The Rules of Engagement Read Online Free PDF

taking priority over everything else. I had had a foretaste of this in Venice. Sitting on the steps of the Redentore while Digby took a nap in the hotel, I told myself that I was free to make plans of my own in the fairly long intervals when he was absent, either physically or mentally, but I had no clear idea what these might be. Reading the papers I could not help but be aware of the enormous strides women were making; they were vocal and radical in a way I knew I could never be, but there was a discontent, even among the most liberated, that I felt summoned to share. I was still young, young enough to wish for something fiercer than the life for which I had settled, or to which I had succumbed.
    The attractions that this marriage had offered did not fade, but they receded. When Digby came home in the evenings he was tired (he seemed to me inordinately tired) and given to airing his business concerns. “ But you don't want to hear about this, ” he would say. “ Tell me about your day. What have you been doing? ” Or he would ask me whether I would prefer Paris or Rome for a spring break. I respected his attempts to entertain me and summoned up an enthusiasm I did not feel. Or he would suggest a dinner party, again of an old-fashioned type, to which the same people always came, friends of his with whom I strove to find something in common. These people, the Johnsons, the Fairlies, seemed to know more about my husband than I did. They never failed to congratulate me on my cooking, and then picked up the conversation where it had left off during my absence in the kitchen. My role was a subordinate one. Fortunately my reserves of silence were sufficient to enable me to repress any awareness of boredom. But it was there: I felt it, and I knew that I must be on my guard.
    In the daytime, when Digby was at his office, I walked, though I hardly saw my surroundings, those dull, almost handsome streets and squares, where I might encounter a neighbour, on the same shopping expedition designed to furnish a quiet afternoon. After an unexpectedly radiant February the weather had turned cold and cloudy; there was no pleasure in these walks but they were my harmless way of damping down any incipient dissatisfaction that I might have felt. I was aware of the paradigm shift between my life in Paris and my life in London, which might prove to be as uneventful in the future as it was in the present. In Paris, despite the solitude, I had been aware of my strengths: I had been mature then in a way that now threatened to desert me. In my empty stoical days, knowing myself to be excluded from more strenuous pleasures, I had at least formed a notion of how life might be, whether or not I managed to negotiate some sort of admission to it. I had been unawakened but incurious, thinking it better to concentrate my attention on the display at a flower stall or the smells of coffee and wine issuing from a café . There was a democratic illusion of participation that I could no longer find in my new surroundings, which were, after all, not so very new. In fact part of the problem may have had to do with a sense of having been returned to the scenes of my childhood and adolescence after a brief foray into adulthood. For the sense of exile I had experienced in Paris had a maturity about it which I had begun to recognize at the time: perhaps adulthood is a sense of exile, or rather that in exile we are obliged to act as adults.
    Here in London, wandering by the river in a cold wind, and knowing that my time was my own until my husband returned and asked me what was for dinner, I could no longer summon any enthusiasm for my preparations, though these were as careful as ever. Throughout that spring I settled into a sort of benign numbness which I took to be contentment, or rather which I willed on myself. I too began to work up an enthusiasm for distant places, and presented Digby with travel brochures and books from the library which illustrated the