The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

She loved him for his steady devotion to herself and to the children, for being a striver like her father, and for rebuilding a fine old English firm that everyone had given up for dead, and for making chicken soup and lockshen on Sundays in his striped apron, and for his kibitzing, which meant his joking around, and for setting the table for their special meals together, the best silver and china, cloth napkins, never paper. And for putting up with the tantrums which ran in her like conflicting impulses of hereditary electricity, there was nothing she could do about them till they were safely over, or he had made love to her, which was by far the best solution, since she had all her sister’s appetites, even if she lacked the looks and amorality to indulge them. And she was deeply ashamed that she could never match his jokes or give him the freed laughter he craved, because even with Harry to liberate it, her laughter still sounded like her mother’s and so did her prayers, and her anger felt like her father’s.

She loved the victim in Harry, and the determined survivor who had endured any privation rather than fall in with his wicked Uncle Benny and his criminal ways until the great Mr Braithwaite came along to save him, just as Harry himself had later come along to save her from her parents and the Zone, and provide her with a new, free, decent life away from everything that till then had held her down. And she loved him as the lonely decider, struggling with conflicting beliefs until Braithwaite’s wise counsel led him to a non-denominational morality so like the Cooperative Christianity championed by her mother and preached throughout Louisa’s childhood from the pulpit of the Union Church in Balboa.

For all these mercies she thanked God and Harry Pendel, and cursed her sister Emily. Louisa honestly believed she loved her husband in all his moods and varieties, but she had never known him like this and she was sick with terror.

If he would only hit her, if that was what he needed to do. If he would lash out, bawl at her, drag her into the garden where the children couldn’t hear and say: ‘Louisa, we’re all washed up, I’m leaving you, I’ve got someone else.’ If that was what he had. Anything, absolutely anything, was better than the bland pretence that their life together was fine, nothing had changed, except that he just had to pop out and measure a valued customer at nine o’clock at night and come back three hours later saying wasn’t it time they had the Delgados to dinner? And why not have the Oakleys and Rafi Domingo as well? Which, as any fool in the world could have seen at a glance, was a recipe for catastrophe, but somehow the gap that had recently formed between herself and Harry didn’t let her say this to him.

So Louisa held her tongue and duly invited Ernesto. One evening as he was on the point of going home she pressed the envelope into his hand and he took it cursorily, thinking it must be a reminder of some sort, Ernesto was such a dreamer and schemer, so wrapped up in his daily struggle against the lobbyists and intriguers that sometimes he hardly knew which hemisphere he was in, let alone what time of day it was. But next morning when he arrived he was courtesy itself, a real Spanish gentleman as always, and yes, he and his wife would be delighted, so long as Louisa would not be offended if they left early, Isabel his wife was concerned about their small son Jorge and his eye infection, sometimes he didn’t seem to sleep at all.

After that she sent a card to Rafi Domingo, knowing that his wife wouldn’t come because she never did, it was that sort of lousy marriage. And next day sure enough a huge bouquet of roses arrived, like fifty dollars’ worth, with a racehorse on the card and Rafi saying in his own handwriting that he would be thrilled and enchanted, darling Louisa, but alas his wife would be somewhere or other. And Louisa knew exactly what the flowers meant because no woman under eighty was safe from Rafi’s advances, the gossip said he had given up underpants in order to improve his time and motion ratio. And the shameful thing was, if Louisa was truthful with herself, which largely after a couple or three vodkas she was, she found him disconcertingly attractive. So finally she called Donna Oakley, a chore she had deliberately left till last, and Donna said, ‘Oh shit, Louisa, we’d love to,’ which was Donna’s level exactly. What a group.

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