May We Borrow Your Husband & Other Comedies of the Sexual Life

  ‘I was wondering,’ Sally said, ‘what happened to the poor pig?’

  ‘They almost certainly had it for dinner,’ Jerome said happily and kissed the dear child again.

  THE INVISIBLE JAPANESE GENTLEMEN

  * * *

  THERE were eight Japanese gentlemen having a fish dinner at Bentley’s. They spoke to each other rarely in their incomprehensible tongue, but always with a courteous smile and often with a small bow. All but one of them wore glasses. Sometimes the pretty girl who sat in the window beyond gave them a passing glance, but her own problem seemed too serious for her to pay real attention to anyone in the world except herself and her companion.

  She had thin blonde hair and her face was pretty and petite in a Regency way, oval like a miniature, though she had a harsh way of speaking – perhaps the accent of the school, Roedean or Cheltenham Ladies’ College, which she had not long ago left. She wore a man’s signet-ring on her engagement finger, and as I sat down at my table, with the Japanese gentlemen between us, she said, ‘So you see we could marry next week.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Her companion appeared a little distraught. He refilled their glasses with Chablis and said, ‘Of course, but Mother . . .’ I missed some of the conversation then, because the eldest Japanese gentleman leant across the table, with a smile and a little bow, and uttered a whole paragraph like the mutter from an aviary, while everyone bent towards him and smiled and listened, and I couldn’t help attending to him myself.

  The girl’s fiancé resembled her physically. I could see them as two miniatures hanging side by side on white wood panels. He should have been a young officer in Nelson’s navy in the days when a certain weakness and sensitivity were no bar to promotion.

  She said, ‘They are giving me an advance of five hundred pounds, and they’ve sold the paperback rights already.’ The hard commercial declaration came as a shock to me; it was a shock too that she was one of my own profession. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. She deserved better of life.

  He said, ‘But my uncle . . .’

  ‘You know you don’t get on with him. This way we shall be quite independent.’

  ‘You will be independent,’ he said grudgingly.

  ‘The wine-trade wouldn’t really suit you, would it? I spoke to my publisher about you and there’s a very good chance . . . if you began with some reading . . .’

  ‘But I don’t know a thing about books.’

  ‘I would help you at the start.’

  ‘My mother says that writing is a good crutch . . .’

  ‘Five hundred pounds and half the paperback rights is a pretty solid crutch,’ she said.

  ‘This Chablis is good, isn’t it?’

  ‘I daresay.’

  I began to change my opinion of him – he had not the Nelson touch. He was doomed to defeat. She came alongside and raked him fore and aft. ‘Do you know what Mr Dwight said?’

  ‘Who’s Dwight?’

  ‘Darling, you don’t listen, do you? My publisher. He said he hadn’t read a first novel in the last ten years which showed such powers of observation.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said sadly, ‘wonderful.’

  ‘Only he wants me to change the title.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He doesn’t like The Ever-Rolling Stream. He wants to call it The Chelsea Set.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I agreed. I do think that with a first novel one should try to keep one’s publisher happy. Especially when, really, he’s going to pay for our marriage, isn’t he?’

  ‘I see what you mean.’ Absent-mindedly he stirred his Chablis with a fork – perhaps before the engagement he had always bought champagne. The Japanese gentlemen had finished their fish and with very little English but with elaborate courtesy they were ordering from the middle-aged waitress a fresh fruit-salad. The girl looked at them, and then she looked at me, but I think she saw only the future. I wanted very much to warn her against any future based on a first novel called The Chelsea Set. I was on the side of his mother. It was a humiliating thought, but I was probably about her mother’s age.

  I wanted to say to her, Are you certain your publisher is telling you the truth? Publishers are human. They may sometimes exaggerate the virtues of the young and the pretty. Will The Chelsea Set be read in five years? Are you prepared for the years of effort, ‘the long defeat of doing nothing well’? As the years pass writing will not become any easier, the daily effort will grow harder to endure, those ‘powers of observation’ will become enfeebled; you will be judged, when you reach your forties, by performance and not by promise.

  ‘My next novel is going to be about St Tropez.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d ever been there.’

  ‘I haven’t. A fresh eye’s terribly important. I thought we might settle down there for six months.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be much left of the advance by that time.’

  ‘The advance is only an advance. I get fifteen per cent after five thousand copies and twenty per cent after ten. And of course another advance will be due, darling, when the next book’s finished. A bigger one if The Chelsea Set sells well.’

  ‘Suppose it doesn’t.’

  ‘Mr Dwight says it will. He ought to know.’

  ‘My uncle would start me at twelve hundred.’

  ‘But, darling, how could you come then to St Tropez?’

  ‘Perhaps we’d do better to marry when you come back.’

  She said harshly, ‘I mightn’t come back if The Chelsea Set sells enough.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She looked at me and the party of Japanese gentlemen. She finished her wine. She said, ‘Is this a quarrel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve got the title for the next book – The Azure Blue.’

  ‘I thought azure was blue.’

  She looked at him with disappointment. ‘You don’t really want to be married to a novelist, do you?’

  ‘You aren’t one yet.’

  ‘I was born one – Mr Dwight says. My powers of observation . . .’

  ‘Yes. You told me that, but, dear, couldn’t you observe a bit nearer home? Here in London.’

  ‘I’ve done that in The Chelsea Set. I don’t want to repeat myself.’

  The bill had been lying beside them for some time now. He took out his wallet to pay, but she snatched the paper out of his reach. She said, ‘This is my celebration.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘The Chelsea Set, of course. Darling, you’re awfully decorative, but sometimes – well, you simply don’t connect.’

  ‘I’d rather . . . if you don’t mind . . .’

  ‘No, darling, this is on me. And Mr Dwight, of course.’ He submitted just as two of the Japanese gentleman gave tongue simultaneously, then stopped abruptly and bowed to each other, as though they were blocked in a doorway.

  I had thought the two young people matching miniatures, but what a contrast in fact there was. The same type of prettiness could contain weakness and strength. Her Regency counterpart, I suppose, would have borne a dozen children without the aid of anaesthetics, while he would have fallen an easy victim to the first dark eyes in Naples. Would there one day be a dozen books on her shelf? They have to be born without an anaesthetic too. I found myself hoping that The Chelsea Set would prove to be a disaster and that eventually she would take up photographic modelling while he established himself solidly in the wine-trade in St James’s. I didn’t like to think of her as the Mrs Humphrey Ward of her generation – not that I would live so long. Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears. I wondered to which publishing firm Dwight belonged. I could imagine the blurb he would have already written about her abrasive powers of observation. There would be a photo, if he was wise, on the back of the jacket, for reviewers, as well as publishers, are human, and she didn’t look like Mrs Humphrey Ward.

  I could hear them talking while they found their coats at the back of the restau
rant. He said, ‘I wonder what all those Japanese are doing here?’

  ‘Japanese?’ she said. ‘What Japanese, darling? Sometimes you are so evasive I think you don’t want to marry me at all.’

  AWFUL WHEN YOU THINK OF IT

  * * *

  WHEN the baby looked up at me from its wicker basket and winked – on the opposite seat somewhere between Reading and Slough – I became uneasy. It was as if he had discovered my secret interest.

  It is awful how little we change. So often an old acquaintance, whom one has not seen for forty years when he occupied the neighbouring chopped and inky desk, detains one in the street with his unwelcome memory. Even as a baby we carry the future with us. Clothes cannot change us, the clothes are the uniform of our character, and our character changes as little as the shape of the nose and the expression of the eyes.

  It has always been my hobby in railway trains to visualize in a baby’s face the man he is to become – the bar-lounger, the gadabout, the frequenter of fashionable weddings; you need only supply the cloth cap, the grey topper, the uniform of the sad, smug or hilarious future. But I have always felt a certain contempt for the babies I have studied with such superior wisdom (they little know), and it was a shock last week when one of the brood not only detected me in the act of observation but returned that knowing signal, as if he shared my knowledge of what the years would make of him.

  He had been momentarily left alone by his young mother on the seat opposite. She had smiled towards me with a tacit understanding that I would look after her baby for a few moments. What danger after all could happen to it? (Perhaps she was less certain of his sex than I was. She knew the shape under the nappies, of course, but shapes can deceive: parts alter, operations are performed.) She could not see what I had seen – the tilted bowler and the umbrella over the arm. (No arm was yet apparent under the coverlet printed with pink rabbits.)

  When she was safely out of the carriage I bent towards the basket and asked him a question. I had never before carried my researches quite so far.

  ‘What’s yours?’ I said.

  He blew a thick white bubble, brown at the edges. There could be no doubt at all that he was saying, ‘A pint of the best bitter.’

  ‘Haven’t seen you lately – you know – in the old place,’ I said.

  He gave a quick smile, passing it off, then he winked again. You couldn’t doubt that he was saying, ‘The other half?’

  I blew a bubble in my turn – we spoke the same language.

  Very slightly he turned his head to one side. He didn’t want anybody to hear what he was going to say now.

  ‘You’ve got a tip?’ I asked.

  Don’t mistake my meaning. It was not racing information I wanted. Of course I could not see his waist under all those pink-rabbit wrappings, but I knew perfectly well that he wore a double-breasted waistcoat and had nothing to do with the tracks. I said very rapidly because his mother might return at any moment, ‘My brokers are Druce, Davis and Burrows.’

  He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes and a little line of spittle began to form at the corner of his mouth. I said, ‘Oh, I know they’re not all that good. But at the moment they are recommending Stores.’

  He gave a high wail of pain – you could have mistaken the cause for wind, but I knew better. In his club they didn’t have to serve dill water. I said, ‘I don’t agree, mind you,’ and he stopped crying and blew a bubble – a little tough white one which lingered on his lip.

  I caught his meaning at once. ‘My round,’ I said. ‘Time for a short?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Scotch?’ I know few people will believe me, but he raised his head an inch or two and gazed unmistakably at my watch.

  ‘A bit early?’ I said. ‘Pink gin?’

  I didn’t have to wait for his reply. ‘Make them large ones,’ I said to the imaginary barman.

  He spat at me, so I added, ‘Throw away the pink.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘here’s to you. Happy future,’ and we smiled at each other, well content.

  ‘I don’t know what you would advise,’ I said, ‘but surely Tobaccos are about as low as they will go. When you think Imps were a cool 80/ – in the early Thirties and now you can pick them up for under 60/ –. . . . This cancer scare can’t go on. People have got to have their fun.’

  At the word fun he winked again, looked secretively around, and I realized that perhaps I had been on the wrong track. It was not after all the state of the markets he had been so ready to talk about.

  ‘I heard a damn good one yesterday,’ I said. ‘A man got into a tube train, and there was a pretty girl with one stocking coming down . . .’

  He yawned and closed his eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I thought it was new. You tell me one.’

  And do you know that damned baby was quite ready to oblige? But he belonged to the school who find their own jokes funny and when he tried to speak, he could only laugh. He couldn’t get his story out for laughter. He laughed and winked and laughed again – what a good story it must have been. I could have dined out for weeks on the strength of it. His limbs twitched in the basket; he even tried to get his hands free from the pink rabbits, and then the laughter died. I could almost hear him saying, ‘Tell you later, old man.’

  His mother opened the door of the compartment. She said, ‘You’ve been amusing baby. How kind of you. Are you fond of babies?’ And she gave me such a look – the love-wrinkles forming round the mouth and eyes – that I was tempted to reply with the warmth and hypocrisy required, but then I met the baby’s hard relentless gaze.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I’m not. Not really,’ I drooled on, losing all my chances before that blue and pebbly stare. ‘You know how it is . . . never had one of my own . . . I’m fond of fishes though . . .’

  I suppose in a way I got my reward. The baby blew a whole succession of bubbles. He was satisfied; after all a chap shouldn’t make passes at another chap’s mother, especially if he belongs to the same club – for suddenly I knew inevitably to what club he would belong in twenty-five years’ time, ‘On me,’ he was obviously saying now. ‘Doubles all round.’ I could only hope that I would not live so long.

  DOCTOR CROMBIE

  * * *

  AN unfortunate circumstance in my life has just recalled to mind a certain Doctor Crombie and the conversations I used to hold with him when I was young. He was the school doctor until the eccentricity of his ideas became generally known. After he had ceased to attend the school the rest of his practice was soon reduced to a few old people, almost as eccentric as himself – there were, I remember, Colonel Parker, a British Israelite, Miss Warrender who kept twenty-five cats, and a man called Horace Turner who invented a system for turning the National Debt into a National Credit.

  Doctor Crombie lived all alone half a mile from the school in a red-brick villa in King’s Road. Luckily he possessed a small private income, for at the end his work had come to be entirely paperwork – long articles for the Lancet and the British Medical Journal which were never published. It was long before the days of television; otherwise a corner might have been found for him in some magazine programme, and his views would have reached a larger public than the random gossips of Bankstead – with who knows what result? – for he spoke with sincerity, and when I was young he certainly to me carried a measure of conviction.

  Our school, which had begun as a grammar school during the reign of Henry VIII, had, by the twentieth century, just edged its way into the Public Schools Year Book. There were many day-boys, of whom I was one, for Bankstead was only an hour from London by train, and in the days of the old London Midland and Scottish Railways there were frequent and rapid services for commuters. In a boarding-school where the boys are isolated for months at a time like prisoners on Dartmoor, Doctor Crombie’s views would have become known more slowly. By the time a boy went home for the holidays he would have forgotten any curious details, and the parents, dotted about En
gland in equal isolation, would have been unable to get together and check up on any unusual stories. It was different at Bankstead, where parents lived a community life and attended singsongs, but even here Doctor Crombie’s views had a long innings.

  The headmaster was a progressively minded man, and, when the boys emerged, at the age of thirteen, from the junior school, he arranged, with the consent of the parents, that Doctor Crombie should address them in small groups on the problems of personal hygiene and the dangers which lay ahead. I have only faint memories of the occasion, of the boys who sniggered, of the boys who blushed, of the boys who stared at the ground as though they had dropped something, but I remember vividly the explicit and plain-speaking Doctor Crombie, with his melancholy moustache, which remained blond from nicotine long after his head was grey, and his gold-rimmed spectacles – gold rims, like a pipe, always give me the impression of a rectitude I can never achieve. I understood very little of what he was saying, but I do remember later that I asked my parents what he meant by ‘playing with oneself’. Being an only child I was accustomed to play with myself. For example, in the case of my model railway, I was in turn driver, signalman and station-master, and I felt no need of an assistant.

  My mother said she had forgotten to speak to the cook and left us alone.

  ‘Doctor Crombie,’ I told my father, ‘says that it causes cancer.’

  ‘Cancer!’ my father exclaimed. ‘Are you sure he didn’t say insanity?’ (It was a great period for insanity: loss of vitality leading to nervous debility and nervous debility becoming melancholia and eventually melancholia becoming madness. For some reasons these effects were said to come before marriage and not after.)

  ‘He said cancer. An incurable disease, he said.’

  ‘Odd!’ my father remarked. He reassured me about playing trains, and Doctor Crombie’s theory went out of my head for some years. I don’t think my father can have mentioned it to anyone else except possibly my mother and that only as a joke. Cancer was as good a scare during puberty as madness – the standard of dishonesty among parents is a high one. They had themselves long ceased to believe in the threat of madness, but they used it as a convenience, and only after some years did they reach the conclusion that Doctor Crombie was a strictly honest man.