HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) (14 page)

Do you remember that scene where the wife and her lover (I am far from textbooks, and my memory for names is bad) talk softly together while the husband nods in his armchair, and then, after bundling him out of the way by the most transparent of stratagems, they take up a candle apiece and tiptoe off to bed? For some odd reason that seemed to be us, and we lived their exchanges vividly as we watched them: the man seeking her answer with a vigilant eagerness, the woman gently delaying him, the pair of them somehow agreed, even as they fenced, that the night before them was to be joyfully and tenderly shared. While they were playing that scene you held my hand tightly: when they tiptoed from the darkened stage you sighed: when the curtain came down you turned towards me with such candid desire in your eyes that I could have taken you in my arms there and then.

‘Oh, darling!’ you said. ‘This is lovely. This is just what we wanted.’

‘Yes.’

‘How good they were together! They were telling each other all the time that it was all right, even when they seemed to be denying it. That is what love should be like.’

‘Of course, you and I are a little more respectable.’

‘Are we? Not in feeling, surely. I don’t care whether it’s a lover or a husband–’

‘I’m a husband,’ I interrupted.

‘But in a way it is like that for us, isn’t it?’ You were gravely serious now, though in your face lingered the loving concentration of a moment ago: the people moving round us as they relaxed for the interval were still not in our world at all. ‘We have the same sort of secret agreement, that certainty, all the time, that whatever we are saying or doing we shall be together and happy, a little later on, at the end of the day. That’s the best of marriage – of our sort of marriage, anyway: we can argue, we can be emotionally apart, but we know that in the end it will all be resolved and we will be close to each other again.’

‘That’s behind everything we do, now,’ I agreed. ‘There’s always that certainty, and we always have it to look forward to, even at the most unlikely times, even if we’re arguing like wild cats about the future of the universe.’

‘Even then ...’ You smiled. ‘All the books say it is bad to feel sure of each other, and especially bad to admit it, and all the books are wrong. Someone should rewrite them. It’s feeling sure – sure of a welcome, sure of love, sure of fun – that makes it so lovely.’

‘It should be less exciting.’

‘Is it?’

‘No. More. But that might be–’

‘What?’

‘That could be just the honeymoon, couldn’t it?’

‘Is that what you feel?’

Uncertain, I looked up at the balconies and the arching roof overhead, blurred with cigarette smoke. ‘Darling, I don’t know enough about it. Neither of us does, at this stage. It’s lovely now, because we don’t need any – any outside stimulus. We’re new to each other: we both like to be sure of something that we find so sweet.’

After a moment you said: ‘How far are you looking ahead?’

I took your hand again and squeezed it tightly. ‘Darling. I don’t know anything about it. I’m only guessing, and it may be bad guesswork.’

‘But you are optimistic?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I am. In fact I couldn’t be more so, and I really don’t know why I started arguing about it. I married you because–’ I stopped, and smiled, and corrected myself: ‘I mean I asked you to marry me because you were the only person I had ever met who seemed to promise not to grow less precious as time went by. And if you think that sounds too cold-blooded and calculating, there are a lot of other reasons, some of which can be put politely, others not.’

You smiled, in turn, and looked round slowly at the packed rows of people, and back again to me.

‘You have my permission to become unprintable, if you feel like it.’

A woman sitting in front of us turned round at that, and gave me a long, challenging stare, which I bore as best I could. It was clear that two acts of the play had not conditioned her either to Congreve’s language, or to his line of thought. I decided to stick to generalities.

‘I’ll go into that later,’ I said. ‘But–’

You giggled suddenly, and when I realized why, I found myself blushing – something I had not done for a good many years. That was the first time I realized that you had what might be called a masculine side to your mind. It hadn’t occurred to me before. (But perhaps I have been wrong about women all the time.) I decided that I liked it: that is, as long as it was exhibited only to me.

That ‘only to me’ reservation is a preposterous viewpoint, of course: a viewpoint so thoroughly male and illogical that it will not bear examination; but I think it is pretty well universal among people who surmount a certain dead-level of toughness and vulgarity. Almost all men enjoy sex jokes, provided they have a smattering of wit or incongruity to eke them out: they enjoy telling them (perhaps in a sterilized version) to women they know well; but they do not like women to take the lead in that respect. To most men, in fact, nothing is more embarrassing than for a woman to volunteer an indecent joke, as a matter of casual conversation, or to show herself ready to initiate that kind of session. Her ability to express herself, if necessary, as coarsely and succinctly as a man, is occasionally attractive: it can, at the right moment of exhilaration, be amusing; but she should await his lead all the time. It is rather like a man’s club, which admits women to an annexe, and enjoys having them there, but which steadfastly refuses them full membership. Granted, again, that is illogical and unfair: but it is true, and it does hold good, and any transgression stands out as a
gauche
and irretrievable blunder, unlikely to be forgotten.

That didn’t refer to us, of course – another illogicality, this time home-made. If you had a coarse, or rather a sexually candid, side of your mind, that was fine, and you could go ahead and display it for me any time: I knew that you would keep it for me, as a secret only to be confided to someone you trusted utterly. It was, of course, exciting in a subtle way: above all, it was part of being in love and being, whenever we chose, one person instead of two.

We were one person now, as the house lights darkened again, and our hands sought each other’s, and the players returned to offer us more riches, more delight.

For people like us there was only one thing to do after the curtain fell on that admirable play, and that was to have a drink at the Café Royal.

The Café Royal … You know how I feel about that place: I think you have come to share the feeling. For me, it is London – London in a certain mood of talkative exhilaration, London as a focus of intelligence, London as a refuge for people in love. You have laughed at me before for what you think is an out-of-character ‘foreign’ streak in my makeup – as if I would look more natural to you if I walked up the Rue Royale exhibiting check plus fours and a smouldering briar; but certainly, long before I met you, Paris had given me an ineradicable liking for the life which centres round the café table.

It is hard to define, that life, and it invites the charge of triviality, even of blatant idleness, when it is abused or misinterpreted; but, broadly, it propounds the idea that one can work hard and effectively, and still think that the best way of passing the time, the best introduction to or solace for that hard work, is to sit at a table at the Dôme or the Rotonde and reorganize the universe to one’s own exact taste. It is not waste of time, it is time itself come to full flower, time as an educator and a warm comfort. From it, I myself can draw every kind of feeling and every variety of entertainment. I like talking, I like drinking, I like watching people, listening to them, falling silent, quarrelling about essentials, and agreeing on trivialities. All those things are part of living, the blessed leaven that makes the whole thing tolerable. All those things you can find over a café table, stimulated by alcohol, sweetened (if you are lucky) by the knowledge that at your side is love in its most companionable form, love awaiting its natural tide and not wasting the intervals in boredom, Pekinese dogs, or chocolate creams.

I shall always think that men and women, when they are not in bed, should have their elbows on a marble-topped table, their eyes occupied sometimes with each other, sometimes with the passing scene, their voices mingling unhurriedly, and their hearts as close as the two wineglasses that stand between them. And if that is an escapist picture, let us all escape, and find it. It is preferable to almost every other twentieth-century method of employing the mind and the body, and it has ambition, greed, and the cruelty of man to man beaten into a cocked hat.

The Café Royal has always been a trifle more respectable than either of the two Rive Gauche institutions I have mentioned, but still it has a lot of the same tradition, it had the right idea … The war has changed it, put the prices up, given it a touch of formality it never had in the late nineteen thirties, when hair was worn at the alert and uniforms were practically the mark of the beast; of its former
habitués
, most are in the Services and many must be dead; but it can still give a welcome of a particular sort to those who need it. That welcome we found ready for us, when we strolled in arm-in-arm from the darkened street: of all the endearing oddments, nothing had changed – the plush seats, the crowding mirrors, the intent, articulate people, the tall glasses of lager beer – they were all there for our reassurance, forming the background of our choice or the half-hour’s relaxed contentment we had come in search of.

Except for the friendly waiters and a man who had been an advertising copy-writer before the war and was now some kind of arbiter of destiny at the Ministry of Information, there was no one there we knew: happily isolated, we took time out from everything, enjoying a kind of suspended animation which we could only afford if we did not think of the swiftly passing moments. At the back of my mind I knew that time was already running, running, running against us; but better not to count the hours, when they were so few and so dear … Memories of the play returned to us, like messages from an odd spirit-world which thoroughly approved of all we were doing: it was impossible not to feel much in love, when the mood of the evening had been pointed out to us with such wit and such elegant authority.

At one point you referred to this, interrupting some choice and authoritarian comments of mine in a way which showed that you were not attending as closely as you might have been. I did not mind.

‘Darling,’ you began.

‘M’m?’ I was sitting close beside you: your leg was touching mine, by no accidental contact, and the sleeve of your red dress made a vivid contrast with my drab khaki uniform. I was utterly content: for all the brush of the crowds round us we might have been on a desert island together.

‘Seeing
Love for Love
, and enjoying it so much – has it made a difference to what we feel for each other?’

‘Do you mean in the long run?’

‘No; just this evening – in fact, just this moment. Watching it so attentively –
living
it, in fact – was exciting in an obvious way, wasn’t it, apart from the more subtle enjoyment we had from it?’

‘Yes, it was.’ I turned towards you. ‘I think it affected us both in the same way – a sort of prompting of desire. Does that worry you?’

‘Not really. It just seems to be an odd sort of message to get from the seventeenth century. Was it meant to have that sort of effect, do you suppose?’

‘Possibly. It must have been written to attract the customers in the first place, and that brand of excitement was just as saleable then as it is today. But in any case it was an accurate account of lover-like tactics in those days, and so it was bound to affect us like that.’

You frowned. ‘I feel that somehow we ought to be beyond the range of that.’

‘More cold-blooded?’

‘No – more self-sufficient. We don’t need it, do we? We ought to be – we ought to want each other just as strongly, no matter how we’ve passed the evening or what sort of things we’ve seen. All that kind of outside stimulus – a lush tune, a lot to drink, a thin-ice novel – shouldn’t really be so potent – in fact it shouldn’t make an atom of difference one way or another, to people who are closely in love.’

‘But, sweet, we can’t live in a vacuum. These things are bound to have an effect. And we
would
be wanting each other now, this moment, whether we’d seen the play or not. Isn’t that true? You know what’s happening to us just now. My leg touching yours is exciting, isn’t it?’

‘Very.’

‘Well?’

‘But I’d rather you didn’t get the same excitement from anything else. You do, don’t you? It isn’t a private affair at all. A picture of one of those little sweater-girls would do just as well as my leg.’

‘Up to a point, yes.’

‘What point?’

‘A picture is – just a picture.’

‘And the best kind of love is three-dimensional, with central heating, huh? That’s a little hard on my morale, you know – taking up where the pin-up girls leave off. It makes it seem rather a detached sort of operation. And in any case you mightn’t be touching my leg if we hadn’t seen that play.’

I decided that this had gone far enough. ‘As God is my witness,’ I said in a loud voice, ‘I swear I should be touching your leg now, even if we’d spent the evening in two cold baths a hundred yards apart. In fact, if there weren’t so many people round me I should be – ’ I stopped, deciding that this also had gone far enough, even for the Café Royal.