The Rules of Engagement (33 page)

We were silent on our walk to the restaurant,
although the beautiful evening was conducive to mild
peaceable conversation. He did not touch my arm or
take my hand, the sort of gesture that endorses
existing physical experience and awakens the
indulgence of passers-by. We were glad to sit
down, to unfurl napkins, to greet our usual
waiter. Apparently there was to be no pretence that
nothing untoward had taken place, yet neither of us
knew how to broach the subject. At last I
broke the silence.
“
There is nothing for you to be
afraid of,
”
I said.
“
We were discussing a
mutual friend, who may be rather ill, and working out what
was going to be needed.
”
(
“
I know what has to be
done,
”
Edmund had said.)
“
I'm afraid I
was rather shocked; I had not realized that she was ill.
I had not seen her for some time.
”
Whether this
explanation satisfied him or not was
irrelevant; it had the authority of truth. But
then the fact of Betsy and her illness surfaced
and bid fair to overwhelm me. It was as if all
my associations were in turmoil, and the
past, that other enemy, coming back to haunt me.
Our youth, Betsy's and mine, was once again
threatened, and we must both now deal with the realities
visited on adults, whether or not they are
prepared. I felt an ache in my throat,
laid down my fork.
“
You must forgive me,
”
I
said.
“
This has been a shock.
”

Then he did lay a hand on mine, and his touch
comforted me. But he did not stay with me that night.
It was easy to imagine him walking off, alone,
into the night, his purpose, his life, even,
subjected to careful revision.

What could have been a breach was repaired, and quite
soon: we may have feared a return to an
unregarded and unpartnered state. In retrospect
we both, individually, and without discussing the
matter, remembered those stretches of time which had
been filled dutifully and without pleasure. For
both of us it was a novelty to be connected. For that
was the underlying message: connection. I doubt if
it was ever more than that, though it was a relief
to surrender our solipsism, to allow a more or
less chosen companion into our lives, and to feel
increasingly at ease in this new companionship,
to pick up references, to reserve anecdotes,
to accept as a given one's desire and indeed
one's right to pleasure.

This was enough to override any residual
misgivings and misunderstandings. But because we were aware
that our association had so nearly been undermined by that
glimpse of what was undoubtedly genuine and
unrehearsed we were on our best behaviour, not
only out of fear but out of a residual sense of
honour. We were bound to do justice to the situation which
we had both created, to value its merits, its
sheer suitability. We were alike in so far as
we approved of consistency. Nigel no doubt
appreciated this more than I did. But I had
only to imagine myself in a hospital bed, with no
visitors, to cling more closely to what was in
essence the simulacrum of an affair, a
marriage, the benefits of which it was impossible
to overlook, though the strains were now rather more
pronounced. The incompatibility of our tastes
and temperaments, both forged in more passionate
circumstances, might have warned us of
difficulties to come. Instead we averted
our eyes, became more careful than was entirely
comfortable. Nigel, of course, was blameless, but
I could see quite clearly now a lurking
censoriousness that placed me on probation. So far
I had given no cause for undue suspicion.
Suspicion, however, was what I now had
to allay. Instead of making me indignant, this
made me cautious. I told myself that I was beyond
the age of meaningful glances, of involuntary
memories. I was a middle-aged woman and it was
in my interest to rescue myself from what would almost
certainly be that further age in which there are few
compensations.

The image of the hospital bed, which had come out of
nowhere, was impossible to dismiss. I knew that this
applied to Betsy and yet I felt the anguish
of the situation as though it were a very real threat to myself.
I saw the dependency, the acceptance that illness
brings with it, and the loneliness. I had always been
perfectly healthy; there was no reason for me
to experience this horror. It was a horror that I
had first encountered as a child, when my grandfather was dying:
I associated the figure in the bed with the miasma
of sickness, the dense tainted atmosphere in the
room, the impotent scrabbling of his weak hand. I
had cried, protested, been sent out to play. But
play was incompatible with what I had seen, although
I could hardly have understood it. It was then that I
understood the notion of damage, which persisted until
I managed to give it a name. Naming it, however,
merely increased its power.

It was perhaps significant, perhaps not, that I had
another dream at this time, again connected with
electricity. In the dream I had tried
to switch on the light in the bathroom, only
to see and to feel coils of wire dripping from the
socket, down the walls to the floor. This was
repeated in all the other rooms. I told myself
calmly that an electrician must be called, but
before I could do so the door was pushed open to admit
two women whom I did not know. They appeared
to know me, very well, so well that they made themselves
entirely at home, at one point lying down on
my bed. They chatted between themselves as if they were in a
public place. One produced a bottle of
hand lotion which she passed to the other; they shared it
carelessly, so that it spilled onto the coverlet,
soiling it. I knew that I should find traces of
this same glutinous substance on the chairs, the
table, the carpets throughout the flat. The
two women, absorbed in their conversation, paid no
attention to me. And there was no help for it: that was the
point. I struggled out of this dream, or
nightmare, with a sense of horror so great that I
did something I had never done before. I
telephoned Nigel, who must have sensed my
distress, for he promised to come over. It was
five o'clock in the morning. By six he was with me.
He was of immense value to me at that moment,
although he did not quite understand why I should be so
frightened.

My nightmare he was inclined to dismiss as a little
woman's nervous imagination, but I think it
pleased him to see me as timorous, fallible,
anxious for his opinion and his reassurance. My
woeful appearance seemed to have called forth some
extinct manliness, so that he took charge, made
tea, and informed me that we should spend the day in the
park, Holland Park, and eat lunch there. I
knew that we were both behaving out of character, he so
strong, I so weak, and yet it was a relief to us
both to indulge these alternative characteristics,
to give in to a rarely glimpsed temptation to be
other than we were. We both knew that a
return to normal was inevitable, that it was necessary but
not entirely welcome. I pleased him further
by worrying that I was taking him away from his work, and
it was at this point that normality began once more
to intrude, for he confessed that there was little work for him
to do, that perhaps there never had been, at which point his
bleakness threatened to overtake my own. I was not
willing to pity either of us
—
pity was too dangerous
—
so I showered and dressed and made breakfast,
relying on these reassuring activities to put us
both to rights. The sun was already at full strength:
we had passed the longest day. The fear of
summer's decline convinced us that we must take
advantage of this light, this heat. We set out
for the park before nine.

There, sitting on a bench, we had our first real
conversation. He wondered why I had been so
frightened by what was only a dream, and I tried
to explain my concept of damage, and how it had
been reviv
ed by news of Betsy's illness. W
ere
we very close, he asked. No, but we had grown
up together, I replied, and then began to do what I
had not intended to do, to reminisce about the past. It
all came out: Bourne Street, Pimlico
Road, our earliest urban landscape, then
school, and our easy unthinking
association which ended when I went to Paris, leaving
Betsy to deal with her aunt's demise on her
own. When she succeeded me in Paris we lost
touch, until she appeared at my wedding,
hopeful, even joyous, as I had not been. I
broke off my account at this point: I still wanted
to prolong the ceremony of innocence. But I could
hardly convey what this meant to me, and how sadly
I had grown away from it. He questioned me
astutely as we sat there in the sun, but there was
nothing more I was able or willing to add. My
feeling that a part of life had already come to an end was
too strong, and the knowledge that I had not particularly
valued that part too sad.

“
And this is the friend you are worried about?
”
he
said.

“
Yes,
”
I replied. I then surprised
myself by saying,
“
I suppose we have been shadowing
each other all our lives. And now she is ill
and I must face up to all the implications. I
think she must want me with her at this time.
”
I
managed not to say,
“
Despite our knowledge of each
other.
”

Then he said a kind thing.
“
Do you want me
to come with you?
”
To the hospital, to the bedside, to the
duties that devolve on a person designated
as the next of kin.

He prevailed upon me to eat lunch, on a
day that seemed stranger than any other. Then he
put me in a taxi and stood waving until I was
out of sight.

But as the taxi sped away my mood of
grateful appreciation declined, and I became
hard again, as I knew I might have to be.
Tearful empathy was not what would be needed, nor were
misgivings and reminiscences. Also I perceived the
gratification that my momentary weakness had bestowed
on Nigel, for whose conscientious support I
now felt a certain impatience. It would seem that
in the absence of passion I could feel little except
fear. That was the singular gift of passion: it
eradicated fear. Now I felt fear, but only
for myself: the real thing. I feared the night to come and the
dreams it might bring. I feared what I had
already perceived, my transformation into the kind of feeble
needy woman whom a man like Nigel might think
appropriate. I feared a collapse of the
nerves that might precipitate me into troubles I
had so far only glimpsed. I feared a loss of
authenticity which would leave me at the
mercy of others, my own vestigial strengths quite
gone. Therefore I willed myself to think of Edmund
and how I might get in touch with him again.
Yet I was forced to acknowledge that my brief
foray into the unconscious, or wherever it was that
dreams were manufactured, had done me a
disservice, turning me into a younger, frightened
person, or worse, an older sicker one, and that
Nigel was somehow associated with this process,
through no fault of his own, and possibly none of
mine. He had been competent, considerate, yet
there had been something in his behaviour that distanced me
from the man whose measure I thought I had taken.
There had been a touch of complacency as he had
sought to calm my fears, and the arm that he had laid
on my shoulders had been that of a nurse or a
guardian, or even a parent: sexless. As we
had walked through the summer flowerbeds the arm had
grown heavier and I had wanted to shrug it off, but
could not do so without causing offence. If we were
to continue together I should have to get used to this uxorious
possessiveness, and yet his kind action was that of a
clumsy man whom I knew I could never meet
on his own terms. His gesture
—
the arm around my
shoulders
—
went with a certain elaborate patience
as he listened to my account of that dream of intrusion,
of soiling, as if such matters were unknown to him.
I had done my best to turn him into a sort of
companion with whom I might spend a major part
of my life, yet always with an unacknowledged
reservation, namely that he was a stranger and likely
to remain one. This at last was the breakthrough into an
unwelcome truth: I could no longer tolerate
him, any more than I could feel comfortable with his
heavy arm shackling me to his side. I had done
my best to turn myself into another person, the sort
of woman who would not puzzle him, who would be
anxious for his welfare, good-tempered in all
circumstances, content with what he chose to tell
me about himself, and keeping mute about my own true
nature. And I had done this quite successfully,
leading him perhaps towards a conclusion which he accepted
too readily. I had not been aware of the strain,
yet now I felt fatigue at the prospect of
continuing along this road. Edmund's reappearance
had done much to accelerate this process, yet
Edmund was not to blame. It was Nigel who was
to blame, for his very virtues of leniency and conformity
—
conformity to a stereotype which was perhaps inauthentic in
both our cases, out of character. I knew
nothing about him except what he chose to tell
me. The same was true in my case. The
inevitability of marriage loomed frighteningly
large. I had had one such marriage, and had known
the restrictions it had placed on me, but my
true nature had won out, and I could not risk this
happening again. For I remained convinced that Nigel
was a good man, as Digby had been, and that with him
I might lead a dull life and a more or less
contented one. He would be proof against further bad
dreams, and yet to indulge in the very indulgence I
might call forth would seem a sin against all forms
of creative energy. For a woman to put such
primitive forces aside meant, I knew, a
diminution of all her faculties, so that a
dryness would ensue, a loss of some sort, a
complaisant and complacent acceptance of what had
been more or less willingly entered into but should have
been seen from the outset as the danger it was.