I thought he was stupid—if he were a woman, I mean. And then I was so bored, so bored, so bored. Then he felt my boredom and decided to reclaim me. So he stood up and said: Oh well, I suppose I’d better be getting home to 16 Plane Avenue, or whatever it is. Expecting me to say, Oh no, I can’t bear you to leave. You know, the poor married man, bound to wife and kiddies. They all do it. Please be sorry for me, I have to get home to 16 Plane Avenue and the dreary labour-saving house in the suburbs. He said it once. He said it three times—just as if he didn’t live there, weren’t married to her, as if it had nothing to do with him. The little house at 16 Plane Avenue and the missus.’
‘As a matter of accuracy, a bloody great mansion with two maids and three cars at Richmond.’
‘You must admit he radiates an atmosphere of the suburbs. Odd. But they all do—I mean those tycoons, they all did. One could positively see the labour-saving devices and the kiddies all in their slumber-wear, coming down to kiss daddy good night. Bloody complacent swine they all are.’
‘You are talking like a whore,’ said Molly; then looked conscious, smiling, because she was surprised she had used the word.
‘Oddly enough it’s only by the greatest effort of will I don’t feel like one. They put so much effort—oh unconsciously, of course, and that’s where they win, every time, into making one feel it. Well. Anyway. I said Good night, Richard, I’m so sleepy, and thank you so much for showing me all that high life. He stood there wondering if he shouldn’t say, Oh dear, I’ve got to go home to my dreary wife, for the fourth time. He was wondering why that unimaginative woman Anna was so unsympathetic to him. Then I could see him thinking, Of course, she’s nothing but an intellectual, what a pity I didn’t take one of my other girls. So then I waited—you know, for that moment when they have to pay one back? He said: Anna, you should take more care of yourself, you’re looking ten years older than you should, you are getting positively wizened. So I said, But Richard, if I’d said to you, Oh yes, do come into bed, at this very moment you’d be saying how beautiful I was. Surely the truth lies somewhere in between?…’
Molly was holding a cushion to her breasts, and hugging it and laughing.
‘So he said: But Anna, when you invited me up to coffee you surely must have known what it meant. I’m a very virile man, he said, and I either have a relationship with a woman or I don’t. So then I got tired of him, and said, Oh do go away, Richard, you’re an awful bore…so you can understand that there were bound to be—is the word I’m looking for, tensions? between me and Richard today.’
Molly stopped laughing and said: ‘All the same, you and Richard, you must be mad.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna, completely serious. ‘Yes, Molly, I think I’ve been not far off it.’
But at this Molly got up and said quickly: ‘I’m going to make lunch.’ The look she gave Anna was guilty and contrite. Anna got up too, and said: ‘Then I’ll come into the kitchen for a moment.’
‘You can tell me the gossip.’
‘Ohhh,’ said Anna yawning, very casual. ‘Come to think of it, what can I tell you that’s new? Everything’s the same. But exactly.’
‘In a year? The Twentieth Congress. Hungary. Suez. And doubtless the natural progression of the human heart from one thing to another? No change?’
The small kitchen was white, crammed with order, glistening from the surfaces of ranked coloured cups, plates, dishes; and from drops of steam condensing on the walls and ceiling. The windows were misted. The oven seemed to leap and heave with the energy of the heat inside it. Molly flung up the window and a hot smell of roasting meat rushed out over damp roofs and soiled back yards, as a waiting ball of sunlight leaped neatly over the sill and curled itself on the floor.
‘England,’ said Molly. ‘England. Coming back this time was worse than usual. I felt the energy going out of me even on the boat. I walked in to the shops yesterday and I looked at the nice, decent faces, everyone so kind, and so decent and so bloody dull.’ She stared briefly out of the window, and then determinedly turned her back on it.
‘We’d better accept the fact that we and everybody we know’s likely to spend their lives grumbling about England. We are living in it, however.’
‘I’m going to leave again soon. I’d go tomorrow if it wasn’t for Tommy. Yesterday I was down rehearsing at the theatre. Every man in the cast is a queer but one, and he’s sixteen. So what am I doing here? All the time I was away, everything came naturally, the men treat you like women, you feel good, I never remembered my age, I never thought about sex. I had a couple of nice gay affairs, nothing tormented, everything easy. But as soon as you set foot here, you have to tighten your belt, and remember, Now be careful, these men are Englishmen. Except for the rare exception. And you get all self-conscious and sex-conscious. How can a country so full of screwed up people be any good?’
‘You’ll have settled down in a week or two.’
‘I don’t want to settle down. I can feel resignation creeping up already. And this house. It ought to be painted again. I simply don’t want to start—painting and putting up curtains. Why is everything such hard work here? It isn’t in Europe. One sleeps a couple of hours a night and is happy. Here, one sleeps and makes an effort…’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Anna laughing. ‘Well, I’m sure we’ll be making the same speech to each other for years, every time we come back from somewhere.’
The house shook as a train went past, close, underground. ‘And you ought to do something about that ceiling,’ added Anna, looking up at it. The house, laid open by a bomb towards the end of the war, had stood empty for two years, receiving wind and rain through all its rooms. It had been patched up again. When the trains passed, grains of substance could be heard trickling behind clean surfaces of paint. The ceiling had a crack across it.
‘Oh hell,’ said Molly. ‘I can’t face it. But I suppose I shall. Why is it, it’s only in this country everybody one knows seems to put a good face on things, everyone is bravely carrying a burden.’ Tears were smudging her eyes, and she blinked them away and turned back to her oven.
‘Because this is the country we know. The other countries are the places we don’t think in.’
‘That’s not altogether true and you know it. Well. You’d better be quick with the news. I’m going to serve lunch in a minute.’ It was now Molly’s turn to exude an atmosphere of being alone, of not having been met. Her hands, pathetic and stoical, reproached Anna. As for Anna she was thinking: If I join in now, in a what’s-wrong-with-men session, then I won’t go home, I’ll stay for lunch and all afternoon, and Molly and I will feel warm and friendly, all barriers gone. And when we part, there’ll be a sudden resentment, a rancour—because after all, our real loyalties are always to men, and not to women…Anna nearly sat down, ready to submerge herself. But she did not. She thought: I want to be done with it all, finished with the men vs women business, all the complaints and the reproaches and the betrayals. Besides, it’s dishonest. We’ve chosen to live a certain way, knowing the penalties, or if we didn’t we know now, so why whine and complain…and besides, if I’m not careful, Molly and I will descend into a kind of twin old-maidhood, where we sit around saying to each other, Do you remember how that man, what-was-his-name said that insensitive thing, it must have been in 1947…
‘Well, let’s have it,’ said Molly, very brisk, to Anna, who had stood silent for some time now.
‘Yes. You don’t want to hear about the comrades, I take it?’
‘In France and Italy the intellectuals talk day and night about the Twentieth Congress and Hungary, the perspectives of and the lessons of and mistakes to be learned from.’
‘In that case, since it’s the same here, though thank God people are getting bored with it, I’ll skip it.’
‘Good.’
‘But I think I’ll mention three of the comrades—oh, only in passing,’ said Anna hastily,