For a while the houses on either side of us were empty. Then at about the
same time the 'For Sale' signs were taken away and people moved into them.
We live in a (just) detached house in between, which I've come to assume,
perhaps my wife has too, we'll be living in for the rest of our lives . . .
Well, one has to begin somewhere, on any old scrap of paper. I'm not sure
what the point of it is. We shall have to see. It may take quite a time.
Webb, our neighbour on one side, suffers from too much curiosity but it
lacks malice, I'm sure. On our other side live a man called Hamble and his
wife who display in their demeanour a constant long-suffering which I
suspect in each other's company alone they find something of a strain. Webb
is married too. His wife is hunched, wan and bespectacled and seems to keep
out of the way as if in her time she has been too much the object of
curiosity.
I often, not all that often, wish we could afford to live without close
neighbours instead of here in this unnoteworthy north London suburb where to
try to keep to oneself is to draw attention to oneself. Too much
neighbourliness is forced upon me in my place of work without my having to
put up with it in the long periods in between. My wife would regard such
theories (if at all) as anti-social. She is whatever the opposite of that
is. Society is something she is decidedly pro, having theories about anyway
– both the one that is and the better one we should all be trying to bring
into being. She practises what she preaches – the other way round too which
some might find, well, anti-social perhaps the word is. I don't. I admire
what she does very much, namely good works in another neighbourhood, asking
herself now and again, only in theory thank the Lord, whether she ought to
be paid for them. Between us therefore you could say we are trying to bring
a better world into being, a wider neighbourliness. At any rate that's the
theory and I won't let it come between us.
When she sees the Webbs or the Hambles she waves briskly at them without
pausing in what she is doing – mainly striding resolutely up or down our
front path – and she answers Webb's enquiries with a sideways pull of one
half of her mouth that only Webb might mistake for a smile. My wife does not
enjoy entering into discussion about our neighbours when there are topics
more far-reaching to be talked about, such as our children's progress and
growing social awareness, my total lack of them (which are talked about only
by implication) and the world's way of falling somewhere in between.
It wouldn't much matter to my wife where we lived, within limits of course;
I think she'd prefer greater poverty and hardship to having to classify
herself more evidently among the privileged. So, equally often, I am glad we
live where we do, midway, roughly speaking, between the two i.e. not
squalidly and not too stricken by her conscience. The neighbourhood where
she works has a lot of squalor in it, about which she tells me as I go 'Ts ts', shake my head, silently count my blessings and say nothing. These are
the early 1970s and things seem to be getting worse and worse which makes
them better and better for her, I'm glad (sorry) to say.
Up to a point, I like to imagine that Webb married his wife purely out of
curiosity, to discover what the intimacies of wedlock with someone so shy of
them would be like, or because she seemed docile enough to experiment a lot
with. I also imagine he is curious about my intimacies with my wife, though
he might guess they wouldn't make him curious for more ad infinitum. One of
my speculations is that when we go up to bed he is in the bathroom opposite
our bedroom window with the light off in the hope that one night we'll
forget to draw the curtains and turn our light out. This is not at all the
kind of notion I can share with my wife. It would make her think me
frivolous on top of lacking in imagination. It would also make her despise
Webb for being somebody anybody could have that kind of thought about. So
far I think I like Webb enough not to want him to be despised, especially
(even?) by my wife. Also, without going to the lengths of hanging about in
unlit bathrooms, I am not that much less curious than I imagine Webb to be
to know what he and Mrs Webb get up to together. When I go to bed I
sometimes slow down a lot without actually coming to a complete stop, and
glance across at their bedroom to see if anything interesting is going on,
on the off-chance they are more careless than we are. I mean than my wife is
– it is she who draws our curtains and always with an extra two tugs to shut
out the tiniest possible remaining chink of light between them. Generally
speaking, my own curiosity is limited to holding myself in readiness not to
turn the other way and hurry past should something going on present itself
to me. When I go for walks after dark I look nonchalantly up at lit bedrooms
with undrawn curtains. I've never seen anything.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
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