The Rules of Engagement (29 page)

I was late getting to bed, and the usual soothing
routines were not effective. I lay in the dark,
trying to rid myself of the events of the day, which had been
unusually disconcerting. Of the encounter with Betsy
I preferred not to think, and so far the events of the
evening were not quantifiable. My bold suggestion
to Nigel Ward had been out of character; it was company
rather than sex that I had wanted, although the body can
often prove a traitor. What disturbed me was
the thought that I had not been in good faith, and that I
had no real interest in this man beyond his no doubt
unusual story. It would have been one of those
makeshift intimacies in which I too should have
to furnish a history, something I was not willing
to do. This particular man seemed to be proceeding
on the same principle, yet I had to remember
that he had turned me down. I had also been
prompted by a certain shame at my own continence.
This was no longer de rigueur, was almost
suspect. My standards of behaviour were markedly
out of keeping with the spirit of the times; they were standards
remembered from the novels I used to read, in which
there was no doubt that virtue and sexual fidelity
went hand in hand. It was entirely possible that such
standards could only be attained in fiction. At the
same time there were disturbing echoes of the same
belief in Nigel Ward, whose physical
presence, though agreeable, was somehow hollow. I
could see that he was imprinted with the memory
of his early experiences; his standards had been set
by a combination of Oxford, of love, of confidence, and of
early promise, none of which had borne fruit.
No doubt he had moments of lucidity, in which he
saw himself as a hostage to the past, and by his own
decree a hostage to a grim present. His
flat in Bedford Way would be austere, a cell
suitable for a latter-day penitent, and long walks
his remedy for inconvenient physical promptings.
He gave the impression of having made a good
job of his life, of coming to terms with it by devoting his
energies to young people with whom he sympathized largely
by virtue of their youth. In his lost world he had
been a participant; now he was merely an
observer. Such confidence as he had enjoyed had
proved fallacious, yet he still treated it as if
it remained his sole capital. He had conveyed
all this in very few words, yet left the impression
that it remained an article of faith, likely
to outlive whatever had come after. At some point there
would have been a reckoning, an unwelcome
realization of the truth, perhaps even a slow
recovery. In that respect he was superior
to myself. Yet I knew, by instinct, that we both
preferred our failures to our relative
successes. In that respect we were perhaps more
alike than unalike. Perhaps friendship would be
possible. Perhaps he saw that too.

The season changed, and I, reluctantly,
changed with it. Though there was little raw nature in
my immediate surroundings to inform me of this change I
could not help but be aware of the lighter mornings and
evenings, the longer days which faded slowly and almost
imperceptibly into shadow. I regretted the dark
that had previously enfolded me, permitting the
voluptuous descent into welcome sleep. Now
my sleep was fitful, so that the day never really
ended, and I was awake before dawn at the beginning of
another long day. It was also warm, so that it was a
relief to throw back the bedclothes, to get up and
take a shower. Thus my day began when other people were
still asleep, and I found this unwelcome, revealing
to me as it did my lack of occupation, or rather of
direction.

Occupation of a sort was available, but the greater
part of it took on the nature of displacement
activity. My mother telephoned from
Spain to ask if I would like to visit for a few
days, but I knew that there was no room in the little
house she shared with her friend, and that I should have to go
to an hotel. I was not anxious for her company,
nor she for mine. I knew that her days were filled
with arguments, as they had been when she lived at
home with my father; she accepted this as natural
behaviour, as I dare say her friend did. Some
women are contentious by nature, relieving their
anger at the hand life has dealt them with a
pointless stream of criticisms which they dare not
direct against themselves. I no longer questioned my
father's decision to leave, though I had thought him
cruel to do so. I had become so used to my mother's
dissatisfaction
—
in which I was aware that I played
a part
—
that for many years I accepted her references
to her unusual sensitivity, which were constant, without
questioning her claims to her refined nature, her
dislike of other people, particularly women, even of
her closest friends.

I had come to a sterner assessment of these
claims, but was uncomfortably aware that she was an
unhappy woman. I thought that in her exile she
had found some sort of solution to her various
discontents, arguing, as she had always done,
proclaiming the rightness of her decisions,
animadverting freely against those whom she accused
of letting her down. She had had the good fortune,
if that was what it was, to find a companion
similar to herself in outlook; no doubt they
understood each other perfectly, and did not
complain, or not more than was customary, about their
routine disagreements. I viewed this arrangement as
something unnatural which I did not care to witness
at close quarters. The idea of a woman
choosing to live not with a man but with another woman was
unfamiliar to me, nor did my attitude ever
change. Therefore sorrow for my mother, mixed with the
difficult love we still felt for each other,
kept me away from her. Nor did I have
fantasies about an alternative mother whom I
might fashion in my own image. No doubt
childhood was something I was prepared to forgo. I do
not remember at any time regretting this.

At Easter the streets had been deserted, and
I had felt uneasy at the prospect of what
seemed endless uninterrupted time. The unusual
warmth had made me aware of the confines of the flat,
pleasant enough in winter, but now inappropriately
restricting. On Easter Sunday I
walked round the park, but this inevitably brought
to mind Nigel Ward and his student followers. I
thought perhaps, as I had not thought at the time, that the
students were indulging him, that they had no real
interest in the long walks, and would rather be drinking
coffee somewhere more convivial. I now saw his
efforts on their behalf as noble but a little sad, and
also rather impressive in their innocence. I imagined
him on his holiday, walking purposefully through
France, persuading himself that there was some
satisfaction in carrying out a self-imposed
task, and doing so successfully, so that when he
eventually met up with his friends he would in fact have
little to say to them, the mere enactment of the task being
paramount.

His friends, in their turn, would welcome him
warily, their affection tempered by his unwavering
sternness. Yet there would be affection, I thought.
One is touched, even moved, by a spectacle of
such virtue; one is also made uncomfortable by it.
I myself had felt shabby, flimsy, in his
company, I had been impressed but also appalled
by the vision he had given me of his life, the depth
of disappointment that had spoilt his youth and
contributed so unhappily to what should have been the
years of his maturity. In many ways he had been
frozen in time, and therefore exhibited a conduct of
extreme ambiguity, although to him this may not have
been apparent. An attractive man by any
standards, he was paradoxically unapproachable.
There had been no hint of a woman in the
background, apart from the child-bride to whose memory
he had remained faithful. He did not seem
to know that such unclouded times, if one is fortunate
enough to have experienced them, can never be replicated.
He would conjure up their memory, and be eternally
saddened by his inability to build on it. Yet
he was intelligent, and seemed to need no
consolation. He had made strenuous efforts, the
sort of efforts beyond most of us, certainly beyond
myself, and the result was a rigidity of behaviour that
might alienate any possible company he might
have wished.

There was a mismatch here between us which I
regretted but could not ignore. Whereas he had
been permitted to enjoy youth and its optimism I
had been the opposite, restrained and expecting
nothing. I now looked back in something like horror
to my lonely days in Paris, and knew quite suddenly
that I should not go back there. I was not keen
to emulate the stoicism of which I could not help but
be aware. Our approach to each other had been as
tentative as that between automata, and I had been
both impatient and embarrassed by my failure
to intrigue him. I had never been a great
success in this way; I was not confident enough to make
claims on my own behalf. That was the great
virtue of my husband, whose easy tolerance and good
nature had appeased my sexual misgivings,
no doubt the result of a homesickness for romance
that I had felt in Paris and had not found with the few
young men I had met and known there. I had owed him
an immense debt that I continued to honour. It was
entirely possible that Nigel Ward could
provide the same sort of loyal companionship
—
anything less would be unthinkable
—
which would leave
me comforted but unassuaged. I had never committed
the indignity of blaming Digby for the passion I
felt for Edmund, but no doubt it would serve as
an explanation. I had been aware of checks and
balances since my early adolescence: if I
renounced this then I could have that. It had never
occurred to me that I could have it all, as the
feminists proclaimed. I saw this as
impossible: how could one reconcile such diverging
opposites?

The question that preoccupied me as I walked round
the park was whether either of us was so tired of our
lives as to seek out each other, and why this
prospect should appeal to one so ferociously
guarded as Nigel Ward. The advantage to myself
would be obvious; no longer a careful widow I
might enjoy more dignity than had recently been
my lot. Indeed I was conscious, as I might
otherwise not have been, of how drab a figure I
must have appeared to anyone who had not known me in the
days of my confidence as both wife and mistress.
I could see why Betsy's hateful remarks had
so offended me, stirring in me thoughts of flight, of
exile: I appeared to her, and no doubt to others,
as a polite relic, all fires put out. I
had been so successful in my concealment that none
thought to question it. In a sense this was appropriate:
my secret was safe with me. Now I saw that it
had not always been so, that it had been overlooked
only by virtue of certain codes, a barrier which
Betsy had knocked down. The defiant
freedom I had once felt had been eclipsed
and could never be re-invented. What I wanted now
was something quite different, a sort of
blamelessness such as adults rarely come by. I
wanted, if anything, some of Nigel Ward's
virtue. I wanted a good conscience, such as I
had not enjoyed for a long time, perhaps never.
I viewed this matter almost in the abstract,
since my feelings were not engaged. This fact did
not disturb me unduly; rather it seemed a matter for
congratulation. Fate had presented me with a
possibility which I could hardly ignore. I was
not old, but I was no longer young. Nor was I
particularly worried that I was thinking these thoughts in
isolation, without reference to the partner whom I was
speedily taking for granted. Sex might be a
problem, but I was prepared for that. His physical
reluctance had been unmistakable, not merely in
his smiling refusal of my invitation, but in his
obvious avoidance of contact, even in the
precipitate way he moved his legs when I
approached with his glass of wine. Such conduct
seemed to me pitiable, though it was obviously part
of his life, and had no doubt been fashioned in
rigorous circumstances. I doubted the existence
of another woman, let alone other women, although
other women must certainly have punctuated his
austere existence. Flattered by his good manners
such women, if they indeed existed, would have
expected a favourable outcome, only to be
puzzled and disappointed by his lack of desire.
Thus each promising beginning would be followed by a
period of such extreme caution that some would shrug
their shoulders and move on. I had proof of this
caution, for he had not left me his home
telephone number. At first I had assumed that
he had forgotten to do so; now I saw this as a
tactical manoeuvre, leaving the entire
undertaking in his own hands, to implement or to discard as
he saw fit. This was a more formidable obstacle
than whatever sexual
naïveté
I ascribed
to him. And yet I remained convinced that he would
find his way back to me, that he was lonely, and
even ashamed of his loneliness, and that I
represented something agreeable and approachable which
he might find to his taste.

I hoped that he would not take too long to do this,
as the warmer days presented me with a problem. There
was no patch of grass that I could call my own,
and I could not bear to sit in the flat entertaining
busy and no doubt reckless calculations. My
fantasy of a little house, with a kitchen table and a
back door, soon faded; I did not
have the money for such an enterprise. What I had
was the flat, in which I was condemned to remain. Yet
every morning I had an impulse to leave it, and as
soon as I could I went round to a modest local
café
for breakfast. This place, thronged at that
time of the morning with young men in tin hats and baggy
shorts, took no notice of me: I could sit
there for a couple of hours with a cup of coffee in
front of me and read the paper. When the owner
seemed to find this acceptable I had no further
qualms about doing so, and would spend the morning being
anonymous and untroubled. One good result of this
regime was that I started reading again, with the hunger of
one long deprived. I wondered how I could have
borne to be without the printed page for so long,
although what I read hardly corresponded to the
thoughts chasing each other in my mind. I read
Villette, and marvelled with something like despair
at the noble heroine, yet I was convinced, as I
once had been, of the superiority of such trusting
behaviour. This opened up a whole range of
role models, and they seemed so natural that I
wondered how I could have left them behind. Dickens
I would avoid; his characters were virtuous beyond my
reach, perhaps beyond anybody's reach, and the archaic part
of me was still trying to calculate what was and was not
permitted. One comes back to nineteenth-century
novels again and again, largely because of the sheer beauty
of the reasoning: happiness at last, achieved through the
exercise of faithfulness and right thinking. That this was still
possible if one were a lesser, even a fallen
being, I doubted; nevertheless it continued to make a
forceful impression. And there was always a marriage,
seen as the right true end, and this I did not doubt.
The fragmentation of present-day society had
meant a loss of hope, so that those who harboured
traditional leanings were largely disappointed. My
love affair, in which I still believed
passionately, was in truth largely a matter of
bad faith for all concerned, and its unexpected
aftermath, in which I had become unwillingly
involved, even worse.