Free Mr Wrong by Elizabeth Jane Howard

moment she imagined the getting out, but before she was beyond her first picture of it –
Mervyn’s face when she told him that at last she was free – Alan had returned.
    ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, in tones of one to whom the practice was unfamiliar. ‘I feel I ought to – look, I’ve been feeling so awful, you see – the
least I can do is explain a bit . . .’
    ‘Oh God,’ she thought; ‘he’s ill! He’s got some ghastly illness he’s been trying to face by himself!’ She took another cigarette and handed the packet
to him; her hands, she noticed, had started to shake again.
    ‘I’ve been having this affair, you see. I expect you knew, really, there didn’t seem any point in actually telling you . . .’
    She didn’t say that there had been so many affairs that she no longer distinguished between one and another. He had only once told her about a girl; after it was over, and then he had made
it painfully plain that Melanie had been the one (and only) love of his life. He had been too distraught then for her to bring up the previous occasions. It was before she had even met Mervyn, and
she had thought her own world was coming to an end. After that, she had slipped slowly and painlessly out of love with him . . .
    ‘. . . for months I didn’t notice her – well, I thought she was a nice girl – jolly good secretary and all that – until one day I came into my office and found her
crying – some bloody bastard had let her down . . .’
    Mervyn’s lined and craggy face with eyes both brilliant and kind beneath amazing eyebrows rose up before her – annihilating any impatience, any cruelty – however oblique
– with her husband and his Everyman saga. Mervyn never thought ill of people, and anyway, was not one of those boring men who said all he thought.
    ‘. . . started by us just having a drink after work: she led an awful cramped little life at home with her parents – she’s never had anyone to talk to before . . . Anyone
decent, I mean,’ he added with a self-deprecating laugh. And I used to sit at home wondering whether to have the casserole with Julie after her homework, or whether to put it back in the oven
and wait.
    ‘. . . an only child, which always makes that kind of sterile, suburban life worse . . .’
    You get only wives too. They don’t have other wives to moan at or gossip with. They have to be alone all day, and all evening too, if their only husband doesn’t come home. You
can’t talk to children; they have to be protected. There’s a case for saying that being an only child is a jolly good preparation for being a wife.
    ‘. . . short of it was that we fell in love. I told her that I was married,’ he added, implying that this showed that he had done all that could be expected of him. ‘She was
marvellous about it. She said she didn’t mind. That a little of me was much better than none at all.’
    I bet she did. But Mervyn wasn’t married, so shut up. He was waiting for her. He’d waited eight years now, and had said then, and still said, that he’d wait until she felt free to come to him. I am too lucky to be a bitch. Poor Alan.
But if he feels like this why can’t I go? Just take Julie, and go?
    ‘. . . it
would
be just before this holiday, she suddenly seemed different. I mean, by then we’d – oh well, you remember that last weekend you had to go to Westmorland
on that research job?’
    Indeed yes. Mervyn, though never demanding, had proved a virtuoso at designing reasons that for years now had enabled them to be together ‘enough to keep us kicking’, he said.
    ‘Well, I took her to Amsterdam. We had a fantastic time. Sorry – I don’t want to hurt your feelings,’ he went on, as though they had just occurred to him. ‘You know
how it is.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, before she could stop herself.
    ‘You really
are
imaginative about other people – in a good kind of way. But don’t worry.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘You