The Rules of Engagement (6 page)

For these different reasons I was extremely
receptive to Betsy's voice on the
telephone the following morning. She was in
London to sell the house, she told me, and she
was not alone. That was how she always put it:
“
I
am not alone.
”
Daniel was with her, and she would
love me to meet him. Of course, I said: why
not bring him round to tea this afternoon? By the way, what
is his name? I've only heard you call him
Daniel. Saint-Jorre, she said. Daniel
de Saint-Jorre. We'll see you this afternoon.
I'm so looking forward to it.

Great physical beauty is extremely
rare. In those days, the days of which I speak, men
were divided into the young and the no longer young. Now the
middle-aged are spurred on to greater acts of
youthfulness, as if the depredations of age could for that
reason have no purchase on them. But
Saint-Jorre was truly young, in a fashion that
called into question any other category. And he was
beautiful, with a lithe mythical beauty that brought
to mind certain classical statues seen in
reproduction, as if only now was I face
to face with the real thing. If he lacked true
classical qualities it was because he was never in
repose. After greeting me, rather perfunctorily,
I thought, he sat down for only a few minutes
before getting to his feet again and roaming round the
room while Betsy explained their plans, or
perhaps her plans: she was selling the house, they were
staying temporarily in the rue Cler until they
were able to find something big enough for the comrades to gather every
evening in pursuit of their nebulous ideals. I
tried to get her to elucidate these ideals, and she
may have done so, but I was too distracted to understand
them, or perhaps she no longer understood them herself.

Saint-Jorre was restlessly on his feet, and
humming under his breath.
“
Do sit down,
”
I
said, exasperated. He ignored me.
“
You have
all this space?
”
he asked incredulously.
“
For the two of you?
”
I saw nothing wrong with this.
Of course he was a communist, or something like it.
I pointed this out to him. A Marxist, he
corrected me. And what does that entail, I
asked him.
“
Structures,
”
he replied.
“
New structures. Long overdue. Don't
you agree?
”
His tone was obdurate, as was his
expression. I realized that I was not worth
bothering about, not even worth converting. He
obviously considered himself a leader of a sort, as
his looks proclaimed him to be. It was clear
to me that he had no thought of earning a living in a
humdrum way, as my husband did, as everyone
else did. He was the movement, the
Zeitgeist, powered by the intoxication of recent
events. This was in the 1970's, when those events were
receding into the background. No doubt the money
Betsy received from the sale of her house would
solve immediate problems of subsistence. And no
doubt she would find other ways of securing his
wellbeing if and when that money ran out. As I was
beginning to perceive, one pays a high price for a
man as prestigious as he so clearly was.

Nevertheless I found him repellent. His
activity, his humming deprived him of ordinary
accessibility and removed any possibility of
normal exchange of the kind practised in the
circles in which I moved. I doubted, in fact,
that he himself was normal. It seemed to me that for
all his resplendent appearance he would not have much
use for normal love or sex, for his energies
appeared to be concentrated on achieving some
impossible Utopian goal which might
conceivably benefit the many, or at least those like
himself, rather than any one particular person. And if
he loved Betsy, which I had no reason
to doubt, it would be as an adjunct to his wishes,
ready to throw in her lot with him, less for love
than for reasons of solidarity, even political
solidarity. Much as I was able to admire him
—
but
in the abstract, almost as a work of art
—
and to understand
what that lithe frame, those effortless movements
might inspire in a woman, I did not think that
he would respond in the same way to that woman's
own attractions, and that his volatility would
militate against the sort of exclusive
closeness that would be a woman's own wish. I
even had time to congratulate myself on my own
situation, which, in a way, I had contrived: my
own will had not been subverted by a dangerous
attachment of the kind to which Betsy had so willingly
succumbed. We had both been born too soon
for the freedoms currently claimed by women; we
had assumed, perhaps wrongly, that safety lay in
stability, that love and desire could have only one
true end: marriage, and no doubt children. That this
certainty was being attacked from all sides had not
yet taken us over, changing us from what we had
been and were still destined to be. We were
innocent, like girls at school, waiting
patiently for fulfilment, which would come to us in the
guise of another person, and not a series of more
or less random persons who might or might not
have our wellbeing at heart.

My own marriage, with its tediums, and the
solitude it inevitably brought in its wake,
had given me one inestimable gift: the assurance
of affection. I knew that Digby would never be
unfaithful, would never torment me. In a sense
I had the upper hand, though I had never desired
this. I had wanted what my mother had assured me
was priceless: fidelity. I reminded myself of this
from time to time, when I was particularly bored; there
would be no unpleasant revelations. Yet I
knew that women of my age were in revolt against their
mothers, that it was their mothers, and not men, who were the
enemy. I was even grateful that my mother was, so
to speak, off the map, for her sceptical
discontented attitude might have found more faults
in my situation than I was willing to do. I had
vivid memories of my unresolved life in
Paris and the time I had to fill there, knowing that this was
not the destiny of a young person, but honing my
skills to endure the lack of success that I already
knew was to be my lot. I had achieved the kind
of stasis that my situation demanded, and if I ever
again wandered haplessly through uninhabited afternoons I
should do so by my own decree, and
with
the assurance that I
could at any time call upon the sort of
companionship that would assure me dignity if
nothing else.

Betsy was watching her lover with anxious
eyes, as if she were his mother or his nurse. She was
willing him to give a good account of himself, for to her
I still represented a settled way of life,
even a place in society that had been denied
her. She could see that the afternoon was not going well:
how could she not? Daniel made no effort to play
his part, indeed made it quite clear that his part lay
elsewhere, on those barricades that existed in his own
mind and in the minds of others similarly convinced.
I was all too clearly on the wrong side of the
barricades, a bourgeoise, a member of a
despised and obsolete class. He sat
flung back in his chair, his teacup
negligently clasped between his thumb and forefinger.
I offered him a cigarette, from the silver box that
I had been used to seeing at my mother's elbow;
he refused the cigarette, but examined the
box, as if appraising it for its monetary
value. He was so extremely unaccommodating
that I could only register this as a fact of
nature, or of upbringing; his origins were a
mystery to me, as was his formation. There seemed to be
no way in which I could bring him into the conversation, or
such conversation as Betsy and I were able to sustain.

“
Would you like some more tea?
”
I asked him.

“
Tea?
”
he said, surprised.
“
No, no
tea.
”
He stood up, ready to leave.

“
Yes,
”
said Betsy.
“
It's time we were
making a move. You must come and see us in
Paris.
”
Her tone was worldly, as if this invitation
might hold some reality. We both knew that we
might not see each other again.

She took his arm, and at last he broke into a
smile. The smile transformed him, so that I could
understand the bond between them. They found each other's
hands, and, so joined, proceeded towards the door which
I held open for them. Betsy turned to me with a
smile that held a certain fatigue. I thought
she must have grown thinner; either that or her eyes were
wide, too wide, as if she were contemplating a
great difficulty. She was faultlessly dressed;
her hair was immaculate. She was becoming
transformed into one of those Parisian women whose
look of exigence, of stress, merely adds to their
allure, and announces their readiness to deal with
any possible criticism, if anyone were rash enough
to offer it. Any difference of opinion would be dealt
with combatively; I had witnessed this too many times
to expect anything different. And I could see that
Betsy would soon acquire this manner, if and
when she were called upon to defend her lover, in whom
hostile witnesses, such as myself, could see only
idleness, wilfulness, a sort of innocent
savagery, like that of an infant whose own wishes
must be imposed on his surroundings. Yet as he
turned to her he gave her a look of love to which
she so naturally responded that I was left in no
doubt that this was a genuine love affair, even if
in my eyes it had little to recommend it beyond the
fact that it seemed to have come about naturally, and that it
therefore had nature on its side.

As I cleared away the cups and saucers (and
I seemed always to be clearing things away in what
was after all my own home) I wondered whether I
should ever be able to attach myself to a man who
promised little more than youth and beauty, and decided
that I was too staid in temperament ever
to conceive of such an arrangement. Yet the afternoon had
saddened me: it is a terrible thing to lose a friend,
and it was clear that I had lost Betsy, or rather that
we had lost each other. I told myself that I could
bear this, as I had learned to bear other absences in
my life, passion, joy, rapture, escape from
the destiny I had sought and had congratulated myself
on attaining. I wandered into the bedroom and
contemplated it for a moment. Then I shook my
head, as if to dismiss unseemly thoughts, thoughts which
visited me when I was low-spirited. I decided
to write Betsy a note, suggesting that we
meet, just the two of us. I hoped that this might
restore something of our previous friendship. If such
a meeting took place I should not mention
Daniel. I did not want to question her or to learn
any more about him. To be an accessory to another
woman's love affair is an invidious
position, and I had no intention of becoming such an
accessory, however much Betsy might wish me
to become one.