A Misalliance Page 3

  This interlude over, she would carry the cups to the sink, and, donning her gloves, would turn both taps full on. Above the roar of the water she would begin her aria. A coach trip, of an ecclesiastical nature, had been planned to some outlying beauty spot, but this had brought complications in its wake. There had been an unpleasantness, Blanche might remember, when a newish member’s offer to organize it had been turned down. In view of that trouble last year this came as a surprise to no one. There were various other hazards to be overcome, some of them of a psychological nature – Miss Elphinstone would not burden Blanche with the details. Allusions to this matter were guarded, but none the less forceful. Miss Elphinstone had taken it upon herself to proffer certain suggestions, which had not been too well received. There had been an exchange of views, some of them lacking in cordiality, but Miss Elphinstone had stood her ground.

  ‘You see my point, Blanche,’ Miss Elphinstone would say some time later, poised in the doorway of the dining-room. ‘I’m in a trap of me own devising.’

  Blanche would regret all this news as she later watched Miss Elphinstone putting herself to rights for the journey home. Over and above admiration for Miss Elphinstone’s virtuous yet interesting life, she appreciated her extreme elegance. Miss Elphinstone had none of the waistless high-stomached appearance of the elderly, although she was of an age at which one is normally encouraged to put one’s feet up. A tall pale woman, with abundant grey hair drawn back and secured somewhere in the recesses of her hat, Miss Elphinstone carried herself well and trod gracefully on her narrow and substantially shod feet. Blanche’s black coat hung straight from her thin shoulders; Blanche’s black and white silk blouse was concealed by a spotless if faded overall. The ritual whereby Miss Elphinstone smoothed and tidied her hair without removing her hat fascinated Blanche, and reminded her of convent girls taking a bath in their shifts or matrons undressing on the beach. Frequently Blanche would buy a garment which did not quite suit her but which she could see quite clearly on Miss Elphinstone. ‘Well, I’ll take it off you if you’ve no call for it,’ Miss Elphinstone would say in a critical tone, her long dry hand lovingly feeling the material. ‘I dare say I can get some wear out of it. It might do for the outing, if the weather holds. Though that’s now in some dispute, as I was telling you. Well, yes, Blanche, if you’re making coffee anyway; I’ve just got time for a cup. I hope you’ll do some proper shopping this week. We’re low on everything, I see. And I’ve defrosted the fridge, so you’d better not fill it up until later.’

  Seated once more at the kitchen table, bag and gloves by her side, Miss Elphinstone would sip her coffee and look around with an appraising glance. Blanche would wait for some word of commendation, but, ‘We thought of Bourton-on-the-Water this year,’ Miss Elphinstone would say. And then, ‘Thought about going away yourself? Why don’t you ring up Mrs Jack and ask for a loan of the cottage? I hear we’ve got a touch of gout, so he won’t be much in evidence. A bit of fresh air would put you to rights, if I’m any judge.’ How Miss Elphinstone gathered her information was quite unclear to Blanche; she supposed that information, like some heat-seeking particle, flew to its natural home of its own accord or inclination. And Miss Elphinstone’s tangential acquaintance with Bertie’s sister entitled her to that form of patronage which implied a balanced and almost omnipotent weighing up of the evidence. She knew that Barbara and Jack Little possessed a cottage in Wiltshire, and she frequently assigned Blanche to a restorative stay there. But Blanche rarely went, impelled by sheer inertia not to move from the flat, a worrying trend of which she was increasingly conscious.

  When the moment of her departure could no longer be delayed, Miss Elphinstone’s procedure was always the same. She would give a final twitch to the curtains, tell Blanche that she found her looking peaked, remind her of the supplies she needed, and would finally close the door behind her. Out in the street, she would look back at Blanche who would be standing at the window, and would bare her brilliant false teeth in the sort of smile that betokens an impeccable conscience. Blanche would wave her hand until Miss Elphinstone disappeared in the direction of the bus stop.

  In the new social uncertainty of her divorced state, in which, she had observed, she was to be left relatively alone so that she might ‘find her feet’, and presumably be returned to her friends as a person who would not give the lie to her former sophistication, rather than one who might rehearse her grievances at inconvenient moments and in civilized gatherings, Blanche was interested, but not surprised, to see that sympathy was on the side of the guilty party. The hubbub of speculation that surrounded her husband’s new liaison had made itself felt even in Blanche’s silent rooms. She was well aware that this speculation contained an element of the desire to see Bertie make a fool of himself or come a cropper, in which case the call would go out to her once more and she would be invited to give her opinion. It was even hoped, vaguely, that she might effect her re-entry into society by marrying again; but until then, she was, like certain Hollywood actresses in the bad old days, on suspension.

  She gave so few signs of madness or rage that it was difficult to sympathize with her. Indeed, it was Mousie’s contention, vividly expressed to her sympathetic friends, that Blanche had brought Bertie to the verge of complete emotional sterility by virtue of her ‘intellectual snobbery’. This view had reached Blanche, as such views always will, and had met only honest bewilderment. She perceived the difference between Mousie and herself as a very simple one: Mousie was used to being loved. Metaphorically, Mousie had been holding out her arms, in the certainty of meeting a welcoming embrace, since she was a little girl. Even her nickname, Mousie, bestowed on her at that same early age, betokened spoiling, cherishing, a father’s, if not a mother’s, indulgence. By holding out her baby arms Mousie had emitted the correct signals: people knew what their response should be. And because she was so delightfully forthcoming, because she was so easy to understand, because she was so artlessly pleased with the response she invariably elicited, she was allowed to be equally artless when the response was perhaps a little lacking in fervour. Tears of rage would start up in her eyes, accusations would pour from her hotly, presents would be spurned. In this way she cemented attachment through guilt, and any discomfort that this might cause would be swept away by one of Mousie’s lightning changes of mood, her gaiety, her demands for affection, of which she could apparently never have enough. Mousie needed to function from a position of emotional dominance; as this was an art which she had learnt in her cradle, and as it had worked so well at that time, she had seen no need to modify it throughout her adult life.

  Bertie, used to the calm unemotional woman whom Blanche had become, had been enchanted by the petulance, the self-assurance, and the shamelessness of Mousie. He took all these qualities as evidence of passion, in which he was mistaken, although it was an easy mistake to make, and he was not alone in making it. Bertie himself, a rich man, of reserved and powerful personality, represented to Mousie the father to whom she could stretch out her infant arms once more, a delightful prolongation of her habitual and instinctive state. Bertie, whose desire for control was easily titillated by a token opposition, and who had begun to see in Blanche a strength of character that seemed to challenge his own, had succumbed easily to Mousie’s appeal. Not for Mousie the discretion of a woman technically in the wrong; her very indecency had thrilled Bertie to the core. Mousie would telephone him at home, sometimes tearfully, if she had not seen him that day, and was not put out if Blanche happened to be at hand. Once Blanche had answered, and had said, ‘Do you wish to speak to my husband or are you going to pretend that you have the wrong number?’ This was taken by Mousie to be a massively unsporting response, and she had complained, with tears, to Bertie about it. Bertie, seeing vistas of unease opening suddenly before him, had also responded by blaming Blanche. In this way Blanche could be isolated by virtue of her innocence. The discomfort of the guilty parties could only be resolved by invoking Blanche’s lack of co-operation. Behaving properly, in this context, took on a radically different meaning from Blanche’s understanding of the matter, or indeed of any matter.

  ‘Your little friend telephoned,’ Blanche would say to Bertie, as he returned from the office, looking alternately younger and more harassed. ‘Why don’t you ask her round? I hate to think of her huddled downstairs on the doorstep.’ For how could Bertie pretend to be faithful to Blanche when Mousie had made the facts of the situation so patently obvious? And how could Blanche, so schooled in good behaviour, win in a contest with a naughty child, with tactics long expunged from her life as stupid, dishonest, above all uncharacteristic? It was particularly difficult to behave with dignity in such circumstances; for in order to negotiate successfully, Blanche would have needed to transact in what she privately considered to be an unworthy manner, and would have had to call on reserves of patience and cunning in which she was notably deficient. It was all the more puzzling in that the baby whom she knew Mousie to be was disguised as a young adult woman who earned her living in an adult way and lunched in wine bars with her young upwardly mobile female friends, all of them busy gentrifying the south-western suburbs and comparing notes on their live-in companions. Marriage they scorned, thinking of it as the shackle that kept women at home, or at best tired out with being too successful all round, yet oaths of fealty were exacted, as in some new code of chivalry. Blanche, musing over a glass of wine and a sandwich, could see these lunches quite clearly. The talk would be excited, the briefcases parked on an empty chair; acquaintances would be hailed in delighted and uninhibited tones. And when the confidences started, the heads would be lowered and would come together, and the laws of the Mafia would prevail. Mafia honour must be satisfied, no matter what the price to be paid. In fact the price was always survival: no laughing matter, as Blanche had reason to reflect.

  Naturally, certain rationalizations had had to be circulated before the divorce could take place. The most useful had been confided by Mousie to her friends. ‘If the man decides to look elsewhere,’ said Mousie, ‘you can be sure that his wife can’t satisfy him.’ The friends all saw the wisdom of this. However Blanche’s current isolation was caused not by the opinion of Mousie’s friends, whom she did not know, but by the parallel defection of her own, all of whom seemed to think privately what Mousie and her friends were saying so publicly. Blanche’s habit of arcane references, her way of raising unsuitable matters at dinner parties, thus came to be seen as evidence of thin blood, of reserve, or of incapacity; she was far less interesting than Mousie, who was so dramatic in her reactions. And it was not always clear what Blanche meant. If you had not read the same books you did not always make sense of her allusions. Whereas Mousie was a child in comparison, an adorable child. Tiresome too, on occasions, and embarrassing, but on the whole great fun.

  ‘I see it all,’ Blanche had said to Barbara, in the course of one of their less guarded telephone conversations. ‘I am not adorable. I can be very sarcastic, and that is apparently more wounding to Bertie than the plain fact of Mousie’s taking possession. And now people seem to think that I am frigid, and there is no possible way in which I can refute them. So clever of them, don’t you think?’

  ‘You could sleep with their husbands,’ said Barbara, who was a plain-spoken woman.

  ‘I only ever wanted to sleep with my own,’ said Blanche sadly. ‘And apparently that was wrong too. People would have been more sympathetic if I had had a messy and injurious private life. It would have been evidence that I am human.’

  ‘Farmyard thinking,’ said Barbara. ‘I’m surprised you take any notice.’

  ‘Ah, but my dear, I am meant to. And I think I must.’

  ‘I really think that Bertie has behaved unforgivably,’ said Barbara to her husband after she had put down the telephone.

  Jack’s response was to chuckle. ‘I never would have thought he had it in him,’ he said. ‘Pompous bastard, I always thought. And he’s come up with a little cracker like this girl. Bad luck for Blanche, of course,’ he added hastily, seeing his wife’s look. The matter had not been discussed again.

  And so the word went out, as the word always will, that Blanche was to be the loser. And as curiosity had to be satisfied, Bertie and Mousie had to be invited to dinner. And as Mousie was adept at the business of survival, many allusions were made in the course of these dinners to Blanche’s famous eccentricities. Thus the legend was established and the verdict was passed: Blanche was too eccentric to be borne. She was insupportably eccentric. And age could only make her worse.

  Bertie, who thought his wife uncomfortable although he knew her to be honest, abstained from these colloquies, said nothing to refute the current or received opinion, but sometimes called in on his way home, or perhaps later, in the course of an errand to the off-licence. Carrying a wrapped bottle, he would observe, testily, that Blanche drank too much.

  ‘What did you have for lunch?’ Blanche would say. For she was not surprised at the way things had turned out. If, as Plato says, all knowledge is recollection, she had always known that she would fail in this particular contest, for her own plainness as a child had caused her to look longingly at the delighted smiles bestowed on other, prettier little girls, and she had wished in vain to have a tantrum of her very own. But the tantrums of plain little girls do not have the desired effect, and by the time those plain little girls have grown up and become elegant women the art has been lost for ever because it has never been possessed.

  And since then the weather had seemed to be uniformly awful, although Blanche was well aware that she was extrapolating from her own inner disarray. Nevertheless, she was statistically sure that somewhere there was heat, there was sunshine, and radiance, and that this happy climate was reserved for those who had the determination to seek it. For herself, the grey days and the endless afternoons seemed a fitting context for her present life, and sometimes she needed all her courage to leave the house, driven out as she was by the even greater horror of staying in. And as human contact seemed to recede from her grasp, she craved it all the more, although her cocked head and quizzical smile, assumed out of frightened deference to the gods, had driven many lesser mortals from her company.

  Her fantasies, on which her lips remained firmly closed, and which she would have died rather than reveal, came dangerously near to the surface as she surveyed the sodden garden and stood at the window immobilized by a vision of an alternate life, the one she would have wished for herself had she been in a position to lay her case before some benevolent tribunal.

  If only I could live in a real house before I die, smell lilac in my own garden. If only I could be married again, to Bertie, young enough to be confident, not middle-aged and wary, having seen too much. If only it were Sunday, in summer, just once more, and I were about to take our tea out into the garden. And if only there had been that pram in the hall that is said to stifle all creative endeavour but would have had the opposite effect on me. Our sons, our daughters, playing in that garden, shaking raindrops from those lilac bushes, stalking the cat. Always hot sunshine, in these imaginings.

  And no shame in getting old, getting weak. Arm in arm, companionably taking a walk in that garden … the children coming to tea, with their children.

  ‘Perhaps you should have given him a child,’ Barbara had once said, goaded to harshness by Blanche’s passivity.

  ‘Perhaps he should have given me one,’ Blanche had replied, speaking for once bitterly, out of her greatest hurt. And there the matter rested. They had never referred to it again.

  On this grey day, momentarily warmed by Miss Elphinstone’s company and the evidence that perfectly sane people lived equally ruminative lives, Blanche determined to shop and to cook as if she were a normal woman with normal household concerns. She bought supplies that would see her through the week, in case – always the lurking fear – she was kept at home by illness, and on her return did some more baking. Her excellent cooking, in which she required no co-operation, was, had she known it, a further count against her in Mousie’s circle, as was her small private income. ‘These houseproud women wouldn’t be so houseproud if they had to do a day’s work,’ Mousie would say in the wine bar, flushed with anger, her hair slightly untidy after an ideological lunch with the friends. ‘I believe in involving the man,’ she would add proudly, remembering Bertie with an apron over his business suit and the inordinate length of time it took to prepare a meal, there being so much to discuss and so many false starts to be rectified. Bertie seemed to thrive on it all. And then they were out so much, at those dinner parties which kept Mousie in the forefront of everybody’s attention, in the position that she found most effortless and most congenial. When Bertie required her to give a dinner party herself, she ordered everything from a caterer and dressed up to the nines to compensate for the fact that dishes tended to emerge from the oven at the wrong temperature. Though she drank less than Blanche, she became much more animated much more quickly. Blanche, after two or three glasses, merely became calmer and displayed the rudiments of a sententious smile.

  Bertie, looking in that evening, found her halfway through a bottle of Sancerre, calm in her white silk shirt and her patterned velvet skirt.

  ‘You must spend a fortune on that stuff,’ he said uneasily. ‘And it can’t be doing you any good.’ He hated evidence of solitary habits, just as he hated the echoing silence of the flat, as he stood outside wondering whether or not to use his old key.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Blanche. ‘I have never been drunk in my life. You do not run the risk of seeing me hanging round a lamp-post with a riotous hat over one eye. I think you are frightened of my turning up at your house and making a scene. Bursting in on your guests while Mousie is dishing up the stuffed peppers. Having to be removed by men in white coats. Reduced to begging in the streets, asking passers-by for five pounds for a cup of tea. Yourself shuddering with disgust on the other side of the road. Anyway, I can afford it. That must be one worry off your mind.’