A Misalliance (4 page)

Bertie, used to the calm unemotional woman whom Blanche had become, had been enchanted by the petulance, the self-assurance, and the shamelessness of Mousie. He took all these qualities as evidence of passion, in which he was mistaken, although it was an easy mistake to make, and he was not alone in making it. Bertie himself, a rich man, of reserved and powerful personality, represented to Mousie the father to whom she could stretch out her infant arms once more, a delightful prolongation of her habitual and instinctive state. Bertie, whose desire for control was easily titillated by a token opposition, and who had begun to see in Blanche a strength of character that seemed to challenge his own, had succumbed easily to Mousie’s appeal. Not for Mousie the discretion of a woman technically in the wrong; her very indecency had thrilled Bertie to the core. Mousie would telephone him at home, sometimes tearfully, if she had not seen him that day, and was not put out if Blanche happened to be at hand. Once Blanche had answered, and
had said, ‘Do you wish to speak to my husband or are you going to pretend that you have the wrong number?’ This was taken by Mousie to be a massively unsporting response, and she had complained, with tears, to Bertie about it. Bertie, seeing vistas of unease opening suddenly before him, had also responded by blaming Blanche. In this way Blanche could be isolated by virtue of her innocence. The discomfort of the guilty parties could only be resolved by invoking Blanche’s lack of co-operation. Behaving properly, in this context, took on a radically different meaning from Blanche’s understanding of the matter, or indeed of any matter.

‘Your little friend telephoned,’ Blanche would say to Bertie, as he returned from the office, looking alternately younger and more harassed. ‘Why don’t you ask her round? I hate to think of her huddled downstairs on the doorstep.’ For how could Bertie pretend to be faithful to Blanche when Mousie had made the facts of the situation so patently obvious? And how could Blanche, so schooled in good behaviour, win in a contest with a naughty child, with tactics long expunged from her life as stupid, dishonest, above all uncharacteristic? It was particularly difficult to behave with dignity in such circumstances; for in order to negotiate successfully, Blanche would have needed to transact in what she privately considered to be an unworthy manner, and would have had to call on reserves of patience and cunning in which she was notably deficient. It was all the more puzzling in that the baby whom she knew Mousie to be was disguised as a young adult woman who earned her living in an adult way and lunched in wine bars with her young upwardly mobile female friends, all of them busy gentrifying the south-western suburbs and comparing notes on their live-in companions. Marriage they scorned, thinking of it as the shackle that kept women at home, or at best tired out with being too successful all round, yet oaths of fealty were
exacted, as in some new code of chivalry. Blanche, musing over a glass of wine and a sandwich, could see these lunches quite clearly. The talk would be excited, the briefcases parked on an empty chair; acquaintances would be hailed in delighted and uninhibited tones. And when the confidences started, the heads would be lowered and would come together, and the laws of the Mafia would prevail. Mafia honour must be satisfied, no matter what the price to be paid. In fact the price was always survival: no laughing matter, as Blanche had reason to reflect.

Naturally, certain rationalizations had had to be circulated before the divorce could take place. The most useful had been confided by Mousie to her friends. ‘If the man decides to look elsewhere,’ said Mousie, ‘you can be sure that his wife can’t satisfy him.’ The friends all saw the wisdom of this. However Blanche’s current isolation was caused not by the opinion of Mousie’s friends, whom she did not know, but by the parallel defection of her own, all of whom seemed to think privately what Mousie and her friends were saying so publicly. Blanche’s habit of arcane references, her way of raising unsuitable matters at dinner parties, thus came to be seen as evidence of thin blood, of reserve, or of incapacity; she was far less interesting than Mousie, who was so dramatic in her reactions. And it was not always clear what Blanche meant. If you had not read the same books you did not always make sense of her allusions. Whereas Mousie was a child in comparison, an adorable child. Tiresome too, on occasions, and embarrassing, but on the whole great fun.

‘I see it all,’ Blanche had said to Barbara, in the course of one of their less guarded telephone conversations. ‘I am not adorable. I can be very sarcastic, and that is apparently more wounding to Bertie than the plain fact of Mousie’s taking possession. And now people seem to think that I am frigid, and there is no possible way in which I can refute them. So clever of them, don’t you think?’

‘You could sleep with their husbands,’ said Barbara, who was a plain-spoken woman.

‘I only ever wanted to sleep with my own,’ said Blanche sadly. ‘And apparently that was wrong too. People would have been more sympathetic if I had had a messy and injurious private life. It would have been evidence that I am human.’

‘Farmyard thinking,’ said Barbara. ‘I’m surprised you take any notice.’

‘Ah, but my dear, I am meant to. And I think I must.’

‘I really think that Bertie has behaved unforgivably,’ said Barbara to her husband after she had put down the telephone.

Jack’s response was to chuckle. ‘I never would have thought he had it in him,’ he said. ‘Pompous bastard, I always thought. And he’s come up with a little cracker like this girl. Bad luck for Blanche, of course,’ he added hastily, seeing his wife’s look. The matter had not been discussed again.

And so the word went out, as the word always will, that Blanche was to be the loser. And as curiosity had to be satisfied, Bertie and Mousie had to be invited to dinner. And as Mousie was adept at the business of survival, many allusions were made in the course of these dinners to Blanche’s famous eccentricities. Thus the legend was established and the verdict was passed: Blanche was too eccentric to be borne. She was
insupportably
eccentric. And age could only make her worse.

Bertie, who thought his wife uncomfortable although he knew her to be honest, abstained from these colloquies, said nothing to refute the current or received opinion, but sometimes called in on his way home, or perhaps later, in the course of an errand to the off-licence. Carrying a wrapped bottle, he would observe, testily, that Blanche drank too much.

‘What did you have for lunch?’ Blanche would say. For
she was not surprised at the way things had turned out. If, as Plato says, all knowledge is recollection, she had always known that she would fail in this particular contest, for her own plainness as a child had caused her to look longingly at the delighted smiles bestowed on other, prettier little girls, and she had wished in vain to have a tantrum of her very own. But the tantrums of plain little girls do not have the desired effect, and by the time those plain little girls have grown up and become elegant women the art has been lost for ever because it has never been possessed.

And since then the weather had seemed to be uniformly awful, although Blanche was well aware that she was extrapolating from her own inner disarray. Nevertheless, she was statistically sure that somewhere there was heat, there was sunshine, and radiance, and that this happy climate was reserved for those who had the determination to seek it. For herself, the grey days and the endless afternoons seemed a fitting context for her present life, and sometimes she needed all her courage to leave the house, driven out as she was by the even greater horror of staying in. And as human contact seemed to recede from her grasp, she craved it all the more, although her cocked head and quizzical smile, assumed out of frightened deference to the gods, had driven many lesser mortals from her company.

Her fantasies, on which her lips remained firmly closed, and which she would have died rather than reveal, came dangerously near to the surface as she surveyed the sodden garden and stood at the window immobilized by a vision of an alternate life, the one she would have wished for herself had she been in a position to lay her case before some benevolent tribunal.

If only I could live in a real house before I die, smell lilac in my own garden. If only I could be married again, to Bertie, young enough to be confident, not middle-aged and wary, having seen too much. If only it were Sunday, in
summer, just once more, and I were about to take our tea out into the garden. And if only there had been that pram in the hall that is said to stifle all creative endeavour but would have had the opposite effect on me. Our sons, our daughters, playing in that garden, shaking raindrops from those lilac bushes, stalking the cat. Always hot sunshine, in these imaginings.

And no shame in getting old, getting weak. Arm in arm, companionably taking a walk in that garden … the children coming to tea, with their children.

‘Perhaps you should have given him a child,’ Barbara had once said, goaded to harshness by Blanche’s passivity.

‘Perhaps he should have given me one,’ Blanche had replied, speaking for once bitterly, out of her greatest hurt. And there the matter rested. They had never referred to it again.

On this grey day, momentarily warmed by Miss Elphinstone’s company and the evidence that perfectly sane people lived equally ruminative lives, Blanche determined to shop and to cook as if she were a normal woman with normal household concerns. She bought supplies that would see her through the week, in case – always the lurking fear – she was kept at home by illness, and on her return did some more baking. Her excellent cooking, in which she required no co-operation, was, had she known it, a further count against her in Mousie’s circle, as was her small private income. ‘These houseproud women wouldn’t be so houseproud if they had to do a day’s work,’ Mousie would say in the wine bar, flushed with anger, her hair slightly untidy after an ideological lunch with the friends. ‘I believe in
involving
the man,’ she would add proudly, remembering Bertie with an apron over his business suit and the inordinate length of time it took to prepare a meal, there being so much to discuss and so many false starts to be rectified. Bertie seemed to thrive on it all. And then they were out so much,
at those dinner parties which kept Mousie in the forefront of everybody’s attention, in the position that she found most effortless and most congenial. When Bertie required her to give a dinner party herself, she ordered everything from a caterer and dressed up to the nines to compensate for the fact that dishes tended to emerge from the oven at the wrong temperature. Though she drank less than Blanche, she became much more animated much more quickly. Blanche, after two or three glasses, merely became calmer and displayed the rudiments of a sententious smile.

Bertie, looking in that evening, found her halfway through a bottle of Sancerre, calm in her white silk shirt and her patterned velvet skirt.

‘You must spend a fortune on that stuff,’ he said uneasily. ‘And it can’t be doing you any good.’ He hated evidence of solitary habits, just as he hated the echoing silence of the flat, as he stood outside wondering whether or not to use his old key.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Blanche. ‘I have never been drunk in my life. You do not run the risk of seeing me hanging round a lamp-post with a riotous hat over one eye. I think you are frightened of my turning up at your house and making a scene. Bursting in on your guests while Mousie is dishing up the stuffed peppers. Having to be removed by men in white coats. Reduced to begging in the streets, asking passers-by for five pounds for a cup of tea. Yourself shuddering with disgust on the other side of the road. Anyway, I can afford it. That must be one worry off your mind.’

Bertie sat down in his usual chair with a slight sigh.

‘I hope I find you well,’ said Blanche, looking at him with an expression of some reserve.

Bertie appeared strange to her. Mousie insisted that in the evenings and at weekends he change into clothes that broadcast messages of youth and leisure. He looked like a child, Blanche thought. ‘In any case, I think it behooves
lonely women to take on the burden of the world’s drinking,’ she said. ‘Curious verb, behooves. I behoove, you behoove. Or is it intransitive? You’ll find a bottle of Malaga in the larder,’ she added, seeing that, as usual, he was taking no notice. ‘Or there’s some Madeira, if you prefer it. With a sliver of Madeira cake, perhaps.’

Bertie ran a finger round where his collar ought to be. ‘Home-made?’ he enquired, remembering that he was wearing a polo-necked jersey.

‘Naturally,’ said Blanche, getting up and going out for the tray.

They sat sipping in companionable silence, while Bertie ran an eye over his former home. There was no doubt that this flat was more congenial to him than his new home, although the house agent had told him that prices in Fulham were due to go through the roof. When they did, he planned to buy something else; Mousie was all for keeping on the move, exploring new possibilities, getting to know new people. Eventually, she said, they would want to settle down and become part of a community. But there was no hint of mobility or change in Blanche’s rooms, where the lamps were always low and where furniture stood, shadowy, in the half light. Blanche, gliding back from the kitchen, seemed to be moving soundlessly, her feet half hidden. An atmosphere of quietude surrounded her activities; in all their years together he had never known her to be unreasonable. When he thought about it, as he sometimes did, he realized that he had never really been put out by her bizarre notions, although he now supposed that they were more noticeable than had ever been apparent to him. Of course, he was sorry to have upset her, more sorry than he judged it wise to let Mousie know, but the great thing about Blanche was her self-sufficiency. What was more, he had never seen her cry, whereas Mousie cried rather a lot.

‘This carpet is getting shabby, Blanche.’

‘True,’ she agreed; ‘but it is so dark in here that you can hardly see it.’

This, coming from her, sounded almost like an accusation.