A Misalliance Read Online Free PDF

you going to pretend that you have the wrong number?’ This was taken by Mousie to be a massively unsporting response, and she had complained, with tears, to Bertie about it. Bertie, seeing vistas of unease opening suddenly before him, had also responded by blaming Blanche. In this way Blanche could be isolated by virtue of her innocence. The discomfort of the guilty parties could only be resolved by invoking Blanche’s lack of co-operation. Behaving properly, in this context, took on a radically different meaning from Blanche’s understanding of the matter, or indeed of any matter.
    ‘Your little friend telephoned,’ Blanche would say to Bertie, as he returned from the office, looking alternately younger and more harassed. ‘Why don’t you ask her round? I hate to think of her huddled downstairs on the doorstep.’ For how could Bertie pretend to be faithful to Blanche when Mousie had made the facts of the situation so patently obvious? And how could Blanche, so schooled in good behaviour, win in a contest with a naughty child, with tactics long expunged from her life as stupid, dishonest, above all uncharacteristic? It was particularly difficult to behave with dignity in such circumstances; for in order to negotiate successfully, Blanche would have needed to transact in what she privately considered to be an unworthy manner, and would have had to call on reserves of patience and cunning in which she was notably deficient. It was all the more puzzling in that the baby whom she knew Mousie to be was disguised as a young adult woman who earned her living in an adult way and lunched in wine bars with her young upwardly mobile female friends, all of them busy gentrifying the south-western suburbs and comparing notes on their live-in companions. Marriage they scorned, thinking of it as the shackle that kept women at home, or at best tired out with being too successful all round, yet oaths of fealty wereexacted, as in some new code of chivalry. Blanche, musing over a glass of wine and a sandwich, could see these lunches quite clearly. The talk would be excited, the briefcases parked on an empty chair; acquaintances would be hailed in delighted and uninhibited tones. And when the confidences started, the heads would be lowered and would come together, and the laws of the Mafia would prevail. Mafia honour must be satisfied, no matter what the price to be paid. In fact the price was always survival: no laughing matter, as Blanche had reason to reflect.
    Naturally, certain rationalizations had had to be circulated before the divorce could take place. The most useful had been confided by Mousie to her friends. ‘If the man decides to look elsewhere,’ said Mousie, ‘you can be sure that his wife can’t satisfy him.’ The friends all saw the wisdom of this. However Blanche’s current isolation was caused not by the opinion of Mousie’s friends, whom she did not know, but by the parallel defection of her own, all of whom seemed to think privately what Mousie and her friends were saying so publicly. Blanche’s habit of arcane references, her way of raising unsuitable matters at dinner parties, thus came to be seen as evidence of thin blood, of reserve, or of incapacity; she was far less interesting than Mousie, who was so dramatic in her reactions. And it was not always clear what Blanche meant. If you had not read the same books you did not always make sense of her allusions. Whereas Mousie was a child in comparison, an adorable child. Tiresome too, on occasions, and embarrassing, but on the whole great fun.
    ‘I see it all,’ Blanche had said to Barbara, in the course of one of their less guarded telephone conversations. ‘I am not adorable. I can be very sarcastic, and that is apparently more wounding to Bertie than the plain fact of Mousie’s taking possession. And now people seem to think that I am frigid, and there is no possible way in which I can refute them. So clever of them, don’t you think?’
    ‘You could