Free 31st Of February by Julian Symons Page A

stock of drink. Elaine is a neat, tarty little piece, slick and smart and hard. What did she see in Fletchley to marry him? That’s another problem, but I can’t go into it now.
    Val had kept her job on Woman Beautiful, so when Elaine came the girls would talk office gossip all evening long. Fletchley never seemed to mind, just as he never seemed to mind Elaine going out with other men. “She always comes back,” he used to say to me. “She always comes back to old Fletch.” But at this time, when they first came here, Elaine didn’t go out much. She would talk office gossip with Val in the evening until I was nearly crazy. Occasionally I thought she was intending to make a pass at me, but Fletchley never seemed to notice, so perhaps I was wrong. I got so crazy with their talk that I suggested in desperation to Val that we should go out and drink. Six months ago she’d have leaped at the suggestion, but now she didn’t much want to do anything but drink a pint or two of black-market whisky by her own comfortable electric fireside while she chattered to Elaine. And when we did go out it wasn’t any good, because I didn’t really care for drinking and I could hardly even be polite to Val. “You’re never nice to me, Andy, the way you used to be,” she’d say tearfully, and look at me with her head slightly on one side Was it true? Had I ever been nice to her? I can’t believe that I ever was. She’d invented my niceness in the past to contrast with my howwidness in the present. We can’t recreate the past, but we can always soothe sorrow and vanity by inventing it.
    So drinking was no good, and after a couple of years there was another thing that was no good, too. I couldn’t work up the least flicker of interest in Val while I was with her. When I was away from her – in the office writing copy, interviewing a client, sitting round a conference table – then very often I would positively shiver with desire for her. The most powerful and violent sexual images came to my mind, and they were not merely vague images – they had a positive association with Val. As soon as I saw her, though – as soon, even, as I knew I would see her within half an hour – they vanished altogether. It would all have been comic if it had not been deeply humiliating.
    All this sounds like a good case for divorce, or at any rate separation. But strangely enough, Val never wanted a separation – throughout the whole of our life together she was absolutely devoted to me. And why did I stay with Val? I find the question absolutely unanswerable. It would have been difficult, I suppose, to arrange a separation. She would have wanted to go on living with Elaine. I should have had to get out of Joseph Street, and I didn’t want to get out. Then again I should have been lonely. She had become a habit, and we live by our habits. But there was something outside all that, something that held me to her. It was, it seems to me, precisely because I disliked her, because she filled our home with hideous furniture and empty chatter, that I wanted to live with her. The things that I most detested were the things I most desired! Shall I put down the image that came to me most often when I saw Val, tearstained and reproachful, or limply acquiescent in my unkindness? It was of my mother, and the ghastly house we lived in so many years ago – and of holding my mother’s hand as she lay, a pitiful and repulsive skeleton, upon her deathbed.
    But now I come to the real reason for writing in this book – the effect Val’s death has had on me. We lived together for several detestable years. For the whole of that time I had seen with irritation the grease on her face at night, and her intolerable cheerfulness in the morning. I’d listened all that time to her inanities about clothes and film stars. Unconsciously, I must dozens of times have wished her dead. But now that she is dead, and the bathroom is free when I want to use it and I no longer find