by Alec Waugh
He called the front desk. ‘Could you please put me through to Mrs. Trail?’
He was not going to give the room. He had to be sure that he was ringing the right number. He waited; there was the ringing tone, then there came a click. ‘Darling,’ he called, ‘your door’s locked. What’s the matter?’
There was no reply. ‘Myra,’ he called. ‘Myra.’ Silence; an utter silence. He flushed hotly, angrily. She had taken up the receiver. She must have laid it down on the bedside table.
‘The bitch,’ he thought. ‘The bloody bitch.’
Naomi woke late next morning, late at least for her, at half past eight. She ordered a continental breakfast. Was Myra up yet? She was tempted to ring through but decided not. If things had turned out as she presumed they had, Myra would be in no mood for early calls. She lingered so long over her own tray and the morning papers that it was after ten before she came down into the lobby. When she did, it was to find Francis Everett at the cashier’s counter, in a dark city suit with a couple of suitcases beside him.
‘What on earth are you about?’ she asked.
‘I’m checking out. I’m hopping the next plane to London.’
‘I thought that you were staying on till Saturday.’
‘That was my intention.’
‘I hope you haven’t had bad news from home.’
‘I’ve had no news from home.’
His eyes were stern. He certainly was good-looking. ‘You’re German,’ he said. ‘You speak English perfectly. But you may not know all our slang. Do you know what a C.T. is?’
‘Yes, I know what a C.T. is.’
‘Then you can tell your friend Myra Trail that that is exactly what she is. And you can tell her that I’m on my way to London. I’m going to Soho. I’ll find a prostitute, give her the ten or twenty pounds she needs, and have an honest time with an honest whore. You tell her that. Stress the word honest,’ and he picked up his suitcases and was on his way to the porch before any of the porters could intervene.
Naomi whistled. That very certainly was that. She crossed to the house telephone. She called 207. There was the sound of a lifted receiver but no reply. ‘Myra, it’s me here, Naomi,’ she called.
This time there was an answer. ‘Oh, thank heavens. I haven’t dared speak into the machine all day, and people have kept on calling me.’
‘You needn’t worry any more. He’s gone.’
‘That’s something anyhow.’
‘Should I come up and see you or will you come down?’
‘I’ll come right down. I’m tired of this room.’
They sat together in the lobby. The bar was not open yet. Anyhow it was too early for alcohol. ‘What did he say?’ asked Myra.
‘He wasn’t complimentary.’
‘I’m not surprised. I behaved disgracefully.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. I locked my door and took my receiver off the hook.’
‘He seemed to think you had encouraged him.’
‘I had. I meant it, too. It was the kind of thing you read about in books. Meeting an attractive stranger, without any impediments, without any complications. Someone that I’d never see again. No subsequent embarrassment. I never will have such another chance. I’d made up my mind halfway through the evening. The way he danced decided me. I knew that he’d be good in bed. I was going through with it. And then…’
‘And then?’
‘I don’t know how it happened. I was sitting, waiting. I’d showered, anointed myself with oils, the works, you know. I’d arranged the lights, left the door unlatched; and then suddenly I found I couldn’t. I belonged to Victor. I couldn’t do this with another man. I didn’t try to argue with myself. I got up. I latched the door and switched the centre light on. I lay there waiting. I watched the door handle. I heard him tap. A pause; then another tap, a louder one “Come on,” I told myself, “don’t be a ninny. If you don’t open that door now, you’ll be regretting it all your life.” Maybe I shall. Don’t they say that it’s the things you haven’t done, not the things you have done that you regret? But it was no good. I couldn’t move. He didn’t rap again. I presumed that he’d gone back to his room. Then the telephone rang, as I’d guessed it would. I lifted the receiver. I put it on the table. I could hear his voice. It sent a storm along my nerves. I hated myself. I despised myself. But I couldn’t lift the receiver. I couldn’t go through with it. I belonged to Victor.’
She paused. Naomi said nothing. She waited for Myra to go on—as she did hesitantly, searching for the exact words to express what she really meant, repeating herself, contradicting herself, restating this and that, in terms of what she had contradicted.
Naomi, thinking it over afterwards, revolved it into this confession. ‘You must remember,’ Myra said, ‘that I was engaged in my first season, when I was nineteen; I was married when I was twenty. As a schoolgirl I had had flirtations in the holidays—of course I had—but I had been very carefully watched. England wasn’t like America in that way. In those days you didn’t have teenagers rushing about in groups, petting in the back of cars; if not going quite the limit, almost going it. In that finishing school in Switzerland, we were watched even more closely. The French are very strict; and this was French Switzerland. No one could have been more of a novice than I when I went in with all those others to the Queen Charlotte Ball which is where I met Victor. Everything stopped there and everything began there. I was more than a virgin when I married. I had never been touched by anyone but Victor. He was the initiator; I was entered by him. I was possessed by him. Between the knees and the navel I belong to him. How could I deliver myself to any other man?’
‘To any other man. Yes, I see that. But…’
It was at the end of a long, long talk in that hotel lobby, waiting for the bar to open, that Naomi reached that ‘But’.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘We’ve told each other quite a lot, this way and that, and though I’ve guessed it, though you’ve implied it, you’ve not said so in so many words. But you are having troubles, aren’t you, with your marriage.’
It was then that Myra told Naomi about her problems, her own heart searchings. Naomi nodded as she listened, not interrupting, but interjecting an occasional comment, an occasional query. She let her hand drop over Myra’s, stroking the long thin fingers with her short ones. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I see.’
When Myra had at last reached the end Naomi stood up. ‘We’ve got to have a long talk about all of this. I’ve quite a lot to say. We all have to talk about ourselves when we’re in trouble; if we don’t, things inside us fester. The psychoanalysts have taught us that. I think that a young wife is far better off talking to a woman a few years older than herself than she is to a priest or a psychiatrist. It’s lucky that we’ve got a whole week together.’
That was how it began. That was how it went on. They followed, on the surface, the conventional tourist routine. They swam and sunbathed. They went on trips. They had, through letters of introduction, contacts with some residents; the Maltese are very hospitable. They were invited to a lunch at the fashionable Union Club and to a couple of cocktail parties. One party led to others.
Their time was fully occupied; when Myra wrote to Victor she could present herself as leading a varied and enlivening existence; but all that was on the surface. Below the surface she was conducting with Naomi a sequence of confessions that in retrospect she saw as a continuous dialogue.
Myra had an instinct to confide. She had kept her feelings bottled up too long. Naomi had a strong personality and a persuasive manner. Moreover she was a foreigner, who rarely came to England. She knew none of Myra’s friends. Myra would not be embarrassed later on by having made admissions, a thing that could happen so easily in one’s own setting. You let down your hair with your oldest friend and then, ever afterwards, felt awkward in her presence. That would not happen now. No secret was too intimate for her to betray to Naomi.
Naomi asked if she had noti
ced any change in Victor’s manner. ‘Does he make love to you less often?’
‘No, I don’t think so, no.’
‘How often do you make love?’
‘It’s hard to say. Sometimes three or four times over a weekend, then not again for ten days or so.’
‘Nine or ten times a month?’
‘Yes, I suppose so, yes.’
‘Did you keep a score of the number of times you made love on your honeymoon?’
‘Good heavens, no.’
‘It wouldn’t have been an unwise precaution. Presumably you made love all the time.’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘Did you hear that old saying about the married couple who during the first year of their marriage put a bead into a vase every time they made love? At the end of the year, they put the beads into a bag. At the start of the second year, they started again putting a bead into the vase. At the end of fifteen years they had not collected as many beads as they had during the first year.’
Myra laughed. ‘That wouldn’t be true in my case.’
‘Not altogether. But remember this, if your husband was making love to you thirty times a month during your honeymoon and now makes love to you less than ten times a month, he has a certain amount of unexpended energy.’
‘He wasn’t going to an office during our honeymoon.’
‘Did he make love to you any less often during the first six weeks after you’d got back?’
‘Not as far as I remember.’
‘That’s what I mean. He’s capable of making love more often than he does. He has some surplus energy, for another woman.’ Naomi’s questions became increasingly intimate. ‘You like love-making, don’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘There’s no “of course” to it. A lot of women don’t. Do you enjoy it very much?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Do you feel restless if you’ve not been made love to for several weeks?’
‘I’ve never not been made love to for several weeks.’
‘Are you beginning to feel restless here?’
There was a mischievous look in Naomi’s eyes as she said that, a titillating look. Myra’s zest for these questions quickened.
What on earth will she ask me next, she’d think. When the dialogue was discontinued as they swam, as they listened to the guide’s flow of explanation, as they were separated at a cocktail party, she became impatient for its resumption; at the day’s end she would go over it phase by phase. She was fascinated not only by the questions themselves, but by the way in which Naomi set them. A roguish glint would flicker in her eyes. The tip of her tongue would slip between her lips. Naomi had a mesmeric effect on her. ‘Have you noticed any change recently in his ways of making love?’ she asked.
‘What kind of difference?’
‘A different position, a different trick, something he might have learned from another woman.’
Myra shook her head.
‘What position or what positions do you use?’ asked Naomi.
‘The usual ones.’
‘That’s not an answer. There are according to the Kama Sutra some sixty different positions. Let us be more specific.’
Myra became specific. At the end of her interrogation, Naomi shook her head.
‘It really boils down to only three. It was a pity that you had your first child so soon.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because this is, I suspect, what happened. You were completely inexperienced when you married. You’d read the little books, the manuals; but there’s all the difference in the world between actual and theoretical experience. You were puzzled by it all at first. It didn’t seem quite natural for you to be behaving in this way with a man; you didn’t feel at ease with him, you didn’t enjoy it very much.’
‘Oh, yes, I did. I was so proud of myself at not being a virgin any longer, at knowing all the things about which as a schoolgirl I had been inquisitive. No woman could boast her superior knowledge; I was tickled to death. Oh yes, I enjoyed myself all right.’
‘But the actual act itself, how enjoyable was that?’
‘It hurt at first, but then I had been warned it would. It didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected. It was uncomfortable, but that didn’t last for long.’
‘What about the orgasm?’
‘What about the orgasm?’
‘How long was it before you got one?’
‘I can’t be sure. It’s hard to tell, isn’t it, with a woman. There’s not the explosion that there is with a man. I enjoy it more sometimes than I do at others. I get excited when Victor does; there’s a feeling of achievement then, but really I don’t know. I wonder if we don’t make too much fuss about the orgasm, feeling that there must be with women an exact equivalent of what there is with men. I’ve an idea that with a woman it’s all more diffused.’
She looked at Naomi questioningly; but Naomi let the implication pass.
‘Why,’ Myra persisted, ‘do you think it was a pity that I had a child so soon?’
‘Because it checked your amatory development.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘A honeymoon’s an education, an initiation; a woman’s shy at first and awkward. She’s uncertain of herself. Gradually she becomes accustomed to the whole ritual of love-making. She becomes audacious. You remember Juliet’s “Strange love grown bold” thinking “true love acted simple modesty”. That’s what happens during the first year of marriage. The love-making gets more and more elaborate till there isn’t a thing you haven’t done together. That’s unlikely to happen if there’s a baby right away. A playmate becomes an invalid; she cumbersome, she has to be treated gently. Love-making becomes limited. It isn’t, how shall I put it, a hurly-burly any longer. You fall into a routine, and once you’ve fallen into that, it’s difficult to shake out of it. When the wife has recovered after her baby, she picks up the routine that she had followed during her pregnancy.’
‘Does that matter provided the routine is pleasant?’
‘In my opinion, yes, because it prevents a couple from learning all the varieties of love-making.’
‘You think that’s important?’
Naomi answered her obliquely. ‘How much pornography have you read?’
‘Not very much. Fanny Hill, of course.’
‘That’s the greatest fun, but it’s not very explicit. Have you seen any blue films?’
‘No,’
‘You haven’t read any of those books that go into exact detail?’
‘Modern novels go quite a long way, don’t they?’
‘Perhaps, but they can’t go all the way. There are semi-medical books that do. Most men have read them and they wonder what it’s like in these elaborate ways. I don’t say those ways are more satisfactory, but they are different and there’s a kick about doing things that perhaps are frowned upon. If a man doesn’t do them with his wife, he’ll be tempted to do them with another woman. It holds good for the wife, too. If she suspects that another man can give her a new experience, she’ll very likely give herself an opportunity of finding out.’
Naomi was asking fewer questions now. She was talking as an instructress to a pupil.
‘It is essential in marriage,’ she went on, ‘that each should satisfy the other’s curiosity. You will hear a woman say, “I couldn’t let my husband do that to me,” or a husband say, “I couldn’t do that with my own wife.” But the wife who says that may be very sure that some other woman will, and the husband can be very sure that some other man will be less punctilious. The wife will be grateful to that other man.’
Naomi developed her theory amusingly, lightly, with no undue solemnity. She kept Myra laughing half the time.
‘If Victor is being unfaithful to you,’ she said, ‘it’s not that he’s not devoted to you, that he doesn’t love you, it’s not even that he may not be in love with you. If he’s unfaithful, it’s because some woman is giving him some trifling assuagement tha
t you never have.’
She paused. She looked at Myra quizzically. ‘Has it ever occurred to you to whip your husband?’ Myra was so astonished that she could only gape. Naomi laughed. ‘I can see that it never has.’
‘It couldn’t occur to anyone to think of that in connection with Victor.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s so conventional, so formal; Winchester and New College. So completely the Treasury official.’
‘That’s the very type for whom that treatment might be effective.’
‘But one can’t imagine anyone like Victor submitting himself to anything undignified.’
‘That’s the very type of person who responds to it. You have heard of flagellation.’
‘Of course, yes. But…’
‘But you thought it was only neurotics, decadents, who indulged in it. Men whose nerves were so jaded that they needed an extra kick. But that isn’t the way it is. It’s solid citizens who fall for it. Which race of men would you say were the most ponderous, the most formal, the most self-important, the most insistent upon protocol? The English, the Germans, and the Swedes; and they are the three races most addicted to it. They want to escape from their robes and chains of office. They want to be human. It means nothing to the light-hearted Mediterranean types—the French, the Spaniards, the Italians; nor to the South Americans—with their comic-opera revolutions. But the stodgy, hide-bound northerners! Think of how bored a judge must get sitting in a high seat, pretending to be shocked by the misdemeanours of some hippie. What a relief to him to drive straight from the law courts to a small flat in Maida Vale, to be ordered about by a trollop, to be told to take off his clothes, go down on his hands and knees, then to have her mount him as though he were a horse and flog him round the flat. Of all the past presidents of France, who is the one who is held now in most affectionate esteem, who has the most streets named after him? Felix Fauré. And why? He was on his way to a high civic function. He was seated at his official desk; he was wearing a frock coat and a high starched collar. His gleaming silk hat was on the desk beside him. But in addition to all that, a naked girl was on her knees between his legs; his hands caressed her head. In a sudden spasm of pleasure, he had a heart attack and died. His fingers fastened in her hair; the girl could only be released at the cost of her shorn locks. Felix Fauré is a national hero.’
