A Circle of Friends Page 15

  That term I started to think. It’s funny how it happens quite suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, almost. I’d never thought about anything at all properly before. I was interested in knowing things and finding out what they were all about, and whether what people said was true or not. When it came to the Cambridge exams at Christmas, I found them perfectly all right, really. I got in, anyway.

  I don’t know what started it. Perhaps it was Lucy on the swing-seat, though I doubt it. Perhaps it was all the lonely riding I did that September. Perhaps it had been creeping up on me for ages, and the shock of the divorce made me realise it at last. I don’t know. I do know I thought Mom and Pop were being pretty frivolous about the divorce, the more I heard about what was generally going on. That was part of beginning to think properly. It was odd the way I suddenly could. Mom said it was Martin, but I honestly don’t think he had anything to do with it at all.

  Some of the evidence given by members of the staff at Charncot regarding association seemed altogether negligible. There were however some matters which deserved more serious consideration.

  POEMS

  His Lordship referred to certain poems written by the co-respondent, the meaning of which had, he acknowledged, at first escaped him. But he was persuaded by the expert literary evidence called by the husband that these apparently mystifying documents were in fact passionate love-letters of a most unusual kind. It had never previously come to His Lordship’s attention that common garden flowers could be so passionately pressed into poetry. He had heard of flowers being pressed between pages, but never actually into them. In this case there was no doubt that the sexual references in the poems implied frequent adultery between the wife and the co-respondent, though this was denied by both. The co-respondent did not, however, deny writing the poems, and he admitted that they could be interpreted as the literary experts had interpreted them. But he claimed that the wife was quite ignorant of these meanings, and that the events described in the verses were entirely fictitious.

  Henrietta was furious—I guess she still is—because I didn’t come in through the front door and up the stairs. She thought I deliberately sneaked up on her, to catch her out. But that’s just not true. I used the lift because the damned thing was there and I was loaded down with baggage. Did she think I’d arrive without a suitcase? We always came in the back way when we had baggage, because it was easier to get to the lift that way. There was nothing sinister about it. Jesus, did she imagine I’d know she’d be screwing with him at three o’clock in the afternoon the day I was going to show up? She never screwed with me at three in the afternoon. Oh no. If I ever suggested it, she said something corny like, ‘Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time?’ Not that she didn’t like it, but she hated to get undressed in the afternoon. She thought it was immoral even to sleep after lunch. She thought it was something only old Englishmen did in their clubs. I told her people all over the world took a nap after lunch, but it didn’t make any difference.

  That’s one of five hundred reasons why I couldn’t believe my eyes when I walked in there. I mean, you just never expect to see another man kissing your wife in her bedroom—your goddam bedroom—with or without his pants on. I was dazed for a minute. I didn’t know whether I was maybe still asleep on the plane or whether I was really seeing it. They were absolutely still, and believe me, so was I. I just couldn’t tell where I was. You get like that after flying the Atlantic. You don’t get your sensations properly adjusted for a while. Your time scheme is all shot to hell and your stomach doesn’t know what’s going on, and you’re sleepy when you should be awake, and even your sense of smell and taste will let you down. But I’d never had my eyes play me a trick like that before. And of course it wasn’t a trick, that was the hell of it, it was life that was playing the trick, if anything. Afterwards I used to wonder if they weren’t maybe telling the truth about that afternoon, because it was plain stupid them doing it in front of the window like that, and not even locking the door. And then I remembered a few indiscretions of my own and how you don’t care about things like that—you get a kick out of doing something stupid and dangerous. You don’t bolt the door and you do stand half-naked in front of the window, kissing each other, and you don’t give a damn who sees you. It’s a sort of recklessness. It doesn’t last. Not into marriage.

  And were they being reckless! I suppose we just stared at each other for a minute—it seemed much longer, like an hour or more. And then she said, ‘Oh, hello. How nice.’

  He just stood there looking at me. I dropped the case I was carrying and took a step towards them. At least I tried to. But the damnedest thing had happened—I couldn’t move. I was paralysed, literally, with the shock. I just stood there, paralysed. I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t move, all I could do was look.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said. It was crazy, she sounded really concerned, as though she had no idea what could be bothering me. I guess I must have looked bad. He knew what the matter was, though. He was looking at me, but his hands were twisting the tail of his shirt about in front of his underpants. She started coming towards me, looking worried, genuinely worried. I still couldn’t move. It was the damnedest thing. I could see and hear—I could receive all right, I just couldn’t transmit. I was stuck there. She came right on over to me and now she looked scared.

  ‘What’s the matter, Freddy?’ she said. ‘Martin, look at him, is he all right?’

  Martin was trying to shuffle himself into his pants. They had big slippers on the knees—they were something to do with Lawrence’s play. They made him look even more like someone out of a dream. He was pushing his foot down again and again trying to push it through the trouser-leg, but it was twisted or something and he couldn’t get it straight. Those crazy shoes kept bobbing up and down. He looked a nightmare, too.

  ‘Freddy, what is the matter?’ she said.

  I looked at her. I just looked. She was white. She thought I was having a heart-attack or something. That’s what she said, later. I felt fine, I just couldn’t move, that was all. She took me by the arm and tried to pull me over towards the bed to sit down. But I couldn’t seem to go with her.

  Martin, do for heaven’s sake try to help,’ she said.

  He’d got both feet into his pants now, and was buttoning them up fast, getting the buttons all in the wrong order and having to start all over again. I felt so strange, watching him. I thought, Give me American pants any day, give me zip-fasteners. He came towards me, still buttoning.

  ‘What’s the matter with him,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shook me, really quite hard. I felt my head wobble on my shoulders like a jelly.

  ‘Perhaps you should slap his face,’ said Martin.

  I remember thinking, Thanks.

  She looked doubtful. ‘Freddy, can you hear me?’

  I could hear her all right. And then I began to feel this enormous laugh beginning inside me. It started way down in my gut some place, way down near the pelvis, and it started sweeping up and up, and then it engulfed me, and I shook and shook, laughing in their faces.

  ‘Slap him,’ said Martin.

  Henrietta slapped me, not too hard. It just made me laugh still more. And now I could feel a second wave beginning, not laughter this time, a black wave, I could taste it, of rage and hatred and bile, and as I went under it I heard myself begin to shout. When I came out again I was still shouting and Martin had gone. So I shouted at her, and she began to see that I was all right again, and mad, not English mad, American mad, hopping mad, bloody annoyed as they say in England. And then we had it out for ten punchy minutes, and she said I was out of my head (English mad) and I said this was the end, which it was. And then I calmed down as quick as I’d started. I knew I meant it, that we were all washed up for ever, finished, kaput. It was like a bucket of water over my head, and I could begin to see where I was going and I was going right back to Sally in New York City, and I was going to stay there. And I blessed Henrietta�
�s unspeakable mother for having had that accident and her poor old poop of a father for having installed that creepy elevator. Because I’d never have caught them, otherwise, never. They might have laid it on for my benefit. They even left those goddam poems of Martin’s right there beside the bed.

  People who knew us both pretty well before ask me sometimes why I didn’t get an American divorce—six weeks in Reno or less in Alabama. Well, I didn’t for a number of reasons. First, I don’t care for Reno, I hate Nevada, I loathe gambling joints. The same applies to Alabama—I don’t care for my fellow-citizens down South. I can’t understand half of what the Negroes are saying, and since they’re the only people I want to talk to down there, I don’t get any conversation. And then I don’t approve of easy, quiet divorce. If someone’s been playing around, it should all come out. That’s an important part of the legal system—justice should be seen to be done. It’s part of your punishment that everyone should know what a dirty little bitch you are, if the judge chooses to use those words. He didn’t say that to Henrietta, though he had the chance. I guess people in England are pretty careful not to offend judges, knowing the sort of stuff they can come out with. It’s a pity they have this law over there that you can’t publish the evidence in a divorce case, only the judge’s summing up. I wish I’d been able to broadcast my evidence to the whole damned world.

  I hated Henrietta, that’s why I brought the case against her in England. England was where we were married, so that’s where they could dissolve us, too. I wanted her to see what her English law and her English justice were like. I was through with England, I hated it. And Henrietta was English and so I hated her. Or maybe it was the other way around. It all came clear to me later. For nineteen years I’d been trailing round as ‘that rich Englishwoman’s husband’, and I’d not even realised it. I wasn’t good enough for her parents to start with—even though I was over there protecting their stinking country from Hitler and Goebbels. No matter who you were and what you were doing, you could never be good enough for the Brookes. And even though she kidded herself about it, I guess Henrietta never thought I was good enough for her, either. Not after the war, not after we’d got two kids and were living in New York and I wasn’t such a big success (whoever was a success who mattered who made it before he was forty?) and all the time she longed to be back in that damp great house where I finally caught her with her lover. She hated America, it wasn’t good enough for her. It wasn’t only me, it was the whole damned country. She wouldn’t send Lawrence to a decent democratic school—oh no, he had to go to some stuck-up place for breeding British class-distinctions and prejudice. American schools would do for Anne, because girls don’t matter so much, but for her boy it had to be British was best. I hated her for that. I’d been hating her for so much, it had been building up in me for so long, I was choking with it.

  I don’t hate her any more. I got rid of my hatred, exposing her there in the papers. Because they certainly went to town. I didn’t give a damn about exposing myself—I was used to it, I was in the theatre. But she hated that, it really hurt her. It was another reason why our marriage was really doomed from the start. She thought the theatre was vulgar, because you have to expose yourself there, for better or worse. ‘Common’ was the word her mother used. She said it, the mother: ‘Only very common people go on the stage in England.’ She said that to me. And Henrietta got more and more like her mother as time went on. To me she did. Other people couldn’t tell, but I saw it. Most people thought Henrietta was just great and witty and amusing and wonderful. But I knew. She despised me because I was in a business where we weren’t ashamed of all the publicity we could get. So I gave her some publicity so she would really know what she was missing. She wouldn’t forget it. And nor would anyone else.

  And the other thing that made me mad was that she wouldn’t admit it. She wouldn’t say she’d been screwing with Martin. She just went on saying, No, she knew it looked bad, but it wasn’t true. I even said I’d divorce her in Reno if she’d only admit it. But she wouldn’t. And that was why I brought the case in England. I wanted to prove it under every tilted British nose. And I did.

  The co-respondent fully admitted that he was in love with the wife, but claimed that the wife was not in love with him. Yet both he and the wife had produced a thoroughly improbable explanation for the scene which the husband had discovered. The fact of the co-respondent’s embracing of the wife in the wife’s bedroom, where the poems were found, and the fact of the co-respondent’s being only partially dressed could not be credibly explained by the need for the co-respondent’s trousers to be altered for the dramatic representation which was to take place the following day.

  When the children had gone back to school and Freddy had made it clear that he was in earnest, I met Martin in London. He seemed oddly pleased about the whole business. We had a couple of drinks in an almost gay mood, laughing at the lawyers’ language and the absurdity of everything.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. But the lawyers say Freddy probably means it. They were rather shocked at the idea that anyone might go this far just for laughs.’

  ‘So would I be,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t take it seriously at first. I thought he was just—I don’t know.’

  Martin looked uncomfortable, then he said, ‘Since he is serious, at least you know what you can do and what you can’t.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well—maybe it’ll work out to your advantage now. All you have to do is to let the case go by default. You just don’t defend it. And then you’re free to do whatever you want, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t think I know what I want.’

  ‘I’ve been asking a friend of mine who’s a lawyer about it,’ he said. ‘The whole thing only lasts about fifteen minutes. Freddy gets his divorce, you and I pay the costs, and you’re free to marry Adam. You can marry Freddy again, if you want to. It happens all the time.’

  ‘It’s so unfair on you,’ I said. ‘I see that it obviously is hopeless about Freddy and me. He wants to marry Sally. Our thing is over, completely. But it does so happen that it’s not true that you and I were “committing adultery” when Freddy walked in, and I don’t see why you should suffer, even if it won’t make much difference to me.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he just go to Alabama?’

  ‘God knows. To create more scandal, I suppose. Here, that is But I don’t see why you should be dragged into it.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Martin. He seemed quite excited at the prospect. ‘Let it go. It won’t hurt me at all. Nobody knows who I am, anyway, and it’s better for you that it should be someone most of your friends in England have never heard of.’

  ‘You talk as though all these things are free. It can be quite expensive, even if you don’t defend the case.’

  ‘I shall apply for legal aid. I daresay I shall need it.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll pay,’ I said. ‘Of course I shall. It wouldn’t be right, otherwise.’

  ‘Funny word, “right”,’ he said. Then he said, ‘There’s much less scandal attached to an undefended case, you know.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘It’ll be much better for the children. It’ll be bad enough as it is. I’m sorry Lawrence and I won’t be able to renew our tutor-pupil relationship. He’s an awfully nice boy, really.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ I said.

  ‘Of course.’ And he grinned happily.

  I couldn’t understand why he was so pleased about everything. Of course he thought he was in love with me—I’d known that long before he actually got around to saying so. I couldn’t understand why he took so long, as a matter of fact. I mean, we were all perfectly civilised, and I was much too old for him, but that wouldn’t and didn’t stop us being even closer friends than we were. I wouldn’t have dreamed of going to bed with him—that was one of the ironies of the whole situation: it would have been like going
to bed with Lawrence almost. And he wasn’t really in love with me at all—I don’t believe in hopeless passions, not after the first fortnight. He’d simply talked himself into believing it. He was terribly timid. I think I was probably the first woman who was ever even nice to him.

  ‘Why are you grinning?’ I said.

  ‘Because you’ll be free.’

  ‘I don’t in the least want to be free,’ I said. Perhaps Martin was going to propose to me the day the decree was made absolute, I thought. There was quite a little Puritan lurking in him. ‘How’s your mother?’ I said.

  ‘She’s all right. I haven’t told them about it yet. I don’t think I shall tell them. There’s no reason to, is there? The case won’t make the papers.’

  ‘It might. Freddy’s a personality of a sort.’

  ‘Well, if they find out, they find out, that’s all. Perhaps they’ll think it’s someone with the same name. There must be a lot of Martin Bannisters around.’

  ‘I think they print the addresses as well.’