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

by Graham Greene

  It was a feature common to most of these jolly bunches that they contained no male attachment, and perhaps that was why the attempt to look attractive was completely abandoned. Huge buttocks were exposed in their full horror in tight large-patterned Bermuda shorts. Heads were bound in scarves to cover rollers which were not removed even by lunch-time – they stuck out like small mole-hills. Daily she watched the bums lurch by like hippos on the way to the water. Only in the evening would the women change from the monstrous shorts into monstrous cotton frocks, covered with mauve or scarlet flowers, in order to take dinner on the terrace where formality was demanded in the book of rules, and the few men who appeared were forced to wear jackets and ties though the thermometer stood at close on eighty degrees after sunset. The market in femininity being such, how could one hope to see any male foragers? Only old and broken husbands were sometimes to be seen towed towards an Issa store advertising free-port prices.

  She had been encouraged during the first week by the sight of three men with crew-cuts who went past the bar towards the swimming-pool wearing male bikinis. They were far too young for her, but in her present mood she would have welcomed altruistically the sight of another’s romance. Romance is said to be contagious, and if in the candle-lit evenings the ‘informal’ coffee tavern had contained a few young amorous couples, who could say what men of maturer years might not eventually arrive to catch the infection? But her hopes dwindled. The young men came and went without a glance at the Bermuda shorts or the pinned hair. Why should they stay? They were certainly more beautiful than any girl there and they knew it.

  By nine o’clock most evenings Mary Watson was on her way to bed. A few evenings of calypsos, of quaint false impromptus and the hideous jangle of rattles, had been enough. Outside the closed windows of the hotel annexe the boxes of the air-conditioners made a continuous rumble in the starry palmy night like over-fed hotel guests. Her room was full of dried air which bore no more resemblance to fresh air than the dried figs to the newly picked fruit. When she looked in the glass to brush her hair she often regretted her lack of charity to the jolly bunch from St Louis. It was true she did not wear Bermuda shorts nor coil her hair in rollers, but her hair was streaky nonetheless with heat and the mirror reflected more plainly than it seemed to do at home her thirty-nine years. If she had not paid in advance for a four-weeks pension on her individual round-trip tour, with tickets exchangeable for a variety of excursions, she would have turned tail and returned to the campus. Next year, she thought, when I am forty, I must feel grateful that I have preserved the love of a good man.

  She was a woman given to self-analysis, and perhaps because it is a great deal easier to direct questions to a particular face rather than to a void (one has the right to expect some kind of a response even from eyes one sees many times a day in a compact), she posed the questions to herself with a belligerent direct stare into the looking-glass. She was an honest woman, and for that reason the questions were all the cruder. She would say to herself, I have slept with no one other than Charlie (she wouldn’t admit as sexual experiences the small exciting half-way points that she had reached before marriage); why am I now seeking to find a strange body, which will probably give me less pleasure than the body I already know? It had been more than a month before Charlie brought her real pleasure. Pleasure, she learnt, grew with habit, so that if it were not really pleasure that she looked for, what was it? The answer could only be the unfamiliar. She had friends, even on the respectable campus, who had admitted to her, in the frank admirable American way, their adventures. These had usually been in Europe – a momentary marital absence had given the opportunity for a momentary excitement, and then with what a sigh of relief they had found themselves safely at home. All the same they felt afterwards that they had enlarged their experience; they understood something that their husbands did not really understand – the real character of a Frenchman, an Italian, even – there were such cases – of an Englishman.

  Mary Watson was painfully aware, as an Englishwoman, that her experience was confined to one American. They all, on the campus, believed her to be European, but all she knew was confined to one man and he was a citizen of Boston who had no curiosity for the great Western regions. In a sense she was more American by choice than he was by birth. Perhaps she was less European even than the wife of the Professor of Romance Languages, who had confided to her that once – overwhelmingly – in Antibes . . . it had happened only once because the sabbatical year was over . . . her husband was up in Paris checking manuscripts before they flew home . . .

  Had she herself, Mary Watson sometimes wondered, been just such a European adventure which Charlie mistakenly had domesticated? (She couldn’t pretend to be a tigress in a cage, but they kept smaller creatures in cages, white mice, love-birds.) And, to be fair, Charlie too was her adventure, her American adventure, the kind of man whom at twenty-seven she had not before encountered in frowsy London. Henry James had described the type, and at that moment in her history she had been reading a great deal of Henry James: ‘A man of intellect whose body was not much to him and its senses and appetites not importunate.’ All the same for a while she had made the appetites importunate.

  That was her private conquest of the American continent, and when the Professor’s wife had spoken of the dancer of Antibes (no, that was a Roman inscription – the man had been a marchand de vin) she had thought, The lover I know and admire is American and I am proud of it. But afterwards came the thought: American or New England? Yet to know a country must one know every region sexually?

  It was absurd at thirty-nine not to be content. She had her man. The book on James Thomson would be published by the University Press, and Charlie had the intention afterwards of making a revolutionary break from the romantic poetry of the eighteenth century into a study of the American image in European literature – it was to be called The Double Reflection: the effect of Fenimore Cooper on the European scene: the image of America presented by Mrs Trollope – the details were not yet worked out. The study might possibly end with the first arrival of Dylan Thomas on the shores of America – at the Cunard quay or at Idlewild? That was a point of later research. She examined herself again closely in the glass – the new decade of the forties stared frankly back at her – an Englander who had become a New Englander. After all she hadn’t travelled very far – Kent to Connecticut. This was not just the physical restlessness of middle age, she argued; it was the universal desire to see a little bit further, before one surrendered to old age and the blank certitude of death.

  2

  Next day she picked up her courage and went as far as the swimming-pool. A strong wind blew and whipped up the waves in the almost land-girt harbour – the hurricane season would soon be here. All the world creaked around her: the wooden struts of the shabby harbour, the jalousies of the small hopeless houses which looked as though they had been knocked together from a make-it-yourself kit, the branches of the palms – a long, weary, worn-out creaking. Even the water of the swimming-pool imitated in miniature the waves of the harbour.

  She was glad that she was alone in the swimming-pool, at least for all practical purposes alone, for the old man splashing water over himself, like an elephant, in the shallow end hardly counted. He was a solitary elephant and not one of the hippo band. They would have called her with merry cries to join them – and it’s difficult to be stand-offish in a swimming-pool which is common to all as a table is not. They might even in their resentment have ducked her – pretending like schoolchildren that it was all a merry game; there was nothing she put beyond those thick thighs, whether they were encased in bikinis or Bermuda shorts. As she floated in the pool her ears were alert for their approach. At the first sound she would get well away from the water, but today they were probably making an excursion to Tower Isle on the other side of the island, or had they done that yesterday? Only the old man watched her, pouring water over his head to keep away sunstroke. She was safely alone, which was the next be
st thing to the adventure she had come here to find. All the same, as she sat on the rim of the pool, and let the sun and wind dry her, she realized the extent of her solitude. She had spoken to no one but black waiters and Syrian receptionists for more than two weeks. Soon, she thought, I shall even begin to miss Charlie – it would be an ignoble finish to what she had intended to be an adventure.

  A voice from the water said to her, ‘My name’s Hickslaughter – Henry Hickslaughter.’ She couldn’t have sworn to the name in court, but that was how it had sounded at the time and he never repeated it. She looked down at a polished mahogany crown surrounded by white hair; perhaps he resembled Neptune more than an elephant. Neptune was always outsize, and as he had pulled himself a little out of the water to speak, she could see the rolls of fat folding over the blue bathing-slip, with tough hair lying like weeds along the ditches. She replied with amusement, ‘My name is Watson. Mary Watson.’

  ‘You’re English?’

  ‘My husband’s American,’ she said in extenuation.

  ‘I haven’t seen him around, have I?’

  ‘He’s in England,’ she said with a small sigh, for the geographical and national situation seemed too complicated for casual explanation.

  ‘You like it here?’ he asked and lifting a hand-cup of water he distributed it over his bald head.

  ‘So so.’

  ‘Got the time on you?’

  She looked in her bag and told him, ‘Eleven fifteen.’

  ‘I’ve had my half hour,’ he said and trod heavily away towards the ladder at the shallow end.

  An hour later, staring at her lukewarm Martini with its great green unappetizing olive, she saw him looming down at her from the other end of the bamboo bar. He wore an ordinary shirt open at the neck and a brown leather belt; his type of shoes in her childhood had been known as corespondent, but one seldom saw them today. She wondered what Charlie would think of her pick-up; unquestionably she had landed him, rather as an angler struggling with a heavy catch finds that he has hooked nothing better than an old boot. She was no angler; she didn’t know whether a boot would put an ordinary hook out of action altogether, but she knew that her hook could be irremediably damaged. No one would approach her if she were in his company. She drained the Martini in one gulp and even attacked the olive so as to have no excuse to linger in the bar.

  ‘Would you do me the honour,’ Mr Hickslaughter asked, ‘of having a drink with me?’ His manner was completely changed; on dry land he seemed unsure of himself and spoke with an old-fashioned propriety.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve only just finished one. I have to be off.’ Inside the gross form she thought she saw a tousled child with disappointed eyes. ‘I’m having lunch early today.’ She got up and added rather stupidly, for the bar was quite empty, ‘You can have my table.’

  ‘I don’t need a drink that much,’ he said solemnly. ‘I was just after company.’ She knew that he was watching her as she moved to the adjoining coffee tavern, and she thought with guilt, at least I’ve got the old boot off the hook. She refused the shrimp cocktail with tomato ketchup and fell back as was usual with her on a grapefruit, with grilled trout to follow. ‘Please no tomato with the trout,’ she implored, but the black waiter obviously didn’t understand her. While she waited she began with amusement to picture a scene between Charlie and Mr Hickslaughter, who happened for the purpose of her story to be crossing the campus. ‘This is Henry Hickslaughter, Charlie. We used to go bathing together when I was in Jamaica.’ Charlie, who always wore English clothes, was very tall, very thin, very concave. It was a satisfaction to know that he would never lose his figure – his nerves would see to that and his extreme sensibility. He hated anything gross; there was no grossness in The Seasons, not even in the lines on spring.

  She heard slow footsteps coming up behind her and panicked. ‘May I share your table?’ Mr Hickslaughter asked. He had recovered his terrestrial politeness, but only so far as speech was concerned, for he sat firmly down without waiting for her reply. The chair was too small for him; his thighs overlapped like a double mattress on a single bed. He began to study the menu.

  ‘They copy American food; it’s worse than the reality,’ Mary Watson said.

  ‘You don’t like American food?’

  ‘Tomatoes even with the trout!’

  ‘Tomatoes? Oh, you mean tomatoes,’ he said, correcting her accent. ‘I’m very fond of tomatoes myself.’

  ‘And fresh pineapple in the salad.’

  ‘There’s a lot of vitamins in fresh pineapple.’ Almost as if he wished to emphasize their disagreement, he ordered shrimp cocktail, grilled trout and a sweet salad. Of course, when her trout arrived, the tomatoes were there. ‘You can have mine if you want to,’ she said and he accepted with pleasure. ‘You are very kind. You are really very kind.’ He held out his plate like Oliver Twist.

  She began to feel oddly at ease with the old man. She would have been less at ease, she was certain, with a possible adventure: she would have been wondering about her effect on him, while now she could be sure that she gave him pleasure – with the tomatoes. He was perhaps less the old anonymous boot than an old shoe comfortable to wear. And curiously enough, in spite of his first approach and in spite of his correcting her over the pronunciation of tomatoes, it was not really an old American shoe of which she was reminded. Charlie wore English clothes over his English figure, he studied English eighteenth-century literature, his book would be published in England by the Cambridge University Press who would buy sheets, but she had the impression that he was far more fashioned as an American shoe than Hickslaughter. Even Charlie, whose manners were perfect, if they had met for the first time today at the swimming-pool, would have interrogated her more closely. Interrogation had always seemed to her a principal part of American social life – an inheritance perhaps from the Indian smoke-fires: ‘Where are you from? Do you know the so and so’s? Have you been to the botanic gardens?’ It came over here that Mr Hickslaughter, if that were really his name, was perhaps an American reject – not necessarily more flawed than the pottery rejects of famous firms you find in bargain-basements.

  She found herself questioning him, with circumlocutions, while he savoured the tomatoes. ‘I was born in London. I couldn’t have been born more than four hundred miles from there without drowning, could I? But you belong to a continent thousands of miles wide and long. Where were you born?’ (She remembered a character in a Western movie directed by John Ford who asked, ‘Where do you hail from, stranger?’ The question was more frankly put than hers.)

  He said, ‘St Louis.’

  ‘Oh, then there are lots of your people here – you are not alone.’ She felt a slight disappointment that he might belong to the jolly bunch.

  ‘I’m alone,’ he said. ‘Room 63.’ It was in her own corridor on the third floor of the annexe. He spoke firmly as though he were imparting information for future use. ‘Five doors down from you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I saw you come out your first day.’

  ‘I never noticed you.’

  ‘I keep to myself unless I see someone I like.’

  ‘Didn’t you see anyone you liked from St Louis?’

  ‘I’m not all that fond of St Louis, and St Louis can do without me. I’m not a favourite son.’

  ‘Do you come here often?’

  ‘In August. It’s cheap in August.’ He kept on surprising her. First there was his lack of local patriotism, and now his frankness about money or rather about the lack of it, a frankness that could almost be classed as an un-American activity.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have to go where it’s reasonable,’ he said, as though he were exposing his bad hand to a partner at gin.

  ‘You’ve retired?’

  ‘Well – I’ve been retired.’ He added, ‘You ought to take salad . . . It’s good for you.’

  ‘I feel quite well without it.’

  ‘You could do with more weight.’ He added appraisingl
y, ‘A couple of pounds.’ She was tempted to tell him that he could do with less. They had both seen each other exposed.

  ‘Were you in business?’ She was being driven to interrogate. He hadn’t asked her a personal question since his first at the pool.

  ‘In a way,’ he said. She had a sense that he was supremely uninterested in his own doings; she was certainly discovering an America which she had not known existed.

  She said, ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me . . .’

  ‘Aren’t you taking any dessert?’

  ‘No, I’m a light luncher.’

  ‘It’s all included in the price. You ought to eat some fruit.’ He was looking at her under his white eyebrows with an air of disappointment which touched her.

  ‘I don’t care much for fruit and I want a nap. I always have a nap in the afternoon.’

  Perhaps, after all, she thought, as she moved away through the formal dining-room, he is disappointed only because I’m not taking full advantage of the cheap rate.

  She passed his room going to her own: the door was open and a big white-haired mammy was making the bed. The room was exactly like her own; the same pair of double beds, the same wardrobe, the same dressing-table in the same position, the same heavy breathing of the air-conditioner. In her own room she looked in vain for the thermos of iced water; then she rang the bell and waited for several minutes. You couldn’t expect good service in August. She went down the passage; Mr Hickslaughter’s door was still open and she went in to find the maid. The door of the bathroom was open too and a wet cloth lay on the tiles.