May We Borrow Your Husband? Read Free Page A

didn’t notice what they were at – at any rate, the girl didn’t; I don’t know about him. I longed to warn her, but what could I have said that wouldn’t have shocked her or angered her? I believe the two would have changed their floor if that would have helped to bring them closer to the fortress; they probably discussed the move together and decided against it as too overt.
    Because they knew that I could do nothing against them, they regarded me almost in the role of an ally. After all, I might be useful one day in distracting the girl’s attention – and I suppose they were not quite mistaken in that; they could tell from the way I looked at her how interested I was, and they probably calculated that my interests might in the long run coincide with theirs. It didn’t occur to them that, perhaps, I was a man with scruples. If one really wanted a thing scruples were obviously, in their eyes, out of place. There was a tortoiseshell star mirror at St Paul they were plotting to obtain for half the price demanded (I think there was an old mother who looked after the shop when her daughter was away at a boîte for women of a certain taste); naturally, therefore, when I looked at the girl, as they saw me so often do, they considered I would be ready to join in any ‘reasonable’ scheme.
    â€˜When I looked at the girl’ – realize that I have made no real attempt to describe her. In writing a biography one can, of course, just insert a portrait and the affair is done: I have the prints of Lady Rochester and Mrs Barry in front of me now. But speaking as a professional novelist (for biography and reminiscence are both new forms to me), one describes a woman not so much that the reader should see her in all the cramping detail of colour and shape (how often Dickens’s elaborate portraits seem like directions to the illustrator which might well have been left out of the finished book), but to convey an emotion. Let the reader make his own image of a wife, a mistress, some passer-by ‘sweet and kind’ (the poet required no other descriptive words), if he has a fancy to. If I were to describe the girl (I can’t bring myself at this moment to write her hateful name), it would be not to convey the colour of her hair, the shape of her mouth, but to express the pleasure and the pain with which I recall her – I, the writer, the observer, the subsidiary character, what you will. But if I didn’t bother to convey them to her, why should I bother to convey them to you, hypocrite lecteur ?
    How quickly those two tunnelled. I don’t think it was more than four mornings after the arrival that, when I came down to breakfast, I found they had moved their table next to the girl’s and were entertaining her in her husband’s absence. They did it very well; it was the first time I had seen her relaxed and happy – and she was happy because she was talking about Peter. Peter was agent for his father, somewhere in Hampshire – there were three thousand acres to manage. Yes, he was fond of riding and so was she. It all tumbled out – the kind of life she dreamed of having when she returned home. Stephen just dropped in a word now and then, of a rather old-fashioned courteous interest, to keep her going. Apparently he had once decorated some hall in their neighbourhood and knew the names of some people Peter knew – Winstanley, I think – and that gave her immense confidence.
    â€˜He’s one of Peter’s best friends,’ she said, and the two flickered their eyes at each other like lizards’ tongues.
    â€˜Come and join us, William,’ Stephen said, but only when he had noticed that I was within earshot. ‘You know Mrs Travis?’
    How could I refuse to sit at their table? And yet in doing so I seemed to become an ally.
    â€˜Not the William Harris?’ the girl asked. It was a phrase which I hated, and yet she