Stories (83 page)

These two different women sat stirring coffee cups as they had done a hundred times, while the five children shouted, competed and loved in the garden, and Althea wept, because she said this was a watershed in her marriage, like eating the apple in Eden. If she told her beloved husband that she was—temporarily, she did so hope and believe—besottedly in love with this young doctor, then it must be the end of everything between them. But if she didn’t tell him, then it was betrayal. Whatever she did would have terrible results. Not telling Frederick seemed to her worse even than the infidelity itself. She had never, ever concealed anything from him. Perfect frankness and sincerity had been their rule—no, not a rule, they had never had to lay down rules for behaviour that came so excellently and simply out of their love and trust. She could not imagine keeping anything from Frederick. And she was sure he told her everything. She could not bear it, would certainly leave him at once, if she knew that he had ever lied to her. No, she would not mind infidelity of a certain kind—how could she mind?—now that she forfeited any rights in the matter! But lies, deceptions, furtiveness—no, that would be the end, the end of everything.

Althea and Muriel stayed together, while one woman wept and talked and the other listened, stopping only when the children came in, for all that day, and all the next, and for several after that. For Muriel was understanding that it was the words and tears that were the point, not what was said: soon the energy of suffering, the tension of conflict, would have spent itself, making it all seem less important. But Muriel was determined not to listen for one minute more than was necessary.
And soon she was able to advise Althea, the tears having abated, not to tell her Fred anything at all, she would just have to learn to live with a lie.

And now of course she had to think, really to think, whether she liked it or not, about the way she had been making love—or sex—in a frivolous, and some people might say sordid, way with her best friend’s husband. She was being made to think. Most definitely she did not want to think: it was extraordinary, the strength of her instinct not to examine that area of her life.

However, examining it, or rather, touching lightly on it, she was able to congratulate herself, or rather, both herself and dear Fred, that never had they in the presence of their spouses enjoyed that most awful of betrayals, enjoyment of their complicity while their said spouses remained oblivious. She could not remember ever, when together, their so much as looking at each other in an invitation to make love, or sex; she was positive they had never once allowed their eyes to signal: these poor fools don’t know our secret. For certainly they had never felt like this. They had not ever, not once, made plans to meet alone. They might have fallen into each other’s arms the moment the opportunity offered, as if no other behaviour was possible to them, but they did not engineer opportunities. And, having arrived in each other’s arms, all laughter and pleasure, there was never a feeling of having gone one better than Althea and Henry, of doing them down in any way. And, having separated, they did not think about what had happened, nor consider their partners: it was as if these occasions belonged to another plane altogether—that trivial, sordid, and unimportant, that friendly, good-natured and entirely enjoyable plane that lay beside, or above, or within these two so satisfactory marriages.

It occurred to Muriel that its nature, its essence, was lack of emotion. Her feeling for Frederick, what Frederick felt for her, was all calm sense and pleasure, with not so much as a twinge of that yearning anguish we call being in love.

And, thinking about it all, as these long sessions with weeping and miserable (enjoyable miserable?) Althea had made her do, she understood, and became determined to hold on to, her belief that her instinct, or compulsion, never to examine, brood, or make emotional profit-and-loss accounts about the sex she had with Frederick was healthy. For as soon as she did put weight on that area, start to measure and weigh, all sorts of
sensations hitherto foreign to this relationship began to gabble and gobble, insist and demand. Guilt, for one.

She came to a conclusion. It was so seditious of any idea held in common by these four and their kind that she had to look at it, as it were, sideways. It was this: that very likely the falling-in-love with the young doctor was not at all as Althea was seeing it (as anyone was likely to see it); the point was not the periods of making love—love, not sex!—which of course had been all rapture, though muted, inevitably, with their particular brand of wry and civilised understanding, but it was the spilling of emotion afterwards, the anguish, the guilt. Emotion was the point. Great emotion had been felt, had been suffered. Althea had suffered, was suffering abominably. Everyone had got it wrong: the real motive for such affairs was the need to suffer the pain and the yearning afterwards.

The two marriages continued to grow like trees, sheltering the children who flourished beneath them.

Soon, they had been married fifteen years.

There occurred another crisis, much worse.

Its prelude was this. Due to a set of circumstances not important—Althea had to visit a sick mother and took the children; the Smith children went to visit a grandmother, Henry was away—Frederick and Muriel spent two weeks alone with each other. Ostensibly they were in their separate homes, but they were five minutes’ drive from each other, and not even in a gossipy inbred little English town could neighbours see anything wrong in two people being together a lot who were with each other constantly year in and out.

It was a time of relaxation. Of enjoyment. Of quiet. They spent nights in the same bed—for the first time. They took long intimate meals together alone, for the first time. They had seldom been alone together, when they came to think of it. It was extraordinary how communal it was, the life of the Joneses and the Smiths.

Their relationship, instead of being the fleeting, or flighty thing it had been—rolls in the hay (literally), or in the snow, an hour on the drawingroom carpet, a quick touch-up in a telephone booth—was suddenly all dignity, privacy and leisure.

And now Frederick showed a disposition to responsible feeling—“love” was the word he insisted on using, while Muriel nervously implored him not to be solemn. He pointed out that
he was betraying his beloved Althea, that she was betraying her darling Henry, and that this was what they had been doing for years and years, and without a twinge of guilt or a moment’s reluctance.

And without, Muriel pointed out, feeling.

Ah yes, she was right, how awful, he was really beginning to feel that …

For God’s sake, she cried, stop it, don’t spoil everything, can’t you see the dogs of destruction are sniffing at our door? Stop it, darling Fred, I won’t have you using words like “love,” no, no, that is our redeeming point, our strength—we haven’t been in love, we have never agonised over each other, desired each other, missed each other, wanted each other; we have not ever “felt” anything for each other….

Frederick allowed it to be seen that he found this view of them too cool, if not heartless.

But, she pointed out, what they had done was to help each other in every way, to be strong pillars in a foursome, to rejoice at the birth of each other’s children, to share ideas and read books recommended by the other. They had enjoyed random and delightful and irresponsible sex without a twang of conscience when they could—had, in short, lived for fifteen years in close harmony.

Fred called her an intelligent woman.

During that fortnight love was imminent on at least a dozen occasions. She resisted.

But there was no doubt, and Muriel saw this with an irritation made strong by self-knowledge—for of course she would have adored to be “in love” with Frederick, to anguish and weep and lie awake—that Frederick, by the time his wife came back, was feeling thoroughly deprived. His Muriel had deprived him. Of emotional experience.

Ah emotion, emotion, let us bathe in thee!

For instance, the television, that mirror of us all:

A man has crashed his car, and his wife and three children have burned to death.

“And what did you feel when this happened?” asks the bland, but humanly concerned, young interviewer. “Tell us, what did you feel?”

Or, two astronauts have just survived thirty-six hours when every second might have meant their deaths.

“What did you feel? Please tell us, what did you feel?”

Or, a woman’s two children have spent all night exposed on a mountain top but were rescued alive.

“What did you feel?” cries the interviewer. “What did you feel while you were waiting?”

An old woman has been rescued from a burning building by a passerby, but for some minutes had every reason to think that her end had come.

“What did you feel? You thought your number was up, you said that, didn’t you? What did you feel when you thought that?”

What do you think I felt, you silly nit, what would you have felt in my place? What does everybody watching this programme know perfectly well what I felt? So why ask me when you know already?

Why, madam?—of course it is because feeling is our substitute for tortured slaves and dying gladiators. We have to feel sad, anxious, worried, joyful, agonised, delighted. I feel. You feel. They felt. I felt. We were feeling … If we don’t feel, then how can we believe that anything is happening to us at all?

And since none of us feel as much as we have been trained to believe that we ought to feel in order to prove ourselves profound and sincere people, then luckily here is the television where we can see other people feeling for us. So tell me, madam, what did you feel while you stood there believing that you were going to be burned to death? Meanwhile the viewers will be chanting our creed: We feel, therefore we are.

Althea came back, the children came back, Henry came back, life went on, and Frederick almost at once fell violently in love with a girl of twenty who had applied to be a receptionist in the surgery. And Muriel felt exactly the same, but on the emotional plane, as a virtuously frigid wife felt—so we are told—when her husband went to a prostitute: If I had only given him what he wanted, he wouldn’t have gone to her!

For she knew that her Frederick would not have fallen in love with the girl if she had allowed him to be in love with her. He had had an allowance of “love” to be used up, because he had not understood—he had only said that he did—that he was wanting to fall in love: he needed the condition of being in love, needed to feel all that. Or, as Muriel muttered (but
only very privately, and to herself), he needed to suffer. She should have allowed him to suffer. It is clear that everybody needs it.

And now there was this crisis, a nasty one, which rocked all four of them. Althea was unhappy, because her marriage was at stake: Frederick was talking of a divorce. And of course she was remembering her lapse with the young doctor four years before, and the living lie she had so ably maintained since. And Frederick was suicidal, because he was not so stupid as not to know that to leave a wife he adored, and was happy with, for the sake of a girl of twenty was—stupid. He was past forty-five. But he had never loved before, he said. He actually said this, and to Henry, who told Muriel.

Henry, who so far had not contributed a crisis, now revealed that he had suffered similarly some years before, but “it had not seemed important.” He confessed this to Muriel, who felt some irritation. For one thing, she felt she had never really appreciated Henry as he deserved, because the way he said “it had not seemed important” surely should commend itself to her? Yet it did not; she felt in some ridiculous way belittled because he made light of what had been—surely?—a deep experience? And if it had not, why not? And then, she felt she had been betrayed; that she was able to say to herself she was being absurd did not help. In short, suddenly Muriel was in a bad way. More about Frederick than about Henry. Deprived in a flash of years of sanity, she submerged under waves of jealousy of the young girl, of deprivation—but of what? what? she was in fact deprived of nothing!—of sexual longing, and of emotional loneliness. Her Henry, she had always known, was a cold fish. Their happiness had been a half-thing. Her own potential had always been in cold storage. And so she raged and suffered, for the sake of Frederick, her real love—so she felt now. Her only love. How could she have been so mad as not to enjoy being really in love, two weeks of love. How could she not have seen, all those years, where the truth lay. How could she …

That was what she felt. What she thought, and knew, was that she was mad. Everything she felt now had nothing, but nothing to do with her long relationship with Frederick, which was as pleasant as a good healthy diet and as unremarkable, and nothing to do with her marriage with Henry, whom she
loved deeply, and who made her happy, and whose humorous and civilised company she enjoyed more than anyone’s.

Frederick brought his great love to an end. Or, to put it accurately, it was brought to an end: the girl married. For a while he sulked; he could not forgive life for his being nearly fifty. Althea helped him come back to himself, and to their life together.

Muriel and Henry re-established their loving equilibrium.

Muriel and Frederick for a long time did not, when they found themselves together, make sex. That phase had ended, so they told each other, when they had a discussion: they had never had a discussion of this sort before, and the fact that they were having one seemed proof indeed that they had finished with each other. It happened that this talk was taking place in his car, he having picked her up from some fete given to raise funds for the local hospital. Althea had not been able to attend. The children, once enjoyers of such affairs, were getting too old for them. Muriel was attending on behalf of them all, and Frederick was giving her a lift home. Frederick stopped the car on the edge of a small wood, which was now damp and brown with winter: this desolation seemed a mirror of their own dimmed and ageing state. Suddenly, no word having been spoken, they were in an embrace—and, shortly thereafter, on top of his coat and under hers in a clump of young birches whose shining winter branches dropped large tingling lively drops tasting of wet bark onto their naked cheeks and arms.