May We Borrow Your Husband? (13 page)

He said, ‘I'm not an alcoholic.'

‘Of course you aren't.'

She sat on the bed beside him and took his left hand in hers. It was cracked and dry, and she wanted to clean back the cuticle until she remembered that was something she did for Charlie.

‘I wanted company,' he said.

‘I'm here.'

‘You'd better turn off the bell-light or the maid will come.'

‘She'll never know what she missed in the way of Old Walker.'

When she returned from the door he was lying back against the pillows in an odd twisted position, and she thought again of the ship broken-backed upon the rocks. She tried to pick up his feet to lay them on the bed, but they were like heavy stones at the bottom of a quarry.

‘Lie down,' she said, ‘you'll never be sleepy that way. What do you do for company in Curaçao?'

‘I manage,' he said.

‘You've finished the bourbon. Let me put out the lights.'

‘It's no good pretending to you,' he said.

‘Pretending?'

‘I'm afraid of the dark.'

She thought, I'll smile later when I think of who it was I feared. She said, ‘Do the old pirates you fought come back to haunt you?'

‘I've done some bad things,' he said, ‘in my time.'

‘Haven't we all?'

‘Nothing extraditable,' he explained as though that were an extenuation.

‘If you take one of my pills . . .'

‘You won't go – not yet?'

‘No, no. I'll stay till you're sleepy.'

‘I've been wanting to talk to you for days.'

‘I'm glad you did.'

‘Would you believe it – I hadn't got the nerve.' If she had shut her eyes it might have been a very young man speaking. ‘I don't know your sort.'

‘Don't you have my sort in Curaçao?'

‘No.'

‘You haven't taken the pill yet.'

‘I'm afraid of not waking up.'

‘Have you so much to do tomorrow?'

‘I mean ever.' He put out his hand and touched her knee, searchingly, without sensuality, as if he needed support from the bone. ‘I'll tell you what's wrong. You're a stranger, so I can tell you. I'm afraid of dying, with nobody around, in the dark.'

‘Are you ill?'

‘I wouldn't know. I don't see doctors. I don't like doctors.'

‘But why should you think . . . ?'

‘I'm over seventy. The Bible age. It could happen any day now.'

‘You'll live to a hundred,' she said with an odd conviction.

‘Then I'll have to live with fear the hell of a long time.'

‘Was that why you were crying?'

‘No. I thought you were going to stay awhile, and then suddenly you went. I guess I was disappointed.'

‘Are you never alone in Curaçao?'

‘I pay not to be alone.'

‘As you'd have paid the maid?'

‘Ye-eh. Sort of.'

It was as though she were discovering for the first time the interior of the enormous continent on which she had elected to live. America had been Charlie, it had been New England; through books and movies she had been aware of the wonders of nature like some great cineramic film with Lowell Thomas cheapening the Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon with his clichés. There had been no mystery anywhere from Miami to Niagara Falls, from Cape Cod to the Pacific Palisades; tomatoes were served on every plate and Coca-Cola in every glass. Nobody anywhere admitted failure or fear; they were like sins ‘hushed up' – worse perhaps than sins, for sins have glamour – they were bad taste. But here stretched on the bed, dressed in striped pyjamas which Brooks Brothers would have disowned, failure and fear talked to her without shame, and in an American accent. It was as though she were living in the remote future, after God knew what catastrophe.

She said, ‘I wasn't for sale? There was only the Old Walker to tempt
me
.'

He raised his antique Neptune head a little way from the pillow and said, ‘I'm not afraid of death. Not sudden death. Believe me, I've looked for it here and there. It's the certain sure business, closing in on you, like tax-inspectors . . .'

She said, ‘Sleep now.'

‘I can't.'

‘Yes, you can.'

‘If you'd stay with me awhile . . .'

‘I'll stay with you. Relax.' She lay down on the bed beside him on the outside of the sheet. In a few minutes he was deeply asleep and she turned off the light. He grunted several times and spoke only once, when he said, ‘You've got me wrong,' and after that he became for a little while like a dead man in his immobility and his silence, so that during that period she fell asleep. When she woke she was aware from his breathing that he was awake too. He was lying away from her so that their bodies wouldn't touch. She put out her hand and felt no repulsion at all at his excitement. It was as though she had spent many nights beside him in the one bed, and when he made love to her, silently and abruptly in the darkness, she gave a sigh of satisfaction. There was no guilt; she would be going back in a few days, resigned and tender, to Charlie and Charlie's loving skill, and she wept a little, but not seriously, at the temporary nature of this meeting.

‘What's wrong?' he asked.

‘Nothing. Nothing. I wish I could stay.'

‘Stay a little longer. Stay till it's light.' That would not be very long. Already they could distinguish the grey masses of the furniture standing around them like Caribbean tombs.

‘Oh yes, I'll stay till it's light. That wasn't what I meant.' His body began to slip out of her, and it was as though he were carrying away her unknown child, away in the direction of Curaçao, and she tried to hold him back, the fat old frightened man whom she almost loved.

He said, ‘I never had this in mind.'

‘I know. Don't say it. I understand.'

‘I guess after all we've got a lot in common,' he said, and she agreed in order to quieten him. He was fast asleep by the time the light came back, so she got off the bed without waking him and went to her room. She locked the door and began with resolution to pack her bag: it was time for her to leave, it was time for term to start again. She wondered afterwards, when she thought of him, what it was they could have had in common, except the fact, of course, that for both of them Jamaica was cheap in August.

A SHOCKING ACCIDENT

1

J
EROME
was called into his housemaster's room in the break between the second and the third class on a Thursday morning. He had no fear of trouble, for he was a warden – the name that the proprietor and headmaster of a rather expensive preparatory school had chosen to give to approved, reliable boys in the lower forms (from a warden one became a guardian and finally before leaving, it was hoped for Marlborough or Rugby, a crusader). The housemaster, Mr Wordsworth, sat behind his desk with an appearance of perplexity and apprehension. Jerome had the odd impression when he entered that he was a cause of fear.

‘Sit down, Jerome,' Mr Wordsworth said. ‘All going well with the trigonometry?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘I've had a telephone call, Jerome. From your aunt. I'm afraid I have bad news for you.'

‘Yes, sir?'

‘Your father has had an accident.'

‘Oh.'

Mr Wordsworth looked at him with some surprise. ‘A serious accident.'

‘Yes, sir?'

Jerome worshipped his father: the verb is exact. As man re-creates God, so Jerome re-created his father – from a restless widowed author into a mysterious adventurer who travelled in far places – Nice, Beirut, Majorca, even the Canaries. The time had arrived about his eighth birthday when Jerome believed that his father either ‘ran guns' or was a member of the British Secret Service. Now it occurred to him that his father might have been wounded in ‘a hail of machine-gun bullets'.

Mr Wordsworth played with the ruler on his desk. He seemed at a loss how to continue. He said, ‘You know your father was in Naples?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Your aunt heard from the hospital today.'

‘Oh.'

Mr Wordsworth said with desperation, ‘It was a street accident.'

‘Yes, sir?' It seemed quite likely to Jerome that they would call it a street accident. The police of course had fired first; his father would not take human life except as a last resort.

‘I'm afraid your father was very seriously hurt indeed.'

‘Oh.'

‘In fact, Jerome, he died yesterday. Quite without pain.'

‘Did they shoot him through the heart?'

‘I beg your pardon. What did you say, Jerome?'

‘Did they shoot him through the heart?'

‘Nobody shot him, Jerome. A pig fell on him.' An inexplicable convulsion took place in the nerves of Mr Wordsworth's face; it really looked for a moment as though he were going to laugh. He closed his eyes, composed his features and said rapidly as though it were necessary to expel the story as rapidly as possible, ‘Your father was walking along a street in Naples when a pig fell on him. A shocking accident. Apparently in the poorer quarters of Naples they keep pigs on their balconies. This one was on the fifth floor. It had grown too fat. The balcony broke. The pig fell on your father.'

Mr Wordsworth left his desk rapidly and went to the window, turning his back on Jerome. He shook a little with emotion.

Jerome said, ‘What happened to the pig?'

2

This was not callousness on the part of Jerome, as it was interpreted by Mr Wordsworth to his colleagues (he even discussed with them whether, perhaps, Jerome was not yet fitted to be a warden). Jerome was only attempting to visualize the strange scene to get the details right. Nor was Jerome a boy who cried; he was a boy who brooded, and it never occurred to him at his preparatory school that the circumstances of his father's death were comic – they were still part of the mystery of life. It was later, in his first term at his public school, when he told the story to his best friend, that he began to realize how it affected others. Naturally after that disclosure he was known, rather unreasonably, as Pig.

Unfortunately his aunt had no sense of humour. There was an enlarged snapshot of his father on the piano; a large sad man in an unsuitable dark suit posed in Capri with an umbrella (to guard him against sunstroke), the Faraglione rocks forming the background. By the age of sixteen Jerome was well aware that the portrait looked more like the author of
Sunshine and Shade
and
Rambles in the Balearics
than an agent of the Secret Service. All the same he loved the memory of his father: he still possessed an album filled with picture-postcards (the stamps had been soaked off long ago for his other collection), and it pained him when his aunt embarked with strangers on the story of his father's death.

‘A shocking accident,' she would begin, and the stranger would compose his or her features into the correct shape for interest and commiseration. Both reactions, of course, were false, but it was terrible for Jerome to see how suddenly midway in her rambling discourse, the interest would become genuine. ‘I can't think how such things can be allowed in a civilized country,' his aunt would say. ‘I suppose one has to regard Italy as civilized. One is prepared for all kinds of things abroad, of course, and my brother was a great traveller. He always carried a water-filter with him. It was far less expensive, you know, than buying all those bottles of mineral water. My brother always said that his filter paid for his dinner wine. You can see from that what a careful man he was, but who could possibly have expected when he was walking along the Via Dottore Manuele Panucci on his way to the Hydrographic Museum that a pig would fall on him?' That was the moment when the interest became genuine.

Jerome's father had not been a very distinguished writer, but the time always seems to come, after an author's death, when somebody thinks it worth his while to write a letter to the
Times Literary Supplement
announcing the preparation of a biography and asking to see any letters or documents or receive any anecdotes from friends of the dead man. Most of the biographies, of course, never appear – one wonders whether the whole thing may not be an obscure form of blackmail and whether many a potential writer of a biography or thesis finds the means in this way to finish his education at Kansas or Nottingham. Jerome, however, as a chartered accountant, lived far from the literary world. He did not realize how small the menace really was, or that the danger period for someone of his father's obscurity had long passed. Sometimes he rehearsed the method of recounting his father's death so as to reduce the comic element to its smallest dimensions – it would be of no use to refuse information, for in that case the biographer would undoubtedly visit his aunt who was living to a great old age with no sign of flagging.

It seemed to Jerome that there were two possible methods – the first led gently up to the accident, so that by the time it was described the listener was so well prepared that the death came really as an anti-climax. The chief danger of laughter in such a story was always surprise. When he rehearsed this method Jerome began boringly enough.

‘You know Naples and those high tenement buildings? Somebody once told me that the Neapolitan always feels at home in New York just as the man from Turin feels at home in London because the river runs in much the same way in both cities. Where was I? Oh, yes. Naples, of course. You'd be surprised in the poorer quarters what things they keep on the balconies of those sky-scraping tenements – not washing, you know, or bedding, but things like livestock, chickens or even pigs. Of course the pigs get no exercise whatever and fatten all the quicker.' He could imagine how his hearer's eyes would have glazed by this time. ‘I've no idea, have you, how heavy a pig can be, but these old buildings are all badly in need of repair. A balcony on the fifth floor gave way under one of those pigs. It struck the third floor balcony on its way down and sort of ricochetted into the street. My father was on the way to the Hydrographic Museum when the pig hit him. Coming from that height and that angle it broke his neck.' This was really a masterly attempt to make an intrinsically interesting subject boring.