Роберт Эйкман - The Late Breakfasters (Faber Finds)

After similar experiences at irregular and unpredictable intervals on twenty-eight occasions, Griselda, when a twenty-ninth occasion offered, felt positively but indefinably unwell. It would be deplorable, she spent much of the time reflecting, if, moreover, nature, despite counter-measures, took her course. She began to wonder more than ever whether she was truly suited to marriage.

Energy, thwarted of satisfactory direct outlet, expended itself obliquely, as is the way in marriage. Griselda began to apply herself more steadily and more forethoughtfully at the shop; and also to see that Kynaston applied himself as efficiently as his temperament and his job permitted. Soon the shop became the subject of a note in The Bookseller , and Colonel Costa-Rica was holding before Kynaston the possibility of a position, at higher pay, in the Orinocan Intelligence Service. Not only did they become richer, their increase in income being coupled with a diminished desire to expend; but they began to scent the first faint sunrising of social approbation renewed.

Before long Kynaston was losing interest in both poetry and his plastic poses, in favour of a projected Anthology of Curatorship, for which he hoped to obtain a Foreword from the Editor of Country Life . Sometimes they found themselves invited to visit homes of repute and to mingle on equal terms with the enbosomed families. More and more the shop stocked books which might sell, instead of minority books. Lena, over whom, of course, hymeneal happiness had yet to hover, regarded this last tendency disapprovingly; though the proceeds conveniently augmented the slight returns from her own new book. A climax was reached when Kynaston received an invitation to stand in the Labour interest at the Parish Council Elections. He declined, because he deemed politics to obstruct full self-realisation; but he declined politely, conscious that, far more than any other party, the Labour party gives careful heed to the morals and probity of all it permits to join its pilgrimage.

When she had been married nearly a year, Griselda one morning realized with surprise that Lena, to judge by some remarks she made, regarded her state with envy.

‘But, Lena, you don’t have to marry a man in order to enjoy him.’

Lena leaned back against the counter, her hands in her pockets. ‘There are times, Griselda, when your superficiality is equalled only by your smugness.’

She had never before spoken so to Griselda, though given to the style when speaking to certain other people. Griselda had observed, however, that Lena’s censoriousness, though seldom judicious, was seldom wholly undeserved.

‘Am I becoming smug, Lena?’

‘I apologize for what I said. I’m a bitch.’

‘But am I becoming smug?’

‘As a matter of fact, you are.’

‘What should I do about it?’

‘I wish I knew.’

Before the matter could be taken further, they were interrupted by the arrival of a thousand copies of a book describing the atrociousness of the new German government.

Not the least remarkable change in Kynaston was his sustained firmness in dealing with the problem of Lotus. Quite soon Lotus was reduced to supplicating Griselda: a procedure which Griselda considered superfluous and irrelevant, though, with a perverseness new to her nature, she did not say so to Lotus.

‘You gave me your word,’ cried Lotus, her beauty rising from her tears, like Venus from the flood.

And instead of simply pointing out that she had in no way broken it, Griselda replied reflectively ‘Things are never quite the same after marriage as they were before it,’ and offered Lotus another glass of lemon tea.

After weeks of apparent rebuff and equivocation Lotus tumultuously capitulated at the end of February.

‘You’ve won him and I’ve lost him,’ she said to Griselda over morning coffee. ‘You’ve been stamping out my body like wine beneath your little feet. I need renewal. I always find it in the same place.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Sfax.’

In due course, a picture postcard of a grinning Arab under a palm tree laden with dates, confirmed Lotus’s decision; but Griselda wondered what in Kynaston’s life had replaced the satisfactions, however limited, which, even by his own account, Lotus had given him. She looked at the sky of Sfax, almost unnaturally ultramarine, at the camels on the horizon, at the Wagons-Lits official in the foreground; and supposed that Kynaston must at last have found a purpose in life. Really it was most unlike him.

About a week after Lena’s outburst in the shop, Griselda received a visit from Guillaume. It was a Saturday afternoon; and Griselda was lying on her back, gazing at the ceiling, and eating Pascall’s crкmes-de-menthe. She and Kynaston had not yet found a better place to live; indeed lately the search itself had flagged.

‘Sorry Geoffrey’s out. How’s Florence?’

Guillaume was wandering about the small sitting-room collecting cushions.

‘Losing weight just a little, I’m afraid. She strains you know. I try to open her eyes to the wonder of life, but I doubt if the brightness of it all is ever wholly clear to her.’

He filled an armchair with his accumulation and sank his large body slowly into the midst of it.

There followed a long silence. Guillaume looked like a dingy Mother Goose.

He restarted the momentum of intercourse. ‘I thought I’d take a chance of finding you in.’

‘Have a crкme-de-menthe?’

‘May I take a handful?’ He nearly emptied the small green tin. ‘I’m engaged on research at Soane’s. The work of years. Probably my very last chance. The final brief passage before the volume closes.’

‘Surely not?’

‘I’m a disappointed man, you know, Mrs Kynaston.’ He smiled like the last sunset of autumn. He had difficulty in extracting the sweets entirely from their papers, so that every now and then he ejected a tiny moist scrap which had accidentally entered his mouth.

‘Florence told me.’

He seemed disturbed. ‘That she had no right to do. Even a failure has his pride.’

‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Where is it that you’ve failed?’

‘Can you look at the world around you and ask me that?’ he replied. ‘On the one hand the dream. On the other the reality. And I started with such hopes.’ He was feeling for his pocket handkerchief. Griselda feared that he was about to weep, but he only sought to remove some of the stickiness which his large moist hands had retained from the sweets.

‘Take only one case,’ he continued, ‘Take the state of affairs in denominational schools. Little children exposed naked to the blast of bigotry. Take the mines. Do you know that the faces of miners are black all the time they work? Men born as white as you or I. Take the so-called catering industry. Have you ever worked for twenty-four hours on end in an underground kitchen? Do you know that the world’s supply of phosphorus is being consumed at ten or twenty times the rate it’s being replaced? Look at the cruelty and waste involved in the so-called sport of polo alone! If you live in Wallsend, you have to walk ten miles to see a blade of grass. Is anything being done to harness the energy in the planets? Even though there’s enough to extirpate work everywhere. Think of the millions deceived by so-called free insurance schemes, paid for out of profits!’

‘I see what you mean.’ said Griselda.

‘And in other countries things are worse. What have you to say about the Japanese? Or the Andaman Islanders, who pass their entire lives in a prison camp? Or the so-called freed slaves in Liberia?’

‘Perhaps we’d better stick to England. At least to start with.’

‘There’s a great danger in parochialism. The aboriginal Tasmanians discovered that.’