Funny Girl(27)

And now Edith was sleeping with him, and Dennis didn’t know what to do about it. She would leave him in the end, he supposed, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to leave her, not unless he awoke from this miserable dream and realized that a wife who chose to sleep with another man was unlikely to make him very happy any time soon, and a wife who chose to so much as smile at Vernon Whitfield was in any case the least suitable life partner he could possibly have found. What a terrible thing an education was, he thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it.

Edith didn’t want to stay at Penguin Books, of course. She hated being stuck in Harmondsworth, right out near London Airport, for a start, and anyway she wanted to move to Jonathan Cape or Chatto & Windus, proper publishers who happened to be based in proper parts of town. She wouldn’t ever confess to disapproving of the Penguin principle, the idea of selling books to people who had never previously bought them; she was a socialist, and an intellectual, and in theory she was heartily in favour of creating more people like her. But there was something about it that made her feel queasy, Dennis could tell, and she’d been appalled by the sex-starved herd buying copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in their millions. Dennis bought one himself, just to annoy her, and read it in bed, guffawing at all the silly dirty parts. That drove her mad, so he’d stopped. It wasn’t doing him much good anyway, in any direction.

What was he doing with her? How on earth could he love her? But he did. Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless combination of feelings, but ‘love’ would have to do for now. He, like everybody else in the room, had been charmed by Sophie, by her laugh and her eyes and her sense of humour, and on the way home he’d tried to imagine what it might be like to take her out to dinner, take her to bed, marry her. But he’d failed. He was a Cambridge English graduate with a pipe and a beard, and he was doomed to be with someone like Edith.

Edith hadn’t done any shopping, so there wasn’t anything to eat.

‘Do you want to go out for something?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I have a lot to read. There are eggs, I think, if you’re hungry. And some bread.’

‘How was your day?’

‘Oh, bloody,’ she said.

‘Bloody’, he had learned, didn’t mean what it might have meant to a soldier or a surgeon. It usually meant that a telephone call with a politics professor had gone on longer than she had wanted it to.

‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Did you get out at all?’

She looked at him.

‘Did you try calling me? I had to go into town for a meeting.’

‘No, I didn’t call. But it was a lovely afternoon.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s all I meant.’

It wasn’t all he’d meant at all. But that was the sort of dangerous, poison-dart territory one could wander into, with just a casual observation about the weather.

‘How about you?’ She didn’t often ask, and he took the feigned interest as a sign of guilt.

‘Had a very tricky meeting,’ he said.

‘What does “tricky” mean?’

He imagined things, he knew he did, but he definitely heard a faint mocking superiority, a refusal to believe that anything connected with light entertainment could ever be onerous.

‘It means exactly the same as it does in your job, I should think. I mean, there wasn’t any blood, obviously. But there were very difficult moments involving very strong characters.’

She sighed heavily and picked up a manuscript. He’d misjudged his tone, again. He always did. How on earth could she love him? But she didn’t.

‘I’m going to have a bath,’ he said. ‘Do you want scrambled eggs, if I make them later?’

‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘And I think she’s just gone in the bathroom.’

‘She’ was Mrs Posnanski, their Polish landlady, who lived on the top two floors of the house. Edith and Dennis had the whole of the ground floor, but the bathroom was on the half-landing. If Mrs Posnanski had only just gone in, it meant that she wouldn’t be out for hours.

‘Do you mind awfully if I turn the radio on?’

‘Then I’d have to read in the bedroom.’

‘I’ll go for a walk, then.’