May We Borrow Your Husband? by Graham Greene

Author:Graham Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2000-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

If she could be so cowardly, she thought, with a harmless old man like that, how could she have faced the real decisiveness of an adventure? One was not, at her age, ‘swept off the feet’. Charlie had been proved just as sadly right to trust her as she was right to trust Charlie. Now with the difference in time he would be leaving the Museum, or rather, if this were a Sunday as the Blood of the Lamb seemed to indicate, he would probably have just quit writing in his hotel room. After a successful day’s work he always resembled an advertisement for a new shaving-cream: a kind of glow. . . . She found it irritating, like living with a halo. Even his voice had a different timbre and he would call her ‘old girl’ and pat her bottom patronizingly. She preferred him when he was touchy with failure: only temporary failure, of course, the failure of an idea which hadn’t worked out, the touchiness of a child’s disappointment at a party which has not come up to his expectations, not the failure of the old man – the rusted framework of a ship transfixed once and for all upon the rock where it had struck.

She felt ignoble. What earthly risk could the old man represent to justify refusing him half an hour’s companionship? He could no more assault her than the boat could detach itself from the rock and steam out to sea for the Fortunate Islands. She pictured him sitting along with his half-empty bottle of bourbon seeking unconsciousness. Or was he perhaps finishing the crude blackmailing letter to his brother? What a story she would make of it one day, she thought with self-disgust as she took off her dress, her evening with a blackmailer and ‘pirate’.

There was one thing she could do for him: she could give him her bottle of pills. She put on her dressing-gown and retrod the corridor, room by room, until she arrived at 63. His voice told her to come in. She opened the door and in the light of the bedside lamp saw him sitting on the edge of the bed wearing a crumpled pair of cotton pyjamas with broad mauve stripes. She began, ‘I’ve brought you . . .’ and then she saw to her amazement that he had been crying. His eyes were red and the evening darkness of his cheeks sparkled with points like dew. She had only once before seen a man cry – Charlie, when the University Press had decided against his first volume of literary essays.

‘I thought you were the maid,’ he said. ‘I rang for her.’

‘What did you want?’

‘I thought she might take a glass of bourbon,’ he said.

‘Did you want so much . . .? I’ll take a glass.’ The bottle was still on the dressing-table where they had left it and the two glasses – she identified hers by the smear of lipstick. ‘Here you are,’ she said, ‘drink it up.

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