May We Borrow Your Husband & Other Comedies of the Sexual Life, Page 2

  ‘The young bride,’ Tony said.

  ‘Deserted already,’ Stephen said with extreme satisfaction.

  ‘Her name is Poopy Travis, you know.’

  ‘It’s an extraordinary name to choose. She couldn’t have been christened that way, unless they found a very liberal vicar.’

  ‘He is called Peter. Of an undefined occupation. Not Army, I think, do you?’

  ‘Oh no, not Army. Something to do with land perhaps – there’s an agreeable herbal smell about him.’

  ‘You seem to know nearly all there is to know,’ I said.

  ‘We looked at their police carnet before dinner.’

  ‘I have an idea,’ Tony said, ‘that PT hardly represents their activities last night.’ He looked across the tables at the girl with an expression extraordinarily like hatred.

  ‘We were both taken,’ Stephen said, ‘by the air of innocence. One felt he was more used to horses.’

  ‘He mistook the yearnings of the rider’s crotch for something quite different.’

  Perhaps they hoped to shock me, but I don’t think it was that. I really believe they were in a state of extreme sexual excitement; they had received a coup de foudre last night on the terrace and were quite incapable of disguising their feelings. I was an excuse to talk, to speculate about the desired object. The sailor had been a stop-gap: this was the real thing. I was inclined to be amused, for what could this absurd pair hope to gain from a young man newly married to the girl who now sat there patiently waiting, wearing her beauty like an old sweater she had forgotten to change? But that was a bad simile to use: she would have been afraid to wear an old sweater, except secretly, by herself, in the playroom. She had no idea that she was one of those who can afford to disregard the fashion of their clothes. She caught my eye and, because I was so obviously English, I suppose, gave me half a timid smile. Perhaps I too would have received the coupe de foudre if I had not been thirty years older and twice married.

  Tony detected the smile. ‘A regular body-snatcher,’ he said. My breakfast and the young man arrived at the same moment before I had time to reply. As he passed the table I could feel the tension.

  ‘Cuir de Russie,’ Stephen said, quivering a nostril. ‘A mistake of inexperience.’

  The youth caught the words as he went past and turned with an astonished look to see who had spoken, and they both smiled insolently back at him as though they really believed they had the power to take him over . . .

  For the first time I felt disquiet.

  3

  Something was not going well; that was sadly obvious. The girl nearly always came down to breakfast ahead of her husband – I have an idea he spent a long time bathing and shaving and applying his Cuir de Russie. When he joined her he would give her a courteous brotherly kiss as though they had not spent the night together in the same bed. She began to have those shadows under the eyes which come from lack of sleep – for I couldn’t believe that they were ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’. Sometimes from my balcony I saw them returning from a walk – nothing, except perhaps a pair of horses, could have been more handsome. His gentleness towards her might have reassured her mother, but it made a man impatient to see him squiring her across the undangerous road, holding open doors, following a pace behind her like the husband of a princess. I longed to see some outbreak of irritation caused by the sense of satiety, but they never seemed to be in conversation when they returned from their walk, and at table I caught only the kind of phrases people use who are dining together for the sake of politeness. And yet I could swear that she loved him, even by the way she avoided watching him. There was nothing avid or starved about her; she stole her quick glances when she was quite certain that his attention was absorbed elsewhere – they were tender, anxious perhaps, quite undemanding. If one inquired after him when he wasn’t there, she glowed with the pleasure of using his name. ‘Oh, Peter overslept this morning.’ ‘Peter cut himself. He’s staunching the blood now.’ ‘Peter’s mislaid his tie. He thinks the floor-waiter has purloined it.’ Certainly she loved him; I was far less certain of what his feelings were.

  And you must imagine how all the time those other two were closing in. It was like a medieval siege: they dug their trenches and threw up their earthworks. The difference was that the besieged didn’t notice what they were at – at any rate, the girl didn’t; I don’t know about him. I longed to warn her, but what could I have said that wouldn’t have shocked her or angered her? I believe the two would have changed their floor if that would have helped to bring them closer to the fortress; they probably discussed the move together and decided against it as too overt.

  Because they knew that I could do nothing against them, they regarded me almost in the role of an ally. After all, I might be useful one day in distracting the girl’s attention – and I suppose they were not quite mistaken in that; they could tell from the way I looked at her how interested I was, and they probably calculated that my interests might in the long run coincide with theirs. It didn’t occur to them that, perhaps, I was a man with scruples. If one really wanted a thing scruples were obviously, in their eyes, out of place. There was a tortoiseshell star mirror at St Paul they were plotting to obtain for half the price demanded (I think there was an old mother who looked after the shop when her daughter was away at a boîte for women of a certain taste); naturally, therefore, when I looked at the girl, as they saw me so often do, they considered I would be ready to join in any ‘reasonable’ scheme.

  ‘When I looked at the girl’ – realize that I have made no real attempt to describe her. In writing a biography one can, of course, just insert a portrait and the affair is done: I have the prints of Lady Rochester and Mrs Barry in front of me now. But speaking as a professional novelist (for biography and reminiscence are both new forms to me), one describes a woman not so much that the reader should see her in all the cramping detail of colour and shape (how often Dickens’s elaborate portraits seem like directions to the illustrator which might well have been left out of the finished book), but to convey an emotion. Let the reader make his own image of a wife, a mistress, some passer-by ‘sweet and kind’ (the poet required no other descriptive words), if he has a fancy to. If I were to describe the girl (I can’t bring myself at this moment to write her hateful name), it would be not to convey the colour of her hair, the shape of her mouth, but to express the pleasure and the pain with which I recall her – I, the writer, the observer, the subsidiary character, what you will. But if I didn’t bother to convey them to her, why should I bother to convey them to you, hypocrite lecteur?

  How quickly those two tunnelled. I don’t think it was more than four mornings after the arrival that, when I came down to breakfast, I found they had moved their table next to the girl’s and were entertaining her in her husband’s absence. They did it very well; it was the first time I had seen her relaxed and happy – and she was happy because she was talking about Peter. Peter was agent for his father, somewhere in Hampshire – there were three thousand acres to manage. Yes, he was fond of riding and so was she. It all tumbled out – the kind of life she dreamed of having when she returned home. Stephen just dropped in a word now and then, of a rather old-fashioned courteous interest, to keep her going. Apparently he had once decorated some hall in their neighbourhood and knew the names of some people Peter knew – Winstanley, I think – and that gave her immense confidence.

  ‘He’s one of Peter’s best friends,’ she said, and the two flickered their eyes at each other like lizards’ tongues.

  ‘Come and join us, William,’ Stephen said, but only when he had noticed that I was within earshot. ‘You know Mrs Travis?’

  How could I refuse to sit at their table? And yet in doing so I seemed to become an ally.

  ‘Not the William Harris?’ the girl asked. It was a phrase which I hated, and yet she transformed even that, with her air of innocence. For she had a capacity to make everything new: Antibes became a discovery and we were the first foreigner
s to have made it. When she said, ‘Of course, I’m afraid I haven’t actually read any of your books,’ I heard the over-familiar remark for the first time; it even seemed to me a proof of her honesty – I nearly wrote her virginal honesty. ‘You must know an awful lot about people,’ she said, and again I read into the banality of the remark an appeal – for help against whom, those two or the husband who at that moment appeared on the terrace? He had the same nervous air as she, even the same shadows under the lids, so that they might have been taken by a stranger, as I wrote before, for brother and sister. He hesitated a moment when he saw all of us there and she called across to him, ‘Come and meet these nice people, darling.’ He didn’t look any too pleased, but he sat glumly down and asked whether the coffee was still hot.

  ‘I’ll order some more, darling. They know the Winstanleys, and this is the William Harris.’

  He looked at me blankly; I think he was wondering if I had anything to do with tweeds.

  ‘I hear you like horses,’ Stephen said, ‘and I was wondering whether you and your wife would come to lunch with us at Cagnes on Saturday. That’s tomorrow, isn’t it? There’s a very good racecourse at Cagnes . . .’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said dubiously, looking to his wife for a clue.

  ‘But, darling, of course we must go. You’d love it.’

  His face cleared instantly. I really believe he had been troubled by a social scruple: the question whether one accepts invitations on a honeymoon. ‘It’s very good of you,’ he said, ‘Mr . . .’

  ‘Let’s start as we mean to go on. I’m Stephen and this is Tony.’

  ‘I’m Peter.’ He added a trifle gloomily, ‘And this is Poopy.’

  ‘Tony, you take Poopy in the Sprite, and Peter and I will go by autobus.’ (I had the impression, and I think Tony had too, that Stephen had gained a point.)

  ‘You’ll come too, Mr Harris?’ the girl asked, using my surname as though she wished to emphasize the difference between me and them.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t. I’m working against time.’

  I watched them that evening from my balcony as they returned from Cagnes and, hearing the way they all laughed together, I thought, ‘The enemy are within the citadel: it’s only a question of time.’ A lot of time, because they proceeded very carefully, those two. There was no question of a quick grab which I suspect had caused the contusion in Corsica.

  4

  It became a regular habit with the two of them to entertain the girl during her solitary breakfast before her husband arrived. I never sat at their table again, but scraps of the conversation would come over to me, and it seemed to me that she was never quite so cheerful again. Even the sense of novelty had gone. I heard her say once, ‘There’s so little to do here,’ and it struck me as an odd observation for a honeymooner to make.

  Then one evening I found her in tears outside the Musée Grimaldi. I had been fetching my papers, and, as my habit was, I made a round by the Place Nationale with the pillar erected in 1819 to celebrate – a remarkable paradox – the loyalty of Antibes to the monarchy and her resistance to les Troupes Etrangères, who were seeking to re-establish the monarchy. Then, according to rule, I went on by the market and the old port and Lou-Lou’s restaurant up the ramp towards the cathedral and the Musée, and there in the grey evening light, before the street-lamps came on, I found her crying under the cliff of the château.

  I noticed too late what she was at or I wouldn’t have said, ‘Good evening, Mrs Travis.’ She jumped a little as she turned and dropped her handkerchief, and when I picked it up I found it soaked with tears – it was like holding a small drowned animal in my hand. I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ meaning that I was sorry to have startled her, but she took it in quite another sense. She said, ‘Oh, I’m being silly, that’s all. It’s just a mood. Everybody has moods, don’t they?’

  ‘Where’s Peter?’

  ‘He’s in the museum with Stephen and Tony looking at the Picassos. I don’t understand them a bit.’

  ‘That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people don’t.’

  ‘But Peter doesn’t understand them either. I know he doesn’t. He’s just pretending to be interested.’

  ‘Oh well . . .’

  ‘And it’s not that either. I pretended for a time too, to please Stephen. But he’s pretending just to get away from me.’

  ‘You are imagining things.’

  Punctually at five o’clock the phare lit up, but it was still too light to see the beam.

  I said, ‘The museum will be closing now.’

  ‘Walk back with me to the hotel.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to wait for Peter?’

  ‘I don’t smell, do I?’ she asked miserably.

  ‘Well, there’s a trace of Arpège. I’ve always liked Arpège.’

  ‘How terribly experienced you sound.’

  ‘Not really. It’s just that my first wife used to buy Arpège.’

  We began walking back, and the mistral bit our ears and gave her an excuse when the time came for the reddened eyes.

  She said, ‘I think Antibes so sad and grey.’

  ‘I thought you enjoyed it here.’

  ‘Oh, for a day or two.’

  ‘Why not go home?’

  ‘It would look odd, wouldn’t it, returning early from a honeymoon?’

  ‘Or go on to Rome – or somewhere. You can get a plane to most places from Nice.’

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference,’ she said. ‘It’s not the place that’s wrong, it’s me.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He’s not happy with me. It’s as simple as that.’

  She stopped opposite one of the little rock houses by the ramparts. Washing hung down over the street below and there was a cold-looking canary in a cage.

  ‘You said yourself . . . a mood . . .’

  ‘It’s not his fault,’ she said. ‘It’s me. I expect it seems very stupid to you, but I never slept with anyone before I married.’ She gulped miserably at the canary.

  ‘And Peter?’

  ‘He’s terribly sensitive,’ she said, and added quickly, ‘That’s a good quality. I wouldn’t have fallen in love with him if he hadn’t been.’

  ‘If I were you, I’d take him home – as quickly as possible.’ I couldn’t help the words sounding sinister, but she hardly heard them. She was listening to the voices that came nearer down the ramparts – to Stephen’s gay laugh. ‘They’re very sweet,’ she said. ‘I’m glad he’s found friends.’

  How could I say that they were seducing Peter before her eyes? And in any case wasn’t her mistake already irretrievable? Those were two of the questions which haunted the hours, dreary for a solitary man, of the middle afternoon when work is finished and the exhilaration of the wine at lunch, and the time for the first drink has not yet come and the winter heating is at its feeblest. Had she no idea of the nature of the young man she had married? Had he taken her on as a blind or as a last desperate throw for normality? I couldn’t bring myself to believe that. There was a sort of innocence about the boy which seemed to justify her love, and I preferred to think that he was not yet fully formed, that he had married honestly and it was only now that he found himself on the brink of a different experience. And yet if that were the case the comedy was all the crueller. Would everything have gone normally well if some conjunction of the planets had not crossed their honeymoon with that hungry pair of hunters?

  I longed to speak out, and in the end I did speak, but not, so it happened, to her. I was going to my room and the door of one of theirs was open and I heard again Stephen’s laugh – a kind of laugh which is sometimes with unintentional irony called infectious; it maddened me. I knocked and went in. Tony was stretched on a double bed and Stephen was ‘doing’ his hair, holding a brush in each hand and meticulously arranging the grey waves on either side. The dressing-table had as many pots on it as a woman’s.

  ‘You really mean he told you that?’ Tony was saying. ‘Wh
y, how are you, William? Come in. Our young friend has been confiding in Stephen. Such really fascinating things.’

  ‘Which of your young friends?’ I asked.

  ‘Why, Peter, of course. Who else? The secrets of married life.’

  ‘I thought it might have been your sailor.’

  ‘Naughty!’ Tony said. ‘But touché too, of course.’

  ‘I wish you’d leave Peter alone.’

  ‘I don’t think he’d like that,’ Stephen said. ‘You can see that he hasn’t quite the right tastes for this sort of honeymoon.’

  ‘Now you happen to like women, William,’ Tony said. ‘Why not go after the girl? It’s a grand opportunity. She’s not getting what I believe is vulgarly called her greens.’ Of the two he was easily the more brutal. I wanted to hit him, but this is not the century for that kind of romantic gesture, and anyway he was stretched out flat upon the bed. I said feebly enough – I ought to have known better than to have entered into a debate with those two – ‘She happens to be in love with him.’

  ‘I think Tony is right and she would find more satisfaction with you, William dear,’ Stephen said, giving a last flick to the hair over his right ear – the contusion was quite gone now. ‘From what Peter has said to me, I think you’d be doing a favour to both of them.’

  ‘Tell him what Peter said, Stephen.’

  ‘He said that from the very first there was a kind of hungry femininity about her which he found frightening and repulsive. Poor boy – he was really trapped into this business of marriage. His father wanted heirs – he breeds horses too, and then her mother – there’s quite a lot of lucre with that lot. I don’t think he had any idea of – of the Shape of Things to Come.’ Stephen shuddered into the glass and then regarded himself with satisfaction.

  Even today I have to believe for my own peace of mind that the young man had not really said those monstrous things. I believe, and hope, that the words were put into his mouth by that cunning dramatizer, but there is little comfort in the thought, for Stephen’s inventions were always true to character. He even saw through my apparent indifference to the girl and realized that Tony and he had gone too far; it would suit their purpose, if I were driven to the wrong kind of action, or if, by their crudities, I lost my interest in Poopy.