The Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates

Author:Richard Yates [Richard Yates]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2008-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

Liars in Love

WHEN WARREN MATHEWS came to live in London, with his wife and their two-year-old daughter, he was afraid people might wonder at his apparent idleness. It didn’t help much to say he was “on a Fulbright” because only a few other Americans knew what that meant; most of the English would look blank or smile helpfully until he explained it, and even then they didn’t understand.

“Why tell them anything at all?” his wife would say. “Is it any of their business? What about all the Americans living here on private incomes?” And she’d go back to work at the stove, or the sink, or the ironing board, or at the rhythmic and graceful task of brushing her long brown hair.

She was a sharp-featured, pretty girl named Carol, married at an age she often said had been much too young, and it didn’t take her long to discover that she hated London. It was big and drab and unwelcoming; you could walk or ride a bus for miles without seeing anything nice, and the coming of winter brought an evil-smelling sulphurous fog that stained everything yellow, that seeped through closed windows and doors to hang in your rooms and afflict your wincing, weeping eyes.

Besides, she and Warren hadn’t been getting along well for a long time. They may both have hoped the adventure of moving to England might help set things right, but now it was hard to remember whether they’d hoped that or not. They didn’t quarrel much—quarreling had belonged to an earlier phase of their marriage—but they hardly ever enjoyed each other’s company, and there were whole days when they seemed unable to do anything at all in their small, tidy basement flat without getting in each other’s way. “Oh, sorry,” they would mutter after each clumsy little bump or jostle. “Sorry . . .”

The basement flat had been their single stroke of luck: it cost them only a token rent because it belonged to Carol’s English aunt, Judith, an elegant widow of seventy who lived alone in the apartment upstairs and who often told them, fondly, how “charming” they were. She was very charming too. The only inconvenience, carefully discussed in advance, was that Judith required the use of their bathtub because there wasn’t one in her own place. She would knock shyly at their door in the mornings and come in, all smiles and apologies, wrapped in a regal floor-length robe. Later, emerging from her bath in billows of steam with her handsome old face as pink and fresh as a child’s, she would make her way slowly into the front room. Sometimes she’d linger there to talk for a while, sometimes not. Once, pausing with her hand on the knob of the hallway door, she said, “Do you know, when we first made this living arrangement, when I agreed to sublet this floor, I remember thinking, Oh, but what if I don’t like them? And now it’s all so marvelous, because I do like you both so very much.

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