sniffed and sobbed.
‘Never mind. Don’t even think about it,’ he said kindly, he went out of his way to be kind and considerate for months and months. ‘It’s quite unimportant,’ he pretended.
When he decided it was time to stop pretending, they were in the half-house in Blythe Road, Fulham, a basement, ground floor, first floor affair, some other family living upstairs. The marriage was already gravely threatened; quarrels, hair falling out in the bath, and other nervous disorders too despairing to mention, he thought. It dawned on him that he ought to have seen Doctor Elliot about her ages ago, though Dr Elliot was usually too fuddled to be seen about anything except elbowitis. But he tootled along and tackled him in the saloon. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘confidentially, old man, I want to talk to you about the wife. She’s driving me balmy.’ He laughed, being slightly embarrassed, but old Elliot wouldn’t send a bill in, this interview would only cost a pint of bitter, eightpence.
He returned home quite jubilant, and although they’d had a bit of an Upandowner in the early afternoon, he was very kind and considerate.
‘Ivy, my dear,’ he said gently, sitting beside her. ‘I’ve got this for you. I think we might save our marriage even yet.’ He gave her the admission card Elliot had given him, to a local hospital. ‘Will you go? You will, won’t you? It’s your duty, surely, isn’t it?’
She gave one look at the card, coloured, swung round and gave him a fearful welt round the face.
He got straight up and walked out of the house.
His face was hot one side, cold the other. His heart was icy cold all over, all round inside and out. Bloody Hell! Women. Well, well! there was something to be said for homosexuality after all. He was through with women. Through with them? He’d never started with them. Merely married one of them, one who wouldn’t even go to a hospital and be examined, perhaps have a small bit of an operation. This was the end.
He strode about Kensington Gardens, not knowing how he had got there, but realising slowly he hadn’t the fare back and must walk, in shoes which let the snow through.
The park looked sad and nice. It was white, the trees were stark and white, and the people like cold, uncertain shadows, moving about the ice of the Round Pond.
The sun was blurred red and shapeless up there in the grey-black of more snow to come, it looked like a half-healed wound.
When he got back, his feet were wet and cold and he was worn out. He was too tired to say any of the things he had decided to say. What was the use of saying he was going to leave her? Where would he go? Where would she go?
And what would God say about his obligations?
What God might not say about hers, were not his affair. He was full of self betterment, and spiritual theories, and liked to feel that marriage led two people towards a goal.
What could he feel now?
She sewed and she said:
‘I’m sorry I lost my temper. I ought not to have done that. I apologise.’
This time it was he who sat and said nothing.
She said:
‘You must realise, William, a woman is different, physically, mentally, and spiritually, from a man.’
‘I do begin to realise it,’ he said quietly.
THERE was a fearful shindy the first time it came out that he had made love, as she called it, to a girl who came in to dust up the old homestead. She was a naughty little thing, and he found her methods irresistible. In vain did he tell himself he was not playing cricket, and he loyally refused to allow himself to think: ‘It’s entirely Ivy’s fault.’ It wasn’t. It was his fault, and it was Elsie’s fault. Elsie was sixteen and her trouble was she had elder brothers. She kept getting in his way in the passage, and smiling up at him and going red. She had a floppy little body which it was impossible to ignore. When Ivy cleared out Up West one winter afternoon, he went up to Elsie, who beamed round and upwards, and, as she put it later, ‘Let him take a liberty with me, but I didn’t mind, at least Mr Bowling is a gentleman.’ On the bed, there was no difficulty about clothes, because the wretched child didn’t seem to go in for them. She had soft lips and elegant teeth and Cleopatra appeared to have nothing on her. And although he condemned himself for a cad, and thought about the old school and all that sort of thing, he repeated the performance at teatime, and many teatimes afterwards. It was a bit of a strain, craning the neck up at the basement window, to see if old Ivy was coming up the road yet. And needless to say the poor child clicked, as she called it, dead on the three months to the minute. This at least threw off a certain amount of reserve, and they went at their love affair hammer and tongs while the going was good. His health at once recovered, he liked women again, thought about Angel, and even contemplated marriage with dirty little Elsie. This didn’t last long, however, and he started in at insurance with new zest, now and again varying it by crowd work at Elstree, whence his accent very occasionally got him a line to say, or his dinner jacket got him a sitting part in a cabaret scene. Then he came home one day and heard, smelt and saw the fat sizzling in the fire. He couldn’t resist:
‘Well, my dear Ivy, you’ve asked for it, you know, I must say!’
Needless to say, she said:
‘How like a man! You’re a cad and a brute, and I hope you go to prison!’
‘Prison?’ he said, startled, and had quite a turn when it became apparent Elsie had lied about her age, and was really only a pullet-like fifteen, or had been ‘at the time of the alleged incident’. This was going back a bit, and he did some anxious arithmetic. Elsie stood about, sniffing and sobbing, and looking more like a slut than she ever had before, as if to increase his shame, and he thought: ‘Well, now perhaps I’ve achieved a divorce, which will be something!’ But not a bit of it. There was to be no freedom, and the threat of prison hovered for some time, together with the unpleasing rumour that Elsie’s dad, from the docks, was coming along presently to tear his block off. Unnerved by the general prospect, he hurried along to Queenie, confessed all, and was well ticked off for his lack of caution. However, it was worth it, for she took on her shoulders the entire matter, going to fix up for Elsie where she was to have the baby, firmly insisting that she got it adopted immediately afterwards, and the outlook began to look a little safer. Life with Ivy was then grim indeed. She threw it up at him for each meal, and she threw his music up at him, ‘not that you do any,’ and she threw money items up at him, ‘not that you earn any.’ They had frenzied scenes, and slammed doors at each other, and hated the very sight and thought of each other. Sometimes he went to the piano in a state of exhaustion, and composed a sad little tune which he knew was rather good. But when he saw music publishers about it, they just smoked cigars at him, said nice things, but were clearly thinking about something totally different. One winter he got a nice little job playing in a concert party at Eastbourne, but something or other happened, a quarrel or something, and he was soon back picking up the crumbs from insurance magnates’ tables.
‘I dunno, I’m sure,’ was what he thought about life. And he laughed helplessly. ‘I dunno, I’ll tootle along and see old Queenie. See if she’s really going to be married.’
Having had a good time with old Queenie, and learned that she was going to marry a crashing
