May We Borrow Your Husband? Read Online Free PDF

every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.
    She wouldn’t have believed me. She said, ‘I used to weep like anything at that poem about “Passing Away”. Do you write sad things?’
    â€˜The biography I am writing now is sad enough. Two people tied together by love and yet one of them incapable of fidelity. The man dead of old age, burnt-out, at less than forty, and a fashionable preacher lurking by the bedside to snatch his soul. No privacy even for a dying man: the bishop wrote a book about it.’
    An Englishman who kept a chandlers’ shop in the old port was talking at the bar, and two old women who were part of the family knitted at the end of the room. A dog trotted in and looked at us and went away again with its tail curled.
    â€˜How long ago did all that happen?’
    â€˜Nearly three hundred years.’
    â€˜It sounded quite contemporary. Only now it would be the man from the Mirror and not a bishop.’
    â€˜That’s why I wanted to write it. I’m not really interested in the past. I don’t like costume-pieces.’
    Winning someone’s confidence is rather like the way some men set about seducing a woman; they circle a long way from their true purpose, they try to interest and amuse until finally the moment comes to strike. It came, so I wrongly thought, when I was adding up the bill. She said, ‘I wonder where Peter is at this moment,’ and I was quick to reply, ‘What’s going wrong between the two of you?’
    She said, ‘Let’s go.’
    â€˜I’ve got to wait for my change.’
    It was always easier to get served at Lou-Lou’s than to pay the bill. At that moment everyone always had a habit of disappearing: the old woman (her knitting abandoned on the table), the aunt who helped to serve, Lou-Lou herself, her husband in his blue sweater. If the dog hadn’t gone already he would have left at that moment.
    I said, ‘You forget – you told me that he wasn’t happy.’
    â€˜Please, please find someone and let’s go.’
    So I disinterred Lou-Lou’s aunt from the kitchen and paid. When we left, everyone seemed to be back again, even the dog.
    Outside I asked her whether she wanted to return to the hotel.
    â€˜Not just yet – but I’m keeping you from your work.’
    â€˜I never work after drinking. That’s why I like to start early. It brings the first drink nearer.’
    She said that she had seen nothing of Antibes but the ramparts and the beach and the lighthouse, so I walked her around the small narrow backstreets where the washing hung out of the windows as in Naples and there were glimpses of small rooms overflowing with children and grandchildren; stone scrolls were carved over the ancient doorways of what had once been noblemen’s houses; the pavements were blocked by barrels of wine and the streets by children playing at ball. In a low room on a ground floor a man sat painting the horrible ceramics which would later go to Vallauris to be sold to tourists in Picasso’s old stamping-ground – spotted pink frogs and mauve fish and pigs with slits for coins.
    She said, ‘Let’s go back to the sea.’ So we returned to a patch of hot sun on the bastion, and again I was tempted to tell her what I feared, but the thought that she might watch me with the blankness of ignorance deterred me. She sat on the wall and her long legs in the tight black trousers dangled down like Christmas stockings. She said, ‘I’m not sorry that I married Peter,’ and I was reminded of a song Edith Piaf sings, ‘Je ne regrette rien’ . It is typical of such a phrase that it is always sung or spoken with defiance.
    I could only say again, ‘You ought to take him home,’ but I wondered what would have happened if I had said, ‘You are