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

  I had just left school by that time and I had not yet gone up to the university; Doctor Crombie’s head was quite white by then, though his moustache stayed blond. We had become close friends, for we both liked observing trains, and sometimes on a summer’s day we took a picnic-lunch and sat on the green mound of Bankstead Castle from which we could watch the line and see below it the canal with the bright-painted barges drawn by slow horses in the direction of Birmingham. We drank ginger-beer out of stone bottles and ate ham sandwiches while Doctor Crombie studied Bradshaw. When I want an image for innocence I think of those afternoons.

  But the peace of the afternoon I am remembering now was disturbed. An immense goods-train of coal-waggons went by us – I counted sixty-three, which approached our record, but when I asked for his confirmation, Doctor Crombie had inexplicably forgotten to count.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘The school has asked me to resign,’ he said, and he took off the gold-rimmed glasses and wiped them.

  ‘Good heavens! Why?’

  ‘The secrets of the consulting-room, my dear boy, are one-sided,’ he said. ‘The patient, though not the doctor, is at liberty to tell everything.’

  A week later I learnt a little of what had happened. The story had spread rapidly from parent to parent, for this was not something which concerned small boys – this concerned all of them. Perhaps there was even an element of fear in the talk – fear that Doctor Crombie might be right. Incredible thought!

  A boy whom I knew, a little younger than myself, called Fred Wright, who was still in the sixth form, had visited Doctor Crombie because of certain pains in the testicles. He had had his first woman in a street off Leicester Square on a half-day excursion – there were half-day excursions in those happy days of rival railway-companies – and he had taken his courage in his hands and visited Doctor Crombie. He was afraid that he had caught what was then known as a social disease. Doctor Crombie had reassured him – he was suffering from acidity, that was all, and he should be careful not to eat tomatoes, but Doctor Crombie went on, rashly and unnecessarily, to warn him, as he had warned all of us at thirteen . . .

  Fred Wright had no reason to feel ashamed. Acidity can happen to anyone, and he didn’t hesitate to tell his parents of the further advice which Doctor Crombie had given him. When I returned home that afternoon and questioned my parents, I found the story had already reached them as it had reached the school authorities. Parent after parent had checked with one another, and afterwards child after child was interrogated. Cancer as the result of masturbation was one thing – you had to discourage it somehow – but what right had Doctor Crombie to say that cancer was the result of prolonged sexual relations, even in a proper marriage recognized by Church and State? (It was unfortunate that Fred Wright’s very virile father, unknown to his son, had already fallen a victim to the dread disease.)

  I was even a little shaken myself. I had great affection for Doctor Crombie and great confidence in him. (I had never played trains all by myself after thirteen with the same pleasure as before his hygienic talk.) And the worst of it was that now I had fallen in love, hopelessly in love, with a girl in Castle Street with what we called then bobbed hair; she resembled in an innocent and provincial way two famous society sisters whose photographs appeared nearly every week in the Daily Mail. (The years seem to be returning on their tracks, and I see now everywhere the same fact, the same hair, as I saw then, but alas, with little or no emotion.)

  The next time I went out with Doctor Crombie to watch the trains I tackled him – shyly; there were still words I didn’t like to use with my elders. ‘Did you really tell Fred Wright that – marriage – is a cause of cancer?’

  ‘Not marriage in itself, my boy. Any form of sexual congress.’

  ‘Congress?’ It was the first time I had heard the word used in that way. I thought of the Congress of Vienna.

  ‘Making love,’ Doctor Crombie said gruffly. ‘I thought I had explained all that to you at the age of thirteen.’

  ‘I just thought you were talking about playing trains alone,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean, playing trains?’ he asked with bewilderment as a fast passenger-train went by, in and out of Bankstead station, leaving a great ball of steam at either end of No. 2 platform. ‘The 3.45 from Newcastle,’ he said. ‘I make it a minute and a quarter slow.’

  ‘Three-quarters of a minute,’ I said. We had no means of checking our watches. It was before the days of radio.

  ‘I am ahead of the time,’ Doctor Crombie said, ‘and I expect to suffer inconvenience. The strange thing is that people here have only just noticed. I have been speaking to you boys on the subject of cancer for years.’

  ‘Nobody realized that you meant marriage,’ I said.

  ‘One begins with first things first. You were, none of you, in those symposiums which I held, of an age to marry.’

  ‘But maiden ladies,’ I objected, ‘they die of cancer too.’

  ‘The definition of maiden in common use,’ Doctor Crombie replied, looking at his watch as a goods-train went by towards Bletchley, ‘is an unbroken hymen. A lady may have had prolonged sexual relations with herself or another without injuring the maidenhead.’

  I became curious. A new world was opening to me.

  ‘You mean girls play with themselves too?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But the young don’t often die of cancer, do they?’

  ‘They can lay the foundations with their excesses. It was from that I wished to save you all.’

  ‘And the saints,’ I said, ‘did none of them die of cancer?’

  ‘I know very little about saints. I would hazard a guess that the percentage of such deaths in their case was a small one, but I have never taught that sexual congress is the sole cause of cancer: only that it is the most frequent.’

  ‘But all married people don’t die that way?’

  ‘My boy, you would be surprised how seldom many married people make love. A burst of enthusiasm and then a long retreat. The danger is necessarily less in those cases.’

  ‘The more you love the greater the danger?’

  ‘I’m afraid that is a truth which applies to more than the danger of cancer.’

  I was too much in love myself to be easily convinced, but his answers came, I had to admit, quickly and readily. When I made some remark about statistics he quickly closed that avenue of hope. ‘If they demand statistics,’ Doctor Crombie said, ‘statistics they shall have. They have suspected many causes in the past and based their suspicion on dubious and debatable statistics. White flour for example. It would not surprise me if one day they did not come to suspect even this little innocent comfort of mine’ (he waved his cigarette in the direction of the Grand Junction Canal), ‘but can they deny that statistically my solution outweighs all others? Almost one hundred per cent of those who die of cancer have practised sex.’

  It was a statement impossible to deny, and for a little it silenced me. ‘Aren’t you afraid yourself?’ I asked him at last.

  ‘You know that I live alone. I am one of the few who have never been greatly tempted in that direction.’

  ‘If all of us followed your advice,’ I said gloomily, ‘the world would cease to exist.’

  ‘You mean the human race. The inter-pollination of flowers seems to have no ill side-effects.’

  ‘And men were created only to die out,’

  ‘I am no believer in the God of Genesis, young man. I think that the natural processes of evolution see to it that an animal becomes extinct when it makes a wrong accidental deviation. Man will perhaps follow the dinosaurs.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Now here is something wholly abnormal. The time is close on 4.10 and the four o’clock from Bletchley has not even been signalled. Yes, you may check the time, but this delay cannot be accounted for by a difference in watches.’

  I have quite forgotten why the four o’clock was so delayed, and I had even forgotten Doctor Crombie and ou
r conversation until this afternoon. Doctor Crombie survived his ruined practice for a few years and then died quietly one winter night of pneumonia following flu. I married four times, so little had I heeded Doctor Crombie’s advice, and I only remembered his theory today when my specialist broke to me with rather exaggerated prudence and gravity the fact that I am suffering from cancer of the lungs. My sexual desires, now that I am past sixty, are beginning to diminish, and I am quite content to follow the dinosaurs into obscurity. Of course the doctors attribute the disease to my heavy indulgence in cigarettes, but it amuses me all the same to believe with Doctor Crombie that it has been caused by excesses of a more agreeable nature.

  THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL

  * * *

  THIS story was told me by my father who heard it directly from his father, the brother of one of the participants; otherwise I doubt whether I would have credited it. But my father was a man of absolute rectitude, and I have no reason to believe that this virtue did not then run in the family.

  The events happened in 189–, as they say in old Russian novels, in the small market town of B—. My father was German-speaking, and when he settled in England he was the first of the family to go further than a few kilometres from the home commune, province, canton or whatever it was called in those parts. He was a Protestant who believed in his faith, and no one has a greater ability to believe, without doubt or scruple, than a Protestant of that type. He would not even allow my mother to read us fairy-stories, and he walked three miles to church rather than go to one with pews. ‘We’ve nothing to hide,’ he said. ‘If I sleep I sleep, and let the world know the weakness of my flesh. Why,’ he added, and the thought touched my imagination strongly and perhaps had some influence on my future, ‘they could play cards in those pews and no one the wiser.’

  That phrase is linked in my mind with the fashion in which he would begin this story. ‘Original sin gave man a tilt towards secrecy,’ he would say. ‘An open sin is only half a sin, and a secret innocence is only half innocent. When you have secrets, there, sooner or later, you’ll have sin. I wouldn’t let a Freemason cross my threshold. Where I come from secret societies were illegal, and the government had reason. Innocent though they might be at the start, like that club of Schmidt’s.’

  It appears that among the old people of the town where my father lived were a couple whom I shall continue to call Schmidt, being a little uncertain of the nature of the laws of libel and how limitations and the like affect the dead. Herr Schmidt was a big man and a heavy drinker, but most of his drinking he preferred to do at his own board to the discomfort of his wife, who never touched a drop of alcohol herself. Not that she wished to interfere with her husband’s potations; she had a proper idea of a wife’s duty, but she had reached an age (she was over sixty and he well past seventy) when she had a great yearning to sit quietly with another woman knitting something or other for her grandchildren and talking about their latest maladies. You can’t do that at ease with a man continually on the go to the cellar for another litre. There’s a man’s atmosphere and a woman’s atmosphere, and they don’t mix except in the proper place, under the sheets. Many a time Frau Schmidt in her gentle way had tried to persuade him to go out of an evening to the inn. ‘What and pay more for every glass?’ he would say. Then she tried to persuade him that he had need of men’s company and men’s conversation. ‘Not when I’m tasting a good wine,’ he said.

  So last of all she took her trouble to Frau Muller who suffered in just the same manner as herself. Frau Muller was a stronger type of woman and she set out to build an organization. She found four other women starved of female company and female interests, and they arranged to forgather once a week with their sewing and take their evening coffee together. Between them they could summon up more than two dozen grandchildren, so you can imagine they were never short of subjects to talk about. When one child had finished with the chicken-pox, at least two would have started the measles. There were all the varying treatments to compare too, and there was one school of thought which took the motto ‘starve a cold’ to mean ‘if you starve a cold you will feed a fever’ and another school which took the more traditional view. But their debates were never heated like those they had with their husbands, and they took it in turn to act hostess and make the cakes.

  But what was happening all this time to the husbands? You might think they would be content to go on drinking alone, but not a bit of it. Drinking’s like reading a ‘romance’ (my father used the term with contempt, he had never turned the pages of a novel in his life); you don’t need talk, but you need company, otherwise it begins to feel like work. Frau Muller had thought of that and she suggested to her husband – very gently, so that he hardly noticed – that, when the women were meeting elsewhere, he should ask the other husbands in with their own drinks (no need to spend extra money at the bar) and they could sit as silent as they wished with their glasses till bedtime. Not, of course, that they would be silent all the time. Now and then no doubt one of them would remark on the wet or the fine day, and another would mention the prospects for the harvest, and a third would say that they’d never had so warm a summer as the summer of 188 –. Men’s talk, which, in the absence of women, would never become heated.

  But there was one snag in this arrangement and it was the one which caused the disaster. Frau Muller roped in a seventh woman, who had been widowed by something other than drink, by her husband’s curiosity. Frau Puckler had a husband whom none of them could abide, and, before they could settle down to their friendly evenings, they had to decide what to do about him. He was a little vinegary man with a squint and a completely bald head who would empty any bar when he came into it. His eyes, coming together like that, had the effect of a gimlet, and he would stay in conversation with one man for ten minutes on end with his eyes fixed on the other’s forehead until you expected sawdust to come out. Unfortunately Frau Puckler was highly respected. It was essential to keep from her any idea that her husband was unwelcome, so for some weeks they had to reject Frau Muller’s proposal. They were quite happy, they said, sitting alone at home with a glass when what they really meant was that even loneliness was preferable to the company of Herr Puckler. But they got so miserable all this time that often, when their wives returned home, they would find their husbands tucked up in bed and asleep.

  It was then Herr Schmidt broke his customary silence. He called round at Herr Muller’s door, one evening when the wives were away, with a four-litre jug of wine, and he hadn’t got through more than two litres when he broke silence. This lonely drinking, he said, must come to an end – he had had more sleep the last few weeks than he had had in six months and it was sapping his strength. ‘The grave yawns for us,’ he said, yawning himself from habit.

  ‘But Puckler?’ Herr Muller objected. ‘He’s worse than the grave.’

  ‘We shall have to meet in secret,’ Herr Schmidt said. ‘Braun has a fine big cellar,’ and that was how the secret began; and from secrecy, my father would moralize, you can grow every sin in the calendar. I pictured secrecy like the dark mould in the cellar where we cultivated our mushrooms, but the mushrooms were good to eat, so that their secret growth . . . I always found an ambivalence in my father’s moral teaching.

  It appears that for a time all went well. The men were happy drinking together – in the absence, of course, of Herr Puckler, and so were the women, even Frau Puckler, for she always found her husband in bed at night ready for domesticities. He was far too proud to tell her of his ramblings in search of company between the strokes of the town-clock. Every night he would try a different house and every night he found only the closed door and the darkened window. Once in Herr Braun’s cellar the husbands heard the knocker hammering overhead. At the Gasthof too he would look regularly in – and sometimes irregularly, as though he hoped that he might catch them off their guard. The street-lamp shone on his bald head, and often some late drinker going home would be confronted by those gimlet-eyes which believed nothin
g you said. ‘Have you seen Herr Muller tonight?’ or ‘Herr Schmidt, is he at home?’ he would demand of another reveller. He sought them here, he sought them there – he had been content enough aforetime drinking in his own home and sending his wife down to the cellar for a refill, but he knew only too well, now he was alone, that there was no pleasure possible for a solitary drinker. If Herr Schmidt and Herr Muller were not at home, where were they? And the other four with whom he had never been well acquainted, where were they? Frau Puckler was the very reverse of her husband, she had no curiosity, and Frau Muller and Frau Schmidt had mouths which clinked shut like the clasp of a well-made handbag.

  Inevitably after a certain time Herr Puckler went to the police. He refused to speak to anyone lower than the Superintendent. His gimlet-eyes bored like a migraine into the Superintendent’s forehead. While the eyes rested on the one spot, his words wandered ambiguously. There had been an anarchist outrage at Schloss – I can’t remember the name; there were rumours of an attempt on a Grand Duke. The Superintendent shifted a little this way and a little that way on his seat, for these were big affairs which did not concern him, while the squinting eyes bored continuously at the sensitive spot above his nose where his migraine always began. Then the Superintendent blew loudly and said, ‘The times are evil,’ a phrase which he had remembered from the service on Sunday.

  ‘You know the law about secret societies,’ Herr Puckler said.

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘And yet here, under the nose of the police,’ and the squint-eyes bored deeper, ‘there exists just such a society.’