Bowen conducted a brief inner debate on the topic of what he would most like to hand Mrs. Knowles, then sank into a reverie about her, both in isolation and as she affected him. No ailment short of tetanus, he could avouch, would keep her mouth shut. It grieved him that Barbara couldn’t see this. What also gave him cause to mourn was the way his relations with his mother-in-law were so resolutely taking their prescribed place in the comic-postcard aspect of his life’s odyssey. They followed upon, and emphasised the unity of, the lodgings and kippers, the beer-ups, the sex-oriented days on the beach and muffed encounters on sofas that had played so large a part in his bachelorhood. He could just see himself, shrunk to half Barbara’s stature, leering horribly at a globular-bottomed girl on a tandem or, red-nosed and with half-unmoored collar, being hit over the head by Barbara with a rolling-pin. And why was there so much about his mother-in-law in a letter addressed to him?
Well, fair play, the old girl had been ill and Barbara was her daughter, you couldn’t get away from that. No, especially the second half of it. He wondered how seriously the old girl had been ill. Pretty seriously, to be prepared to break up the holiday of a daughter she undoubtedly loved. But if really seriously, why hadn’t she been taken to hospital instead of being, as an earlier letter had described, looked after by the neighbour and the neighbour’s daughter-in-law until Barbara turned up, five days after her first attack? Had it been inadvisable to move her? Or was it just that for spiritual reasons she “couldn’t” go to hospital? Bowen wished he knew more. He did at any rate know that many of Mrs. Knowles’s previous actions had been such as to make him object, but also such as to make him feel guilty for objecting. She was good at devising actions of that kind.
… relief not to have to go back to London yet especially this time of the year, I really think one more cocktail party would have killed me, they’re all exactly the same and so are all the people we seem to meet, I can’t bear their patter, they all talk exactly the same, they’re all so incredibly catty and so dishonest, all trying to impress each other or do each other down the whole time. I do wish you didn’t feel so tied to London the whole time, what a ghastly place it is, everyone leading unnatural lives and all of them perfectly miserable, you can feel it as soon as you arrive in the place, I can tell you I didn’t lose any time getting from the air terminal over to King’s Cross. You know Garnet we really ought to see if we can’t get out of London sometimes for weekends, of course a cottage would be lovely but they cost no end these days, still I’m sure there must be some nice little country pubs where we could put up quite cheap. I might be able to get a little bit of riding in then …
Bowen could stand the idea of Barbara and her riding, since it was his faith that she did it out of a love of horses, not out of a love of being seen or known to frequent their backs, but he wished he could warn her of the appalling attendant dangers. You never knew the sort of people you might meet in connection with horses: auctioneers’ wives, solicitors’ daughters, dentists’ mistresses, on a bad day even—he supposed dimly —aristocrats with titles, all talking horribly about horses and not about horses. And then there was this London thing, put in as if on purpose to bait him. Barbara had complained to him before that everyone there was the same, that she couldn’t tell people apart (he found as little difficulty here as he found in telling female film-stars apart, another rare feat according to the kind of journalism she liked), but this was the first time he remembered her actually attacking the place, and cocktail parties in general as well, come to that. In his experience London was virtually staffed by people who said they didn’t like London and cocktail parties by people who said they didn’t like cocktail parties. He didn’t say that. He liked London. He liked cocktail parties.
… Mummy …
Aaoh! aoh! aooh! How had she managed to get back again? Eh? Perhaps the real reason for his attitude was that he was afraid there might be some truth in the old cow’s conception of his character. Was he really, as she suggested by hints of a subtlety that Proust might have envied, a dipsomaniacal gourmand, a Dickensian workhousemaster in the home, a fang-baring sadist towards his children, an aesthete when it came to doing a decent day’s work and a navvy when he picked up a pen, a priapic fiend in marital relations? That last role was one which, during their visits to Mrs. Knowles, he sometimes seemed to get near playing in Barbara’s eyes. It was probably no more than that Mum had warned her off the old maggot so heartily in the past that even legal stuff appeared reprehensible with Mum just round the corner, getting up as she often did to pad past their room and switch off the landing light or the immersion heater, belting downstairs to let that sod of a
