May We Borrow Your Husband? (3 page)

How quickly those two tunnelled. I don't think it was more than four mornings after the arrival that, when I came down to breakfast, I found they had moved their table next to the girl's and were entertaining her in her husband's absence. They did it very well; it was the first time I had seen her relaxed and happy – and she was happy because she was talking about Peter. Peter was agent for his father, somewhere in Hampshire – there were three thousand acres to manage. Yes, he was fond of riding and so was she. It all tumbled out – the kind of life she dreamed of having when she returned home. Stephen just dropped in a word now and then, of a rather old-fashioned courteous interest, to keep her going. Apparently he had once decorated some hall in their neighbourhood and knew the names of some people Peter knew – Winstanley, I think – and that gave her immense confidence.

‘He's one of Peter's best friends,' she said, and the two flickered their eyes at each other like lizards' tongues.

‘Come and join us, William,' Stephen said, but only when he had noticed that I was within earshot. ‘You know Mrs Travis?'

How could I refuse to sit at their table? And yet in doing so I seemed to become an ally.

‘Not
the
William Harris?' the girl asked. It was a phrase which I hated, and yet she transformed even that, with her air of innocence. For she had a capacity to make everything new: Antibes became a discovery and we were the first foreigners to have made it. When she said, ‘Of course, I'm afraid I haven't actually
read
any of your books,' I heard the over-familiar remark for the first time; it even seemed to me a proof of her honesty – I nearly wrote her virginal honesty. ‘You must know an awful lot about people,' she said, and again I read into the banality of the remark an appeal – for help against whom, those two or the husband who at that moment appeared on the terrace? He had the same nervous air as she, even the same shadows under the lids, so that they might have been taken by a stranger, as I wrote before, for brother and sister. He hesitated a moment when he saw all of us there and she called across to him, ‘Come and meet these nice people, darling.' He didn't look any too pleased, but he sat glumly down and asked whether the coffee was still hot.

‘I'll order some more, darling. They know the Winstanleys, and this is
the
William Harris.'

He looked at me blankly; I think he was wondering if I had anything to do with tweeds.

‘I hear you like horses,' Stephen said, ‘and I was wondering whether you and your wife would come to lunch with us at Cagnes on Saturday. That's tomorrow, isn't it? There's a very good racecourse at Cagnes . . .'

‘I don't know,' he said dubiously, looking to his wife for a clue.

‘But, darling, of course we must go. You'd love it.'

His face cleared instantly. I really believe he had been troubled by a social scruple: the question whether one accepts invitations on a honeymoon. ‘It's very good of you,' he said, ‘Mr . . .'

‘Let's start as we mean to go on. I'm Stephen and this is Tony.'

‘I'm Peter.' He added a trifle gloomily, ‘And this is Poopy.'

‘Tony, you take Poopy in the Sprite, and Peter and I will go by
autobus
.' (I had the impression, and I think Tony had too, that Stephen had gained a point.)

‘You'll come too, Mr Harris?' the girl asked, using my surname as though she wished to emphasize the difference between me and them.

‘I'm afraid I can't. I'm working against time.'

I watched them that evening from my balcony as they returned from Cagnes and, hearing the way they all laughed together, I thought, ‘The enemy are within the citadel: it's only a question of time.' A lot of time, because they proceeded very carefully, those two. There was no question of a quick grab which I suspect had caused the contusion in Corsica.

4

It became a regular habit with the two of them to entertain the girl during her solitary breakfast before her husband arrived. I never sat at their table again, but scraps of the conversation would come over to me, and it seemed to me that she was never quite so cheerful again. Even the sense of novelty had gone. I heard her say once, ‘There's so little to do here,' and it struck me as an odd observation for a honeymooner to make.

Then one evening I found her in tears outside the Musée Grimaldi. I had been fetching my papers, and, as my habit was, I made a round by the Place Nationale with the pillar erected in 1819 to celebrate – a remarkable paradox – the loyalty of Antibes to the monarchy and her resistance to
les Troupes Etrangères
, who were seeking to re-establish the monarchy. Then, according to rule, I went on by the market and the old port and Lou-Lou's restaurant up the ramp towards the cathedral and the Musée, and there in the grey evening light, before the street-lamps came on, I found her crying under the cliff of the château.

I noticed too late what she was at or I wouldn't have said, ‘Good evening, Mrs Travis.' She jumped a little as she turned and dropped her handkerchief, and when I picked it up I found it soaked with tears – it was like holding a small drowned animal in my hand. I said, ‘I'm sorry,' meaning that I was sorry to have startled her, but she took it in quite another sense. She said, ‘Oh, I'm being silly, that's all. It's just a mood. Everybody has moods, don't they?'

‘Where's Peter?'

‘He's in the museum with Stephen and Tony looking at the Picassos. I don't understand them a bit.'

‘That's nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people don't.'

‘But Peter doesn't understand them either. I know he doesn't. He's just pretending to be interested.'

‘Oh well . . .'

‘And it's not that either. I pretended for a time too, to please Stephen. But he's pretending just to get away from me.'

‘You are imagining things.'

Punctually at five o'clock the
phare
lit up, but it was still too light to see the beam.

I said, ‘The museum will be closing now.'

‘Walk back with me to the hotel.'

‘Wouldn't you like to wait for Peter?'

‘I don't smell, do I?' she asked miserably.

‘Well, there's a trace of Arpège. I've always liked Arpège.'

‘How terribly experienced you sound.'

‘Not really. It's just that my first wife used to buy Arpège.'

We began walking back, and the mistral bit our ears and gave her an excuse when the time came for the reddened eyes.

She said, ‘I think Antibes so sad and grey.'

‘I thought you enjoyed it here.'

‘Oh, for a day or two.'

‘Why not go home?'

‘It would look odd, wouldn't it, returning early from a honeymoon?'

‘Or go on to Rome – or somewhere. You can get a plane to most places from Nice.'

‘It wouldn't make any difference,' she said. ‘It's not the place that's wrong, it's me.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘He's not happy with me. It's as simple as that.'

She stopped opposite one of the little rock houses by the ramparts. Washing hung down over the street below and there was a cold-looking canary in a cage.

‘You said yourself . . . a mood . . .'

‘It's not his fault,' she said. ‘It's me. I expect it seems very stupid to you, but I never slept with anyone before I married.' She gulped miserably at the canary.

‘And Peter?'

‘He's terribly sensitive,' she said, and added quickly, ‘That's a good quality. I wouldn't have fallen in love with him if he hadn't been.'

‘If I were you, I'd take him home – as quickly as possible.' I couldn't help the words sounding sinister, but she hardly heard them. She was listening to the voices that came nearer down the ramparts – to Stephen's gay laugh. ‘They're very sweet,' she said. ‘I'm glad he's found friends.'

How could I say that they were seducing Peter before her eyes? And in any case wasn't her mistake already irretrievable? Those were two of the questions which haunted the hours, dreary for a solitary man, of the middle afternoon when work is finished and the exhilaration of the wine at lunch, and the time for the first drink has not yet come and the winter heating is at its feeblest. Had she no idea of the nature of the young man she had married? Had he taken her on as a blind or as a last desperate throw for normality? I couldn't bring myself to believe that. There was a sort of innocence about the boy which seemed to justify her love, and I preferred to think that he was not yet fully formed, that he had married honestly and it was only now that he found himself on the brink of a different experience. And yet if that were the case the comedy was all the crueller. Would everything have gone normally well if some conjunction of the planets had not crossed their honeymoon with that hungry pair of hunters?

I longed to speak out, and in the end I did speak, but not, so it happened, to her. I was going to my room and the door of one of theirs was open and I heard again Stephen's laugh – a kind of laugh which is sometimes with unintentional irony called infectious; it maddened me. I knocked and went in. Tony was stretched on a double bed and Stephen was ‘doing' his hair, holding a brush in each hand and meticulously arranging the grey waves on either side. The dressing-table had as many pots on it as a woman's.

‘You really mean he told you that?' Tony was saying. ‘Why, how are you, William? Come in. Our young friend has been confiding in Stephen. Such really fascinating things.'

‘Which of your young friends?' I asked.

‘Why, Peter, of course. Who else? The secrets of married life.'

‘I thought it might have been your sailor.'

‘Naughty!' Tony said. ‘But
touché
too, of course.'

‘I wish you'd leave Peter alone.'

‘I don't think he'd like that,' Stephen said. ‘You can see that he hasn't quite the right tastes for this sort of honeymoon.'

‘Now you happen to like women, William,' Tony said. ‘Why not go after the girl? It's a grand opportunity. She's not getting what I believe is vulgarly called her greens.' Of the two he was easily the more brutal. I wanted to hit him, but this is not the century for that kind of romantic gesture, and anyway he was stretched out flat upon the bed. I said feebly enough – I ought to have known better than to have entered into a debate with those two – ‘She happens to be in love with him.'

‘I think Tony is right and she would find more satisfaction with you, William dear,' Stephen said, giving a last flick to the hair over his right ear – the contusion was quite gone now. ‘From what Peter has said to me, I think you'd be doing a favour to both of them.'

‘Tell him what Peter said, Stephen.'

‘He said that from the very first there was a kind of hungry femininity about her which he found frightening and repulsive. Poor boy – he was really trapped into this business of marriage. His father wanted heirs – he breeds horses too, and then her mother – there's quite a lot of lucre with that lot. I don't think he had any idea of – of the Shape of Things to Come.' Stephen shuddered into the glass and then regarded himself with satisfaction.

Even today I have to believe for my own peace of mind that the young man had not really said those monstrous things. I believe, and hope, that the words were put into his mouth by that cunning dramatizer, but there is little comfort in the thought, for Stephen's inventions were always true to character. He even saw through my apparent indifference to the girl and realized that Tony and he had gone too far; it would suit their purpose, if I were driven to the wrong kind of action, or if, by their crudities, I lost my interest in Poopy.

‘Of course,' Stephen said, ‘I'm exaggerating. Undoubtedly he felt a bit amorous before it came to the point. His father would describe her, I suppose, as a fine filly.'

‘What do you plan to do with him?' I asked. ‘Do you toss up, or does one of you take the head and the other the tail?'

Tony laughed. ‘Good old William. What a clinical mind you have.'

‘And suppose,' I said, ‘I went to her and recounted this nice conversation?'

‘My dear, she wouldn't even understand. She's incredibly innocent.'

‘Isn't he?'

‘I doubt it – knowing our friend Colin Winstanley. But it's still a moot point. He hasn't given himself away yet.'

‘We are planning to put it to the test one day soon,' Stephen said.

‘A drive in the country,' Tony said. ‘The strain's telling on him, you can see that. He's even afraid to take a siesta for fear of unwanted attentions.'

‘Haven't you
any
mercy?' It was an absurd old-fashioned word to use to those two sophisticates. I felt more than ever square. ‘Doesn't it occur to you that you may ruin her life – for the sake of your little game?'

‘We can depend on you, William,' Tony said, ‘to give her creature comforts.'

Stephen said, ‘It's no game. You should realize we are saving
him.
Think of the life that he would lead – with all those soft contours lapping him around.' He added, ‘Women always remind me of a damp salad – you know, those faded bits of greenery positively swimming . . .'

‘Every man to his taste,' Tony said. ‘But Peter's not cut out for that sort of life. He's very sensitive,' he said, using the girl's own words. There wasn't any more I could think of to say.

5

You will notice that I play a very unheroic part in this comedy. I could have gone direct, I suppose, to the girl and given her a little lecture on the facts of life, beginning gently with the régime of an English public school – he had worn a scarf of old-boy colours, until Tony had said to him one day at breakfast that he thought the puce stripe was an error of judgement. Or perhaps I could have protested to the boy himself, but, if Stephen had spoken the truth and he was under a severe nervous strain, my intervention would hardly have helped to ease it. There was no move I could make. I had just to sit there and watch while they made the moves carefully and adroitly towards the climax.