Somewhere Beyond Reproach (11 page)

Dinah sat down on the rug in front of the gas fire. She pulled up her knees, and inclined her head. A small band of skin showed where her white sweater rose as she leant
forward
. I was aware of nothing but her as Serkin played on. I am well aware of the dangers of eulogising. I shall not do so here. Only say that for that moment I had never seen a more beautiful combination of colours than the blue and white of her clothes and the jet blackness of her hair. If I had been a painter what a study I could have made of ‘Girl in front of Gas fire’.

I have read through my description of the dinner. I am horrified at my apparent composure. I cannot believe that it was really like that, and yet I remember what I said almost exactly. During the following week I had ample time to feel the agony of my limitations. I had no idea what the next step should be. I did not even know whether I was intended to make it. My one hope was that Dinah had not asked me to the flat simply out of kindness. I felt that I was being tested in some obscure way. What a fool I had been to suppose that meeting would follow meeting as a matter of course once the first successful approaches had been made. I remembered various things that she had said. ‘You mustn’t try to stop me going back.’ A line for some
femme
fatale
in a French film. Her intenseness as she asked: ‘What do you want, Harry?’ This contrasted with the flippancy of her manner in the showrooms and her almost total silence at the dinner. The way she had invited me was extremely puzzling. Her deadly joking
seriousness
, and yet when it had come to the actual occasion she had done nothing but look on. Yet even if I was able to find some pattern in all this, the next move still had to be made. I had made the first approaches, then she had been
responsible
for our tea together and my invitation to the flat. I knew that it was my turn. I did not feel that I could presume to invite her out in a direct way. I should have to use Andrew again. By doing this she would have to make part of the decision. I rang up several times and got no answer. Perhaps this was fortunate. Instead I decided to revert to the safer
medium of the letter. In this way I should say no more than I intended. I asked her whether she and Andrew would like to come out for the day the following Saturday. She wrote back almost at once to say that I would have to try another time since he was still away with friends. She had refused to let me use him as an excuse. Nevertheless I decided to go on with this ploy. I wrote asking when he would be back. She suggested a day that would be all right. I felt
considerable
relief, although initially I had been disappointed that she had not volunteered to come by herself since the child was away. All the same it would be an opportunity to show my ability with children and would also reduce some of the tension that we experienced when alone together. Once she had accepted I rang up Tim Gerson and asked him whether he would be at his house outside Robertsbridge that weekend. He said he would be. He seemed pleased that I should want to come to lunch that Saturday. Yes, it was all right to bring any number of people. He seemed curious when I wouldn’t tell him who was coming. The names, I explained, would mean nothing to him. This was true since he had never met Dinah. This time I rang her up and said that I had fixed up lunch with a friend in the country. She said
uneffusively
that that was ‘fine by her’.

*

I woke up ridiculously early on the day in question. I got up at once and tore open the curtains. Although it was still dark the sky looked clear. The weather had been
remarkable
during the past four days. My prayers for a
continuation
of this sunny spell were answered.

*

When I had them both safely in the car I asked Dinah if it was all right leaving Mark alone. She told me casually that he was spending the weekend at Mapham with a former therapist. I wondered whether Simpson shared his wife’s alleged incapacity for marital lying. The way that she had tossed out his weekend rendezvous as something of little significance made me suspect that she knew what his
relationship
with Jane had been. I looked at Dinah’s slender form
next to me. She was wearing a dark blue suit with white edgings at the collar and sleeves. Her overcoat was white with brass buttons. As I looked, my indignation with Simpson grew. How could anybody be unfaithful to such a woman? That somebody with his disadvantages should be, seemed almost obscene. The depth of my disgust for the husband was exactly paralleled by the depth of my protective
tenderness
for the wife.

Driving has always given me a sense of freedom and
well-being
that few other activities equal. I know that I cannot express this feeling exactly. There is much more to it than the freedom from other cares that a fixed purpose, namely getting from A to B, gives. The freedom is partly in getting out of the town. The denser housing gives way to straggling ribbon development, reservoirs, commons and then finally the country itself is there. It is almost like shaking away the houses like unwanted bits of gravel. The master of the
film-show
of my windscreen, I can relax as the road unravels, unspools under me. Trees, fields, woods, hills, all coalesce to form the vast amalgam of my contentment. I have always found the country beautiful in late winter. The colours are pale and gentle as though everything has been refined and washed. Only the shadows are emphatic or perhaps a touch of evergreen, a black barn or the ribbon of the road scrawled like a pencil line between the fields. The air is so clear and fresh. A church tower can be seen to glisten over a mile away. I am not attempting by this description to set myself up as a great lover of the country. I live in the town by choice. My pleasure in a rural scene is all the sharper for the infrequency of my seeing it. Yet without Dinah beside me I would have noticed little. Her very presence even makes my observation better. I can feel alive. How pleasant are the definite colours of her clothes against the pastel shades of ploughed fields and winter-tired grass.

On the way I only occasionally indulged Andrew’s desire to see how fast the car would go. He had been quite
unsatisfied
when I had told him I knew already. Each time the needle touched more than 80, Dinah’s hands would
clasp the dashboard. If this happened I immediately slowed down.

*

Lunch was reasonably successful. Tim and Cathy had far too much sense to ask Dinah any questions about her husband when I had introduced her as Mrs Simpson. Afterwards Andrew and John, Tim’s son, went out together. I suggested a walk. Tim and Cathy tactfully refused. Tim showed me a walk through some nearby woods on an Ordnance Survey map. Dinah borrowed a pair of Cathy’s wellingtons. I hoped that her consenting to come with me had more behind it than a dislike for the alternative of talking most of the afternoon to two comparative strangers.

When we reached the end of the lawn, Dinah turned and looked at the creeper-covered house. I never thought of it as being sizeable inside. From here it looked large. The sun touched the stone with a pleasing warmth. She said:

‘Wouldn’t you like to live in a house like that?’ Her voice was teasing. The question implied: if you’ve got as much money as Tim, why do you lead a spartan life?

‘I think it would be a bit big for me.’

We walked through a vegetable garden and then through a gate into a field. The woods were at the bottom. The night’s frost had thawed. Dinah’s boots glistened with moisture as she scuffed her feet through the grass. She continued:

‘I suppose it wouldn’t be much fun alone in the country.’ I tried to keep the glumness I felt out of my voice as I said:

‘I suppose it wouldn’t.’

Suddenly she took my arm and looked up at me with a smile of apology.

‘You do take things seriously. All that about the miniature the other evening. You really ought to try and laugh.’ She paused. ‘You know Mark quite took to you.’

This did make me laugh.

‘What’s he like to people he doesn’t quite take to?’

‘He wouldn’t have taken anything like the same trouble. You got him quite excited. He can be pretty taciturn.’

I couldn’t make out whether she was being funny at my
expense. Was I meant to be laughing good-naturedly now? I said:

‘I’m glad the evening was a success.’

She let go of my arm, took a few strides out in front of me, then turned to face me. I stopped. We were in the middle of the field. She said more seriously:

‘I suppose I was grateful that you didn’t try to get him to like you. It would have been easier that way. Some people do it like that. The good friend of hubby. Holidays together, adjoining rooms. Tipping the porters the right sum.’

My heart was beating impossibly faster.

‘While I was sun-bathing you could have wheeled him on the promenade. He might be suspicious, but too frightened to try and find out.’

‘Am I as transparent as that?’ I murmured looking at the new-made pile of some mole.

She started walking again.

‘It isn’t quite fair to you,’ she said quietly. ‘I suppose that you tried too hard. Everything has been so calculated.’

‘You asked me to meet your husband,’ I said, controlling my voice.

‘To see how hard you were prepared to try.’ She smiled.

‘And you were glad that I didn’t try to get him to like me.’ I felt helpless desperation and certainty that I was
getting
nowhere. The arcs of the circle never seemed likely to meet.

‘That’s right. But you did better. That would have been too obvious a ploy. You let him provoke you, were reserved, twisted his tail just enough to impress me that you were in control.’

My anger broke.

‘Why the hell did you come out with me today?’

‘Because I don’t mind what you’ve done.’

‘Then why do you try and torture me?’

‘I suppose I ought to say: to see how much you can stand. In some obscure way I feel I owe it to myself. I think that’s why.’

‘And there’s nothing I can say to that,’ I said as we reached
the edge of the woods. Yet she had spared me something. She could have told me that she didn’t believe adultery should be easy. I had purposely not dared to think of
possible
success with Dinah. Divorce? What would happen to the child? Would Simpson try to retain his wife by
threatening
to take possession of Andrew if they parted? The things she had said about mutual holidays and adjoining rooms made it look as though an unofficial liaison would not suit her. I myself doubted whether I could stand it. Even as I thought about these things, they still seemed events almost too remote to contemplate safely.

‘You’re looking very serious,’ she said.

The path we were on led down to a wooden bridge over a stream. The trees were not so thick lower down. The ground was not so hard here. The moisture made it slippery. Dinah took my arm for the second time.

‘You don’t mind my using you as an anchor?’

‘Go ahead.’

We stopped on the bridge and looked down at the slowly moving water. Dinah said:

‘Aren’t you afraid I might take you for a ride? Wouldn’t it be perfectly reasonable to leave a crippled husband for a rich and healthy one?’

‘No it wouldn’t,’ I snapped.

‘So the horrid idea of this advantage you have never entered your mind?’

‘I didn’t know about Mark’s leg till after I had begun. It changed nothing. It entered my head that you would have to love me a lot to dream of leaving a man in his condition.’

Dinah did not reply to this. She started to walk on to the other bank.

‘Aren’t we rather crossing our bridges before we come to them?’ she asked, looking back at me.

‘Isn’t that rather the result of your charming directness?’

‘Which is the result of your kind invitation.’

The bank on the other side of the bridge rose steeply. Dinah decided to skirt the worst of the slope. I did not. The looseness of the bank and the mud did the rest. I fell and
slid for several feet on my stomach. When I got up my chest was covered by a two-inch-thick layer of mud. Dinah looked down at me. Whether she had initially wanted to laugh, I don’t know. If she had wished to, she nevertheless managed to stifle it. I got up and walked round the way she had gone. As I did so I took off my coat. My shirt and tie, I was pleased to see, were not marked. When I had reached the same level as Dinah, I managed to smile and say:

‘You were quite right. I shouldn’t have tried a short cut.’

‘Just like Mark,’ she said. ‘He always used to try the most impossibly difficult things when he got out of hospital.’

She looked at me with mocking intentness.

‘I’m afraid you’ve got your knees a bit messy.’

‘I’ll be able to brush it off when it dries.’

‘Well then, there’s no need to be looking quite so
sorrowful
.’ Now she did laugh. ‘If you could have seen your face. So intent and then so dismayed.’ She came closer to me. I had my back to a beech tree. She was still laughing when I felt her breath on my face. Her kiss almost had the quality of derision. I turned my face slightly. The action seemed so insanely out of character. I longed to be able to cry out: ‘Not yet, I am not ready yet.’ She did not let me go. I felt her arms round the back of my neck. Her breath came in little spurts as she kissed me again and again and her laughter bubbled up from inside. When she stepped back there was no look of humility, no desire for self-justification. She turned and softly hummed:

And I leant against the one stable thing in the universe — the tree behind me. The feeling was not unlike an impossibly bright light at the back of my head. I seemed to be hovering between life and death, an unreal region. I felt almost as if my heart had been physically ripped out and was no longer with me but with my beautiful laughing torturer. I saw the sun glinting on the brass buttons of her coat as she walked into a clearing. What should I do? Pretend that
nothing
had happened. Deny the almost chemical change that had taken place in my body? She would have to speak. The words of her little couplet might have prepared me for what she said next:

‘Do you think we’ll write each other letters in the long separations? Will I write: “It will be marvellous to see you and hold you in my arms. Life is so dreadfully different without you. I’m sitting peeling potatoes and thinking of you; the way the hair grows on your chest. Andrew is
splashing
in the bathroom. Mark is still getting up.”?’ She stopped and looked at me without mockery. Her voice was utterly flat. ‘Do you know he can put on his clothes by himself now? I had to dress him. Then there was the excitement of every little thing he could do for himself. “Look, I can do this, I can do that, I can stand on my head …” And I was so good with my bravos and well dones.’ She turned away. I saw her put her hands over her face. ‘Why does everything have to be so sickeningly sad, Harry?’