instead I have parted us perhaps for ever, and I await with dread, with impotent panic, with the most awful helplessness I have ever known, the coming trial.
By setting down the facts — and the irony, the awful irony that runs through them like a sharp glittering thread — I may come to see things more clearly. I may find some way to convince those inexorable powers that be of how it really was; to make Defending Counsel believe me and not raise his eyebrows and shake his head; to ensure, at any rate, that if Laura and I must be separated she will know as she sees me taken from the court to my long imprisonment, that the truth is known and justice done.
Alone here with nothing else to do, with nothing to wait for but that trial, I could write reams about the character, the appearance, the neuroses, of Brenda Goring. I could write the great hate novel of all time. In this context, though, much of it would be irrelevant, and I shall be as brief as I can.
Some character in Shakespeare says of a woman, “Would I had never seen her!” And the reply is: “Then you would have left unseen a very wonderful piece of work.” Well, would indeed I had never seen Brenda. As for her being a wonderful piece of work, I suppose I would agree with that too. Once she had had a husband. To be rid of her for ever, no doubt, he paid her enormous alimony and had settled on her a lump sum with which she bought the cottage up the lane from our house. On our village she made the impact one would expect of such a newcomer. Wonderful she was, an amazing refreshment to all those retired couples and cautious weekenders, with her clothes, her long blond hair, her sports car, her talents, and her jet-set past. For a while, that is. Until she got too much for them to take.
From the first she fastened on to Laura. Understandable in a way, since my wife was the only woman in the locality who was of comparable age, who lived there all the time and who had no job. But surely — or so I thought at first — she would never have singled out Laura if she had had a wider choice. To me my wife is lovely, all I could ever want, the only woman I have ever really cared for, but I know that to others she appears shy, colorless, a simple and quiet little housewife. What, then, had she to offer to that extrovert, that bright bejeweled butterfly? She gave me the beginning of the answer herself.
“Haven’t you noticed the way people are starting to shun her darling? The Goldsmiths didn’t ask her to their party last week and Mary Williamson refuses to have her on the fete committee.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” I said. “The way she talks and the things she talks about.”
“You mean her love affairs and all that sort of thing? But, darling, she’s lived in the sort of society where that’s quite normal. It’s natural for her to talk like that, it’s just that she’s open and honest.”
“She’s not living in that sort of society now,” I said, “and she’ll have to adapt if she wants to be accepted. Did you notice Isabel Goldsmith’s face when Brenda told that story about going off for a weekend with some chap she’d picked up in a bar? I tried to stop her going on about all the men her husband named in his divorce action, but I couldn’t. And then she’s always saying, ‘When I was living with so-and-so’ and ‘That was the time of my affair with what’s-his-name.’ Elderly people find that a bit up-setting, you know.”
“Well, we’re not elderly,” said Laura, “and I hope we can be a bit more broad-minded. You do like her, don’t you?”
I was always very gentle with my wife. The daughter of clever domineering parents who belittled her, she grew up with an inerad-icable sense of her own inferiority. She is a born victim, an inviter of bullying, and therefore I have tried never to bully her, never even to cross her. So all I said was that Brenda was all right and that I was glad, since I was out all day, that she had found a friend and companion of her own age.
And if Brenda had befriended and companioned her only during the day, I daresay I shouldn’t have objected. I should have got used to the knowledge that Laura was listening, day in and day out, to stories of a world she had never known, to hearing illicit sex and duplicity glorified, and I should have been safe in the conviction that she was incorruptible. But I had to put up with Brenda myself in the evenings when I got home from my long commuting. There she would be, lounging on our sofa, in her silk trousers or long skirt and high boots, chain-smoking. Or she would arrive with a bottle of wine just as we had sat down to dinner and involve us in one of those favorite debates of hers on the lines of “Is marriage a dying institution?” or “Are parents necessary?” And to illustrate some specious point of hers she would come out with some personal experience of the kind that had so upset our elderly friends.
Of course I was not obliged to stay with them. Ours is quite a big house, and I could go off into the dining room or the room Laura called my study. But all I wanted was what I had once had, to be alone in the evenings with my wife. And it was even worse when we were summoned to coffee or drinks with Brenda, there in her lavishly furnished, over-ornate cottage to be shown the latest thing she had made — she was always embroidering and weaving and potting and messing about with watercolors — and shown too the gifts she had received at some time or another from Mark and Larry and Paul and all the dozens of other men there had been in her life. When I refused to go Laura would become nervous and depressed, then pathetically elated if, after a couple of blissful Brenda-less evenings, I suggested for the sake of pleasing her that I supposed we might as well drop in on old Brenda.
What sustained me was the certainty that sooner or later any woman so apparently popular with the opposite sex would find herself a boyfriend and have less or no time for my wife. I couldn’t understand why this hadn’t happened already and I said so to Laura.
“She does see her men friends when she goes up to London,” said my wife.
“She never has any of them down here,” I said, and that evening when Brenda was treating us to a highly colored account of some painter she knew called Laszlo who was terribly attractive and who adored her, I said I’d like to meet him and why didn’t she invite him down for the weekend?
Brenda flashed her long green-painted fingernails about and gave Laura a conspiratorial woman-to-woman look. “And what would all the old fuddy-duddies have to say about that, I wonder?”
“Surely you can rise above all that sort of thing, Brenda,” I said.
“Of course I can. Give them something to talk about. I’m quite well aware it’s only sour grapes. I’d have Laszlo here like a shot, only he wouldn’t come. He hates the country, he’d be bored stiff.”
Apparently Richard and Jonathan and Stephen also hated the country or would be bored or couldn’t spare the time. It was much better for Brenda to go up and see them in town, and I noticed that after my probing about Laszlo, Brenda seemed to go to London more often and that the tales of her escapades after these visits became more and more sensational. I think I am quite a perceptive man and soon there began to form in my mind an idea so fantastic that for a while I refused to admit it even to myself. But I put it to the test. Instead of just listening to Brenda and throwing in the occasional rather sour rejoinder, I started asking her questions. I took her up on names and dates. “I thought you said you met Mark in America?” I would say, or “But surely you didn’t have that holiday with Richard until after your divorce?” I tied her up in knots without her realizing it, and the idea began to seem not so fantastic after all. The final test came at Christmas.
I had noticed that Brenda was a very different woman when she was alone with me than when Laura was with us. If, for example, Laura was out in the kitchen making coffee or, as sometimes happened at the weekends, Brenda dropped in when Laura was out, she was rather cool and shy with me. Gone then were the flamboyant gestures and the provocative remarks, and Brenda would chat about village matters as mundanely as Isabel Goldsmith. Not quite the behavior one would expect from a self-styled Messalina alone with a young and reasonably personable man. It struck me then that in the days when Brenda had been invited to village parties, and now when she still met neighbors at our parties, she never once attempted a flirtation. Were all the men too old for her to bother with? Was a slim, handsome man of going on fifty too ancient to be considered fair game for a woman who would never see thirty again? Of course they were all married, but so were her Paul and her Stephen, and, if she were to be believed, she had had no compunction about taking them away from their wives.
If she were to be believed. That was the crux of it. Not one of them wanted to spend Christmas with her. No London lover invited her to a party or offered to take her away. She would be with us, of course, for Christmas lunch, for the whole of the day, and at our Boxing Day gathering of friends and relatives. I had hung a bunch of mistletoe in our hall, and on Christmas morning I admitted her to the house myself, Laura being busy in the kitchen.
“Merry Christmas,” I said. “Give us a kiss, Brenda,” and I took her in my arms under that mistletoe and kissed her on the mouth.
She stiffened. I swear a shudder ran through her. She was as awkward, as apprehensive, as repelled as a sheltered twelve-year-old.
And then I knew. Married she may have been — and it was not hard now to guess the cause of her divorce — but she had never had a lover or enjoyed an embrace or even been alone with a man longer than she could help.
