It was in its way a perfect relationship, with just enough separation to keep desire going. The pattern lasted until the time of Peter’s property caper. Then, out of my wish to impress Perdita, and perhaps also more than a little to please myself, I spent a few weekends in Peter’s big house. I should say I behaved very well with Perdita on those occasions. The optimism I drew from Marian served me well. Perdita loved visiting the big house and being waited on by the plump, spoilt men in striped trousers. Her lovely voice came into its own then, and it pleased me to play the perfect courtier with her. I tipped welclass="underline" it pleased Perdita. And this extra time away from Marian sharpened my wish to get back to her as soon as I could. So everybody was served.
We changed hotels a few times, though staying in the general area: I wished always, while my father lived, to be within reach of the cottage. In the beginning this changing of hotels was to prevent Marian from being recognised by her friends or relations. Later it was mainly for the novelty: new rooms, new staff, new lounge and bar, new dining room. We thought for a time of buying a flat or house in an outlying small town, and the idea excited us for some months, but then as we began to go into the details the thought of housekeeping grew more and more oppressive to both of us.
A housekeeping weekend would have been not at all what I wanted. It would have brought out the family side of Marian which I closed my mind to. That family side was always there in the background; sometimes I could feel family problems pressing on Marian; but I wished to know nothing of them. To know more, to see Marian as a day-to-day council-estate housewife, would have done away with the enchantment I found in her rough ways and her deformed accent, things that went so strangely with her swimmer’s clean-smelling, exercised body. But the idea of property had excited her; and in the end, in a kind of compensation, I bought her council-estate house for her. The law had recently been changed, to enable council-estate tenants to buy their houses. I could put no price on my weekends with Marian, and the price the council put on her house was more than reasonable.
Just as people — like my father, say — can gradually get used to a medical condition which, if presented to them all at once, would have been like an overturning of their world, something as calamitous as war or invasion, with every familiar routine undermined and some things destroyed, so I grew into my new social condition: living intensely at weekends with a woman with whom I could have no true conversation, whom I had no wish to “take out” or to present to anyone.
And then, about nine or ten years ago, when you had just left the ruins of your Africa and were in West Berlin, minutes away from the ruins of the East, about that time I made a literary discovery. I read selections from the journals of a Victorian gentleman called A. J. Munby, and found a fellow.
Munby was born in 1828 and died in 1910. This makes him the exact contemporary of Tolstoy. He was a highly educated man, a fine and vivid writer in the effortless Victorian way, and he was deep in the intellectual and artistic life of his time. He knew many of the great names. Some, like Ruskin and William Morris, he knew by sight. When he was still a very young man he could greet Dickens in the street and then in a few words in his journal he could pin down the physical appearance of the fifty-two-year-old author: a dandy, a bit of an actor, vain of his slender figure, his hat tilted on his head.
But Munby — like Ruskin and like Dickens — had a sexual secret. Munby was passionately interested in working women. He liked women who did heavy work with their hands and literally got their hands dirty. He liked seeing servant women in their dirt, as he said, with their hands and faces black with soot and grime. And it is astonishing to us today how many dirty jobs of the time, cleaning fireplaces and so on, were done by women without tools, only with bare and uncovered hands. When these hands were washed they showed rough and thick and red. Ladies’ hands were white and small. Munby’s preference, away from drawing rooms, was for those red hands which, unless covered by the elbow-length gloves of fashion, could always give a working woman away.
Munby talked to any number of these women in the street. He sketched them. He had them photographed. He was an early amateur of photography. He posed women colliery workers in their coarse, heavily patched trousers, legs crossed sometimes, leaning on their man-sized shovels, looking hard and bemused at the photographer, one or two finding enough vanity for a smile. There is nothing pornographic in Munby’s photographs and drawings, though for Munby the subject would doubtless have had some erotic charge.
For most of his life he had a secret liaison with a servant woman. She was tall and robust, a head above most people in the street. Munby liked women of size and strength. He liked the idea of this woman friend of his continuing to work as a servant in other houses; and though she sometimes complained about the inconsiderateness of her employers, he was not too eager to emancipate her. He liked to see the woman in her working dirt. She understood his fetish and didn’t mind: before meeting Munby she had longed in a dreamy way to have a gentleman as a lover or husband. Sometimes, though rarely in the beginning, they lived together in the same house. Then, when people called, the woman had to get up from her drawing-room chair and pretend to be the maid. In the journal there is no hint of sex in the relationship, though this might only have been Victorian reticence.
For a man of Munby’s tastes Victorian London would have been full of excitement. What pleasure, for instance, in a Bloomsbury square, to see, at six in the evening, every basement window lit up, each with its special treasure displayed as on a stage: a servant woman sitting on a chair, waiting to be called.
And just as in Munby’s journal there is a sense of an encircling London servant life, full of pain and pleasure for him, so for me, with Marian, though I closed my mind to what she did when she wasn’t with me, there came fragments, developing after a time into a full picture, of a frightening and brutal council-estate life I had never really known.
During the week Marian lived in her council house with the “mistakes” Jo had mentioned to me right at the beginning. The mistakes were two: two children by different men. I gathered early on that the first of those men was a “drifter.” It was one of Marian’s words; she made it sound almost technical, almost an occupation that might be entered in social security or other government forms. Occupation: Drifter. The drifter was dark-haired. The hair was important: Marian mentioned it more than once, as if it explained everything.
And Marian herself had been one of four mistakes her mother had made with three different men. After these four mistakes Marian’s mother, still only in her twenties, came upon a man she really fancied. It was what she had been waiting for all her life. Love: it was her destiny. She didn’t hesitate. She left the four mistakes and went off with the man, to another house on the council estate. There was some trouble with the authorities then, because Marian’s mother wanted to keep on claiming the benefits that the four mistakes had brought her. Somehow that matter was smoothed over, and Marian’s mother lived with her man until he got tired of her and ran off somewhere with somebody else. It was the way of life down there.
This kind of thing happens elsewhere as well, but what is interesting to me is that at no stage was Marian’s mother required by anyone in authority to live with the material or financial consequences of her decisions. There was always a council house available, and always a benefit of some sort. You might say that for Marian’s mother every action brought an official reward. The people who paid were the children, the mistakes. And I suppose it can be said that they weren’t being punished in any special way: they were only being trained for council-estate life, the way Marian’s poor mother had been trained in her childhood, by other people and other events.