A Misalliance Read Online Free PDF Page B

sleep with their husbands,’ said Barbara, who was a plain-spoken woman.
    ‘I only ever wanted to sleep with my own,’ said Blanche sadly. ‘And apparently that was wrong too. People would have been more sympathetic if I had had a messy and injurious private life. It would have been evidence that I am human.’
    ‘Farmyard thinking,’ said Barbara. ‘I’m surprised you take any notice.’
    ‘Ah, but my dear, I am meant to. And I think I must.’
    ‘I really think that Bertie has behaved unforgivably,’ said Barbara to her husband after she had put down the telephone.
    Jack’s response was to chuckle. ‘I never would have thought he had it in him,’ he said. ‘Pompous bastard, I always thought. And he’s come up with a little cracker like this girl. Bad luck for Blanche, of course,’ he added hastily, seeing his wife’s look. The matter had not been discussed again.
    And so the word went out, as the word always will, that Blanche was to be the loser. And as curiosity had to be satisfied, Bertie and Mousie had to be invited to dinner. And as Mousie was adept at the business of survival, many allusions were made in the course of these dinners to Blanche’s famous eccentricities. Thus the legend was established and the verdict was passed: Blanche was too eccentric to be borne. She was
insupportably
eccentric. And age could only make her worse.
    Bertie, who thought his wife uncomfortable although he knew her to be honest, abstained from these colloquies, said nothing to refute the current or received opinion, but sometimes called in on his way home, or perhaps later, in the course of an errand to the off-licence. Carrying a wrapped bottle, he would observe, testily, that Blanche drank too much.
    ‘What did you have for lunch?’ Blanche would say. Forshe was not surprised at the way things had turned out. If, as Plato says, all knowledge is recollection, she had always known that she would fail in this particular contest, for her own plainness as a child had caused her to look longingly at the delighted smiles bestowed on other, prettier little girls, and she had wished in vain to have a tantrum of her very own. But the tantrums of plain little girls do not have the desired effect, and by the time those plain little girls have grown up and become elegant women the art has been lost for ever because it has never been possessed.
    And since then the weather had seemed to be uniformly awful, although Blanche was well aware that she was extrapolating from her own inner disarray. Nevertheless, she was statistically sure that somewhere there was heat, there was sunshine, and radiance, and that this happy climate was reserved for those who had the determination to seek it. For herself, the grey days and the endless afternoons seemed a fitting context for her present life, and sometimes she needed all her courage to leave the house, driven out as she was by the even greater horror of staying in. And as human contact seemed to recede from her grasp, she craved it all the more, although her cocked head and quizzical smile, assumed out of frightened deference to the gods, had driven many lesser mortals from her company.
    Her fantasies, on which her lips remained firmly closed, and which she would have died rather than reveal, came dangerously near to the surface as she surveyed the sodden garden and stood at the window immobilized by a vision of an alternate life, the one she would have wished for herself had she been in a position to lay her case before some benevolent tribunal.
    If only I could live in a real house before I die, smell lilac in my own garden. If only I could be married again, to Bertie, young enough to be confident, not middle-aged and wary, having seen too much. If only it were Sunday, insummer, just once more, and I were about to take our tea out into the garden. And if only there had been that pram in the hall that is said to stifle all creative endeavour but would have had the opposite effect on me.