Tremor of Intent (25 page)

Why not? I suppose she was attractive enough in her very thin way, but I'd got used to a different sort of woman, bad as she was. But the badness wasn't her fault, I kept telling myself. If there'd been no woman in the house I wouldn't have been perpetually reminded of Brigitte, reminded that is by contrast. I still had something of Brigitte, namely photographs, and it was because Lucy was around that I took to comforting myself with photographs which recalled happier times – Brigitte on a rock at the seaside posing as a sort of Lorelei, Brigitte wearing her frothy décolleté evening dress, Brigitte demure in a simple frock. They were a comfort sometimes to take to bed.
¹
It was when I went down with a bit of stomach trouble that things got a bit out of hand. I rang up to say I wouldn't be coming to the lab and then I went back to bed with a hot water bottle. It was I think gastric flu. I knew there was no way out of what was going to happen that evening, but I felt too ill to care very much. Well, she turned up at about five, having got off early and everybody would wink and know why, and then she was in her element, florence nightingaling all over the house in for some reason her white lab coat. She gave me bicarb and hot milk and two hot water bottles (one of them was Brigitte's and as if Brigitte was being vindictive even in her absence it started to leak so I threw it out) and smoothed my Fevered Brow. She said I ought not to be
left that night and besides there was the question of seeing how I was in the morning, so she insisted on making up the bed in the spare room. Naturally I was grateful but I knew there would be a Reckoning.

The Reckoning came three days later when I was feeling a good deal better and thinking of getting up. She said no, see how I was when she came back that evening and perhaps the next day something might be done about my getting up. It was a very cold day in late November and she returned from work shivering. I suppose I should never have suggested to her that she have a hot water bottle that night instead of me, me being very warm now, and I told her not to take the one that leaked. But she did, either by accident or design, perhaps the latter, and she came into my room to say that she couldn't possibly sleep in a damp bed. Well, there we were then. She just lay there and I just lay there as though we were side by side in lounging chairs on a crowded deck, then she said she still felt very cold and came closer. Then I said: You'll catch my flu. She said: There are things more important than catching flu. Before I knew what was happening we'd started. I suppose the sweating got rid of the last of the flu, and I sweated a long time.

I sweated a long time because I was able to just go on and on, nothing happening to me at all. It was like acting it on the stage. That school group photograph was just about visible in the light from the street lamp and I could see Father Byrne and Hillier and O'Brien and Pereira and the others very dimly. After an hour they must have got very bored with the performance. Mine, anyway. She thought it was marvellous and kept going oh oh darling oh I never knew it could be like this and don't stop. It was all right for her but there was nothing in it for me. I tried to imagine it was somebody else – a girl in one of the offices with the same black sweater on every day giving off a great aroma of stew and earwax but with huge breasts on her, a half-caste girl
singer on the television whose dresses were cut very low so that the camera always deliberately tried to make her look naked, a big-buttocked woman in the local supermarket. All the time I was trying to avoid Brigitte but at last I had to bring her in and then it was different. At last I was able to bring it to an end and then she cried out very loud and afterwards said: Darling, was it as good for you as it was for me?

Somebody in some book on sex said that the biggest sin a man can commit with a woman is to do it and pretend you're doing it with somebody else. That seems to me very mystical. I mean, who knows you're pretending except you? Unless, of course, you're going to bring God into it. What the book should have said was the danger of calling the real woman by the name of the imagined one. But Lucy was very good about that. She even said: Poor darling, you must have loved her very much and she hurt you very badly, didn't she? And then she said: Never mind, when we're really together I'll make you happier than she ever could. And I'll never leave you. What Lucy meant was getting married. We're as good as married now, aren't we. darling, except that I'm still not Mrs Roper. She had a wedding ring though, her dead mother's she said it was, and she would use it as a kind of stimulator in bed, as though she thought that was why married women wore wedding rings.

But she couldn't drive Brigitte out. She was making me bring Brigitte back again. Every night. And she herself had brought all her clothes and little knick-knacks from her flat and then she gave up the flat. But I'd never asked her to come and settle in and share my bed, had I? It was what they call a liberty. But I couldn't tell her to get out, could I? One day she said that people in the Institute were talking and that it was about time I did something about a divorce. So then I went out and got drunk. I wasn't supposed to drink at all now. When Brigitte left I'd started to hit the bottle a bit, but it was Lucy who'd stopped all that. Beer for everyone else at those parties, lemon barley water for me. So it was a big disappointment for Lucy
now when I staggered in after closing-time reeking of bitter beer (five pints) and whisky (five John Haigs, large), also
whiskey
in memory of Father Byrne (two small JJs). Why had I been thinking of Father Byrne? Perhaps because of the damnable sex, perhaps because I was homesick and had no home.
¹
Anyway, when I staggered in I fell against things, and Lucy was
bitterly
disappointed. I staggered against a little table with a brown fruit-bowl on it, and in the brown fruit-bowl not fruit but a crouching cat made of blue china. I knocked this over, and the head came off the cat, and then Lucy cried, saying it had belonged to her mother. So I said nobody had asked her to bring it into
my
house and for that matter nobody had asked
her
to bring
herself
into my house, so she cried worse. She said nothing of walking out of the house with her bags packed, all she said was that I'd better sleep in the spare room that night and she hoped I'd have one hell of a hangover the next morning, which I did.

From now on I didn't much care to go home in the evenings. Damn it, it was my home, or house anyway, and I had a good big damned slice of mortgage still to pay off. But I couldn't order Lucy out, having, in her view, taken advantage of her and allowed her to build up hopes as yet unfulfilled. And this business of it being the biggest sin a man could commit in bed with a woman made me, even though it was all nonsense, feel guilty towards her. I was turning her into a kind of thin Brigitte, although, to be fair to myself, it was always Lucy who made the first bed-move. So, although I was in my rights in regarding her as an intruder, I couldn't tell her to get out. But I wasn't going to marry her – oh no. I was still married. What I did most evenings now was to look for Brigitte.

I looked first of all in Soho. There were laws now which forbade prostitutes to parade the streets with little dogs on leads or to walk
up and down with their handbags open, waiting for men to come along to tell them they'd got their handbags open. But the laws weren't taken very seriously. Still, I don't think there were as many on the streets as there had used to be, certainly not anywhere near so many as in the great days of opportunity of the war, when the lie was given to the old liberal sociological studies of prostitution which said that women took it up only because they couldn't get any other kind of work. What you saw more of now was women beckoning from doorways and windows and suddenly darting out from the darkness and saying: Want a quickie, darling? I made a very thorough job of my search around Soho – Frith Street, Greek Street, Wardour Street, Old Compton Street, Dean Street, everywhere – but I didn't find Brigitte. In the advertisement-cases of shady tobacconists and bookshops I saw ambiguous announcements: Fifi for Correction (Leather a Speciality); Yvonne, Artist's and Photographer's Model – 40 24 38; Colonic Irrigation administered by Spanish Specialist. Never once did I find anything (like Fräulein with German Novelties) which would lead me to Brigitte. In a pub I found a man who had a brochure – all photographs and telephone numbers – called The Ladies' Directory, but Brigitte wasn't in it. I even went into a police station and said I was looking for my wife, a German girl who, through her innocence, had perhaps let herself be drugged and whiteslaved, but they were very suspicious about that.
¹

As always happens, I found Brigitte by accident. I went one night to a cinema on Baker Street (nothing I particularly wanted to see; I was just tired and fed up) and afterwards had a couple of small whiskies in a pub just by Blandford Street. A woman entered, well dressed, well made-up, well spoken, bringing in with her a synthetic smell of rose gardens
²
and a husky Dietrich kind of voice. She said
to the landlord: Bottle of Booth's, Fred, and forty Senior. Certainly mavourneen, he said. She crackled a lot of five-pound notes in her bag. I wondered about the mavourneen and then caught on: Bridget sounds Irish to the English. I gave her a long look but it was a fair time before she recognised me, or else she
did
recognise me and pretended that she hadn't. Anyway, she couldn't get away with that. She went out quickly and I followed. Leave me alone, she said, or I'll call the police. That was a good one, that was. I said: The police are the last people you'll call. Besides, there's no law that I know of that prevents a husband speaking to his wife. She said: You'd better forget all about that. Divorce me and finish with it. I could now, I said, now that I know where you are and what you're doing; otherwise I'd have to wait three years for desertion (she'd reconciled herself to my following her to where she lived), but once you're divorced you'll be deported as an undesirable alien. I saw that undesirable was the wrong word there. All she said was: I won't be deported.

Her flat was evidently a very expensive one, central heating, corner bar with bar-stools, cushions, erotic pictures on the walls (German ones from the Nazi time; I saw that). There was a kitchenette with a refrigerator humming, an open bathroom-door with bath-smells coming from it, an open bedroom-door showing a big bed with a silk coverlet, dim wall-lights on. Will you have a drink? she said. This is my night off and I was going to get to bed early, but have a drink and say what you want and then go. Perhaps she thought I wanted to know where she'd left the spare front-door key of the house. Thinking of the house made me want to cry. What I said was: I want you. She said: You can have my number; ring me sometime. No no no, I said, I want you. I want you to come back. She laughed at that and said:
Warum
? Her suddenly asking why in German, when her English seemed to have improved so much, brought back the whole past to me, and I really started to cry this time. Don't do that, she said. What has to be has to be. I want to be
as I am. I don't want shopping and hausfrauing any more. I meet some very important people now. I'm a lady. You're a whore, I said, the English and German words being very nearly the same. That's what you are, a prostitute. She said: the two words are not quite the same. Oand said: oh, why don't you grow up and learn about the great world?

Apart from anything else, I said, I have certain rights. Conjugal rights. I demand their restoration. You filthy pig, she shouted; I've never had such filth spoken to me before. Get out of here at once. And then she gave me a very foul mouthful of German. And then she said: If you want a woman there are thousands in London willing to do it for the money. Some of them even walk the streets with little dogs, which is against the law. But do not come to me, no, not to me, do not come to me. I felt very bitter and ill-used then, but I could not really turn against her. Also I felt triumphant, because I would have her that night and she would not know it. But I boiled also within to think that this was my wife and other men could possess her and I could not. I became very cold and cunning outside, despite the boiling inside, and, when I saw her handbag lying open on the settee, I said: Give me a drink and then I'll go. A cold drink. Perhaps you have beer in the fridge. We always used to have it in the old days. All right, she said, go and help yourself. Then get out. But I said: For old time's sake, Brigitte, get me a drink with your own hands. Please. I ask no more. She shrugged and said: Oh all right, then went to get it. I knew that her key was in that bag. It was no trouble to get it out and put it in my pocket. When she brought the beer I drank it off in one draught. She said: You drink like a pig, just as you ate like a pig. I only smiled and said: A goodnight kiss? For old time's sake? But she wouldn't give me even that, my right. I left then and said: Goodbye, dear Brigitte. Look after yourself. She seemed a little puzzled to see me go without further trouble. Out in the street I looked up at her sitting-room window till the lights went out. Then I went home. Lucy was waiting for me with some nice hot supper.

I now had something to do every night. What I did mostly at first was to walk that street, seeing who went into her flat. Her trade was a high-class one, to judge by the cars that parked there. Once a policeman looked at me suspiciously but I got in right away with: Never mind, constable. This is a job. Private detective agency. He didn't ask to see my card or anything. The pleasure I got from watching was what, I suppose, is called a masochistic one. I never thought such pleasure was possible, but it is. It is not just what Shakespeare calls wearing the horns; it is making a kind of crown of horns.
¹
I delayed my entering for as long as possible, letting weeks go by. I felt especially virtuous about submitting to all this delicious pain, since I'd told Lucy that I was after evidence for a divorce. When I got back at night she said: You poor dear. Let's have a nice hot drink before we go to bed.