Free 31st Of February by Julian Symons

were married.
    So there it is, or there’s the beginning of it. During the whole of that six months if I’d ever asked myself whether I liked Val, the answer would have been an unhesitating No.
    I dislike girls who lisp, girls who are kittenish, girls who drink too much. Valerie did all of those things. Why did I marry her, then? Partly I’d got into the habit of seeing her – but what made me start the habit? Partly no doubt I was the victim of that feeling war and bombing gave you, that no relationship you formed mattered much, or was likely to be permanent – and how damned mistaken that feeling was. Partly she was good in bed, and although I was over thirty when I met her I hadn’t much experience of that sort of thing. Although Val was nearly ten years younger than I was, I gathered she’d had plenty. But although I enjoyed our times in bed, I wasn’t all that interested. That certainly won’t do for a main motive.
    And why did Valerie marry me? If I can’t explain my own motives, I certainly can’t understand hers. I think she found me attractive – although few women have done so. I believe she liked men older than herself. And – although I may be quite wrong – I believe she regarded me as a very different person from the man I am. Subconsciously I assumed that we should stop drinking and going to parties after we got married. But Val assumed that we should go on drinking, and go to more parties than ever.
    So we started off wrong. And then there was trouble about this house. Val was essentially what I think of as an Earl’s Court girl – nice gay parties with people in the rag trade as she called it, a few commercial artists, some fifth-rate actors. Well, you can get all that in our bit of Pimlico if you want it, but in rather too sordid a way for Val. She liked a bit of glamour spread over it – not too much, just a thin layer. She was horrified when she first saw the house and even more so when I told her I liked it. “But how can you like it? It’s so vulgar. That woman Flossie Williams – she’s just a tawt.” And what are your friends, do you think? I asked her. And what are you? Didn’t you sleep with me the first time you met me? The only difference was that she got marriage instead of a spot cash settlement. At that she burst into tears, and it’s true I was unfair, because Val was a one-man woman. I say I think she found me attractive, but I’m doing myself an injustice. The fact is that she never looked at anybody else at all. She told Elaine Fletchley so, and Elaine told me. And how can one explain that? That’s as nonsensical as the rest of it.
    So Val burst into tears. She was always bursting into tears; it was one of the most irritating things about her. Then she asked me again why I liked living here, but I couldn’t answer that, because I didn’t know. There was just something about the streets and the people and the atmosphere, that’s all.
    But if Valerie couldn’t get her own way about the house, at least she made it look the way she wanted. It’s all round me now, as it’s been round me for years – the glaring colours, the fumed oak paradise in the bedroom. “It’s so bright and gay and new,” she’d say – but with the lisp, of course. “I hate old stuff. I’d like life to start again every morning. New people, new job, new places, new everything. Wouldn’t you like that?” And when I said truthfully that I’d like nothing less, she’d be upset. And she not only had her way about the look of the place; she got Elaine to live in it as well. First she said the house was too big for just the two of us. Maybe there’ll be three one day, I said, but she didn’t want children. Then she wanted Elaine to come and live here with us. I didn’t want it; I wanted to be alone. But she had it her way. We turned the place into two self-contained flats and we had the ground floor and the Fletchleys had the first. We shared the cellar, where we both kept a small