FOUR
TOM REMEMBERED CHARLOTTE saying — during dinner table chitchat at her house in the country, on a night when hail was driving almost horizontally against the windows, and Charlotte was waiting for a power cut so that she could set out candles and let them sample the lives of workers and peasants of seventy years ago — that a man who left his wife, and took up with a girl young enough to be his daughter, would soon repeat the mistakes which had destroyed the previous liaison.
Henry agreed. He had to. But Tom replied, pushing his cup forward for more coffee, that making the same irreparable gaffes with a new spouse was more interesting than staying with a woman to whom there was no more of your bad side to show. In any case, some years must elapse before boredom or acrimony crippled the new union, and by that time you might be dead.
Another disadvantage of not enduring the first ordeal, Barbara Whissendine suggested, was that a man never really got to know himself, and there was surely some value in that.
Tom, under scrutiny, retorted — and he was of course backed up by Norman Bakewell in this — that even supposing there was no more for a man to discover (and he may even so be well aware of all that there was) to remain in one emotionally arid gridlock would nullify all that experience had taught him up to that point, rather than illuminate the mind in any way — or words to that effect, after the prose was honed up in Bakewell’s ever-working brain.
A third point, perhaps more perceptive, not to say provocative, was that the gadabout was incapable of reasoning along such lines. Tom threw this in free. He was a man of action, he went on, not a vegetable deadbeat languishing at his fireside, like Henry, who may, he thought, for all anybody could tell, be a deeply philosophical character, though the only effect was to keep him securely under Charlotte’s thumb, and what kind of philosophy was that?
Too much reflection was often more useless, and demoralising, than too little, and made action difficult if not impossible. Norman Bakewell, who was at his most acute when cogging into others’ thoughts, went on to comment that whatever move one makes, even if it does little good, or even if it exacerbates the situation, must be better than the abandoned marital state of ongoing bitterness and eternal inertia — he concluded, reaching for his glass and then becoming too drunk to come out with anything that was either sensible or readable.
‘To stay in one marriage for life under any conditions deadens a man,’ Tom said, riding roughshod through Charlotte’s silence, ‘and argues deadness even in a woman’ — a nod to Barbara and Emmy Brites, who were holding hands — ‘but a man who gets hitched two or three times may have done so in order to try and rectify genuine errors.’
Nearly everyone around the table chipped in at this point, Emmy Brites coming up with the barb that a man has to be diabolically flawed to marry a third or a fourth time, an inference which Tom absolutely disagreed with, considering himself the opposite of a failure in life.
‘Men are blest who marry often,’ he said, and stood up to say it. ‘Those who don’t try more than once could be said to lack energy or, let’s face it, money, or confidence, or the good fortune to pick ’em and the know-how to have them fall in love with him. Most men, like most women I suppose, whether due to love, loyalty, or the inanition brought about by the inborn ability to put up with ongoing turmoil, stay with the same partner for life.’
‘Don’t talk such rubbish.’ Charlotte filled his glass in the hope that he would get too drunk to speak, a mistake, because he swigged it off, looking at Emmy Brites and hoping, that since Norman sat boggle-eyed and out for the night, she would put his words if not into her present novel then plough them into the next. ‘Men who go from one woman to another must be more interesting and attractive than those who don’t because they can’t. Those who can’t look on those who can and do as amoral villains, or lucky dogs, according to the way they feel about their own marriage.’
Recalling such an evening did Tom little good as he sat by himself in the club with his bottle three-quarters empty. To say his fourth marriage was going badly was, as a negative exaggeration, the understatement of the decade. He was unable to understand why a man like himself, who knew so much about women, and loved them more than any other creatures in the world, couldn’t keep a marriage going for life (though on his own terms) and so give more time to his work.
The first try with Angela lasted seven years, and he justified its ending by saying he had never really loved her but had been trapped into marriage by her spiderish act of keeping him for too long at a distance. What held them together was at best infatuation rather than love, luckily broken on her taking umbrage — a real North Country set-to there — at his affair with Diana.
Calling for another bottle, he remembered that his love for Diana began with crashing sexual magnetism at one of dear old Charlotte’s lunch parties. What love didn’t start in a similar manner, he would like to know. Unhappily for both, his affair with Diana turned into something they mistook for love. In those heady days he prided himself that, like Bismarck, he was able to learn from other people’s mistakes, with the result that he never saw the big ones coming.
Unable to be apart from each other, in those dangerous weeks after Angela had gone, and when their affair seemed to be ending, he made the biggest blunder of his life and, as soon as the divorce came through, asked her to marry him.
Fireworks, he recalled, Catherine wheels and exploding rockets replaced the umbrella of nuptial starshells. Who would have realised that their allotted bliss had been used up already during their passionate affair? In little time at all they were unable to tolerate each other. They endured for a while through misplaced pride or obstinacy, so that after a year they were like siamese twins and couldn’t live without each other. Neither could they live with each other, which galled them so much that they could only sit back appalled and hope the other would leave first.
Because the other — whoever it was at some vindictive Jason and Medea moment — was unable to act due to the potency of the original infatuation, their sterile marriage went on for almost three years. Tom hoped to find her gone on getting back from the office. After he had left for work Diana prayed he wouldn’t come home again. Tom knew that if he returned exhausted from work to find she had flitted he would cut his throat. Diana realised that if he didn’t show up at the expected time she would hang herself.
Tom was aware that such a perfectly balanced emotional pendulum was diabolically organised by something more powerful than either, and might keep them close forever. Diana assumed that, though able to walk out at any moment, she couldn’t unless he went first.
The hour Tom felt most able to light off was between eleven o’clock and midnight, but by then he was too half seas over to crawl on hands and knees to the car. He could do nothing more than find the route to bed, though mumbling his absolute determination to scarper at the first blink of dawn. He would be at Heathrow in no time, and a few hours later Diana would get a telephone call from as far off as Lisbon or St Petersburg. Before being released on his alcoholic decline into sleep he would even pencil a reminder and leave it under the alarm clock on the bedside table, telling himself: ‘Leave her definitely today,’ but on waking with a fuddled mind, and hollow for breakfast, his only thought was to eat and get away early for work.
He surmised that such a marriage must have been brewed up in Antarctica, while Diana placed the destructively spewing volcano of Krakatoa at the geographical centre. The fact of their mismatch was all they could agree on, though to say so was unnecessary. Foreseeing far more anguish if they separated, it was only possible to stay together as if observing someone else’s marriage, while realising too late that they were looking in on their own, and were humiliatingly bound by it. Whatever emotional profit there was in being taken beyond the limits of a tolerable existence, which someone like Norman Bakewell might have seen as a positive advantage for his writing, was not enjoyed by either.