A Desirable Husband Read online

‘Oh dear, poor Darcy,’ said Finola. ‘Do you know, Gerard and I were wondering – we think he still loves her.’

  ‘Oh really, Finola!’ said Hugh, clearing his throat.

  ‘Truly. After all she’s clever, and quite attractive –’ Isabel was a beauty – ‘I think he does prefer her. He’s the sort of man who would be unfaithful to a wife he loved, and if Isabel were less forceful,’ she said, hugging her knees, ‘I bet he would confess all his affairs to her and ask her forgiveness, on his knees.’ She twitched a look at Hugh, and he laughed, though Finola seemed rather serious.

  ‘I say my dear, you’ll never get divorced, will you?’

  ‘No,’ said Finola, and smiled. She and Gerard had agreed half an hour ago that that was impossible.

  Hugh walked over to the dark window, and Amelia followed him, her nails clicking on the floorboards. ‘What annoys me particularly,’ he said, ‘and I’ll have to tell Gerard, unless you tell him, is that I’ll have to make other arrangements for Darcy now. In my will.’

  ‘Oh, why?’ said Finola.

  ‘Because he’s a lame duck! No good expecting him to live on his pay, when that woman’s gone off with all her money. No, Finola, I’ll have to leave him more and that will affect you and Gerard. Perhaps you don’t quite understand?’ he added.

  ‘I think I do,’ she said. ‘But Darcy’s got to be provided for, as you say.’

  ‘I don’t think Gerard realises how much poorer you’re going to be, when I’m dead,’ said Hugh. He had often warned his son that half the estate would be taken away in death duties.

  ‘No … After all,’ said Finola, who had never thought of the problems of inheritance in such absolute terms, ‘it doesn’t look like that.’ She was frightened by what he said.

  ‘Well! You’ll manage somehow, and you can always blame Darcy. You’ll tell Gerard, Finola?’ said Hugh.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘All this business has meant the dogs haven’t had a decent walk all day,’ he said suddenly. ‘And now it’s pitch dark, of course. You and Gerard should have gone out after lunch, my dears, I’m sure you don’t get enough exercise.’

  ‘We’ll take them for a long walk tomorrow,’ said Finola, and she got up and closed the curtains in front of his view.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Finola.’

  She looked at his face with her head on one side, and pulled in confusion at her hair. ‘I’m not, really.’

  CHAPTER 2

  ALICE MOLLOY AND ANATOLE BRÉCU

  ‘Will you listen to this,’ said Finola’s mother Alice, unwrapping the newspaper which contained the week’s meat ration, and spreading it out on the table.

  ‘“The Hon. Mrs Parnell, ‘Iza’ to her friends, was looking very chic in her Chanel two-piece. She said she was ‘too insulted for words’ by the suggestion that she had spent a weekend at the exclusive New York Plaza with Mr Billington. She and her children were staying in Long Island with Mr Billington’s mother, Mrs Lulu Pittsburg. At no time had she been alone in Mr Billington’s company,” will you believe it! “Mrs Parnell, whose mother Lady Pytchley is American, is a close friend of ‘Poppy’ Lady Bamborough”. D’you suppose Fin and Gerard have seen it?’

  ‘I expect so,’ said Anatole.

  ‘March 3rd,’ said Alice, looking at the date. ‘I call it very vulgar.’

  ‘It is no more than Darcy deserves,’ said Anatole. ‘Put it in the dustbin, Alice, we don’t want to have it lying about when they come.’

  ‘Covered in bloodstains, too. Oh, hell – I’ve forgotten the potatoes. I’ll go out again – I couldn’t find any lemons at all, Anatole. I told you I wouldn’t be able to.’

  ‘One would not think,’ said Anatole, ‘that having one’s daughter and son-in-law to dinner was such very hard work. Did you try the greengrocer in Museum Street? I saw two lemons there last week.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will you?’ He looked up at her, and raised his eyebrows. Anatole was sixteen years older than his wife, and seven inches shorter.

  ‘All right, all right, just to please you.’

  When Alice was gone, Anatole examined the newspaper closely. He thought how ridiculous and interesting it was that this should be a connection of his daughter’s. Anatole disapproved of Darcy because he considered him a boy who made a hurtful, humiliating fuss about his love affairs: he himself had always been calmly affectionate to women except when in the middle of a row.

  Anatole thought his daughter had chosen her husband remarkably well, though Gerard puzzled him. Finola told her parents nothing, but Alice and Anatole used to speculate sometimes about whether he had ever had a love affair before he met Finola.

  *

  Finola’s parents lived in the upper half of an old house in Great Queen Street, where they had five small rooms and an attic studio for Alice. This studio (in which Alice was now fortifying herself with a cigarette before setting out for Museum Street) she had made to resemble her old one in Earl’s Court, where she had lived before the war. It was a smaller attic, but she had fitted in most of the things from the other house, except for a sagging iron bed where her models used to pose. She no longer needed this, for she rarely painted from life now, instead producing pictures of scenes from her childhood; she had done a couple of modern, London landscapes which Constance Parnell had been surprised to see at the Royal Academy, and had said were really not attractive. They showed bombed land in summer, brick arches and rubble and rosebay willowherb, strong sun and thick striped clouds and dirty children playing.

  Alice looked at one of these closely. She had told Finola, who did not understand, that it was not the bomb sites she disliked so much: it was the huge number of cars nowadays, the new buildings, the inefficiency of the buses, and all the new people.

  Alice would glower sometimes when she went out into the street, especially when she had a dull errand to run, and think with nasty concentration of how things used to be. She often pretended to be older than in fact she was: she was only fifty-three years old, and by the time she was sixteen taxi-cabs had already replaced the hansom, and there had been jazz music and the tango and some terrible strikes, and prophecies of disaster in the newspapers. She enjoyed talking sometimes as though she had been born in the eighteen-sixties, which amused Anatole and Finola.

  ‘There weren’t any lemons, like I said,’ she told her husband when she was back in the kitchen at Great Queen Street half an hour later. ‘But I’ve got the potatoes.’

  ‘Good. If you would please peel them for me.’

  Alice sat down at the table while Anatole remained at the stove.

  ‘There are times when I wish we had servants, like Fin,’ said Alice. ‘Just think, if she’d married Gerard when she was twenty she’d have had a cook, and two maids not a daily woman, and a gardener for that bit of yard I shouldn’t wonder, and a nursery maid as well as Nanny. And a butler.’ She reached for another potato. ‘And grooms and footmen and page boys and still-room maids and –’

  ‘No, I do not think a butler,’ said Anatole, considering. ‘Or a nursery maid.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  Alice and Anatole had grown over the years to look rather alike, though their features were quite different. Both had the same sharp but kindly expressions on their faces, high foreheads, thick eyebrows, and sensual mouths. Anatole’s hair was as thick as it had been when he was a boy, and it was startling white, though his eyebrows were still black. Alice, who was grey-haired and thin with a long oval face and bright auburn eyes, could pass at her best for a handsome woman. The couple’s clothes were as eccentric as was suitable for people in their position: Anatole had on an unstarched butterfly collar which did not fit, and Alice wore a shawl, and low shoes made in the style of the twenties.

  ‘Perhaps we should have invited some other people,’ said Alice.

  ‘I think it is good for them sometimes to see only us,’ said Anatole. It was some time since they had last seen Gerard and Finola.

  �
��I hope they won’t be too bored.’ She thought it was kind of them to come, and stabbed at the potato she was peeling.

  ‘Winston said he might perhaps come in, after dinner.’

  They finished cooking at six o’clock and left all the food ready to be reheated. For an hour and a half Anatole practised on his violin, while Alice cleaned some paintbrushes and re-read a little of A Room of One’s Own. Then they dressed for dinner in less untidy clothes: Anatole put on a jacket, and Alice took off the coarse net in which she wore her hair, and put it up on top of her head in a bun like Constance Parnell’s. She also changed into a dress of which she thought Finola would approve.

  They went to wait in their sitting-room, where their three cats were asleep on the floor. The eldest cat, who had been christened Churchill just after the Battle of Britain, woke up and climbed onto Alice’s lap, but she pushed him off. ‘They’re very late, it’s not like them,’ she said.

  ‘It is only ten past eight.’

  ‘I don’t know what we’re doing, waiting about like this.’

  ‘Quiet, Alice.’

  At a quarter past eight Gerard and Finola rang the bell. Anatole went down to open the door to them, and presently Alice heard the three sets of footsteps mounting the wooden staircase. Finola entered the sitting-room first, looking very young in her large and enviable nutria coat, wearing a little rouge. She and Gerard kissed Alice, and asked after her health. The Parnells apologised for being so late: they knew it was inconvenient.

  *

  They were talking about punishment and religion.

  ‘People cannot understand about repentance, understand its real nature,’ said Gerard, clenching one fist. ‘Apart from anything else, it’s a damned stupid blunder to punish someone who has – has truly repented, as they say. To know one’s done evil – really to know it, which means one must regret it so bitterly – is the worst thing in the world, it’s such a terrible thought I can’t – you know Manley Hopkins, “Oh the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall, frightful sheer, no man fathomed, hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there” – I can’t remember the rest of it, but without faith, comfort, there must be such despair –’ He tangled his sentences when he was talking about what interested him, God and darkness and folly and history, as though like a person in a certain kind of society he never had a chance to speak of what was not familiar without being thought an embarrassment. Everyone was interested in what he was saying tonight. ‘The sin itself is hell. When I think of the men I see convicted in court, I really wonder –’

  Alice amazed the company. ‘“Here, creep, wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all life death does end, and each day dies with sleep.” That’s how it ends.’

  ‘So it does! Of course.’

  ‘I cannot think,’ said Anatole, pushing tobacco into his pipe, ‘that you can ever have done what is greatly wrong, Gerard.’

  Gerard raised one hand and let it fall, then smiled slightly. Alice, sitting opposite with some photographs of Richard and Eleanor in her lap, thought what a stupid nickname ‘Pretty Polly’ was. There was nothing feminine about Gerard’s good looks, about his strong hands and broad shoulders and the highly becoming scar, which ran along one cheekbone from his eye to his ear. She wondered whether there was anything he had done.

  ‘I’m a very wicked woman myself,’ said Alice, putting down the photographs. She was very pleased with herself for having remembered Manley Hopkins’ lines. ‘Not that I don’t agree with you that what you call worldly punishment never made anyone any better. Certainly not me.’

  Anatole got up to find the matches.

  ‘I suppose what you call remorse is only the worst thing for good people,’ said Finola, who had not said very much till now, ‘and repentance – Gerard’s Christian repentance – is a comfort only to them.’ She blushed because she had so nearly expressed herself well.

  ‘I never punished Fin when she was small and look how well she turned out,’ said Alice to Gerard. ‘Does anyone want more coffee?’

  Finola sat back with her hands in her lap, looking at her father and her husband against the background of the empty fireplace and the sketch by Picasso to which Anatole had taken a fancy many years ago. They had gone back to the sitting-room after dinner, instead of remaining all night in the kitchen as her parents’ guests had always done before the war.

  This sitting-room was tidy, as no room of Alice’s had been when Finola was small. Although it was crowded, and the blue and terracotta curtains were far too large for the window, and the sofa-cover was a faded Turkish rug, Finola thought how much more civilised it was than the old house in Bramham Gardens: she disapproved only of the fat florists’ daffodils on the big central table, which must have been a present from someone. Her parents could not obtain proper country garden flowers.

  ‘I think it’s simply grovelling to call oneself a sinner!’ said Finola suddenly. ‘Especially when it isn’t true, or only half true, I suppose. I’m not a miserable sinner and I won’t call myself one.’

  ‘Finola!’ said Gerard. He was touched.

  ‘Oh, darling, I know it shocks you.’

  ‘Your daughter must have inherited her paganism from you, Anatole,’ said Gerard.

  ‘I’m not really a pagan. I’m an Anglican agnostic.’

  ‘Undoubtedly this is so. Alice is quite as wicked as she says, of course, but she remains a good Catholic,’ said Anatole.

  Finola was trying to challenge her husband to say more, without saying more herself.

  ‘That must be Winston,’ said Alice, who had heard the bell though no one else had. ‘I’ll go. And it’s not for you to say I’m wicked, Anatole.’ She was not cross.

  ‘Very few people seem to be improved by being religious,’ said Finola, gathering up the photographs of her children.

  ‘I’ve heard you say that you believe in some creative force,’ said Gerard in a voice of pleasant, academic reason. ‘You wanted to be baptised when you married me.’

  ‘Winston,’ said Anatole, getting up and limping over to the door to shake hands with the man who had just come in. He was dark, short and stocky with a hooked nose and eyebrows like a bar.

  Finola gave an irritated glance at the interruption. They had been told at dinner that a Winston Lowell would be coming round to return some book he had borrowed, and that he was quite young and rather quiet but nice, and not really like a civil servant though he was an Assistant Secretary at the Home Office.

  Winston Lowell accepted a cup of coffee and seemed interested by the company. He was polite and charming, but he reminded Finola of a mosaic picture she had seen somewhere of an overfed, powerful-looking Roman, ugly and incapable of spiritual complexity.

  CHAPTER 3

  GERARD

  Alice and Constance referred to each other as ‘that woman’ and though this distressed Gerard, it amused him too. It had been obvious from the start that they would not like each other, but he did not consider either woman capable of real and deliberate malice. Each denied being a snob, and each said she only disliked the other for being such a bad, careless and interfering parent.

  ‘I do like your parents, Finola,’ Gerard said suddenly as their taxi drew up in Egerton Gardens.

  She looked at him and smiled. ‘Really, darling?’

  Gerard handed her out of the cab. Finola knew that her husband would always help her to do such things, even when she was old, because they had been married so long already. He had never preceded her through a door since she was in the Wrens and he was a Commander in the Navy, and they had met formally on duty and had the worst conversation of their life. He had asked her to marry him the next time he saw her.

  Gerard paid off the taxi while Finola went in, still thinking it was remarkable that their two families dealt together at all. He had been fascinated by Alice and Anatole ever since he had taken Finola out to dinner in Portsmouth during the war, and she had spoken about them first tentatively, then with amusement, and a kind of remote a
ffection, surprising herself as she went on, for she had never mentioned her family and upbringing to a man before. He had been very nervous when she had first taken him to meet them, but he had discovered that her picture had been almost accurate: they were only a little brisker and more efficient than he had imagined. A little later he discovered that they were also less socialist than he had expected; and so he thought that Finola, who had described them as very left-wing indeed to give him an agreeable surprise, was innocent in some ways. He had told his own parents that Finola’s were very bohemian, but not really avant garde, Hugh and Constance had told him that this was a contradiction in terms, but they had both been curious to meet them. Gerard had not argued with them about the contradiction, because he never did argue, and he had known ever since he won his scholarship to Cambridge that some people’s minds were in a rut.

  The hall at Egerton Gardens was lit by one pale bulb, and on the table there was a note, which Finola read.

  ‘Carlotta’s cold has turned to critical pneumonia, and she’s staying in bed tomorrow,’ she said, putting it down again. ‘Do you think it can be a touch of flu? It’s rather late in the year. Perhaps I’d better go up and see her.’

  ‘No don’t,’ he said. ‘I expect she’s fast asleep.’

  ‘Got the cooking brandy with her, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Finola, who sometimes talked like Alice. She was relieved that he did not wish her to go and see the cook tonight; she always took notice of his wishes. ‘And she says she’s done some macaroni thing we can heat up tomorrow, so she can’t be all that bad. Gerard,’ she said, and hesitated, ‘you said that about Alice, but I do wish sometimes, myself, she wouldn’t talk about Constance like that, in front of you. She’s always been so …’

  ‘I like it,’ he said. ‘I like the contrast –’ he thought, in a way which was usual with him, that this was a stupid way of expressing himself – ‘I don’t believe either of them is really malicious. My mother can be a little uncharitable, but …’ He added: ‘I’m beginning to think my mother may have said something really to hurt Alice last time.’ The two women had not met for eighteen months. ‘I don’t mean her usual sort of talk about her way of life.’