May We Borrow Your Husband? (4 page)

It came three days later at breakfast when, as usual, she was sitting alone with them, while her husband was upstairs with his lotions. They had never been more charming or more entertaining. As I arrived at my table they were giving her a really funny description of a house in Kensington that they had decorated for a dowager duchess who was passionately interested in the Napoleonic wars. There was an ashtray, I remember, made out of a horse's hoof, guaranteed – so the dealer said – by Apsley House to have belonged to a grey ridden by Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo; there was an umbrella stand made out of a shell-case found on the field of Austerlitz; a fire-escape made of a scaling ladder from Badajoz. She had lost half that sense of strain listening to them. She had forgotten her rolls and coffee; Stephen had her complete attention. I wanted to say to her, ‘You little owl.' I wouldn't have been insulting her – she
had
got rather large eyes.

And then Stephen produced the master-plan. I could tell it was coming by the way his hands stiffened on his coffee-cup, by the way Tony lowered his eyes and appeared to be praying over his
croissant
. ‘We were wondering, Poopy – may we borrow your husband?' I have never heard words spoken with more elaborate casualness.

She laughed. She hadn't noticed a thing. ‘Borrow my husband?'

‘There's a little village in the mountains behind Monte Carlo – Peille it's called – and I've heard rumours of a devastatingly lovely old bureau there – not for sale, of course, but Tony and I, we have our winning ways.'

‘I've noticed that,' she said, ‘myself.'

Stephen for an instant was disconcerted, but she meant nothing by it, except perhaps a compliment.

‘We were thinking of having lunch at Peille and passing the whole day on the road so as to take a look at the scenery. The only trouble is there's no room in the Sprite for more than three, but Peter was saying the other day that you wanted some time to have a hair-do, so we thought . . .'

I had the impression that he was talking far too much to be convincing, but there wasn't any need for him to worry: she saw nothing at all. ‘I think it's a marvellous idea,' she said. ‘You know, he needs a little holiday from me. He's had hardly a moment to himself since I came up the aisle.' She was magnificently sensible, and perhaps even relieved. Poor girl. She needed a little holiday, too.

‘It's going to be excruciatingly uncomfortable. He'll have to sit on Tony's knee.'

‘I don't suppose he'll mind that.'

‘And, of course, we can't guarantee the quality of food en route.'

For the first time I saw Stephen as a stupid man. Was there a shade of hope in that?

In the long run, of the two, notwithstanding his brutality, Tony had the better brain. Before Stephen had time to speak once more, Tony raised his eyes from the
croissant
and said decisively, ‘That's fine. All's settled, and we'll deliver him back in one piece by dinner-time.'

He looked challengingly across at me. ‘Of course, we hate to leave you alone for lunch, but I am sure William will look after you.'

‘William?' she asked, and I hated the way she looked at me as if I didn't exist. ‘Oh, you mean Mr Harris?'

I invited her to have lunch with me at Lou-Lou's in the old port – I couldn't very well do anything else – and at that moment the laggard Peter came out on to the terrace. She said quickly, ‘I don't want to interrupt your work . . .'

‘I don't believe in starvation,' I said. ‘It has to be interrupted for meals.'

Peter had cut himself again shaving and had a large blob of cottonwool stuck on his chin: it reminded me of Stephen's contusion. I had the impression, while he stood there waiting for someone to say something to him, that he knew all about the conversation; it had been carefully rehearsed by all three, the parts allotted, the unconcerned manner practised well beforehand, even the bit about the food. . . . Now somebody had missed a cue, so I spoke.

‘I've asked your wife to lunch at Lou-Lou's,' I said. ‘I hope you don't mind.'

I would have been amused by the expression of quick relief on all three faces if I had found it possible to be amused by anything at all in the situation.

6

‘And you didn't marry again after she left?'

‘By that time I was getting too old to marry.'

‘Picasso does it.'

‘Oh, I'm not quite as old as Picasso.'

The silly conversation went on against a background of fishing-nets draped over a wallpaper with a design of wine-bottles – interior decoration again. Sometimes I longed for a room which had simply grown that way like the lines on a human face. The fish soup steamed away between us, smelling of garlic. We were the only guests there. Perhaps it was the solitude, perhaps it was the directness of her question, perhaps it was only the effect of the
rosé
, but quite suddenly I had the comforting sense that we were intimate friends. ‘There's always work,' I said, ‘and wine and a good cheese.'

‘I couldn't be that philosophical if I lost Peter.'

‘That's not likely to happen, is it?'

‘I think I'd die,' she said, ‘like someone in Christina Rossetti.'

‘I thought nobody of your generation read her.'

If I had been twenty years older, perhaps, I could have explained that nothing is quite as bad as that, that at the end of what is called ‘the sexual life' the only love which has lasted is the love that has accepted everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

She wouldn't have believed me. She said, ‘I used to weep like anything at that poem about “Passing Away”. Do you write sad things?'

‘The biography I am writing now is sad enough. Two people tied together by love and yet one of them incapable of fidelity. The man dead of old age, burnt-out, at less than forty, and a fashionable preacher lurking by the bedside to snatch his soul. No privacy even for a dying man: the bishop wrote a book about it.'

An Englishman who kept a chandlers' shop in the old port was talking at the bar, and two old women who were part of the family knitted at the end of the room. A dog trotted in and looked at us and went away again with its tail curled.

‘How long ago did all that happen?'

‘Nearly three hundred years.'

‘It sounded quite contemporary. Only now it would be the man from the
Mirror
and not a bishop.'

‘That's why I wanted to write it. I'm not really interested in the past. I don't like costume-pieces.'

Winning someone's confidence is rather like the way some men set about seducing a woman; they circle a long way from their true purpose, they try to interest and amuse until finally the moment comes to strike. It came, so I wrongly thought, when I was adding up the bill. She said, ‘I wonder where Peter is at this moment,' and I was quick to reply, ‘What's going wrong between the two of you?'

She said, ‘Let's go.'

‘I've got to wait for my change.'

It was always easier to get served at Lou-Lou's than to pay the bill. At that moment everyone always had a habit of disappearing: the old woman (her knitting abandoned on the table), the aunt who helped to serve, Lou-Lou herself, her husband in his blue sweater. If the dog hadn't gone already he would have left at that moment.

I said, ‘You forget – you told me that he wasn't happy.'

‘Please, please find someone and let's go.'

So I disinterred Lou-Lou's aunt from the kitchen and paid. When we left, everyone seemed to be back again, even the dog.

Outside I asked her whether she wanted to return to the hotel.

‘Not just yet – but I'm keeping you from your work.'

‘I never work after drinking. That's why I like to start early. It brings the first drink nearer.'

She said that she had seen nothing of Antibes but the ramparts and the beach and the lighthouse, so I walked her around the small narrow backstreets where the washing hung out of the windows as in Naples and there were glimpses of small rooms overflowing with children and grandchildren; stone scrolls were carved over the ancient doorways of what had once been noblemen's houses; the pavements were blocked by barrels of wine and the streets by children playing at ball. In a low room on a ground floor a man sat painting the horrible ceramics which would later go to Vallauris to be sold to tourists in Picasso's old stamping-ground – spotted pink frogs and mauve fish and pigs with slits for coins.

She said, ‘Let's go back to the sea.' So we returned to a patch of hot sun on the bastion, and again I was tempted to tell her what I feared, but the thought that she might watch me with the blankness of ignorance deterred me. She sat on the wall and her long legs in the tight black trousers dangled down like Christmas stockings. She said, ‘I'm not sorry that I married Peter,' and I was reminded of a song Edith Piaf sings,
‘Je ne regrette rien'
. It is typical of such a phrase that it is always sung or spoken with defiance.

I could only say again, ‘You ought to take him home,' but I wondered what would have happened if I had said, ‘You are married to a man who only likes men and he's off now picnicking with his boy friends. I'm thirty years older than you, but at least I have always preferred women and I've fallen in love with you and we could still have a few good years together before the time comes when you want to leave me for a younger man.' All I said was, ‘He probably misses the country – and the riding.'

‘I wish you were right, but it's really worse than that.'

Had she, after all, realized the nature of her problem? I waited for her to explain her meaning. It was a little like a novel which hesitates on the verge between comedy and tragedy. If she recognized the situation it would be a tragedy; if she were ignorant it was a comedy, even a farce – a situation between an immature girl too innocent to understand and a man too old to have the courage to explain. I suppose I have a taste for tragedy. I hoped for that.

She said, ‘We didn't really know each other much before we came here. You know, weekend parties and the odd theatre – and riding, of course.'

I wasn't sure where her remarks tended. I said, ‘These occasions are nearly always a strain. You are picked out of ordinary life and dumped together after an elaborate ceremony – almost like two animals shut in a cage who haven't seen each other before.'

‘And now he sees me he doesn't like me.'

‘You are exaggerating.'

‘No.' She added, with anxiety, ‘I won't shock you, will I, if I tell you things? There's nobody else I can talk to.'

‘After fifty years I'm guaranteed shockproof.'

‘We haven't made love – properly, once, since we came here.'

‘What do you mean – properly?'

‘He starts, but he doesn't finish; nothing happens.'

I said uncomfortably, ‘Rochester wrote about that. A poem called “The Imperfect Enjoyment”.' I don't know why I gave her this shady piece of literary information; perhaps, like a psychoanalyst, I wanted her not to feel alone with her problem. ‘It can happen to anybody.'

‘But it's not his fault,' she said. ‘It's mine. I know it is. He just doesn't like my body.'

‘Surely it's a bit late to discover that.'

‘He'd never seen me naked till I came here,' she said with the candour of a girl to her doctor – that was all I meant to her, I felt sure.

‘There are nearly always first-night nerves. And then if a man worries (you must realize how much it hurts his pride) he can get stuck in the situation for days – weeks even.' I began to tell her about a mistress I once had – we stayed together a very long time and yet for two weeks at the beginning I could do nothing at all. ‘I was too anxious to succeed.'

‘That's different. You didn't hate the sight of her.'

‘You are making such a lot of so little.'

‘That's what he tries to do,' she said with sudden schoolgirl coarseness and giggled miserably.

‘We went away for a week and changed the scene, and everything after that was all right. For ten days it had been a flop, and for ten years afterwards we were happy. Very happy. But worry can get established in a room, in the colour of the curtains – it can hang itself up on coat-hangers; you find it smoking away in the ashtray marked Pernod, and when you look at the bed it pokes its head out from underneath like the toes of a pair of shoes.' Again I repeated the only charm I could think of. ‘Take him home.'

‘It wouldn't make any difference. He's disappointed, that's all it is.' She looked down at her long black legs; I followed the course of her eyes because I was finding now that I really wanted her and she said with sincere conviction, ‘I'm just not pretty enough when I'm undressed.'

‘You are talking real nonsense. You don't know what nonsense you are talking.'

‘Oh no, I'm not. You see – it started all right, but then he touched me' – she put her hands on her breasts – ‘and it all went wrong. I always knew they weren't much good. At school we used to have dormitory inspection – it was awful. Everybody could grow them big except me. I'm no Jayne Mansfield, I can tell you.' She gave again that mirthless giggle. ‘I remember one of the girls told me to sleep with a pillow on top – they said they'd struggle for release and what they needed was exercise. But of course it didn't work. I doubt if the idea was very scientific.' She added, ‘I remember it was awfully hot at night like that.'