Free The Rules of Engagement by Anita Brookner Page B

distortion. This was surely a projection. I walked to the window and looked out, but there was little to be seen that I had not seen before. When I looked back at him, in this different light and perspective, he seemed much as normal.
    Digby had picked up my book and was leafing through it. “ You won't like that, ” I warned him. “ I never have liked it. It's a woman's book, really. ”
    “ Yet it was written by a man. ”
    “ Yes, only a man would have killed her off. ”
    “ She died because she had got into debt, ” I reminded him coldly.
    “ I suppose so. ” There was a brief silence. “ Are you making tea? ” he asked. “ Deborah gone? ”
    “ Ages ago. Yes, I'll make tea. ”
    I went immediately to the kitchen, suddenly anxious to avoid his presence. Yet I had warmed to him in the course of that peaceful afternoon, appreciated him, even admired him. Now my mood changed to one of weariness and incipient revolt. I played my wifely part adequately, and yet I could see it for what it was: a sham. And it was not only my married life that was a sham; my other life too did not, could not, bear active scrutiny. I saw the point of those grim days in Paris. They had been the means of preparing me for a life lived according to my own rules, rather than by rules imposed on me by other people. I had had a glimpse of the freedom available to the purely selfish, though that freedom could be limited by desire. Once again I wanted to roam the streets unobserved, my thoughts confined to myself rather than anticipating another's movements, another's wishes. I wanted everyone to die and leave me alone. I particularly wanted Edmund to die, for I knew that without him I should be myself again and not the person I had become once I had chosen him, or been chosen by him.
    There was another area of discomfort. When we had exchanged that meaningful glance, and the recognition of each other that was to change everything, we had been in his house, in the presence of his wife. So great was the pressure of that moment that I had managed to ignore her. Now I wondered how much she knew about her husband's affairs, of his skilful arrangements. With increasing discomfort I could now see that she was fully aware — must be aware — of Edmund's manoeuvres, and that she was cynical enough to be amused by them. Either that, or they were so close that full disclosure was possible on both sides, that Edmund's adulteries were part of a marital game which engendered a sort of excitement they both found acceptable, even desirable. Maybe Constance too had lovers and could deal with them in such a way as to engender no remorse, no anguish, no soul-searching. Not every woman is an Emma Bovary.
    Constance had always made me uncomfortable. She seemed to find me amusing in several minor ways: my careful cooking, my earnest reading, my obvious — obvious to a woman like herself — boredom, my acute self-consciousness in her presence. For she had managed to instil an uneasiness even before there had been any justification for such a feeling to exist. Her sly watchfulness across the dinner table had always seemed to expose weaknesses in myself that were not obvious to anyone else. I felt transparent in her presence, and had always done so. That was why I must never see her again, never go to their house, never ask about her children, once heard innocently playing in an upstairs room. I must never ask Edmund if he loved her, though, alone in my kitchen, I could see that he must be linked to her in several ways that survived love. Her value to him was obvious, almost as great as his value to her. It was a Faustian bargain, but who was to say that Faustian bargains never worked?
    This revelation, which I had somehow managed not to confront, shocked me, as complicity, connivance, always shock one. I saw that I was merely an accessory, a minor character in a much grander plot, one I was not fully equipped to understand. I saw both of them on one side of a