The Rules of Engagement (21 page)

“
Well, you could have had the cigarette.
”

“
I don't smoke,
”
I said sadly.
“
Though I suppose I could always take it
up.
”

“
There are places where you can eat that sort of
food all day, if you really want to. I
don't suppose you're serious. Are you trying
to shock me?
”

“
Possibly, although there's no reason why I
should want to. Anyway, you're far too
easily shocked. You always were.
”

This made it easy for one or other of us to hark
back to the old days, to ask,
“
Do you remember
so-and-so?
”
or
“
What happened to such-and-such?
”
Here I should be handing the advantage back
to Betsy, who had faithfully kept in touch with
our old friends. They might now have to go, as she
isolated herself in the interest of maximum
availability. She too would in time discover the
limits of this exclusivity, and for a moment I
felt genuine indignation on her behalf.

“
I think it's I who have shocked you,
”
she
said.

“
Not really.
”
This was true, though it is
sometimes difficult to measure the extent of shock.
“
Just be sure to look after yourself, your own part in
this, I mean. However it turns out. Don't let
yourself be monopolized by the Fairlies. They're
a brutal couple.
”

“
Yes,
”
she said.
“
I know.
”

After that we smiled at each other, and embraced
in good faith.

“
Come to me next time. For lunch, I mean.
Come any time. I'm always at home, for the time
being, anyway. Until Christmas. After that I
don't know.
”

“
I'd love to. It made a difference, your
being there. After Daniel, I mean, and my moving
into the flat. Sometimes I wake up and wonder where
I am.
”

“
Everybody does that.
”

“
Do they?
”
She looked surprised.
“
And
I do get frightened sometimes. That's why I've
always been so grateful for company.
”

That night I had a dream so vivid that when I
woke I wondered whether or not a real event had
taken place, or if it was not a dream but a
memory that I had somehow mislaid. It took
place in a dingy deserted restaurant, and I
assumed it was too early for other patrons to have
arrived. Edmund was seated at the only occupied
table, and he was as I remembered him, in an
open-necked shirt, a discarded newspaper beside
him. As I approached he looked up, his
expression abstracted. I knew, even in the
dream, that any hesitation in a greeting was
significant, that it might have meant inattention,
even reluctance. So clear was this that I could even
see the level of coffee in his cup, see the
pattern on the cup itself. He looked at me,
puzzled, then said,
“
We make a great
couple.
”
In a second his face exploded
into joy as he saw Betsy approaching behind me.
She was dressed in a loose grey sweater and
trousers, the sort of clothes she never wore.
He got up to welcome her, and as he did so
her upper lip lifted into an answering smile that
hinted at intimacy. This dream had no sequel:
the moment remained frozen, as did their smiles,
his joyous, hers open but with a hint of excuse, as
if seeking my indulgence. I was simply an
observer, and with some remaining instinct of
self-preservation I walked past them and sat
down at another table. My instinct was to be
angry, at their discourtesy if nothing else, and
this I managed for the second that my dreaming mind
had decreed. Then, still in the dream, my anger
gave way to a terrible dismay as I perceived the
truth of their involvement, the joy on Edmund's
face, the shy disclosure on hers.
“
We make
a great couple,
”
he had said, and this remark
stayed with me. There was no turning back from this knowledge,
which I had produced for my own enlightenment. I
had witnessed a love affair, which had perhaps been
going on for some time, and of which I had had no warning
until it had been demonstrated, made
manifest to my unsuspecting but so irrelevant
self.

The horror of this dream was still with me when I
woke, and it was only gradually, in the course of a
normal morning, that I managed to persuade myself
that it was in fact only a dream and not a real
encounter. It seemed a matter of my continued
existence, of life itself, that I survey
what I knew of Betsy and discount the phantoms
with which the dream had presented me. That there was a
connection between them I already knew: Betsy had
confessed as much. That there might be true feeling
involved was something I had contrived to ignore. As
the cold grey day wore on I persuaded myself
that what I knew of both of them was my only
guarantee of sanity. Edmund's curiosity,
Betsy's sincerity could only result in a
mismatch which would bring one or the other of them
to grief. I willed on him the kind of punishment
he had shown no signs of receiving: the wicked again,
flourishing like the green bay tree. I urged on
him baldness, impotence, gout, also absent, or
at least not yet present. He would extricate
himself the moment he felt endangered: that I also
knew. It was difficult to imagine Betsy's
reaction when that happened. No doubt she would
blame herself. And my role was simply to watch,
as I had done in the dream, seated alone at
another table, my ruffled feelings giving way to the
purest despair.

While I might have predicted that Betsy would
fall under Edmund's spell, or even that she would
devote herself to Constance, I was not prepared for her
love for their children, which was absolutely genuine and not
troubled by conflicting loyalties.
“
They're so
beautiful,
”
she said on the telephone when she
called to wish me a happy Christmas. Though
I thought the word unnecessarily emotive, I
had to concede that they were indeed beautiful. This I had
been able to see for myself when Digby and I had
visited their house: shouts and protestations had
issued from behind a closed door, to materialize
into three ethereal presences when they were summoned
to greet the guests. The girls had been fair,
like Edmund, while the boy was dark, like his mother,
and
with
a hint of her wolfish grin. I had seen that in
time the boy, David, would eclipse his father and I
was sorry that I should not be able to witness the
process, for even at the time I read volumes
into Edmund's pride and exasperation as he
reproached the boy for some undisclosed
misdemeanour, one that had preceded our appearance
on the scene. In his eyes I saw a wonder,
almost an admiration for the boy's loose
limbs, his unfettered movements. In that glance,
to which the boy did not respond, keeping his head
obstinately lowered, Edmund seemed to perceive that
at some point he would grow old, be replaced, and
that his famed sexual potency would pass to the boy,
with his mother's approval.

Constance, in fact, had given every sign that she
would welcome this moment, had treated the boy as an
adult, had given full approval to his
latent anarchy, and had dismissed him lightly after
hearing his plans for the evening. They were all on their
way out, the girls to one party, the boy to another.
Privileged children, they were never at a loss for
company or entertainment. Though the girls were
beautiful, with their long fair hair and narrow
features, it was the boy who captured the
attention. Edmund's eyes had followed him as
he left the room. Constance, whose victory was so
clearly in sight, merely smiled pleasantly,
savouring the moment of her ascendancy.
“
Don't
be late,
”
called Edmund, unwilling to see
them go. But they had gone, nudging each other
exuberantly, all movement suddenly restored.

They had been young then, the girls fifteen, the
boy nearly twelve. Now they would all be
adolescents, with even more exciting prospects.
Betsy herself, in that same telephone call,
seemed excited herself, at this new sign that the
Fairlies had in their gift even more rewarding
companionship than that which she already took for
granted. For she had, as it were, renewed her
lease with the Fairlies by making herself useful in the
matter of the children, performing with alacrity those small
tasks which might otherwise have fallen to the
housekeeper, the renewal of their school clothes,
the occasional visit to the dentist, the purchase of
birthday presents for their friends, and perhaps most of
all the confidences of the two girls, Julia and
Isabella, who appeared to regard her as their
governess. On holiday from their prestigious
schools, they were, to her fond eyes, already more
emancipated than she had thought permissible.

Both girls had boyfriends, whom they discussed
without for a moment doubting their own appeal, both could
drive and had been promised cars, both were already
familiar with fashionable bars and restaurants.
On the strength of her long sojourn in Paris
Betsy's stock was high. Although with unwavering
instinct they perceived her to be quite
naïve
, they were
willing to give her credit in the matter
of personal appearance, and listened avidly to her
largely irrelevant advice. For a time they
accepted her as part of the household, and, she said,
felt genuine affection for her to which she had the wit
to respond with moderation. She seemed happy, and
I could only hope that her hero-worship of
Edmund and Constance, differentiated but ardent in
both cases, would cool and be replaced by a quite
different and more justified love for their children.
This was apparent in her happy voice on the
telephone, as she told me that she had been
invited to the Fairlies' on Christmas Day for
lunch, or was it dinner? whatever that punitive
meal was called, and that she would contact me after the
holidays when we must catch up on one another's
news. When I put down the receiver, my own
holidays obstinately not taking shape, I
wondered if this late avatar of family
happiness were not feeding Betsy's particular
addiction. I could see only too clearly that
both Edmund and Constance had found an acceptable
way of emphasizing her status as an acolyte.

This may have served Constance's purposes, for
Constance had always considered Betsy a
subordinate who had been drafted into her home
by a process which it would not have taken her long
to understand. Edmund, whose feelings in the matter were
unknown to me, apart from the evidence of that horrifying
dream, the details of which were still vivid in my
mind, might regard Betsy's position as the
least worst thing to come out of their adventure. He
may have had genuine feeling for her, but, seeing her
with his children, had painlessly removed her to the
background. This may have been inadvertent.
Unlike his other loves, Edmund's love for his
children was fierce; not only were they miraculous,
unique, they did not appear to find him wanting.

And, less fortunately for Betsy, the beauty
of the girls put her own looks into perspective.
She had always been a pretty girl, but she was
no longer a girl. We were both approaching the
age at which a woman knows she will never have a child.
The implications of this were, I thought, more apparent
in Betsy's case than in mine. My small
closed face had undoubtedly not benefited from the
passage of time, but I could detect no major
changes, perhaps because I was not looking for any.
Whereas Betsy's fairness compared unfavourably
with that of the girls, which was flawless. Despite her
eagerness on the telephone she complained
of tiredness, and the effects of fatigue on a
fair complexion are well-known. I urged her
to reserve some time for herself, but she protested that there
would be no opportunity to do so, as she had
promised to help with various arrangements: the party
on Christmas Eve, the open house on Boxing
Day, and then seeing Constance and the children off to Scotland
for the rest of the holiday, after which she promised to be
in touch.

There was something vaguely worrying in all this
zeal. I could imagine, though she did not appear
to do so, that she had been relegated in some way.
Why else did they consent to her continued presence
unless it had become completely anodyne, without
greater significance? And although she played her part
with enthusiasm it worried me that she had failed
to perceive the mechanism at play. Again, I had
no means of knowing Edmund's feelings, nor did
I intend to give her the opportunity of confiding
in me. I was still sore at what I saw as his
rejection, for he had not sought so much as a conversation
with me, such as I took for granted before, during,
and, perhaps more significantly, after any love
affair. He had not even indicated that he would be
absent, nor for how long: his absence alone
spoke for him. Though I was willing to accept that
he had been touched by Betsy's
naïve
t
é
, and
perhaps more, it did not take me long to work out that
Constance's will would prevail in this matter, that it was
her own fine instinct that had engineered an outcome
to a situation perhaps more threatening than most, and that by the
terms of their contract he would be honour bound
to observe it. Nor need it constrain him unduly:
he was still free to visit Betsy, though perhaps by now
he was able to cast a more critical eye on her
surroundings. Infinitely more practised than she
could ever be, he would wonder why she had not
intuited change, would decide that at some point
he would explain himself to her, but that before that point was
reached he might as well take advantage of a
not unsatisfactory arrangement. And she loved
his children: he gave her credit for that. He may
even have thought in terms of the end of the holidays, when
family intimacy would return to normal, either with
or without additions. When the children went back
to school changes would take place naturally;
there would be no need for explanations. And in any
event he knew where she was, should he ever feel
the need to see her.

All this was supposition on my part,
but I thought I knew him well enough to work out what
might have been on his mind. There was always the
terrifying possibility that his feeling for her was
genuine, but I had almost managed to convince myself that
I had no real evidence for this. It was painful for
me to deny myself information that I could have come by had I
had the intelligence to question Betsy without revealing
anything of my recent history. But I was not
clever enough to be able to do that, and besides it seemed to me
a morally distasteful thing to do. Why I was so
scrupulous when so many other barriers had fallen
I did not quite know. What I did know was that a
relatively clear conscience, such as I was able
to admit to now, gave me a better night's
sleep. Although a part of me sought to gain eager
admittance to what was after all a private affair
I could not trust myself to withstand certain revelations,
certain details that might have tormented me through
untold quiet nights. All women compare
themselves, in this situation, as I dare say men do:
one longs to know how others behave, yet at the
same time one evades the knowledge. Besides, I had no
doubt that Betsy would be happy to unburden herself.
It was only with the greatest difficulty that she had
refrained so far, and I put down to the fact that
we had been children together that we had never exchanged the
dreadful confidences that women are supposed, indeed
entitled, to share. We understood that we were bound
to remain on the right side of defensible behaviour,
whether it suited us to do so or not.

Besides, I had no desire for further contact
with Edmund, either directly or by proxy. A
kind of distaste had intervened, not primarily over
my own behaviour but over his. I reminded myself
that it was not his character that had attracted me: now I
saw this as mildly meretricious. But to apply
moral considerations to someone so profoundly and so
gracefully amoral was misconceived.
Nevertheless I took care never to be in his orbit,
even by accident. That meant avoiding his street or
the flat where we used to meet, until I
reflected that he might have no use for this since
he had a reason for going straight home with
Betsy and thus economizing on both time and
effort. I did not gloss over my own bad
behaviour, but I viewed it more calmly. I had
not been seduced against my will, but had been
genuinely happy with what had been offered. This had
been a rapture rather than a simple love
affair, as I had known at the time: the
gods, perhaps, reminding humans that it was they who were
in control. Or maybe I was not made for
moderate friendships. I even wondered whether I
had not retrieved a kind of authenticity with
Edmund that I had been in danger of losing. My
marriage was by all accounts successful, but it was
largely an affair of affection and good manners.
I was bound by those standards out of a loyalty
to Digby, but I remembered all too clearly
the sheer excitement of leaving such constraints behind.
Infatuation seemed to me a perfectly reasonable
condition. Yet I knew it was no longer something
I need consider, that it had passed to others, or rather
to another, and that I must avoid all knowledge of it if
I were not to succumb, perhaps more fatally, another time.