When I Was Otherwise

by Stephen Benatar

  “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.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure,” responded Marsha.

  “What was that, dear? No, naturally you’re not! Why should you be? Handsome is as handsome does—that’s what I say. But…” She fiddled impatiently with her hearing aid. “You yourself always had the looks of the family, didn’t you, dear? I mean the Stormonts. Henry was all right—facially—but one has to admit that Dan didn’t come out of it too well. He looked just like a thin, gangly monkey when he was younger, with sleeked-down gingery hair, and he looks just like a slower, puffier version now, with hardly any hair at all to speak of, gingery or otherwise! Not that that matters, of course. He has a nice lazy easy-going sort of face to match his personality. Not much get-up-and-go, however—oh, well, you can’t have everything—none of you ever showed much of that! Of course, it usually works out in this life that it’s the brothers who get all the beauty and the sisters who are left to look like monkeys. So you, dear, did very well for yourself. I mean—in that respect. But… Why did your mother never encourage you to develop more resources? I’ve often wondered.”

  “I suppose in those days people just didn’t consider it important for women to be educated.”

  “Well, I don’t know, dear. I managed to scrape together an education of some kind. Of course, that wasn’t quite in those days, I grant you. Your mother herself was reasonably well-educated. In a way. According to her lights. I must say it seems very strange. And it wasn’t only you! To have let Dan go into hairnets and Henry into Selfridge’s… Didn’t your father ever have a say in it?”

  “You’re forgetting, Daisy. When Father died Henry would only have been—what?—thirteen.”

  “Yes, but Dan…he’d have been older. And he never went to university. So your father could still have had a say in it, couldn’t he? Those hairnets.”

  Marsha merely shrugged. “I really can’t remember.”

  Anyway, thought Daisy, Marsha’s father must have been a distinctly poor sort of a fish: you only had to look at the woman he’d chosen to marry! He’d clearly had the words There, there! inscribed all over him in indelible ink—luminous, too. And even the fact that he had finally marched off to war to make the supreme sacrifice…this couldn’t always be seen as enough of a gesture to exonerate him completely.

  And besides which, she already knew the answer to the main part of her question. The reason Marsha hadn’t been encouraged to develop more resources was simply this: Florence had wanted to keep her daughter thoroughly subservient. That was mainly why she had organized the divorce: to have an unpaid companion to dance grateful and admiring attendance in her final years. And how wonderfully she had succeeded!

  “I wonder what she’s doing now.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mother.”

  Marsha stared at her. “But, Daisy, my mother is dead.”

  Daisy stared back at her a moment; suddenly appeared to give herself a little shake.

  “Yes, I know that, dear.”

  She passed one hand across her forehead and spoke almost with vehemence.

  “I meant, of course—I wonder what she’s doing now, in the afterlife. Don’t you believe in heaven? Don’t you believe that we go on?”

  “Yes…I think I do.”

  “Well, then?” She put her hand back to her forehead, kept it there a little, shaded her eyes with it. “Don’t go for just a minute, there’s a dear.”

  “Aren’t you feeling well, Daisy?”

  “Oh—as well as I ever do! But I think somebody must have walked over my grave, that’s all. What a ridiculous expression! Before they did so I hope they at least had the manners to wipe their boots!”

  Marsha began to relax. “You’re not sitting in a draught or something?”

  “Yes, I am. I’m sitting in a something. I’m sitting in a bed.”

  “Oh, you chump!”

  They chuckled.

  But, after a moment, Marsha administered one further test.

  “What do you think heaven will be like, Daisy?”

  “A colossal bore, most likely.”

  “Oh—you don’t!”

  “It all depends what types you’ll have to mix with. Suppose I found myself surrounded by a lot of idiotic women engaging in good works? Them, of course, not me—all gracious and condescending and holier-than-thou! (Well, that’s my view of it, anyway. I could be talking through my hat. I very often do!) Or suppose I was forced, for the sake of redeeming my lost and shabby soul, to attend meetings given by the Mother’s Union: suppose I had to be polite to my own mother let alone to yours? I don’t think I could stand it.” (There seemed nothing much wrong there, Marsha thought.) “Though that was just my little joke, dear, as I’m very sure you realize.”

  “Yes, Daisy, of course.”

  “Great Scot! I do believe you’re growing quite broad-minded in your old age! There’s hope for you yet!”

  “Oh, good! I am relieved!”

  “No, but I don’t really mean it, dear—you know me—not a word. Shall I tell you what I intend to do the minute I arrive?”

  “In heaven?”

  “Yes. Paint the town red; you might have guessed. ‘Good Lord,’ they’ll say, ‘what’s this the wind’s blown in? Hold on to your hats, boys! This place will never be the same—oh, hallelujah!’ Apart from which, I intend to catch up on a few of the shows I was sorry to have missed in London. I mean, I’d like to see Burbage and Garrick and Kean. And—of course—keep up with all that’s going on when I’m no longer here to see it.”

  But Marsha shook her head. Smiling. Bewildered.

  “Oh, Daisy, how can that be? What’s past is past. Nothing can bring it back.”

  “Oh, ye of little faith!”

  “Well, it’s no good pretending that I understand! But do you really belie
ve it might be possible?”

  “I do! I do! If that’s the sort of thing you’re after.”

  “Then I’ll just have to think about it. I know I’ve never been as clever as you, Daisy.”

  “‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.’”

  It was a moment of rare harmony between them.

  “And do you know how else I see it?” asked Daisy. “I see it as a sort of might-have-been place, where you can relive your life as it really ought to have been. All the right people responding in the right way. Your true potential unimpeded. I wouldn’t mind, dear, finding myself in a place like that. Would you?”

  “No, it sounds quite beautiful.”

  “And probably all poppycock if the truth were known!”

  “I shan’t believe that!”

  “You please yourself, dear. You’ll be as mad as I am before you’re through!”

  Marsha stood up. “Well, Daisy, in that case I could certainly do worse. But now I think I really had better be on my way. You need to get your beauty sleep. I need to make Dan his good-night cup of Horlicks.”

  “Yes, naturally you do! I mustn’t keep you. Perhaps we ought to call you Martha—not Marsha.” Daisy gave a wide yawn.

  “Oh, don’t do that; you’re making me do it, too!”

  “Now just look at you, you poor old thing! You should have been in your bed hours ago. Tell Dan to make his own Horlicks!”

  “Here, let me take your aid for you and put it on the table. Do your pillows need plumping again? Is that a little better?”

  Daisy didn’t hear but nonetheless she supplied the right answer. “That’s very nice. Thank you, dear.” She gave another yawn. “Thank you for my hot-water bottle. Just the way I like it. Thank you for sitting and listening to me. I’ve been jawing the hind legs off a donkey—as usual! But tonight, dear, you provided a fair amount of the jawing yourself! Still—mum’s the word—I shan’t tell on you! Don’t forget to say goodnight to Dan for me.”

  Marsha bent and kissed her on the cheek. (It was still as rouged as in the daytime.) Daisy mumbled her customary nocturnal benediction.