The Rules of Engagement (9 page)

I surveyed the flat, which had been Digby's
flat, and therefore part of my mother's plan for my
future when our house in Bourne Street was
put on the market. Despite her worldly
opinions she was as unreconstructed as Mrs
Crook, believing that a woman's principal
need was to be looked after by a man. I accepted the
dull flat for what it was, a no doubt enviable
property to which, in some unimaginable future, I
should not lay claim. At that time, and that could only
be when Digby died, I should leave and go somewhere
else, perhaps back to Paris, where my former
morose habits would reassert themselves. This
prospect no longer frightened me. I had been
given a certificate of viability, and
it would guarantee my future. I knew that, in
comparison with Edmund, I had few assets of
my own. This was the one factor that seriously
divided us. Sometimes I felt poor when I was
with him, and this was a genuine shadow on my
happiness. I doubted whether this aspect of the
affair was apparent to him, or, if it was, whether
it would have made any difference to my status.
I could not spend the rest of this disappointing day
indoors. I decided to take a book and go to the
garden, out of loyalty, out of longing, not out of
exasperation. Instead I went to a
café
round the
corner and ate a full English breakfast in the
guise of lunch, swallowing every greasy mouthful with
something like genuine enthusiasm. This was another
change in my behaviour, a preference for gross
and speedy satisfactions. Uncomfortably
full, I walked to the garden and chose a seat from
which I could no longer see the windows of the flat.
But I was restless; without the prospect of seeing
Edmund I was reduced to pure vagrancy.
Finally I went home, roasted the chicken,
peeled the potatoes, washed the salad, and sat
down to wait not for my lover but for my husband. That
husband was agreeably surprised to find me
sitting in my usual chair, with an open book in
my hands.

“
No class tonight?
”
he asked.

“
Cancelled,
”
I replied.

After we had eaten he went into the other room as
usual, and switched on the television. When I
joined him I found him asleep, a scene of
passion beaming out unnoticed. When two characters
joined in a violent embrace I switched it
off.

“
I was watching that,
”
Digby protested
mildly.

“
No, you weren't. Your eyes were closed.
”

“
Oh, I knew what was going on anyway.
One always does.
”

I looked at him uncertainly. But there was
nothing in his mild gaze to give me pause, and
after a few minutes I went to bed, his remark
dying quietly on the night air.

If I had learned anything it was that the highest
virtue
—
honour, dignity
—
can be subverted or
negated in an instant, given the right
stimulus. Sublime behaviour exists now
only in the pages of Betsy's beloved
Racine. I also learned that nature, that great
benefactor, exacts its punishment for all the
bounties hitherto enjoyed, without a thought of worth
or entitlement, and that all life ends badly.
“
Peacefully, in his sleep,
”
one reads, but
what of the preceding hours or minutes?
Shakespeare has it over Racine here, and
Hamlet's doubts and fears speak for all of us.
It is these rather than the statecraft that the
seventeenth-century classicists brought to the
consideration of these matters that resonate in the
mind. I also learned that it is the gods who are in
control, and that their pagan indifference can be visited
on any life, no matter how correctly that
life has been lived. I have come to believe that
there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that
comes at the end, the sheer regret that one's life
is finished, that one's failures remain indelible
and one's successes illusory. I also believe
that there occurs a moment of renunciation, when one
is visited by the knowledge that time is up, that there is to be
no more time, or that if a little time remains it will be
lived posthumously, and
with
a sense of pure loss.
This is also, conversely, an invitation to play
Russian roulette with one's life and affections
while one has the time, to take chances, to defy
safety. But of course one no longer has the time
to do that. The ability
—
the capacity
—
to take chances
has been lost. All is subject henceforth to the
iron decree of mortality.

The first of these propositions I had been able
to verify for myself. The second came to me by way
of information relayed by my mother during one of her
brief visits to London from the villa in
Spain she had bought with a further injection of money
from my father and which she shared with a woman friend. I
looked at her, perplexed, unwilling to accede
to these morbid matters which she seemed to have
embraced without prior warning. It was true that I
no longer saw her on a regular basis; had
I done so I should have been prepared for the change in
her appearance, which I could not quite analyse. Her
face seemed to have changed its shape, to be
hollowed out on one side, and her lips were
slightly puckered, like the lips of a very old
woman. But she was not old, or rather she was old
by my standards, in her late fifties, and still, as
far as I knew, unimpaired. Yet the
altered shape of her features, so different from the
carefully nurtured appearance with which I had grown
up, together with her doleful pronouncements, brought
an unwelcome sense of danger, of further
changes still to come, which I found unwelcome.
She smiled faintly at my inability to give
her credit for her lately discovered wisdom, and
put her hand to her face.
“
You're probably
wondering what brought this on,
”
she said.
“
Such a
minor thing, but it served as a warning of some kind.
I had to have some teeth out. I'm afraid
Spanish dentists aren't very good
—
not that English
dentists are much better
—
and the apparatus I have
to wear doesn't really fit. It's obvious,
isn't it?
”

“
You'll come to terms with it,
”
I said
awkwardly, not willing to be conscripted into this new
intimacy. My mother had always exaggerated. I had
thought her brave when I was a child, making light of
my colds and scratches, my minor and not so
minor accidents. Now I saw that her brashness
hid terror, and that her defences against that terror were
no longer adequate. I was particularly concerned
to eschew any form of sympathy that would lead to the
sort of identification she seemed to desire, as
if we were no longer mother and daughter but one old
woman commiserating with another. She seemed to have
forfeited a sort of propriety, to be looking
to me for reassurance, and again I could not help but
perceive a loss of nerve. Once again I was glad
that she was not there to witness my behaviour, though that
behaviour was, I thought, discreet. But I
feared her instincts, which had always been sharp. She
was the kind of woman whose main attention is given
over to other women, as if to calculate their
assets, and if possible their disadvantages, with
regard to herself. She had been expert at the
subtle insinuation, the laughing dismissal, as if
these matters were crucial to a woman's success
with men. I now saw why my father had looked for
love and comfort elsewhere. I did not exonerate
him, but I understood him. Yet she had been
beautiful, and was so no longer. I was able
to regret that quite sincerely, while at the same time
resenting the fact that it had been brought to my
notice.

“
You've changed too,
”
she said.
“
You've
got more colour in your face. And you're better
dressed. Well, you can afford to be.
”
She
laughed, with one of her old angry laughs
that always accompanied any discussion of money.
Yet I knew that she expected me to express
gratitude to her for having steered me into marriage
with a prosperous older man. At least he had
seemed prosperous at the time, although in the light of
Edmund's wealth his income was probably
minimal. We lived comfortably enough, and I was
happy to add my own money to his. I paid my
way, as seemed only right to me, while Digby
took care of the outgoing expenses. I realized that
our holidays, in the early days of our marriage,
must have been costly, and was glad for several
reasons that these had come to an end.

My mother's presence was particularly onerous because
I had several matters of my own to think about. The
first and most important of these was Edmund, or rather
his absence. He had taken his family to France,
to a house they always rented in the Alpilles, and
I should not see him for three or even four
weeks. This enforced period of calm was
unwelcome for many reasons, for I knew, or
sensed, that if the momentum of a love affair
falters one loses one's confidence in a good
outcome. I could not help but contrast his
circumstances with my own. I spent quiet days
alone or with Digby, whose own holiday it was.
He preferred to spend it at home, venturing out
only for a ruminative morning walk, and sometimes
not even for that. It was only too easy to imagine
the physical splendour of Edmund's surroundings
and activities, the lithe bodies of his children
supplementing his own, as if they were a different
race, and inhabited a different atmosphere to our
own, to Digby's and mine, and now, tiresomely,
to my mother's. Until she sat down, glass of
whisky to hand, and started unloading her dire
observations for my instruction, I had not
actively minded our uneventful summer. Both
Digby and I were preoccupied and did not converse
much, yet there was a kind of harmony in our
silence, and I had felt the faintest inkling of a
distaste for Britten Street and a recognition that
honourable behaviour does impress one and
convince one of its validity. Yet, of course,
as soon as I perceived this the counter-argument became
active, and I was ready to issue hot denials
of the importance of dignity and gratitude in
human affairs and to claim rights that would in any
case be rendered obsolete by age and infirmity.
In this I was very much of my time, since
women had long discovered the euphoria of
protest, possibly because their own mothers, like mine,
were uttering dire warnings, shaking their heads at the
heedlessness of youth, willing younger people to observe their
own constraints, without success. There was an envy
there, which daughters perhaps intuited before their mothers
did, and it served to sour relations for a time.
Certainly I did not intend to compare myself with my
mother, whose hand had once again crept to her sunken
cheek. I willed my own hand to remain in my
lap. Had I been alone I should have run to a
mirror to make sure that my appearance was
unchanged.

After weeks of blank and grateful sleep I
had begun to dream again, and I had had two dreams
that seemed oddly baleful, as dreams do when they
linger in the mind. In the first I had been persuaded
that all the lights in the flat had failed, and that
I must remember to ask the caretaker to check the
fuses. I was aware that I was dreaming this, that it was
the middle of the night, and that I must telephone the
caretaker as early as possible the following
morning, yet the image of the lightless flat was so
convincing that I actually got out of bed and went to the
bathroom, where the light worked normally. I could
hardly reassure myself by switching on the lights
in the other rooms, spent perhaps a couple of
minutes looking out of the window on to the silent
street, and then got back into bed, where I
immediately, or so it seemed, had another dream. This
took place in a notional daytime, on a sunny
afternoon much like the afternoons I had been used to spending in
the garden. This time, in the dream, I was in South
Kensington, not far from Melton Court, and about
to enter a
café
, where Edmund was already seated.
He appeared not to know me, but this disturbed me
less than the fact that his hair had turned
white. I could make no sense of this, for Edmund
seemed to be guaranteed protection from age,
until I realized that it was not Edmund who had
turned white but Digby.

“
And Digby looks terrible,
”
said my mother,
intruding into my mental landscape.
“
Are you
sure you're looking after him?
”
“
He gets tired,
”
I said lamely.

“
He works very hard, too hard. I think he's
quite looking forward to retirement.
”
Though what I
should do when he was at home all day I had not
yet worked out.

My mother's hand was at her face again.
“
He couldn't remember my name,
”
she said, in
genuine alarm.
“
He called me Helen.
”

“
Helen was the name of his first wife,
”
I
told her, though this made me sad.
“
You must have
reminded him of her.
”

She smiled, with her new lopsided smile, as
if this were some kind of compliment. Yet some instinct
moved her to get to her feet and make noises of
departure. She was staying at the Basil Street
Hotel, where my wedding reception had taken
place, and she was anxious to be re-absorbed
into its benign atmosphere, after revealing too
much, and indeed learning too much, in the course of the
afternoon.