A Closed Eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

the shop, the gas fire humming on winter afternoons, and the kettle on the boil for Harriet’s tea when she came home from school. Hughie seemed about to beg his new son-in-law to take care of his daughter, but Merle put a stop to that and thrust another glass of champagne into her husband’s hand. What was done was done, and, she thought tiredly, it was for the best. Harriet would now have to take her chance along with the rest of the human race, the female half of it, at least. She felt too old to sympathize. All she wanted now was the peace of her new bed, with the sea outside her window, and time to think of herself at last.
    Harriet, in her new home in Cornwall Gardens, felt sorry for them, as she knew they felt sorry for her. This was both the depth and the limit of their love for each other. With her husband she was easier than she had ever been with herparents: the words ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ now brought with them a kind of sadness that had to do with their frustrated lives and their pitiful domesticity and the reality behind their still handsome faces. But with Freddie Lytton all was solid, reassuring, prosperous. He was quiet, and pleasant, and she was fond of him in an uncomplicated way. Without the slightest feeling of strangeness she waited on him, served his breakfast in the morning, charmed by the novelty of seeing him respectable in his business suit after his behaviour of the previous night. When he returned in the evening she kissed him, took his briefcase from him, glanced at the
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, then lit the two red candles on the dining-table and waited for him to pour the wine. Without warning, it seemed, she had become a married woman. She shopped and cooked and looked after the flat—his flat—and sometimes she walked through the fallen leaves in the fine afternoons, just sighing a little when the light began to fade and she remembered those homeward journeys of which she would now never be a part. The seasons changed, but nothing else changed. However, she liked her life. She liked Freddie, who was more of a father than her father had ever been. Her marriage seemed to her like a form of honourable retirement, with pleasant amenities to which she had previously had no access: the opera, the ballet. They talked objectively, on interesting topics. Feelings were rarely discussed. Nothing was expected of her except that she be reasonable and decorative. She had no trouble in being either. He, in his silent way, seemed devoted to her. He was an ideal husband.
    But he was not an ideal lover. She knew this instinctively, although she was completely inexperienced. His taciturnity, so soothing and reliable in the daytime, vanished at night, when he was ardent, even violent, careless of her, briefly unknowable, occasionally foul-mouthed. Shock, and even a kind of excitement, gave way to distaste, to disappointment,to resignation, as her mild endearments failed to calm his fury. ‘Quiet’, she heard, and ‘Keep still’, and then, despite sensations of her own, which she was quite sure were in no way compatible with her husband’s volcanic state, she would long for the return to calm and to some degree of respect for the night’s integrity. He would subside and say nothing, for which she was grateful. She would not have known how to reply, whether to be gallant or to tell the truth. She lacked the mocking spirit, although some part of her was amused by her husband’s doubleness. And in the morning she would bathe and dress and feel quite happy at the prospect of another day. Thus she reckoned that her marriage was a success.
    They had friends to dinner, went to Glyndebourne, went abroad. Obediently she forgot her own life and adopted that of her husband. She had always hankered for stability and had always feared pity, the mournful pity she now felt for her parents, and thus found it easy to be her husband’s creature, to dress as he liked her to dress, to entertain his business partners and their