When I Was Otherwise (23 page)

They immediately followed her suggestion; but in water; their cider hadn't yet arrived.

“And you gave that silly ass St Joan what for! Or was that a bit after your time; it may have been. Though silly ass or not I think she had her points.” Daisy looked grim. “And I'm sorry that she ended up the way she did. Well, who wouldn't be? The fiends! Oh, those fiends!” She rapped her fork upon the table—twice—and this abrupt alteration in mood was highly disconcerting. Her voice quivered and he had the impression that under all the makeup she had suddenly gone pale. “How I'd like to have them here in front of me this moment! My word, but wouldn't I give them a piece of my mind! Those thugs and fascists and barbarians!”

To distract her he said, rather hurriedly, what he'd been about to say when they had somehow hit the royal road to Agincourt.

“But imagine anyone actually being able to lead Queen Mary a frightful dance! Queen
Mary
!”

His success was undeniable, thank God, although it was really himself rather than God whom Andrew patted on the back. Daisy instantly stepped down from her pile of faggots and entirely genuine as had been the force and passion of her empathy replaced it with a joyful exclamation.

“Oh, I have no doubt of it. That shameless knave has her
very
firmly wrapped around his little finger!”

“Can we be speaking of the same Queen Mary?”

“I can, at any rate.”

“Do you know whom she reminds me of?”

“Florence!”

“I mean, whom else she reminds me of?”

“Well, so long as you're not looking straight at
me
…?”

“My own mother—that's whom. Mater.”

Daisy stared at him, incredulous.

“The man who jumped from a frying pan!” she said, at last. “You ought to have been billed at the circus! ‘Out of the rifle range…into the minefield!' Plonk! How could anyone have been so unfortunate? So reckless? So short-sighted?”

“The thing is, though, I married Marsha—not her mother.” He spoke a little pompously; he was suddenly mindful of a forgotten code of honour.

“Yes, that's true. Very true. Even if most women
do
eventually turn into their own mothers.”

He shrugged. She did her best to comfort him.

“But you obviously hadn't heard that. So how were you to know? Anyway, it possibly won't happen.” There were times, though, when it was hard for her to summon up conviction.

Their prime red beef and Yorkshire pudding came: the former was carved beside their table. The cider arrived too.

“If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven,” said Daisy. “Oh no, my mistake: it probably comes from Somerset. Same thing, however. What was your father like?”

“I never knew him. He met my mother very late in life. He died only a few months after their marriage.”

“One can understand that.”

They smiled.

“What was his profession?”

“Like mine. Stock Exchange.”

“Did he hate it as much as you do?”

“Mater would never have told me even if he had. But perhaps we're alike in some ways. Apparently he enjoyed horse racing.”

“I meant to ask you about that,” said Daisy.

“What?”

“Well, I know nothing—truly not the first thing—about the sport of kings. But I've always thought it might be fascinating; I mean, if I ever met someone who wouldn't mind talking about it to an ignoramus like me.”

“Oh, I could talk about it till the cows came home,” laughed Andrew, “to
anybody
—although there aren't many I know who are really that interested. In fact,” he added, with a sudden rather childlike, rather forlorn honesty, “there aren't
any
I know who are even remotely interested. Unfortunately I just don't seem to move in those circles.”

He hesitated.

“Therefore,” he said, “be careful what you may unleash.”

“Oh, I was never in my whole life careful about anything,” boasted Daisy.

So by and large he had a lovely evening—certainly among the twenty best of his existence, he considered afterwards.

He wouldn't have been able to enumerate the other nineteen.

33

And there were other almost equally good evenings: one about every eight weeks to begin with, eventually becoming one about every six—one about every four. Marsha grew more and more accustomed to Andrew having to work late or spending the odd evening alone with his mother or with some schoolfriend whom he had happened to bump into in the street; but whom it never seemed to occur to him to bring home. Once he spent a whole evening at a Turkish bath, hoping to sweat out a rotten cold which she hadn't even noticed he had. She grew increasingly accustomed to these periodic absences of his; and finally didn't even care too much—just accepted his announcement with a casual shrug. A long time before that, of course, she'd had the baby; which, despite making her very depressed at the beginning, had soon introduced into her life the sort of preoccupation Andrew had hoped and foreseen it might. When young Andrew was a few months old she dismissed the nanny and insisted on looking after him herself…although it was Mary, naturally, who saw to the bulk of his washing and even prepared most of his meals. But it was Marsha who fed him and changed his nappy and played with him and bathed him and took him for walks; and talked to him, talked to him endlessly, even when he slept. Young Andrew seemed to provide the kind of companionship which old Andrew so often didn't; and this patently brought benefits to all—or, anyway, that was how Andrew was inclined to phrase it to himself.

For one thing, Marsha no longer bombarded him with either questions or recitals. Once, indeed, he had even said: “Got a bit of news for you today! Walter was an hour and twenty minutes late this morning!” “Oh, and what happened?” she asked. “The Colonel seemed to swallow his excuses.” “Well, I should think so, too—would you like to come up now and say goodnight to Andy?” He had even had to tell her the nature of those excuses, without her enquiring, and after all this time Marsha's reaction to his little anecdote—when he had only hoped to please her—was somewhat anticlimactic, to say the least.

For another thing, more importantly perhaps, she was obviously kept busy enough not to have suspicions. At times he was surprised at, even mildly scornful of, the fact that she suspected nothing; but it was undeniably convenient, especially when he was so fully aware of the risks he took. She
might
have phoned the office and Miss Eggling
might
unwittingly have made some fateful disclosure; Mater might, equally unknowingly, have revealed some discrepancy. Furthermore, there was always the chance that somebody—maybe a wedding guest on Marsha's side, or one of her earliest visitors to the house—could have seen him out with Daisy. The pitfalls were innumerable. But there was now a certain charm, for a young man who in the past had so often congratulated himself on never running risks, on so coolly and responsibly taking into account each eventuality and attempting to provide for it, there was now a certain charm in the thought of his own recklessness. The very knowledge that he walked a tightrope added piquancy and thrills. And he came to realize he hadn't known himself before; otherwise, of course, upon jumping out of that frying pan he would certainly have paid much closer attention to where he was going to land. Now he did know himself; and wasn't by any means dissatisfied with what he'd found. Allied to his sense of moral obligation and to his utter dependability, to the self-evident maturity contained in his policy of always planning for the morrow, was the consciousness of his also being a man who enjoyed living dangerously, who liked to spice his plain and wholesome diet with a dash of adventure, a dash of jauntily harmless intrigue. A bit of a romantic. A bit of an unknown quantity.

A bit of a gay dog.

It was especially satisfying because Marsha had on several occasions accused him of being stuffy. Naturally the charge had wounded him but because he was fair-minded he had wondered if it mightn't contain an element of truth. Now at last he knew.

And if either of them was stuffy—dull—a bore—it was definitely not him. Oh no, my sweet Marsha, definitely not I! He would have liked to remind her, forbearingly, of one of her own favourite maxims: that people who live in glass houses…

And it was quite typical, of course, the fact he couldn't do so: typical, farcical, frustrating: the cross he had to bear! Particularly frustrating that Marsha—Marsha out of all the people in this world (well, apart from Florence, maybe, and just a handful of others)—would remain the one person who could never be told the truth.

For Daisy didn't find him dull. Daisy, who was the arbiter of dullness—and damnably well qualified to be so! Her interests weren't at all those of an ordinary woman. She was rare and she was splendid. Splendid—even though from time to time he
might
have to acknowledge she inhabited a house with just the odd pane of glass in it. But in her case, funnily enough, this only added to her charm: such occasional glimpses of fanlight or French window reassured you she was feminine!

In fact, he had never seen the
actual
house where she lived—or, at any rate, not from the inside; she had a middle-floor flat in Belsize Park, more or less self-contained although needing to share a bathroom with the couple above. She was very old fashioned about inviting him in, and he respected her for this, despite the fact it would have saved him a great deal of expense if she could sometimes have cooked them dinner. But apart from the moral aspect of the thing—no, very much tied up with that—Daisy's landlord himself lived on the ground floor and even as it was, apparently, was trying to find good reason to get rid of her: simply because she always insisted on her rights and endeavoured to make him carry out repairs which he would have been happier ducking out of. The man was a villain; a profiteer; he was nothing but a fat idiot, to use Daisy's own terminology. And how like Daisy—how magnificently like Daisy—he felt proud of her—to snap and worry at his heels and give him not one moment's rest until he'd been hounded and harried and threatened into carrying out his duties. The oaf! The bully! Andrew would have liked to come and punch him on the jaw but was forced to admit this might have provided him with the very lever he sought as a means of effecting Daisy's removal.

And in a way the situation suited him. As Andrew would have owned quite candidly, at least in any company composed exclusively of men, he had a remarkably strong sexual drive—what bit of a gay dog hadn't?—but he felt glad he'd never descended to the level of somebody like Haley, who not only bragged over lunch about the sheer number of his love affairs but always seemed on the very brink of divulging
details
, guaranteed both to put Andrew off his
plat du jour
, assuming it was cheap enough and slimming enough,
and
to produce prolonged and nervous indigestion. Haley disgusted him—and so did Johnson, who was still very much shackled to his wife but endlessly self-pitying and unable either to find any partial solution to his troubles, like Haley, or else to show that he could take them squarely on the chin. (“For heaven's sake, have the courage of a man,” Andrew had several times wanted to tell him—and unless he could soon find some excuse to avoid their company altogether at lunchtime, one of these days he might actually be powerless to prevent himself!) Moreover, even forgetting the likes of Haley, he was glad to have it proved that he was master of his appetites. Despite huge temptation he hadn't in the last resort been at all unfaithful to Marsha. He had preserved the sanctity of marriage.

So he never set foot in Daisy's house. They had to go every time to a restaurant—though usually, praise the Lord, to a very much cheaper one than Simpson's.

In the long run, indeed, they found their own special place, where after a while they came to be greeted with familiarity: “Good evening, sir; good evening, madam—we thought we'd soon be seeing you again!”

It was in an alleyway close to Regent Street and belonged to an Italian couple who were fat and sombre-clothed, especially the wife, but always very jolly: “real people,” as Daisy termed them, bestowing her second- or third-best accolade. Also, it was reasonable and the food was good, “although madly fattening,” said Daisy, who never put on an ounce—the opposite of Marsha, who was constantly fussing over her weight—and they could afford to wash it down with plenty of Chianti.

So they would usually sit for three or four hours—in their favourite corner booth whenever possible—with either the Chianti still in front of them on the red-checked tablecloth, long after they had finished eating, or else a large pot of coffee; and Daisy would lean back comfortably against the wooden partition and smoke cigarette after cigarette with the charming air of a catlike Venetian contessa: it was an
Italian
restaurant, he said, and he had quickly overridden her self-image of a Parisian Left-Bank intellectual.

(Marsha, when she smoked, could nearly always be relied on to inhale the wrong way at least once during the course of any evening, and furthermore was singularly inept with her holder—which she usually mislaid in any case—and as a consequence often had unsightly nicotine upon her fingers. He himself seldom smoked a cigarette at all—people had told him that a pipe was a good deal healthier; incidentally, Daisy claimed, a pipe gave him a very manly jawline, provided sex appeal
and
reliability, and he supposed it didn't cost a whole lot just to humour her.)

Normally she got through at least twelve or fifteen whilst they were together and it gave him simple pleasure, when she suddenly discovered she had somehow reached the end of her packet, casually to produce a new one, which he would lay on the table without comment. Yet she didn't even need to open it: he also carried his gold cigarette case on these occasions, always freshly filled. “My word, what an escort!” she would say, or “How you do think of everything!” or, “What made you guess they might be necessary?”
And
they're Abdullah, she would add, or Passing Cloud or De Reske Minor, or whatever happened to be apposite; how do you manage so unfailingly to always pick my favourite? She was such a strange mixture of someone who needed to be cared for and someone who could well look after herself—she forgot her cigarettes but she could make plucky little fists at landlords; of someone who had good, firm, even forceful opinions of her own and yet who nevertheless looked up to him for enlightenment and guidance, for what she herself had once termed “the solidly masculine point of view”. He couldn't help but find her fascinating.