The whisky was affecting the way she put things. An hour ago she wouldn’t have said ‘wanting to you-know-what’ or ‘short of the ready’. It was odd that she had an awareness in this direction and yet could not hear the twang in her voice which instantly gave her away.
‘But you don’t love your husband.’
‘I respect him. It’s only that I hate having to you-know-what with him. I really do hate that. I’ve never actually loved him.’
He regretted saying she didn’t love her husband: the remark had slipped out, and it was regrettable because it involved him in the conversation in a way he didn’t wish to be.
‘Maybe things will work out better when you get back.’
‘I know what I’m going back to.’ She paused, searching for his eyes with hers. ‘I’ll never till I die forget Isfahan.’
‘It’s very beautiful.’
‘I’ll never forget the Chaharbagh Tours, or Hafiz. I’ll never forget that place you brought me to. Or the Shah Abbas Hotel.’
‘I think it’s time I saw you back to your own hotel.’
‘I could sit in this bar for ever.’
‘I’m afraid I’m not at all one for night-life.’
‘I shall visualize you when I’m back in Bombay. I shall think of you in your village, with your wife, happy in England. I shall think of you working at your architectural plans. I shall often wonder about you travelling alone because your wife doesn’t care for it.’
‘I hope it’s better in Bombay. Sometimes things are, when you least expect them to be.’
‘It’s been like a tonic. You’ve made me very happy.’
‘It’s kind of you to say that.’
‘There’s much that’s unsaid between us. Will you remember me?’
‘Oh yes, of course.’
Reluctantly, she drank the dregs of her whisky. She took her medicine from her handbag and poured a little into the glass and drank that, too. It helped the tickle in her throat, she said. She always had a tickle when the wretched cough came.
‘Shall we walk back?’
They left the bar. She clung to him again, walking very slowly between the mosaiced columns. All the way back to the Old Atlantic Hotel she talked about the evening they had spent and how delightful it had been. Not for the world would she have missed Isfahan, she repeated several times.
When they said goodbye she kissed his cheek. Her beautiful eyes swallowed him up, and for a moment he had a feeling that her eyes were the real thing about her, reflecting her as she should be.
He woke at half past two and could not sleep. Dawn was already beginning to break. He lay there, watching the light increase in the gap he’d left between the curtains so that there’d be fresh air in the room. Another day had passed: he went through it piece by piece, from his early-morning walk to the moment when he’d put his green pyjamas on and got into bed. It was a regular night-time exercise with him. He closed his eyes, remembering in detail.
He turned again into the offices of Chaharbagh Tours and was told by Hafiz to go to the upstairs office. He saw her sitting there writing to her mother, and heard her voice asking him if he was going on the tour. He saw again the sunburnt faces of the German couple and the wholesome faces of the American girls, and faces in the French party. He went again on his afternoon walk, and after that there was his bath. She came towards him in the bazaar, with her dark glasses and her small purchases. There was her story as she had told it.
For his part, he had told her nothing. He had agreed with her novelette picture of him, living in a Home Counties village, a well-to-do architect married to a wife who gardened. Architects had become as romantic as doctors, there’d been no reason to disillusion her. She would for ever imagine him travelling to exotic places, on his own because he enjoyed it, because his wife was a home bird.
Why could he not have told her? Why could he not have exchanged one story for another? She had made a mess of things and did not seek to hide it. Life had let her down, she’d let herself down. Ridiculously, she gave elocution lessons to Indian women and did not see it as ridiculous. She had told him her secret, and he knew it was true that he shared it only with her mother and herself.
The hours went by. He should be lying with her in this bed, the size of a dance-floor. In the dawn he should be staring into her sumptuous eyes, in love with the mystery there. He should be telling her and asking for her sympathy, as she had asked for his. He should be telling her that he had walked into a room, not in a Home Counties village, but in harsh, ugly Hampstead, to find his second wife, as once he had found his first, in his bed with another man. He should in humility have asked her why it was that he was naturally a cuckold, why two women of different temperaments and characters had been inspired to have lovers at his expense. He should be telling her, with the warmth of her body warming his, that his second wife had confessed to greater sexual pleasure when she remembered that she was deceiving him.
It was a story no better than hers, certainly as unpleasant. Yet he hadn’t had the courage to tell it because it cast him in a certain light. He travelled easily, moving over surfaces and revealing only surfaces himself. He was acceptable as a stranger: in two marriages he had not been forgiven for turning out to be different from what he seemed. To be a cuckold once was the luck of the game, but his double cuckoldry had a whiff of revenge about it. In all humility he might have asked her about that.
At half past four he stood by the window, looking out at the empty street below. She would be on her way to the bus station, to catch the five o’clock bus to Teheran. He could dress, he could even shave and still be there in time. He could pay, on her behalf, the extra air fare that would accrue. He could tell her his story and they could spend a few days. They could go together to Shiraz, city of wine and roses and nightingales.
He stood by the window, watching nothing happening in the street, knowing that if he stood there for ever he wouldn’t find the courage. She had met a sympathetic man, more marvellous to her than all the marvels of Isfahan. She would carry that memory to the bungalow in Bombay, knowing nothing about a pettiness which brought out cruelty in people. And he would remember a woman who possessed, deep beneath her unprepossessing surface, the distinction that her eyes mysteriously claimed for her. In different circumstances, with a less unfortunate story to tell, it would have emerged. But in the early morning there was another truth, too. He was the stuff of fantasy. She had quality, he had none.
Angels at the Ritz
The game was played when the party, whichever party it happened to be, had thinned out. Those who stayed on beyond a certain point – beyond, usually, about one o’clock – knew that the game was on the cards and in fact had stayed for that reason. Often, as one o’clock approached, there were marital disagreements about whether or not to go home.
The game of swapping wives and husbands, with chance rather than choice dictating the formations, had been practised in this outer suburb since the mid-s. The swinging wives and husbands of that time were now passing into the first years of elderliness, but their party game continued. In the outer suburb it was most popular when the early struggles of marriage were over, after children had been born and were established at school, when there were signs of marital wilting that gin and tonic did not cure.
‘I think it’s awfully silly,’ Polly Dillard pronounced, addressing her husband on the evening of the Ryders’ party.
Her husband, whose first name was Gavin, pointed out that they’d known for years that the practice was prevalent at Saturday-night parties in the outer suburb. There’d been, he reminded her, the moment at the Meacocks’ when they’d realized they’d stayed too late, when the remaining men threw their car-keys on to the Meacocks’ carpet and Sylvia Meacock began to tie scarves over the eyes of the wives.