Edith was tall, dark, beautiful and clever, and when she agreed to marry him his friends made the kinds of jokes that friends were supposed to make in those circumstances, all of them various articulations of disbelief along the lines of ‘How did you hook her, you lucky so-and-so?’ They didn’t seem so funny now, and he didn’t seem so lucky. He shouldn’t have hooked her. She wasn’t the sort of catch one could take home and show off to people; she was the sort of catch that drags the angler off the end of the pier and pulls him out to sea before tearing him to pieces as he’s drowning. He shouldn’t have been fishing at all, not when he was so ill equipped.
Why had she married him? He still wasn’t sure. She must have thought that he was going places, but then he got the sense that he wasn’t travelling as fast or as far as she’d been expecting. This was unfair, because despite the constant barbs he had to endure about Other Dennis, he was doing all right for himself. Tom Sloan liked him, up until but possibly not including recent incidents; he had good relationships with writers and actors, and the programmes were good, mostly, with only the occasional misfire. (He had to take some of the blame, he knew, for Talk of the Devil.)
The problem was that Edith didn’t really have a funny bone in her entire body and couldn’t see that comedy was any sort of a job for a man with a university education. She’d presumed that he’d trudge through a couple of years with people like Bill and Tony, and then move on to somewhere smarter, to News and Current Affairs, or to one of the arts programmes. Dennis, however, loved his job, and wanted to work with funny writers and funny actors for the rest of his life.
Edith was an editor at Penguin Books and had met her lover at work. Vernon Whitfield was a poet and essayist, a frequent contributor to the Third Programme, older than her and quite insufferably serious-minded. His last radio talk had been entitled ‘Sartre, Stockhausen, and the Death of the Soul’. Even before Dennis had found the letter, he’d always turned the radio off when he heard the familiar drone. If he could have chosen any living person to represent everything he opposed, Whitfield would probably have been the man.
And now Edith was sleeping with him, and Dennis didn’t know what to do about it. She would leave him in the end, he supposed, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to leave her, not unless he awoke from this miserable dream and realized that a wife who chose to sleep with another man was unlikely to make him very happy any time soon, and a wife who chose to so much as smile at Vernon Whitfield was in any case the least suitable life partner he could possibly have found. What a terrible thing an education was, he thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it.
Edith didn’t want to stay at Penguin Books, of course. She hated being stuck in Harmondsworth, right out near London Airport, for a start, and anyway she wanted to move to Jonathan Cape or Chatto & Windus, proper publishers who happened to be based in proper parts of town. She wouldn’t ever confess to disapproving of the Penguin principle, the idea of selling books to people who had never previously bought them; she was a socialist, and an intellectual, and in theory she was heartily in favour of creating more people like her. But there was something about it that made her feel queasy, Dennis could tell, and she’d been appalled by the sex-starved herd buying copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in their millions. Dennis bought one himself, just to annoy her, and read it in bed, guffawing at all the silly dirty parts. That drove her mad, so he’d stopped. It wasn’t doing him much good anyway, in any direction.
What was he doing with her? How on earth could he love her? But he did. Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless combination of feelings, but ‘love’ would have to do for now. He, like everybody else in the room, had been charmed by Sophie, by her laugh and her eyes and her sense of humour, and on the way home he’d tried to imagine what it might be like to take her out to dinner, take her to bed, marry her. But he’d failed. He was a Cambridge English graduate with a pipe and a beard, and he was doomed to be with someone like Edith.
Edith hadn’t done any shopping, so there wasn’t anything to eat.
‘Do you want to go out for something?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I have a lot to read. There are eggs, I think, if you’re hungry. And some bread.’
‘How was your day?’
‘Oh, bloody,’ she said.
‘Bloody’, he had learned, didn’t mean what it might have meant to a soldier or a surgeon. It usually meant that a telephone call with a politics professor had gone on longer than she had wanted it to.
‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Did you get out at all?’
She looked at him.
‘Did you try calling me? I had to go into town for a meeting.’
‘No, I didn’t call. But it was a lovely afternoon.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s all I meant.’
It wasn’t all he’d meant at all. But that was the sort of dangerous, poison-dart territory one could wander into, with just a casual observation about the weather.
‘How about you?’ She didn’t often ask, and he took the feigned interest as a sign of guilt.
‘Had a very tricky meeting,’ he said.