‘A course?’
‘Yes, now I don’t have the children buzzing around me like a swarm of bees I think I might be capable of some form of mental
activity. I’ve always looked down on summer courses, but that was probably because I knew I didn’t have the time or the energy
to face them. However right now I do have the time and I ought to have the energy so I’m going to make the effort. I think
it’s time I found out just how stupid and addled by martinis my brain really is.’
‘Okay,’ said Scott.
I waited but he said nothing else. I wondered if he were upset, if he could possibly be one of those men who resented their
wives pursuing any activity outside the home, but he seemed tranquil and unconcerned. It then occurred to me that this was
exactly why his reaction was so off-key: he was unconcerned. What I did with my time was of no importance to him so long as
I was available when he needed me.
Reminding myself that he was unaccustomed to sharing his life with anyone, I tried not to be hurt. ‘Well, you might show some
interest!’ I protested with a smile. ‘I shall be interested in your work, so why shouldn’t you be interested in mine?’
‘Oh, I never talk about my work,’ said Scott. ‘Once I leave the office, that’s that. The last thing I’ll ever want to do when
I come home at night is tell you what I’ve been doing all day.’
I was so taken aback that I couldn’t at first decide what to say. Neither Sam nor Sebastian had regaled me with the details
of issues, bids, mergers and all the other delights of investment banking; it had been left to my father, confiding in me
through many an evening
during the past three years, to give me that kind of information about the world where my husbands had spent so much of their
lives, but Sebastian had been full of amusing anecdotes about the mundane side of office life, and Sam had talked interminably
about the importance of the people he advised. Sometimes I had been interested, sometimes I had been bored but always I had
been aware that they had been making some attempt, no matter how limited, to share with me the huge segment of their lives
from which I was excluded. The thought of Scott living an existence to which I had no access was like pulling the drapes on
a sunny morning only to find that the window had been walled up during the night.
‘I probably know more about banking than you think I do,’ I said hesitantly at last. ‘And I enjoy following the stock market.’
‘Great,’ said Scott. ‘That kind of small talk will come in useful when I have to give these goddamned dinner-parties. I hope
you won’t find them too boring.’
There seemed to be nothing else to do but drop the subject. Taking a sip of coffee I looked vaguely around the patio as I
tried to think of another topic of conversation. It was cool in the garden, probably no more than sixty-five degrees, but
the lack of humidity was so pleasant that I didn’t miss the heat of New York. Huge white clouds billowed across the midsummer
sky, little English robins sang fleetingly from the top of the mellow brick wall and beyond the white wrought-iron table where
we were sitting the miniature roses glowed scarlet in their tubs. It was a Saturday morning.
‘I’ve never cared much for London,’ I said at last, ‘but I can see the attraction of the serene leisurely English way of life.
Kevin certainly seems very happy here … By the way, Kevin wants us to have dinner with him. Is that okay?’
Scott shrugged. ‘If he can make the effort to invite me I guess I can make the effort to go.’
This was hardly encouraging. ‘Maybe I’ll call him and suggest he and I have lunch
à deux
.’
‘That would probably be better, yes.’
I decided that this would be the wrong moment to mention Sebastian. Abruptly I began to talk of our afternoon plans to see
my mother, now happily installed in a luxurious south-coast hotel which catered for convalescents. I had decided to sail home
to New York with her at the end of August.
‘My mother’s taken to you in a big way!’ I said smiling at him. ‘She’s thrilled we’re going to be spending the summer together
… Scott, there won’t be any difficulty, will there, about me being here like this?
I know we’re in so-called Swinging London, but will all those pokerfaced businessmen from the City and their impeccably dressed
wives approve of us living together without the blessing of the Church of England?’
‘The important thing is that you must never attempt to explain just what you’re doing here – never even refer to it. The British
can accept almost anything from a couple who have the good taste to behave like hermaphrodites.’
We laughed.
‘And besides,’ said Scott, ‘we’re not going to spend all our time in London surrounded by businessmen and their wives. I want
to take you down to Mallingham to see Elfrida. You’ve never been to Mallingham, have you? It’s an interesting place. I’m sure
you’d like it.’
I was silent. Mallingham was the one place I never wanted to visit. Mallingham was where Steve Sullivan was buried and where
there was a memorial commemorating Scott’s brother Tony. Mallingham represented the past which was still trying to prise Scott
apart from the future he deserved. Mallingham summed up in one word everything which threatened our happiness. I wanted to
keep it at arm’s length.
‘What’s so special about Mallingham?’ I said, trying not to sound hostile.
‘The time there is time out of mind.’
There was a pause. I groped for a reply. I had a sudden picture of our two minds forming two circles which touched but never
intersected.
‘I’m not sure what you mean by that,’ I said.
He looked apologetic, as if he had committed some social
faux pas
by speaking in a language I couldn’t understand.
‘I just mean it’s very old there and very peaceful.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘As a matter of fact my own personal vision of time out of mind is a seascape, a dark sea breaking on white sands with blue
mountains beyond. Mallingham’s very different. It’s set in a flat marshy landscape about a mile and a half from the coast,
yet still there’s this absence of time there; I’ve always thought of it as a place where perhaps for one brief moment one
can step out of time altogether and be conscious of the vastness where time doesn’t exist. I’m glad my father’s buried at
Mallingham. It’s right. For him it’s a true home where he can rest in peace. A true home can’t exist in time because time
destroys everything. A true home can only exist beyond time in places like Mallingham.’
I had never before been so intensely aware of how inflexible my
mind was. As I cautiously tried to bend it to meet his I saw exactly why he had always seemed so mysterious to me. His world
wasn’t bounded by logic and common sense as mine was. His world opened into other worlds limited only by the scope of his
intellect and imagination.
‘You mean Mallingham for you,’ I said slowly, ‘is a little like T. S. Eliot’s rose-garden, a magic place where everything
comes together, and … what might have been and what has been coexist and …
are
.’ The very effort of expressing such thoughts which for me were so far from normality made me feel limp.
‘That’s right,’ said Scott casually, the gifted bilingual who switched effortlessly back and forth between his two languages.
‘Mallingham’s like Burnt Norton.’ Then suddenly he was back in my world again, speaking my language. ‘Hey, you never told
me you’d read T. S. Eliot!’
‘Oh, I’m not such a philistine as you think I am!’ I retorted with spirit, but although we were at ease with each other again
I never told him who had introduced me to Eliot’s
Four Quartets
.
Somehow it seemed so much more comfortable not to mention Sebastian’s name …
[8]
I was appalled even though I wasn’t surprised by how hard he worked. However since I had anticipated the late returns in the
evenings, the exhaustion and the desire for solitude in order to recuperate, I didn’t complain or press him into conversation
as soon as he arrived home from work. Instead I let him rest by himself for a while in the library which was his retreat,
the one room I seldom entered. He would have two drinks there by himself and read for half an hour. I privately wished we
could have shared at least one evening drink together but Scott said no, what he liked was to have two drinks on his own.
Remembering the magazine articles on alcoholism which I regularly read in order to give myself a healthy fright, I was at
once suspicious and started checking the levels of the liquor bottles every day, but contrary to the know-it-alls who swore
that to drink alone was the road to ruin, Scott never seemed to have more than two drinks during these solitary sessions.
Finally with relief I decided that he liked to drink alone simply because he liked to be alone, and that this particular preference
was no more sinister than his taste for reading alone or listening to music by himself.
Some time around nine-thirty we would have dinner together. Scott, who was uninterested in food, apparently never suffered
from
hunger pangs, but I would be starving by early evening and I soon arranged with the housekeeper that I could have access to
the kitchen at seven o clock in order to fix myself a low-calorie snack. After dinner, during which Scott never drank although
I often secretly yearned for wine, we would either read in the living-room or listen to records, but we never watched television
because Scott had no set. To be fair to Scott I must admit he offered to rent a set for me, but I decided it would do me no
harm to live without television for a couple of months.
At midnight we would go to bed, and very often that was all we did: undress, get into bed and fall asleep. This prosaic end
to the day disturbed me at first, but since Scott wanted to do little else on weekends except make love I soon stopped regretting
the uneventful evenings during the working week. Presently to my surprise I even began to enjoy this unexpected pattern of
our private life with its extremes of abstinence and excess. The abstinence made the excess more exciting and heightened the
electrical tension which was always present between us but which rose to an almost unbearable pitch towards the end of the
week.
‘Maybe those Victorians weren’t so dumb about sex as we now think they were,’ I remarked once to Scott. ‘Think how exciting
sex must have been when everyone postponed it endlessly until they almost went out of their minds!’
‘Marriage was postponed,’ said Scott, ‘but sex wasn’t. It’s a myth that the Victorians kept sex at arm’s length. The reality
was prostitutes and pornography with everyone being scared out of their wits by venereal disease.’
‘Yes, but …’ I sighed. Scott often made me feel hopelessly ignorant. He didn’t mean to; he drew on the well of his superior
education automatically, but the effect was still depressing. Once I tried to talk about the course I was taking – I had selected
an extramural London University course on Existentialism in Modern Literature – but Scott’s knowledge of literature and philosophy
only made me realize how vast the two subjects were and how little I knew about them. However I was determined not to feel
depressed when I had every reason to be happy, so I reminded myself how boring it had been to live with a man like Sam, whose
favourite hobby had been dismantling television sets, and how lucky I was now to be able to live with a man like Scott, who
could stretch my brain and exercise it daily.
‘I don’t know how you can read that garbage, Vicky,’ said Scott, as he found me as usual at the breakfast table with my nose
in the
Daily Express
.
‘I like William Hickey’s column. Anyway darling, I must have some kind of light relief, particularly at breakfast! I can’t
live on an intellectual plane twenty-four hours a day!’
‘I guess not,’ said Scott, opening
The Times
.
‘Here’s a picture of Elvis. Maybe he’s made another of his frightful films.’
‘Who?’
‘Elvis Presley.’
‘Oh.’
I thought guiltily: I must call Sebastian, how awful not to have called before. But then I looked at Scott and thought: later.
We still hadn’t been to Mallingham. Elfrida, busy winding up her school’s summer semester, had suggested we visited her later,
but despite our postponed trip to Norfolk our weekends had been busy, sailing in Sussex, walking in Surrey and Shakespeare-watching
at Stratford-on-Avon. Soon we became busier during the week. I found myself enjoying the dinner-parties which bored Scott
so much, and presently I made a couple of new friends and realized I was close to feeling at home in that alien city where
I had been so unhappy in the past. Relaxing at last, I experimented with miniskirts behind my locked bedroom door, let my
hair grow a little longer and wondered how far I dared alter my eye-make-up. Fortunately Scott’s desire for me to be chastely
and conservatively dressed made me no more than a closet-follower of current British fashion trends, but even behind my locked
bedroom door I still enjoyed myself enormously.
Then one day in August I suddenly thought: I can’t put off this phone call one second longer. I’ve got to talk to Sebastian,
and I’ve got to mention his name.
‘Something wrong?’ said Scott when we had finished making love after breakfast and were seriously thinking of getting up.
It was a Sunday morning.
‘No. I was just wondering if you’d mind if I went up to Cambridge for the day next week. Sebastian wrote to me way back with
an invitation to lunch, and I just feel I can’t spend the whole summer in England without making the effort to see him.’
There was a silence. Then without a word Scott got out of bed and reached for his bathrobe.
‘Scott, I didn’t think it would be necessary for me to say this, but there’s no need whatsoever for you to worry. Sebastian
and I are just good friends. I know that sounds corny, but—’
‘Not just corny,’ said Scott. ‘Inconceivable.’
‘But Scott—’
‘Vicky, just who the hell do you think you’re kidding? You lived with that man, you had a child by him, he was – probably
still is – obsessed by you. Believe me, the one thing you and Sebastian can never be is “just good friends”! You’ve been much
too deeply involved with each other.’