New World in the Morning

by Stephen Benatar

  I resolved to ring her at ten the following morning to offer what I could in the way of apology and to share my hope of the right buyer soon being found—one who, no question, would want to keep her on. Was there even a slim chance Junie might decide to run the business?

  From where I stood I could see Action Man watchful on his table. Turning away, I felt almost as if here was yet another friend I was deserting.

  I bought a book for my journey from a souvenir shop on the front. Commiserated with the owner on his disappointing day. My commiserations were sincere. I knew what he’d be going through.

  Without any such direct knowledge, I also empathized with the hero of the paperback I had chosen: a book still fitfully holding my attention when I arrived at Victoria…when I arrived at West Hampstead. Mangam’s wife and children had been blown up by the Mafia and he himself was on the run—although all the time preparing for the tough and arduous fight that lay ahead. His loss, his problems, spasmodically made my own seem easier to bear.

  His outlook affected me, as well. I was stirred by his integrity, his persistence, and even by the set of his shoulders and his clean-cut jaw—both depicted on the somewhat lurid cover. Exterminating Jack Mangam. His qualities were those endorsed by Kipling. Mangam reminded me I should never lose sight of the fact that you had to accept whatever life might dump on you. More difficult—whatever life might dump on those you loved. (Even though, in this case, that happened to be death.) But Mangam had a faith and was able to convince himself his wife and children were now better off.

  And if that appeared glib…well, at least it helped him cope with his bereavement.

  Mine, too, was a little like bereavement. I tried to convince myself that such bereavement would be good for all of us: for me, my wife, my children. In fact I honestly wasn’t thinking so much about me. Junie and Ella and Matt, I hoped, would grow stronger because of their experience, more self-reliant, more aware of the hitherto unfelt realities. Matt would soon become a man.

  Besides…

  ‘The art of living,’ I told myself; told both myself and Mangam. The art of living. All things work together for good, to them that see a positive side to their tribulations.

  Clearly not doing so without humour, I prayed that Moira would see it in that light. I’d been wondering what I’d do if Moira wasn’t there. But the Morgan was: parked in more or less its usual place: two boys wistfully examining it. I wanted to let slip I’d driven it myself and authoritatively answer any shyly awestruck questions they might choose to put. But I imagined Moira occasionally came to her window to carry out a spot check.

  Before I rang the bell I carefully pushed my cases out of sight.

  Certainly she seemed surprised; it was hard to know if she were pleased. For an instant I felt she might be, because there was perhaps the start of a smile and the flicker of something joyful in her eyes; but then the eyes grew dull and when I made to kiss her she hastily averted her face…which put me in mind of Junie roughly eight hours before.

  “I thought you had returned to Deal,” she said, without expression.

  “Moira, I’ve got to explain things.”

  “Why? So far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing to explain.”

  I answered: “No, you’re wrong. There’s everything.”

  She gave a sigh. “Look, Sammy, it was fun. In many ways it was fun. We had a good time. Let’s leave it at that, shall we? I don’t want any explanations. And I don’t feel any resentment.”

  “But can’t I even come in?” Mayn’t.

  “No. I don’t think so. What point?”

  “I’ve left my wife,” I said. “We’re getting a divorce.”

  For a moment she appeared to be studying the two boys who were studying her motorcar. They began reluctantly to move away.

  “And what do you want me to say to that? How sorry I am? How surprised I am? What?”

  “I want you to ask me up. I think you owe me that much—no matter what the flaws in my behaviour. There are things I have to tell you.”

  She sighed again.

  “All right. I can give you half an hour. But I’m expecting somebody at seven.”

  “What sort of somebody?” I asked it sharply and without thinking.

  “That isn’t any of your business!”

  “No, I know it’s not. I’m sorry. I meant…is it a man?”

  “Yes…since you ask.” But then she unbent a little; it must have been my look of pain, or at least of disillusion. “A friend. Somebody I’ve known for years. Not what you’re thinking.”

  I nodded. “Thank you, that’s kind. I have two cases here. May I leave them just inside the door?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “So what are your plans, precisely?”

  I had known what they were, of course, had known precisely. But naturally I couldn’t tell her, not here on the doorstep. Nor, indeed, anywhere. Not now. Not in the face of such a welcome.

  I had my pride. Whatever else I didn’t have…I had the remnants of my pride.

  “I’m not too sure as yet.”

  She didn’t comment. I followed her upstairs. We sat in the sitting room—quite decorously: she on the edge of a chair, I on a corner of the couch. She got up again when she offered me a drink but after she’d handed it to me, didn’t—as I’d been hoping—come to join me on the sofa.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “All the best.”

  But there wasn’t any meaning to it. I remembered how she had writhed against me by that window. We’d had thirty hours of complete happiness. But nearly one-and-a-half times as many had been endured since then.

  “What time did you get back last night?” As had been the case much earlier I was trying to make conversation.

  “Late afternoon. Five? Six? I don’t know. Why?”

  I didn’t ask her where she’d gone; didn’t want to hear of the outing I had missed.

  “Thank you for sponging down my suit.”

  She shrugged.

  “I’m dreadfully sorry about that. All of it.”

  “It happens,” she said.

  “Never to me. Never before to me. That’s what makes it so humiliating. That’s what makes me so ashamed.”

  “Then you’d better just chalk it up to experience, hadn’t you?”

  “But the timing of it!”

  No response.

  “And then the rug and the mess and all the rest of it. Tell me—just tell me—break it to me gently: had I flushed the loo?” (Whatever else I had done, or had not done, during the whole course of the evening…during the whole course of my life… I remembered my exact words.)

  “Yes, of course.” She answered me briskly.

  Oh, thank you, I said. Thank you.

  “But how in heaven’s name did you get me onto the bed?”

  “You weren’t out cold. You managed to cooperate. Up to a point.”

  “You should have left me on the floor. Or, at any rate, here on this couch.”

  “I slept on the couch.”

  “Oh.”

  It was a peculiar kind of reminiscence; we could almost have been talking of the weather. (No. In the past we had talked far more vigorously about that. In the past? All of two days ago!) I suppose I had been hoping for a sense of camaraderie to arise, even out of the ashes of such details as formed the prelude to a hangover. I suppose I had been thinking of a phrase I’d remembered only that morning while walking back from Jalna. I take this man in sickness and in health.

  “So what was it you felt you needed to explain?”

  “Mainly that I love you—and that I want to marry you.”

  “No,” she said. “Impossible.”

  I had expected difficulties. I’d anticipated the necessity for a whole new period of courtship and the gradual reworking of my cause; but the coldness of that word, the finality which lay behind it, had essentially pulled out the rug from under me even as I groped for the carpet tacks.

  “Listen, Moira. You can’t say that. W
e had so much going for us; we have so much going for us. I know you liked me—I think you loved me. You told me I was the sweetest person…” I veered away from that one. “You even asked me if I wanted children; you spoke about our finding money for my university fees. We seemed to feel alike about absolutely everything. And apart from all of this we had the best sex imaginable. If any two bodies were ever made for each other…”

  I was inspired by my own words, jumped up from the sofa, moved behind her chair and roughly cupped and squeezed her breasts. Furiously she tore my hands away.

  “Don’t you ever dare do that again!” she exclaimed. “Back off or else…”

  “Yes? Or else?”

  Stunned, I went on standing there. Abruptly she got up and crossed behind the sofa. It was like a game of chess: the king and queen divided by their two lines of upholstery; obstructed, sheltered. We glared at one another. “Or else what?” I repeated. Inherently bull-headed.

  “Or else you’ll get my knee in your balls! Hard and crippling and delivered with delight!” It should have sounded comic but it was a statement of fact which reached out far beyond comedy.

  “Unless I do it with permission?”

  “Which is something you are never going to get.”

  She added, after a pause—and a good deal more calmly—“Believe that, Sam! You must. It will make it so much easier for the pair of us.”

  “I feel completely miserable,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. I truly am. But… Well, you did bring it on yourself, you know.”

  “Is that supposed to make it any better? For two pins I’d jump out of that window.”

  “It will pass,” she answered, wearily.

  There followed yet another pause. “You can sit down again,” I said. “I shan’t try anything. May I freshen up my glass?”

  We exchanged places: Moira on the sofa, myself on the chair.

  “Didn’t you like me, then? I mean—a lot? Wasn’t I someone…very special to you?”

  She ran a finger round the base of her sherry glass. “Yes. Everything you said just now was true. Entirely true. With the exception of one sentence. You said that we had so much going for us—which I, too, thought we had. But then at once you changed the tense…and that’s where you went wrong.”

  “But I don’t understand. Why? I’m a free man now; or very shortly shall be. Moira, I know that I deceived you but—”

  “No buts.”

  “Darling, I did it only out of love. I love you. I love you with all my heart.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  That, too, seemed utterly final. We both sat there in silence.

  “Listen, Sam. I want to tell you something.” This, after perhaps a minute. “Ten years ago I was married.” (It was odd: I’d totally forgotten that.) “When I met Zach I was twenty-nine, maybe old enough to have known better, but I fell in love with him in a way I’d never thought possible—possible, or even desirable. And it wasn’t desirable: no, it was totally unsettling: although he was younger than me, he was Mr Wonderful incarnate and I was Little Miss Fairly Ordinary, gooey-eyed and quite unsure of myself, with hardly a thought that didn’t revolve around this man or an opinion that couldn’t be changed by him; hardly an hour—especially if we were apart—when I wasn’t worrying tormentedly over some silly little thing I’d either said or hadn’t said. In brief, there was no one in the world like him; never had been; never could be.” She smiled. “And I had always looked upon myself as something of a feminist. Still do, as it happens.”

  “What was he like?” I asked, without feeling a vast amount of interest—but again the important thing at the moment was to keep our dialogue from lapsing. Her expected visitor might have been merely a pretext but I didn’t want her growing mindful of the time.

  “Astonishingly like you,” she said. “You could easily have been brothers. I suppose that’s not surprising. Don’t they say we keep on falling for the same type?”

  So she had fallen for me. Well, she’d said as much already but her reiteration of it, even if unwitting, was of comfort. And this comfort was by no means snatched away by what she told me next.

  “Like you,” she said, “he was kind and demonstrative and witty. Basically good-humoured and usually fine company. Everybody liked him. Fairly intelligent, fairly well-educated, practical about the house. So with all that going for him—plus his physical attractiveness—I’m not surprised, even now, that I should have thought him Mr Wonderful.”

  I was growing rapidly more interested. And identifying with him, in a way. “What was he like in bed?”

  “Not as good as you.”

  Oh, did you hear that, Junie? The atmosphere was changing; my whole mood was changing; everything she said—well, almost everything she said—reinforced the notion I hadn’t really lost her; that if I could prove master of this situation my chances of salvation were turning into certainties. I shouldn’t be able to move back in this evening, I realized that, nor would it be wise even to hint at it, but by the end of the month my address could very well be Solent Road and my future thoroughly assured. Hell, no, by the end of the month? By the end of the week! And as confidence returned, all trace of tiredness disappeared.

  “Was that why things went sour? Was he a homosexual at heart?”

  “Oh, no. God, no. At least, I don’t think so. And our sex life was…well, fine; I mustn’t give the wrong impression. And even if it hadn’t been…” She gave another shrug. I felt a little disappointed.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered?”

  “Not really. Good sex is lovely but so long as I’d known that he still loved me—no—I don’t think it would have mattered all that much.”

  “So, then. What did go wrong?”

  She hesitated. Her answer, when it came, was nearly toneless. But it produced a similar effect to that which you’d experience if you were standing under a warm shower and the water suddenly went cold.

  “He was a liar,” she said.

  27

  “You mean,” I asked, “he didn’t really love you?”

  “Oh, I think he loved me—after his fashion. Probably as much as he was capable of loving anybody. But after we’d been married two years I was on the top of a bus and saw him standing in a doorway kissing someone. I confronted him as soon as he came home. He denied it—absolutely; said how could I behave this way, couldn’t I simply take his word for it, and hadn’t I been as happy with him, then, as he had been with me? And didn’t I know there were probably hundreds of fair-haired young men wandering around London in a yellow jacket and green trousers? Oh, you should have heard him! It was only after I said I’d actually got off the bus and followed the pair of them that he finally owned up. But swore it meant nothing. He’d merely slipped during a moment of weakness—we all had moments of weakness—if not, indeed, why hadn’t I had it out with him right there on the spot? In any case, it was me he loved. Oh, easy to say, I answered; although in fact I think I believed him. And then can you guess what he came up with? He declared he could furnish me with proof. In other words—while we’d been married he’d had four other equally brief affairs and the one thing he’d learned from each of them was just how special I was by comparison!”

  Although I kept my face from showing it—and was certainly not proud of what I felt—I was actually enjoying the stupidity of Moira’s husband.

  “But you said he was intelligent,” I remarked quietly, with a grave, condoling look.

  “I said fairly intelligent. He had a degree in mathematics. Was a qualified optician. Some of the views he held were…a little unthought-out; but he wasn’t an idiot. What he was, perhaps, was ingenuous.”

  I frowned slightly.

  She said, “He really supposed I’d feel so flattered by the lessons he’d learned, and so reassured about the lack of meaning to this present little escapade, I’d simply overlook the fact that he had been unfaithful; five times unfaithful. He thought I’d be impressed by his honesty—and by his resolu
tion to confess. I’d know him for a reformed character, one who’d never lie to me again. He fully believed I’d be willing, on account of all this, merely to murmur, ‘There there, my darling, come back to Momma, do!’”

  “Which of course you weren’t?”

  “Which of course I was.” She smiled. She’d clearly derived pleasure from leading me on, from causing me to form an expectation which, sooner or later, she would utterly confound. That was good. I saw it as part of a pattern. Impossible, she had said. Impossible would turn out, in the end, to be distinctly—gloriously—possible.

  I didn’t begrudge her the desire to play.

  “After all,” she said, “you don’t fall out of love in just one evening.”

  This was another piece of encouragement…whether or not consciously given.

  “And it was also very feasible,” I said, “that he was being perfectly sincere, your husband? I’m sure he could have meant to reform.”

  I wanted to demonstrate my sense of fairness, even though I recognized the gesture to be hollow. Profoundly hollow. Hadn’t I been told the ending?

  “You think so, Sam?” She pursed her lips and nodded. “Yes, at the time, that’s what I myself thought. But since then I’ve never been quite sure.”

  It didn’t cost me much to be magnanimous. I wasn’t like some—like my father-in-law, for instance—who believed in knifing somebody already dying.

  “Moira, I feel certain he must have intended to reform. He was simply weak, that’s all. Why won’t you give him the benefit of the doubt?”

  “Well, perhaps you’re right.” She gave in gracefully and although I realized it wasn’t what you might call a major victory I felt disproportionately elated. I, too, was a shaper of opinions. Without even asking, I helped myself to a further shot of whisky.