The Rules of Engagement (8 page)

“
One hardly sees you these days,
”
she said.
“
Not that one ever saw much of you. Such a private
little person.
”
This last remark was faintly
disparaging, as if she had decided that private little
persons were not qualified to provide much in the
way of interest for persons such as herself, whose
company she thought worthy of greater deference than
I was likely to offer. Meekly I took my
seat in her overstuffed drawing-room, while she
occupied herself with the coffee (which I knew would be
too weak) in the kitchen. I calculated that I
had half an hour before I could be back at home
to take Edmund's telephone call
informing me of his own movements and of his
availability that evening. He was not always free;
demands on his time were numerous, and he sometimes had
to see a client after work. This hardly mattered;
though I was disappointed when we were not able to meet,
the call reassured me that the connection was still
secure, and I knew that his voice would power me
for the rest of the day. I might go to the flat in any
case: those afternoons in the garden were now a part of my
life, perhaps the part I most treasured. They had
an enchantment, a stillness of their own after the
adjustments of the morning. They constituted a time in
which I was free to contemplate my emerging and
authentic self, a self which had been obscured
by the years of careful living which I could now see for
what they had been: erroneous, fallacious, and
with
a
stifling quality I was ready to condemn
unreservedly.

Mrs Crook settled herself in her chair and
prepared to give me her full attention, or rather
prepared to let me give my full attention to the
honour of this summons. She was eighty years
old, an age which I was not inclined to contemplate.
Large, slow, and formidable, she was something of a
presence in the building. Few people found her
sympathetic but all paid her a certain amount of
respect, owing largely to her unshakeable conviction
of her own importance. She was, like most of her
kind, a widow, who probably spent lonely
days but was careful to disguise any loneliness she
might have felt and to dismiss the activities of
others as unimportant. She had travelled
widely with the second of her two husbands, and for a
time, in the early days of my marriage, had
queried me about our holiday arrangements: had we
managed to find the hotel she had recommended, and
if so had we remembered to give her best wishes
to the proprietor? Remarks such as these had
furnished what conversation we were obliged to have. My
husband thought her admirable, as he did anything
of a settled and recognizable nature, but I
perceived a curiosity in her that I did little
to encourage. My reluctance had been noted.
She was not disposed in my favour.

“
And how are you getting on?
”
she now said.

“
Still going to those classes of yours?
”
This was
dangerous ground.
“
Not that I suppose I should
understand a word of them,
”
she continued.
“
I don't
understand much of what is going on these days. The world
has changed so much.
”

I agreed. I recognized this for the
rhetorical performance it was likely to be, and
prepared to give her twenty minutes at the
outside before making my escape.

“
What has happened to manners?
”
she
demanded, without waiting for an answer.
“
Tradition? Standards? All those dreadful
women clamouring to be heard, making fools of
themselves. What has happened to morality?
”

“
I suppose certain changes are
inevitable,
”
I felt emboldened to reply.
“
More women working ...
”

“
That's another thing. In my day women were
looked after by men. I never saw any reason
to quarrel with that. My mind was as good as my
husbands'. Yet I would never have dreamed of
protesting, of arguing with them, of demanding more than my
due.
”

“
I think that women want more than that,
”
I
said. I was playing into her hands.

“
And what good will that do them? They will find out
too late, when all the men have deserted them. I
despair of my sex,
”
she said, with a complacent
little laugh.
“
Not that I have anything in common with this
new breed. Women knew how to behave when I was
young. Oh, do you take sugar? It's in the
kitchen, would you be kind enough ...? You know where it
is.
”

On the kitchen table I saw the pitiable
results of her morning's purchases:
biscuits, a sponge cake, a small loaf,
tea bags, instant coffee, a packet of ham,
and a small oozing bag of tomatoes. Not enough there
to give one an appetite for life, and yet she
seemed vigorous enough, with a monstrous vigour that
enabled her to condemn anything of which she did not
approve. I could envisage her frugal lunch:
a slice of ham and a tomato, washed down with more
of the horrible coffee. She probably still had a
few cronies, would venture out again in the afternoon
to see one or other of them, would rely on an
invitation to dinner which would satisfy her nutritional
requirements until the following day. She
retired early; we could hear her radio booming
through the bedroom wall. At some point she would
fall asleep until the sound roused her. Then
we would hear her make her way to the kitchen for a
cup of tea. Her irregular progress was
audible until she settled down again, round about
midnight. The thought of her life filled
me with horror. I did not intend ever to become like
her.

“
At least you look after Digby
properly,
”
she said, as I returned with the
sugar. She took a proprietorial interest in
my husband, as she would do with all men, asserting
her rights as an unreconstructed woman of the old
school.
“
I dare say your mother brought you up
properly. One can always tell. These women [that
is to say, all women unlike herself] don't
seem to have had that advantage. As for the young ...
”

She lifted both hands in a helpless little gesture
which nevertheless implied a wealth of condemnation.
“
Not
that you're all that young. But you seem to have settled
down quite well.
”

This was calculated to bring me out, as she would no
doubt have put it. But it seemed that I was not of
sufficient interest to engage her attention further.
Either that or she was bored. She was certainly
disappointed. My reticence was a sign that I was
of negligible quality, unworthy of any sort
of husband, let alone the one with whom she had
exchanged playful comments before I had been
imported onto the scene. Though I had occupied
that scene for some time she seemed to view me as
temporary, rather like a servant who might not shape
up to the job. She was unaware that her dislike of
me was quite plain. I was equally aware that she must
never discover the reasons for it. For somewhere, at some
undisturbed level of her brain, she
recognized sexual activity on my part, though
she might not identify it as the most
significant of the differences between us. And I was not
paying her homage. At a very deep level,
even deeper than the first, she made the connection
between the presence of the one and the absence of the other.

“
Mrs Crook, you must excuse me,
”
I
said, getting to my feet.
“
This has been
delightful.
”
I did not return the invitation.
Instead I offered to shop for her on my morning
outings. This may have been a kind offer, but it was not
a genuine one. I was anxious to leave, but was
aware that I should have to make some concessions to the spirit
of the occasion. She viewed me with a marked lack of
indulgence. In my imagination I could hear my
telephone ringing unanswered.

The incident had unsettled me. I had been
brought face to face with an unwelcome
phenomenon, the prospect of a woman from whom
emotional sustenance had been removed and
who had settled for viciousness as a comforting
substitute. Her flat had been filled with that
particular miasma, and everything in it
—
the wheezing
cushions into which she had sunk, the uncared-for
kitchen, deemed fit occupation for a notional
domestic, even the lowly shopping
—
had all
signified an absence which she had tried to fill with
her lofty observations about the decline of standards.
That these were somehow directed against myself, still
technically blameless, had not deceived me, though they
may have deceived Mrs Crook. Sooner or later
my secret would be uncovered, not by my husband but
by the likes of Mrs Crook and her jealous
perceptions. I feared the power of women, though I
was one myself. The only harmless woman I knew
was Betsy, whom I suddenly, acutely
missed. Not that it would have done to have Betsy as a
witness; she would not have understood the dreadful
attraction that bound me to Edmund. For Betsy,
love was only admissible if it were poetic, a
redeeming feature informed by the highest emotion.
Her own love affair was, like all her
endeavours, largely a matter of aspiration. There
was no possibility of my sharing my thoughts with
Betsy, although I should have liked to discuss my
situation with another woman, a woman essentially
uncorrupted, who might not understand but whose
sympathy would be guaranteed by that very transparency
which would honour my confession (for confession it would
be), with all the natural simplicity she had
managed to retain. She would no doubt do her best
to dignify it with the appropriate classical
quotation, out of loyalty, out of a desire
to reconnect with matters so evidently absent from
my own preoccupations. Or would my preoccupations
more properly be identified as obsessions? My
own nature must have held dark secrets, which were
dark only because they were not shared. In the course of
those evenings with Edmund all conscience dissolved and
I possessed a conviction that I was acting in
accordance with my true nature. In the intervals
I was conscious of a fall from grace which I was
obliged to register, though to condemn it seemed not
to be within my power.

In the kitchen the air vibrated as if the phone
had just stopped ringing. I had missed his call, and
it was Thursday; on Friday he would join his
family in the country and I should not see him
until the following week. I dreaded the
weekends, which were filled with subterfuges
of the kind designed to uphold my stance as a
loyal wife. I should be deprived of my afternoons
in the garden, watching the children until they went home
for their tea, waiting
—
and this was the only
circumstance in which waiting could be counted a
pleasure
—
for the time when I would slip my key in
the door and will my waiting to end. The arrangement
no longer seemed questionable to me, nor did the fact
that Edmund had designed it, initially, for others,
for anyone who might willingly join him there,
become a partner in the kind of deception I had
embraced. I had a moment of fear: was he therefore
entirely cynical in his approach to me? This I
dismissed: I had met his glance and sustained it,
besides which there could be no other truth. Before I knew
him I would no doubt have expressed disapproval
of a man who kept such an establishment. Now in
an odd way I approved of it as an indication
of a man's sexual entrepreneurship. And the
benefit was all mine. Nevertheless I was obliged
to recognize the changes it had brought about in my
own nature. For instance I no longer dreamed.
My dream life, which had been vivid, had been
cancelled by the vividness of events. If I
dreamed at all it was in the daytime, sitting in that
garden. Nor did I read as much as formerly,
though my mind was still obstinately stuffed with
Victorian prototypes. This had been kindly
looked upon by my husband as a harmless quirk which
did me credit. My attempts to introduce
such subjects as I thought interesting at our dinner
parties must have made me seem awkward,
tiresome. I blushed now in retrospect at
what must have been tolerance on the part of our
guests.