The Rules of Engagement (3 page)

Naturally I saw less of her once we had
left school and gone our separate ways, but
news reached me from time to time from other friends who were still
in touch with her. As I had anticipated she had
gone to university, where she read French and
German. What I had not foreseen was Miss
Milsom's legacy of ten thousand pounds, making
Betsy independent for the first time in her life.
She was still in Pimlico Road; at some point
she intended to sell the house and purchase a
small flat for herself. She used Miss
Milsom's money to go to Paris to further her
education.
“
Furthering her education
”
meant freeing
herself from the constraints of her upbringing, attending a
few lectures and classes, but also getting her
hair properly cut, acquiring a modest
wardrobe, and generally learning how to be part of a
group of young men and women who, flushed with the
success of the student protests, spent their days in
informal discussion groups before dispersing to one
another's lodgings to continue talking long into the
night. This emancipation, modest though it was, for
I did not suspect undue licence on her part,
completed her progress into adulthood, on the
surface at least. When I next saw her, at
my wedding, I was impressed by the change in her
appearance. Only her eyes, shining with happiness
at what she perceived to be my good fortune, beamed
forth her habitual messages of confidence and
candour.

“
You look lovely,
”
she said, pressing my
hand.

But it was she who looked lovely, as if she were
in some sense fated to be blessed in the same way,
the way signified by this reception in a London
hotel, my parents' last throw of the dice before they
divorced and abandoned me to my new destiny.

“
Are you happy?
”
she went on, her hand
reluctant to let mine go.

“
Yes, of course.
”

“
What a pity we can't meet. We've got
so much to tell each other, haven't we? You're
going away, I suppose?
”
“
Venice. Tomorrow morning.
”

“
Lovely,
”
she said again.
“
Will you get in
touch when you get back? I'll leave it
to you; I expect you'll be busy. Where will you be
living?
”

“
Melton Court. Those flats in South
Kensington.
”
My replies were becoming
abrupt, uninformative.

“
Oh.
”
Her eyes widened.
“
Will that be
nice? I imagined you in Chelsea, somehow. Do
you remember how we used to have coffee in the King's
Road?
”

I did indeed remember, almost nostalgically,
as if harking back to a time before I was overtaken
by adult concerns. In this hotel ballroom, with
its tired waitresses who had seen it all before,
I felt compromised, and, worse than that, without
resource. I should have liked to have sat down with her,
but my mother, whose own wedding it seemed to be, kept
calling me to order, to greet another of her friends,
to whom I had to repeat my mantra of Venice and
Melton Court. In a way the extreme
tedium of the occasion was a blessing in disguise;
Betsy was not a person to whom I could give an
unvarnished account of myself. And in any case she
would not have believed me.

I married Digby Wetherall because I was
bored and unhappy, because my parents' disaffection
had eventually resulted in their separation, prior
to divorce, because our house was to be sold, because I
was drawn to anyone whose attitudes and affections
were uncomplicated, and because he loved me. His
size, his breadth, his expansive smile, would have
drawn me to him in any circumstances; when he
asked me to marry him (with tears in his eyes) I
responded instinctively, although until then I
had only thought of him as a family friend for whom
my father acted as solicitor. And because without him,
or someone like him, I had no future. I had
drifted into the fatal habit of falling in with my
mother's plans, had indeed taken that cookery
course, and had made a fairly good job of
cooking for private dinner parties, as was the
quaint custom in those days.

I longed to be delivered from this chore, but was not
trained to do anything else. The liberating
climate of the recent past had not included me in
any significant respect, though I was
susceptible to the beauty of young men and longed to know
them better. Digby was not a young man. He was
twenty-seven years my senior, but for that very
reason seemed to promise an extension of the
parenthood and guardianship which my father
appeared to have relinquished without regret. I
knew that this father (no longer
“
my
”
father) intended
to remarry, a woman some years younger than my
mother. This disparity in age seemed to me far more
distasteful than the fact that Digby and I were
separated by more than a generation. The divorce was
to be
“
amicable
”
; in other words my mother would be
financially recompensed. Whether this would restore
her temper, as the prospect of it seemed to do,
could have no bearing on my future life. I would
be free of her scorn and her disparaging ways,
free of what I thought of as my father's
indiscretions, and secure, if rather sad, in the knowledge
that no more reasonable outcome could have been found
to mark a change of status which I was convinced was
necessary, both for their sakes and for my own. At the time
I did not identify this instinct as fear.

I did not love Digby. What I felt for
him was the gratitude that unmarried women in
Jane Austen feel for a prospect that might,
if fortune favoured them, bring about the sort of
resolution considered to be appropriate. At that
dormant stage of my life I hardly knew
what love was. Digby was an attractive
man in his way: I hazily acknowledged the fact
that I would not object to his love-making. He was
substantial in every respect, and this gave him
authority. He was the director of an engineering
firm across the river in Battersea. I might have
taken note of the fact that I should be entitled
to fairly uneventful days on my own when he was
at his office. I could give up my job and
spend my time largely as I liked. I should always
be at home to greet him in the evenings. If I
had had a lover I could have fitted him in without
difficulty. But I had no thought of this. On the
contrary, the attraction of this marriage was its
utter seemliness. I was perhaps unduly influenced
by my parents' growing hostility to each other, and also
by the fact that they had entered with something like grim
enthusiasm into the destruction of their marriage. I
viewed the flat in Melton Court as a place
of sanctuary. Its lack of poetry I could
easily accommodate.

What was so nice about Digby was the energy he
put into pleasing me. I did not consider the
honeymoon in Venice as anything other than a
rite of passage: what I liked was the fact that
even if I did not wholly appreciate it there
would be other holidays, other excursions,
so that in time I would be agreeably broken in to a
more expansive way of life. He had already
suggested Christmas in Seville, a spring
holiday in Sicily, anywhere, everywhere, until
I was happy. That was the true quality of the man:
unforced generosity. And that I did appreciate,
for as long as we were married. I like to think, in
retrospect, that I never let him down. Even
when I compared his thickening frame with the sort of
grace I occasionally glimpsed in others, young men
whom I passed in the street, even, occasionally in
the host of those dinner parties for which I provided the
beef Wellington and the chocolate mousse most
favoured in those days, it never occurred to me that
sexual transgression was within my grasp, and
indeed it took some time for this to become evident.

None of this I could say to Betsy, on this or
any other occasion, though even at the wedding I had
it in mind to wish for a return of our early
confidences. I would ask her to tea, in Melton
Court, and ask her about her experiences in Paris
and her plans for the future, and would not divulge
any plans of my own, for I did not have any.
I should describe our holidays, as rather boring people
do, and see her wide eyes, which had perhaps
anticipated revelations, take on a tinge of
puzzlement. I would be seen to have left her far
behind, as perhaps I had intended to, for I knew that
I did not have her sort of courage, the courage
to live alone among strangers in a foreign city.
She would forgive me for this, but she would regret it.
I myself would regret it, perhaps more so than she would.
But I would not let her know this. It was the old
dichotomy of pride and shame: to let her into my
life would be to invite confidences, and that I would not
allow.

There was another reason. In that brief meeting
at the wedding, when she pressed my hand so
joyfully, I noticed something that gave me
pause. She looked young, younger than I did in
my finery. She was brimming over with all that she
longed to tell me, with all the enthusiasm that I
should have to eschew. The cause of this, I assumed,
was a man, the sort of man I was not marrying, the
sort of man one does not, perhaps should not, marry,
the sort of man for whom marriage is not even a
distant fantasy. I imagined that this was easily
accomplished in Paris, for I was unduly
influenced by foreign films at the time. I doubted
if I could have managed the real thing. I
had spent six months in Paris after leaving
school, and had not much enjoyed the experience. I
had lodged with a Mme Lemonnier in a gloomy
flat in the Avenue des Ternes, in the so
respectable seventeenth arrondissement, far
from the excitements I thought of as taking place in
the centre of town. Mme Lemonnier, an
elderly widow, had no liking for me, nor I for
her. She had expected a more lavish contribution
than I was able to make, and consequently paid no
attention to my comfort or wellbeing. I was
expected to spend evenings quietly in my room
and to be in bed by nine o'clock, or even earlier, after
which time absolute silence would reign until the
following morning. I was allowed to make myself
coffee in the morning in her Stone Age kitchen,
and after that I had to fend for myself. That meant eating
out in the evenings, which I loved to do anyway, but
rushing back to the flat shortly afterwards in order
to beat the curfew. This was agreeable in that I got
to know what the French liked to eat, and I made it
a point of honour to order something different at every
meal. This proved to be far more useful to me than
any cookery course, and had the additional
virtue of training me in some sort of
independence.

This was significant, for another reason. I
had not expected to be mobbed by admirers, and
became used to existing on my own. I supposed
that I bore the rigours of Mme Lemonnier's
regime about me like some sort of aura of
untouchability, but I also knew, or came
to know, that I was not the kind of woman who sent out the
right messages. This puzzled and saddened me, but
I accepted it. I was quite nice-looking, and I
thought I behaved like everybody else, but I began
to suspect that women are either instantly
recognizable as potential lovers or somehow
fail the test in ways so subtle that there seems
no possibility of adjustment. The result was that
however many times I went to the same restaurant
I was not greeted with any show of warmth and was left
to eat my meal more or less unattended. I
supposed that my habit of concealment made me
seem self-sufficient, and my habitual
pride enabled me to bear the solitude, to which I
became accustomed. I spent my days in
markets, learning to recognize what French
housewives would buy, and those morning excursions
were somehow companionable.
“
La
carotte est en baisse aujourd'hui,
ménagères
,
”
would shout the stall-holder in
the rue de Buci, and in the rue de Passy (for
I walked from one end of the city to the other) cheeses
exposed their nakedness to the ambient air. In the
afternoons I went to the cinema, and studied the sort of
passion from which I calculated that I must be
excluded by some sort of biological
misunderstanding. The hurt I felt was also concealed,
but came back to haunt me in moments of
discouragement, and has in fact stayed with me ever
since.