The Rules of Engagement Read online

‘Yes, I’m here.’

  She seemed unable either to say anything or to end the call. It was unclear why she had contacted me, for although we were old friends she had noted my dislike of her lover. Who was now dead, I reminded myself. And she herself had not been well, as was evidenced by her subdued and altered tone.

  ‘When can we meet? I’m here all day at the moment. I mean, I’m not busy. Do you want to come over? Now?’

  ‘Tomorrow, perhaps. If you’re sure. I’ve got so much to tell you.’

  ‘Come to tea tomorrow. It will be lovely to see you.’

  I rang off, moved. It would indeed be lovely to see her.

  ‘This tea’s cold,’ remarked my husband. ‘Who were you talking to?’

  ‘My oldest friend,’ I told him. For she was, I realized, the one and only, the friend who follows one through life, and to whom one is bound by the very fact of life itself.

  6

  THE CHILDREN WERE GOING BACK TO SCHOOL. I COULD not help noticing this when I went out the following morning. They seemed excited rather than downcast, as if the prospect of order were a welcome change after the variegated activities of the summer holidays. They dominated the streets, or perhaps one’s eye was simply drawn to them as a fact of nature, the new exerting its rights over the old. It was a sight to make any childless woman thoughtful. While never exactly wishing for children, and in any case knowing myself to be inept, I seemed suddenly to be conscious of a dimension that was lacking in my life. The sight of fathers holding the hands of chattering little daughters affected me now as it would not have done previously. From what I had gathered Edmund’s attitude to his children was one of tacit devotion, not to be spoken of to an outsider, active only within the boundaries of his home, incommunicable to anyone in a position radically different from his own. One sensed that few people would be allowed into the jealously guarded intimacy thus observed, and that to attempt to do so would strike a false note. Even a neutral enquiry, such as I had attempted, would be met with a banality which might have answered my question, had it not been met with an instinctive turning away of the head, and a smile which merely emphasized the firmness of the mouth. After that I was careful to behave as if I hardly knew of his children’s existence. It was an area from which I was excluded. My attributes were those of a woman whose sexual availability was guaranteed by childlessness, as if the same practices could not be visited on a woman whose status was enhanced by the kind of respect accorded to mothers. While I knew that this was an absurd suspicion on my part I was aware that I could not hope to share his experiences of life within a family, and it was perhaps the feature that separated us even more than the disjunction between our needs and wishes.

  This was not the only sign that summer was coming, indeed had come, to an end. The mornings were cooler and the evenings longer than they had been; already leaves were changing colour and scents were sharper in the occasionally misty air. My afternoons in the garden would very shortly be curtailed and I should be obliged to spend more time at home. Oddly enough I had become quite reconciled to home during the peaceful days that were now concluded, when Digby and I had kept each other amiable company without exchanging anxious enquiries or forbidden confessions. For we both contained areas of secrecy. I suspected that he sometimes compared his first marriage with his second, and while never faltering in his loyalty to me must have regretted the intensity of feeling and desire that had died or been extinguished by his young wife’s death. Such thoughts as he must have entertained were kept from me, and I respected his silence on such matters, for I had a silence of my own which must not be broken. I liked to know that he was in another room, that we were within reach of one another, that our tact would protect us from exaggerating a need which had perhaps become diffused but was no less valued. With Digby back at his office the flat would seem unoccupied, for in his absence my presence was somehow diminished. And on such a morning—the end of everyone’s holidays—I was left with a sensation that time had overtaken me. The children on their way to school, and the new silence at home, signified a return to order, and I was obliged to consider the challenge of how to reconcile the disorder of my love affair with the resumption of daily life so clearly within the grasp of those I passed in the street, the eager children and the no less eager parents, all recognizably conforming to some mysterious normality of which I had lost sight.

  Such social conscience as I still retained urged me to buy a cake for Betsy’s tea, rather as if we were still children invited to one another’s houses. I dismissed the idea, but children were on my mind, even the children we had been ourselves. It was hard to see how we had progressed to our present situations without bringing to the matter something of that earlier sincerity, yet we had both in our various ways attained a notional adulthood which, by comparison with our initial state of grace, appeared bizarre, even theatrical. My situation was no doubt banal, Betsy’s more unexpected. And also more unexplained. I did not know if she had been married to this Daniel, and if so when and where the marriage had taken place. The absence of information (for one always advertises a marriage) convinced me that there had been nothing of this kind, wisely so, for few women, even women as unspoilt as Betsy, could bring themselves to take on a man who was essentially still an adolescent, placing his faith in a future to which he would contribute only in the most immaterial of ways. That she could believe that his nebulous discussions could constitute a credible career argued her devotion, which, to judge from the afternoon when she had introduced Daniel to me, was already making her unhappy. A man should grow out of his fantasies and devote himself to making money. And Betsy was my age: she must have humoured him beyond the point at which it made sense to do so. His death would have put an end to a process which had once involved them both but which would eventually have divided them. The wonder to me was that she should have remained loyal for so long. But then, I reflected, she had always been loyal. Loyalty was her besetting sin.

  I also wondered how she would look, whether this rite of passage would show itself in outward and visible signs. She had been a pretty girl, with the slightly undifferentiated prettiness of very young English women, or indeed like the children on their way to school. When she had visited me with Daniel she had seemed half-way to being a French woman, thinner, more obviously cared for, rigorously focused, and yet distracted by her loving anxiety for her charge (for he was no less), doing her valiant best to reconcile her conflicting social duties to us both. I had discerned, above all, a desire to do the right thing, and in this she had not changed. Her quasi-maternal role flattered her but did not altogether suit her: she had been destined to be wholehearted and spontaneous, and perhaps she was aware of this. She was as disturbed by Daniel’s moody presence as I was, but for more generous reasons. She wanted him to be comfortable, to be happy; I merely thought him rude. At the same time it was clear that I was still in some way her standard of respectability, as if I possessed certainties which had been denied her, and which the process of growing up had merely reinforced. She had had the same air of trying to turn a makeshift arrangement into a proper life, and, more important, into a proper home, a proper family. She had produced the names of friends—Vincent, Brigitte, Jean-Pierre—as if they formed part of her curriculum vitae, produced as an earnest of her and their intentions. Yet she had appeared isolated, as if she knew that what bound her to these friends was provisional, and as if Daniel’s ability to take seriously an affiliation which was essentially not serious had only imperfect hold on her honest and forthright nature. She would have wanted all the comforts of marriage and I could see that these would be denied her. I had thought her performance courageous. As well as love she was already dealing with disappointment, and although the two are not infrequently linked I thought she deserved better.

  When she was sitting in front of me I could see that further changes had taken place. She had lost more weight, and her larger eyes gave beauty to a face that had hitherto been a mere receptor of changing moods. She had
gained a stillness, a languor; no longer did she exclaim with enthusiasm when presented with the slightest favour. Her hair had grown, and it was clear that she no longer dedicated much thought to her appearance. This, paradoxically, gave her a certain authority. It was as if her life were now properly adult and she herself had to deal with adult concerns, such as money, property, but also solitude, fear. She smiled faintly at my expression, and it was true that I was shocked. I wanted the truth from her, and I knew that she would give me nothing less, yet I did not want to intrude into such a private matter. All I knew was that her life in Paris was over, that she had returned, or had been returned, to her origins, to the old house, and by the same token to an old friend. I was determined to remain that friend, although I too had changed. Our friendship would now be measured by the success with which we managed such changes, and also by how much we chose to reveal of our changed selves.

  ‘What has happened?’ I asked, largely disobeying my need to be discreet.

  ‘Well, I’m here.’ She gave an unconvincing little laugh. ‘I’ve bought a rather horrible flat off the Fulham Road, and I’ll move in as soon as it’s habitable. Which will have to be soon, because they want to get rid of me. The new owners of the house, that is. It’s been bought by property developers, and they are not particularly responsive to my needs.’

  ‘I mean, what happened to Daniel?’

  ‘Well, he died. I think he wanted to die.’ Her face expressed the most profound disbelief that anyone should want such a thing.

  ‘Was he ill?’

  ‘I think he must have been. I think he was mentally ill. I couldn’t get him to relax. He was over-excited all the time. Sometimes he talked all night. And the flat was being repossessed by the owner, who wanted it for his son. That affected him badly. And the money was getting scarce.’

  Her money, I assumed.

  ‘One night he wouldn’t stop talking, refused food. I tried to get him to calm down, but it merely made him more agitated. Then we had a row, our first. And our last. He ran down the stairs—I could hear him all the way to the street.’ She became silent. ‘He was run over by a police car. I heard it. Or rather I heard a woman scream.’ She was silent again. ‘The police were very kind. They took care of everything. I think they thought I might bring charges. The worst thing was when they asked me about him, and I realized I knew next to nothing. A friend, I said. I think they were relieved to be shot of the matter. They said they would look into it and let me know. But they didn’t. I suppose these things take time. I never heard another word.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I had to find out more about him. It sounds silly, but I only knew what he had told me, and that was so little as to be meaningless. He wouldn’t even talk about his childhood, and most people are willing to do that, aren’t they? But I didn’t know where to go, whom to ask. The friends I used to meet— I told you about them—had begun to disperse. Either that or they were doing other things. Or avoiding him.’ She sighed. ‘He had become very argumentative.’

  ‘I thought you were all plotting the next revolution.’

  ‘Oh, that was nonsense. We may have been interested in politics when we first met; well, it was hard to avoid such discussions after 1968. But in fact we were already drifting apart. It was Daniel who took these things seriously. Too seriously. And Roland, of course.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘I may have mentioned him. Roland Besnard.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He was an older man who sometimes joined us. He took an interest in us, and inevitably wondered how we saw the future. I think he just liked young people. He had been a schoolteacher in Angers. He’d come to Paris in his holidays and had stayed on. He was the only one of us who viewed the situation as something more than spectacle. He said it was a good time to be young. I think he was a little envious, in the nicest possible way. He and Daniel sometimes went off together. I don’t know what they talked about.’

  ‘I saw things quite differently. He seemed so . . . radical.’

  ‘Yes, that was worrying. But I thought I could make things better for him, get him to settle down. But he wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. He was always serious: as if this were 1789, or rather 1848. I think what he really needed was a future for himself, one in which he could claim his rightful place. I wasn’t enough for him. I could see that. But to tell the truth I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Were you very unhappy?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But it was his unhappiness that upset me. And I suppose I gave him something. He did seem to rely on me.’

  ‘Betsy, you are painting a picture of someone who was not quite normal.’

  ‘That’s what I had to find out about. Because if he was as . . . eccentric as he was beginning to become . . .’

  ‘Or always had been . . .’

  She ignored me. ‘I had to see whether I had been mistaken all along. And yet I think he loved me.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I went round the various cafés where we used to meet. It took me a whole day. Then, when I had almost given up, I had a stroke of luck, if you can call it luck. I met Roland coming up the steps of the Métro station at Odéon. I must have been looking a bit odd. He knew what had happened. Word had got round, and I think there was something in the papers, though I deliberately didn’t read them. I didn’t want to know what they said about him. I wanted, if possible, to talk to someone who had known him. So it was really providential my meeting up with Roland in that unexpected fashion. And he was very kind. He took me to a café and made me drink some coffee. Then he told me things I never knew, that Daniel had never told me. That was part of the trouble. You do see that, don’t you?’

  I saw it all too clearly. What he had told her was dismaying even to a hostile witness like myself. Daniel de Saint-Jorre was a fabrication from start to finish. His name was Petitjean. Saint-Jorre was one of his mother’s lovers, distinguishable from the others because he had taken pity on the child Daniel and bought him a toy boat to sail on the pond in the Tuileries. The child had fantasized that this man was his father and had appropriated his name. As the real Saint-Jorre had disappeared he had no knowledge of this. In any case he would have been anxious to leave no trace, and there had been no further contact. It had been easy to assume that Daniel was an orphan. In fact his mother still lived in the room in Asnières where she had brought him up, had earned her living as best she could, no doubt in the most banal way possible. Betsy, without knowing the reasons for Daniel’s unbalanced outlook, had instinctively taken him under her wing. They were not and never had been equals. For all of Betsy’s own sense of early deprivation her character rested on rock-solid foundations. He had understood this as strength, and, like all the dispossessed, had looked for and found a protector. To a certain extent, and from a certain point of view, he was as innocent as she was. And social justice, of the fairytale variety in which he believed, would restore him to a place in life in which Betsy might or might not be invited to join him, depending on whether or not he still needed her.

  I was profoundly shocked by this, Betsy even more so. ‘Did you love him?’ I asked, curious to know. My own life had managed to accommodate a number of unwelcome facts, and perhaps I took pride in my realism. I did not see how one could ignore such facts and preserve the simplicity of one’s feelings. Perhaps it was that very simplicity that had saved her from the sort of corrosion to which even the least selfish are susceptible. She looked like someone who had survived a terrible ordeal, her eyes wide and her expression fixed, as if the telling of the story were some kind of physical re-enactment of that ordeal. ‘Did you?’ I prompted.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said tiredly, her shoulders relaxing slightly. ‘Of course I loved him. I was very slow to fall in love; I had too many arrangements to make, and no one to help me make them. When I was in Paris I realized for the first time that I was young, that I had a little money of my own, and could be as independent as I wanted to be. And being the
sort of student I was then—the sort of student who doesn’t have to take exams—was enormous fun. That was how I met those friends I used to go about with. That was how I met Daniel. Someone brought him along at some point. And you saw how beautiful he was.’

  I nodded. That at least was authentic.

  ‘We started living together straight away, in his little room in the rue Cler. And at the beginning I was so happy. It was like La Bohème .’

  ‘Which ends badly,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Yes, and we ended badly too. He died. There can be no worse ending than that.’ We were both silent. ‘And yet,’ she said, ‘I felt a certain relief. I felt it was my fault that he was unhappy. I blamed myself entirely. So that when I was alone once more, with little money left, and the landlord being very polite but very insistent, it was as if, in a terrible way, I accepted everything that had happened, that I knew that for me a certain kind of happiness was at an end. That’s when I decided to come home.’

  ‘No wonder you were ill. Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘I’ve got to be, haven’t I? I’ve got to move. I’ve got to get used to living alone. And I’ll need some sort of a job.’

  ‘Tell me about this flat you’ve bought.’

  She sighed, rubbed her forehead. ‘It’s a perfectly ordinary one-bedroom flat designed for a person with no roots. It’s impossible to think of normal life going on there. I mean the sort of life lived by normal people.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I said. ‘But it needn’t be like that. I’ll help all I can.’

  At this faint show of sympathy she let down her guard and wept. Yet even as she did so she attempted to reassure me. It was a sign that her essential decency had not been compromised.

  ‘Digby will be home soon,’ I warned her. ‘There’s a bathroom down there if you want it. I’ll make some fresh tea.’

  I felt anger on Betsy’s behalf, and also on my own. That I knew little about Edmund beyond what he chose to reveal was beginning to seem unnervingly close to Betsy’s situation; we were both in love with virtual strangers, whose intimacy was a closely guarded secret. Like simpletons, or perhaps just like women, even here we had been seduced by outward form, and had made the mistake of believing that this outward form represented the truth. But truth is not so easily discerned, certainly not disclosed. I, in my hard-hearted way, was aware of this, but Betsy was so clearly above board that she was a victim of her own good faith. I regretted the fact that she was now enlightened, however reluctantly: her sad face, her wide eyes reflected her new condition. She had spoken as if she would never find her way back to the sort of innocent confidence that had been her most noticeable characteristic. And yet there was no shadow in her wistful smile, no suggestion of widowhood. It was as if she was still bewitched by some youthful amalgam of love and beauty, as if, in fact, she had been true to some ideal which she was not willing to abandon. And it was true that in appearance Daniel had fitted the stereotype of a young hero of legend, and whatever inner darkness he managed so successfully to conceal merely added an intriguing complexity to what was in reality a series of aberrations, to which no one meeting him for the first time could have access.