“If you want to flee, flee.” I said, as she reared and glared at me. “I’m a lone wolf, so it’s not in me to try and stop you. I have forty books under my belt — though I haven’t counted them lately, and because you might have fed some into the stove there could be more. We live in a smokeless zone, but that doesn’t stop you getting that unjustifiable glint of neglect in your eyes. In fact I’ve had so much published I was in line for a knighthood as a reward for my services to English literature, and for keeping people reading at home when they would have been on the streets rioting, burning and looting as a protest at being treated like infants by the media and government, but I made it known in no uncertain Anglo-Saxon terms that whoever thought I deserved one should stick it so far up their rear ends it would come out of their throats and choke them.”
Her features wobbled in torment at my cavalier dismissal of England’s greatest honour. “You never told me you’d been offered a knighthood. ‘Sir Gilbert Blaskin!’ It would have sounded wonderful. Oh, you fool!” She stamped her foot. “How could you have turned it down?”
“Well, I did, and I know you’ll never forgive me. You think I’d have changed my ways into a Doric column of obscene respectability by marrying you and making one more honest woman in the country. You would then have been called a lady, at least by other people.”
She screamed for me to stop. I was getting somewhere. She would never leave me, in case it made me happy. “Listen,” I said, “yesterday I worked hard. I filled three fountain pens in the morning, and by evening they were empty.”
I poured the last coffee into my cup before she could take it. It was cold, so with a gentlemanly gesture I passed it across. “I don’t like you,” she moaned.
“That’s a good start. Let’s get married, then we can have a divorce. I never play my cards right. I live so much in torment from you I sometimes feel tempted by The Suicide’s Handbook, which is always on my desk, but the last sentence says: ‘Pass this book manual on when you finished with it,’ and I don’t have the habit of giving books away. But why don’t you like me, darling? If you know the cause you know the cure.”
“It’s because you always talk such fiddlesticks. How could I know the cause of anything?”
Her indignation was so intense I was almost proud of her. “So you’re leaving me? Where do you intend to go? Will you light off in search of the Holy Grail? You’d be just the person to find it.”
I decided to say no more, but my silence was taken as only another way of making things worse. On holiday in the South Pacific a few years ago she had struck my head with a half coconut, which cut me so much she thought — as I did — that she had killed me. I sensed such a desire coming on her again, so attempted to divert her. “When I went out the day before yesterday,” I said, “I met Ursula Major in the Latitude Club, and we took rather a shine to each other.”
She paused in clearing the breakfast things. “I thought she was a lesbian?”
I stood away, in splendid isolation. “She was. We went back to her flat afterwards. You know me. I go where angels fear to tread: one foot in hell, the other in her bed.”
A cup spun at my head, missed, and fell to the carpet. At least it didn’t break. “You’re lying, you beast,” she shrieked. “And boasting, as well.”
“I only say such things to entertain you.” She sat down, worn out with bickering. Fortunately we only quarrelled every month or so. Had we done it more often we’d have been dead among the daffodils long ago. “You never show any curiosity about what goes in my head,” she said.
“That’s because all the twists and turns are so convoluted it’s only possible to make them plain by what I say to you. You never tell me, so I have to guess.”
“It takes all sorts to make a fool.”
“Only two,” I said. “I’m too interested in what you are going to say to be offended by whatever comes. The thing is you never learned joined-up thinking. Every time you come out with a quip like that I know it’s the end of a screed of thought you’d been struggling for hours to get out. If you’d let me hear all the preambles I’d know that you cared for me. I’m tired of that constipated stiff upper lip you put on most of the time. You know I love you, but you won’t let the fact through, and I’ll never know why.”
An icy tear gathered at the corner of a beautiful cornflower blue eye. “It’s because you don’t respect me, Gilbert. Nothing you say points to it.”
Let no one think I do not have self-control. It’s a quality I have treasured since the day I sucked the coloured paint off my rattle in the pram and didn’t cry when I got smacked for it by the nanny. Never a move was made without self-control ever since. I was, and am, always aware when the moment arrives for its use, because its limit stretches across my conscience like a line of barbed wire. My coolness in action was often commented on in the army, and consequently I came out of the fighting alive, as did most of my men. Self-control is the supreme moral quality of life (ask Epictetus) and if everyone showed enough of it the world would be a better place. But there’s always another side to the equation, in which one exercises self-control only so as to know when with effect, if not dignity, to lose it, and for a purpose however shameful. She backed away. “Don’t hit me!”
Astonishingly agile for a superbly buxom woman, who had been the captain of her hockey team at an excellent school, she missed the worst of a medium-powered slap across the cheek. “Never,” I said, “say that I don’t respect you, because to me that’s the vilest calumny. I love you, don’t I? Aren’t we made for each other? And if I love you it goes without saying I respect you. Haven’t I proved it by showing I can’t tolerate you saying I don’t respect you?” I gave her another, to emphasize my distress. “Of course I respect you. Don’t I know everything you’re thinking, and tailor my responses accordingly? If that’s not respect — as well as kindness, consideration, and devoted attention — I don’t know what is. I love and respect every living fibre of you, and the only thanks I get is for you to tell me so callously that you’re leaving. If you go, how many years will have to pass before I can build up the same intensity of relationship with someone else?” I lit another cigar, and considerately waved the smoke away from her. “If you take up with another man — or with a woman — you’ll have to go through it all again as well.”
She stopped crying. “Oh, Gilbert, I don’t know what to think.”
“You only say that to torment me. How do you imagine anybody would put up with you if you never knew what to think?”
“I always try, you know I do.”
A wicked thought came to me. “In that case, take your knickers off.”
She bridled, and stepped back. “I won’t.”
“And unclip your suspenders.”
“Certainly not.”
“And liberate your gorgeous breasts.”
“Never.”
“You see,” I said, triumphantly, “when you say no so quickly it shows you’re not thinking. You glory in the fact that you can’t, when you should be ashamed. Come on, take off your liberty bodice. Make stepping stones to the bedroom with your underwear so that I can tread my way to bliss.” I do believe she was about to, when the infernal door bell rang. “Who can that be?” I snarled.
“It might be Mr Dukes. He said he’d take me to lunch today.”
“So you weren’t going to leave me?”
“No,” she said, with a malicious haircrack smile, “but when I do I certainly won’t tell you.”
“That will spare my feelings at least. But isn’t it a little early for lunch?”
The bell jangled again. “He doesn’t have any conception of time,” she said.
“If it is him, be sure to take down all he says on the hand-held tape recorder. He’s in with the racketeers, so I’ll have some realistic dialogue for my work.”