The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by Various

  So we went on as I wished and I enjoyed managing the double life and if Rodney didn’t exactly enjoy it he was very good at it. For example, one morning an absolutely ghastly thing happened; Henry’s mother suddenly arrived as Rodney and I were about to set off for Brighton. I have already said about Henry’s mother that you can feel two ways about her; I think that I would be prepared to feel the nicer way more often if she didn’t seem to feel so consistently the nastier way about me. As it is, our relations are not very good and as, like most people, we find it easier to fight battles on our home grounds, we don’t often meet.

  Henry’s mother doesn’t bother much about dress and that day being a rather cold summer day she was wearing an old squirrel-skin coat over her tweeds. As to her hats, you can never tell much about these, because her grey hair gets loose so much and festoons all over them. It is said in the Raven family that she should have been allowed by her father to go to the University and that she would then have been a very good scholar and happy to be so. As it is, she has lived most of her life in a large red-brick Queen Anne house in Hampshire and the only way that you can tell that she is not happy like all the other ladies is that as well as gardening and jam making and local government, she does all the very difficult crossword puzzles very quickly and as well as the travel books and biographies recommended in the Sunday papers she reads sometimes in French and even in German. She closed her eyes when she saw me but this was no especial insult because as I have said she always does this when she speaks.

  ‘You shouldn’t live so close to Harrods, June dear, if you don’t want morning callers,’ was how she greeted me.

  As Rodney and I were both obviously about to go out there was not much to answer to this. But the Ravens have a habit of half-saying what is on their minds and it immediately seemed certain to me that she had only come there because she’d heard about the lodger and wanted to pry. I said, ‘This is Rodney Galt, our lodger. This is Henry’s mother.’

  Rodney must have formed the same conclusion for he immediately said, ‘How do you do? I’m afraid this is a very brief meeting because I’m just off to the London Library.’

  ‘Oh?’ Henry’s mother answered. ‘You must be one of those new members who have all the books out when one wants them. It’s so difficult being a country member. Of course, when Mr Cox was alive,’ and she sighed, putting the blame on to Rodney but also making it quite clear to me that it was him she wanted to investigate. I thought it would be wise to deflect her so I said, ‘You’ll stay and have a coffee or a drink or something, won’t you?’

  But she was not to be deflected. ‘What strange ideas you have about how I spend my mornings, June dear,’ she answered, ‘I haven’t come up from Kingston, you know. I’m afraid you’re one of those busy people who think everybody idle but yourself. I just thought it would be proper since I was so close at Harrods that we should show each other that we were both still alive. But I don’t intend to waste your time, dear. Indeed if Mr Galt is going to the London Library I think I shall ask him if he will share a taxi with me. I’m getting a little old to be called “duckie” as these bus ladies seem to like to do now.’

  So Rodney was caught good and proper. However, I needn’t have worried for him, because when Henry came home I learned that his mother had been round to Brodrick Layland and had spent her time singing Rodney’s praises. It appeared that he’d been so helpful in finding her the best edition of Saint Simon that she had offered him luncheon and that he had suggested Wheelers. His conversation must have been very pleasing to her for she made no grumble about the bill. She had only said to Henry, ‘I can’t think why you described him as a beautiful-looking young man. He’s most presentable and very well informed too.’ So we seemed to have got over that hurdle.

  But Rodney was a success with all our friends; for example, with ‘les jeunes filles en fleur’. This is the name that Henry and I give to two ladies called Miss Jackie Reynolds and Miss Marcia Railton and the point about the name is that although like Andrée and Albertine, they are Lesbian ladies, they are by no means jeunes filles and certainly not en fleur. Henry is very fond of them because like Lady Ann they make him feel broadminded. They are very generous and this is particularly creditable because they do not make much money out of their business of interior decoration. They have lived together for a great many years – since they were young indeed which must be a great great many years ago – and Henry always says that this is very touching. Unfortunately they are often also very boring and this seems to be all right for Henry, because when they have been particularly boring, he remembers how touching their constancy to each other is and this apparently compensates him. But it doesn’t compensate me.

  When the jeunes filles met Rodney, Jackie who is short and stocky with an untidy black-dyed shingle, put her head on one side and said, ‘I say, isn’t he a smasher!’ And Marcia who is petite rather than stocky and altogether dainty in her dress, said, ‘But of a Beauty!’ This is the way they talk when they meet new people; Henry says it’s because they are shy, and so it may be, but it usually makes everybody else rather shy too. I thought it would paralyse Rodney, but he took it in his stride and said, ‘Oh! come, I’m not as good-looking as all that.’ That was when I first realized that I preferred Rodney on his own and this in itself is a difficulty because if one is going to be much with somebody you are bound to be with other people sometimes. How ever, the evening went swimmingly. Rodney decided that, although he would always have really good objects in his own house, the people to whom he let furnished flats would be much happier to be interior decorated and who better to do it than les jeunes filles en fleur? Well, that suited Marcia and Jackie all right. They got together, all three in a huddle, and a very funny huddle it was. Rodney already knew of some Americans, even apart from all the people who would be taking furnished flats from him when he had them to offer, and the rest of the evening was spent in deal discussions. Henry said afterwards he’d never felt so warm to Rodney as when he saw how decent he was to les jeunes filles. I wasn’t quite sure what the decency meant but still…

  The truth was that much though I was enjoying Rodney’s company, I was beginning to get a little depressed by the suit he was so ardently pressing and the decision that this ardour was forcing upon me. It would be so much nicer if there was no cause and effect in life, no one thing leading inevitably to another, but just everything being sufficient in itself. But I could see that Rodney was not the kind of person to take life in this way and quite suddenly something forced this realization upon me rather strongly.

  I have not said much about our Swiss, Henriette Vaudoyer, and I don’t propose to say much now because nothing is more boring than talk about foreign domestics. I have to put up with it at three-quarters of the dinners we go to. Henriette was a very uninteresting girl, but quite pretty. There were only four of us in the house: Henry and me in one bedroom and Rodney and Henriette in two bedrooms. Well, no one can be surprised that Rodney and Henriette began to be in one bedroom sometimes too. I wasn’t surprised but I was upset, it gave me a pain in my stomach. Clearly there were only two things I could do about that pain: get rid of Rodney or get rid of Henriette. The brave thing would have been to get rid of Rodney before I got worse pains; but already the pain was so bad that I was not brave enough. I gave Henriette notice. She said some very unpleasant, smug, Swiss sort of things to me and she began to say them to Henry which was more worrying. Luckily one of Henry’s great virtues is that he never listens to tale-bearing and he did what is called ‘cut her short’. However, he was a bit worried that I should decide to be without a foreign girl, because we’d always had one and sometimes two. But I explained that we had Mrs Golfin coming in, and she was only too pleased to come in even more, and for the rest, having more to do would be wonderful for my moods about which I was getting worried. So Henry saw the necessity and Henriette went. But I saw clearly too that I would have to decide either to accept Rodney’s importuning or not, because soon he would t
ake no answer as the same as ‘answer – no’.

  I think maybe I might have answered no, only at the time Henry annoyed me very much over the holiday question. This is a very old and annoying question with us. Every year since we were married Henry says, ‘Well, I don’t know why we shouldn’t manage Venice (or Madrid, or Rome) this year. I think we’ve deserved it.’ And first, I want to say that people don’t deserve holidays, they just take them; and secondly, I want to point out that we’re really quite rich and there’s no question of our not being able to ‘manage’ Venice or Rome. I long, in fact, for the day when he will say, ‘Well, I don’t know why we shouldn’t manage Lima this year, taking in Honolulu and Madagascar on the way home.’ But if he can’t say that – and he can’t – then I would prefer him to ask, ‘Shall we go to Italy or Spain or North Africa this year, June? The choice is yours.’ However, just about the time that Henriette left, he came out with it. ‘Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t manage Florence this year.’ So I said, ‘Well I do, Henry, because I don’t bloody well want to go there.’ And then he was very upset and as I was feeling rather guilty anyway, I apologized and said how silly my moods were and Florence would be rather enchanting.

  Henry cheered up a good deal at this. ‘If that is so,’ he said, ‘I’m very glad, because it makes it much easier for me to tell you something. It’s been decided on the spur of the moment that I’m to go to New York on business. It’s only for a fortnight but I must leave next week.’

  Now I wouldn’t really have wanted to go to New York for Brodrick Layland on a rush visit but somehow everything conspired together to make me furious and I decided then and there that what I wanted was what Rodney wanted, physical mastery or no. And actually when the time came, the physical mastery wasn’t such a trial. I mean there was nothing ‘extra’ or worrying about it. And for the rest, I was very pleased.

  So that when Henry set off for New York, I was committed on a new course of life, as they say. But the weekend before Henry left, he insisted on running me down to a country hotel in Sussex and making a fuss of me. I suppose I should have felt very bad about it, because really he did his best to make the fuss as good as possible. But all I could think of was that I did hope cause and effect and one thing following another wasn’t going to make life worse instead of better. After all I had made this committal to a new course in order to make life less boring, but if it meant that there were going to be more decisions and choices in front of me, it would be much more boring. One thing, however, I did decide was that I would try not to talk about Rodney to Henry even if I did have to think of him. After all, talking about Rodney would not have been a very kind return for the fussing.

  In the end, however, it was Henry who raised the subject of Rodney. It seemed that Lady Ann had not been able to put a good face on all the time. One day at a cocktail party when even she had found the gin stronger than usual she had dropped her face in front of Henry. She said that the money she had spent on Rodney nobody knew – this I thought was hypocritical because she was just telling Henry how much it was – and the return he’d made had been beneath anything she’d ever experienced. I must say she couldn’t have said worse, considering the sort of life she’s led. Henry was very upset, because although he liked Rodney, Lady Ann was such a very old friend. But I said that age in friendship was not the proper basis for judgement (after all just because Lady Ann was so old!) and I also reminded him that hell had no fury. I succeeded in pacifying him because he didn’t want his fussing of me to be spoiled, but I could see that things would never be the same between Rodney and Henry, as now indeed they were not between any of the three of us.

  Well, there we were – Rodney and me alone for ten days. And Rodney did exactly the right thing – he suggested that we spent most of the time in Paris. How right this was! First there was the note of absurdity of adultery in Paris. ‘That,’ said Rodney, ‘should satisfy your lack of self-assurance. Your passion to put all your actions in inverted commas.’ It must be said that Rodney, for someone only my age, understands me very well, because I do feel less troubled about doing anything when I can see it as faintly absurd. Of course, the reasons he gives don’t satisfy me very well; when I asked him why I was like that, he said, ‘Because you’re incurably middle class, June darling.’ On the whole though, by this time Rodney gave me less of his ‘patrician line’. However, things had not yet reached the pass that I could tell Rodney my theory about him.

  This theory, you will already have guessed, was that he was little better or little worse or whatever than an adventurer, not to say, a potential crook. I did indeed know that his affairs had reached a serious state because of some of the telephone conversations that I overheard and because of the bills that kept arriving. The nicest thing was that Rodney paid the whole of the Paris trip. It is true that he hadn’t paid for his rent for some weeks; it is also true that his trip to Paris was intended as an investment; nevertheless I think it was very lovely of him to have paid the Paris trip when he was up to his eyes in debts. Let me say that until the last day or so the Paris trip was everything I could ask or that money could buy. Also, though I don’t think Rodney realized this, it was a great relief to me not to be committing adultery in Henry’s house (for in a sense it was Henry’s although it belonged to me).

  It was only the last day but one of our trip, when we were sitting at a café looking at the Fontainebleau twiddly staircase and drinking Pernod that Rodney began to press his further suit. I had been expecting it, of course; indeed it was the choice that lay ahead, the inevitable decision, and all the other things that I had so hoped would not happen but that I knew would. He asked me, in fact, to leave Henry for him. At first he just said it was what we both wanted. Then he said he loved me too much to see me go on living with Henry in such a dead, pretence life, getting more bitterly whimsical and harder every year. Then he said I was made like him to use life up and enjoy people and things and then pass on to others. It was all very unreal; but if he had only known it was exactly this confidence trick part of him that attracted me. I could quite clearly see the life of travel and hotels we should have on my money and the bump there would be when we got through my money which I think Rodney would have done rather quickly. But it was the bogusness, the insecurity and even perhaps the boue beneath, for which I had such a nostalgia.

  Somehow, however, he didn’t grasp this or perhaps he was too anxious to secure his aims. For he suddenly changed his tone and became a pathetic, dishonest little boy pleading for a chance. He was desperate, he said, and it must look as though he was after my money, for he was sure I had put two and two together. This I had to admit. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘then you know the worst.’ But he begged me to believe if he could have me with him, it would be different. He had real talent and he only needed some support to use it. Did I understand, he asked me, exactly what his life had been? And then he told me of his background – his father was a narrow, not very successful builder in a small Scotch town – he described to me most movingly his hatred of it all, his hard if dishonest fight to get into a different world, the odds against him. It was I, he begged, who could get him on to the tram-lines again.

  I don’t think I’m very maternal really, because I didn’t find myself moved; I only felt cheated. If I hadn’t been sure that in fact whatever he said, life with Rodney would have been much more like what I imagined than what he was now promising, I should have turned him down on the spot. As it was I said I must think about it. He must leave me alone in London for at least a fortnight and then I would give him an answer. He accepted this because anyway he had business in France, so I returned to London alone.

  Henry was glad on his return to find Rodney absent, I think. And in a short while he was even more glad still. Or, at any rate, I was, because if Rodney had been in our house I think that Henry would have hit him. This, of course, might have fitted into Rodney’s ideas of the violence of life, even if not into his view of civilization; and probably Rodney being much yo
unger he would have won the fight, which would have made me very angry because of Henry. But it is just possible that Henry would have won and this would have made me very sad because of my ideal picture of Rodney.

  What put the lid on it (as they used to say at some period which I’m not sure of the date of) for Henry was a visit he made to his mother shortly after his return, when he discovered that Rodney had borrowed money from her. I could only think that if Rodney could get money from Henry’s mother he had little to fear about the future (and maybe if my future was joined to his, though precarious, it would not founder). But Henry, of course, saw it differently and so did I, when I heard of the sum involved which was only £50, a sum of money insufficient to prevent foundering.

  Hardly had Henry’s mother dealt Henry’s new-found friendship a blow from the right, when up came les jeunes filles and dealt it a knockout from the left. It seemed that they had busily decorated and furnished two flats for American friends of Rodney’s – one for Mrs Milton Brothers and one for Robert J. Masterson and family – and as these American people were visiting the Continent before settling in England, the bills had been given to Rodney to send to them. The bills were quite large because Rodney had told les jeunes filles not to cheese-pare. Now Mrs Brothers and Mr Masterson and family had arrived in London and it seemed that they had already given the money for les jeunes filles to Rodney plus his commission. Jackie said, ‘You can imagine what it makes us look like,’ and Marcia said, ‘Yes, really it is pretty grim.’ Then Jackie said, ‘We look such awful chumps,’ and that I think was what I agreed with most. Henry said he felt sure that when Rodney returned, he would have some explanation to offer. I didn’t think this likely and I didn’t think Henry did. ‘Well,’ said Jackie, ‘that’s just it. I’m not sure that Rodney ought to return because if Mrs Brothers goes on as she is now, I think there’ll be a warrant out for him soon.’