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By Root 2289 0

had been, and if I imagined I was going to get rid of her—I cut this short by telling her, briefly and selectively, the story of the ‘old flame’. How very convenient these cliché phrases are, how soothing to the pained mind, and how misleading, how concealing. Here I was, about to make a decisive move, tormented by love and fear and awful incipient jealousy, telling Rosina a bland, even humorous, story about an ‘old flame’ and thus, while telling the truth, deceiving her. Rosina was cool, intrigued, delighted, intelligent. She was a very different auditor from my cousin and a much more satisfactory one. In fact I found a certain relief in telling the edited tale to this clever and, as it turned out, not unsympathetic woman. What I had intuited at the start, seconds perhaps (so swift is the mind) after hearing the maddening impertinent hooting of the little red car, was that Rosina would view ‘the Hartley question’ in quite a different light from ‘the Lizzie question’.

It is an interesting fact about jealousy (and jealousy is no doubt a major topic in this memoir) that although it is in so many respects a totally irrational as well as a totally irresistible emotion, it does show a certain limited reasonableness where temporal priority is concerned. I had taken up with Lizzie after I had met and appreciated Rosina, and it was fixed (quite erroneously) in Rosina’s mind that Lizzie had somehow ‘stolen me away’. Lizzie was moreover still an attractive woman. Such things made up a classical picture and evoked a typical response. But Hartley, under the ‘old flame’ heading, was a different matter altogether, and here Rosina’s sheer intelligence did work on the side of reason. Hartley belonged to my remote past, Hartley was ‘old’ (that is, my age), Hartley was unattractive and undistinguished and (a not unimportant point) thoroughly married. These data quick Rosina had taken in and assembled, I could almost see the computer working behind her sparkling crooked eyes. Rosina had assessed my chances and did not rate them high. Like James, she thought it would end in tears; and my truthful narrative subtly encouraged this belief.

It was soon clear that of course Rosina could not, from any point of view, regard Hartley as a serious rival; so much was this so that she was even able to pity her, not maliciously, but with a kind of interested objectivity. What Rosina had grasped was that the encounter with Hartley had withered my interest in Lizzie. So . . . when the whole foolish episode had ended in disaster . . . intelligent sympathetic Rosina would be there to pick up the pieces. Of course Rosina saw my relief at talking, my gratitude for her lively clever responses; and indeed I was, just for this moment, pleased with her. And of course I did not tell her everything, least of all my immediate plans. So dedicatedly Machiavellian did I feel just then that I had no sense of treachery as I thus talked Hartley over with dangerous witty Rosina. I led Rosina, and, where it was necessary to me, her own inventive cleverness conveniently deceived her.

It was interesting that Rosina clearly remembered the occasion when the headlights of her car had revealed Hartley to me pinned against the rock. ‘I thought I was going to squash the old bag like a beetle. Come, Charles, she is an old bag, the poor thing, you can’t deny it.’

‘Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat—’

‘Bats have radar. Yours doesn’t seem to be working.’

‘Use your intelligence, anyone can love anyone, consider Perry’s Uncle Peregrine.’

‘Perry’s what—?’

‘Never mind—’

‘I knew you were fibbing that time I drove you to London. You’re a rotten actor, I can’t think why you ever went into the theatre at all. I knew there was something going on, but I thought it was Lizzie.’

‘I never felt like this about Lizzie.’

‘Well, it had better not be Lizzie.’

‘It isn’t! Hasn’t even this convinced you? I love this woman.’ I love her, I thought, just as if I have been actually married to her all those years and have seen her gradually grow old and lose her beauty.

‘Oh,