May We Borrow Your Husband? (19 page)

She went straight to her room, as softly as possible, locked the door and sat down on her single bed. Through the wall she could hear her husband's voice and laugh. She wondered who was with him tonight – Toni or François. François had painted the abstract picture, and Toni, who danced in ballet, always claimed, especially before strangers, to have modelled for the little stone phallus with painted eyes that had a place of honour in the living-room. She began to undress. While the voice next door spun its web, images of the bench in the Parc Monceau returned and of the sauerkraut trolley in the Brasserie Lorraine. If he had heard her come in, her husband would soon proceed to action: it excited him to know that she was a witness. The voice said, ‘Pierre, Pierre,' reproachfully. Pierre was a new name to her. She spread her fingers on the dressing-table to take off her rings and she thought of the sugar-castor for the strawberries, but at the sound of the little yelps and giggles from next door the sugar-castor turned into the phallus with painted eyes. She lay down and screwed beads of wax into her ears, and she shut her eyes and thought how different things might have been if fifteen years ago she had sat on a bench in the Parc Monceau, watching a man with pity killing a pigeon.

‘I can smell a woman on you,' Patience Greaves said with pleasure, sitting up against two pillows. The top pillow was punctured with brown cigarette burns.

‘Oh no, you can't. It's your imagination, dear.'

‘You said you would be home by ten.'

‘It's only twenty past now.'

‘You've been up in the Rue de Douai, haven't you, in one of those bars, looking for a
fille
.'

‘I sat in the Parc Monceau and then I had dinner at the Brasserie Lorraine. Can I give you your drops?'

‘You want me to sleep so that I won't expect anything. That's it, isn't it, you're too old now to do it twice.'

He mixed the drops from the carafe of water on the table between the twin beds. Anything he might say would be wrong when Patience was in a mood like this. Poor Patience, he thought, holding out the drops towards the face crowned with tight red curls, how she misses America – she will never believe that the Coca-Cola tastes the same here. Luckily this would not be one of their worst nights, for she drank from the glass without further argument, while he sat beside her and remembered the street outside the
brasserie
and how, by accident he was sure, he had been called ‘
tu
'.

‘What are you thinking?' Patience asked. ‘Are you still in the Rue de Douai?'

‘I was only thinking that things might have been different,' he said.

It was the biggest protest he had ever allowed himself to make against the condition of life.

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Epub ISBN: 9781409040422

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Copyright © Graham Greene 1967

First published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head Ltd 1967

First published in paperback by Penguin Books 1970

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library