The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches Read online

  She merely smiled, agreeing that they had not met only because of some whim or oversight.

  ‘We were together all that time … the children …’ He shrugged, giving up, and looked straight at her, inviting aid.

  She could, she supposed, ask after his children, his other family. But there was no point in his coming, no point in all this upset and adjustment and sighing and excitement if all they did was to exchange pretexts for not talking. Besides, she knew how they all were, his family: a good friend of hers remained a good friend of his, and reported what went on. Not like a spy, but like a friend. Once she had needed to know; recently she had listened as if to news from a household that did not much concern her.

  He half got up, but sat down again, seeing there was nowhere to move to. ‘You don’t have much space up here,’ he remarked. It sounded like a reproach, and he again reddened.

  ‘But I don’t need much space.’ And now this, she felt, could be taken as a reproach, and she made an irritable gesture – too irritable for what was happening, full of elderly impatience at the trivial. ‘I didn’t mean …’ she exclaimed carefully, ‘what I meant was, I don’t need much room, now the children are grown up. Nancy and Martin hardly need their own rooms any longer!’

  Suddenly he seemed tired. She knew why. The house he now lived in was large, full of rooms in which one might take a little stroll. But it was of course always needing repairs the way houses did, and it was shabby, because it was a much used family house, exploding with the four children and their friends. It pulsated with people, noise, music, telephones ringing, loud voices -Rose’s, particularly – singing, a dog barking, doorbells, the drone of vacuum cleaners. Family life. The oldest child was fifteen, the youngest, nine. In front of James was at least ten years, probably much more, of finding a good deal of money for education. He was a business consultant. He had not wanted to be one. But that was what he had become when, needing a lot of money for the new marriage, he had given up his previous career as an expert in electronics for the aircraft industry and for boats. That was what he had enjoyed.

  Everything he did now, where he lived and how, was because he had fallen in love with Rose, her own opposite in every way, and gone off with her. And things would go on as they were now, they would have to, for years and years. He was fifty-three. He would grow old in Rose’s service. That was what he had chosen. If you could use a word like ‘choose’.

  She was two years older than he.

  She said, ‘I decided to retire this year. They asked me to stay on, but I don’t want to.’

  And now his whole person was momentarily full of the energy of words not spoken, words of aggressive inquiry, if not reproach. It was he who had arranged her very good job with the oil firm. He knew – since the man she had worked for all these years was a friend – that pressure had been put on her to be more than a personal secretary. They had offered her all kinds of better jobs. But she had not wanted to become ambitious and sink her life in the firm’s. She had found her own life more interesting, and had been careful to guard it. But had she accepted, money would have been much less tight. She knew of course that James had been critical of her for being content to be a mere secretary, and this quite apart from the money side of it.

  She said, I don’t need very much money now. I can do as I please.’

  ‘Lucky Sarah,’ he said, suddenly emotional.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘There is no way, no way at all that I could not have gone off with Rose,’ he said unexpectedly. Unexpectedly to him: but she knew this was why he had come. He had to say this! Not as a justification. Not as a plea. He needed to explain some absolute, some imperative, that she – his first wife – must acknowledge. He was asking for justice. From her!

  ‘No, I know,’ she said judicially.

  ‘It was like …’ He hesitated, and not from delicacy, or wanting to spare her, or himself, but because of the astonishment even now: his face was contracted with the effort of coming to terms with what he remembered, ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, ‘I didn’t then. I never have. I could even say I didn’t like her particularly …’ His look at her insisted she must not take this as disloyalty to Rose, or an excuse.

  ‘I know,’ she said again.

  ‘It was because … but I simply had to … it was like being carried away by a …’

  Now she made a sharp irritable gesture, meaning That’s enough. But he did not see it, or if he did, decided to ignore it.

  ‘Have you ever thought, Sarah … we are so alike, we two …’

  She nodded.

  His eyes had filled with tears, and it was because of his bewilderment.

  ‘From one extreme to the other,’ he said. ‘We never had to explain anything, did we? We always understood … but with her, it’s like a wrong turning in a foreign country, and I don’t know the language.’ A silence. ‘The dark and the light of it,’ he said. A silence, ‘I am not saying I regret it. You don’t regret what you couldn’t help. Or if you do it’s a waste of time.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she agreed.

  And now he did get up and stand before her, hands dangling, but with their characteristic look of being on the alert and ready for anything. An embrace? But he went instead to the end window, whose blue square now showed a fat and cherubic cloud, white with gold and fawn shadows. He looked at the cloud, over the disordered back gardens.

  ‘What are you going to do, Sarah?’

  ‘I want to travel.’

  ‘But you’re always on the move. Every time I hear of you, you’re somewhere else,’ he said, with the short laugh that means suppressed envy.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been lucky. It’s been a lovely job, thanks to you. But they say elderly women get restless feet, and that’s what I’ve got.’

  ‘Not only women,’ he said, but shut off the complaint with, ‘Are you going to visit Nancy and Martin?’

  ‘Briefly.’

  He looked an inquiry.

  ‘I would not describe us as a close family,’ she said, and he reddened again.

  ‘Well, I think perhaps we are. Rose is good at that, making a family, I mean.’

  At this, resentment nearly overwhelmed her. She knew he had never understood what it had been like for her, the years of bringing up the children without him. He never would. She maintained a smiling silence. But now she felt at a distance from him, because of his not understanding.

  ‘Anyway, it wasn’t such a bad thing,’ he said. They saw all those different places with you moving about so much, and they were in different schools and fit in anywhere.’

  ‘Citizens of the world,’ she said dryly. “That’s what they are, all right.’

  He could have taken this up, pressing his point, which was necessary to him. But she stopped it with, ‘I shall begin by going on walking tours here. In this country first. I mean, real long ones, all summer …’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said energetically, ‘there’s nothing like it.’

  ‘And then I shall go walking in France and Germany, well, everywhere I can in Europe. Norway …’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said, restless, his feet moving as if ready to set off then and there.

  Rose did not like walking.

  ‘Around the world,’ she said. ‘Why not?’ And she laughed, her whole body, her face, alive with delight at the thought of it, setting off free as a bird … No, that was wrong, birds were not free, they had to obey all kinds of patterns and forces – free as only a human being can be. Though, probably, life being what it was, free only for a short, treasured time before something or other happened. Free to walk, stop, make friends, wander, change her mind, sit all day on a mountainside if she felt like it, watching clouds … She had actually forgotten that he stood there, watching her, smiling his appreciation of her.

  ‘Sarah,’ he said, in a low intimate voice, with the thrill of recklessness in it, ‘why can’t we two go off again somewhere, this summer, soon

  The two smiled at each ot
her, as if their faces were a few inches apart on a pillow. Then she heard herself sigh, and she saw the energy go out of him.

  ‘But why not, Sarah?’ he urged.

  This meant that what Olive had told her was true. Rose was having an affair, and he did not feel bound to be loyal.

  ‘You mean, Rose wouldn’t mind?’

  The thought of how much Rose would mind, and how she would show it, was obviously like a blow to the back of his knees, for he sank down abruptly, and stared, not at her, Sarah, but at the cloud, which now seemed sculptured out of honey-coloured stone.

  ‘Or you wouldn’t tell her?’ she persisted.

  Going off with her on a walking tour was an impulse. He had not thought of it before he came, or not seriously. But probably he would not have felt free to come, if Rose had not set him free. Quid pro quo … well, that is how he would see it.

  Serious, brought down, he looked straight at her, to avoid accusations of evasion, and said, ‘I would have to tell her. She would find out anyway. She would know.’

  ‘Yes, she would.’

  ‘But why not, Sarah? Why ever not? There must be limits to being a good … provider.’

  What he had been going to say she didn’t know. A good husband? A good father?

  What she was thinking was: living with Rose has softened your brain. This is the kind of thing she goes in for, having your cake and eating it and pretending nothing has happened.

  ‘Look, why don’t we two go to Scotland? You remember all that, Sarah?’

  They had been on a three weeks’ walking tour in Scotland, just before they married in 1958.

  ‘We could go next month,’ he urged. ‘I’ve got three weeks due.’

  She shut her eyes, remembering the two of them walking up a heather-covered mountainside.

  ‘Sarah,’ she heard, gruff, accusing, ‘I’ve been thinking about you so much. There’s such a terrible gap in my life. There has been, for years.’

  She said dryly, eyes still shut, ‘Polygamy! You’d like that!’ But she was smiling, she could not stop.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he shouted, and reached her in two long strides. ‘Yes, if that’s what it is, yes.’

  The little armchair by the fire had no companion, and he reached out a long arm and pulled across a chair in which he sat, close beside her. He put his arm around her.

  ‘Sarah,’ he crooned, his cheek on hers. ‘Sarah,’ he went on saying, while their cheeks glued themselves together with tears.

  Suddenly the little room dazzled and glared. A sunbeam hitting a windowpane had been reflected onto a mirror just above their heads, and this in turn sent lozenges and prisms of colour onto a wall. Now it was like sitting in a pool of glittering water, submerged furniture, flowers, and themselves.

  She freed herself from him, got up, pulled curtains across the end window. The curtains were white and unlined. That wall was now flat and white-shadowed, with a large rectangle where hot orange pricked through. Part of this rectangle lifted, and a tangerine-coloured sail swelled out into the room and subsided. In a few moments the sunlight would cease to beat against the back of the curtains, and the whole wall would be a dead flat white.

  Their mood had quite changed.

  She did not dare go and sit by him again. If she did, she would sink into … into …

  He was gazing at her through the warm orange light that soaked everything.

  ‘Sarah?’ he inquired, as if searching for her in a maze.

  He stood up, said, ‘All the same, why not, Sarah? I don’t see one good rational reason why not! I want you in my life! I need you! I simply cannot do without you.’

  He came to her, bent, and gently rubbed his cheek against hers: it was a husband’s, not a lover’s, claim.

  And then he was off, and she heard him bounding down the stairs.

  •  •  •

  The room was dimming. The glare behind the curtains no longer delineated every thread of the coarse linen. The shrill warning clatter of the birds in the plane tree was an evening sound, not the companionable gossiping of the day. The light abruptly faded off the curtains. That wall was now uninterruptedly white.

  She sat down in the chair by the flowers. She looked at them critically. The jug was too smug, too contented a round shape for the gawky, stiff awkwardness of the cherry and the fresh spring lilac with its loose random flowers. She moved the jug to the floor behind her, and tried to think.

  She was in a boil of emotions that were resolving into a single need: to escape … run away, in fact. Run, run, run out of this room, this building, out of London, yes, out of England. She was now out of her chair, and moving clumsily and fast about the room, like a shut-in bird. But what on earth was all this about? She had to run away from James, was that it? But this meeting of theirs had nothing of threat in it; on the contrary, for it had seemed as if some spell had been taken off them that until now had made every meeting, even a telephone call, an angry, guilty, embarrassed misery. Being with James today had been more like the first meeting of people who are going to love each other, full of recognitions and sweet surprises. But her heart was pounding, her stomach hurt, and she was being ravaged by anxiety.

  She forced herself to sit down again, composing her limbs to suit her position, that of an elderly lady considering her situation with sober common sense. She was eyeing the telephone, she observed, as if her nerves expected it to ring, and unpleasantly.

  If James had gone straight home, and if Rose was at home, then of course something about him would instantly have alerted her, even if he had not said at once – which was more likely – ‘I’ve just been talking to Sarah, oh no, don’t worry, I just dropped in on an impulse, that’s all, nothing more to it.’ She could positively hear him saying it.

  Crisis could easily have taken over that house. Rose would already be on the telephone to her current confidante. She had one at a time, in an intense and dramatic bond, full of intimate meetings and vibrant conversations, but then there would be a quarrel, and another ex-intimate of whom she would say, ‘I’m not going there if I’m likely to meet her, the cow!’ She might at this very moment be saying to whoever it was, ‘My God! Do you know what has happened? I’m losing my husband, that’s all! He’s started seeing his first wife – yes, Sarah! For God’s sake, I’ve got to talk about it, it’s urgent. No, cancel it! Come at once, please …’

  While waiting for this tête-à-tête, which would be the first of very many, several a day. Rose would be laying out the cards, consulting I Ching, and making an appointment with her fortune-teller, a woman of limitless psychological penetration who was as familiar with her (Sarah’s) life, as she was with Rose’s; she (Sarah) had been pronounced of no threat to Rose; but her type, the Fair Lady, standing in opposition to Rose as Dark Lady, was, and always would be.

  Rose lived in terror of some slim blonde nymphet. By the time the confidante arrived, Fate would already have pronounced through several mouths, or at least have given some pretty definite indications. As a result of the meeting between the two women all kinds of things would start to happen. The first, that her telephone (Sarah’s) would start to ring. Someone she had never heard of would be saying, ‘Do forgive me for bothering you, but I believe you can help me, actually James suggested it. Can you tell me something about Manchester? You were there, he said? You had a house there, didn’t you? What are the schools like?’

  Yes, James would know this call was going to be made, for Rose would have said in an airy, confident way, challenging James with a bold, laughing look, ‘Oh, James, Sarah could advise, couldn’t she? She knows all about Manchester!’ All kinds of telephone calls and even happenings, none of them unreasonable, and on the face of it the essence of civilized good sense. Just like James coming to see her this afternoon. On the face of it …

  Telephone calls from another of Rose’s best friends – like a schoolgirl she only had best friends – ‘Oh, Sarah, do you remember me, we met at the Tillings’, do you remember? I hear you
are going off with James to Wales? If you are going anywhere near Swansea, would you drop in and see an old friend of mine, she’s so lonely these days since her husband died, she would be more than happy to put you both up, it would be such a kindness.’

  Soon, a telephone call from Rose herself. The low, vibrant voice, always hinting at things that simply could not be said. ‘Sarah, this is Rose! Yes, Rose! I’ve been wanting to really get to know you for such a long time … Do you think we could meet and have a real talk? No, I’ve discussed it all with James, and he’d love it. Would you invite me to tea? I’d love to see your flat, James says ifs so pretty. Oh, I’d love to live in a flat, just by myself, just to be free, and myself, you understand?’

  There would be many other telephone calls from Rose, casual, offhand, insulting. ‘Sarah, is James there? No, but I thought… oh, I must have been mistaken. If he does drop in, do tell him to ring me, there’s been a bit of a crisis, he’s got to deal with it.’

  While all this went on. Rose would be saying to absolutely everyone, ‘I’m sorry to say there’s a crisis in my marriage. James and I are both working at it, we have been so happy, and I’m sure it will all be right in the end.’

  Her love affair would have been given up, after many weepy meetings, ‘I have to make a choice, my darling love. Oh it isn’t easy … the children …’

  People would in fact be expecting the marriage to end. It was Rose’s fourth. Her story, as far as it could be ascertained, for it changed with whomever she was telling it to, was something like this. She had emerged from the miseries of Europe after the war having already experienced everything in the way of hunger, of cold, and the threat of death. Her mother had died in a concentration camp, in some versions, but in others she had abandoned Rose for a lover. Rose, who was very pretty, married an American in the occupying force, whom she had madly loved, though some people knew, without condemning her, that she had become this man’s mistress because if one wanted to eat, one had to attach oneself to one of the new armies.