The Rules of Life (3 page)

‘The sight of the double bed did, I admit, disconcert me. I switched off the television set and waited for Timothy Tovey to come round at eleven for his chilled cream-filled chocolate and his glass of Monbazillac and the pleasure of unbuttoning the dozen small silk buttons that ran down the back of my Thai silk dress. He came on time. He smiled. He did not mention the programme: no doubt he hoped I had not seen it. He was disingenuous. This, more than the sight of the marital double bed, made me angry. I took care not to show it. I murmured and smiled and charmed as usual. Only when he had undone the last button did I slip away from him.

‘“You lied to me,” I said. “You and Janice share a double bed.”

‘Now remember that Timothy Tovey was trained as a diplomat. “We sleep in a double bed,” he said. “But do we share it? I am not so sure. And since we are also unsure about the very nature of truth I think it unreasonable of you to believe you can define a lie, and therefore define me as a liar.”

‘I flung what was left of my wine at him, and the glass hurtled through the air and caught and cracked one of my collection of erotic glass paintings. This one was delicately tender, of lesbians and butterflies sporting in the grass; Lesbos innocent and fragile as it was seen to be in the reign of the young Victoria, from which era the painting originated.

‘“Now see what you’ve done,” I wept, and he laughed and held me, and promised to buy me another painting, as if I were a child to be teased, tempted and cajoled. But I was not my father’s child for nothing. I knew that just as a new kitten cannot replace a familiar old tomcat, inasmuch as mere charm and prettiness, instant purrings and rubbings, fall short in the balance against the weight and resonance of a tough shared experience, so a new work of art can never replace one carelessly destroyed. I also knew in my heart that the glass painting hardly counted as art, merely as the curious and decorative; but I would not let Timothy know I knew. A tragedy had occurred. There was to be no consolation.

‘“It is a bad omen,” I wept. “The glass is shattered: your lies shattered it. Now you and I will have seven years’ bad luck.”

‘“Gabriella,” he pleaded, “be reasonable. You lost your temper and threw a glass at the painting, so it cracked. That’s all.”

‘“You are very clear when it comes to describing my actions,” I said, “but very obscure when it comes to your own. Well, you are a diplomat. I suppose it is only to be expected. Go home to your wife and practise your diplomatic skills on her. Lie as much as you like to her, but I’ll have none of it, or you, for seven years.”

‘“Darling,” he said, “seven years is for mirrors. This is only a piece of painted glass.” But he was quite pale. He knew what was coming.

‘“Five years, then,” I said.

‘“Two,” he pleaded, and I settled for three.

‘I am a woman of my word. I did not see Timothy Tovey again for three whole years. I would not. I unplugged the telephone and shut my ears against the ringing of the doorbell. Presently I went to Corfu, and lived with Stavros until the three years were up. Timothy Tovey always referred to Stavros as “your Greek waiter” in the same tone of voice in which I would refer to Janice as “your poor wife”. In fact Stavros owned shipping lines and vineyards. Timothy was right in one sense: he was no gentleman—but that’s another story, as a result of which few rules can be formulated, except that the best way of washing linen sheets is in running mountain water. Even though water gushed plentiful and hot-and-cold from gold taps in all of Stavros’s many establishments, I always had the maids go up the hillsides and do the washing in the traditional way, and the drying likewise. Our bed was scented with thyme and honey. Stavros loved it. Alas, I did not love Stavros. And living with a man who loves you when you do not love him is ageing. Of all things, boredom is the most ageing. But enough on the subject of Stavros. Hairs grew out of his ears, strong and coarse.

‘Now of course I had always known perfectly well that Timothy and Janice would make love from time to time. How could they not? How could the erotic energy generated by Timothy and myself, on top of or beneath the gold-on-black-on-white lace counterpane, not spill over into other beds? I would have been insulted had it not. In a feebly-sexed marriage the cuckolded husband is jealous of the lover, the deceived wife made unhappy by the mistress, because, poor wedded things, they receive only what is left over. If the marriage is strongly sexed lovers and mistresses must grind their teeth with envy, knowing they exist only to sop up the overflow. That is a further truth. Another is that monogamy, amongst interesting and lively people, is rare. Or, conversely, that only those who lack energy, or courage, are faithful. No, I took offence because it suited me to do so, because the routine of our life had become too steady for the preservation and maintenance of romantic love, and, quite instinctively, I knew the time had come to upset it. In my absence, deprived of cream-filled chocolates, Timothy Tovey became quite slim. Janice’s diet plan for her husband suddenly began to work. I daresay she wondered why.’

At this point Miss Sumpter’s voice failed again. I beg readers to remember that she saw life from the balcony of a St John’s Wood villa, and that in spite of what the pinner priests may say, to be dead is not necessarily to be wise. The voice from the grave may mislead. My own wife is a very fine, brave and interesting woman, and I am convinced the very model of sexual propriety. She is a botanist, and would be ashamed to live as Gabriella Sumpter lived. Miss Sumpter, it seems, never had anything so vulgar or demanding as a
job
in her entire life.

When Miss Sumpter’s voice resumed she was giving instructions as to the removal of scorch stains from white linen. Take ½ pint of vinegar’, she said, ‘2 oz. Fuller’s earth, 1 oz. of dried fowl dung, ½ oz. of soap and the juice of two large onions. Boil all together to the consistency of paste: spread the composition thickly over the damaged part, and if the threads are not too far gone, or actually consumed by fire, every trace of scorching will disappear after the article has been washed once or twice’. Miss Sumpter says she had Frieda Martock use this method on the tablecloths from the linen cupboard which were badly scorched by the fire at Covert House, and very successful it had been. The fire she referred to was, presumably, the one started by her would-be seducer, Walter James, in which her father, Sir William Lacey-Sumpter, died. The greater part of Covert House, the family home, had not only been totally destroyed but was totally uninsured. One staircase remained, untouched by the flames, and the linen cupboards tucked under it survived, by one of those quirks of happenstance which so often attend disasters. The recipe for the removal of scorch marks came from Miss Sumpter’s grandmother’s work-book, which happened to be at the Town Museum, for restoration, at the time of the fire. The pinner priests say that one of the phenomena of this kind of replay is what they call the ‘trauma splurge effect’—the subplot, as it were, spilling back during replay into the major scenarios of life. But I am not sure that what we have here is a case of trauma splurge. I suspect Miss Sumpter of regarding the loss of a tablecloth and the loss of a father as fairly equal tragedies. Thank the GSWITS that my wife, Honor, pays little attention to what she puts over her head in the morning in the way of clothes, or the way the curtains hang; just so long as everything is neat and clean, that’s enough for her.

‘Walter James,’ Miss Sumpter goes on, presently, ‘said he wanted to marry me, and I, being only sixteen and knowing little about either life or love, believed him. He was a dark young man with glowing eyes and a haunted expression—the Byronic type, in fact, which experience was to teach me to dislike and distrust. But a young girl all too easily mistakes neurosis for sensitivity, stupidity for courage, duplicity for subtlety and simple insanity for ardour. “He is after the house as much as you,” my father warned me. “He is after your inheritance; after the Rembrandts and the Renoirs: their value will increase with age, as yours will diminish. He is a young man who thinks a lot about money.” But quite how much neither of us realised!

‘I disliked my father for saying this, naturally, and paid little attention to him, because I loved the way that Walter James pressed his full lips on my soft mouth, and delicately inserted his tongue between my virgin teeth, as a promise of so much, so much more to come, if only I would. … His male hand upon my female breast! I had always known, from the moment of their first springing, that this, and not the messy, animal drippings of lactation, was their point and purpose. Breasts spoil the hang of a dress quite dreadfully: there must, I had always supposed, be some great recompense in store to make up for it, and now, with Walter James’s long, brown fingers laid across their rising whiteness, I knew what it was. My father’s voice no longer sounded clear and firm but blurred and indistinct, the mere monkey-chattering of a distant generation.

‘I had no mother to advise me as to whether Walter James was or was not sincere in his protestations of love. I must tell you about my mother’s death. I was eight. Emerald and I were together on the lawns of Covert House. It was late summer: the sun cast long shadows. I was sitting on a practical twill-covered cushion, wearing a finely woven cotton dress smocked over the bodice with yellow thread and with a yellow sash, drinking squeezed orange juice from a fluted glass. (To remove fruit spots, first cold-soap the article, then touch the spot with a paintbrush dipped in chlorite of soda, and dip instantly into cold water, to prevent injury to the fabric.) My mother was sitting in a pretty white-painted Coalbrookdale wrought iron chair. She sipped champagne. She wore a green dress, and her pretty arms were bare and very white. Her face was shaded, against even the late sun, with a straw hat. She knew how bad a strong light is for the complexion. It is always unwise to drink champagne out-of-doors—wasps love it so—and perhaps it was because of the brim of the hat that she did not see the insect struggling in the liquid, and sipped. The wasp stung her throat, and she was dead, poor, pretty, inconsequential thing, within minutes.

‘Seeing her struggle for life, I went running indoors to fetch my father, who I knew was in the house, and found him in his dressing room, naked, on the bed, half hidden by the red velvet cover, half not, with someone I thought for one terrible moment was Nanny McGorrah, but proved to be only Sue Sansippy, my rather elegant governess. My father disengaged himself at once and pulled on his clothes in a great hurry, but by the time he reached my mother she was dead. Sue Sansippy left our employ soon afterwards: my father required her to go. In his mind, I think, he held her responsible for my mother’s death—though how, reasonably, could either he or she be to blame for the wasp sting? Except, I suppose, had my mother been beneath my father and not Sue Sansippy, she would not have been sipping champagne out-of-doors, in the late summer sun when the wasps are sleepy.

‘I spilt my orange drink in my agitation: Nanny McGorrah later tried to remove the stains with calcium hypo-chlorite but left the paste on too long and the fabric went into holes. I was very annoyed, for it was my favourite dress, and told my father it was time the woman went back to the peat-bogs where she belonged—she was ignorant and a barbarian. My father dismissed her at my insistence. I think he gave her a good reference: I hope so. She was messy and incompetent, but had a good heart. I cried over Nanny McGorrah’s departure, although I had caused it, as I failed to cry at my mother’s funeral. Some tears were owed the God, it seemed: he claimed them one way or another. And I daresay that I, as my father did when he sent away Sue Sansippy, was sacrificing what I loved best, to abate somehow the pain of my mother’s death; to right the balance. Nanny McGorrah wrote me letters every now and then, for years afterwards. They were full of love and concern, thinly written on cheap lined paper. I never wrote back. What was there to say?

‘Nanny McGorrah, incidentally, was not part of the joyous throng, the heavenly troupe of friends who joined with me in my transit from life to death. I imagine she is at some lower, less blissful level of existence—for I can imagine nothing more blissful than this! Perhaps she is blotted out altogether? Yet Nanny McGorrah was a good woman: it was not her fault that her belly hung over her white drawers. It seems it is not the wicked who are punished, merely the dull and the ugly. That is another of the rules.’

Sometimes I think Miss Sumpter says these things simply to annoy me; or, more rationally, that the pinner priests misrecorded her on purpose. They are famous for their cynicism. They refuse to acknowledge or admire that human aspiration to incorporate and control the baser instincts which separates us from the beasts. I try but I cannot in the end believe it is merely
luck
that dooms us to be this member or that of the Universal Cast. Free-will must play some part: must refine our lines, our actions and our reactions. The GNFR, we are told, is the religion of acceptance and self-understanding: its credo is that we must strive to comprehend the sub-text of our lives while delivering the text with gusto and without doubt, and that is all very well. But to accept Miss Sumpter’s claim that the likes of Nanny McGorrah simply wink out; that, as the script of eternal life pours from the cosmic Word Processor, some vindictive search-and-recall mechanism dictates that her name simply vanishes from all ensuing copies—no, I won’t have it.

Or it may be my fault? The re-wind is already degenerating, and my fingers may not play over the console with sufficient dexterity to obtain accurate results. Perhaps in some way my own personality plays into the text? I may be a more cynical person than I suppose. Nothing, they say, can ever truly be known. An atom perceived is very different from an atom unperceived!

Miss Sumpter, fortunately, now forgets about the vexed question of Nanny McGorrah’s survival in the next life and goes on to relate the events which led up to the fire.

‘My father,’ she says, ‘was right in suspecting Walter James’s motives, but wrong in attributing them to greed. What he wanted, in the end, was not money, not me, but revenge upon my father. There was of course no inheritance in existence; my father deluded himself in thinking there was. This was how it happened. Papa had employed young Mr James, a philosophy student from Edinburgh University, to re-arrange his library. There was no money to pay his wages, but Papa did not see fit to mention this at the interview. The world had moved on, since the war, in a way my father could neither countenance nor accept. Tailors now required gentlemen to settle their bills, tradesmen would have the temerity to come knocking at the front door for their money; banks would require stock and even land to be sold to pay off overdrafts. Covert Hall, which once stood proudly at the centre of two hundred and fifty acres, now stood out of all proportion in the merest garden. The house was mortgaged, the horses were gone: as were the Renoirs and Rembrandts Papa spoke of—though naturally he regarded their absence as temporary.