English woman's husband and his girlfriend

The relationship between the Unnamed English woman's husband and his girlfriend is not a hidden fact within the marriage but an acknowledged presence that unsettles its usual boundaries. The wife knows about the girlfriend and even receives the husband's account of her gestures; she nevertheless says the girlfriend matters to him and that asking him to give her up would be selfish. That restraint is neither simple acceptance nor an absence of hurt: the wife's stories disclose jealousy, fury, and a painful effort to decide what she is entitled to demand.

An acknowledged third presence

The girlfriend's place in the marriage becomes tangible through a gift. She gives the husband a record of Schubert, accompanied by liner notes presenting the music as an expression of an overwhelming passion and separation by cruel fate. The wife reads the gesture as pretentious, and describes the girlfriend as jealous and ambitious, with a taste for high drama. Her interpretation is sharpened by the husband's openness: rather than conceal who gave him the record, he tells his wife. That disclosure gives the wife access to the girlfriend's romantic self-presentation, but also makes her an involuntary audience for it.

The wife responds with a small act of ridicule. One evening, after drinking, she uses pink highlighting material to mark about seven phrases on the record sleeve, then hands it to her husband from what she calls a dignified distance. She asks whether this was awful of her. The gesture is pointed but controlled: she does not describe confronting the girlfriend or demanding that the husband reject the gift. Instead, she turns the liner notes into an object of private marital comedy, making the girlfriend's grand romantic language available for mockery while exposing how closely the wife has examined it.

Refusal to make an ultimatum

When asked whether she wants her husband to give up the girlfriend, the wife says no. She considers the girlfriend an important part of his life and believes it would be both mad and selfish to insist that he choose between them. The exchange explicitly reverses a familiar judgment: the expected accusation is that the husband is selfish for maintaining a girlfriend, whereas the wife entertains the possibility that she herself would be selfish to ask him to end the relationship.

Her position is not presented as effortless or conventional. She says that seeing the matter reasonably did not come naturally; it was her first response, but she believes it is what she thinks. She also acknowledges having behaved stupidly toward her husband without understanding what she had done wrong. For years, she had been depressed and lonely while he was often away and working hard. She says she did not have affairs of her own because she regarded him as vulnerable and thought he needed protection. The contrast complicates her refusal to issue an ultimatum: she describes a long history of loneliness and self-restraint, yet does not use it to claim exclusive rights over him. The other speaker challenges her picture of her husband as vulnerable, leaving the wife's explanation open to question rather than settling the moral balance between them.

A separate betrayal and a marital dispute

The wife's account of a dinner party shows that the husband's conduct can provoke anger even where she questions the grounds on which she might restrain him. She describes herself as unusually good at disco dancing but says she experiences it as sexual display and has never enjoyed dancing with her husband. At a dinner with old, left-wing friends, an attractive young woman seated beside him reminded the wife of his girlfriend. Her husband left before the meal had ended and took the young woman to a nightclub, subtly excluding his wife from the invitation and departing against the wishes of the other guests.

The wife says she was not embarrassed, though she wanted to be; she could not afford to be. When asked what happened later, she says her husband had sex with the young woman, but did not have sex with his wife. This episode concerns a woman who resembled the girlfriend, not an identification of that woman as the girlfriend. The distinction matters: the story presents a separate encounter that echoes the existing relationship without establishing that the girlfriend was involved. The husband defended his conduct by pointing to his wife's dislike of dancing with him and her lack of attraction to him, accusing her of hypocrisy if she expected him not to seek elsewhere what she did not offer. They had a long, serious conversation. The wife says she was absolutely furious, then questions why he should be tied to someone. Her anger and her resistance to possessiveness remain side by side.

Secrecy, candor, and an unstable account

The marriage and the girlfriend's relationship with the husband are described through the wife's conversation with another man, and the form of that conversation makes disclosure itself a recurring issue. In another exchange, the wife explains that she goes home because her husband might become curious. She dislikes having to lie and construct small diversions, saying that she wants to preserve some sense of truth without being caught. The account distinguishes two kinds of openness: the husband tells his wife that the girlfriend gave him the record, while the wife's own movements require concealment. Candor about the girlfriend does not make the arrangement uncomplicated or eliminate the burden of secrecy elsewhere.

The narration also questions the status of the English woman's intimate account. A later interlocutor asks how the narrator could know such detailed things about English life from an English woman who does not exist. He replies that he has lived in England, paid attention, and learned something from Rosalie, and calls the woman a repository for that knowledge. This framing does not erase the specific marital exchanges, but it places them within a narrative whose claims to direct experience are challenged. The husband, girlfriend, and wife's debated refusal of an ultimatum therefore function both as elements of an intimate account and as material through which the book tests how private life is narrated.