Neither of us had a car. I led him to a nearby pub where I often relaxed over a pint of lager after working late. Neither of us wished to seduce the other. I am a good judge of character, knew Henry was unselfish, knew he would have stayed late for any woman, old or young, married or single. Nor would he have made a pass at them. In such circumstances I think any single woman could have got him to marry her, for he thought it right to give women what they wanted if it would not hurt them. I had a proposal for him that was not romantic.
Over the lager I said, “If you insist on working late you can do better than tidy the basement.”
The basement staff sent big consignments to shops all over Scotland. They also sent single books ordered by customers up to my department, a smaller but equally important job that was not done regularly. The single books accumulated on a basement trolley for a day or more and often came up with invoices missing, causing me endless trouble. I had asked the basement foreman to send the trolley up twice a day. He grudgingly said he would, but never did as he hated taking orders from a woman. Our managing directors also disliked taking orders from women so would not speak to the foreman on my behalf, saying I should deal with him. I asked Henry to look out for the single books and bring them upstairs whenever he could. If this was not possible during normal working hours he could bring them to me after his workmates left. I said, “Manage that and I’ll try getting you paid overtime, though the directors will likely say the firm can’t afford it. They’re very stingy with everyone who is not upper management and I’m only head of middle management.”
“No matter!” said Henry cheerily. “Every business should be efficient.”
From then on he made my life easier, and his only reward was the pint of lager I bought him afterward.
When the rest of my staff learned of this arrangement they decided we were lovers. The women all thought Henry “a heart-throb” because of his deep soft voice, and one said, “I honestly don’t know what he sees in you.”
Women who are not wee and chubby often wonder why men like me. At university one such man told me loftily, “Compact, manageable female bodies always appeal to the average male sensualist,” though I never let him manage mine. My deputy (another heart-throbbist) said bitterly, “Henry knows which side his bread is buttered. Guess who will be promoted when the next vacancy occurs.”
She was promoted when the next vacancy occurred. The directors employed whoever I thought fit but never promoted those I recommended, and certainly not Henry. They called him “over-qualified”. Six months passed before he and I knew each other well enough to be lovers, another month before we married, yet in all his time with the firm he was one of the worst paid despite (unlike some with four times his salary) keeping an essential part running smoothly.
We honeymooned on a Mediterranean coast where we did not know the language of the natives, so I forget if they were Spanish or Italian. We mostly met English holiday makers who seemed just as foreign, often dining with a couple from Felixstowe who seemed to like us. I once heard the husband say, not knowing he was overheard, “They’re terribly Scotch, aren’t they dear?”
“Very!” said his wife. “But quaintly entertaining.”
He said, “You find them that, but I prefer the company of normal people.”
We enjoyed the local food but never got used to the unrelenting sunshine. That was our first and last trip abroad. Since then Millport and Lamlash on the Firth of Clyde have been our holiday resorts.
The pattern of our evenings had changed long before our marriage. Henry still worked for almost eleven hours a day and I for over nine, so instead of visiting the pub we dined in Chinese or Indian restaurants. I hate making meals and other housework because Mum did these chores for me before I left home, and after moving to my own house I paid an agency to clean it, and for weekends bought meals that could be simply heated and tipped onto a plate. Henry preferred shopping for the ingredients of meals he cooked, having done that for his mum, so at weekends he did so for us, though I felt slightly guilty about that. But the real test of a partnership is how a couple manage together when not doing much. I am a television addict, Henry a thinker. After work and at weekends I relaxed watching a soap opera or reality show and he sat with me reading or thinking. The TV’s noise did not disturb him because, he said, his parents had been television addicts in a two-room flat. The kitchen was the only room with steady heating so at first, when doing homework at night, he had shut out noise by putting fingers in his ears. But this annoyed his dad and Henry had learned to ignore noise by concentrating harder. When Dad died his mum offered (as I did) to listen to the TV on earphones, but he said there was now no need — he could ignore any amount of noise by concentrating.
“Concentrating on what? You’ve no school homework nowadays,” I said, never having seen him read a book. Neither did I, partly because my university tutors had made them boring, partly because I worked all day with books. Henry said he needed no books now because he remembered enough of them, and the Times Literary Supplement told him how things were going.
“What things?” I asked and he said, “Things in general — things Victorians used to call The March of the Mind.” “How is it marching?”
“Badly. New discoveries in physics and biology are always happening but only do good to corporations who finance them. Humane sciences are at a standstill since Marx and Freud stopped being thought important, while linguistic philosophy — the watchdog of speech — is also out of date. So is Existentialism, the last school of philosophy relevant to human action. But I enjoy seeing how academics keep carving cosy niches for themselves and their friends.”
That was not a conversation I could continue. Normally after discussing the daily events we shared he would start reading the T.L.S., underline a word or two in an article, then sit looking into space for a long time with the unread journal open on his lap. When I asked what he was thinking once he jerked slightly as if waking from a dream then said, “Numbers.”
“Mathematics?” I asked and he replied, “Not exactly. I ought to have said quantities — not quantities of things, just quantities in general. Even when very different — even when seemingly contradictory — they still harmonise. Is this a law of nature? Or the result of quantities being human constructs, like language? I can’t decide which.” “Neither can I. It’s totally above my head,” I confessed. “You would understand me better if you were a musician,” he said. Not being musical I returned to watching EastEnders while he resumed thinking about quantities or music with the little smile that some wives might have found annoyingly secretive. Not me. It showed my company was enough for him.
Our lives flowed very smoothly then because (I thought) we enjoyed safety and comfort that would last until retirement and beyond. Children do not guarantee future comfort, so though never discussing them we did without. One day I told my main assistant of our good time together and she said, “I suppose you get on well with him because he does everything you want.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “but I never want anything stupid or difficult.”
“Good for you!” said she. “But I could never respect a man without initiative.”