May We Borrow Your Husband? Read Online Free Page A

on the brink of a different experience. And yet if that were the case the comedy was all the crueller. Would everything have gone normally well if some conjunction of the planets had not crossed their honeymoon with that hungry pair of hunters?
    I longed to speak out, and in the end I did speak, but not, so it happened, to her. I was going to my room and the door of one of theirs was open and I heard again Stephen’s laugh – a kind of laugh which is sometimes with unintentional irony called infectious; it maddened me. I knocked and went in. Tony was stretched on a double bed and Stephen was ‘doing’ his hair, holding a brush in each hand and meticulously arranging the grey waves on either side. The dressing-table had as many pots on it as a woman’s.
    â€˜You really mean he told you that?’ Tony was saying. ‘Why, how are you, William? Come in. Our young friend has been confiding in Stephen. Such really fascinating things.’
    â€˜Which of your young friends?’ I asked.
    â€˜Why, Peter, of course. Who else? The secrets of married life.’
    â€˜I thought it might have been your sailor.’
    â€˜Naughty!’ Tony said. ‘But touché too, of course.’
    â€˜I wish you’d leave Peter alone.’
    â€˜I don’t think he’d like that,’ Stephen said. ‘You can see that he hasn’t quite the right tastes for this sort of honeymoon.’
    â€˜Now you happen to like women, William,’ Tony said. ‘Why not go after the girl? It’s a grand opportunity. She’s not getting what I believe is vulgarly called her greens.’ Of the two he was easily the more brutal. I wanted to hit him, but this is not the century for that kind of romantic gesture, and anyway he was stretched out flat upon the bed. I said feebly enough – I ought to have known better than to have entered into a debate with those two – ‘She happens to be in love with him.’
    â€˜I think Tony is right and she would find more satisfaction with you, William dear,’ Stephen said, giving a last flick to the hair over his right ear – the contusion was quite gone now. ‘From what Peter has said to me, I think you’d be doing a favour to both of them.’
    â€˜Tell him what Peter said, Stephen.’
    â€˜He said that from the very first there was a kind of hungry femininity about her which he found frightening and repulsive. Poor boy – he was really trapped into this business of marriage. His father wanted heirs – he breeds horses too, and then her mother – there’s quite a lot of lucre with that lot. I don’t think he had any idea of – of the Shape of Things to Come.’ Stephen shuddered into the glass and then regarded himself with satisfaction.
    Even today I have to believe for my own peace of mind that the young man had not really said those monstrous things. I believe, and hope, that the words were put into his mouth by that cunning dramatizer, but there is little comfort in the thought, for Stephen’s inventions were always true to character. He even saw through my apparent indifference to the girl and realized that Tony and he had gone too far; it would suit their purpose, if I were driven to the wrong kind of action, or if, by their crudities, I lost my interest in Poopy.
    â€˜Of course,’ Stephen said, ‘I’m exaggerating. Undoubtedly he felt a bit amorous before it came to the point. His father would describe her, I suppose, as a fine filly.’
    â€˜What do you plan to do with him?’ I asked. ‘Do you toss up, or does one of you take the head and the other the tail?’
    Tony laughed. ‘Good old William. What a clinical mind you have.’
    â€˜And suppose,’ I said, ‘I went to her and recounted this nice conversation?’
    â€˜My dear, she wouldn’t even understand. She’s incredibly innocent.’
    â€˜Isn’t