My Husband Simon

by Mollie Panter-Downes

I could not get out of the habit of coming down to coffee and grape-fruit in a dressing-gown. But Simon liked women to be crisp and corseted behind the coffee-pot, at a quarter to nine. In some mysterious way they had to combine this with soft femininity, trailing chiffons, and Ce soir je t’aime at five pounds a bottle.

“This is what you’ve let yourself in for. Nevis Falconer or Mrs. Simon Quinn, which is it to be? Why don’t you make up your mind to stop fighting altogether, or else cut and run?”

Marcus Chard must have been somewhere in the early forties. He was about Simon’s height, but much broader; enormous shoulders and a thick bull neck. In another few years he would be definitely stout. He had a broad, flattish face; a good nose with flaring nostrils; a heavy dark jaw shaved so closely that it looked glossy. His thick dark hair was brushed back from a square forehead. I did not altogether care for the expression of his eyes. They were too unpleasantly acute; too small; too shrewd and brown and lively. But when he smiled their whole expression changed. They almost disappeared in fan-shaped wrinkles of laughter; his face became good-natured and benevolent. He had, too, very beautiful teeth, white, strong and even.

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her dress was black crêpe with amusing touches of white; her little monkey face looked out rather wistfully from a tight-fitting black straw cap edged on the forehead with white like a nun’s coif. The emerald on her left hand was matched exactly by the big chiffon handkerchief that she had thrown down together with a scarf of silver foxes. I thought that her clothes were marvellous.

The streets looked so pure, so clean. One had the feeling that one was seeing them for the first time without all the silly people getting in the way. The broad sweep of Hyde Park Corner had such space and dignity; there stood the giant men of bronze on the Artillery memorial, brooding in the cold dawn light. London, my London!

May passed, and with it some of the shining freshness of buttercups and brilliant green and apple-blossom tumbling over orchard walls in a pale cataract. Now it was June, and the lavender bushes in cottage gardens were beginning to bristle like hedgehogs with purple quills.

There were long evenings and beautiful green dusks that made a hurt angry feeling come into my chest.

And I watched Simon, sitting with my back against the great trunk and the wind running fingers through my hair. He was wonderful to watch on a horse, but equally wonderful just lying there with the shadows of the beech leaves making a pattern on his face. The dusty gold of his hair seemed to blend in with the grass; between those light flickering lashes was the sky.

I lay on my back and stared up at the copper beech tree. It rose in such a miraculous pyre of weaving branches and smooth bronze leaves, high, high, until it lost itself in darkness. Right at the core was a lozenge of blue sky. What was the use of trying to write? I could expend years of energy, gallons of ink, without conveying to anyone else exactly how this tree glowed with secret dark fire in the sunlight, how the trunk stretched out snaky limbs, strong and delicate and exact, to support the piled magnificence of the leaves. Piled magnificence—words, words! What was the good of them? I wanted a new medium, something between writing and painting, with scents and sounds thrown in. How can I make someone see this copper beech tree, smell the cool, luscious grass, hear the hum of bees in the red and purple vetches? It’s no good. … I

“I’m glad nothing has changed. I couldn’t have borne it if a thing had been different.”

“You’re depressed.” “Yes. One oughtn’t to come back to a place where one has been happy. It’s always a risk, always depressing.” “I know.”

We had been lovers here, and we had come back saying cruel, senseless things to each other. It should have been quiet, tranquil, full of memories, and it had ended in the scrape of a chair and “For God’s sake let’s get out of this place!”

Unfortunately our ideas of a good holiday were not the same. Simon liked to motor very fast from place to place, pausing occasionally to climb something or ride something or fish for something. I liked to be hopelessly lazy in one place. I liked to swim and doze in hot sunlight, to lie for long hours with a book which I had no intention of reading, but I liked to be able to emerge at will and find people waiting for me, ready to be watched and speculated about until I grew tired of civilisation and returned to the wilderness again.