The Rules of Engagement (5 page)

My mother embarked on what promised to be an
endless series of cruises and my father decamped
to an alternative domestic arrangement in
Crouch End. I was left alone with my new
husband, whom I continued to find perfectly
agreeable though in some ways disconcerting. Given
his age he was rather more old-fashioned than I was,
and proved to be fussy about his personal comfort,
seeming to view his wife largely as an adjunct
to what was already a well-regulated life, his
business taking priority over everything else. I
had had a foretaste of this in Venice.
Sitting on the steps of the Redentore while
Digby took a nap in the hotel, I told
myself that I was free to make plans of my own in
the fairly long intervals when he was absent, either
physically or mentally, but I had no clear
idea what these might be. Reading the papers I
could not help but be aware of the enormous strides
women were making; they were vocal and radical in a
way I knew I could never be, but there was a
discontent, even among the most liberated, that I
felt summoned to share. I was still young, young enough
to wish for something fiercer than the life for which I had
settled, or to which I had succumbed.

The attractions that this marriage had offered did
not fade, but they receded. When Digby came
home in the evenings he was tired (he seemed to me
inordinately tired) and given to airing his business
concerns.
“
But you don't want to hear about this,
”
he would say.
“
Tell me about your day. What have
you been doing?
”
Or he would ask me whether I
would prefer Paris or Rome for a spring break.
I respected his attempts to entertain me and
summoned up an enthusiasm I did not feel.
Or he would suggest a dinner party, again of an
old-fashioned type, to which the same people always
came, friends of his with whom I strove to find something
in common. These people, the Johnsons, the
Fairlies, seemed to know more about my husband than
I did. They never failed to congratulate me
on my cooking, and then picked up the conversation where
it had left off during my absence in the kitchen.
My role was a subordinate one. Fortunately
my reserves of silence were sufficient to enable me
to repress any awareness of boredom. But it was
there: I felt it, and I knew that I must be on
my guard.

In the daytime, when Digby was at his office,
I walked, though I hardly saw my
surroundings, those dull, almost handsome streets and
squares, where I might encounter a neighbour, on
the same shopping expedition designed to furnish a
quiet afternoon. After an unexpectedly radiant
February the weather had turned cold and cloudy;
there was no pleasure in these walks but they were my
harmless way of damping down any incipient
dissatisfaction that I might have felt. I was
aware of the paradigm shift between my life in
Paris and my life in London, which might
prove to be as uneventful in the future as it was
in the present. In Paris, despite the
solitude, I had been aware of my strengths:
I had been mature then in a way that now
threatened to desert me. In my empty stoical
days, knowing myself to be excluded from more strenuous
pleasures, I had at least formed a notion of how
life might be, whether or not I managed
to negotiate some sort of admission to it. I had
been unawakened but incurious, thinking it better
to concentrate my attention on the display at a
flower stall or the smells of coffee and wine
issuing from a
café
. There was a democratic
illusion of participation that I could no longer find
in my new surroundings, which were, after all, not so
very new. In fact part of the problem may have had to do
with a sense of having been returned to the scenes of
my childhood and adolescence after a brief foray
into adulthood. For the sense of exile I had
experienced in Paris had a maturity about it which
I had begun to recognize at the time: perhaps
adulthood is a sense of exile, or rather that in
exile we are obliged to act as adults.

Here in London, wandering by the river in a cold
wind, and knowing that my time was my own until my
husband returned and asked me what was for dinner,
I could no longer summon any enthusiasm for my
preparations, though these were as careful as ever. Throughout
that spring I settled into a sort of benign
numbness which I took to be contentment, or rather which I
willed on myself. I too began to work up an
enthusiasm for distant places, and presented
Digby with travel brochures and books from the
library which illustrated the beauties of Apulia
or Turkey or Corfu. These served as
conversational fare, and vague plans were made
to visit all or any of these places. At the
same time, as soon as the table had been cleared,
I knew that Digby would take the evening paper
into the other room, switch on the television, and
fall asleep. He slept heavily, more
heavily than I did, and seemed unable to invest
any energy into keeping awake. I was careful not
to disturb him; I laid aside the travel
brochures and picked up a novel, Vanity
Fair or The Professor. I thought that I
might seek out a few evening classes, educate
myself in something like the Victorian novel. Those
I had read were a source of endless fascination.
How brave the female characters were! How noble or
resolute the men! I told myself that that was why
novels were written, to give ordinary men
and women a better idea of themselves, and, more
important, to show how fate might take a hand
even when the given circumstances appeared
to militate against a significant outcome.

On my walks I had noticed a school
building which advertised some sort of programme
of tuition for adults, and I had even lingered by the
school gates, suddenly homesick for a much
earlier time. To be part of an attentive group
once again seemed to promise companionship of a
kind in which I knew myself to be lacking. If this were
regression, I did not much care. It would be part
of the general regression signified by my obedient
childlike wifeliness. Even I knew that the
submissiveness of those Victorian heroines had
nothing to do with weakness; on the contrary they were
fearless, those women, as perhaps I had once been,
even in Paris, where there was no one to mark my
heroism. There was a lesson there for me. I
mentioned the idea of evening classes to Digby, but
he demurred.
“
I like to see you here when I get
home,
”
he said.
“
I look forward to it all the
afternoon.
”

It was true that he was an attentive husband.
I was not able at the time to evaluate the limits of
normal attentiveness before it spilled over
into watchfulness. He needed to know where I was at
all times of the day; I knew that even if I
achieved his permission to attend evening classes
he would insist on driving me to the school and no
doubt be waiting for me afterwards. He did not quite
believe me when I told him that I had spent the
afternoon walking, and once I had even caught sight
of the car which must have been following me. Though I
did not know this at the time, there were moves at the
office to demote him from his present functions and
to make him some sort of honorary chairman. This
enabled him to spend hours away from his desk, so that
on certain afternoons we might even have been circling
one another on our solitary excursions. When
I became aware of this it struck me as
exceedingly odd, even bizarre, but I gave no
sign that I had noticed this behaviour. I knew
that he was conscious of the discrepancy in our ages,
that he feared and distrusted all the feminist
propaganda which was so widespread at the time, and that
in an unacknowledged part of his mind he even feared
that I might seek pleasure elsewhere and betray
him. I think that is what men most fear:
betrayal. Therefore I made no mention
of the fact that I had seen the car, merely
welcomed him when he came home in the evening after
what might have been a normal day. For we both
maintained the fiction that he was returning from the
office just like any other husband. I got used
to this, but it made me uncomfortable.

He loved me. That was what had always
impressed me. He loved me rather too much, in
ways I could hardly accommodate. He was
occasionally impotent, which increased his vigilance.
Neither of us alluded to this; I knew that any such
allusion would be a mortal affront to my husband,
whose ardour was growing more desperate. Our nights,
in that dark bedroom, were often silent, though not
restful. I assumed that Digby had known
physical passion for his first wife, had maybe not
envisaged a resumption of it, but had substituted
some form of ideal domesticity as a realistic
alternative. He made occasional attempts
to appear younger than his age, which was the age of
retirement for most pursuits, and then gave up,
and took a certain pleasure in giving up,
disappearing with his newspaper, watching television
until he dozed off, while I resignedly
read my book and began to awaken to a sense of
bewilderment, of dissatisfaction, even of
resentment. Only in two different circumstances
did Digby reveal a more interesting side to his
nature. One was his attitude at our usual
monthly dinner parties with the Johnsons, the
Fairlies, when he would be genial, hospitable,
generally admirable. The other, unfortunately, was
in the course of those secret afternoons, when, out of the
corner of my eye, I could see the car disappearing
round a corner as I approached from the other end
of a quiet street, with no sign of greeting or
of recognition from either of us. This was Digby's
hidden self, compounded of anxiety and
suspicion. He seemed to be preparing himself for
my eventual desertion. In this he was more
prescient than I was. I never did desert
him, but I think the idea was in his mind most
urgently as we circled each other in the
unsuspecting afternoons. His only reference to these
activities was oblique and neutral.
“
I
don't want you to feel lonely when I'm at the
office,
”
he would say, as if he had verified
my solitude, seen it with his own eyes.
“
Why
don't you ask a friend round? One of your old
friends?
”
I knew he meant safe
schoolgirl friends.
“
It would be company for you.
”
But I had no friends. My neighbours in
Melton Court were stately large-bosomed
widows, or so they seemed to me; there was no
possibility of my inventing a friendship with any of
them. Nor were the Johnsons and the Fairlies
any more approachable, though Digby thought them
suitable companions for me. They were his friends. He
had been at school with Alan Johnson, while
Fairlie was his broker. Their unliberated
wives were largely silent; they had learned their
place. Margaret Johnson was always kind to me,
complimenting me on the poached salmon or the
navarin of lamb, and I responded to her kindness
in a numb fashion, having no chance to respond
in any other way. Constance Fairlie was rather
different, and, I suspected, not kind at all.
Small, dark, and sardonic, she was tacitly
given permission to interrupt her husband, to demand
attention, to wait with a cigarette between her long
fingers until he lit it for her, and to view me with
an amused insistence which seemed to me to hold little
indulgence. I may have had hopes of the
Fairlies, largely on account of their
Victorian names, Constance and Edmund, which I
thought sufficient pretext for a discussion of
Middlemarch or Pendennis, but when I
ventured a perhaps too hopeful introductory
remark to this effect, no notice was taken of it and
I was made to feel foolish. Constance Fairlie
considered me lazily through the smoke of her
cigarette before informing her husband that they must not be
late. She was rude, with the rudeness of a moneyed
woman who was wealthier than her husband. Even
though I was, I thought, better-looking, and with no
stain on my conscience apart from that unhappy
marital secrecy to which I should never refer, I
felt diminished by comparison and more than ever
conscious of my subordinate status. It
occurred to me that she was fortunate in having
Edmund for a husband, for even in my dormant
state I could see that he was attractive. On
one of these occasions I stole a longer look at
him and conceded that he was almost handsome. But my gaze
was objective, dispassionate. Surveying the
wreck of the table as my guests moved into the
drawing-room for coffee I concluded that the evening
had gone well, as always, but that I still had no
friends, more, that I was actively lonely, but so
well-trained that I gave no sign of this
and at times was hardly aware of it myself.