May We Borrow Your Husband? Read Free

Tony said, ‘that PT hardly represents their activities last night.’ He looked across the tables at the girl with an expression extraordinarily like hatred.
    â€˜We were both taken,’ Stephen said, ‘by the air of innocence. One felt he was more used to horses.’
    â€˜He mistook the yearnings of the rider’s crotch for something quite different.’
    Perhaps they hoped to shock me, but I don’t think it was that. I really believe they were in a state of extreme sexual excitement; they had received a coup de foudre last night on the terrace and were quite incapable of disguising their feelings. I was an excuse to talk, to speculate about the desired object. The sailor had been a stop-gap: this was the real thing. I was inclined to be amused, for what could this absurd pair hope to gain from a young man newly married to the girl who now sat there patiently waiting, wearing her beauty like an old sweater she had forgotten to change? But that was a bad simile to use: she would have been afraid to wear an old sweater, except secretly, by herself, in the playroom. She had no idea that she was one of those who can afford to disregard the fashion of their clothes. She caught my eye and, because I was so obviously English, I suppose, gave me half a timid smile. Perhaps I too would have received the coupe de foudre if I had not been thirty years older and twice married.
    Tony detected the smile. ‘A regular body-snatcher,’ he said. My breakfast and the young man arrived at the same moment before I had time to reply. As he passed the table I could feel the tension.
    â€˜Cuir de Russie,’ Stephen said, quivering a nostril. ‘A mistake of inexperience.’
    The youth caught the words as he went past and turned with an astonished look to see who had spoken, and they both smiled insolently back at him as though they really believed they had the power to take him over . . .
    For the first time I felt disquiet.
    3
    Something was not going well; that was sadly obvious. The girl nearly always came down to breakfast ahead of her husband – I have an idea he spent a long time bathing and shaving and applying his Cuir de Russie. When he joined her he would give her a courteous brotherly kiss as though they had not spent the night together in the same bed. She began to have those shadows under the eyes which come from lack of sleep – for I couldn’t believe that they were ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’. Sometimes from my balcony I saw them returning from a walk – nothing, except perhaps a pair of horses, could have been more handsome. His gentleness towards her might have reassured her mother, but it made a man impatient to see him squiring her across the undangerous road, holding open doors, following a pace behind her like the husband of a princess. I longed to see some outbreak of irritation caused by the sense of satiety, but they never seemed to be in conversation when they returned from their walk, and at table I caught only the kind of phrases people use who are dining together for the sake of politeness. And yet I could swear that she loved him, even by the way she avoided watching him. There was nothing avid or starved about her; she stole her quick glances when she was quite certain that his attention was absorbed elsewhere – they were tender, anxious perhaps, quite undemanding. If one inquired after him when he wasn’t there, she glowed with the pleasure of using his name. ‘Oh, Peter overslept this morning.’ ‘Peter cut himself. He’s staunching the blood now.’ ‘Peter’s mislaid his tie. He thinks the floor-waiter has purloined it.’ Certainly she loved him; I was far less certain of what his feelings were.
    And you must imagine how all the time those other two were closing in. It was like a medieval siege: they dug their trenches and threw up their earthworks. The difference was that the besieged