May We Borrow Your Husband? Read Online Free PDF Page B

married to a man who only likes men and he’s off now picnicking with his boy friends. I’m thirty years older than you, but at least I have always preferred women and I’ve fallen in love with you and we could still have a few good years together before the time comes when you want to leave me for a younger man.’ All I said was, ‘He probably misses the country – and the riding.’
    â€˜I wish you were right, but it’s really worse than that.’
    Had she, after all, realized the nature of her problem? I waited for her to explain her meaning. It was a little like a novel which hesitates on the verge between comedy and tragedy. If she recognized the situation it would be a tragedy; if she were ignorant it was a comedy, even a farce – a situation between an immature girl too innocent to understand and a man too old to have the courage to explain. I suppose I have a taste for tragedy. I hoped for that.
    She said, ‘We didn’t really know each other much before we came here. You know, weekend parties and the odd theatre – and riding, of course.’
    I wasn’t sure where her remarks tended. I said, ‘These occasions are nearly always a strain. You are picked out of ordinary life and dumped together after an elaborate ceremony – almost like two animals shut in a cage who haven’t seen each other before.’
    â€˜And now he sees me he doesn’t like me.’
    â€˜You are exaggerating.’
    â€˜No.’ She added, with anxiety, ‘I won’t shock you, will I, if I tell you things? There’s nobody else I can talk to.’
    â€˜After fifty years I’m guaranteed shockproof.’
    â€˜We haven’t made love – properly, once, since we came here.’
    â€˜What do you mean – properly?’
    â€˜He starts, but he doesn’t finish; nothing happens.’
    I said uncomfortably, ‘Rochester wrote about that. A poem called “The Imperfect Enjoyment”.’ I don’t know why I gave her this shady piece of literary information; perhaps, like a psychoanalyst, I wanted her not to feel alone with her problem. ‘It can happen to anybody.’
    â€˜But it’s not his fault,’ she said. ‘It’s mine. I know it is. He just doesn’t like my body.’
    â€˜Surely it’s a bit late to discover that.’
    â€˜He’d never seen me naked till I came here,’ she said with the candour of a girl to her doctor – that was all I meant to her, I felt sure.
    â€˜There are nearly always first-night nerves. And then if a man worries (you must realize how much it hurts his pride) he can get stuck in the situation for days – weeks even.’ I began to tell her about a mistress I once had – we stayed together a very long time and yet for two weeks at the beginning I could do nothing at all. ‘I was too anxious to succeed.’
    â€˜That’s different. You didn’t hate the sight of her.’
    â€˜You are making such a lot of so little.’
    â€˜That’s what he tries to do,’ she said with sudden schoolgirl coarseness and giggled miserably.
    â€˜We went away for a week and changed the scene, and everything after that was all right. For ten days it had been a flop, and for ten years afterwards we were happy. Very happy. But worry can get established in a room, in the colour of the curtains – it can hang itself up on coat-hangers; you find it smoking away in the ashtray marked Pernod, and when you look at the bed it pokes its head out from underneath like the toes of a pair of shoes.’ Again I repeated the only charm I could think of. ‘Take him home.’
    â€˜It wouldn’t make any difference. He’s disappointed, that’s all it is.’ She looked down at her long black legs; I followed the course of her eyes because I was finding now that I really wanted her and she said with sincere conviction,