May We Borrow Your Husband? (14 page)

The other method Jerome rehearsed had the virtue of brevity.

‘My father was killed by a pig.'

‘Really? In India?'

‘No, in Italy.'

‘How interesting. I never realized there was pig-sticking in Italy. Was your father keen on polo?'

In course of time, neither too early nor too late, rather as though, in his capacity as a chartered accountant, Jerome had studied the statistics and taken the average, he became engaged to be married: to a pleasant fresh-faced girl of twenty-five whose father was a doctor in Pinner. Her name was Sally, her favourite author was still Hugh Walpole, and she had adored babies ever since she had been given a doll at the age of five which moved its eyes and made water. Their relationship was contented rather than exciting, as became the love-affair of a chartered accountant; it would never have done if it had interfered with the figures.

One thought worried Jerome, however. Now that within a year he might himself become a father, his love for the dead man increased; he realized what affection had gone into the picture-postcards. He felt a longing to protect his memory, and uncertain whether this quiet love of his would survive if Sally were so insensitive as to laugh when she heard the story of his father's death. Inevitably she would hear it when Jerome brought her to dinner with his aunt. Several times he tried to tell her himself, as she was naturally anxious to know all she could that concerned him.

‘You were very small when your father died?'

‘Just nine.'

‘Poor little boy,' she said.

‘I was at school. They broke the news to me.'

‘Did you take it very hard?'

‘I can't remember.'

‘You never told me how it happened.'

‘It was very sudden. A street accident.'

‘You'll never drive fast, will you, Jemmy?' (She had begun to call him ‘Jemmy'.) It was too late then to try the second method – the one he thought of as the pig-sticking one.

They were going to marry quietly in a registry-office and have their honeymoon at Torquay. He avoided taking her to see his aunt until a week before the wedding, but then the night came, and he could not have told himself whether his apprehension was more for his father's memory or the security of his own love.

The moment came all too soon. ‘Is that Jemmy's father?' Sally asked, picking up the portrait of the man with the umbrella.

‘Yes, dear. How did you guess?'

‘He has Jemmy's eyes and brow, hasn't he?'

‘Has Jerome lent you his books?'

‘No.'

‘I will give you a set for your wedding. He wrote so tenderly about his travels. My own favourite is
Nooks and Crannies.
He would have had a great future. It made that shocking accident all the worse.'

‘Yes?'

How Jerome longed to leave the room and not see that loved face crinkle with irresistible amusement.

‘I had so many letters from his readers after the pig fell on him.' She had never been so abrupt before.

And then the miracle happened. Sally did not laugh. Sally sat with open eyes of horror while his aunt told her the story, and at the end, ‘How horrible,' Sally said. ‘It makes you think, doesn't it? Happening like that. Out of a clear sky.'

Jerome's heart sang with joy. It was as though she had appeased his fear for ever. In the taxi going home he kissed her with more passion than he had ever shown and she returned it. There were babies in her pale blue pupils, babies that rolled their eyes and made water.

‘A week today,' Jerome said, and she squeezed his hand. ‘Penny for your thoughts, my darling.'

‘I was wondering,' Sally said, ‘what happened to the poor pig?'

‘They almost certainly had it for dinner,' Jerome said happily and kissed the dear child again.

THE INVISIBLE JAPANESE GENTLEMEN

T
HERE
were eight Japanese gentlemen having a fish dinner at Bentley's. They spoke to each other rarely in their incomprehensible tongue, but always with a courteous smile and often with a small bow. All but one of them wore glasses. Sometimes the pretty girl who sat in the window beyond gave them a passing glance, but her own problem seemed too serious for her to pay real attention to anyone in the world except herself and her companion.

She had thin blonde hair and her face was pretty and
petite
in a Regency way, oval like a miniature, though she had a harsh way of speaking – perhaps the accent of the school, Roedean or Cheltenham Ladies' College, which she had not long ago left. She wore a man's signet-ring on her engagement finger, and as I sat down at my table, with the Japanese gentlemen between us, she said, ‘So you see we could marry next week.'

‘Yes?'

Her companion appeared a little distraught. He refilled their glasses with Chablis and said, ‘Of course, but Mother . . .' I missed some of the conversation then, because the eldest Japanese gentleman leant across the table, with a smile and a little bow, and uttered a whole paragraph like the mutter from an aviary, while everyone bent towards him and smiled and listened, and I couldn't help attending to him myself.

The girl's fiancé resembled her physically. I could see them as two miniatures hanging side by side on white wood panels. He should have been a young officer in Nelson's navy in the days when a certain weakness and sensitivity were no bar to promotion.

She said, ‘They are giving me an advance of five hundred pounds, and they've sold the paperback rights already.' The hard commercial declaration came as a shock to me; it was a shock too that she was one of my own profession. She couldn't have been more than twenty. She deserved better of life.

He said, ‘But my uncle . . .'

‘You know you don't get on with him. This way we shall be quite independent.'

‘You
will be independent,' he said grudgingly.

‘The wine-trade wouldn't really suit you, would it? I spoke to my publisher about you and there's a very good chance . . . if you began with some reading . . .'

‘But I don't know a thing about books.'

‘I would help you at the start.'

‘My mother says that writing is a good crutch . . .'

‘Five hundred pounds and half the paperback rights is a pretty solid crutch,' she said.

‘This Chablis is good, isn't it?'

‘I daresay.'

I began to change my opinion of him – he had not the Nelson touch. He was doomed to defeat. She came alongside and raked him fore and aft. ‘Do you know what Mr Dwight said?'

‘Who's Dwight?'

‘Darling, you don't listen, do you? My publisher. He said he hadn't read a first novel in the last ten years which showed such powers of observation.'

‘That's wonderful,' he said sadly, ‘wonderful.'

‘Only he wants me to change the title.'

‘Yes?'

‘He doesn't like
The Ever-Rolling Stream.
He wants to call it
The Chelsea Set
.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I agreed. I do think that with a first novel one should try to keep one's publisher happy. Especially when, really, he's going to pay for our marriage, isn't he?'

‘I see what you mean.' Absent-mindedly he stirred his Chablis with a fork – perhaps before the engagement he had always bought champagne. The Japanese gentlemen had finished their fish and with very little English but with elaborate courtesy they were ordering from the middle-aged waitress a fresh fruit-salad. The girl looked at them, and then she looked at me, but I think she saw only the future. I wanted very much to warn her against any future based on a first novel called
The Chelsea Set.
I was on the side of his mother. It was a humiliating thought, but I was probably about her mother's age.

I wanted to say to her, Are you certain your publisher is telling you the truth? Publishers are human. They may sometimes exaggerate the virtues of the young and the pretty. Will
The Chelsea Set
be read in five years? Are you prepared for the years of effort, ‘the long defeat of doing nothing well'? As the years pass writing will not become any easier, the daily effort will grow harder to endure, those ‘powers of observation' will become enfeebled; you will be judged, when you reach your forties, by performance and not by promise.

‘My next novel is going to be about St Tropez.'

‘I didn't know you'd ever been there.'

‘I haven't. A fresh eye's terribly important. I thought we might settle down there for six months.'

‘There wouldn't be much left of the advance by that time.'

‘The advance is only an advance. I get fifteen per cent after five thousand copies and twenty per cent after ten. And of course another advance will be due, darling, when the next book's finished. A bigger one if
The Chelsea Set
sells well.'

‘Suppose it doesn't.'

‘Mr Dwight says it will. He ought to know.'

‘My uncle would start me at twelve hundred.'

‘But, darling, how could you come then to St Tropez?'

‘Perhaps we'd do better to marry when you come back.'

She said harshly, ‘I mightn't come back if
The Chelsea Set
sells enough.'

‘Oh.'

She looked at me and the party of Japanese gentlemen. She finished her wine. She said, ‘Is this a quarrel?'

‘No.'

‘I've got the title for the next book –
The Azure Blue
.'

‘I thought azure
was
blue.'

She looked at him with disappointment. ‘You don't really want to be married to a novelist, do you?'

‘You aren't one yet.'

‘I was born one – Mr Dwight says. My powers of observation . . .'

‘Yes. You told me that, but, dear, couldn't you observe a bit nearer home? Here in London.'

‘I've done that in
The Chelsea Set.
I don't want to repeat myself.'

The bill had been lying beside them for some time now. He took out his wallet to pay, but she snatched the paper out of his reach. She said, ‘This is my celebration.'

‘What of?'

‘The Chelsea Set,
of course. Darling, you're awfully decorative, but sometimes – well, you simply don't connect.'

‘I'd rather . . . if you don't mind . . .'

‘No, darling, this is on me. And Mr Dwight, of course.' He submitted just as two of the Japanese gentleman gave tongue simultaneously, then stopped abruptly and bowed to each other, as though they were blocked in a doorway.

I had thought the two young people matching miniatures, but what a contrast in fact there was. The same type of prettiness could contain weakness and strength. Her Regency counterpart, I suppose, would have borne a dozen children without the aid of anaesthetics, while he would have fallen an easy victim to the first dark eyes in Naples. Would there one day be a dozen books on her shelf? They have to be born without an anaesthetic too. I found myself hoping that
The Chelsea Set
would prove to be a disaster and that eventually she would take up photographic modelling while he established himself solidly in the wine-trade in St James's. I didn't like to think of her as the Mrs Humphrey Ward of her generation – not that I would live so long. Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears. I wondered to which publishing firm Dwight belonged. I could imagine the blurb he would have already written about her abrasive powers of observation. There would be a photo, if he was wise, on the back of the jacket, for reviewers, as well as publishers, are human, and she didn't look like Mrs Humphrey Ward.

I could hear them talking while they found their coats at the back of the restaurant. He said, ‘I wonder what all those Japanese are doing here?'

‘Japanese?' she said. ‘What Japanese, darling? Sometimes you are so evasive I think you don't want to marry me at all.'

AWFUL WHEN YOU THINK OF IT

W
HEN
the baby looked up at me from its wicker basket and winked – on the opposite seat somewhere between Reading and Slough – I became uneasy. It was as if he had discovered my secret interest.

It is awful how little we change. So often an old acquaintance, whom one has not seen for forty years when he occupied the neighbouring chopped and inky desk, detains one in the street with his unwelcome memory. Even as a baby we carry the future with us. Clothes cannot change us, the clothes are the uniform of our character, and our character changes as little as the shape of the nose and the expression of the eyes.

It has always been my hobby in railway trains to visualize in a baby's face the man he is to become – the bar-lounger, the gadabout, the frequenter of fashionable weddings; you need only supply the cloth cap, the grey topper, the uniform of the sad, smug or hilarious future. But I have always felt a certain contempt for the babies I have studied with such superior wisdom (they little know), and it was a shock last week when one of the brood not only detected me in the act of observation but returned that knowing signal, as if he shared my knowledge of what the years would make of him.

He had been momentarily left alone by his young mother on the seat opposite. She had smiled towards me with a tacit understanding that I would look after her baby for a few moments. What danger after all could happen to
it
? (Perhaps she was less certain of his sex than I was. She knew the shape under the nappies, of course, but shapes can deceive: parts alter, operations are performed.) She could not see what I had seen – the tilted bowler and the umbrella over the arm. (No arm was yet apparent under the coverlet printed with pink rabbits.)