Josephine, whom he had met for the first time at Mickey’s wedding and thought an appalling, disturbing sort of woman, an entirely self-centred creature who contrived scenes and dramas in order to focus attention upon herself, had come to see him at one of the monthly ‘surgeries’ he held in the constituency.
He’d recognized her straight away – she wasn’t the kind of person easily forgotten: the redness of her hair and slightly crazed look in the eye, as if at any unprompted moment she might burst into a furious temper. She was less flamboyantly dressed this second time he met her; she had on a voluminous black dress and an emerald green coiled telephone wire as a necklace, but no hat and little make-up – unlike the wedding when the greens and reds on her face had been of pantomime proportions.
She had come to see him on behalf of her employer, who now felt so shamefully abused by the imposition of death duties he had removed himself to the Bahamas for two months in order to recuperate.
The irony of this situation had not escaped Josephine: ‘Margate might have strengthened his case but the recovery process would take longer,’ she said, catching Dan’s eyes with a slightly cynical glint.
It seemed that the noble earl was at the point of being forced to sell off a gallery or two of paintings, and this in spite of his plans to follow the examples of Woburn and other stately compromises.
‘Perhaps you’d like to come and see them, the paintings,’ Josephine suggested.
Dan hesitated a moment, selecting one of the several little phrases he kept in store for refusing invitations: ‘My secretary tells me she’ll resign if I make any more engagements without consulting her first’; ‘There’s a three-line whip coming up’; ‘I’ll do my very best but it’s impossible to commit myself to dates and times while the House is sitting’. None of them would wash with Josephine, but Dan had not gone into politics in order to desoak the rich. He was not always certain of the exact reason for his political aspirations (if he really had any). He had been invited to stand for Parliament shortly after Charlotte had departed with Vicky and at the time it had offered an escape from the preoccupation of private misery. Of course, it had become much more than that, an all-absorbing challenge that required single-minded dedication to word and deed, to public winning as opposed to private losing. But Dan was not given to self-deception: he believed in admitting to himself, if not others, the mundane truth, which was why he had suffered more than other men whose wives leave them. He didn’t search for comforting explanations, ego-restoring excuses: Charlotte had left him because she was bored with him and had fallen in love with someone else.
Josephine had that same look of impatient womanhood, the impression that she anticipated disappointment but had not yet come to terms with its inevitability.
‘I have little knowledge of art,’ he said, adding in his thoughts, although my wife knew a great deal. ‘Would this evening be convenient?’
She seemed a little surprised, but evidently pleased that her mission had achieved initial success.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘And, thank you. I expected a diplomatic brush-off. Peter will be impressed.’
She stood up to leave. Dan smiled, using the trick he’d cultivated of pressing his tongue against his teeth. He’d noted the deliberately unself-conscious use of her employer’s Christian name.
‘I should have told you to come to the front door,’ she said that evening when he arrived at her flat. ‘I do apologize.’
Dan never expected grand treatment but received it more often than not. It didn’t suit him, being flattered and having ingratiating platitudes laid before him; but he was and always had been, a long-suffering man, more inclined to the gratification of others’ expectations than his own.
So, Josephine, whose admiration and respect was never instantly nor easily won, let him in by a side door that might once have been used by trades people, and took him through the dimly lit corridor of the earl’s mansion, forty-watt light bulbs casting a gloom of genteel poverty.
The pictures, similarly lit, had a uniform brownness about them, brown backgrounds, brown flesh tones, brown trees. Dan had no idea whether they were any good; the value was, apparently, in their antiquity: they were not at all like the paintings Charlotte favoured, those bright, Impressionist canvases with their disregard for precise line.
Josephine paused in front of a muddy landscape and sighed.
‘I can see you’re not an art lover,’ she said, gazing into the picture. ‘Although I have to admit I always find it depressing in here myself. Do you ever get depressed?’ she added, unexpectedly.
‘Doesn’t everyone?’ Dan replied, uneasy at this sudden ‘close-up’ question.
‘That’s a politician’s answer,’ she said.
He moved past her to the next painting.
‘Well, do you then?’ she persisted.
‘Of course, I wouldn’t be human otherwise.’
‘Oh, there are plenty of people around who never get so much as a twinge,’ she informed him. ‘Although I didn’t think you were one of them. How long have you known Mickey?’
The sudden changes in direction seemed calculated to catch him off guard, but failed: he was used to all manner of tactics, trained as he was in the law.
She wants to know if there’s ever been anything between Mickey and me, he thought. She’s got a lascivious mind.
‘Why do you ask?’ he said.
‘Do you always answer questions with questions?’
‘No.’
‘End of conversation?’
They had reached the far end of the gallery. Josephine, who felt herself to be badly in need of sexual intercourse, was trying to decide whether she really fancied him. It was a pity, she concluded, that he wasn’t better looking, but she rather liked him: he was unassuming for a man in his position.
It seemed he had been giving consideration to whether or not they were to converse on a more personal level and had decided there would be no harm in a small chat. He felt rather sorry for her and vaguely intrigued. She had a strong personality but everything about her indicated that it was deeply flawed.
‘In answer to your question, I’ve known Mickey several years and I’m very fond of her.’
‘So am I. She’s one of the few genuinely nice people I know, kind of guileless but intelligent – a rare combination.’
Dan realized she was right and yet he’d never been able to come up with such an accurate summation: guileless but intelligent, that had been Charlotte too, although his wife had never been nice, not naturally in the way of Mickey. There was the similarity and the difference. Any feelings he might have harboured towards Mickey had been sweetly passive; Charlotte was still compulsive pain.
Dan indulged the piece of shrapnel in his chest for a brief moment, then forced it away, gave Josephine eye contact and invited her to have dinner with him.
Uncertain of her reputation and mindful of his own, he took her to an Indian restaurant that played rather loud sitar music and represented an unlikely haunt for members of his constituency party. Such prudence, he reflected, as an obsequious waiter grinned and bowed and swiped a napkin across a crumby table, was a dismal indication of middle age: how he had relished Charlotte’s dubious reputation when they were young!
‘Tell me,’ he said, opening the dinner conversation, ‘why doesn’t the earl make a speech in the Lords about the punitive effect of death duties?’
‘I think he feels it would appear too self-seeking, and besides, he suffers from a speech impediment.’
‘Unfortunate.’
‘Yes and no. He makes good use of it. It gives him time to think about what he’s saying and it makes his blood sound very blue.’
Dan laughed at her turn of phrase.
‘How did you come to work for him?’ he asked.
‘Our fathers knew one another and when life became less fun for my family he took pity. God, that makes me sound like a “distressed gentlefolk” and it’s not really like that. I think he nee
ds me as much as I do his job. It’s very boring really. Most of the time all I do is run his wretched gift shop, otherwise he uses me as he sees fit, which includes soothing his troubled brow, although not in the way you might imagine; firing people because he doesn’t like doing it and that sort of thing. Don’t ask me to talk about myself, I have a habit of not stopping once I start. I have this sort of lemming-like urge to do it to the peons at the sporting club. I go completely over the top because they find it all so shocking and I can’t resist shocking people. Childish, isn’t it? It’s probably due to some deep-rooted insecurity. I need to make quite certain they won’t like me so there’s nothing to lose.’
‘I think it’s more likely you’re easily bored.’
‘Is that a compliment?’
‘You must decide.’
‘Alright, I’ll take it as one. I like you, Dan Lovell. Let’s talk about you. As well as being a self-obsessed manic-depressive, I’m also very nosy.’
Dan, who was not one to talk about himself, saw that he was trapped, not so much by Josephine’s professed curiosity as by the realization that she was available to him; and although she was strange and too candid and very likely to cause embarrassment, he would allow the evening to take its course. And why not? He was enjoying her company. Difficult women were his type. Preordained, he was, to be their victim. He smiled across the table, mercifully she had resumed her own monologue and taking encouragement from his expression, moved up a gear and into the outrageous and eloquently vulgar.
It was quite late by the time they’d finished the meal. A basket of hot flannels was brought to their table and a tray of coloured seeds.
‘I’m never quite sure whether to swallow this stuff or spit it out,’ Josephine was saying as a crowd of people entered the restaurant, among them, David, but not Mickey.
They both saw him, but it seemed he hadn’t noticed them. A few minutes later they made to leave and had to pass the table where David was sitting.
What he felt to be a rather despicable desire for invisibility passed through Dan together with an image of Josephine at David and Mickey’s wedding. Briefly, he entertained the forlorn hope that they might navigate the passage to the door without her saying anything.
‘David! What have you done with Mickey?’ she said, loudly.
Several heads turned.
‘If it isn’t Josephine,’ said one of them, his voice a little slurred. ‘Why don’t you join us?’
‘No thanks, I’m with someone. You know Dan Lovell?’
‘Lucky fellow!’ the same person observed in an unpleasantly knowing tone.
Dan felt his genitals shrivel.
David greeted him, turning his head in their direction, but remaining seated. He spoke slowly and seemed only mildly surprised to see them together.
‘Where’s Mickey?’ Josephine repeated.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ David said, and Dan realized he was drunk.
‘Well you should have,’ Josephine said, rather aggressively.
‘Come on, we must be going,’ Dan murmured to her, taking her arm.
For a moment she pulled against his grip then succumbed and followed him out of the restaurant.
Outside, in the car park, she stopped again, as if considering going back.
‘What is it?’ Dan asked.
‘She’s my friend. Mickey, I mean.’
‘It’s none of our business,’ Dan said.
‘God, what an attitude!’ she rounded on him. Her voice had risen to a shout and he glanced round the car park to see if anyone else was about.
‘Listen,’ he said, with quiet insistence. ‘It’s no good interfering in other people’s marriages. What can you do, anyway?’
‘Go back in there and tell him he’s a drunken bastard who ought to know where his wife is!’
‘For God’s sake! Everyone will think you’re mad!’
‘I don’t give a fuck what other people think!’
Dan stared at her, a mixture of distaste and admiration clouding the issue. He felt rather concerned for Mickey himself and not a little ashamed of his own concern over appearances. When had he become like this, and how? The person he really was seemed to be crouching in the shadow of an acquired image that relied upon respectability in the eyes of people for whom he had no liking. He envied Josephine as he had once Charlotte in the days when he’d been bound within the stereotype of his parents’ expectations, and Charlotte, free-spirited and unencumbered by that inherent sense of duty that had lodged within him from an early age, appalled and enthralled him with her adolescent disdain for what was right and proper.
He’d thought at one time he’d overcome that stuffy self-consciousness of his youth, become inured to the opinion of others.
Josephine was glowering at him, and through him – at the whole world of toadyism and pretence and minding one’s own business.
‘Josephine,’ he said, loudly. ‘I would like you to come home with me.’
‘If that’s what you want,’ she said, dismissively, as changeable as bad weather.
As they drove out to Dan’s village, she appeared subdued, and when they arrived at the house he felt inclined to show her a little tenderness. Still in the car, its engine switched off and in the dense silence that then invades, he leaned across to her and kissed the corner of her mouth.
‘You don’t have to pretend,’ she said. ‘We both want it but let’s not kid ourselves there’s anything more than there is.’
‘That’s a sad thing to say,’ he said.
‘Delusion is sadder.’
He wondered then whether he would be able to make love to her. He needed a level of pretence.
They went into the house, the home that Charlotte had created and was just as she had left it although nothing was the same.
‘Would you like a brandy and some coffee?’ he asked.
‘It’s alright, I don’t expect ritual,’ she answered him.
‘Well, I do,’ he said, taking her hand and leading her into Charlotte’s comfortable drawing room.
He sat her down on the gold sofa with the corner tassels and lit the imitation log fire.
‘That’s clever,’ she said.
‘Not the real thing, but it creates something.’
‘How come the logs don’t burn?’
‘The flame is cold.’
‘Cleaner than the real thing, and no trouble. Do you think David and Mickey will survive?’
Dan was pouring the cognac.
‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘How do you like your coffee?’
‘Oh, please, don’t bother with coffee. I’d like to talk.’
He handed her a glass and sat down opposite.
‘What about?’
‘Oh, why we all make such a mess of our lives, why I have this appalling feeling of satisfaction at the thought of David and Mickey, of whom I’m terribly fond, breaking up and being unhappy.’
‘Is that really what you feel?’
‘Yes! I know it’s deplorable, but it’s the truth. It’s the same as wanting other people to be fat, offering them cigarettes when they’re trying to give up smoking, wanting them to fail. Other people’s success and happiness is always a choker.’
‘Only if you feel a failure yourself.’
‘Oh, the smug generosity of success!’
‘You’re very bitter. Do you really have cause?’
‘Probably not. My bitterness is against myself. I am, as they say, my own worse enemy.’
They sipped their brandy, their gaze drawn to the cold flame, with its blue core. Dan pondered over Mickey’s marriage, he’d never thought David good enough for her. Did he feel satisfaction to know there was the possibility they’d floundered?
‘What happened to your wife?’ Josephine broke into his thoughts.
‘She left me.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s all,’ he said, with finality.
She looked as if she might pursue it, then her expression changed t
o one of resignation. She sighed and stood up.
‘You know, I thought you were a winner, but I should have known better. After all, don’t the winners always end up with each other and the losers the same.’
‘Would you like me to drive you home?’ he asked her.
‘No. If it’s all the same to you I’d appreciate being taken to bed.’
‘You haven’t exactly gilded the invitation,’ he said.
‘No, I’m sorry. Do you think you could possibly forget what I’ve said, just for tonight?’
Her tone was not exactly pleading, he could not have coped with that; but he felt sorry for her, and if earlier in the evening he had found her attractive in an odd sort of way, now it was different. He no longer wanted to make love to her but he knew he would because it was not in his nature to hurt those who showed their vulnerability to him. He had no high opinion of himself but he did not think he was in the category of sufferers who gained satisfaction from the distress of others.
He turned off the gas that fed the flame in the hearth, took Josephine’s hand and led her upstairs to his bed.
She said nothing more until they were in it and he’d switched out the light.
‘I do believe you are that rare phenomenon, a good man,’ she said, with a tone of pathos.
‘Don’t give me too much credit. Don’t say any more,’ he murmured, suddenly finding himself aroused.
She was noisy but otherwise more inhibited than he might have expected and when she cried out he had the impression it was faked.
He moved away from her. The room had some light; the curtains were not fully drawn together and from the night sky a cold grey glimmer lay across the bed. Dan felt less than satisfied and just as lonely as he did all the other nights he slept in this room. His thoughts fell to Mickey and the possibility her marriage too had failed. Did it give him any comfort in the way Josephine had suggested? He felt not.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Josephine asked.
‘Mickey,’ he answered. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added, not wishing to give her a false impression. ‘I was thinking about what you said, comfort in another’s sorrow. God, that sounds even worse.’
Not Playing the Game Page 11
