The Rules of Life Read Online Free Page A

I did not love Stavros. And living with a man who loves you when you do not love him is ageing. Of all things, boredom is the most ageing. But enough on the subject of Stavros. Hairs grew out of his ears, strong and coarse.
    ‘Now of course I had always known perfectly well that Timothy and Janice would make love from time to time. How could they not? How could the erotic energy generated by Timothy and myself, on top of or beneath the gold-on-black-on-white lace counterpane, not spill over into other beds? I would have been insulted had it not. In a feebly-sexed marriage the cuckolded husband is jealous of the lover, the deceived wife made unhappy by the mistress, because, poor wedded things, they receive only what is left over. If the marriage is strongly sexed lovers and mistresses must grind their teeth with envy, knowing they exist only to sop up the overflow. That is a further truth. Another is that monogamy, amongst interesting and lively people, is rare. Or, conversely, that only those who lack energy, or courage, are faithful. No, I took offence because it suited me to do so, because the routine of our life had become too steady for the preservation and maintenance of romantic love, and, quite instinctively, I knew the time had come to upset it. In my absence, deprived of cream-filled chocolates, Timothy Tovey became quite slim. Janice’s diet plan for her husband suddenly began to work. I daresay she wondered why.’
    At this point Miss Sumpter’s voice failed again. I beg readers to remember that she saw life from the balcony of a St John’s Wood villa, and that in spite of what the pinner priests may say, to be dead is not necessarily to be wise. The voice from the grave may mislead. My own wife is a very fine, brave and interesting woman, and I am convinced the very model of sexual propriety. She is a botanist, and would be ashamed to live as Gabriella Sumpter lived. Miss Sumpter, it seems, never had anything so vulgar or demanding as a job in her entire life.
    When Miss Sumpter’s voice resumed she was giving instructions as to the removal of scorch stains from white linen. Take ½ pint of vinegar’, she said, ‘2 oz. Fuller’s earth, 1 oz. of dried fowl dung, ½ oz. of soap and the juice of two large onions. Boil all together to the consistency of paste: spread the composition thickly over the damaged part, and if the threads are not too far gone, or actually consumed by fire, every trace of scorching will disappear after the article has been washed once or twice’. Miss Sumpter says she had Frieda Martock use this method on the tablecloths from the linen cupboard which were badly scorched by the fire at Covert House, and very successful it had been. The fire she referred to was, presumably, the one started by her would-be seducer, Walter James, in which her father, Sir William Lacey-Sumpter, died. The greater part of Covert House, the family home, had not only been totally destroyed but was totally uninsured. One staircase remained, untouched by the flames, and the linen cupboards tucked under it survived, by one of those quirks of happenstance which so often attend disasters. The recipe for the removal of scorch marks came from Miss Sumpter’s grandmother’s work-book, which happened to be at the Town Museum, for restoration, at the time of the fire. The pinner priests say that one of the phenomena of this kind of replay is what they call the ‘trauma splurge effect’—the subplot, as it were, spilling back during replay into the major scenarios of life. But I am not sure that what we have here is a case of trauma splurge. I suspect Miss Sumpter of regarding the loss of a tablecloth and the loss of a father as fairly equal tragedies. Thank the GSWITS that my wife, Honor, pays little attention to what she puts over her head in the morning in the way of clothes, or the way the curtains hang; just so long as everything is neat and clean, that’s enough for her.
    ‘Walter James,’ Miss Sumpter