When I Was Otherwise (6 page)

Indeed, it was a happy evening. Especially as dear, sweet Dan had insisted on paying for everything, even for the cider—though strictly, of course, on the q.t.!—and all her cups of coffee and cigarettes were safe.

She felt so pleased with the pair of them.

It was doubly unfortunate, then, that the following day Marsha should again become upset…being equally as enraged when the students
didn't
come to lunch as she had been when she'd first been told they would.

8

“Thank you, dear, that's very good of you,” said Daisy, taking the hot-water bottle which Marsha was holding out to her. “These September nights are getting really quite nippy—don't
you
find that?” Daisy was already in bed but in expectation of Marsha's visit she had her hearing aid clipped into the pocket of her pyjama jacket; it was a man's one, striped. “Don't run along at once, dear…unless, that is, you're just too busy to stay. Sometimes it worries me how much you have to see to. I just can't imagine how you cope. But I take my hat off to you; really and truly I do. Or I would, I mean, if I had it on! So why don't you just sit down a moment and rest your tired old legs? Tonight, dear, I'm feeling a little…well, to tell the truth, a little lonely. That chair is a nice and comfortable one. Just sling the handbag on the floor—oh, anywhere, it doesn't matter. ‘A
handbag
, Mr Worthing?' Yes, I must say, you and Dan have made it all quite cosy for me. On the whole. But then, of course, it
is
six months since I moved in—would you believe it?—it hardly seems more than a week or two. And, incredibly, we still appear to be surviving, don't we?”

“We certainly do.”

“But…”

“Yes, Daisy?”

“I often wonder who she was, dear, don't you?”

“Who?”

“The woman who did that tapestry thing. Many's the time I've lain here—just propped up against these pillows—staring up at it. And thinking.”

“Perhaps she's still alive?”

But Daisy shook her head, decisively. “No. I feel it in my bones she's not.” And she didn't add that, alive, she would have been just another woman, not someone you could speculate upon with any real degree of satisfaction. “Anyway, I certainly hope that
I
never fall into the habit of judging people.”

“Well, I suppose no one can avoid it, really.”

“No, you're quite right, dear. Quite right. You usually are, of course.”

“Oh, oh, oh. All this soft soap. What might you be after, Lady Jane?”

“Yes—and don't forget the flannel, dear. Soft soap
and
flannel! My word, you've just reminded me: I used to grow mustard-and-cress on a flannel once, when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. And delicious it was, too. Cress sandwiches—the best I've ever tasted. They were. It's true! But…Now what were we saying? Oh, yes, dear, I was thinking a little about your own case. I don't see how you can help judging people when you have to go through all the rigmarole of a divorce. Do you?”

Marsha gave a shrug. “Well, that was a long time ago, Daisy.”

“And now one can be all philosophical about it and see that the fault was evenly divided—is that what you're saying? You just weren't compatible?” Daisy nodded. “Although you, dear, were probably a lot more compatible than he was, if the truth were known. That was always
my
view of the matter at any rate.”

“Do you know something? It was exactly forty-one years ago, last April, forty-one years ago that we got married?”

“Good gracious! Almost an anniversary. We ought to celebrate. Except that he was a bad 'un, of course. Not that you could help liking him, though.”

“If you didn't have to live with him.”

“Quite! Oh, spoken like a
true
philosopher! Upon my soul, do you ever know a man until you've lived with him?—and then, afterwards, dear, do you ever want to?”

Marsha raised both eyebrows. “Yet I always thought, Daisy, that in your opinion men could do no wrong.”

“Oh, men, maybe. Men. But who ever said anything about husbands?”

They laughed.

Daisy nodded again, sympathetically. “Yes, you had a raw deal, if you ask me. A very raw deal indeed. We both did! But poor Marsha. That's what I always say: poor old Marsha. If only the cards
hadn't
been stacked so high against you. And you started off with such a
very
good hand; what sheer rotten luck you couldn't have managed to play it just a little better. I think you must have been jinxed from the beginning…some old shrew at the christening, no doubt, scheming for you to someday prick your finger!”

She considered this possibility with rage. With a blending of rage and satisfaction.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “I mean, if you'd like to. Naturally I haven't any wish to pry.”

9

Yet what was there to tell? It was all such a dull little story.

On the night Andrew Poynton had proposed she had sung to him. “If you were the only boy in the world and I were the only girl.” They'd been alone in the garden but there could have been others within earshot. He had been most woefully embarrassed.

That was Marsha's party piece. (Although she had only sung it twice at an actual party.) She had a fairly pretty voice.

But undoubtedly the prettiest thing about her was her face.

Once, when she'd been dressing for a dance and a cousin had been staying in the house, this child had lain there on the carpet with her chin cupped in both hands—and just solemnly gazed: Marsha at eighteen was the most beautiful thing that she had ever seen, she said. Yet, perhaps oddly, Marsha didn't hear about that until a great many years later…by which time most of her looks were gone and her life was nothing but a bleak routine, joyless and wearisome.

Of course, her school reports had never been good. Her last one (well, not counting the finishing school at Lausanne) had actually bemoaned the fact that Marsha was all ‘bubble' and had strongly recommended she should do her very best to develop some worthwhile interests. But even then one of her teachers had said that her personality was as charming as her face and that it was quite impossible not to be enchanted by her!

The real problem, though—as she herself saw it in after-years—was her appalling lack of experience. If only she had known then about the things which might have been possible! If only she had known about theatrical schools!—or that it was indeed not unheard-of to defy your parents over matters more important than a smuggled-out lipstick.

Well, no, defy your mother; her father had died when she was only three.

She married the first man who asked her: not because she thought she wouldn't have plenty of other opportunities but because he was handsome and there was a lovely moon and she was impatient to be the mistress of her own establishment, to entertain her many friends whenever she wanted, quite unsupervised, and to tell the cook what to prepare.

Also she was very much moved by the sentiments expressed in that old, slow favourite of hers—even if Andrew (almost ungallantly) did rather cut across them to offer for her hand.

She hadn't realized then how easily he grew embarrassed. Amazingly it wasn't so much their wedding—nor its preliminary introductions to family and to friends—which made her cognizant. It was their first breakfast-time in Austria, when she absent-mindedly asked, within their waiter's hearing, whether he took sugar in his coffee. For the rest of that morning he hardly spoke to her.

He was embarrassed again, in a dozen trivial ways, before and after the arrival of their first child. Once, she had been very sick behind a telephone kiosk: he had stalked on huffily, resolutely dissociated. Later, when her pregnancy was more apparent, he showed reluctance to go out with her at all. Later yet, if she were pushing the pram, he would usually walk in front, or behind, or on the other side of the road. He would never have considered pushing it himself. Not under ordinary circumstances.

He was twenty-four when he married her. But whereas he seemed like seventeen in some ways, he seemed like twenty-seven (or forty-seven) in others; and very soon Marsha had begun to call him a stick-in-the-mud, disappointed that he wouldn't take her out more often and increasingly impatient with his assertion (constantly reiterated) that savings and insurance were the only things which mattered. After a few years, he said, he would be earning more; they would be settled; time then to think of theatres and dances and holidays abroad. He worked on the Stock Exchange. It was a job he loathed. But especially because he loathed it, he claimed, he had to stick at it. She didn't understand why.

He was a stick-in-the-mud; he was a puritan. He was also a boor; although once, when she actually put it in a note rebelliously explaining her absence from the breakfast table—she had left the house while he was shaving and carrying out his ablutions, which included submerging himself in a stone-cold bath—she had spelt it Boer (three times, complete with capital letters, exclamation marks and underlinings). This was the morning after she had given a small dinner party which, demonstrably, he had not found very interesting. He had first begun to yawn, broadly and loudly, and then he had picked up a newspaper—opening it wide and ostentatiously rustling its pages. Finally, he had smuggled into the room an alarm clock, which had gone off stridently at midnight, making everybody jump.

It had been impossible to pass it off as a joke although she had of course tried.

Her friends might have pretended to believe her; her husband's eyes—if not his actual words—had plainly denied its being one.

Yet in some measure she soon afterwards, inadvertently, had her revenge. Andrew had invited his boss home to dinner. His boss was merely humorless but his boss's wife would have made Lady Bracknell seem an easy mixer. Marsha had suggested that it might help things to have another couple present. Evelyn Hesketh was a schoolfriend—and the daughter of a lord. Wouldn't she and her husband perhaps be worthy to sit at the same table as Colonel and Mrs Quinn?

Unfortunately, at the last moment, Evelyn phoned to say that John seemed to have caught something and was feeling very ill.

“Oh, but you can't let me down; you just can't! Think how
awful
it would be! Oh, Evie—please! I've been depending on you.”

They came. During the meal John Hesketh had to leave the table: three times. The third time, like the drowning man, he didn't come back. The cloakroom was next door to the dining room: it was a modern house; the walls were paper-thin. Through most of the fish course (and a lot of the duck) they heard him retching. Even the strawberries and cream were difficult to get down. (The cream was clotted and had come from Cornwall.) Often, when he wasn't retching, he was groaning: a great deal of the conversation had to be repeated. But although at length Evelyn—with one or two mysterious gestures—did slip apologetically away neither the Quinns nor Andrew acknowledged anything unusual. It would have been hard to say who displayed the greatest valour in the face of nearly overwhelming odds. They talked about the Stavisky trial. They talked about the Depression and the current condition of the stock market. They talked about the weather and horse racing and Charlie Chaplin and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. Their smiles were grisly. Marsha—who anyway wouldn't have had much to contribute to some of these subjects but who was normally put down as a very sympathetic listener—said scarcely a word. She came to feel thoroughly miserable; ashamed, as much as anything, at the thought of her own heartlessness. She should never have insisted that her friends attend.

In the end she grew quite hysterical. She started laughing. This was when Colonel and Mrs Quinn, who had had to rush away immediately after dinner, had thanked her for… “such a very charming evening. Quite delightful. Really.”

“Yes, wasn't it fun?” she replied. “You must come again. I'm so glad you enjoyed it.”

It was totally the wrong thing to have said; at least in Andrew's eyes it was. (He didn't suggest what might have been the right thing.) He was furious in his disappointment and, later on, morose. It was all her fault. It was she who'd wanted the Heskeths in the first place. It was she who—on hearing of the husband's illness—had refused to take no for an answer. She had hardly done or said a single thing all evening to add to the general entertainment.

At the height of his fury he even hinted that she might have contrived the whole affair. Out of spite. She hadn't wanted him to make a good impression. “That's why you laughed in their faces when they left.”

Their divorce was still some dozen years in the future and there was a whole world war to be fought out in the meanwhile, not to mention many good times when she would imagine herself to be again beautifully in love with him. Yet this was the evening on which she first started clinging semi-seriously to the thought of that divorce.

Or at least fantasizing about it. And seeing it as a solace and a refuge. A new beginning.

A beacon in the mist.

10

“Well, I'm not surprised, dear. Not at
all
surprised. Henry, too, was a very poor stick of a man. Oh, yes, a very poor stick indeed.” She was always forgetting the tiresome fact of their having been related—Henry and Marsha and Dan. “Thank you for telling me all that. You didn't have to. But I'm very glad you did. You look a little peaky, dear; you really ought to go to bed. But… Just imagine his bringing in an alarm clock to speed the parting guest! What a lot you must have had to put up with! I never knew he had it in him! Yet I always liked that quiet dry sense of humour of his; that sharp ironic wit. It goes with such panache—I recognized it then. And he was certainly very handsome. You can forgive a man a lot, I always find, if he's young and handsome and can make you laugh.”