Casting Off (38 page)

‘Tired, sweetie?’

‘A bit.’

‘I did like your friends.’

‘Paddy and Jill? Yes. I was sorry the Carews didn’t come, though.’

‘Oh, yes. Why didn’t they?’

‘I think they don’t relish the idea of unmarried couples.’

‘How foolish of them.’ He went into the bathroom to take out his teeth and clean them – something that, unlike with Villy, he did not do in front of Diana. When he came back she was still sitting in front of her dressing table.

‘Edward! What is happening?’

‘About what?’

‘About the divorce.’

He had said that it was far too late to start talking about that, but she had said, no it wasn’t, she really wanted to know. ‘I mean, I understand that the whole thing will take some time, but I’d at least like to know that it had started. And it hasn’t, has it?’

‘Not formally.’

‘You mean not at all, don’t you? Have you discussed it with lawyers? Or with her?’

‘If you must know, no, I haven’t.’

‘But if you don’t, nothing will ever happen.’

‘There’s always the chance that she will start things off.’

‘Do you seriously mean just to wait for that?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Supposing she doesn’t?’

‘I don’t know! Honestly, how the hell am I supposed to know?’

He felt cornered: it seemed to him that everyone – even she – conspired to make him feel in the wrong. And she was supposed to be on his side, dammit! Just as he was beginning to feel that he couldn’t take any more, she changed: got up and went to him and put her arms round him. ‘Poor darling! I know how hard it has been for you. You’ve been so marvellous facing up to everything . . .’ She had said a lot more of that kind of thing and he began to feel better. They went to bed and he made love to her and she seemed keener than usual on him which was enjoyable, and afterwards as they lay with his arm round her, he said that he would make an arrangement to see Villy to talk about divorce.

So he’d lunched with her. He’d picked a restaurant that he didn’t usually go to in Soho: he didn’t want to meet friends or have devoted waiters distracting him. He’d rung her up and simply said that he’d wanted to discuss things and she’d sounded guarded, but she’d agreed.

She was waiting at the table for him, dressed in her navy blue suit and wearing rather a lot of cyclamen lipstick. He greeted her heartily and ordered Martinis for both of them.

But it had been a difficult lunch. Conversation had veered unpredictably between carefully chosen subjects (he did the choosing) and her sudden, bitter asides, conducted in a tone of voice that he described to himself as stagey, but which, none the less, made him feel very uncomfortable. He had, for instance, been asking about her recent summer holiday with the Duchy and Rachel – she had taken the children to Home Place – when she almost interrupted him by saying: ‘I suppose I shall have to live on charity with people being sorry for me for the rest of my life!’ That first time, he had made the mistake of asking her what on earth she meant, and she had looked at him with that awful heroic smile, which, he realized now, had always irritated him, and said: ‘Mean? I mean that beggars can’t be choosers.’ There had been a frightful silence while she had watched him being at a loss. Later, when he told her about Teddy and his financial troubles and added that he didn’t think that Bernadine was proving much of a wife, she had said: ‘Oh, well, we know what predominates in this family, don’t we? Lust!’ She made the word sound so disgusting that he felt himself going red. All in all, it wasn’t a good climate for broaching the idea of a divorce. However, he’d promised Diana that he would, so he did.

The idea appalled her, she said. Nobody in her family had ever gone through such a disgraceful procedure. She could see no reason why she should be the first, simply to satisfy the predatory instincts of a woman who had, after all, ruined her life. He said he thought it would make things tidier, easier for the children than the present rather ambiguous situation, to which she had replied that it would be easier for the children if there was no situation at all.

Would she at least think about it, he asked.

‘What I simply cannot understand’, she said, after nobody had said anything for some time, ‘is what induced you to let me think we were choosing a house together, when all the time you had no intention of living in it.’

‘I thought you would feel more secure if you had a house.’

‘But if I’d known what was going on behind my back, I might have wanted to live somewhere quite different – away from it all.’

‘If you want to, you could do that. I’m making the house over to you, so it will be yours to sell.’

‘Oh – it really doesn’t matter where I live!’ she exclaimed.

‘It wasn’t my idea. Louise thought you’d be happier if you had somewhere to live.’

‘Louise? Do you mean you discussed me with Louise?’

Oh, Lord, he thought, what a damn silly thing to have said. ‘I was trying to get things right. I was trying to do it the best possible way.’

‘There isn’t a “best possible way” to do what you’ve done to me. But you could at least have refrained from going behind my back with my own daughter. Don’t you see how terribly humiliating that is for me?’

‘Yes, yes, I do now. I’m most awfully sorry. I honestly wanted not to upset you—’

‘Not to upset me! Oh, my dear Edward!’ She gave a bitter laugh, drank some coffee and began to choke. She was given to the occasional choking fit, and they usually seemed to occur in a restaurant or some other public place. He had ceased to feel embarrassed by them years ago, and now, having poured her a glass of water, and timed a few judicious thumps on her back, he handed her his handkerchief ready for the fit of sneezing that would ensue when the choking was over. He smiled encouragingly at her now, as she blew her nose, sneezed, mopped her eyes – her make-up had gone into orangey streaks – sneezed twice more, apologized, blew her nose and sneezed again. She looked awful, familiar, totally undesirable and somehow touching. For the first time since he had left her, he recognized the immense importance to her of her pride.

‘I always admire the way you deal with your chokes,’ he said.

‘I’ve had plenty of practice.’ But she sounded calmer. She got out her powder compact and, with small clucks of dismay, tried to repair the streaks.

He was at a loss now for things to say to her. Any mention of Roly would be unwise: she had earlier announced her intention of refusing to allow him ever to go to the new house or meet that woman. In the end, he offered her a car and she seemed pleased at the idea. ‘It would make visiting Lydia at school much easier,’ she said.

That was that. He paid the bill and they said goodbye in the street without touching; he lifted his hat to her as he would to a stranger.

That afternoon in the office he asked Rupert if he would bring Zoë to dinner at Ranulf Road, saw that he was about to refuse and said, ‘Do, old boy. It would make things so much easier,’ and Rupert said fine, all right, he would.

At least that would please Diana, he thought as he drove back after dropping Teddy. It would help about the other bit, which wasn’t so good.

She was wearing a new dress, a dark blue and emerald green affair, and luckily he noticed it before she told him it was new. She had made a large shaker of Martini – he would rather have gone on with whisky after the drink with Teddy, but hadn’t the heart to say so.

‘It was so funny,’ she said. ‘I found this dress in one of those awful little boutiques in Finchley Road. I took Jamie with me, before he went back to school, and the shop lady said, “Won’t your daddy be pleased with Mummy in her lovely new dress?” And Jamie said, ‘He’s not my daddy. He’s the man my mummy lives with.’

‘Oh, God!’

‘The poor woman didn’t know where to look!’

‘I’ve asked Rupert and Zoë to dinner,’ he said.

‘Oh, good! I do so want to meet them. Give me the other half, darling.’ He poured it. ‘And how did lunch go?’

‘Not too bad.’ He felt her waiting. ‘She’ll think it over,’ he said. ‘There really isn’t anything else I can do. I can’t divorce her.’

‘Did you tell her about Susan?’

‘No. No, I didn’t. She’s pretty bitter, you know. There’s no point in making things worse.’

There was another silence. This isn’t the kind of evening I want to have, he thought.

‘It doesn’t sound very promising.’

He got up from the chair where he had been sitting. ‘I must wash,’ he said. He wanted to get away from her before they had an argument, or something approaching it.

He had a dressing room adjoining their bedroom with a bathroom leading off it. He had a pee, laved his face in cold water, and washed his hands, then brushed his hair with his pair of silver-backed brushes. He was beginning to go bald. He felt curiously dispirited, something he wasn’t used to feeling. Usually he didn’t think about how he felt, he simply felt it, but today – the board meeting, with Hugh standing out against him and the consequent compromise; the interview with the bank when the loan he had negotiated had been on surprisingly harsh terms; his decision to take another ten thousand out of his own money to finance things (two more lots of boarding-school fees for Lydia and Jamie, plus getting Villy’s allowance organized, and now buying her a car) and then Teddy wanting more money – it had really been the sort of day that made him notice that he felt tired and kind of driven and hemmed in to uncomfortable and hitherto foreign corners. He realized now that he had left out the lunch with Villy, which in its way had been one of the worst things because, although he couldn’t possibly discuss it with Diana, he did feel bloody awful about her – he had been married to her for damn nearly twenty-six years, after all, so it must be a frightful blow for her suddenly to be left. Of course, she’d never liked sex or any of that sort of thing, but she had obviously liked being married, women did – look how keen Diana was on the idea; he didn’t think he’d really care for the sort of woman who didn’t think that marriage was important . . . although it was not something that a man particularly wanted – he, for instance, would be perfectly happy if the situation with Diana stayed as it was. The point was that he was in love with her, in a way that he knew he had never been in love with Villy. He thought of Villy: his first sight of her in the restaurant, wearing make-up, which she used only to wear in the evenings for parties; the sharp lipstick had made her mouth look thin and bitter, and the brown powder had emphasized the deep lines that ran from each side of her nose to below her mouth. When young, she had seemed rather delightfully boyish, but this was not a quality that aged well: now she looked merely unfeminine and, after the choking, pathetic. Again, when they had been standing in the street outside the restaurant, neither of them knowing how to finish their meeting, and she had looked at him with a smile that was not a smile – a kind of grimace that smouldered with resentment damped down by self-pity . . . He was amazed now to realize that he had seen all this because he had not acknowledged any of it at the time. What had gone through his mind had been ‘I can’t kiss her, it might make her break down – I can’t shake hands with her, she would think I was being unkind, what the hell do I do?’ And he’d raised his hat, returning her smile, and walked away. He wondered now whether she had ever loved him. He’d never thought about that before.

Diana calling him to come down for dinner was a welcome relief from these thoughts. The dining room looked festive with silver candlesticks and a silver bowl and white and yellow chrysanthemums and white linen and his favourite decanter full of burgundy, and Mrs Greenacre cooked good English food well, roast lamb, angels on horseback – he was known to prefer savouries – and then there was some decent Stilton, but he discovered that he wasn’t hungry at all, and in spite of eating only a token amount, he had quite severe indigestion even before the meal was finished. Diana was sweet to him, got him some bicarbonate – filthy stuff to drink but it did the trick so well that he felt like a brandy with her in the drawing room before they went to bed. He made love to her more seriously than usual, to make it up to her about not getting the divorce thing settled, and because he needed her to be, as he put it to himself, on his side, and she was: she seemed thrilled and appreciative and happy and she fell asleep immediately afterwards. But he – and this was not at all like him – found that he could not sleep: his indigestion returned and, after lying miserably awake for some time, he got up to go in search of bicarb.

Two

November 1946

‘What did you think of her?’

‘She seemed friendly.’ She thought for a moment, and then said, ‘She had very ugly hands. And those rings Edward’s given her make one notice them more.’

‘Oh, Zoë! I never noticed them.’

‘You asked me.’

‘I meant a bit more generally than that, I suppose.’

They were driving down West End Lane: it was late, and rather foggy.

‘She’s very much the opposite of Villy, isn’t she? To look at, I mean.’

‘Amazing eyes,’ he said, ‘sort of bluebell-coloured. Well, you wouldn’t expect her to be like Villy, surely.’

‘I don’t know. I thought men usually went for the same type. And there were some things that were the same about her.’

‘What?’

‘Well, she was a bit dramatic, a bit what the Duchy would call theatrical.’

‘I can’t see that at all—’ he began, but she interrupted.

‘Yes! She was theatrical about being sincere. She kept saying how much she believed in people saying what they thought, being straightforward, that sort of thing.’

‘You didn’t like her, then.’

‘Well, I didn’t dislike her.’

‘Oh, well. We don’t have to be enormous friends with her. Edward wanted us to meet her, and we have.’

‘We’ll have to have them back, though, and we’ll have to shut up to Villy about having met her.’

‘And Hugh,’ he said. ‘Oh, damn!’

They had almost reached the bottom of the lane and, without warning, were surrounded by dense fog. Rupert slowed down at once as he narrowly missed hitting a parked car.