When I Was Otherwise

by Stephen Benatar

  For one thing, Marsha no longer bombarded him with either questions or recitals. Once, indeed, he had even said: “Got a bit of news for you today! Walter was an hour and twenty minutes late this morning!” “Oh, and what happened?” she asked. “The Colonel seemed to swallow his excuses.” “Well, I should think so, too—would you like to come up now and say goodnight to Andy?” He had even had to tell her the nature of those excuses, without her enquiring, and after all this time Marsha’s reaction to his little anecdote—when he had only hoped to please her—was somewhat anticlimactic, to say the least.

  For another thing, more importantly perhaps, she was obviously kept busy enough not to have suspicions. At times he was surprised at, even mildly scornful of, the fact that she suspected nothing; but it was undeniably convenient, especially when he was so fully aware of the risks he took. She might have phoned the office and Miss Eggling might unwittingly have made some fateful disclosure; Mater might, equally unknowingly, have revealed some discrepancy. Furthermore, there was always the chance that somebody—maybe a wedding guest on Marsha’s side, or one of her earliest visitors to the house—could have seen him out with Daisy. The pitfalls were innumerable. But there was now a certain charm, for a young man who in the past had so often congratulated himself on never running risks, on so coolly and responsibly taking into account each eventuality and attempting to provide for it, there was now a certain charm in the thought of his own recklessness. The very knowledge that he walked a tightrope added piquancy and thrills. And he came to realize he hadn’t known himself before; otherwise, of course, upon jumping out of that frying pan he would certainly have paid much closer attention to where he was going to land. Now he did know himself; and wasn’t by any means dissatisfied with what he’d found. Allied to his sense of moral obligation and to his utter dependability, to the self-evident maturity contained in his policy of always planning for the morrow, was the consciousness of his also being a man who enjoyed living dangerously, who liked to spice his plain and wholesome diet with a dash of adventure, a dash of jauntily harmless intrigue. A bit of a romantic. A bit of an unknown quantity.

  A bit of a gay dog.

  It was especially satisfying because Marsha had on several occasions accused him of being stuffy. Naturally the charge had wounded him but because he was fair-minded he had wondered if it mightn’t contain an element of truth. Now at last he knew.

  And if either of them was stuffy—dull—a bore—it was definitely not him. Oh no, my sweet Marsha, definitely not I! He would have liked to remind her, forbearingly, of one of her own favourite maxims: that people who live in glass houses…

  And it was quite typical, of course, the fact he couldn’t do so: typical, farcical, frustrating: the cross he had to bear! Particularly frustrating that Marsha—Marsha out of all the people in this world (well, apart from Florence, maybe, and just a handful of others)—would remain the one person who could never be told the truth.

  For Daisy didn’t find him dull. Daisy, who was the arbiter of dullness—and damnably well qualified to be so! Her interests weren’t at all those of an ordinary woman. She was rare and she was splendid. Splendid—even though from time to time he might have to acknowledge she inhabited a house with just the odd pane of glass in it. But in her case, funnily enough, this only added to her charm: such occasional glimpses of fanlight or French window reassured you she was feminine!

  In fact, he had never seen the actual house where she lived—or, at any rate, not from the inside; she had a middle-floor flat in Belsize Park, more or less self-contained although needing to share a bathroom with the couple above. She was very old fashioned about inviting him in, and he respected her for this, despite the fact it would have saved him a great deal of expense if she could sometimes have cooked them dinner. But apart from the moral aspect of the thing—no, very much tied up with that—Daisy’s landlord himself lived on the ground floor and even as it was, apparently, was trying to find good reason to get rid of her: simply because she always insisted on her rights and endeavoured to make him carry out repairs which he would have been happier ducking out of. The man was a villain; a profiteer; he was nothing but a fat idiot, to use Daisy’s own terminology. And how like Daisy—how magnificently like Daisy—he felt proud of her—to snap and worry at his heels and give him not one moment’s rest until he’d been hounded and harried and threatened into carrying out his duties. The oaf! The bully! Andrew would have liked to come and punch him on the jaw but was forced to admit this might have provided him with the very lever he sought as a means of effecting Daisy’s removal.

  And in a way the situation suited him. As Andrew would have owned quite candidly, at least in any company composed exclusively of men, he had a remarkably strong sexual drive—what bit of a gay dog hadn’t?—but he felt glad he’d never descended to the level of somebody like Haley, who not only bragged over lunch about the sheer number of his love affairs but always seemed on the very brink of divulging details, guaranteed both to put Andrew off his plat du jour, assuming it was cheap enough and slimming enough, and to produce prolonged and nervous indigestion. Haley disgusted him—and so did Johnson, who was still very much shackled to his wife but endlessly self-pitying and unable either to find any partial solution to his troubles, like Haley, or else to show that he could take them squarely on the chin. (“For heaven’s sake, have the courage of a man,” Andrew had several times wanted to tell him—and unless he could soon find some excuse to avoid their company altogether at lunchtime, one of these days he might actually be powerless to prevent himself!) Moreover, even forgetting the likes of Haley, he was glad to have it proved that he was master of his appetites. Despite huge temptation he hadn’t in the last resort been at all unfaithful to Marsha. He had preserved the sanctity of marriage.

  So he never set foot in Daisy’s house. They had to go every time to a restaurant—though usually, praise the Lord, to a very much cheaper one than Simpson’s.

  In the long run, indeed, they found their own special place, where after a while they came to be greeted with familiarity: “Good evening, sir; good evening, madam—we thought we’d soon be seeing you again!”

  It was in an alleyway close to Regent Street and belonged to an Italian couple who were fat and sombre-clothed, especially the wife, but always very jolly: “real people,” as Daisy termed them, bestowing her second- or third-best accolade. Also, it was reasonable and the food was good, “although madly fattening,” said Daisy, who never put on an ounce—the opposite of Marsha, who was constantly fussing over her weight—and they could afford to wash it down with plenty of Chianti.

  So they would usually sit for three or four hours—in their favourite corner booth whenever possible—with either the Chianti still in front of them on the red-checked tablecloth, long after they had finished eating, or else a large pot of coffee; and Daisy would lean back comfortably against the wooden partition and smoke cigarette after cigarette with the charming air of a catlike Venetian contessa: it was an Italian restaurant, he said, and he had quickly overridden her self-image of a Parisian Left-Bank intellectual.

  (Marsha, when she smoked, could nearly always be relied on to inhale the wrong way at least once during the course of any evening, and furthermore was singularly inept with her holder—which she usually mislaid in any case—and as a consequence often had unsightly nicotine upon her fingers. He himself seldom smoked a cigarette at all—people had told him that a pipe was a good deal healthier; incidentally, Daisy claimed, a pipe gave him a very manly jawline, provided sex appeal and reliability, and he supposed it didn’t cost a whole lot just to humour her.)

  Normally she got through at least twelve or fifteen whilst they were together and it gave him simple pleasure, when she suddenly discovered she had somehow reached the end of her packet, casually to produce a new one, which he would lay on the table without comment. Yet she didn’t even need to open it: he also carried his gold cigarette case on these occasions, always freshly filled. “My word, what
an escort!” she would say, or “How you do think of everything!” or, “What made you guess they might be necessary?” And they’re Abdullah, she would add, or Passing Cloud or De Reske Minor, or whatever happened to be apposite; how do you manage so unfailingly to always pick my favourite? She was such a strange mixture of someone who needed to be cared for and someone who could well look after herself—she forgot her cigarettes but she could make plucky little fists at landlords; of someone who had good, firm, even forceful opinions of her own and yet who nevertheless looked up to him for enlightenment and guidance, for what she herself had once termed “the solidly masculine point of view”. He couldn’t help but find her fascinating.

  Specifically, the guidance she needed was often to do with business; she’d asked him to be her stockbroker. She had only a small amount of money but she trusted him to do his best with it—miracle worker, she sometimes called him. He imagined it had come from her parents, from her father anyway, more than from her husband, although naturally he’d never had such indelicacy as to try to find out. She had never once mentioned Henry. Andrew didn’t mention him either; not to her. Reading between the lines of what Marsha said about him, dismissing out of hand all Florence’s effusions, and relying mainly on his own instincts—objectively inspired by snapshots in the family album—he privately supposed Henry had belonged to the species of ‘poor fish’. Physically, at any rate, he had been a sadly underdeveloped specimen. Andrew had stared with some contempt at a photograph taken on the beach at Scarborough in 1929, when Henry had been much the same age as he himself was now. And even facially…well, not to put too fine a point on it, Andrew had considered it was almost an effeminate face, weak and indeterminate, a ‘pretty’ face—rather similar to Marsha’s as a matter of fact—not quite decent in a man. No. He would never have spoken to Daisy about it, obviously, nor yet to Marsha, but he rather suspected that Henry hadn’t been a wholly decent type. Indeed, ‘decent’ wasn’t a word which he’d apply to him at all. As this was the one adjective which more than any other Andrew hoped people would use about himself after his death, he was aware that he was passing quite a judgment on this unknown brother-in-law of his. But the very fact Daisy never mentioned him surely pointed up the soundness of such a judgment. He believed that, short though it was, Daisy had probably led a brute of a life with Henry. Poor little thing! She was so small! Brave little thing! Whenever he thought about it he wanted to enfold her in his arms and let her know the solid comfort of what a true man’s strength could be. For, after all, what was the purpose of acquiring strength if it wasn’t to share it?

  But though such a form of financial guidance clearly involved discussing his work to some degree—and when he left the office these days this was precisely the last thing he normally wished to do—he found that, strangely, he didn’t object to talking shop with Daisy. It wasn’t merely her quick grasp or even the look of admiration so discernible in her gaze: it was more the impression of wistfulness she conveyed. If only she had been a man she too would have chosen the Stock Exchange; that’s what he understood. What other job was so requisite of flair, boldness and imagination—a refusal just to play it safe and ape the common herd? He read this in her eyes, and it made him feel, if only temporarily, that yes he had a fine career. She could make things come alive, could Daisy. She could conjure up excitement.

  They had a lot to talk about as well in the way of politics; here guidance and enlightenment converged. There was, for instance, the death of the king and the accession of…himself! “If ever his brother should try to depose him before the coronation,” cried Daisy, rather confusingly, “we know exactly whom we could send to take his place! You’ll have to swim the moat, of course. I’m sure that you can swim?” Well, certainly he could; her confidence was not misplaced. “Farewell to the sower of wild oats!” sighed Daisy. “Hail to the sweet and sobered king!” That was in January. In March there came the German repudiation of the Locarno Treaty and the return of its armed forces to the Rhineland; there were a few harsh words spoken about Erica at this point. In May, Italian troops occupied Addis Ababa—but Daisy and Andrew hadn’t yet found their small Italian restaurant and by the time that they had, in mid-July, the Civil War in Spain provided, politically, the chief topic of conversation. Their evening outings had now become monthly ones—and if he’d been forced to give them up Andrew didn’t know what he’d have done; but, even so, they’d only been to their new and regular meeting place five times when the newspapers and wireless finally announced the awful news: that King Edward, their Edward, was to abdicate after a reign of merely three hundred and twenty-five days. As it happened, they met for the sixth time at that small restaurant exactly two days later—12th December—the day his brother George had ascended the throne in his stead.

  “But I take it I won’t have to swim the moat now?”

  It was a miscalculation. Although not solely on account of this remark Daisy grew as outraged as she’d become on considering the fate of Joan of Arc. She would patently have liked to see another female shoved up in the French girl’s place.

  “Poor fool! Poor sad fool! To let himself become ensnared by a typically designing woman! Busy at her loom, painstakingly weaving her web! Of course, one always knew he would come to a sticky end. The signs were always there for anyone to see. I’m not at all surprised.”

  But she was bitterly disappointed. Andrew was amazed that anyone could feel things—things which didn’t directly concern themselves—half so vehemently as she did. In a way he was envious; he thought she might have the makings of a much finer person than he was.

  Yet all this empathy and all this fury…so utterly remote from anything in his own experience. And personally he wasn’t sure he could ever have welcomed an involvement quite so passionate. (Not to mention, he supposed, fairly tiring. In the long run.)

  “Married twice already!” she said. “I should have thought that was warning enough for anyone—even the biggest fool going!”

  Andrew felt a sneaking sympathy for the man, which was utterly lacking in passion: that anyone could have fallen so far and so swiftly from grace!

  “And American. And what’s that silly heathen name which she rejoices in?—Wallis. Wallis? Does she think she’s a photographer’s shop or something? Besides—she’s not even good-looking. I can’t imagine what he thinks he sees in her. She’s bewitched him, that’s all.”

  And from the way she glared at him across the table he could believe he must indeed bear a strong resemblance to the king. Ex-king.

  “Plainly, though, one can see what she was after! Oh, very nice to be the Queen of England, I daresay. Very nice to get your hands on all those crown jewels, stow them away in your shopping bag! Well, she jolly well underestimated us, didn’t she—us loyal subjects of the British Empire? Silly ass! How like an American! She probably thought she could bring her friends here—if she has any, which I doubt—and turn them all into dukes and earls and prime ministers. The sheer and utter gall of it! Besides, she’s old enough to be his mother.”

  “Hardly!”

  “Well, she looks it, anyway—which comes to the same thing. But what’s the matter with you tonight? You’re very quiet it seems. Cat got your tongue?” She gave a sharp laugh; none too pleasant. This was certainly a different Daisy. “Have you ever been to Wallis Heathen? Everybody else has.”

  The mistake was intentional. She was referring to Wallis Heaton and he knew he’d be done for if he admitted he’d lately bought a camera there. (And been overcharged for it; wasn’t Oxford Street supposed to be cheaper than most of its competitors?) But he was too honourable to tell a lie. He contented himself with a shrug.

  “No, obviously. I think it’s every bit as appalling as you do.”

  “To abandon your native heath like that!” she exclaimed. “Just to slough it off like an old skin! The country that suckled and supported you! The empire that gave you a playground! And all in the name of what the songwriters would have you think was love!”
She gave a snort; it was undeniably a snort. “Love!” she repeated. “To abandon everything for love!” She made the notion sound obscene.

  “Yes, no doubt about it, he’s a cad,” agreed Andrew.

  A cad, when just three days ago he’d been…a card. And Andrew couldn’t help but feel slightly sorry for him: weak, licentious, a shirker of duty though the fellow had plainly proved to be. He wouldn’t have expected to feel sorry for him. But it was all so final somehow—turning your back on a life and a throne and a people who had worshipped you. And behaving this way for some kind of chemical imbalance which Haley, or was it Johnson, had claimed couldn’t last for more than eighteen months at the outside. So you’d be bound to regret it, bound to look backwards—or sideways—and wonder in a particular moment of dislike, or boredom, or discontent, what exciting thing you might have been doing now if your life had just gone down that other road, the road which everyone, yourself included, had assumed it would.

  “Yet the thing is,” he said to Daisy, “surely you have to feel sorry for someone who’s made such a mess of things? Especially when he started out with such a very fine hand?”

  “Oh, you make it sound like a game of bridge or pontoon!” snapped Daisy, who had never had much affection for cards—at all events, not the kind you shuffled; and still wasn’t feeling pleased with him.

  So Andrew didn’t add that somehow he found the downfall of a playboy—of such a darling of the gods—distinctly reassuring. He realized it wasn’t quite the decent way to feel.

  What he didn’t realize was that, on occasion, he could actually have drawn comfort from the downfall of anyone; and that at odd times throughout his life he most certainly would.