A Misalliance (21 page)

‘I thought of Marbella,’ he replied, uneasily. ‘Or Ischia.’

‘And what will you do there, Patrick? It is hardly your scene, as they say.’

‘Whatever Sally wants to do.’ He looked increasingly unhappy.

‘Patrick,’ Blanche said gently. ‘Is this honourable? Always remembering that honour is the highest good. Pleasure unmixed with reason is apparently what the unenlightened go in for. It does not guarantee a good conscience.’

‘I have had too much of a good conscience,’ he remonstrated. ‘I work hard. I have no debts. For years I danced attendance on my widowed mother.’

‘I thought you were devoted to her.’

‘Nevertheless, she required my presence long past the time of my requiring hers. I suppose that is one form of honour.’

‘Not really,’ said Blanche. ‘That is duty. We cannot always choose our duties.’

‘We are told to honour our father and mother.’

‘I am never sure how far one is expected to go along that line. Most of the parents in the Bible would have been impossible. I notice that we don’t hear too much from Job’s daughters. What a life they must have had. Besides, the messages in the Bible are by no means clear. Some of them are downright subversive. Remember Uriah the Hittite. What else have you done that puts you in good standing, as Sally would say?’

‘I don’t suppose I have done much by your standards, Blanche. You were always flippant. I have been … concerned. Aware. I have not, I think, been unkind.’

‘That sentence contains two negatives. Have you been kind, that is the main thing. And, yes, I suppose you have. And there is no reason why I should appear to sit in judgment
on you. I am not judging you, Patrick. I simply recognize what you are doing. I have seen it before. Your position is secure. You are respected at work. Your income is stable. You have done your duty. You have honoured your mother and no doubt many other people. Now you want to be reprehensible. You want to commit questionable actions. You want to raise scandalized comment. You want the sheer – what is the word? – exhilaration of it. You want to be free of all your standards and of everybody else’s too. And you are right, of course. Whether what you are
doing
is right or not is another matter. You want your own life back. You want autonomy.’

‘You understand me well, Blanche.’

‘What I don’t understand is why men do these things for some women and not for others. Perhaps you can tell me.’

‘It is simply that some women make one restless. Others one knows will always be there to come home to. It is as simple as that.’

‘No, it is not simple, not if you are one of those other women. When you see men driven to folly, you think, why can’t I do that? Not that you want to be a wrecker. But it is never quite clear how far you can go. Perhaps you are waiting to see how far others will be prepared to go. But perhaps you don’t wait long enough. Perhaps you don’t dare. Perhaps you don’t even like waiting. Perhaps you want to rush in with your own contribution: wanting to make things quicker and easier all round.’

‘But I think Sally has done all that.’

‘Well, no, I don’t think she has. Sally, as far as I can see, has made no contribution at all.’

‘Sally is her own contribution.’

‘Ah yes, I see. How sad it all is.’

‘Sad?’

‘Well, yes, I think it is rather sad. For you, not necessarily
for her. You forget that the Sallies of this world are very good at discarding.’

‘But that is the way of the world, Blanche.’

‘To discard? To lighten the load? Is it?’

‘If you want your own way, it is.’

‘You mean that nature tells us to look after number one? And all the rest is superstructure, ethical systems perpetrated on us by old men?’

‘In a way.’

‘But if that were so nature would tell us to desert our parents when they became tiresome, murder our rivals, take what we wanted, no matter how much it cost other people.’

‘Nature simply tells us to enjoy ourselves from time to time.’

‘I know that, Patrick. And perhaps you are willing to pay the price.’

‘What is the price?’

‘Ah, nobody knows. That is the catch, you see.’

‘I think I am willing to pay it.’

‘Then you had better telephone Sally, while I mix the salad. For some reason she doesn’t answer.’

‘I will ring her later, Blanche. When I get home.’ He assumed the faraway look of one who will shortly communicate with the Muses. Clearly he telephoned her every night, deriving emotional sustenance from her vague and elliptical remarks, marvelling at the sheer unfamiliarity of it all, and believing that unaccountability contains erotic messages, messages of intrigue, of favours withheld, of penalties meted out. Delighting in the danger.

‘I have thought that I might arrange for Elinor to have a little money,’ said Blanche, coming back with the tray. ‘When she is seventeen. That is the age at which to commit follies. Of course, I would rather not. The money wouldn’t matter, but I have a feeling that I am buying off my conscience and doing a very dreary thing at the same time. It is
what old ladies do, always postponing things as long as they can. And who is to say that Elinor will not turn out like her parents?’

‘Sally is actually quite a good mother.’

‘Yes, I can see that she might be great fun. But I have the feeling that Elinor does not quite like all this fun. She is a much more serious person.’

‘She is only three years old, Blanche. We don’t know what she will become.’

‘No, and I don’t intend to wait and see. She is not my child and nothing could ever make her so. I have never wanted substitutes. Or I don’t think I have. When I first saw her, I thought she looked lonely. I know about lonely children. Some people are lonely children all their lives. I think I wanted to prevent that. As far as that goes, I suppose I too was emotionally involved.’

‘I have often wondered why you had no children of your own.’

‘So have I.’ She looked down. ‘Do have some more of this chicken, Patrick. A kind neighbour brought it when I was unwell.’ She noticed that he had not asked after her, admittedly restored, health. He is far gone, she thought. But then it was the intensity of his self-absorption that had always stood in the way of greater intimacy. Until this evening, when they seemed to be speaking naturally, she had always had the feeling that he counted any personal remark she made as a kind of intrusion on his own stream of consciousness. He is not only far gone, she thought: he has gone as far as he is likely to go. When they no longer have the telephone to keep them apart but are forced into daily contact, they will reveal themselves to each other. And then she saw that this was all a dream of Patrick’s, that Sally would never go away with him, not even to Marbella or to Ischia. Sally’s instincts were too good. She saw the self-absorption, the undeniable respectability, the wistful desire to regress; above all, she saw
the sheer lack of practice. Sally saw all this; that was why she was currently unavailable.

The sound of a key in the lock brought her back to her own circumstances, and she prepared herself to entertain Patrick and Mrs Duff for the rest of the evening. But it was Bertie who stood in the doorway, looking tanned and annoyed.

‘I thought you were ill,’ he said. ‘Barbara said you were ill. Good evening, Patrick.’

‘Patrick looked in to see how I was,’ said Blanche smoothly, feeling a trifle faint. ‘I will sit down for a moment, if you don’t mind. I think I have been quite unwell.’

‘Not too unwell to cook, I see,’ said Bertie, eyeing the apple tart. After a minute or two he helped himself to a slice. Nobody said anything. He ate moodily, distancing himself from enjoyment, as one does in the presence of the sick.

‘And how was Crete?’ asked Blanche.

‘Corfu. Very hot. Rather noisy. There seemed to be a number of people there one knew. Or almost knew. You know how it is. Dinner with a crowd of about ten every night. Great fun, of course. Enormously enjoyable.’

‘How was the villa?’ asked Blanche, thinking of dinner with a crowd of about ten every night.

‘Well, we shared it with another couple, friends of Mousie’s. We all got on pretty well. Well, we had to, there wasn’t all that much room. Mousie’s friend’s friend was pretty annoyed. Said he was going to complain to the agency. Kept taking photographs of the bathroom to prove that it was inadequate. I just made the best of it. It does one no harm to rough it from time to time.’

Blanche, who remembered Bertie as a man of the utmost fastidiousness, filling the bathroom with smells of verbena and sandalwood, marvelled at this, only saying, ‘You are eating Patrick’s pudding, Bertie.’

‘So I am,’ said Bertie, taking another small but crucial slice.

‘I was thinking of going away for a bit myself,’ said Blanche. ‘I have been in the flat for what seems to me a very long time. I am not needed here.’

‘What do you mean, Blanche, not needed?’

‘I mean, Bertie, that no one would notice if I disappeared. It is, of course, delightful to see you again, and you too, Patrick, but I am sure that I am not essential to either of you. You both have other commitments. That leaves me quite free. I shall go south and sit in the sun. As Patrick and I have agreed, it is sometimes essential to please oneself. Nature tells us to.’

She began to put plates, knives, and forks on to the tray, having apparently decided that the meal was at an end. Patrick made a half-hearted attempt to help her, getting up from his chair, pushing his plate towards her. Having done this he sat down again.

‘Of course,’ said Blanche pleasantly, ‘I can see that either of you might want to drop in from time to time. My hospitality, though modest, is profound. I shall never be guilty of saying that your visits are inconvenient. As a matter of fact they are not. I am not, as you must have noticed, excessively busy. But who is to say that I might not want to be somewhere else?’

‘You invited me, Blanche,’ said Patrick.

‘So I did. That was only because we had something to discuss. But I was thinking of you, Bertie. You seem to expect me to be here all the time, just as I always was.’

‘I came because Barbara told me you were ill. I wondered if you needed anything.’

‘You wondered if I needed anything? How thoughtful. But as you see, I am, as I always was, self-sufficient. Oh, are you going, Patrick? Must you? I am suddenly feeling rather sociable.’

Patrick, looking grave, had picked up his briefcase. ‘I will telephone you, Blanche, about the arrangements. You will want to know as soon as possible. And I do realize what I am doing, you know.’

‘But he doesn’t,’ said Blanche to Bertie, as she came back into the room after seeing Patrick to the door. ‘He looks so senatorial that one invests him with more wisdom than he could possibly possess. I was right to worry about him, all those years ago. I think I knew that something would always stop him making up his mind. And now he is in the grip of a great decision. It will be a defeat for him either way. Patrick’s effectiveness stops short of action. Action is by now so foreign to him that it presents itself as a disaster. And he knows this in his heart of hearts. It is just that he is so tired of being safe. I do understand that.’

‘You have apparently got to know him very well.’

‘Have a drink, Bertie. I always knew him well. I knew how he suffered from his own shortcomings. As we all do. I wanted to make him feel safer than he knew how to feel on his own, safer than he
deserved
to feel. Perhaps it was silly of me. One shouldn’t try to buttress people against the world. The gods are stronger than we are.’

‘Blanche,’ said Bertie.

‘No, don’t stop me. I have been thinking a great deal about the past and now I see it more clearly. You were bound to leave me, Bertie. I had served my term. The restlessness that drives men to folly drives them away from people like me. It was as futile for me to try to keep you as it would have been for me to try to turn myself into someone twenty years younger. And then I saw the pattern. The pattern is plain for all to see. One visit to the National Gallery would convince you, if you were in any doubt. There they all are, the good and the indifferent. I incline to think that there
are
no bad. Indifference to the good is all that is needed.’

‘If you are alluding to Mousie, then you are wrong. Mousie is fundamentally a very good and caring person.’

‘Mousie is a novice, Bertie. Mousie’s weapons are a girl’s weapons, crude. Basically she is rather timorous. Afraid of the wrath to come. Why else does she keep sending you round here to see if I have put my head in the gas oven? Why else does she need the approbation of her friends to keep her going? Why share a villa in Corfu when she could have had you to herself? No, Mousie is not a bad person. She is a child, defying her elders, and she is so charming that they do not slap her. But grown-up children can be very dangerous. Women who persist in thinking of themselves as little girls tend to think their misdemeanours unimportant. I have to say that they usually get away with it. You can open that other bottle if you want to. Patrick seems to have drunk most of the first. It is a sign of his agitation.’

‘He looked pretty comfortable to me. And can’t we talk about something else? Must I always do penance?’

‘It is what you come here for, Bertie. And there is no need, you know. I have just been trying to explain to you. I see the pattern.’

‘I do wish you’d shut up, occasionally, Blanche. You always did talk too much.’

‘And you get less talk in Fulham?’

‘It is of a different nature.’

‘I can see that women drive men mad,’ said Blanche, lighting a cigarette. ‘What I can’t see is why some of them get away with it.’

‘No, I’m sure you can’t. The corkscrew is by your elbow, if you wouldn’t mind. I should just like to point out that I have done a hard day’s work and that I should like a moment’s peace and quiet.’

‘Men always say that. I remember my father saying it. Have you eaten, by the way?’

‘Only that piece of tart.’

Blanche went into the kitchen and came back with the rest of the jellied chicken, some buttered water biscuits, a piece of Wensleydale, and a peach. She assembled it all on a tray and put the tray on Bertie’s knees. ‘What were the arrangements that Patrick was talking about?’ he asked, picking up his fork and darting a quick glance at her when she was not looking.