Marco Polo Plans a Divorce Using an Adultery Accusation

Marco Polo’s divorce plan turns a private separation into a precarious legal performance: Susan Munro would bring the case, while Lisa would help make its adultery allegation plausible. The scheme promised a way out of an unwanted marriage and a city Marco Polo meant to leave, but it depended on secrecy, money, and the cooperation of people with different stakes in the outcome. Before the legal process could resolve his marital situation, wartime arrest cut off his ability to follow it and left his money and future entangled with Calcutta.

Background and Legal Obstacles

Although Marco Polo had married in an Indian church, he had not had the time or opportunity to learn the country’s laws. His visa was nearing expiry, and he wanted to do something—anything—that would let him leave Calcutta permanently. Divorce, however, was not a simple administrative step. Legal advice made clear that the case would demand effort, time, and money; the petitioner had to appear in court, and witnesses had to be found. When Marco Polo asked how long the process might take, the lawyer could not say for certain and warned that it might last as long as two years.

That delay sharpened the conflict between the legal process and Marco Polo’s immediate wish to depart. He was not merely seeking formal recognition of a separation the couple already regarded as real: he needed a certificate, and the route to obtaining it risked keeping him connected to the country he wanted to escape. The plan that emerged was designed to make the case easier to pursue, not to establish that the alleged adultery had actually occurred.

The Proposed Adultery Claim

The couple decided that Susan Munro would file for divorce and accuse her husband of flirting with other women. As the petitioner, she could proceed while Marco Polo was away at his distant workplace; his absence would prevent him from taking part in the case, and the narrative presents a favorable verdict as more readily attainable under this arrangement. The accusation was thus tailored to serve two purposes at once: it would preserve Susan Munro’s reputation while giving Marco Polo the legal separation he wanted.

Susan Munro did not welcome the proposal. Her marriage certificate was an advantage in her profession, so ending the marriage meant surrendering something of practical value to her. Marco Polo appealed to the love he had once felt for her, asking her to do him this favor. His appeal did not make the arrangement uncomplicated: she was being asked to risk a useful professional status for a plan whose central allegation was knowingly fabricated.

When Marco Polo grew desperate at the prospect that no woman would agree to participate in a false adultery case, Susan Munro suggested Lisa. In her view, Lisa had no reputation to lose, and Susan Munro had already done her favors. Lisa did not simply accept the proposal sight unseen: she wanted to look at the person with whom, according to the accusation, she was supposed to be having an affair. Her participation therefore began with an inspection of the man whose supposed conduct the legal story would describe.

Staging the Allegation and Filing the Case

When they met, Marco Polo explained that the story was not wholly invented in the sense that Susan Munro had introduced them. He then tried to specify several particular occasions—four or five nights—when he had been caught there, and asked Susan Munro to note the dates in her notebook. Embarrassed, he could not finish the explanation; Lisa supplied the implication that he meant spending the night and laughed. The exchange exposes the artificial construction of the claim: a list of dates and a suggestive circumstance were being assembled to give a legal accusation the appearance of particulars.

Lisa called the arrangement a piece of theatre. Marco Polo stared at the floor without answering, and Lisa agreed that they could spend some time together that night. He thanked her on behalf of himself and his wife, making explicit that her cooperation was intended to serve the couple’s joint purpose. The scene leaves the distinction between performance and fact sharply visible: Lisa’s agreement helps the proposed story, but the account does not establish that she later gave evidence or that the court accepted the allegation.

Marco Polo handed Lisa one thousand rupees, explaining that what little he had left needed to go to the lawyer and that he would send more when he returned. The lawyer was paid, and Susan Munro’s divorce petition, alleging adultery, was filed in court. On the day the application was to be signed, the lawyer warned them that the petition had to deny any conspiracy between the parties to obtain the divorce. Such an arrangement counted as collusion and could endanger the case if the court suspected it. The lawyer insisted that no one could know Marco Polo had paid to obtain Susan Munro’s divorce, declared Susan Munro the sole client, and instructed them not to contact the office. The plan’s central convenience had become its central vulnerability: the participants had to manufacture the appearance of an uncontested claim while concealing that they had coordinated it.

Interruption and Aftermath

After settling some matters in Calcutta, Marco Polo returned to work. He managed to raise about five hundred rupees and sent them to Lisa, promising to send the remainder later. With no way to write to her or learn what was happening, and no friend who could keep him informed, he was left outside the very process he had set in motion. Susan Munro wrote once to say she had bought a new car. Meanwhile, Marco Polo’s fear about the divorce arrangements was growing, and when the lawyer asked for more money, he borrowed it and sent it to Susan Munro’s address.

The case’s progress is not resolved in the account. Instead, the next decisive turn is Marco Polo’s arrest: the police were alerted again by his connection with Italy, in a period when Italy’s relationship with the Allies made that background consequential. He remained imprisoned until the final day of the war and then left reluctantly for Italy. There he stayed afloat through small jobs on the Riviera, while the Calcutta divorce and its finances remained beyond his reach.

A later discovery gives the failed plan a lasting material consequence. Marco Polo realized that a large sum from what he thought of as the balance sheet of his life was frozen in an account in a city in the East. The passage links his desolation and resentment to that trapped money, without establishing the final legal outcome of the divorce. What began as an attempt to obtain a certificate through a carefully staged accusation ends, in the evidence presented, with the case suspended from Marco Polo’s view, his funds inaccessible, and his departure from India shaped by arrest rather than by the legal resolution he had sought.