The Centre of the Green by John Bowen Read Free Book Online

affair? But Penny would have known at once. And an affair would have trapped him emotionally , tied him almost as securely, as his marriage did already. All his life he had run away from being tied.
    He had never wanted to be tied, never wanted people to make on him the sort of emotional claims his mother made. When he had wanted sex, he had avoided the women of his own class—Good God! they had thought him shy! The Army had taught him how to make the casual pick-up, had taught him the easy gallantry of the pub or Palais, the suggestion of class which attracted, the hint of commonness which reassured. He knew all the ways—the back seat in the cinema, the bench or the bushes on the heath, the bodies pressed together against a wall in an unlighted alley. “Sordid!” Penny would say, “squalid!”, but it was not sordid to him; it was a game, an adventure, a way of proving to himself that he could get all that whenever he wanted it. It was all those things, and now it was more—it had caught him; it had become a compulsion.
    When he had married, he had intended to give all that up. Yes, he had. Really. Not in any moral sort of way— he didn’t see that there was anything immoral in it—but because you have to make some sacrifices. He might miss it, but you couldn’t go on doing that sort of thingwhen you were married; it wouldn’t be fair. Only, it wasn’t easy. Even during their honeymoon, he had been unable to keep from responding to the habitual coquetries of the maid, of the girl in the tobacco kiosk, of women who passed them in the streets, expecting to be admired. But after all that
was
only automatic. He never intended to do anything about it. It meant nothing. At least, it meant nothing to him. It meant a lot to Penny.
    At first she mocked him gently. “Eyes front!” she would say, and they would both laugh, and he would say “Well, I’m only human”. Then she said nothing about it at all, but sometimes she would be watching him, and he wouldn’t know how long she had been watching him. Then she began to nag him. Nag, nag, nag! She was always going off at him. She never forgot anything. She would remember some perfectly harmless pleasantry to some perfectly harmless creature, and she would remind him of it, and ask him what he meant by it, and they would quarrel. Sulks and tears. Neglecting the home, and taking offence if he suggested that the floor might be swept, the furniture polished. The amount of housework I do, he thought—and an echo of Betty Monney came into his mind, “It’s not right. That’s not a man’s job.”
What on earth was he going to do
?
    Not that Betty had been the beginning of things. That had started long ago—the trip to Leicester on a test campaign , the girl at the milk bar, who came off duty at six, and never, she said, knew what to do with her evenings . He had forgotten it was so easy. After that there had been a string of pick-ups from the teen-age market, bleached blondes in amusement arcades, urchin cuts in coffee bars, counter girls at cheap stores, usherettes in suburban cinemas, deadened intelligences in dead-end occupations, looking for a cheap thrill and a bit of life.
    Not that in many cases they had often been able—no,it was most a matter of fumbling and feeling-up. But because , in most cases, he never got further than the preliminaries , than the casual touch of a hand, the pressure of a knee, the preliminaries had become habitual; if it had not been for the occasional trips to the provinces or afternoons snatched from the office, they might, indeed, have taken the place of sex altogether. And so since Betty was available, and had seemed responsive, and after all, he had told himself, she knew what she was doing , and anyway the poor kid didn’t get much fun, and now——
    “Why, Julian, what a surprise! I noticed someone hiding up here in the gloom, and I felt I must see who it was. So I was very bold, and came straight across. But, my dear, I never