Read The Oriental Wife for Free Online Page A

wish her good night. But he never made a move to follow her.
    In August she was to accompany her employers to their house on the Norfolk coast. Julian, it seemed, was going to his parents’ place in Suffolk, something she only learnedwhen he mentioned it to a couple at the next table. She was always nerving herself to speak to him, rehearsing impassioned speeches as she went over French verbs or the geography of Africa with her charge. But he seemed to know, every time, when she had summoned the courage to ask to talk to him alone. Just as she was going to touch his hand, he would turn away and call out a remark about the rugger to someone at another table, or push back his chair and ask who was ready for the next round of drinks.
    So she went to Norfolk and walked up and down in the garden between lessons, still making up things to say. She wrote him pleading letters—
At least talk to me, at least tell me how things went wrong between us, surely you can do that much
—and furious ones—
How dare you behave like this? What kind of coward are you?
In the end, they all landed in the wastebasket, but then she could not sleep.
    He did not write to her. She had known he wouldn’t, even as she gave him the little slip of paper with her address in the country. But still, every morning, sitting on the terrace with her coffee, watching her charge being led around the sloping lawn on his pony, she strained her ears for the sound of the mail landing on the mat inside the front door, the bronze flap banging shut. Then the maid would bring it through to her employer in his study. On those few occasions when there was a letter for her—it was always, only, from her father—he would bring it to her on the terrace, handing it over with a small flourish; then he would call out encouragement to his son, who was attempting small jumps over a low hurdle they had erected on the grass.
    On her return to London, she stayed away from the King’s Head, and from every other place where she had gone withJulian. There were whole streets she had to avoid walking down, perfectly innocent buildings from which she averted her eyes. In her room at the top of the house, with the housekeeper snoring next door, she lay on the bed, trying to conjure up a future, or switched on the light and examined her face in the mirror, appraising her chances of happiness. At four in the morning, she was full of defiant plans—she would be a spy, or a chorus girl, or a kept woman—and wild energy surged through her. With daylight, though, it always sputtered out again.
    On some nights, she remembered people she had not thought of in years: the French mistress in her first school, the boy from her dancing class who had trembled as he kissed her. When she wrote to her father she sometimes asked what those people were doing now, but he rarely told her. More and more, his letters were devoid of real news; they were filled with silly jokes, as though she were twelve years old.
    The sisters from Nuremberg, who had moved on to Holland, had told her about a café in South Kensington where refugees from Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna went to drink wine and coffee and carry on running arguments. The first time she went there, she drank her coffee in silence and left quickly, meaning never to go back; she was shocked by their flippancy about the English. “It’s astonishing how they all still believe in their schoolboy code.” “That’s because they never really cease being schoolboys. No proper Englishman ever outgrows his childhood.” But a week later she returned, to eavesdrop further. She was the youngest person there. The women were mostly in black, and waved their cigarettes as they talked, and interrupted each other. The men, so much darker and shorter than Julian, wore shabby suits and highlypolished shoes. As in the pub, conversations spread from table to table. Mockery was the order of the day, even running to jokes about Hitler: “It’s because he’s an