The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(60)
“The wine isn’t bad, Bertie. But I don’t think it as excellent as you maintain. Moreover, I would venture to say nor do you.”
Jane’s last pronouncement threw Wells, who insisted even more stubbornly on how pleasurable he found the wine, on how velvety it was as it slipped down his throat, the aftertaste it left in his mouth of a forest at dawn, and so on. Jane let him talk, making an irritating clucking sound with her tongue that succeeded in gradually dampening Wells’s exalted speech. Finally, rather peevishly, he decided to listen to what his wife had to say. And Jane spoke with the authority conferred upon her by the many similar revelations she had made in the past.
“It isn’t the wine itself you find excellent,” she explained, smiling the way she always did when she began analyzing her husband, “but rather the situation.”
And, with a sweep of her hand, she invited Wells to consider their surroundings. They were in a restaurant, which, as advertised, successfully combined the charm of a Parisian bistro with the silence and orderliness essential to the English way of life. In addition, there were few customers that evening, so the background conversation, far from being a nuisance, created a pleasant murmur. They had been seated at a corner table, from which they were able to observe their fellow diners discreetly from a distance. The waiter who had brought them the menu had even recognized Wells and praised his latest novel. The wine was served at the perfect temperature, in an elegant, tall-stemmed glass that was perfectly adapted to his hand and as light as a bubble. The orchestra was playing mellow music, he had enjoyed a productive day’s work . . . need she go on?
“Any decent wine would taste excellent to you under these circumstances, Bertie. But you would have found the same wine unremarkable, and possibly downright bad, if they had given us a table beside the door and we had been forced to sit in a cold draft every time someone came in or left. Or if the waiter hadn’t been so friendly, or if the lighting was too dim or too bright, or if . . .”
“All right, all right. But isn’t that the same for everybody?” he had protested, rather halfheartedly, as though it were a formality he had to go through before yielding to Jane’s new theory.
She shook her head.
“Nobody is as impressionable as you, Bertie. Nobody.”
And Wells observed his habitual thoughtful silence following one of his wife’s revelations. Then Jane began browsing through the menu, pretending to choose between the beef and the salmon, letting Wells muse at his leisure, aware that he was doing what he always did after she pronounced one of her judgments: recalling other incidents in his life to see whether that theory applied. When, after a few minutes, Wells saw the pointlessness of the exercise, he grudgingly accepted that she was right. And as they headed for home, he wondered whether Jane wasn’t afraid that their love might be built on something as fragile as the random circumstances that had held sway the day they had met: the good humor with which he imparted his lecture, the black dress she wore because she was mourning her father’s recent death, the light filtering through the window and setting her hair aflame, the boredom of the other students, which allowed the two of them to speak without feeling they were being watched . . . Perhaps if it had been raining that day, and he had been in a bad mood, or she had been wearing a different dress that didn’t make her look so vulnerable, that dinner might never have taken place. But in the end what did it matter? he thought. The circumstances had been propitious, and, whether they liked it or not, here they were, happily together.
The sitting room door opened again, breaking off Wells’s reflections, and from his armchair he saw Jane walk in holding the pruning shears, then take her straw hat from the stand. After putting it on, she left the room, giving him a stern look, as if it vexed her to see him slumped in an armchair instead of training a troupe of chimpanzees to dance for her. Whenever they quarreled, Jane would go out into the garden and vent her fury on the defenseless rosebushes, and for days the fragrance of freshly cut roses would fill the house. It was a smell Wells couldn’t help associating with their squabbles, but also with their reconciliations, for sooner or later he would go to her with a submissive smile, the first of many steps he would have to take before Jane finally agreed to sign a peace treaty, which she always did. It was an unspoken rule that, by the time the roses wilted, Wells would need to have patched things up between them. And if out of apathy or indifference he allowed that deadline to expire, he might as well start packing his bags.
Before commencing the process, Wells couldn’t help wondering once again if it was worth all the effort for a marriage he found increasingly stifling. Recently, for example, he had noticed within him the stirrings of desire for other women, for the newness of unknown bodies, for embarking anew on the forgotten adventure of courtship, of seducing a woman who wasn’t yet aware of all his little foibles. He had felt guilty to begin with, but he soon realized that this intense desire did not affect the love he felt for Jane. He had no doubt that she was the woman with whom he wanted to end his days. It had taken them almost three years to get to know each other, and the idea of forging a similarly deep bond with another woman was unthinkable. And so, far from betraying Jane by experimenting with his desire, Wells felt he was betraying himself by trying to suppress it, advocating by his irreproachable behavior a virtue and honesty to which he did not subscribe. Whose bright idea had it been to force man into monogamy when it was so obviously not natural to him? Wells had needs his marriage couldn’t satisfy. Perhaps he should speak to Jane about all this, he thought, explain to her that his soul craved more emotions than she alone could provide, and that if she allowed him to indulge in an occasional extramarital affair, he would promise never to fall in love and only maintain playful, fleeting dalliances that posed no threat to their marriage—something he preferred, in the end, for it would free him from the need to behave in the romantic fashion Jane was always complaining he lacked. Jane would remain the guiding light of his life, while those future lovers would only ever attain the pitiful status of stimulants, which as the years went by would become increasingly necessary if he didn’t want the slow but sure road to decrepitude to plunge him into depression. However, no matter how reasonable that explanation seemed to him, he doubted very much whether his wife would understand or agree to a new routine whereby his controlled dalliances would be allowed to act as an aid to their marriage.