Somewhere Beyond Reproach Read Free Page B

alliance with a Turk. It was some small consolation. Soon, though, I started to see that this was no disaster. Had she remained in London or gone to a university the number of eligible suitors would have been infinitely greater.
    Three months later I gave up advertising and devoted myself entirely to the haulage business which Tim Gerson and I had started. We became partners. Within a year the business was a viable concern. I worked hard and continued a normal social life while Dinah was away. I was content to wait. It would be easy enough to discover her father’s address on his return.
    I find it very difficult to write about Dinah’s return and the start of our first relationship. So much has happened since then. So many times I have seen my earlier interpretations of events shown to be hopelessly false. I shall try to be honest about this. Yet I still cannot bear the thought that my self-absorption and my need to see things in a certain way has given me a false memory of the beginning of our first affair. Before we slept together I was afraid of anything other than the hypothetical, anything beyond the planned. My expectations of our happiness were day-dreams, and day-dreams are safe. I was frightened of any real culmination . Once I had reached some consummation, what could there be beyond it? I feared I should soon be proclaiming my happiness and at the same instant realising that this happiness had passed while I spoke. In retrospect I am disconcerted at the ease with which I first possessed her. Perhapsbecause all my previous preparations are made to look so unnecessary. Perhaps because I should have realised then that it was possible only because Dinah was a woman and not the goddess of a region in my mind. I shall not say what she wore or how she looked, or tell you that her sheets were striped or that her feet were cold. Only the facts.
    As I had guessed, the social world in which she had moved abroad had been limited to embassy parties. She had often been bored and lonely. Neither did her return to England make everything all right. She now knew few people and felt isolated and alone. Two weeks after her return she had written to me asking whether I could come as her partner to a dance. I accepted. I was not only excited, but also touched that she had had to ask somebody she had known so little. At the party she told me about her present problems , also that she had not found a job and was having to pay too much for a tiny flat. I was sympathetic and helpful. Very different from the brash and arrogant young man I had previously attempted to portray. At the end of the dance my car would not start. This was not planned. Nobody else was leaving at that time. The tubes and buses had long since stopped. I offered to walk home with her. There were no taxis in sight. It is a long walk from Chelsea to Putney. It was already four o’clock and a cold February night. When we reached the flat it was after five and the first of the early morning delivery lorries were starting to rumble over Putney Bridge. Outside a butcher’s, men were carrying the disembowelled carcasses of sheep into the shop, still dripping with blood. At the door of her flat she said I couldn’t possibly walk all the way back. She had a sofa. I agreed to stay. The flat consisted of a bathroom, a kitchen and a bed-sitting room. The sofa and her bed were in the same room. The sofa was too short, there weren’t enough blankets. I got up after half an hour and murmured that I was leaving. She rolled over, still half-asleep, leaving me room to get into bed with her. I did. I lay awake hardly daring to move. Later she half-woke and like a drowsy child laid an arm across my chest. We lay like this till dawn. Three days later Ipossesed her. It had been simple, natural and beautiful. For a time I laughed at my former fears.
    *
    It was several days after my return from France, in late June of 1957, that I discovered where Dinah had gone. In all my careful