordinarily lucky to have him, however much he had feared and hated him. He believed that, had he gone to a private school, he would inevitably have been bullied, and beaten, although he never would have broken a rule: it was a most wonderful privilege, he knew, never to have had any but emotional suffering. There had, of course, been the horror of the war, but, because he had not been wounded and had met Finola, Gerard felt that he could not really count that. Mr Crayshaw, his tutor, had told Gerard many times that he had no right to be miserable, that it was all selfishness; and whenever he was miserable, Gerard agreed. He had to be grateful to Mr Crayshaw because, although for four years he had talked about beating him, caning such a wretched girlish little object, he had never actually done so (he had had, to be fair, whole days of jocular amiability).

  Then he had been shamefully lucky at Eton, Gerard reflected, as he looked at Finola’s large flat bed. He picked up the ragged teddy-bear which, when he slept with his wife, had often seemed to be in his way, and put it disdainfully on a chair, because it looked rather foolish on the pillow and reminded him too much. He then put it back, in case Finola should suspect, and walked downstairs, along the passage to the empty kitchen.

  He sat on the kitchen table, and this action cheered him up because it was s
o foolish and unsuitable. He was still thinking of school, where he could not say he had been unhappy: he had been in a slack house run by a rather vague scholar, where his fagmaster, when he was a lower boy, had been so kind that Gerard had trembled. He closed his eyes as he saw the face of that older boy, who had always seemed so worried and hungry: he had been killed a few months after leaving Eton, in the autumn of 1918. He had never tried to use cruelty in order to make Gerard oblige him, and he used to say when Gerard had finished some task for him: ‘I say, Polly – Parnell – don’t go just yet – stay and have a banger or something, nobody’ll know.’ He had made such invitations for nearly a year, usually touching Gerard’s sleeve as he spoke, until Gerard had thought his chest would burst with guilt and fright and gratitude for his not being a bully. ‘No, thank you, Chartley – no, thank you, I can’t.’

  It was very painful to feel, when he was forty-nine and settled at Combe Chalcot, that he was still sometimes cringing, useless Pretty Polly. Gerard had not felt like this for many years, but he had lost his temper because of it, when in April Darcy had calmly addressed him as ‘Polly’ in front of Finola.

  O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace, thought Gerard, looking at his nails. Well-treated as he had been nearly all his life, his vision of hell was the timeless continuation of that sense of absolute and black confinement to his own dirty little soul, which he had known in the worst moments of his childhood. Gerard was still a little embarrassed by, though sinfully proud of, his own religion: his father had had a very old-fashioned opinion of what he had called interfering claptrap. (Darcy called it Enthusiasm.)

  He smiled when he thought how quickly his life had become so much better, in his last three years at Eton, and then afterwards at Cambridge. At sixteen he had nearly reached his full height, and rowing had given him a fine pair of shoulders. (Gerard had always liked being taller than most men, though he believed he did not like being beautiful.) It was only after he had realised, at twenty-one, that he had been neither bold nor sophisticated in sleeping with a married woman, that he had again felt himself to be mysteriously bad.

  He slipped down from the kitchen table and, feeling very much an intruder, looked into the servants’ hall. This was now almost Carlotta’s private sitting-room, as Mainwaring and his wife lived out, and the butler in any case no longer came in every day when the Parnells were alone. Gerard had loved to visit it as a child, though he had always wondered that so many servants, as there had been then, were required to use such a dark little room. Quietly, he left it, and hurried back to his study.

  Gerard sat at his desk and went through his letters, for he had not dealt with all yesterday’s post. Sometimes he thought of employing a secretary for two days a week. He had so many dull and worrying letters to read and answer that, when he was rebellious, he often said he might as well be in an office. If he were to employ someone, he would he supposed be wholly idle, and Finola, who seemed to like his being so busy, would wonder at this. He did not know himself quite what he would do with his time, but he believed that, had he not lived in modern times, he would have been happy reading the Latin and Greek which had been such a pleasure at Cambridge.

  He found among the pile of correspondence a letter from his mother with a Sedley Warren postmark four days old, and he frowned as he opened it.

  ‘My dear Gerard,’ Constance had written on Sir William’s writing-paper, ‘Here I am, you see, at Sedley Warren. Poor William is dreadfully cut up over Mary’s death still, and I’m doing what I can, of course. Quite frankly, I had no idea he was so fond of her, and I also had no idea that, in spite of her being so ill, she was actually most efficient in comparison with poor dear William, who simply hasn’t a clue. She never appeared to do anything, and you know how vague she was when one talked to her! One lives and learns.’

  The easy tone of this made Gerard think that he was learning all sorts of new things about his mother. Unlike Finola, he had not noticed, in March, that her character was very much changed.

  ‘She asked to be buried actually in that charming little grey and white garden of hers (do you remember Finola saying “nothing so brash as coloured flowers!” in that sharp, rather witty way she has sometimes?).’ Constance had extravagantly praised this little garden when Finola and Gerard had gone to stay at Sedley Warren. Finola had made her remark in that voice of gentle but dry amusement which showed that she was not quite so grave as she sometimes seemed: Gerard remembered very well. ‘Mary and I of course were both great gardeners, and I must say my little back-yard at Headington does provide me with an interest in life, now that I really can never ride again, according to wretched Dr Sinclair. Have you and Finola, I wonder, done anything much to my old rose-garden?

  ‘Now I must really get to the point. I don’t believe this for a moment, but Emily Wentworth was up here last night on her way to the Comptons’, and she said that she had heard strange rumours as she put it that Finola was showing a certain amount of interest in a very odd young man at the Foreign Office. You know how these things get about: I suppose this young man said something to someone, about having her dine in his rooms. I didn’t actually hear that she went there alone, and I’m sure there’s nothing in it. But that was the gist of it and I knew I really ought to tell you.’

  Gerard checked that there was nothing more of any importance, and then put the letter down. He thought, in a quite reasonable way, that he would certainly write a stiff little note to his mother, and ask her not to spread ridiculous stories about his wife. Gerard knew that the man concerned must be Winston Lowell, because he was neither young nor at the Foreign Office. He tried to call up some suitable anger, but found he could not. He knew what Finola would say when he showed this to her. He had always known very well that she never would show the slightest interest in any man but himself, however things were between them. That was one reason for his having gratefully loved her: he reminded himself that he truly had felt tender desire from the moment he first set eyes on her.

  *

  ‘Well?’ said Gerard. ‘What about it?’ By asking this of Finola he was tormenting himself, but not too unpleasantly. Since she had refused to sleep with him he had invented an imaginary mistress, a strong dark female who was sometimes the wife of a friend, and sometimes a very old-fashioned kept woman. She did not give him great pleasure, but he knew in his prayers that he was delighting in the thought of sin, and it was of her and not of Winston Lowell that he had been thinking chiefly since reading Constance’s letter.

  ‘What about it?’ said Finola. She had just come back from the Manor, having picked up Richard on the way, and she was tired, but excited. She looked at the letter again. ‘Do you want to make a great big scene out of this thing?’

  ‘No, of course not. I presume it is Winston Lowell she’s referring to?’

  ‘I told you ages ago,’ said Finola, looking at the ceiling, ‘that, as you say, he was kind enough to take me out to the theatre. And he’s given me lunch a couple of times. Anything else?’

  ‘Not if you say not.’

  ‘Of course, he’s quite hideous,’ said Finola, ‘but fascinating to women. I’ve been rolling about in bed with him, groaning, in this sordid lodging of his, in touch with the earthy passions and all that –’

  ‘Stop it, Finola!’ He was breathing hard as he looked at her white face. It always surprised him a little when her resemblance to her parents became pronounced, and she used the manners which had been familiar to her in childhood.

  ‘Well, what d’you expect me to say? I never heard such nonsense in my life. Goodness, he’s never even tried to – to flirt with me!’ This, she reflected, was true.

  ‘I quite agree that this is a stupid, vulgar letter,’ said Gerard after a pause.

  ‘Yes, we do agree about that.’

  ‘How often have you been alone with Lowell? As a matter of interest.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Gerard, I’ve alw
ays met him in restaurants, or at the theatre, and the only time I went to his flat Alice was there! I like him because he’s never tried to – to kiss me or anything.’

  ‘Alice was there?’

  ‘Yes. Would you like me to cross my heart and swear on the Bible?’

  ‘Do,’ said Gerard, his fair skin flushing. ‘I’d like that very much.’ His wife’s romantic pantheism had never pleased him very much.

  ‘I won’t do anything of the kind!’

  ‘Why not? What difference does it make?’ His lips moved, Finola thought, towards a little smile.

  ‘Exactly. What difference would it make? I suppose you think I’m lying?’ This was a most exhilarating talk.

  ‘No. Just oblige me,’ said Gerard. Both thought for a moment of the interesting London life which each might have had, had the other not deprived him.

  ‘No, I won’t. You must be mad. It’s – it’s humiliating, and stupid. I suppose any minute now you’ll be saying I promised to obey you!’ added Finola.

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’ Gerard lost his faint look of curious amusement.

  ‘I am not being ridiculous, and what’s more I’ll see Winston as often as I like.’ In public, she thought, but he did not know that.

  ‘I ask you not to.’

  ‘Mummy!’ said Eleanor. ‘Mummy, Richard’s taken my mon-sters and hidden them!’

  The child stood there, dark and fat in the doorway of the sitting-room, with her face screwed up in fury.

  Eleanor showed no interest in any toys but her little slimy rubber animals whom Richard had christened Repellent, Repulsive, Disgusting, Foul, Vile and Squalid. His parents had been surprised to discover that his vocabulary, though he never read, was so large: those words were not often upon their own lips.