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By Root 376 0

who suffered. Common: it was the word Sandra had given us, and it was the word to which she was now herself pinned. She became a girl from the East End of London, without breeding or education, who had been rescued by myself, besotted by the glamour of her race. But money was the subject of greater fantasies. I don’t suppose we could have made anyone believe that to Sandra money had come as no surprise, it being no more than what she had considered her element; that about money she had always been vague, not knowing even as a student what her grant was or how much she had in the bank; that in money matters she lacked the neurotic precision of myself, who was uneasy unless he knew how much he had and how much he could resonably expect to have in a year’s time; and that to me it had come as no surprise that the very girl who before her marriage would have considered fifty pounds wealth should be talking calmly three years later of our overdraft of a hundred thousand dollars. Her feeling for the luxurious, her readiness to create the occasion with very little, never altered from the time I met her; her demands, even during the days of riches, remained small; and when she left me she left more or less as she had come. Not only from pride; nor yet from that sense of tainted fairy money which the money-gift brings; but, I feel certain, from the conviction that money had ceased to be an issue. It is the peculiar madness that comes with the gift; it makes so many unlikely people – to the wonderment of the world – throw away all.

The simplicities! The distortions! The incident at the Indian Commissioner’s, for instance, was more than modified in the retelling. The talk, it was said, had turned to music. The Canadian Trade Commissioner had said to Sandra, ‘Do you care for music?’ To which, the story would have it, Sandra replied in a low-class London accent: ‘What do you think I am? I would have you know that I like a good symphony concert.’ Then there was the bookshop story, in which I figured. Was it the assistant who spread the hilarious exchange in which he had said to me, ‘Oh, your wife likes reading!’ and I had angrily replied, ‘Look here, I would have you know that my wife reads good books’? This was the dialogue style of these stories: Sandra and I were always ‘having people know’ things. To these stories and to others, of lasciviousness, betrayal and even sexual quaintness, I reacted not at all; and I thought that Sandra shared that placidity, partly her gift, which had come to me with our marriage. But she suffered more than I knew. It did not occur to me that she was not always able to handle a situation which she had provoked; it did not occur to me that, with the gift of the phrase, she could also be vulnerable to the phrase; and that against a low level of distortion she was helpless, as some children remain helpless against the taunts of their fellows, for all the philosophizing of their elders.

She would cultivate a woman friend assiduously, jealously, someone newly arrived, someone new to the group; she would see this person every day and show her every sort of generosity and favour. In no time every aspect of the relationship would be exhausted; and there would occur the inevitable rupture, the anger that was really hurt. More and more I noticed she cultivated Americans; in our group they were a neutral and variable element; and they were as charmed by her accent as she by theirs. With every new encounter, every new friend, she fashioned a matching myth of racial niceness. She was never content with the individual as individual; she wished to go beyond; it was what remained of her avidity and enthusiasm, which could revive at so little. I wish I had seen then, as I see so clearly now, that she was sinking.

What makes a marriage? What makes a house with two people empty? Surely we were compatible, even complementary. Yet it was this very compatibility that drew her away from me. She had begun to get some of my geographical sense, that feeling of having been flung off the world, for all the landscapes and memories