The Rules of Engagement (7 page)

I ran a bath, washed my hair, put the
disruptive afternoon out of my mind. We were to dine with the
Fairlies, in their rather grand house overlooking the
river. This was the sort of entertainment I was used
to, and it was very different from the sort of love in a
garret which I imagined reserved for the happy few.
The evening would be ponderous, and I might question my
own tolerance of such ceremonies. And so it
proved. I studied Constance Fairlie with some
perplexity, as if newly open to her barely
concealed malice. Edmund Fairlie saw my
glance, and I turned to meet his eyes with a
deprecating smile, as if to excuse myself.
Digby's eyes were watering slightly in the effort
to keep awake. Then it was time to leave. Edmund
Fairlie helped me into my coat, then stood
watching me as I held the collar
protectively to my face. That instant proved
to me that it was not the first, almost unemotional, sighting
of a potential lover that was significant, but the
second, the moment not of recognition but of
confirmation, so that every other consideration is
irrelevant, as if it might have mattered at some
point in the past but no longer had any currency
in the charged wordless exchange that seals the matter for
ever, regardless of the dangers thus incurred and
whatever the cost.

I descended into clandestinity with a gratitude,
a relief, and an open-heartedness of which I had not
previously thought myself capable. It was another
paradigm shift, a change from one category
to another, from the obedience I had once observed
to something like a lawlessness which I found altogether more
natural. I had a reason for getting up in the
morning other than to make coffee, to pour orange
juice, and to grill the bacon on which Digby
insisted and which I had always found repulsive.

All day I performed domestic tasks
uncomplainingly, knowing that the days were a mere
preparation for the evenings, when I should see my
lover. I told Digby that I had found an
evening class, a fact which he found mildly
annoying but which he did not seek to check. Had he
done so he would have discovered that these classes met
at seven o'clock and finished at nine, and that they had
moreover come to an end at the beginning of the summer,
when the city began to empty and the students to disperse.
From time to time I even regretted these notional
classes, only to delight when the stately
periods of the Victorian novel, which I still
read, gave way to the crudest of language in the
course of those evenings to which I now devoted my
life.

I covered my tracks by leaving Digby's
meal in the oven, having instructed him by telephone
how to heat it up, and by assuring him that a friend would
give me a lift home after the class. At first
he demurred at this, but my expression was so
innocent and so convincing that he believed me. My
one cause for concern was that I might see the car,
either following me or coming to meet me, but as I was
in a part of the neighbourhood quite removed from the
school in which the evening classes were held I thought
I was safe. And, surprisingly, I was: I
was protected by a new-found gambler's insouciance
which was in itself a comment on the laborious good
behaviour which I had exchanged for a fulfilment that
I knew to be my birthright.

It hardly disturbed me that I was unfaithful
to my husband or that Edmund was unfaithful to his
wife. With eyes and senses newly sharpened I more
or less knew that he made a habit of this, that
he thought such adventures a legitimate part of a
man's life. Why else did he keep a
rented flat for this particular purpose? I was
never so deluded as to imagine that I was the
first woman to visit this flat or even that I should
be the last. It was enough to know that I had rights of
admission, and that for one or two evenings a week,
sometimes fewer, and never at the weekends, I should
meet him there, should linger after he had gone home,
and luxuriate in the knowledge that our intimacy was a
secret enshrined in this place, which, as far as I
knew, had not yet been discovered by any third or
fourth party. The day he gave me a key to the
flat was the happiest of my life.

I knew very little about him. I knew that he was a
welcome ten years younger than my husband. I
knew that he had three children, twin girls,
Julia and Isabella, and a boy, David, and
that he was devoted to them. When he spoke of them,
which was frequently, I felt a mild unease,
a wistfulness which I tried to ignore. I was
stoical enough to look the situation in the face, and at
no point was I tactless enough to ask him if he
loved me. His attitude was simple: his
sexual confidence demanded that he employ that
confidence in the most natural way. He was a
man of pleasure, and I was a means of ensuring that
pleasure. Nor did he give much time
to rationalizing his behaviour, or indeed my own.
“
Incredible,
”
was all he said.
“
One never
suspects ... That, of course, is part of the
fun.
”
“
Fun
”
was the only false note; it
was the wrong word to describe what I was feeling.
Maybe it did not adequately describe what
he himself was feeling, but we did not talk about that.
Our attachment was at its best when it was wordless.
Fortunately, given the limited time at our
disposal, it usually was.

I loved him, while never completely
suppressing the knowledge that love was something quite different,
that it was steadiness, constancy, familiarity, even
availability. But I dismissed this knowledge, as I had
to. I had only to watch the expression on his
healthy face, see his eyes widen
appreciatively, to acknowledge that what I had,
or rather what I was given, was enough. I no longer
thought in terms of lifelong allegiance. I thought
of his strength and what I now perceived as his beauty.
He was tall and fair, with a slightly heavy
build, the sort of man one sees jogging in the
early morning and to whom one pays little attention.
Now I understood the message of such exercise:
it was an element of courtship, a desire
to remain attractive and fit for the main
business of life. Edmund put in an hour of
such punishing exercise before beginning his normal
working day. This was one of the few facts I knew
about his life. His wife I managed to forget for
most of the time. Fortunately the dinner parties were in
abeyance: Constance and the children were in the habit of
spending the school holidays at their house in
Hampshire, where Edmund joined them at
weekends. Digby had more or less given up
trying to tempt me with holidays abroad. I
think he thought my new-found contentment an
appreciation of our life as it was. In any
event he was tired, more tired than he had been
at the outset of our life together, and may have been
slightly relieved not to have to make further efforts
to entertain me. To his tiredness I owed the
relative safety of my evenings. Perhaps he was
grateful for my absence, though I could never quite
rid myself of the need to choose unfamiliar
streets, to take unnecessary diversions, so that I was
in no danger of being sighted from the car, or,
worse, being subject to that stealthy and
unacknowledged surveillance which had so puzzled and
alarmed me and which now, thankfully, seemed to be
at an end.

The days took on a charmed quality. I would
leave Melton Court when the sun was at its
height, just after three. It seemed appropriate
that these matters were taking place in the summer, in
those long light days when nature adds its energy
to one's own feeling of wellbeing. Edmund's
flat was in a small street bounded on one side
by a public garden, where I would spend the afternoon,
almost innocently, with a book. There was a church,
to which I turned my back, as I might not have done
at an earlier stage in my life, for I knew
that Dickens had married there. When the children
appeared, at an hour when they were allowed to make
a last use of the climbing frame in the play
area, when the tired mothers wheeled their babies
home after collecting them from the child
-
minder, I
would get up, put away my book, and cross the
garden to the flat in Britten Street, let myself
in with my key, and wait for Edmund, who would join
me shortly after five. Our time together was brief,
too brief, for he always telephoned his
family, or was telephoned by his wife in the
country at the same time every evening. He was
frequently invited out to dinner: friends took pity
on him for being left in town. I think that
our evenings together held some poetry for him. I was
careful never to let him see my rapture,
except in one particular circumstance; my former
secrecy reasserted itself for my protection, and for
his. I knew that he must not be exposed to the
depth of my feeling for him, for that would spoil the
“
fun,
”
and he relied on me to accept this
particular bargain. Thus he did not know that when
he left I would wander round the flat, take a
shower, fantasize briefly about a possible
future life with him, and then slowly make my
way home to my dozing husband, the television still
on, the newspaper discarded by his side. He would
rouse himself as sounds came from the kitchen where I
would wash up after his meal, and hastily eat some
bread and cheese.
“
You must ask that friend of yours
in,
”
he once said.
“
It's good of her to give
you a lift.
”
I made noises of agreement.
Even I knew, even then, that there are some
limits to duplicity.

I felt surprisingly little guilt; shame,
perhaps, yes, almost certainly shame, when I
looked at my husband's sleeping face and even
at his ungainly aspect as he sat slumped in
his chair, oblivious to the television blaring out its
multi
-
coloured attractions. But what I mostly
felt was energy, and it was true that I was never
tired. I identified with the young people I passed in the
street, bare-armed, bare-legged in the beautiful
summer light, rather than the slow-moving and so
respectable women issuing from flats like mine at
an hour when I had already done my hasty shopping
and was willing to sacrifice the rest of the morning to the
preparation of Digby's dinner. He complained that
the casseroles I left in the oven for him were too
heavy, that they gave him indigestion, but what little
conscience I had left was appeased by the care I
put into the composition of those meals, as if they would
count in my favour at some hazy moral
tribunal which might or might not take place.
I was not sure about this, although it seemed likely that
at some point a reckoning would be demanded of me
by a higher power, albeit one with which I had long
since ceased communication.

At other times I felt distressed when pierced
by a shaft of unwelcome insight, for I knew that
Digby was in many ways superior to Edmund,
even knew that Edmund was a worldly character, aware of
his entitlements and indifferent to any form of
censure. His handsome appearance and
attributes had in some fashion secured him
permission to act as he pleased; this too seemed
to me to be a law of nature. And he had after
all not put anyone in jeopardy: his children were
healthy, his position in life assured, his wife
apparently complaisant. On this last point I
chose not to ask questions, either of myself or of Edmund,
who would, I knew, frown at what he would
consider a breach of etiquette. At that same
moral tribunal I would be obliged
to acknowledge that her cynicism, her disabused
indolence, might have been earned the hard way, that it
was entirely possible that she knew everything, that the
two of them were parties to an arrangement that I could
hardly understand. I was relatively inexperienced,
and remarkably stupid for my age. I was in
fact older than those girls I passed in the
street, but too young to identify with those other women
with their shopping baskets and their no doubt spotless
consciences. I was too busy living in the
present, making my own calculations of occupation
and urgency before setting out for Britten Street
and the exalted time I was able to spend in the garden, as
a prelude to the evening's fulfilment.

Therefore it was with a feeling of supreme
annoyance, as if my movements had been
unnaturally checked, that I was waylaid on the
stairs to my own flat by Mrs Crook, whose
invitation to coffee I could hardly refuse. It was
after all eleven o'clock in the morning, and I had time
to roast the chicken which I would leave for Digby.
Yet I felt hampered and distracted by the
invitation, and followed her unwillingly into her
flat, which was a mirror image of our own. I
felt that my safety depended on my keeping my
distance from this kind of woman, from the species of which
Mrs Crook was an outstanding representative.