Doting by Henry Green

They started together, fast, for the passage. Once outside, he shouted "in here" throwing open his and Diana's bedroom. There was a bathroom opened out of this, but, because the space was small, a basin with hot and cold water had been fitted by Diana's bed. It was to this that Miss Paynton ran. Turning the hot tap on, she zipped off her skirt, and stood with her fat legs starting out of lace knickers.

"Here, let me" he said, and knelt at her side.

She picked the handkerchief out of his breast pocket, drenched it in that basin, and then, putting her hand inside the skirt she had discarded, she began to rub at the stain.

And it was at this moment Diana entered.

She stood at the door with a completely expressionless face.

"Arthur" she said "when you're done, could you come outside a minute."

In a pivotal scene in Henry Green's Doting, Diana Middleton walks in on her husband kneeling at the feet of 20-year-old Annabel Paynton. Her husband, Arthur, has just knocked over a tureen of coffee onto her dress, and they have scrambled to save it, but of course, that's not what it looks like. But it is what it looks like, because Arthur has just been making out with the girl, who is slightly older than his son, and although the scene is quite comical in its irony, if the coffee had not been spilled, Diana might just as well have walked in on Arthur and Annabel sucking face. It's a great scene, the best in the book, and perhaps the only scene, strictly speaking: mostly, Doting is told entirely in dialogue.

The half-affair between Annabel and Arthur is a pathetic thing, never consummated, and for the most part barely more than a concatenation of middle-aged put-ons and half-rebuffs. Annabel finds Arthur attractive, but admires Diana; mostly she operates by a kind of young person's instinct that's only half-able to really think through the long term implications of her own desires, whatever those might be. She's having a bit of fun, but for Arthur, the affair is a desperate one, even though he deeply loves his wife. Doting, Arthur says to Annabel at one point, is not the same as loving--that is, the kind of relationship that Arthur has with Annabel, obsessive, squalid, horny, is not really even in the same universe as his relationship with his wife. Perhaps that is the way most affairs are conducted, whether it's a truthful statement or no; we love our partners even as we betray them, and need not really feel dissatisfied to be captivated by the allure of someone else.

Diana mostly turns a blind eye, even encourages Arthur in what seem to be his harmless attentions. They set up rules that are as pathetic as the affair itself--no meeting at night, no bringing her to the house--and which of course are immediately broken. Diana, miffed, begins an equally sexless flirtation with Arthur's friend Charles. Arthur, wanting out of a situation of his own making, tries to pawn Annabel off on Charles, a gambit that works too well, leaving both Arthur and Diana dejected. Annabel ends up introducing Charles to her equally young friend, and they fall in love, the end of a chain of infatuations in which Charles and Clare are the only ones who actually end up sleeping together. I don't know if Doting is the best novel Green ever produced, but it's definitely the funniest, and the deflation of every grand affair is part of its charm. All this is brought full circle by the return of the Middleton son Peter, a whinging, juvenile pest who's blind to all the stormy drama that's been going on in his absence, and whose immaturity only underlines how icky the middle-aged men of the novel really are.