A Glove Shop In Vienna

The Adultery of Jenny Craig

Jenny Craig knew that there was no such thing as adultery any more. The women’s movement, the new way of thinking had made the word, the whole concept, obsolete. There weren’t really ‘affairs’ any more either; there were just different people relating to each other, taking and giving love, some inside marriage, some out… That’s what it was like now.

Only, seemingly, not for her. What she was planning to do: to meet a man called Thomas Marsham, to whom she was not married, for a weekend in London, felt like adultery. Furthermore the sleeplessness, the indigestion, the tension headaches she had developed as the result of the lies it had been necessary to tell her husband, felt like guilt.

Jenny had been married to Philip Craig for twelve years and they had been good ones. All the trouble people had with sex hadn’t really come their way. Philip enjoyed it and so did she and when after the first few years they had done all the ordinary things and were perhaps inclined to get a little bit into a rut, they had gone out and bought some books and done slightly less ordinary things. Only, of course, after a while these too got a little bit repetitive, there being only so many things one can expect of the human body; and lately, returning from one of his more exhausting business trips, Philip had been inclined to fall asleep before, rather than after, they had expressed themselves in this particular way.

All of which Jenny understood and didn’t in the least mind. As far as she could see, the sex thing was a ‘heads you win, tails I lose’ situation up to a point, since if you started well you were bound to get caught up in the sheer repetition thing and if you started badly you’d had it anyway. So she was in no way inclined to use this as an alibi for what was about to happen between herself and Thomas Marsham.

She had met Thomas at an adult education class in philosophy run by the local university where he had tried to explain to a group of housewives, retired schoolteachers and weirdos what Wittgenstein had meant by sentences like: ‘The World is all that is the case’.

Jenny had not understood Wittgenstein, as she had hot really understood Kant or Descartes or the doctrines of logical positivism, but over a cup of coffee in the university canteen she found that she understood Dr Marsham.

He was a few years older than she was, with wild hair already turning grey and short-sighted blue eyes behind thick glasses: an untidy, chain-smoking, neglected-looking man with beautiful hands and a formidable intelligence which he concealed with idiotic jokes, self-denigration and buffoonery. He had married, at Cambridge, a Girtonian with a First in Anthropology whose academic career matched, and now seemed likely to surpass, his own. Between expeditions to the He-He in Basutoland (whose adopted tribe member she was), broadcasts and committee meetings, Professor Marjorie Marsham found life a full and absorbing business and though extremely fond of Thomas, was inclined to communicate with him mostly through little notes propped against the tea-pot informing him how and when to empty the dustbins and roughly what day he could expect her back from Basutoland.

It was therefore with a pleasure whose innocence at first entirely misled him that he looked at Jenny Craig with her snub nose, shining curly brown hair and trusting grey eyes, and listened as she apologised for her lack of education, the fact that she had ‘only’ been a shorthand typist before her marriage, and confided in him her longing to avoid the ‘coffee morning’ set-up now that her two children were both at school. With students he was careful, even shy, but this little housewife with her shining cleanliness, her readiness to be impressed by the glory of learning, found him with his defences down.

The first cup of coffee in the canteen after the lecture had been followed by others, as often as not chaperoned by some other member of the class. The way that Jenny looked round the filthy refectory with its plastic cups and garish walls, the wistful look with which she breathed in the ‘academic’ atmosphere, touched him profoundly. Without realising it, he was starved of comfort, comeliness and grace and these old-fashioned qualities he found in this woman who apologised with every second sentence for her lack of brains.

Inevitably, there came a day when Philip was away on a business trip, Professor Marsham was recording a broadcast in Manchester on the initiation rites of the Wai-Titi and Jenny’s mother was staying with her and longed only to put the children to bed undisturbed.

‘I suppose… you wouldn’t care to come to the concert in the City Hall?’ asked Thomas hesitantly, and waited — as the nicest men seem to go on doing all their lives — for a rebuff.

‘I’d love to,’ said Jenny, overcome by the honour of being chosen by the lecturer. ‘It’s the Brahms Fourth, isn’t it? I love that. The bit in the second movement…’

So they went to the concert.

A shared love of great music is known to be the greatest aphrodisiac of them all. If it had been Bach, Jenny thought later, perhaps it would have been all right. We might have been uplifted, but not the other thing. Instead, in the second movement, at the exact phrase that always sent her soaring, Thomas turned and smiled at her. After which the thing was done.

They walked home hand in hand through the darkening streets of the industrial city which had suddenly become Elysium. The uncertainty and fear of rebuff were over, the plotting and scheming not yet begun. A halcyon interval; the best, perhaps, in any love affair. They kissed chastely and parted. Thomas had his hair cut, bought a new shirt and gave a series of lectures on ‘The Nature of Speech Acts’ which left even the stroppiest of his students gasping with admiration. Jenny sang about the house, lingered in her garden to touch the papery calices of her daffodils and bought a new nightdress to take off for Philip when he got back from his trip.

Both of them felt wonderfully happy and very, very good.

There followed the next stage, so familiar to all who have trodden this well-worn path: the attempt to open up the friendship, fit it into the quadrilateral of conventional married life. Jenny accordingly gave a little dinner party for Thomas and his wife and the most intellectual of Philip’s business friends, a couple who had done PPE at Oxford.

The dinner party was a success. Jenny wore a dark red skirt and a white blouse and cooked Boeuf Bourguignon and Crime brulee. There was a great deal to drink. Philip liked Thomas, who was extremely witty about university politics, and Jenny liked Professor Marjorie who made her laugh like anything about the kinship systems of the He-He. By this time, however, it was too late, Thomas and Jenny retaining little from the evening except the look in the other’s eye.

It was now that Jenny began to fight. She fought honestly and hard — for her husband, Philip, whom she truly loved; for her own peace of mind and sense of honour, her deep-rooted, uncomplicated belief in an open life; above all for her children, who would pay the price if her indiscretions ricocheted.

She had always turned to the printed word for comfort, so now she removed from her bedside table the women’s magazines, biographies and novels with which she usually read herself to sleep and substituted — but gradually, so as not to arouse Philip’s suspicions — the great cookery books of religion and ethics wherein the sages of the world have given their recipes for the good life. Thus Jenny borrowed, bought or scrounged the Tao Te Ching (which informed her that Desire is Illusion), the Dhammapada (which besought her to Straighten her Mind like a Fletcher Straightens his Arrow) and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, that great Stoic, who regarded it as essential to have nothing in one’s mind that could not immediately be spoken aloud to others. She read also a treatise called The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts and just to keep her options open, she read the Quiet Corner of Patience Strong.

The only thing she didn’t read was the Bible. She didn’t read the Bible because she knew what the Bible had to say on the subject of adultery. The Bible said one should not commit it. As far as she could remember, the Bible did not say why one should not commit it, it just said one should not. This struck Jenny as useless and unfair; also old-fashioned in a way which even she, morally stranded as she apparently was in the Middle Ages, regarded as going altogether too far.

She struggled on in this way for several weeks and in his smoke-filled, book-littered room in the university, Thomas Marsham — nominally finishing a thesis on ‘The Relationship of Quality to the Objective World’ — struggled also. Though more intelligent than Jenny, he was not a great deal wiser, nor did the discipline of his subject greatly aid him for philosophy has never been famous for producing men able to bring the concepts of duty, truth and morality to bear on their private lives.

Philip, throughout this time, remained fond and attentive. Jenny would not in any case have attempted the ‘he takes me for granted’ routine, since it had always seemed to her that if married people did not grant themselves, each to the other, to take, then marriage was something other than she had supposed.

Term had ended, the lecture course was over. Thomas and Jenny were compelled to meet in secret for occasions referred to as ‘only’ having lunch or ‘only’ going for a walk. Perhaps it was the falseness of the word ‘only’ that made Jenny finally throw in the sponge. Changing her dress three times in order ‘only’ to meet Thomas for a cup of tea in the refectory, rushing back through the darkening streets with a thumping heart, terrified that the children would be home before her, she experienced such self-loathing at her hypocrisy that for a moment it drowned everything else. That night she packed away the great cookery books of living. The next morning she rang Thomas at the university and in a voice almost inaudible with fright, told him she would meet him in London.

The peace of mind which is supposed to follow any firm decision did not follow. Nor, come to that, did peace of body. But she stuck it out and behaved with efficiency, organising first the confidante so necessary for this kind of enterprise — a warm-hearted, rackety friend called Christine who had divorced her husband and lived a cheerfully promiscuous life somewhere off the Earl’s Court Road. Christine sent an eager invitation to an imaginary school reunion; Philip was delighted for her to go; her mother swooped happily on the children and bore them off to her cottage. Jenny threw up in the lavatory, had a hot bath and tottered, light-headed from sleeplessness, on to the 8.57 train.

Thomas was waiting at Euston. He had bought a new jacket and cut himself a little shaving. Meeting, they were suddenly violently shy and embarrassed and in the taxi avoided each other’s eyes.

Then, outside the hotel, Jenny suddenly exploded into sophistication, well-being and joy. She felt completely relaxed, wonderfully worldly. There was only one more moment of anxiety and that the worst of all, far transcending any guilt: the terror of not pleasing — and then that, too, was past.

That first time there was mostly relief at having somehow not failed each other, but afterwards they talked in the way that men and women do talk at such a time — perhaps the only time that human speech, being no longer necessary, becomes what it was meant to be. Later they went out to eat and already the alchemy was at work, transforming Thomas from a gauche academic into a courteous and charming host; changing Jenny from a diffident housewife into a subtle and witty woman of the world. When they got back to the hotel they were already old-established friends and lovers and this time found themselves carried by that strange and mysterious act into a place which marvellously mingled gaiety and peace.

Yet when she packed her case the following morning, Jenny thought, well really it wasn’t so amazing. No one swung from any chandeliers. We’re just people who are fond of each other and wanted to be together. What’s all the fuss about? Fidelity… adultery… all those stupid words. Why do people carry on so? Why did I get in such a state?

They had decided to travel back by separate trains, but Thomas insisted on seeing her off. So once again they stood on the platform at Euston station, smiling at each other, keeping an eye open for acquaintances, thanking each other over and over again.

Then Jenny got on the train and shut the door and lowered the window. And as she felt the door slam between her and Thomas, saw him stand there with his head back, looking at her, his glasses in his hand, she was seized suddenly with an anguish so terrible, so physically overwhelming that she thought she could not bear it. It was as though everything inside her had suddenly imploded — as though each and every organ in her body was collapsing one by one and crumbling into dust — and she cried, ‘I can’t leave you, I can’t, I can’t!’

But the train had started; there was only time for a last glimpse of Thomas’s face showing the same incomprehensible anguish that was on her own and then they were past the end of the platform, moving between sooty walls and tenements, gathering speed…

It was then, standing there in the corridor of the 1.35 to Torchester on a drizzly morning on the twenty-third of June, that Jenny understood about the Bible. She understood why it had said ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ in that stroppy, unequivocal way, and she understood why it had not said why. It had not said why because most probably it did not know, or more likely because there were no words for the knowing. But

Jenny, tottering to the buffet car to see if it was yet open and would sell her, so early in the day, a double whisky or perhaps a pint of opium, could have told the Old Testamental gentleman who had penned that bit exactly why. Because to make love is to make love and in that plastic hotel behind the British Museum, on a bed most hideously covered in purple candle-wick, she and Dr Thomas Marsham had given birth to this devastating product, had manufactured it as surely and solidly as the Bessemer Process — in the far-off, halcyon corridor of her schooldays — had been supposed to manufacture steel.

There was nothing to be done about it. She had set off on this course and somehow she would work it through and perhaps in the end she would hurt no one, not even herself. But as she travelled homeward, disembowelled and divided, as to a distant, sun-drenched landscape she could never hope to reach, Jenny, drinking whisky and eating hard-boiled eggs (for passion, like pregnancy, most strangely affects the appetite) knew why the Bible carried on the way it did. She wouldn’t read it — one didn’t any more. But, God, she knew…