his own because he enjoyed it, because his wife was a home bird.
Why could he not have told her? Why could he not have exchanged one story for another? She had made a mess of things and did not seek to hide it. Life had let her down, she’d let herself down. Ridiculously, she gave elocution lessons to Indian women and did not see it as ridiculous. She had told him her secret, and he knew it was true that he shared it only with her mother and herself.
The hours went by. He should be lying with her in this bed, the size of a dance-floor. In the dawn he should be staring into her sumptuous eyes, in love with the mystery there. He should be telling her and asking for her sympathy, as she had asked for his. He should be telling her that he had walked into a room, not in a Home Counties village, but in harsh, ugly Hampstead, to find his second wife, as once he had found his first, in his bed with another man. He should in humility have asked her why it was that he was naturally a cuckold, why two women of different temperaments and characters had been inspired to have lovers at his expense. He should be telling her, with the warmth of her body warming his, that his second wife had confessed to greater sexual pleasure when she remembered that she was deceiving him.
It was a story no better than hers, certainly as unpleasant. Yet he hadn’t had the courage to tell it because it cast him in a certain light. He travelled easily, moving over surfaces and revealing only surfaces himself. He was acceptable as a stranger: in two marriages he had not been forgiven for turning out to be different from what he seemed. To be a cuckold once was the luck of the game, but his double cuckoldry had a whiff of revenge about it. In all humility he might have asked her about that.
At half past four he stood by the window, looking out at the empty street below. She would be on her way to the bus station, to catch the five o’clock bus to Teheran. He could dress, he could even shave and still be there in time. He could pay, on her behalf, the extra air fare that would accrue. He could tell her his story and they could spend a few days. They could go together to Shiraz, city of wine and roses and nightingales.
He stood by the window, watching nothing happening in the street, knowing that if he stood there for ever he wouldn’t find the courage. She had met a sympathetic man, more marvellous to her than all the marvels of Isfahan. She would carry that memory to the bungalow in Bombay, knowing nothing about a pettiness which brought out cruelty in people. And he would remember a woman who possessed, deep beneath her unprepossessing surface, the distinction that her eyes mysteriously claimed for her. In different circumstances, with a less unfortunate story to tell, it would have emerged. But in the early morning there was another truth, too. He was the stuff of fantasy. She had quality, he had none.
The game was played when the party, whichever party it happened to be, had thinned out. Those who stayed on beyond a certain point – beyond, usually, about one o’clock – knew that the game was on the cards and in fact had stayed for that reason. Often, as one o’clock approached, there were marital disagreements about whether or not to go home.
The game of swapping wives and husbands, with chance rather than choice dictating the formations, had been practised in this outer suburb since the mid-s. The swinging wives and husbands of that time were now passing into the first years of elderliness, but their party game continued. In the outer suburb it was most popular when the early struggles of marriage were over, after children had been born and were established at school, when there were signs of marital wilting that gin and tonic did not cure.
‘I think it’s awfully silly,’ Polly Dillard pronounced, addressing her husband on the evening of the Ryders’ party.
Her husband, whose first name was Gavin, pointed out that they’d known for years that the practice was prevalent at Saturday-night parties in the outer suburb. There’d been, he reminded her, the moment at the Meacocks’ when they’d realized they’d stayed too late, when the remaining men threw their car-keys on to the Meacocks’ carpet and Sylvia Meacock began to tie scarves over the eyes of the wives.
‘I mean, it’s silly Sue and Malcolm going in for it. All of a sudden, out of the blue like that.’
‘They’re just shuffling along with it, I suppose.’
Polly shook her head. Quietly, she said that in the past Sue and Malcolm Ryder hadn’t been the kind to shuffle along with things. Sue had sounded like a silly schoolgirl, embarrassed and not looking her in the eye when she told her.
Gavin could see she was upset, but one of the things about Polly since she’d had their two children and had come to live in the outer suburb was that she was able to deal with being upset. She dealt with it now, keeping calm, not raising her voice. She’d have been the same when Sue Ryder averted her eyes and said that she and Malcolm had decided to go in, too, for the outer suburb’s most popular party game. Polly would have been astonished and would have said so, and then she’d have attempted to become reconciled to the development. Before this evening came to an end she really would be reconciled, philosophically accepting the development as part of the Ryders’ middle age, while denying that it could ever be part of hers.
‘I suppose,’ Gavin said, ‘it’s like a schoolgirl deciding to let herself be kissed for the first time. Don’t you remember sounding silly then, Polly?’
She said it wasn’t at all like that. Imagine, she suggested, finding yourself teamed up with a sweaty creature like Tim Gruffydd. Imagine any school-girl in her senses letting Tim Gruffydd within two million miles of her. She still couldn’t believe that Sue and Malcolm Ryder were going in for stuff like that. What on earth happened to people? she asked Gavin, and Gavin said he didn’t know.
Polly Dillard was thirty-six, her husband two years older. Her short fair hair had streaks of grey in it now. Her thin, rather long face wasn’t pretty but did occasionally seem beautiful, the eyes deep blue, the mouth wide, becoming slanted when she smiled. She herself considered that nothing matched properly in her face and that her body was too lanky and her breasts too slight. But after thirty-six years she’d become used to all that, and other women envied her her figure and her looks.
On the evening of the Ryders’ party she surveyed the features that did not in her opinion match, applying eye-shadow in her bedroom looking-glass and now and again glancing at the reflection of her husband, who was changing from his Saturday clothes into clothes more suitable for Saturday night at the Ryders’: a blue corduroy suit, pink shirt and pinkish tie. Of medium height, fattening on lunches and alcohol, he was dark-haired and still handsome, for his chunky features were only just beginning to trail signs of this telltale plumpness. By profession Gavin Dillard was a director of promotional films for television, mainly in the soap and detergent field.
The hall doorbell rang as Polly rose from the chair in front of her looking-glass.
‘I’ll go,’ he said, adding that it would be Estrella, their babysitter.
‘Estrella couldn’t come, I had to ring Problem. Some Irish-sounding girl it’ll be.’
‘Hannah McCarthy,’ a round-faced girl at the door said. ‘Are you Mr Dillard, sir?’
