Somewhere Beyond Reproach

by Tim Jeal

  This was beginning to become tiresome. I managed a smile.

  ‘Really I can’t let that pass. Dinah will tell you that I didn’t ever really like it.’ I gave her an appealing look. She said with affected disappointment:

  ‘But you said the detail was fantastic.’ Suddenly petulant: ‘You said it just to please me.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said smiling. ‘Lies have been told for less noble reasons.’

  I seemed to have won. The topic was dropped. I felt quite pleased. The thing could have caused considerable embarrassment. I felt that if I chose the subjects for conversation I would be in less danger.

  ‘Do you often go to Tewkesbury these days?’ I asked Mark.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m afraid Mark’s father died two years ago,’ Dinah said softly.

  I murmured condolence and reapplied myself to my food. This, I reflected, would have made Mark a rich man. There was little to show for it here. Dinah must resent this. I enjoyed the thought of Mrs Lisle’s probable feelings about this. I wondered what they’d done with all the furniture.

  ‘I suppose you let the house now?’ I asked.

  Simpson nodded. He seemed disinclined to say any more about it. Nevertheless I pressed on:

  ‘Have you ever thought of selling the place?’

  ‘Yes. I might want to go back there some day. So I’m hanging on.’ He sounded bored. I felt angry that I, their guest, should not be given more help. Simpson added as an afterthought, ‘My mother has to have somewhere to live.’ I felt that he had deliberately left this most obvious factor to the last to make me appear foolish. Why had he let it then? She was living in part of it. Was I imagining that he was getting at me? I tried to think of Mrs Simpson to get rid of my anger. I saw her with a wicker basket over her arm coming into their kitchen and depositing a huge pile of plums and black-currants. Her fingers were always stained with fruit juice, her face weather-worn like a dried apricot. When I poured out more wine I did not bother with the napkin. Correctly I poured for Dinah first, then walked round the table to deal with Mark. I must have tripped over his stick which he had laid on the floor by his chair. I didn’t spill much wine but what I did spill went on his shirt.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ I murmured.

  ‘I hope you didn’t do that when you were a wine-steward,’ he said in a way that made the remark only half-humorous. Why the hell had I bothered to tell them?

  ‘Can I get a wet cloth or anything?’

  Dinah started to laugh.

  ‘You don’t want to drown him in water as well, do you?’

  I was grateful to her. Simpson managed a weak smile. He looked enormously comic with the red wine splattered down his chest like blood. I was mad to laugh but I couldn’t help it. I saw his eyes narrow in his chubby face. He had not always been fat. Now as he stared at me he looked like a plump schoolboy who had been suddenly overtaken by middle age. Dinah looked at him without apparent disapproval, or for that matter approval. I could see that she was interested in the possible outcome of this absurd new development.

  ‘That stick of mine again,’ Mark said playfully. ‘I don’t think where I put it, sometimes I even forget it and try tottering off without it.’ He watched me carefully to try and gauge my reaction. I was surprised that he had alluded to an incident which could easily be told at his expense, and yet could it? He had suggested I left Dinah alone and I hadn’t done so. I looked at Dinah, who seemed to have decided to take the role of spectator. Simpson playful again: ‘I hope you’re not embarrassed this time anyway.’

  ‘No, you’ve put me completely at ease.’

  ‘Good, I’m so glad.’ My jovial host clapped his hands and said to Dinah, ‘What’s for pudding?’

  It turned out to be raspberry flan. Mark took a few mouthfuls and said:

  ‘I was really awfully pleased when you accepted my wife’s invitation to come this evening.’

  ‘Very nice of you,’ I murmured. He ignored my interjection and went on:

  ‘It showed that you meant what you said at lunch the other day, the bit about my being worth more than a few stilted words in a cheap restaurant.’

  Dinah looked surprised. He evidently hadn’t told her about our lunch. I smiled at Simpson and said:

  ‘I’m surprised you ever doubted me.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. Just that you seemed angry about something at the time.’ Delightful dimples appeared in his chubby cheeks as he said this. This time I was determined not to lose the slightest fraction of control. I said calmly:

  ‘I was just offended that you should have considered my judgement of you to be entirely governed by your disability and appearance.’

  Badly phrased though this was, he was left momentarily with nothing to say.

  After a few more mouthfuls of flan he said:

  ‘Nevertheless you were nice enough to allude to my condition by assuring me that you felt certain I didn’t feel different.’ I was amazed at the accuracy of his memory of our meeting. Dinah cut in, laughing:

  ‘That isn’t true anyway. He returned home a different man in body and mind.’ I was pleased to see that Simpson didn’t find this at all amusing. It confirmed my feeling that she was not by any means delighted at her husband’s new occupation. She turned to me and confided: ‘He’s writing a book about religion and suffering. You wouldn’t have done that without your illness, would you, darling?’ I thought of the notes he had written. The reason why the drawer was unlocked now became apparent. He would miss those pages, probably had done already. I looked at him and imagined his discomfort with pleasure. I decided to discomfort him still further. I said:

  ‘I suppose you’re going to knock down the argument that most people who turn to God in illness do so because there’s nothing else left for them?’

  He looked at me as though some terrible doubt had suddenly been resolved. I wondered how a religious man could manage to square a look of such hatred with his principles. But then I reflected that the God who had appeared in Simpson’s pages had had a distinctly Old Testament flavour.

  ‘I don’t think knocking down that argument would fill a book,’ he said, as though determined to dismiss the subject. I pretended not to have noticed the tone of voice he had said this in.

  ‘Well I’ve never been able to take the view that the gods punish those they love.’

  Simpson was now making no effort to go on eating. His anger was obvious. This last remark was taken as a direct challenge.

  ‘I should prefer the word remind to the word punish. It makes better sense.’ I could not resist what I said next.

  ‘Roosevelt called infantile paralysis a rather unpleasant reminder of infancy.’

  Not only had I made a joke in bad taste, but I had also side-stepped a discussion that Simpson would have won. I did not feel repentant though. He had not spared me earlier. Was this a token of love that must punish to be of use? Dinah suggested we had coffee in the sitting room. She gave no indication of what she had made of our exchange. I felt certain that Mark knew who had taken those pages.

  I had started to feel a strange elation. I decided not to tell Simpson what a friend of a friend had seen on a hoarding outside a non-conformist church in south London: ‘Drink is thy worst enemy.’ Then further down on that very hoarding, I had been assured, was: ‘Make thy worst enemy thy best friend.’ Dinah handed me my coffee. There was little more conversation. Mark put on a record. Brahms’s piano concerto. Not that other piece. I still remembered the tears in his eyes. A sudden pang of pity. What had Jane the therapist said? ‘Anything is better than showing pity for a patient.’ ‘Patient’ I reflected meant one who suffered.

  Dinah sat down on the rug in front of the gas fire. She pulled up her knees, and inclined her head. A small band of skin showed where her white sweater rose as she leant forward. I was aware of nothing but her as Serkin played on. I am well aware of the dangers of eulogising. I shall not do so here. Only say that for that moment I had never seen a mo
re beautiful combination of colours than the blue and white of her clothes and the jet blackness of her hair. If I had been a painter what a study I could have made of ‘Girl in front of Gas fire’.

  Sixteen

  I have read through my description of the dinner. I am horrified at my apparent composure. I cannot believe that it was really like that, and yet I remember what I said almost exactly. During the following week I had ample time to feel the agony of my limitations. I had no idea what the next step should be. I did not even know whether I was intended to make it. My one hope was that Dinah had not asked me to the flat simply out of kindness. I felt that I was being tested in some obscure way. What a fool I had been to suppose that meeting would follow meeting as a matter of course once the first successful approaches had been made. I remembered various things that she had said. ‘You mustn’t try to stop me going back.’ A line for some femme fatale in a French film. Her intenseness as she asked: ‘What do you want, Harry?’ This contrasted with the flippancy of her manner in the showrooms and her almost total silence at the dinner. The way she had invited me was extremely puzzling. Her deadly joking seriousness, and yet when it had come to the actual occasion she had done nothing but look on. Yet even if I was able to find some pattern in all this, the next move still had to be made. I had made the first approaches, then she had been responsible for our tea together and my invitation to the flat. I knew that it was my turn. I did not feel that I could presume to invite her out in a direct way. I should have to use Andrew again. By doing this she would have to make part of the decision. I rang up several times and got no answer. Perhaps this was fortunate. Instead I decided to revert to the safer medium of the letter. In this way I should say no more than I intended. I asked her whether she and Andrew would like to come out for the day the following Saturday. She wrote back almost at once to say that I would have to try another time since he was still away with friends. She had refused to let me use him as an excuse. Nevertheless I decided to go on with this ploy. I wrote asking when he would be back. She suggested a day that would be all right. I felt considerable relief, although initially I had been disappointed that she had not volunteered to come by herself since the child was away. All the same it would be an opportunity to show my ability with children and would also reduce some of the tension that we experienced when alone together. Once she had accepted I rang up Tim Gerson and asked him whether he would be at his house outside Robertsbridge that weekend. He said he would be. He seemed pleased that I should want to come to lunch that Saturday. Yes, it was all right to bring any number of people. He seemed curious when I wouldn’t tell him who was coming. The names, I explained, would mean nothing to him. This was true since he had never met Dinah. This time I rang her up and said that I had fixed up lunch with a friend in the country. She said uneffusively that that was ‘fine by her’.

  *

  I woke up ridiculously early on the day in question. I got up at once and tore open the curtains. Although it was still dark the sky looked clear. The weather had been remarkable during the past four days. My prayers for a continuation of this sunny spell were answered.

  *

  When I had them both safely in the car I asked Dinah if it was all right leaving Mark alone. She told me casually that he was spending the weekend at Mapham with a former therapist. I wondered whether Simpson shared his wife’s alleged incapacity for marital lying. The way that she had tossed out his weekend rendezvous as something of little significance made me suspect that she knew what his relationship with Jane had been. I looked at Dinah’s slender form next to me. She was wearing a dark blue suit with white edgings at the collar and sleeves. Her overcoat was white with brass buttons. As I looked, my indignation with Simpson grew. How could anybody be unfaithful to such a woman? That somebody with his disadvantages should be, seemed almost obscene. The depth of my disgust for the husband was exactly paralleled by the depth of my protective tenderness for the wife.

  Driving has always given me a sense of freedom and well-being that few other activities equal. I know that I cannot express this feeling exactly. There is much more to it than the freedom from other cares that a fixed purpose, namely getting from A to B, gives. The freedom is partly in getting out of the town. The denser housing gives way to straggling ribbon development, reservoirs, commons and then finally the country itself is there. It is almost like shaking away the houses like unwanted bits of gravel. The master of the film-show of my windscreen, I can relax as the road unravels, unspools under me. Trees, fields, woods, hills, all coalesce to form the vast amalgam of my contentment. I have always found the country beautiful in late winter. The colours are pale and gentle as though everything has been refined and washed. Only the shadows are emphatic or perhaps a touch of evergreen, a black barn or the ribbon of the road scrawled like a pencil line between the fields. The air is so clear and fresh. A church tower can be seen to glisten over a mile away. I am not attempting by this description to set myself up as a great lover of the country. I live in the town by choice. My pleasure in a rural scene is all the sharper for the infrequency of my seeing it. Yet without Dinah beside me I would have noticed little. Her very presence even makes my observation better. I can feel alive. How pleasant are the definite colours of her clothes against the pastel shades of ploughed fields and winter-tired grass.

  On the way I only occasionally indulged Andrew’s desire to see how fast the car would go. He had been quite unsatisfied when I had told him I knew already. Each time the needle touched more than 80, Dinah’s hands would clasp the dashboard. If this happened I immediately slowed down.

  *

  Lunch was reasonably successful. Tim and Cathy had far too much sense to ask Dinah any questions about her husband when I had introduced her as Mrs Simpson. Afterwards Andrew and John, Tim’s son, went out together. I suggested a walk. Tim and Cathy tactfully refused. Tim showed me a walk through some nearby woods on an Ordnance Survey map. Dinah borrowed a pair of Cathy’s wellingtons. I hoped that her consenting to come with me had more behind it than a dislike for the alternative of talking most of the afternoon to two comparative strangers.

  When we reached the end of the lawn, Dinah turned and looked at the creeper-covered house. I never thought of it as being sizeable inside. From here it looked large. The sun touched the stone with a pleasing warmth. She said:

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to live in a house like that?’ Her voice was teasing. The question implied: if you’ve got as much money as Tim, why do you lead a spartan life?

  ‘I think it would be a bit big for me.’

  We walked through a vegetable garden and then through a gate into a field. The woods were at the bottom. The night’s frost had thawed. Dinah’s boots glistened with moisture as she scuffed her feet through the grass. She continued:

  ‘I suppose it wouldn’t be much fun alone in the country.’ I tried to keep the glumness I felt out of my voice as I said:

  ‘I suppose it wouldn’t.’

  Suddenly she took my arm and looked up at me with a smile of apology.

  ‘You do take things seriously. All that about the miniature the other evening. You really ought to try and laugh.’ She paused. ‘You know Mark quite took to you.’

  This did make me laugh.

  ‘What’s he like to people he doesn’t quite take to?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have taken anything like the same trouble. You got him quite excited. He can be pretty taciturn.’

  I couldn’t make out whether she was being funny at my expense. Was I meant to be laughing good-naturedly now? I said:

  ‘I’m glad the evening was a success.’

  She let go of my arm, took a few strides out in front of me, then turned to face me. I stopped. We were in the middle of the field. She said more seriously:

  ‘I suppose I was grateful that you didn’t try to get him to like you. It would have been easier that way. Some people do it like that. The good friend of hubby. Holidays together, adjoining rooms. Tipping the porters the right su
m.’

  My heart was beating impossibly faster.

  ‘While I was sun-bathing you could have wheeled him on the promenade. He might be suspicious, but too frightened to try and find out.’

  ‘Am I as transparent as that?’ I murmured looking at the new-made pile of some mole.

  She started walking again.

  ‘It isn’t quite fair to you,’ she said quietly. ‘I suppose that you tried too hard. Everything has been so calculated.’

  ‘You asked me to meet your husband,’ I said, controlling my voice.

  ‘To see how hard you were prepared to try.’ She smiled.

  ‘And you were glad that I didn’t try to get him to like me.’ I felt helpless desperation and certainty that I was getting nowhere. The arcs of the circle never seemed likely to meet.

  ‘That’s right. But you did better. That would have been too obvious a ploy. You let him provoke you, were reserved, twisted his tail just enough to impress me that you were in control.’

  My anger broke.

  ‘Why the hell did you come out with me today?’

  ‘Because I don’t mind what you’ve done.’

  ‘Then why do you try and torture me?’

  ‘I suppose I ought to say: to see how much you can stand. In some obscure way I feel I owe it to myself. I think that’s why.’

  ‘And there’s nothing I can say to that,’ I said as we reached the edge of the woods. Yet she had spared me something. She could have told me that she didn’t believe adultery should be easy. I had purposely not dared to think of possible success with Dinah. Divorce? What would happen to the child? Would Simpson try to retain his wife by threatening to take possession of Andrew if they parted? The things she had said about mutual holidays and adjoining rooms made it look as though an unofficial liaison would not suit her. I myself doubted whether I could stand it. Even as I thought about these things, they still seemed events almost too remote to contemplate safely.

  ‘You’re looking very serious,’ she said.