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find out more. But not now; now she was thinking of friendship between men and women. She was wondering how possible it was for a woman to form a friendship with another woman who was principally a friend of her husband or her lover. Could one do that, or were there always going to be tensions underneath the surface? And in her particular, difficult case, was the problem hers or was it Barbara’s? Barbara might not be jealous of her being married to Rupert; it might be she who was jealous of Barbara. Was that the way it was?

“Do you think that a woman can have a friendship—a strong friendship—with a man?” she asked.

“Depends on what sort of friendship you’re talking about,” said Rupert. “If you’re talking about the type of friendship that D. H. Lawrence goes on about, then … well, I’m not sure. I suppose man-woman friendships are different.”

“Different from what?”

“From the friendships that men have.”

Gloria looked at her husband. He was always talking about a whole cast of friends, but she very rarely saw any of them; nor, she thought, did he. “David and Jonathan?” she asked. “That sort of friendship?”

“Not many men have that,” said Rupert. “Most men have rather distant relations with their male friends. Whereas women are much more emotionally engaged with their female friends. They love their friends. They’re much better at that than we men are.”

Gloria thought that Rupert was generalising rather too much: there were some men with a great talent for friendship; there were some, too, who were emotionally engaged with their friends to the same extent as were women. But then there were so many men who were, quite simply, lonely; who did not seem to know how to conduct a friendship. There were legions and legions of those.

But now she came back to the other question that was troubling her: who was Ratty Mason? Wives believe they know their husbands, but often do not—not really—she now realised. There are whole hinterlands that they do not see: old friends never mentioned, private sorrows, worries about virility, doubts and disappointments. And men go through life bearing all these in the name of masculinity and manliness, until it all becomes too much and they dissolve into tears.

“Who was Ratty Mason? Tell me about him.”

Rupert shook his head. “No,” he said. “Can’t.”

72. Rupert’s Insecurities

BARBARA RAGG, of course, had not been troubled by Rupert’s feelings over her flat for the simple reason that he had never expressed them within her hearing. There had been the occasional comment that was mildly suggestive of envy, but nothing unambiguous. That would have been difficult; one person could hardly say to another that he considered her house to be his by right. Although there were cases where that was said—at an international level—by those who eyed with intent the land and dwellings of others. Such claims are made here and there in our troubled world by bullies and expansionists of every stripe. But Rupert was not one of these—not by the remotest stretch of the imagination—and so he never revealed to Barbara the views he discussed with Gloria. “They stole that flat,” he remarked to his wife. “Her father did not pay a full market price. Dad thought that Gregory wanted to live in it himself. And all the time he was planning to give it to Barbara! If Dad had known that it was for her, he would have passed it on to me instead. They stole it—it’s as simple as that.”

Gloria was not so sure. She was a fair-minded person, and although she thought that Barbara, in Rupert’s words, directed negative waves towards her, she was not prepared to leap to conclusions about her involvement in this particular historical injustice—if that was what it was.

“But they did buy it, didn’t they? Fatty sold it willingly. ‘Willing seller, willing buyer’—isn’t that what they say?”

This annoyed Rupert. “Who says? Who is this they that people talk about?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Gloria. “It’s an expression, that’s all. It’s a way of saying, ‘I’ve heard it said.’”

“Well, you should be more exact,” said Rupert peevishly. “At Uppingham we had this really good housemaster. He used to fine you a penny if you made any statement that couldn’t be supported. He collected all the fines and then used the money to buy books for the house library.”

Gloria stared at him. “The point is, it’s no good raking over old coals. Even if Gregory induced your father to sell on