“Aha.”
“Oh, for God’s sake don’t say Aha as if you understood everything. You don’t understand anything about marriage. I thought I was happy. Then I found out what happiness could mean. For me it meant being less than myself and less than a woman. Do you know what the Feminist League says: ‘A happy wife is a strike-breaker in the fight for female equality’.
“Do they say that? But what kind of happiness are you talking about? It isn’t a simple thing, Maria.”
“It began to seem to me that happiness was what Kater Murr says it is—a cosy place where one is perfectly content with oneself.”
“Well, for a lot of people Kater Murr is dead right. But not for you. And, as if you didn’t know it, not right for Arthur. You underestimate your husband, Maria.”
“Do I? Yes, and he underestimates me! It’s all that bloody money! It cuts me off from everything I have been, and everything I want to be.”
“Which is—?”
“I want to be Maria, whoever Maria is! But I won’t find out in this marriage I’m in now, because everywhere I turn I’m not Maria; I’m Mrs. Arthur Cornish, the very rich bluestocking whose stockings are getting to be a faded puce because all she does is be a slave to that bloody Cornish Foundation, and dish out money to people who want to do a thousand and one things that don’t interest me at all. I’ve given up everything to that Foundation, and I’ve come to the end!”
“Oh, not quite the end, I hope. What about you and Arthur?”
“Arthur’s getting very strange. He’s so God-damned considerate about everything.”
“And now you know why.”
“The mumps thing? Why did it have to be mumps? Such a silly thing, and then it turns out to have a nasty side.”
“Well, call it bilateral orchitis if you want a fancy label. Personally I prefer mumps, because it also means being melancholy, and out of sorts, and plagued by dissatisfaction. Which is what ails Arthur. He’s thoroughly dissatisfied with himself, and being the man he is he thinks he ought to be especially nice to you because you’re married to such a dud. He thinks he’s a wimp and a nerd, and he’s sorry for you. He knows that as he gets older his balls are going to shrivel up, and that won’t be the least bit funny for him. He was afraid he’d lose you, and right now he thinks he’s lost you indeed. Has he?”
“How can you ask?”
“How can I not ask? Obviously you’ve been sleeping with somebody who doesn’t have Arthur’s trouble, and you’ve been so indiscreet as to get pregnant.”
“God, Simon, I think I hate you! You talk exactly like a man!”
“Well—I am a man. And as you obviously think there is some special feminine side to this business, you had better tell me about it.”
“First of all, I haven’t been sleeping with anybody. Not a succession of sneaky betrayals. Just once. And I swear to you it seemed to be somebody I didn’t know; I have never had words with Powell that would have led to anything like that; I’m not really sure I like him. Only once, and it had to get me pregnant! Oh, what a joke! What an uproarious bit of mischief by the Rum Old Joker!”
“Tell me.”
“Yes, yes—’Tell me the old, old story,’ as you like to sing. But it wasn’t quite the old story you think. It was a much older story—a story that goes back through the centuries and probably through the aeons, from a time when women ceased to be sub-humans cringing at the back of the cave.”
“A mythical tale?”
“By God, yes! A mythical tale. Like a god descending on a mortal woman. Do you remember one night when Powell was talking about the plot for this opera, and he was describing how Morgan Le Fay appears two or three times in disguise, and makes mischief?”
“Yes. We had a talk about stage disguise.”
“Arthur said that it had always troubled him in the old plays when somebody puts on a cloak and hat and is accepted by the others as somebody he isn’t. Disguise is impossible, he said. You recognize people by their walk, the way they hold their heads, by a thousand things that we aren’t aware of. How do you disguise your back, he said; none of us can see our backs, but everybody else does, and when you see somebody from the back you may know them much more readily than if you see them face to face. Do you remember what Powell said?”
“Something about people wishing to be deceived?”
“Yes. That you will the deception, just as you will your own deception when you watch a conjuror. He said he had once taken part in a show put on in an asylum for the insane, where a very clever conjuror worked like a dog, and didn’t get any applause whatever. Why? Because the insane were not his partners in his deceits. For them a rabbit might just as well come out of an empty hat as not. But the sane, the doctors and nurses, who were living and watching in the same world of assumptions as the conjuror, were delighted. And it was the same with disguise. On the stage, people accepted somebody in a very transparent disguise because the real reception was brought about by their own will. Show Lancelot and Guenevere a witch, and they accept her as a witch because their situation makes a witch much more acceptable than Morgan Le Fay in a ragged cloak.”
“Yes, I remember. I thought it rather a thin argument at the time.”
“But don’t you remember what he said afterward? We are deceived because we will our own deception. It is somehow necessary to us. It is an aspect of fate.”
“I think I remember. Powell talks a lot of fascinating Celtic moonshine, doesn’t he?”
“You are cynical about Powell because you are jealous of his astonishing powers of persuasion. And if you are in that mood, there’s no point in my going on.”
“Yes, do go on. I’ll promise to suspend my disbelief in Geraint Powell’s ideas.”
“You’d better. Now listen very carefully. About two months ago Powell came to see me about some business. You know he is making contracts with singers and stage people, and he is very scrupulous about showing them to Arthur, or me when Arthur’s away, before he closes his arrangement with the artist. Arthur was away on this particular evening. In Montreal, as he often is, and I didn’t know just when he might come back. That evening, late, or early the next morning. Powell and I worked late, and then we went to bed.”
“Had nothing led up to that?”
“Oh, I don’t mean we went to bed together. Powell often uses a room in our apartment when he is in town late, then he gets up early and drives off to Stratford before breakfast. It’s an established thing, and very convenient for him.”
“So Wally Crottel seemed to think.”
“To hell with Wally Crottel. So—off I went to bed and to sleep, and about two o’clock Arthur came into the room and got into bed with me.”
“Not unusual, I suppose.”
“Not entirely usual, either. Since his illness, Arthur has a room of his own, where he usually sleeps, but of course he comes into my room when it’s sex, you see. So I wasn’t surprised.”
“And it was Arthur?”
“Who else would it be? And it was wearing Arthur’s dressing-gown. You know the one. I gave it to him soon after we were married, and I had it made in King Arthur’s colours and with King Arthur’s device: a green dragon, crowned in red, on a gold shield. You couldn’t mistake it. I could feel the embroidered dragon on the back. He slipped into my bed, opened the dressing-gown, and there we were.”
“All very much according to Hoyle.”
“Yes.”
“Maria, I don’t believe a word of it.”
“But I did. Or a very important part of me did. I took him as Arthur.”
“And did he take you as Arthur?”
“That’s what’s so hard to explain. When a man comes into your very dark room, and you can feel your husband’s dressing-gown that you know so well, and he takes you so wonderfully that all the doubt and dissatisfaction of weeks past melt away, do you ask him to identify himself?”
“He didn’t speak?”