A Misalliance (13 page)

The behaviour of Patrick in this situation aroused Blanche’s keenest interest but also her most melancholy
memories. Both Patrick and Sally changed in each other’s company, and Blanche’s presence often seemed to her analogous to that of a duenna or a chaperone, giving an air of respectability to what might otherwise have seemed, to curious eyes, to be a
louche
assignation. In Patrick’s company, and inevitably Blanche’s too, Sally once again became the creature of those long-lost parties, sparkling as she never had for Blanche alone, and referring to a number of people whom Patrick seemed to know or at least to know of. Much of this anterior life of hers had been lived in the South of France or in Paris, where she had acquired most of her wardrobe; Patrick revealed a great interest in these regions, although, as far as Blanche knew, he tended to frequent more temperate climates and sterner scenery: Norway, the Grampians, the Hebrides. Sally was worldly, thought Blanche; she asserted her right to fascinate. In Patrick’s presence she acquired whims, opinions, tastes, follies. She also established her claim to certain extravagances, which were always justified. Patrick assented to all this and thus made it seem doubly legitimate. Sally was either very acquisitive or very natural: Blanche could not quite decide which. Talking, as she did, of the past, she became airy, imponderable. Nurture had made her so. Whether, like Mousie, she had been the object of her father’s indulgence, or whether her mysteriously absent husband, with his romantic but slightly moist good looks, had lavished on her the full force of his adoration, Sally had the achieved air of one who has always been within her rights. In this she was more advanced than Mousie but recognizably of the same family.

There was within Sally a kind of readiness for friendship, but for a friendship based essentially on amusement. She was not inclined to, or stimulated by, acts of altruism. Blanche could see that her feeling for Elinor was based on a certain spasmodic camaraderie; and that was why the child, to a limited extent, trusted her. What the child resisted was
precisely her pleasure-loving insubstantiality, her desire to be diverted, her readiness to accept the next invitation, her availability. Blanche saw that as a mother, or as a putative mother, Sally was indeed nymph-like; she would provide a temporary shelter for the little girl and educate her to a sort of viability, but it would be senseless to demand of her further guidance. At the age of seven Elinor would be expected to be self-reliant; at the age of ten she would be given her sexual education; at the age of fifteen or sixteen she would be expected to have left home for good. Her refusal to speak was based on her foreknowledge of this fate.

Thus the whole principle of generation would be undersold, for Sally would never yield her place. Her place was to be young and to be the centre of attention. Mothers like this, as Blanche knew only too well, induce bewilderment, loneliness. For this reason she thought of Mrs Duff, who was childless and who had once been seen by Blanche to have real tears in her eyes when admiring a baby outside the Post Office. Blanche, on her way to the hospital that day, had greeted her neighbour as usual, and then taken her arm in concern. ‘Mrs Duff,’ she had said. ‘Are you all right?’ Mrs Duff, at this abstract and routine kindness, had applied a snowy handkerchief to her eyes. ‘It’s just that I so wanted one of my own,’ she whispered. ‘And now it’s too late.’ Yes, thought Blanche, you would have been a good mother, always concerned, always delighted. The arrangements seemed to her random and slapdash. The cruelty of the world in apportioning children to the wrong mothers plunged her briefly into a kind of mourning, which she modestly added to all the others.

And yet Sally Beamish clearly thought her a fortunate woman, and Patrick too, for all she knew. They saw that she was well provided for and not in need of assistance. She was aware that her reticence in the matter of the complaints
she might have imagined herself entitled to make caused her to seem very dull. She never talked about her husband and was thus judged to be unfeeling. She guarded her memories, which were becoming ever more fragile, and was thus dismissed as uncommunicative. If she figured at all in their vocabulary, she thought, it must be as if she were surrounded by a penumbra of vagueness, and always designated by her money, either by the possession of it (which removed any concern for her) or by her ability to disburse it (which made her tiresome but necessary). Any obduracy in her character would be put down to meanness, whereas it was in fact the sum total of several resolves, some of them of a heroic nature.

And Patrick, who had once thought her precious, or so she supposed, now viewed her with indifference and exhibited an eagerness bordering on fatuity when, seated in the ruined brown Fifties chair, and watching Sally disposing her full length on the
chaise-longue
, he chose to assess her situation by indulging his curiosity about her past. Blanche supposed that he did not meet too many women of Sally’s persuasion, and that her very lack of all the qualities he possessed excited his thoughts, offering him, as it were, an unusual holiday, with implications of luxury that he was simply unable to imagine on his own. Blanche could see that no impropriety had taken place, but she could also see that it was in the air, was indeed the very essence of the confrontation. Sally, with practised nonchalance, with elemental expertise, baited Patrick on his sedentary ordered life; Patrick rose delightedly to her teasing, and very soon, and almost habitually, they were exchanging remarks of so unserious and irrelevant a nature that Blanche gazed out of the window and thought that, were it not for her desire to see Elinor again, she would abandon them both and disappear for ever from this basement.

This had now happened on two separate occasions since Blanche had introduced Patrick to Sally, two evenings spent
listening to the kind of flirtatious remarks that were, on Sally’s part, a reassertion of her own skills, a simple recall of modes of conversation useful in the past, and on Patrick’s, a delighted if cautious acceptance of this, to him, new method of discourse. It was on the third occasion, when a telephone call from Sally, asking her to come round and to contact Patrick at the same time, had prepared her for another wasted evening, that the situation appeared to have changed. Arriving first, in answer to this summons, she had found Sally looking uncharacteristically moody, having reverted to her former clouded indifference, and it occurred to her that something must have happened, that the present must once again have managed to occlude the past, bringing with it its usual freight of boredom and disenchantment. Information was once again vague, and an indifference had settled on the down-drooping features. When Patrick arrived, with, Blanche saw thankfully, a bottle of wine, Sally summoned up the energy to sparkle briefly at him and then lapsed into an unfamiliar thoughtfulness, gazing intently out of the window, and lifting and smoothing the hair on the nape of her neck as Blanche had once seen her doing at the hospital. After a few minutes of this a tension was set up, and Blanche saw that Patrick had no means of dealing with it.

‘Sally,’ she said. ‘Is anything wrong?’

Sally sighed. ‘Paul’s coming home,’ she said. ‘Next week.’

‘But that’s splendid,’ cried Blanche.

‘Is it? Not this time, apparently.’

‘But why not?’ asked Blanche. ‘What is the problem?’

‘The problem is …’ Sally lit another cigarette. ‘The problem is that he hasn’t got any money. The problem
is
’, she took a deep drag on her cigarette, ‘that the charming Mr Demuth won’t pay him.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Blanche. ‘Why not?’

‘Because he says that Paul owes him money.’

It was now Patrick’s turn to say, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, obviously Paul has had to have expenses. He can’t live on nothing. Neither of us can. He may have drawn on Demuth’s account. Nothing wrong with that – he would have paid it back. But Demuth’s now saying that Paul has embezzled money from him. The cheek of it. And apparently they’re all coming over, all three of them, and Demuth is threatening to sue Paul, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

She sighed again, apparently with boredom. There was a silence, as Blanche and Patrick struggled, in their different ways, to accommodate this information. Blanche, to her surprise, was not shocked: she had suspected from the first that something unusual was going on, that a profound irregularity underlay the superficial irregularity of Sally’s life. Patrick appeared to be more shaken, not so much by the evidence of Paul’s crime, if crime it was, as by the effect it was bound to have on Sally.

‘My dear girl,’ he said. ‘My dear girl.’ Then his expression became uneasy as he appeared to wonder how he had become embroiled in this situation and what he might be asked to accomplish if he were to be allowed out of it.

‘I don’t see how either of us can help,’ said Blanche, acknowledging defeat, a defeat which she had not anticipated.

‘Perhaps I could see the letter?’ Patrick’s voice had already become more constrained, more official.

Sally, with small brown fingers looking quite useless for practical purposes, handed him a letter headed ‘Ritz Hotel’, and covered with dashing slanting writing so racy, so urgent, that it was almost illegible. Patrick, who saw with relief that he could hardly decipher it, handed it over thankfully to Blanche. Blanche managed to read one line, ‘… hanging on to your coat, which he says is his by right …’, and then only isolated words, ‘monster’, ‘insult’, ‘my poor angel’. He
signed weakly, but with massive underlinings, ‘your Paul’. She placed the letter carefully on the trolley, said, ‘Excuse me a moment,’ went out into the kitchen, and placed three ten-pound notes under the lid of the teapot. She knew perfectly well that this was a futile and masochistic gesture, her only way of quieting a conscience that refused to be engaged any further. It was clear to her that Paul must have been sending money home, that this money was not his to send, and that his employer had now found him out. There may even have been other extravagances, of which they knew nothing. Sally had said that Paul enjoyed high living, and his romantic looks carried a message of unreliability. But romantic looks so often do, she reproached herself. That is why they are romantic. And a very good case could be made out for Paul. Supposing this Demuth is too suspicious? Supposing Paul was keeping strict accounts, and that they would have reckoned the whole thing up at the end, what was owing and what was not? Supposing Paul is the sort of man who insists on buying luxuries for his wife, despite her protestations? Supposing he was sending her what he thought were his wages? Except that he wasn’t being paid wages; only expenses. And that argues that they were keeping him on a tight rein, that they had reason to watch him.

But where does Mrs Demuth come into all this? Surely a middle-aged woman would plead for a young man with Paul’s looks and apparent charm? Unless … But there must be a limit to the squalor of her imaginings, for the precise form of which, however, there were precedents both classical and Biblical. None of this, she knew, could be elucidated by Sally, who had now reverted to the discontented trailing silences, her rare sentences left unfinished, that she had formerly manifested in Blanche’s presence. Patrick’s smile had faded; his flirtatious proposals were quite in abeyance. Suddenly Blanche was aware that he was a middle-aged man, putting on weight, no longer as eligible in appearance as he
once had been, and, she saw, unequal to this situation. She felt, along with a great weariness, an immense distaste, not for Patrick, not even for Sally, but for herself. She had thought that she could do some good, both to herself and to this little family, and she had done less than was even necessary. She had thought to be of service, as befits the fallen creation, and all the while she had been fascinated, like a spy, by the freedom of those who are not bound by rules. Her contributions, though serviceable, had been in every sense inadequate. And throughout this imbroglio she had been without dignity. It was this that shamed and hurt her. Her pitiful intentions had led her into stupidity. And, she realized, she had been misled by the archaic smile and all its implications into betraying her true nature. She determined to have no more of it.

‘I must go,’ she said, perhaps a little abruptly. Patrick looked up in surprise.

‘Blanche has been a brick,’ said Sally, glancing at her pensively. ‘Don’t worry about us. Patrick will sort something out. It’s just that I felt a bit fraught this evening.’ She paused. ‘Particularly with Nellie coming home the day after tomorrow.’

Ah yes, thought Blanche, stopping for a tiny moment in her progress to the door. Of course. There are resources still to be deployed. But she said goodnight and left.

The night was humid and uneasy, a storm brewing somewhere. She walked the few streets to her house lost in thoughts of an incoherent nature. It occurred to her that she had never been deceived; merely surprised. Eternally surprised by the appetites of others and the lengths to which these appetites would take them. And she had been naive enough to think of this trait as selfishness, when it was life itself in its brutal urgings and promptings. It was the lesson she had never learned, being too schooled and educated in careful manners, and hoping to win her reward by scrupulous
good faith. Yet always increasingly aware of the appetites of others, now as palpable as the thunder rolling in the distance and the storm that would, at some unspecified time, but inevitably, break.

In her bedroom she lit a single lamp, undressed, and, standing at the window and looking out over the garden, willed herself into a state of calm. Numbly she acknowledged the fact that all her efforts led towards sadness. For that reason she had no way of knowing whether or not they were valid. She supposed her sadness to be a matter of temperament or rather an accident of birth, as if, in some gigantic lottery, it had been decided that she were to be denied the enjoyment of her own free will. And the irony of it was that she had been unaware of this fact until she was middle-aged. As a child, like all children, she had felt that the world was as much hers as anybody else’s; and as a grown woman she had had no reason to doubt her happy state. It was only recently that the truth had begun to become clear to her, as if only just coming into focus. It was now that she saw the superior freedom of others. The unease felt at the National Gallery, the curious faintness that had overcome her at the sight of the archaic smile of the kouros in the Athens Museum, seemed to her to be an essential commentary on her own shortcomings. I could have saved my own life, she thought. But I was too weak, shackled by the wrong mythology.