The Rules of Engagement (16 page)

“
So look after yourself,
”
I heard her say.
“
Don't neglect your appearance. Take care
of your teeth. Nobody could say I've let
myself go. Not that there's anyone here to take a blind
bit of notice. Still, I have my pride, or
what's left of it. Best foot forward, and all
that. Lots of love, and I'll see you soon.
”

This was Wednesday. I had somehow to get myself
through to Friday, the day of the funeral. I had never
been to a funeral before: at my age, still young by any
reasonable standard, I did not know anyone who had
died. I assumed that after the brief ceremony people
would come back to the flat, that I should have
to acknowledge their good wishes and express a
gratitude which would put the final seal on
Digby's death. In the mirror I looked
haggard and unkempt, the result not only of my
vagrancy but of my recent obsession. I felt
genuine shame on my own behalf, as if I had
woken up after a period of madness. I saw that
I had behaved badly, and also that I had behaved
out of character. For surely I was not a bad person?
I had accepted what had been offered; now I
saw that what had been offered had been
insufficient, and worse, that I had over-invested
in something that was intrinsically worthless, or at best
of no consequence.

My feeling of shame extended even to Edmund,
who had no use for it. The excuses I had
made for him were, I saw, unnecessary, for I had
no way of knowing how he felt. His initial
enthusiasm, born of speculation, was now
exhausted, and my all too eager response
was, for the moment, extinguished. I
viewed my behaviour with horror, a horror that
extended to my nightly wanderings. In truth these had
only occupied the few days when nothing appeared
to be happening, but they had felt enormous, as if
establishing a pattern that I should be obliged
to follow for the rest of my life. Now, in this
brief interlude of lucidity, I saw that I
must behave differently, that my safety, and indeed
my sanity, depended on a change of course.
I should have to obey the rules, observe the social
norms, not those whose pleasure it was to defy them.
I saw the rules as safeguards. If one
obeyed them one would be entitled to ask for help;
if not, not. I even saw that Edmund should obey the
rules, that he was a fortunate man who had never
doubted his good fortune. There was no need for me
to make allowances, either for Edmund or for myself.
I thought in terms of transgression, an idea
I had not previously entertained.

Self-indulgence, such as we both had felt, was
perhaps a weakness, and not, as I had thought, a
strength. A distant contempt was beginning to make
itself felt. I went into the bedroom, put clean
linen on the bed, removed Digby's glasses from
his bedside table, and took them into the study. His
place was there now. He would not haunt me, but I
had learned about goodness from him, and that, I hoped,
would be his legacy to me. The memory of his
benevolence would surely protect me in the days
to come.

I tidied the flat, prepared it to receive
visitors, checked to see whether I had enough
coffee, sherry, funeral baked meats. What were
these exactly? I resolved to do some shopping,
issue into the streets at a normal hour,
behave like a woman of my class and type, almost
old enough to conform to the pattern set for me. I had
grown thin and pale, strange considering all the
fresh air I had had. But the air of those nights
had seemed mephitic compared with the light of this new
day. The sun that bathed the restored prospect was
beneficent, as beneficent as the new order I was
meant to observe. The only aberrant thought that
occurred to me was that Edmund might be at the
funeral, might even come back to the flat. He
had been associated with Digby's business, which
would now, I supposed, have to be sold. He
knew the extent of Digby's investments, held
his portfolio, if that was what stockbrokers
did. I supposed I might be quite
comfortably off, another legacy from Digby.
All this could be dealt with by a solicitor.
Nevertheless I did not want to be seen in my
present distressed state. I made an
appointment with the hairdresser, took my keys,
and
with
a feeling almost of curiosity went out into the
normal day.

It was a radiant autumn, one that inspired
kind thoughts, I am sure, certainly kind
smiles on the faces I encountered. The early
mists that had shrouded me on recent mornings had
dispersed; the sun now had a certain warmth. There was
abundant colour, in the trees, in the dahlias
and asters at the corner flower stall, yet one
knew that all this was brief, subject to the iron
rule of the coming winter. These now were my surroundings,
and I should never leave them. I was light-headed, with
hunger, I supposed, yet I did not like to stop
at a
café
, was in fact not quite ready to do so. I
was enveloped in something like modesty, viewed my
notion of going back to Paris with trepidation, almost
with alarm. Such adventures were appropriate to the
very young, just as my love affair, I supposed, was
appropriate to early middle age. I was after
all no longer a girl, and the day would come when I
might be glad not to have to be subjected to strenuous
activities such as those which had taken place in
Britten Street. I felt that I had suffered
two losses, that of Digby and that of Edmund, for
I did not see how the example of the one could
fail to affect my opinion of the other. Digby
had always obeyed the rules, and I saw the
virtue of this. Integrity, consistency
—
qualities I had once doubted
—
were now
uppermost in my mind. I had thought the pagan
gods of antiquity were protecting me: I should have
remembered their carelessness, their fecklessness.
While still untouched by any alternative
mythology I was obliged to rethink my earlier
attempt to be worthy of those careless feckless
deities. I was human, fallible, yet I
did not intend to do penance. The memory of my
emancipation was still too vivid in my mind for me
to disallow it. The memory might fade, had,
perhaps, already faded, but it would not disappear. These
two ideologies, goodness and freedom, were
difficult to reconcile. The conundrum had
never been resolved. Certainly I could not
resolve it. Yet, strangely, both imposed
a loyalty, an obligation. It would be
difficult to see how such an obligation could be
met.

At the hairdresser's, women nodded and
smiled at me, as if re-admitting me to the
company of the righteous. Sylvia, the receptionist,
came out from behind her desk, clasped my hand, and
murmured,
“
I'm so sorry.
”
This, from a
virtual stranger, was so affecting that tears
filled my eyes, the first since Digby's death.

“
I'll bring you a cup of coffee,
”
she said.
“
I know how you like it.
”
She was a woman of about
my own age, unmarried, to judge from her ringless
finger, and yet in comparison with myself she seemed
mature, dedicated to her sexless profession, for
no man ever came here, unless to collect his
wife. I did not want to be drawn into any
female conspiracy of the sort I had often
witnessed in this place, women discussing minor
ailments or telling of laughable mishaps which were
somehow reassuring. For this was an establishment not
favoured by the young; I liked it because it was so close
to home, and because Alex, who did my hair, was so
soothing and deferential. In my normal state of
mind I found this irksome; in my reduced condition
it felt like balm.

“
Even when you expect it, it's a shock,
”
he said, smoothing the hair back from my face.

“
I didn't expect it,
”
I said.
“
I
thought he was perfectly well.
”

This was so sad that I felt the tears threaten
again. A glass of water was tactfully placed
at my elbow.
“
It's just that I'm rather tired,
”
I tried to explain. It was true that the exertions
of the last few days were beginning to tell on me. The
thought that I could sleep in my bed again comforted me.
A long night, one in which I would remain safely
indoors, looked like normality restored. I could
hardly believe that I had felt so little, wandering in
the dark. With the threatened return of sorrow, and with that
other, less legitimate sense of loss, I
would be obliged to conceal myself at home until I
had shaped the new character I should be obliged
to inhabit.

These kind people had done something to reconcile me
to the daytime world, which was now my world. I thought with
distaste, even bewilderment, of my recent nights
and early mornings, in which I had fancied myself as
some sort of exile, or a character in one of those
foreign films I used to devour when on my own
in Paris. And those glimpses of other
lives that I had imagined ... These daytime
streets, through which I moved almost naturally,
impressed me by their very neutrality; there was no
danger, no sense of exile, rather an
impressive ordinariness in which I might
attempt to immerse myself. Life must now be
invented, with no nostalgia for a past which at last
seemed truly past. Almost without emotion I went
to the shops, bought the sort of provisions that would be
appropriate, acceptable to the unnatural
gathering that would take place after the funeral. I
would make tiny sandwiches, like the ones my mother used
to serve to her guests after their afternoon bridge game.
I never went back in my mind to those early days,
as I dare say most people do: they had been so
uncomfortable that I had been glad to exchange them
for everything that came later, though that too had been
uncomfortable. I should spend days in my flat,
comfortable at last, but comfortable only in the sense that
there would be nothing further to disturb my peace.
The worst had happened, or had it? Apart from the
almost welcome blankness of the future, I did
not foresee any incident that would bring back the
memory of those night walks. Of my other
life, the life that had almost threatened my real
life, I thought less. My main feeling was one
of gratitude that Digby had known nothing of it,
and that I had been with him at the end. For that reason
some fragment of decency had been maintained. It
was that fragment, minimal though it might have been,
to which I clung. It would have to sustain me through the
days to come.

In the flat the mild sun bathed the
unobtrusive chairs, tables, lamps that
appeared newly dear to me. I sat down and
wondered how to fill the rest of the day. I could
read, of course, but I realized, with a further
sense of loss, that I no longer wanted to, and,
worse, that I might have no further use for those
romances that had so absorbed me in the past. For
surely they were romances? My definition of a
romance was a story that proceeded to a
satisfactory conclusion. This, rather than a happy
end, was what made literature so compulsive.
Those heroes, those heroines, even the most
benighted, had weathered the storm and had been brought
safely home. Novels, the sort of
nineteenth-century novels I had loved, had
conferred a sense of order, of justice, that was
surely a moral gift. Jane
Eyre, David Copperfield, had survived
their time of trial, and even if that time had been
grievous their authors had seen fit to reward
them. Therefore one participated in that reward, since
it seemed so natural, so merited. Now it
seemed to me that such endings were fanciful, that in
fact there were no endings to human affairs,
particularly not to affairs of the heart. One's sad
longings might be, and usually were,
unsatisfied, so that if one were lucky they merely
receded, but remained subject to conjecture. One
returned time and again to memories, or
fantasized alternative endings, in which the
triumph of the moralist, or of the novelist,
prevailed. But I had been expelled from that
sequence and should now have to live with doubt. I did
not wish to read novels that drove this message
home. Therefore I might not be able to read at
all, or not until a time when I could draw the
line under my own life with a feeling of gratitude
that I had done no real harm. This might be the
most conclusive loss of all. I put the
books back tidily on the shelves.