Homecomings

1: Lighted Window Seen from the Street

IT was a February afternoon of smoky sunshine, as I walked home along the embankment to my wife. The river ran white in the sun, the plume from a tug’s funnel came out blue as cigarette-smoke; on the far bank the reflections from windows shone through haze, and down towards Chelsea where I was walking, the smoke was so thick that the skyline, the high chimneys, had smudged themselves into it.

The day was a Tuesday, the year 1938; I had not been home since the Thursday before, which was my usual routine, as I had to spend half my week in Cambridge. I felt an edge of anxiety, a tightness of the nerves, as I always did going home after an absence, even an absence as short as this. Ever since I could remember, seeking deep into my childhood, I had felt this dread on the way home, this dread of what might be waiting for me.

It was nothing serious, it was just one of the reasonless anxieties one had to live with, it was no worse than that. Even now, when some times it turned out not so reasonless, I had got used to it. On those Tuesday evenings, walking home from Millbank to Chelsea along the river, I was anxious as I always had been, returning home, but I had put out of mind the special reason why.

Yet that day, as soon as I reached Cheyne Walk, my eyes were straining before I was in sight of our house. When I did see it, the picture might to a stranger have looked serene and enviable. The drawing-room lights were already on, first of the houses along that reach; the curtains had not been drawn, and from the road, up the strip of garden, one could see the walls, high with white-painted panels. If I had been a stranger, looking up the garden from Cheyne Walk, that glimpse of a lighted room would have had for me the charm of domestic mystery and peace.

As I walked up the path, I did not know how she would be.

The hall was brilliantly lit, pernicketily tidy, the hall of a childless couple. No voice greeted me. I went quickly inside the drawing-room. Here also the lights attacked me, as in the dazzle I saw my wife. Saw her quiet, composed, preoccupied. For she was sitting at a small table, away from the fireplace, looking down at a chess-board. On the board were only a few pieces, each of them much bigger than an ordinary chess-man, part of an Indian set which, out of some whim, Sheila had bought herself the year before. So far as I could see, she was not playing a game, but working out a problem. She looked up.

‘Hallo, you’re in, are you?’ she said. ‘You’d better help me with this.’

I was flooded with relief; relief so complete as to be happiness, just as I always was when I found her free from strain. Whatever I had expected, it was not this. I drew up a chair opposite her, and, as she bent her head and glanced at the board, I looked through the tall pieces at her forehead, the lines of which were tightened, not as so often with her own inner care, but with simple calculation.

‘I don’t see it,’ she said, and smiled at me with great light-filled grey eyes.

At this time she was thirty-three, the same age within months as I was myself. But she looked much older than her age. When I first fell in love with her, as long ago as fourteen years before, men had thought her beautiful. Since then her face had changed, though I, who had watched it as no one else had, would have been the last to recognize how much.

The lines, which when she was a girl had been visible on her forehead and under her eyes, were now deep; her fine, strong nose had sharpened; her expression had become both harder and more still, drawn and fixed with unhappiness. Only her eyes were untouched, and they, so large that they might have been mournful as a lemur’s, had not shared in the sadness of her face. Even at her worst, they could still look lively, penetrating, not-taken-in; just as her body, beneath the lined, overwrought face, was strong, almost heavy, the body of a woman powerful, healthy and still young.

Seeing her through the chess pieces, I noticed none of these changes, for I was only concerned with her state from day to day. I knew the slightest change in her expression, but I could not see what would be obvious to others. Trying to keep her steady, over the hours, the days, the years, I had lost my judgement about whether she was getting better or worse. All I knew was that tonight she was gay, anxiety-free, and that for this night, which was as far as I could see ahead, there was nothing to worry about.

I had loved her all through my young manhood, and, although my love had changed because of what had happened to us, I loved her still. When I first met her, I thought that the luck was on her side; she was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was comfortably off, above all she did not love me when I passionately loved her. That meant that she had power over me, and I none over her; it meant that she could tantalize me for years, she could show me the cruelty of one who feels nothing. It meant also, but I did not realize it then, that she was the more to be pitied. For it turned out that it was not only me she could not love, but anyone. She craved to; she tried to find someone to love; she tried to find psychiatrists and doctors who would tell her why she could not. Then, all else failing, she fell back on me, who still loved her, and let me marry her.

It could not have gone well. It might have gone a little better, I sometimes thought, if we had had children, which each of us longed for. But we were left with nothing but ourselves.

‘I must get it out,’ she said, staring long-sightedly at the board. With two fingers she touched a piece shaped like a howdahed elephant, which in a European set would have been a castle. Out of anxious habit, my glance fixed, not on the strong broad-tipped fingers, but on the nails. Once again that night I was relieved. Though they were not painted, they were clean and trimmed. There had been times when her sense of deprivation froze her into stupor, when she no longer took care of herself. That frightened me, but it had not happened for some years. Usually she dressed well enough, and as she walked by the embankment pubs or along the King’s Road, people saw a woman with her head high, a muscular stride, a face handsome and boldly made up.

‘You’d better start again systematically,’ I said.

‘Teach me,’ said Sheila.

It was like her to be willing to take a lesson in the theory of chess problems. It was like her also not to have asked a single question about what I had been doing, although she had not seen me for four days. Cambridge, my London job, they did not exist for her. From before our marriage, from the time when she no longer hoped that all would come well for her, she had become more shut up within herself. In fact, trying to look after her, I had broken my career.

When I married, I thought I knew what it would be like. I should have to watch over her dreads; I had seen something of the schizoid chill; I could imagine how tasks trivial to the rest of us were ordeals to her, how any arrangement in the future, even the prospect of going to a dinner party, could crack her nerves. But I had been borne along by passionate love for her, physical passion pent up for years, and perhaps more than that. So I went into it, and, like others before me,soon knew that no imaginative forecast of what a life will be is anything like that life lived from day to day.

I did my best for her. It scarcely helped her at all. But it left me without much energy free. When we married, I had just got a foot in at the Bar, I was being thought of as a rising junior. Unless I parted from Sheila, I could not keep up that struggle. And so I found less strenuous jobs, a consulting one with Paul Lufkin’s firm and a law fellowship at Cambridge, the latter taking me away from the Chelsea house three or four nights a week. When she was at her most indrawn, sitting by her gramophone for hours on end, I was glad, although it was a cowardly relief, to get away.

That February evening, as we sat opposite each other at the chess table in the bright room, I thought of none of these things. It was quite enough that she seemed content. It gave me — what sometimes can exist in the unhappiest of marriages, although an outsider does not realize its power — a kind of moral calm. Habit was so strong that it could wipe away ambitions put aside, crises of choice, a near-parting, all that had gone on in my secret life with her: habit was sitting near her, watching her nails, watching for the tic, the pseudo-smile, that came when strain was mastering her.

‘I saw RSR today,’ she said out of the blue.

‘Did you?’

‘I’ve got an idea he was looking for me.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ I said.

‘We had a drink. He was in good form.’

Once that would have been a way to provoke my jealousy. Not now. I welcomed anything that would give her interest or hope. She still had bursts of activity in which she lost herself — once or twice, for those were the thirties, in politics; but usually in trying to help some lame dog whom she had met by chance. A little backstreet café where she went by herself — I found that she had lent the proprietor money to keep on the lease. A derelict curate, terrified that he was going to be prosecuted — she was on call for him at any time he wanted. Utterly uninterested in my goings on, her family’s, her old friends’, she could still become absorbed in those of someone new. With them she was selfless, they gave her a flash of hope, she became like the young woman I had first known.

‘He began to talk very airily about getting himself financed again,’ said Sheila.

‘He’s not losing any time, is he?’

‘I wonder if I could do anything for him,’ she said.

‘Plenty of people have tried, you know,’ I said.

It was true. I had only met R S Robinson once; he was a man of sixty, who before 1914 had made a reputation as the editor of an avant-garde monthly. Since then, he had been a hanger-on of letters, ghosting for agents, bringing out uncommercial magazines, losing money, making enemies, always ready with a new project. It was not long since he had manoeuvred an introduction to Sheila; the manoeuvres had been elaborate, he might as well have shouted out loud that he had heard she was well-off.

‘Yes, plenty have tried,’ she said. ‘So much the worse for them.’

She gave me a realistic jeering smile. She always met her down-and-outs with her eyes open. She added: ‘But that isn’t much comfort for him, is it?’

‘But if other people have got involved,’ I said, some second-hand rumour running through my mind, ‘it isn’t encouraging for you.’

‘You’ve heard things against him?’

‘Of course.’

‘I expect,’ said Sheila, ‘he’s heard things against me.’

She gave a curious mocking laugh, almost brazen-sounding, a sign that her hopes were high. It was a long time since I had seen them so.

‘Perhaps even against you,’ she said.

I smiled back, I could not depress her; at moments like this her spirits could still make mine spring from the earth. But I said: ‘I tell you, he’s run through plenty of well-wishers. There must be something the matter.’

‘Of course there’s something the matter. If not,’ she said, ‘he wouldn’t have any use for me.’ Again she smiled: ‘Look, it’s those with something the matter who need someone. I should have thought even you might have grasped that by now.’

She stood up, went over to the fireplace, grasped the mantelpiece and arched her back.

‘We’re all right for money, aren’t we?’ she asked. Just for once, she, who usually spoke so nakedly, was being disingenuous. She knew our financial state as well as I did. She would not have been her father’s daughter otherwise. Actually, prepared to throw money away as she was, she had a shrewd business head. She knew exactly just how much money need not trouble us. With my earnings and her income, we drew in more than two thousand a year, and lived well within it, even though we kept up this comfortable home and had a housekeeper to look after us.

I nodded yes, we were all right.

‘That’s one thing settled then.’

‘As long,’ I said, ‘as you’re not going to be too disappointed—’

‘I don’t expect too much.’

‘You mustn’t expect anything,’ I said.

‘But he is a gifted man, isn’t he?’ cried Sheila, her face softer and less worn.

‘I think he is,’ I said.

‘I might be able to get him going again,’ she said.

She went on, wistfully and yet with something like bravado: ‘That would be something. If I haven’t done anything else, that would be something, wouldn’t it?’

2: Two Kinds of Business Method

ON the track of someone she might serve, Sheila worked as fast as a confidence trickster. It must have been that same week, probably the very next day, that R S Robinson came to dine. Certainly I arrived straight from Lufkin’s office; for long afterwards the juxtaposition struck me as ironic.

I had spent all day in Lufkin’s suite. To begin, he had asked me to be available in the early morning and had then kept me waiting, which was not unusual, for a couple of hours. Outside his office, in an ante-room so thickly carpeted that men walked through it with no noise at all, I passed the time with the member of Lufkin’s entourage whom I knew best, a man of my own age called Gilbert Cooke. He was a kind of personal assistant to Lufkin, in theory giving advice on export problems, just as in theory I gave advice on legal ones; but in practice Lufkin used us both as utility men. The company was one of the smaller oil-businesses, but the smallness was relative, and in 1938, the fourth year of Lufkin’s chairmanship, he had already a turnover of thirty million pounds. He had also his own legal staff, and when he offered me a consultant’s job he did not want another lawyer; but it suited him to pick up young men like me and Cooke, keep them on call, and then listen to them.

In the ante-room, Gilbert Cooke pointed to the office door.

‘He’s running behind time,’ he said, as though Lufkin were a train. Cooke was fleshy, powerfully muscled, with a high-coloured Corinthian face and hot brown eyes; he gave at once an impression of intimacy, kindness and considerable weight of nature. In fact, he spoke as though we were more intimate than we actually were.

‘How is Sheila just now?’ he asked me while he waited, as though he knew the whole history.

I said she was well, but he was not put off.

‘Are you absolutely sure she’s been to the right doctor?’ he said.

I said she had not been near one for some time.

‘Who did she go to?’

He was intrusive, pressing, but kind: it was hard to remember that he had only been inside our house twice. He had taken me often enough to his clubs, we had talked politics and games and Lufkin’s business, but I had not given him a confidence.

At last we were shown into Lufkin’s office: in that suite, as one moved from room to room, the air wafted against the skin like warm breath.

Lufkin sat up straight in a hard chair. He scarcely greeted us: he was inconsiderate, but also informal and without pomp. He was off-hand in personal relations because he was so bad at them, and yet, perversely, they gave him pleasure.

‘You know the point?’ he said.

Yes, we had both been briefed.

‘What do I do?’

It sounded as though we should have finished in ten minutes. In actuality, it took all day, and nothing we said mattered much. Lufkin sat there, indifferent to time, straight, bony, skull-faced. He was only ten years older than Cooke or me; his skin was dark, and his business enemies put it about that he looked Jewish and that his name was Jewish, while as a matter of fact his father was a nonconformist parson in East Anglia.

The point before us was simple enough. He had been asked whether he wanted to buy another distributing business; should he? From the beginning of the talk, throughout the long, smoky, central-heated, unromantic hours, two things stood out. First, this was a point on which neither Cooke’s judgement nor mine was worth much — certainly no more than that of any moderately intelligent man round the office. Second, I was sure that, whatever we or anyone else argued, Lufkin had already made up his mind to buy.

Yet all day Cooke behaved like a professional no-man. He became argumentative and rude, oddly so for a middle-rank employee in the presence of a tycoon. The tone of the discussion was harsh and on the whole impersonal; the arguments were prosaic. Cooke was loquacious, much more than Lufkin or me: he went on pestering, not flattering: as I listened, I knew that he was closer to Lufkin than most people in the firm, and wondered why.

Most of the men Lufkin bought had a bit of professional success behind them; but Cooke had nothing to show but social connexions, except for his own curious kind of personal force.

Once, in the middle of the afternoon, after we had lunched on sandwiches and coffee, Cooke switched from his factual line. Suddenly, staring at Lufkin with his full eyes, he said: ‘I’m afraid you’re liable to overstretch yourself.’

‘Maybe.’ Lufkin seemed willing to consider the idea.

‘I mean, with any empire like yours’ — their eyes met, and Lufkin smiled bleakly — ‘there comes a time when you’ve got to draw in your horns, or else—’

‘What do you say to that, Eliot?’

I said that the firm was short of men, and that the able men were spread thin. He ought to acquire a dozen future managers before he bought much more.

‘I agree that,’ he said. For half-an-hour he got down to detail, and then asked: ‘That make you feel any better, Cooke?’

‘No, it seems easy to you, but it’s not easy.’

‘What seems easy?’

‘Biting off more than anyone can chew.’

Underneath his remote, off-hand manner, Lufkin was obscurely gratified. But he had a knack of pushing away his own gratification, and we returned to figures again.

The sky outside the office windows darkened, the air seemed more than ever hot. Nothing was settled. There had scarcely been a flight of fancy all day. No one would have guessed, though it was the truth, that Lufkin was a man of remarkable imagination; nor that this marathon talk was his technique of coming to the point of action; nor that Gilbert Cooke was swelling with pride, ardent but humble, at being in on anything so big.

When at last we parted, it was nearly seven and still nothing was settled. The whole range of facts about the new business had been re-sorted, except the purchase price, which Lufkin had only mentioned once, and then obliquely. ‘There’s always money for a good business,’ he had added indifferently, and passed on. And yet that purchase price gave a tang to the repetitive, headachey hours, the only tang I was left with on the way to Chelsea in the cold taxi, for it could not have been less than a million pounds.

When I reached home, I met a different kind of business method. R S Robinson was already there in the drawing-room; he was standing plumply by the fire, soft silver-shining hair venerable above smooth baby skin. He looked comfortable, he looked sedate; behind his spectacles, his eyes glinted from Sheila to me, sharp with merriness and suspicion. He made no secret that he wanted Sheila’s backing for a sum as great as he could persuade out of her, as great as a thousand pounds.

‘I’ve not come here just for the sake of your intelligent conversation,’ he told her. His voice was fluent, modulated, flattering, high-spirited.

‘I mustn’t come on false pretences, must I?’ he said. ‘I warn you, I’m a dangerous man to let into your house.’

A thousand was the maximum which he let himself imagine; he did not hope to get away with so much, although he was not too delicate to mention it. He set himself to persuade her, and incidentally me as a possible influence, with all the art of which he was so proud.

Strange, I was thinking as we tasted our drinks, that fifteen, sixteen years before, he had been part of our youth. For he had done, on his own account, a little coterie publishing in the days of the English Review, the Imagists, the rebels of the first war. It had been R S Robinson who had published a translation of Leopardi’s poems under the inept title of Lonely Beneath the Moon. Both Sheila and I had read it just before we met, when we were at the age for romantic pessimism, and to us it had been magical.

Since then everything he had touched had failed. He was trying to raise money from Sheila for another publishing firm, but himself was not able to put down five pounds. And yet we could not forget the past, and he did not want to, so that, as he stood between us on our own hearthrug, it was not Sheila, it was not I, it was he who dispensed the patronage.

‘I was telling Mrs Eliot that she must write a book,’ he told me soon after I joined them.

Sheila shook her head.

‘I’m sure you could,’ he said to her. He turned on me: ‘I’ve just noticed that you, sir, you have artists’ hands.’ He had lost no time getting out his trowel; but Sheila who shrank with self-consciousness at any praise, could take it from him. Unlike our Chelsea acquaintances of our own generation, he had not begun by using our christian names, but instead went on calling me ‘sir’ and Sheila ‘Mrs Eliot’, even when he was speaking with insidious intimacy face-to-face.

Standing between us, he dispensed the patronage; he had dignity and presence, although he was inches shorter than Sheila, who was tall for a woman, and did not come up to my shoulder. Round-shouldered and plump, he touched a crest of his silver hair.

He had come to the house in a dinner-jacket, which had once been smart and was now musty, while neither Sheila nor I had dressed; and it was Robinson who set to work to remove embarrassment.

‘Always do it,’ he advised us, as we went into the dining-room. I asked him what.

‘Always put people at a disadvantage. When they tell you not to dress, take no notice of them. It gives you the moral initiative.’

‘You see,’ he whispered to Sheila, sitting at her right hand, ‘I’ve got the moral initiative tonight.’

In the dining-room he congratulated Sheila on the fact that, since the food came up by the serving hatch, we were alone.

‘So I needn’t pretend, need I?’ he said, and, tucking into his dinner, told stories of other meals back in the legendary past, at which he had tried to raise money to publish books — books, he did not let us forget, that we had all heard of since.

‘I expect you’ve been told that I was better off then?’ He looked up from his plate to Sheila, with a merry, malicious chuckle.

‘Don’t you believe it. People always get everything wrong.’ Stories of multiple manoeuvres, getting promises from A on the strength of B and C, from B on the strength of A and C… ‘The point is, one’s got to refuse to play the game according to the rules,’ he advised Sheila. Stories of personal negotiations of such subtlety and invention as to make my business colleagues of the afternoon seem like different animals.

All the time, listening to him, I had spent most of my attention, as throughout our marriage, watching how Sheila was. She had turned towards him, the firm line of her nose and lip clear against the wall; her face had lost the strained and over-vivid fixity, there was no sign of the tic. Perhaps she did not show the quiet familiar ease that sometimes visited her in the company of her protégés; but she had never had a protégé as invincible as this. It took me all my time to remember that, on his own admission, Robinson was destitute, keeping an invalid wife and himself on £150 a year. More than anything, Sheila looked — and it was rare for her — plain mystified.

Just for an instant, out of dead habit, I wondered if he had any attraction for her. Maybe, those who are locked in their own coldness, as she was, mindless than the rest of us about the object of attraction, about whether it is unsuitable or grotesque in others’ eyes. Doing a good turn for this man of sixty, whom others thought fantastic, Sheila might have known a blessed tinge of sexual warmth. At any rate, her colour was high, and for an hour I could feel responsibility lifted from me; she had managed to forget herself.

Robinson, as natural about eating as about his manoeuvres, asked her for a second helping of meat, and went on with his recent attempts at money raising. Some prosperous author, who had known him in his famous days, had given him an introduction to an insurance company. Robinson digressed, his elephant eyes glinting, to tell us a scandalous anecdote about the prosperous author, a young actor, and an ageing woman; as he told it, Robinson was studying Sheila, probing into her life with me.

Pressing the story on her, but drawing no response, he got going about the insurance company. They had made him go into the City, they had given him coffee and wholemeal biscuits, and then they had talked of the millions they invested in industrial concerns.

‘They talked to me of millions,’ he cried.

‘They didn’t mean anything,’ I said.

‘They should be more sensitive,’ said Robinson. ‘They talked to me of millions when all I wanted was nine hundred pounds.’

I was almost sure he had dropped the figure from a thousand for the sake of the sound, just as, in the shops where my mother used to buy our clothes, they did not speak of five shillings, but always of four and eleven three.

‘What’s more,’ said Robinson, ‘they didn’t intend to give me that. They went on talking about millions here and millions there, and when I got down to brass tacks they looked vague.’

‘Did they offer anything?’ said Sheila.

‘Always know when to cut your losses,’ Robinson said in his firm, advising tone. It occurred to me that, in a couple of hours, he had produced more generalizations on how to run a business than I had heard from Paul Lufkin in four years.

‘I just told them, “You’re treating me very badly. Don’t talk of millions to people who need the money,” and I left them high and dry.’ He sighed. ‘Nine hundred pounds.’

At the thought of humiliation turned upside down, Sheila had laughed out loud, for the first time for months. But now she began asking questions. Nine hundred pounds: that would go nowhere. True, he had kept his old imprint all those years, he could publish a book or two and get someone else to distribute it — but what good was that? Surely if he did that, and it went off half-cock, he had dissipated his credit, and had finished himself for good?

Robinson was not used to being taken by surprise. He flushed: the flush rose up his cheeks, up to the forehead under the white hair. Like many ingenious men, he constantly underrated everyone round him. He had made his judgement of this beautiful hag-ridden woman; he thought she would be the softest of touches. He had marked her down as a neurotic. He was astonished she should show acumen. He was upset that she should see through him.

For, of course, he contrived to be at the same time embarrassingly open and dangerously secretive. Was he even truthful about his own penury? He had been trying on Sheila an alternative version of his technique of multiple approach. This time he was working on several people simultaneously, telling none of them about the others.

‘Always keep things simple,’ he said, trying to wave his panache.

‘Not so simple that they don’t make sense,’ said Sheila, smiling but not yielding.

Soon she got some reason out of him. If he could collect it, he wanted several thousand; at that period, such a sum would let him publish, modestly but professionally, for a couple of years. That failing, however, he still wanted his nine hundred. Even if he could only bring out three books under the old imprint, the name of R S Robinson would go round again.

‘You never know what might happen,’ he said, and blew out wonderful prospects like so many balloons. With three books they would remember him again, he said, and he gave up balloon blowing and spoke of the books he would bring out. He stopped flattering Sheila or using the other dodges which he believed infallible, and all of a sudden one saw that his taste had stayed incorrupt. It was a hard, austere, anti-romantic taste, similar to Sheila’s own.

‘I could do for them,’ he said, ‘what I did before.’

‘You want some money,’ said Sheila.

‘I only want enough to put someone on the map,’ he cried.

She asked: ‘Is money all you need?’

‘No. I want someone like you to keep people from getting the wrong impression. You see, they sometimes think I’m a bit of an ass.’

He was not putting on one of his acts. He had said it angrily, hotly, out of resentment, not trying to get round her. But soon he was master of himself again, enough to calculate that he might extract an answer that night. He must have calculated also that she was on his side and would not shift — for he made an excuse to go to the lavatory, so as to leave the two of us alone.

As soon as I returned without him to the dining-table, where we were still sitting, Sheila said the one word: ‘Well?’

We had been drinking brandy, and with a stiff mass-production gesture, she kept pushing the decanter with the side of her little finger.

‘Well?’ she said again.

I believed, then and afterwards, that if I had intervened I could have stopped her. She still trusted me, and no one else. However much she was set on helping him, she would have listened if I had warned her again. But I had already decided not to. She had found an interest, it would do more good than harm, I thought.

‘If you want to risk it,’ I said, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t.’

‘Do you think any better of him?’

I was thinking, he had raised the temperature of living for her. Then I realized that he had done the same for me. If she was taken in, so was I.

I grinned and said: ‘I must say I’ve rather enjoyed myself.’

She nodded, and then said after a pause: ‘He wouldn’t be grateful, would he?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Don’t soften it.’ Her great eyes swung round on me like searchlights. ‘No one’s grateful for being looked after. He’d be less grateful than most.’

It was the kind of bitter truth that she never spared herself or others, the only kind of truth that she thought worth facing. Who else, I wondered, would have faced it at that moment, just as she was committing herself? Other people could do what she was doing, but not many with that foresight of what lay ahead.

We sat silent, her eyes still levelled at mine, but gradually becoming unfocused, as though looking past me, looking a great distance away.

‘If I don’t do it,’ she said, ‘someone else will. Oh well, I suppose it’s more important to me than it is to him.’

Soon afterwards Robinson came back. As he opened the door, we were quiet, and he thought it was because of him. His manner was jaunty, but even his optimistic nerve was strained, and as he sat down he played, too insidiously, too uneasily, his opening trick.

‘Mrs Eliot, I’ve been thinking, you really ought to write a book yourself.’

‘Never mind about that,’ she said in a cold, brittle tone.

‘I mean it very much.’

‘Never mind.’

The words were final, and Robinson looked down at the table.

She remarked, as though it were obvious: ‘I may as well tell you straight away, I will do what I can to help.’

For the second time that night, Robinson flushed to the temples. In a mutter, absent-minded, bewildered, he thanked her without raising his eyes, and then took out a handkerchief and wiped it hard across his forehead.

‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind, sir, if I have another little drink?’ he said to me, forcing his jollity. ‘After all, we’ve got something to celebrate.’ He was becoming himself again. ‘After all, this is an historic occasion.’

3: The Point of a Circuitous Approach

AFTER that February evening, Sheila told me little of her dealings with Robinson, but I knew they preoccupied her. When, in the early summer, she heard that her parents wished to spend a night in our house, she spoke as though it were an intolerable interruption.

‘I can’t waste the time,’ she said to me, her mouth working.

I said that we could hardly put them off again; this time Mr Knight was visiting a specialist.

‘Why can’t I put them off? No one will enjoy it.’

‘It will give more pain not to have them.’

‘They’ve given enough pain in their time. Anyway,’ she said, ‘just for once I’ve got something better to do.’

She wrote back, refusing to have them. Her concentration on Robinson’s scheme seemed to have become obsessive, so that it was excruciating for her to be distracted even by a letter. But Mrs Knight was not a sensitive woman. She replied by return, morally indignant because Sheila had made an excuse not to go home to the vicarage last Christmas, so that we had not seen them for eighteen months; Sheila’s father, for all Mrs Knight’s care and his own gallantness, would not always be there for his daughter to see; she was showing no sense of duty.

Even on Sheila, who dreaded their company and who blamed her torments of self-consciousness upon them, the family authority still held its hold. No one else could have overruled her, but her mother did.

So, on a morning in May, a taxi stopped at the garden gate, and, as I watched from an upstairs window, Mr and Mrs Knight were making their way very slowly up the path. Very slowly, because Mr Knight was taking tiny steps and pausing between them, leaning all the time upon his wife. She was a big woman, as strong as Sheila, but Mr Knight tottered above her, his hand on her heavy shoulder, his stomach swelling out from the middle chest, not far below the dog collar; he was teetering along like a massive walking casualty, helped out of battle by an orderly.

I went out on to the path to greet them, whilst Sheila stayed at the door.

‘Good morning, Lewis,’ said Mr Knight very faintly.

‘No talking till we get him in,’ Mrs Knight announced.

‘I’m sorry to lay my bones among you,’ whispered Mr Knight.

‘Don’t strain yourself talking, dear,’ said Mrs Knight.

At last the progress ended in an armchair in the drawing-room, where Mr Knight closed his eyes. It was a warm morning, and through a half-open window blew a zephyr breath.

‘Is that too much for you, dear?’ said Mrs Knight, looking accusingly at me.

‘Perhaps a little,’ came a whisper from the armchair. ‘Perhaps a little.’

At once Mrs Knight rammed the window up. She acted as though she had one thought alone, which was to keep her husband alive.

‘How are you?’ I asked, standing by the chair.

‘As you see,’ came the answer, almost inaudible.

‘What do the doctors say?’

‘They know very little, Lewis, they know very little.’

‘So long as we can keep him free from strain,’ said Mrs Knight implacably.

‘I sleep night and day,’ breathed Mr Knight. ‘Night and day.’

Once more he composed his clever, drooping, petulant face. Then he whispered, ‘Sheila! Sheila, I haven’t seen my daughter!’ As she came near, he turned his head, as though by a herculean effort, through a few degrees, in order to present her his cheek to be kissed. Sheila stood over him, strained, white-faced. For an instant it looked to me as though she could not force herself. Then she bent down, gave him a token kiss, and retreated out of our circle into the window seat.

To her mother, it seemed unnatural; but in fact Sheila believed he was making a fool of himself, and hated it. Valetudinarian: self-dramatizing: he had been so since her childhood, though not on such a grandiose scale as now, and she did not credit that there was anything wrong with him. In her heart she wanted to respect him, she thought he had wasted his ability because he was so proud and vain. All he had done was marry money: for it was not the pug-faced, coarse-fibred Mrs Knight who had climbed through marriage, but her husband, the self-indulgent and hyper-acute. Sheila could not throw off the last shreds of her respect for him, and at the sight of his performances her insight, her realism, even her humour failed her.

When we were sitting round the dining-room table, she could not make much pretence of conversation. I was on edge because of her, and Mr Knight, with eyes astute and sly, was surreptitiously inspecting us both. He had time to do so, for Mrs Knight would not let him eat more than a slice of cold ham. It was an effort for him to obey, for he was greedy about his food. But there was something genuine in his hypochondria: he would give up even food, if it lessened his fear of death. Disconsolately, he ate his scrap of ham, his eyes under their heavy lids lurking towards his daughter or me, whenever he thought he was unobserved.

Of the four of us, the only person who came carefree from the meal was Mrs Knight. We rested in the drawing-room, looking down the garden towards the river, and Mrs Knight was satisfied. She was displeased with her daughter’s mood, not upset by it, and she was used to being displeased and could ignore it. For the rest she was happy because her husband had revived. She had put away a good meal; she was satisfied at least with her daughter’s kitchen and the bright smart house. In fact, she was jollying me by being prepared to concede that Sheila might have made a worse marriage.

‘I always knew you’d have a success,’ said Mrs Knight. Her memory could not have been more fallacious. When as a poor young man I was first taken by Sheila to the vicarage, Mrs Knight had thought me undesirable in the highest degree, but in our comfortable dining-room she was certain that she was speaking the truth.

Complacently, Mrs Knight called over the names of other men Sheila might have married, none of whom, in her mother’s view, had gone as far as I had. For an instant I looked at Sheila, who recognized my glance but did not smile. Then came Mr Knight’s modulated voice: ‘Is he, is our friend Lewis, content with how far he’s gone?’

‘I should think so,’ said Mrs Knight sturdily.

‘Is he? I never have been, but of course I’ve done nothing that the world can see. I know our friend Lewis has been out there in the arena, but I should like to be certain that he is content?’

What was he getting at? No one had a sharper appraisal of worldly success than Mr Knight.

‘Of course I’m not,’ I said.

‘I rather fancied you might feel that.’ Circuitous, not looking at me, he went on: ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, I am a child in these matters, but I vaguely imagined that between the two activities you’ve chosen, you don’t expect the highest position in either? I suppose there couldn’t be anything in that impression?’

‘It is absolutely true,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ Mr Knight reflected, ‘if one were of that unfortunate temperament, which some of us are spared, that doesn’t feel on terms with life unless it collects the highest prizes, your present course would mean a certain deprivation.’

‘Yes, it would,’ I said.

He was talking at me, painfully near the bone. He knew it: so did Sheila, so did I. But not so Mrs Knight.

‘Most men would be glad to change with Lewis, I know that,’ she said. She called out to Sheila, who was sitting on a pouf in the shadow: ‘Isn’t that true, Sheila?’

‘You’ve just said it.’

‘It’s your fault if it’s not true, you know.’

Mrs Knight gave a loud laugh. But she could see Sheila’s face, pale with the mechanical smile, fixed in the shadow; and Mrs Knight was irritated that she should not look more hearty. Healthy and happy herself, Mrs Knight could see no reason why everyone round her should not be the same.

‘It’s time you two counted your blessings,’ she said.

Mr Knight, uneasy, was rousing himself, but she continued: ‘I’m speaking to you, Sheila. You’re luckier than most women, and I hope you realize it.’

Sheila did not move.

‘You’ve got a husband who’s well thought of,’ said Mrs Knight, undeterred, ‘you’ve got a fine house because your parents were able to make a contribution, you’ve got enough money for anything in reason. What I can’t understand is—’

Mr Knight tried to divert her, but for once she was not attending to him.

‘What I can’t understand is,’ said Mrs Knight, ‘why you don’t set to work and have a child.’

As I listened, the words first of all meant nothing, just badinage, uncomprehending, said in good nature. Then they went in. They were hard enough for me to take; but my wound was nothing to Sheila’s wound. I gazed at her, appalled, searching for an excuse to take her out and be with her alone.

Her father was gazing at her too, glossing it over, beginning some preamble.

To our astonishment Sheila began to laugh. Not hysterically, but matily, almost coarsely. That classical piece of tactlessness had, for the moment, pleased her. Just for an instant, she could feel ordinary among the ordinary. To be thought a woman who, because she wished to be free to travel or because she did not like to count the pounds, had refused to have a child — that made her feel at one with her mother, as hearty, as matter-of-fact.

Meanwhile Mrs Knight had noticed nothing out of the common, and went on about the dangers of leaving it too late. Sheila’s laugh had dried; and yet she seemed ready to talk back to her mother, and to agree to go out with her for an afternoon’s shopping.

As they walked down the path in the sunshine, Sheila’s stride flowing beneath a light green dress, our eyes followed them, and then, in the warm room, all windows still closed to guard Mr Knight’s health, he turned his glance slowly upon me.

‘There they go,’ he said. His eyes were self-indulgent, shrewd, and sad: when I offered him a cigarette, he closed them in reproof.

‘I dare not. I dare not.’

As though in slow motion, his lids raised themselves, and, not looking at me, he scrutinized the garden outside the window. His interest seemed irrelevant, so did his first remark, and yet I was waiting, as in so many of his circumlocutions, for the thrust to come. He began: ‘I suppose that, if this international situation develops as, between ourselves, I believe it must, we shall all have too much on our minds… Even those of us who are compelled to be spectators. It is a curious fate, my dear Lewis, for one to sit by in one’s retreat and watch happen a good deal that one has, without any special prescience, miserably foretold.’

He continued, weaving his thoughts in and out, staying off the point but nevertheless leaving me in apprehension of the point to come. In his fashion, he was speaking with a kind of intimacy, an intimacy expressed in code. As he described his labyrinthine patterns he inserted some good sense about the world politics of that year, and what we had to look forward to; he always had a streak of cool detachment, startling in a selfish, timid man. With no emphasis he said: ‘I suppose that, if things come to the worst, and it’s a morbid consolation for a backwoodsman like myself to find that someone like you, right in the middle of things, agree that it is only the worst they can come to — I suppose that to some it may take their minds, though it seems a frivolous way of putting delicate matters, it may take their minds off their own distress.’

This was the beginning.

‘It may,’ I said.

‘Will that be so with her?’ he asked, still with no emphasis.

‘I do not know.’

‘Nor do I.’ He started off circuitously again. ‘Which ever of us can claim to know a single thought of another human being? Which ever of us can claim that? Even a man like you, Lewis, who has, if I may say so, more than his share of the gift of understanding. And perhaps one might assume that one was not, in comparison with those one meets, utterly deficient oneself. And yet one would not dare to think, and I believe you wouldn’t, that one could share another’s unhappiness, even if one happened to see it under one’s eyes.’

His glance, sly and sad, was on me, and once more he shied off.

‘Perhaps one feels it most,’ he said, ‘when one has the responsibility for a child. One has the illusion that one could know’ — just for a moment the modulated voice hesitated — ‘him or her as one does oneself. Flesh of one’s flesh, bone of one’s bone. Then one is faced by another human being, and what is wrong one can never know, and it is more grievous because sometimes there is the resemblance to one’s own nerves. If ever you are granted a child, Lewis, and you have any cause for anxiety, and you should have to watch a suffering for which you feel responsible, then I think you will grant the accuracy of what I have tried, of course, inadequately, to explain.’

‘I think I can imagine it.’

As he heard my sarcasm, his eyelids dropped. Quietly he said: ‘Tell me, what is her life like?’

‘It hasn’t changed much,’ I said.

He considered. ‘How does she spend her time in this house?’

I said that she had recently found another occupation, she was trying to help a man who had fallen on bad days.

‘She was always good with the unfortunate.’

His mouth had taken on a pursed, almost petulant smile: was he being detached enough to reflect how different she was from himself, with his passionate interest in success, his zest in finding out, each time he met one, exactly what price, on the stock exchange of reputations, one’s own reputation fetched that day?

He began on another circuit, how it might be a danger to become sentimental about failure: but he cut off short, and, his gaze on the middle distance, said: ‘Of course it is not my responsibility any longer, for that has passed to you, which is better for us all, since I haven’t the strength to bear responsibility any longer, and in fact the strain of talking to you confidentially like this means that I am likely to pay the price in my regrettable health. Of course it is your responsibility now, and I know you take it more willingly than most men would. And of course I know my daughter has never been at her best in the presence of my wife. It has been a grief to me, but for the present we must discount that. But even if today has given me a wrong impression, I must not leave undone those things I ought to have done. Because you see, allowing for everything, including the possibility that I may be totally mistaken, there is something which I should feel culpable if I did not say.’

‘What is it?’ I cried out.

‘You told me a few minutes ago that you thought she was much as usual.’

‘Don’t you?’

He said: ‘I’m afraid, I can only hope I’m wrong and I may well be, but I’m afraid that she has gone a little farther from the rest of us than she ever was before.’

He shut his eyes, and as I started speaking shook his head.

‘I can only leave her with you. That’s all I can say,’ he whispered. ‘This room is just a little stuffy, my dear Lewis. Do you think it would be safe to open a window, just the smallest chink?’

4: Handclasp on a Hot Night

ONE evening, soon after the Knights’ visit, I broke my walk home from Millbank at an embankment pub, and there, sitting between the pin-tables and the looking-glass on the back wall, was a group of my acquaintances. As I went up to them, it seemed that their talk damped down; it seemed also that I caught a glance, acute, uneasy, from the one I knew best, a young woman called Betty Vane. Within moments, though, we were all, not arguing, but joining a chorus of politics, the simple, passionate politics of that year, and it was some time before Betty and I left the pub together.

She was a smallish, sharp-featured woman of thirty, with a prow of a nose and fine open eyes. She was not pretty, but she was so warm and active that her face often took on a glow of charm. She did not expect to be admired by men; her marriage had failed, she was so unsure of herself that it prevented her finding anyone to love her.

I had met her first in circumstances very different, at the country house of the Boscastles, to whom she was related. But that whole family-group was savagely split by the political divide, and she was not on speaking terms with half her relations. She had become friendly with me because we were on the same side; she had gone out to find like-minded persons such as the group in the pub. Sometimes it seemed strange to me to meet her in a society which, to Lord Boscastle, would have seemed as incomprehensible as that of the Trobriand Islanders.

Upon the two of us, as we walked by the river, each with private worries, the public ones weighed down too; and yet, I was thinking, in other times Betty would have been as little political as Mrs Knight. She had dropped into her long, jostling stride that was almost mannish; yet there was no woman less mannish than she. It was her immediate self-protective manner, drawn out of the fear that I or any man might think her ready to make advances. It was only as the evening went on that her gait and her speech became relaxed, and she was warmed by the feeling that she had behaved serenely.

We had fallen into silence when I asked: ‘Were you talking about me when I came in just now?’

She had dropped out of step with me: she gave a skip to right herself. ‘Not exactly,’ she said. She looked down. I saw her lips tighten.

‘What about, then?’ As she did not at once reply I repeated: ‘What about?’

It was an effort for her to look up at me, but when she did so her glance was honest, troubled, steady.

‘You must know.’

‘Sheila?’

She nodded. I knew she did not like Sheila: but I asked what was being said.

‘Nothing. Only nonsense. You know what people are.’

I was silent.

She burst out, in a curiously strident, social voice, as if rallying a stranger at a party: ‘I don’t in the least want to tell you!’

‘That makes it harder for me.’

Betty stopped walking, put her hand on the embankment wall, and faced me. ‘If I do tell you I shan’t be able to wrap it up.’ She knew I should be angry, she knew I had a right to hear. She was unwilling to spoil the evening for herself and could not keep out of her voice resentment that I should make her do it.

I told her to go on.

‘Well, then’ — she reverted to her social tone — ‘as a matter of fact, they say she’s as good as left you.’

I had not expected that, and I laughed and said, ‘Nonsense.’

‘Is it nonsense?’

‘Whom is she supposed to be leaving me for?’

She replied, still in the same social, defensive voice: ‘They say she prefers women.’

There was not a word of truth in it, and I told Betty so.

She was puzzled, cross because I was speaking so harshly, though it was only what she had foreseen.

I cross-questioned her. ‘Where did this start?’

‘Everyone says so.’

‘Who does? Where do they get it from?’

‘I’m not making it up,’ she said. It was a plea for herself, but I did not think of her then.

I made her search her memory for the first rumour.

The effort of searching calmed her: in a moment her face lightened a little. ‘I’m sure it came,’ she said, ‘from someone who knew her. Isn’t she working with someone? Hasn’t she something to do with that man who looks like a frog? The second-hand bookseller?’

Robinson had had a shop once, but had given it up years before: I could scarcely believe what I seemed to be hearing, but I exclaimed: ‘Robinson? Do you mean him?’

‘Robinson? He’s got beautiful white hair, parted in the middle? He knows her, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, he started the word round that she’s mad about women.’

I parted from Betty at the corner of Tite Street without taking her to her flat, blaming her because she had brought bad news. The falser the gossip, it sometimes seemed, the more it seared. On my way home, I continued angry with Betty: I should have liked to have believed that she had garbled it, she who was both truthful and loyal.

But Robinson? It made no sense: he could not have done it, for reason of self-interest alone. No one had more to risk from upsetting her.

I wondered whether I should tell Sheila the rumour, and decided not to. Maybe in itself it would not disturb her much; I was not sure: we had both lived in a society which set out to tolerate all the kinds of sex. And yet gossip, this gossip that pawed, had something degrading about it, especially for one like Sheila. The story that it originated in Robinson, credible or incredible, had been shameful for me to hear, let alone Sheila; if I could, I wanted to spare her that.

Instead of telling her the gossip that night, I listened to her invoking my help for Robinson. He planned to start with three books in the following spring. ‘That may be all he ever does,’ said Sheila, with her business feet on the ground, ‘but if they are all right—’ She meant, though she did not finish, for the phrase was too high-falutin for her, that she would have achieved a purpose: she thought she would have saved his self-respect.

The trouble was, of the foreign books he had counted on, he had only acquired the rights of one. The balloons he had blown up at our dinner table had most of them exploded, she admitted that; he had believed in his own fancies, he always did, he had only to wish for a property hard enough to feel that he possessed it. Yet, in another sense, he kept his judgement. Nothing would make him substitute bad, or even mediocre, books for those he had fancied were in the bag; either something good, or nothing.

Could I help him find an author? There must be one or two pioneer works going begging, and she knew that I had friends among writers. In fact, although she neither had, nor pretended to have, even a remote acquaintance with my official life, she assumed that it was to writing I should devote myself in the end. Mysteriously, the thought gave her some pleasure.

Could I help Robinson?

I wrote several letters on his behalf, because Sheila had asked me; one reply was encouraging enough for her to act on. Then, a fortnight later, I had other news of him.

I was working in the Lufkin suite, when a telephone call came through. Betty Vane was speaking in a sharp, agitated, seemingly angry voice: could she see me soon? That same afternoon she sat in an armchair by my desk, telling me that she was unlucky. More gossip had reached her, and in decency she could not keep it from me. She did not say it, but she knew my temperament, she had watched me last time: I should not be pleased with her for bringing such news. Still, there seemed to her no choice.

By now the rumours were proliferating. Sheila was not only eccentric but unbalanced, the gossip was going round. She had spent periods in the hands of mental specialists; she had been in homes. This explained the anomalies in our married life, why we had given up entertaining, why she was not seen outside the house for weeks at a time, why we had not dared to have a family.

Some of the rumours referred to me, such as that I had married her, knowing her condition, only because her parents had bribed me with a settlement. Mainly they aimed at her, and the most cruel was that, if we had been poor and without influence, she would have been certified.

Nearly all this gossip was elaborate, circumstantial, spun out with rococo inventiveness, at one or two points just off-true; much of it an outsider could believe without bearing her any ill will, once he had observed that she was strange. One or two of the accretions, notably the more clinical, seemed to have been added as the rumours spread from the point of origin. But the original rumours, wonderfully and zestfully constructed, with a curious fluid imagination infusing them, were unlike any I had heard.

This time I could not pretend doubt to myself, not for a minute; there was only one man who could have begun to talk in such a style. I knew it, and Betty knew I knew it.

She said that she had denied the stories where she could.

‘But who believes you when you deny a good story?’ she asked, realistic, obscurely aggrieved.

Walking along the river that evening, the summer air touching the nostrils with pollen, with the rotting, sweet water smell, I found my steps heavy. That morning, I had left Sheila composed, but now I had to warn her; I could see no way out. It had become too dangerous to leave her ignorant. I did not know how to handle the news, or her.

I went upstairs to our bedroom, where she was lying on her bed, reading. Although it was rarely that I had her — (as our marriage went on, it was false to speak of making love, for about it there was, though she did not often refuse me, the one-sidedness of rape) — nevertheless she was easier if I slept in the same room. That evening, sitting on my own bed, I watched her holding her book under the reading-lamp, although the sunlight was beginning to edge into the room. The windows were wide open, and through them came the smell of lime and petrol; it was a hot still night.

It was the heat, I took it for granted, that had sent Sheila to lie down. She was wearing a dressing-gown, smoking a cigarette, with a film of sweat on her forehead. She looked middle-aged and plain. Suddenly, I felt close to her, close with the years of knowledge and the nights I had seen her so, and my heart and body yearned for her.

‘Hot,’ she said.

I lay back, longing not to break the peace of the moment.

In the room, the only sound was Sheila’s turning a page: outside, the skirl of the embankment traffic. On her bed, which was the farther from the window, Sheila’s back was half turned to me, so as to catch the lamplight on the book.

In time — perhaps I put off speaking for half an hour — I called her name.

‘Hallo,’ she said, without stirring.

‘We ought to talk a bit.’

‘What about?’ She still spoke lazily, she had caught nothing ominous yet.

‘Robinson.’

All of a sudden she turned on her back, with her eyes staring at the ceiling.

‘What about him?’

I had been thinking out the words to use, and I answered: ‘If I were you, I should be careful how much you confide in him.’

There was a long silence. Sheila’s face did not move, she gave no sign that she had heard.

At last she said, in a high cold voice: ‘You’re telling me nothing that I don’t know.’

‘Do you know what he’s actually said?’

‘What does it matter?’ she cried.

‘He’s been spreading slander—’

‘I don’t want to hear.’ Her voice rose, but she remained still.

After a pause, she said, into the silent room: ‘I told you that he wouldn’t be grateful.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was right.’

Her laugh was splintered. I thought how those like her, who insisted on baring the harsher facts of the human condition, are those whom those facts ravish most.

She sat up, her back against the bed-head, her eyes full on me.

‘Why should he be grateful?’

‘He’s tried to do you harm.’

‘Why should he be grateful?’ Her glacial anger was rising: it was long since I had seen it. ‘Why should he or anyone else be grateful just because someone interferes with his life? Interferes, I tell you, for reasons of their own. I wasn’t trying to do anything for R S R’s sake, I just wanted to keep myself from the edge, and well you know it. Why shouldn’t he say anything he wants? I don’t deserve anything else.’

‘You do,’ I said.

Her eyes had not left me; her face had gone harsh and cruel.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You’ve given years of your life to taking care of me, haven’t you?’

‘I shouldn’t call it that.’

‘What else would you call it? You’ve been taking care of someone who’s useless by herself. Much good has it done you.’ In a cold, sadic tone, she added: ‘Or me either.’

‘I know that well enough.’

‘Well, you’ve sacrificed things you value, haven’t you? You used to mind about your career. And you’ve sacrificed things most men want. You’d have liked children and a satisfactory bed. You’ve done that for me? — Why?’

‘You know the reason.’

‘I never have known, but it must be a reason of your own.’ Her face looked ravaged, vivid, exhausted, as she cried out: ‘And do you think I’m grateful?’

After that fierce and contemptuous cry, she sat quite still. I saw her eyes, which did not fall before mine, slowly redden, and tears dropped on to her cheeks. It was not often that she cried, but always in states like this. It frightened me that night even though I had watched it before — that she did not raise a hand but sat unmoving, the tears running down her cheeks as down a window pane, wetting the neck of her dressing-gown.

At the end of such an outburst, as I knew by heart, there was nothing for me to do. Neither tenderness nor roughness helped her; it was no use speaking until the stillness broke, and she was reaching for a handkerchief and a cigarette.

We were due at a Soho restaurant at half past eight, to meet my brother. When I reminded her, she shook her head.

‘It’s no use. You’ll have to go by yourself.’

I said that I could put him off without any harm done. ‘You go,’ she said. ‘You’re better out of this.’

I was uneasy about leaving her alone in that state, and she knew it.

‘I shall be all right,’ she said.

‘You’re sure?’

‘I shall be all right.’

So with the familiar sense of escape, guilty escape, I left her: three hours later, with the familiar anxiety, I returned.

She was sitting in almost the same position as when I went away. For an instant I thought she had stayed immobile, but then, with relief, I noticed that she had fetched in her gramophone; there was a pile of records on the floor.

‘Had a good time?’ she asked.

She inquired about my brother, as though in a clumsy inarticulate attempt to make amends. In the same constrained but friendly fashion, she asked: ‘What am I to do about R S R?’

She had been saving up the question.

‘Are you ready to drop him?’

‘I leave it to you.’

Then I knew she was not ready. It was still important for her, keeping him afloat; and I must not make it more difficult than need be.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you knew what he was like all along, and perhaps it doesn’t alter the position, when he’s behaving like himself—’

She smiled, lighter-hearted because I had understood.

Then I told her that one of us must let Robinson know, as explicitly as we could speak, that we had heard of his slanders and did not propose to stand them. I should be glad, and more than glad, to talk to him; but it would probably do more good if she took it on herself. ‘That goes without saying,’ she said.

She got up from her bed, and walked round to the stool in front of her looking-glass. From there she held out a hand and took mine, not as a caress, but as though she was clinching a bargain. She said in an uninflected tone: ‘I hate this life. If it weren’t for you, I don’t think I should stay in it.’

It was unlike her to go in for rhetoric, but I was so relieved that she was stable again, so touched by the strained and surreptitious apology, that I scarcely listened to her, and instead just put my other hand over hers.

5: Inadmissible Hope

WHEN Sheila taxed Robinson with spreading slander he was not embarrassed; he just said blandly that his enemies were making mischief. When I accompanied her to his office a few days later, he received us with his twinkling old-fashioned politeness, quite unabashed, as though her accusations were a breach of taste which he was ready to forget.

He had taken two garret rooms in Maiden Lane. ‘Always have the kind of address that people expect from you,’ he said, showing me writing-paper headed R S Robinson, Ltd, 16 Maiden Lane, London WC2. ‘It sounds like a big firm, doesn’t it? How is anyone to know anything different?’ he said, with his gusto in his own subtlety, his happy faith that all men were easy to bamboozle.

He was dead sober, but his spirits were so roaringly high that he seemed drunk. As he spoke of his dodges, he hiccupped with laughter — pretending to be a non-existent partner, speaking over the telephone as the firm’s chief reader, getting his secretary to introduce him by a variety of aliases. He called to her: she was typing away in the little room beyond his, the only other room he rented, just as she was the only other member of his staff. She was a soft-faced girl of twenty, straight from a smart secretarial college — as I later discovered, the daughter of a headmaster, blooming with sophistication at being in her first London job, and confident that Robinson’s was a normal way for literary business to be done.

‘We impressed him, didn’t we, Miss Smith?’ he said, speaking of a recent visitor, and asking Miss Smith’s opinion with much deference.

‘I think we did,’ she said.

‘You’re sure we did, aren’t you? It’s very important, and I thought you were sure.’

‘Well, we can’t tell till we get his letter,’ she said, with a redeeming touch of realism.

‘Don’t you think he must have been impressed?’ Robinson beamed and gleamed. ‘We were part of the editorial department, you see,’ he explained to Sheila and me, ‘just part of it, in temporary quarters, naturally—’

He broke off, and with a sparkle in his eye, an edge to his voice, said: ‘I’ve got an idea that Sheila doesn’t altogether approve of these bits of improvisation.’

‘It’s waste of time,’ she said. ‘It gets you nowhere.’

‘You know nothing at all about it,’ he said, in a bantering tone, but rude under the banter.

‘I know enough for that.’ Sheila spoke uncomfortably and seriously.

‘You’ll learn better. Three or four good books and a bit of mystification, and people will take some notice. Putting a cat among the pigeons — I’m a great believer in that, because conventional people can’t begin to cope. You’re an example, Sheila, the minute you hear of something unorthodox you’re helpless, you can’t begin to cope. Always do what conventional people wouldn’t do. It’s the only way.’

‘Others manage without it,’ said Sheila.

‘They haven’t got along on negative resources for forty years, have they? Do you think you could have done?’ He maintained his bantering tone.

Often, when boasting of his deceits, he sounded childlike and innocent. He had a child’s face: also, like many of the uninhibited, he had a child’s lack of feeling. Much of his diablerie he performed as though he did not feel at all: and somehow one accepted it so.

But that was not all. There was a fibre in him which had brought him through a lifetime of begging, cajoling, using his arts on those he believed his inferiors. This fibre made him savage anyone who had been of use to him. It filled him with rancour that anyone should have power and money, when he had none. That afternoon he had been charming to Miss Smith, as though he considered her opinion as valuable as any of ours, or more so: he propitiated me because I had done nothing for him, and might even be an enemy: but to Sheila, who through the injustice of life had the power and will to befriend him, he could not help showing his teeth.

I was in a delicate position that afternoon. I should have liked to be brutal; but all I could safely do was to demonstrate that he ought to bear me in mind. For Sheila was not ready to cut her losses. It was not a matter of the money, which was trivial, nor of any feeling for him, which had not decided her in the first place and had turned to repulsion now. But her will had always been strong, and she had set it to do something for this man. He had turned out more monstrous than she reckoned on, but that was neither here nor there; her will would not let her go.

All I could do was listen while Robinson and Sheila discussed a manuscript, which he admired and she thought nothing of. He said goodbye to us at the top of the stairs, gleaming and deprecatory, like a host after a grand party. I was sure that, the instant the door closed behind him, he grinned at Miss Smith, congratulating himself on how he had ridden off the afternoon.

That summer, while I was reading the papers with an anxiety which grew tighter each month, Sheila paid less and less attention to the news. Her politics had once been like mine, she had hoped for and feared much the same things. But in the August and September of ’38, when for the first time I began listening to the wireless bulletins, she sat by as though uninterested, or went out to continue reading a manuscript for Robinson.

On the day of Munich she disappeared without explanation in the morning, leaving me alone. I could not go out myself, because for some days I had been seized with lumbago, which had become a chronic complaint of mine, and which gave me nights so painful that I had to move out of our room during an attack. All that day of Munich, I was lying on a divan in what, when we first bought the house, had been Sheila’s sitting-room; but since it was there that I had once told her I could stand it no longer, a decision I went back on within an hour, she no longer used it, showing a vein of superstition that I had not seen in her before.

Like those of our bedroom, the windows looked over the garden, the trees on the embankment road, the river beyond; from the divan, as the hours passed that day, I could see the tops of the plane trees against the blue indifferent sky.

The only person I spoke to from morning to late evening was our housekeeper, Mrs Wilson, who brought me lemonade and food which I could not eat. She was a woman of sixty, whose face bore the oddity that a mild, seeping, lifelong discontent had not aged, but had rather made it younger; the corners of her mouth and eyes ran down, her mouth was pinched, and yet she looked like a woman in early middle age whose husband was neglecting her.

Just after she had come up with tea, I heard her step on the stairs again, quick instead of, as usual, reproachfully laborious. When she entered her cheeks were flushed, her expression was humorous and attractive, and she said: ‘They say there isn’t going to be a war.’ She went on, repeating the word which was going through the streets, that the Prime Minister was off to Munich. I asked her to fetch me an evening paper. There it was, as she said, in the stop-press news. I lay there, looking at the trees, which were now gilded by the declining sun, the pain lancinating my back, forgetting Sheila, lost in the fear of what would come, as lost as though it were a private misery.

About seven o’clock, when through the window the sky was incandescent in the sunset, Sheila’s key turned in the lock downstairs. Quickly I took three aspirins, so as to be free from pain for half an hour. When she came she said, bringing a chair to the side of the divan: ‘How have you been?’

I said, not comfortable. I asked how her day had gone. Not bad, she said. She volunteered the information (in my jealous days, I had learned how she detested being asked) that during the afternoon she had called at Maiden Lane. He still insisted that he would bring out a book in the spring. She did not guarantee it, she said, with a jab of her old realism.

I was impatient, not able to attend. I said: ‘Have you heard the news?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s as bad as it can be.’

Since tea-time I had wanted to talk to a friend who thought as I did. Now I was speaking to Sheila as I should have spoken years before, when she still had part of her mind free. It would have been a little surcease, to speak out about my fears.

‘It’s as bad as it can be,’ I repeated.

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Don’t you think it is?’ I was appealing to her.

‘I suppose so.’

‘If you can have much hope for the future—’

‘It depends how much the future interests you,’ said Sheila.

Her tone chilled me; but I was so desolate that I went on.

‘One can’t live like that,’ I cried.

Sheila replied: ‘You say so.’

As she stared down at me, with the sunset at her back, I could not make out her expression. But her voice held a brittle pity, as she said: ‘Try and rest. Anyway, this will give us a bit of time.’

‘Do you want a bit of time on those terms?’

She said: ‘It might give us time to get R S R a book out.’

It sounded like a frivolity, a Marie-Antoinettish joke in bad taste: but that would have been preferable. For she had spoken out of all that was left of her to feel, out of dread, obsessive will, the inner cold.

I shouted: ‘Is that all you’re thinking of, tonight of all nights?’ She did not speak again. She filled my glass with lemonade, and inspected the aspirin bottle to see that I had enough. For a time she sat silently beside me, in the room now taken over by the darkness. At last she said: ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’

I said no, and in poised, quiet steps she left me.

It was hot that night, and I did not sleep more than an hour or two. The attacks of pain kept mounting, so that I writhed on the bed and the sweat dripped off me; in the periods of respite, I lay with thoughts running through my mind, dark and lucid after the day’s news, lucid until the next bout of pain. For a long time I did not think of Sheila. I was working out repetitively, uselessly, how much time there was, when the next Munich night would follow, what the choice would be. As the hours passed, I began to ask myself, nearer the frontier of sleep, how much chance there was that we should be left — no, not we, I alone — with a personal life? More and more as the morning came, the question took on dream-shapes but stayed there: if this happened or that, what should I do with Sheila?

I took it for granted that I was tied to her. In the past years when I faced, not just the living habit of marriage, but the thought of it, I knew that other men would have found it intolerable: that did not support me, for it made me recognize something harsher, that this was what my nature had sought out. Not because I took responsibility and looked after others: that was true but superficial, it hid the root from which the amiable and deceptive parts of my character grew.

The root was not so pretty. It was a flaw or set of flaws, which both for good and ill, shaped much of how I affected others and the way my life had gone. In some ways I cared less for myself than most men. Not only to my wife, but to my brother, to my friend Roy Calvert, to others, I devoted myself with a lack of self-regard that was, so far as it went, quite genuine. But deeper down the flaw took another shape. Had Sheila been thinking of it when, in our bedroom, she broke out about people helping others for reasons of their own?

At the springs of my nature I had some kind of pride or vanity which not only made me careless of myself but also prevented me going into the deepest human relation on equal terms. I could devote myself; that was all right; so long as I was not in turn understood, looked after, made to take the shames as well as the blessedness of an equal heart.

Thus, so far as I could see within, I had been in search of such a marriage as I found with Sheila — where I was protecting her, watching her face from day to day, and getting back no more interest, often indeed far less, than she would spend on her housekeeper or an acquaintance in a Chelsea pub. It was a marriage in which I was strained as far as I could bear it, constantly apprehensive, often dismally unhappy; and yet it left me with a reserve and strength of spirit, it was a kind of home.

There was a lot of chance, I knew, in human relations; one cannot have seen much unless one believed in chance; I might have been luckier and got into a relation less extreme; but on the whole, I had to say of myself what I should have said of others — in your deepest relations, there is only one test of what you profoundly want: it consists of what happens to you.

And yet, no one can believe himself utterly foredoomed. I was not ready to accept that I was my own prisoner. In the early morning, after the night of Munich, I recognized the question, which now formed itself quite clear: what shall I do with Sheila? interspersed among the shapes of the future. Once I had tried to leave her; I could not do so again. Often, though, I had let myself imagine a time in which I might be set free.

Now, in that desolate night, among the thoughts of danger, there entered the inadmissible hope, that somehow I should get relief from the strain of watching over her. In the darkness of the months to come, I might at least (I did not will it, but the hope was there) be freed from the sight of her neurosis. It could happen that I need be responsible no more. As the pain abated and the sky lightened I lay on the threshold of sleep, with the dream-thought that, throwing responsibility away, I should then find something better.

6: Frown under the Bedside Lamp

FEW of my acquaintances liked Sheila. Many men had been attracted to her and several had loved her, but she had always been too odd, too self-centred and ungiving, to evoke ordinary affection. As she grew older and the bones of her character showed through, that was more than ever true. Some of the helpless whom she was kind to idolized her, and so did those who worked for her, including Mrs Wilson, who was the last person to express unconsidered enthusiasm. Apart from them, I had no one to talk to about her when the rumours began to spread; no one I knew in the Chelsea bars and parties would defend her, except one or two, like Betty Vane, who would do so for my sake.

That autumn, I could not discover how much the rumours were alive. I had the impression that after Sheila had confronted Robinson there had been a lull. But Robinson — it was only now that I realized it clearly — became so merry with gossip that he never let it rest for long; exaggerating, transmogrifying, inventing, he presented the story, too luscious to keep, to anyone who met him; everything became a bit larger than life, and I heard, through a chain of word-of-mouth which led back to him, that Sheila’s private income was £4,000 a year, when in fact it was £700.

Thus I thought it likely that Sheila was still being traduced; watching her, I was convinced that she knew it, and that none of her attempts to forget herself had exposed her so. Sometimes, towards the end of the year, I fancied that she was getting tired of it. Even obsessions wear themselves out, I was thinking, just as, in the unhappiest love affair, there comes eventually a point where the forces urging one to escape unhappiness become infinitesimally stronger than those which immerse one in it.

In fact, Sheila’s behaviour was becoming more than ever strange. She went out less, but she was not playing her records hour after hour, which was her final refuge. She seemed to have a new preoccupation. Twice, returning home earlier than usual from Millbank, I heard her footsteps running over the bedroom floor and the sounds of drawers shutting, as though she had been disturbed by my arrival and was hiding something.

It was not safe to ask, and yet I had to know. Mrs Wilson let fall that Sheila had taken to going, each morning, into the room we used as a study; and one day, after starting for the office, I came back as though by accident. Mrs Wilson said that, following her new routine, Sheila was upstairs in the study. It was a room at the back of the house, and I went along the landing and looked in. Beside the window, which looked over the Chelsea roofs, Sheila was sitting at the desk. In front of her was an exercise book, an ordinary school exercise book ruled with blue lines; her head thrown back because of her long sight, she was looking at the words she had just written, her pen balanced over the page. So far as I could see from across the room, it was not continuous prose she was writing, nor was it verse: it looked more like a piece of conversation.

Suddenly she realized that the door was open, that I was there. At once she slammed the exercise book shut and pressed her hand on it.

‘It’s not fair,’ she cried, like an adolescent girl caught in a secret.

I asked her something neutral, such as whether I could change my mind and dine at home that night. ‘It’s not fair,’ Sheila repeated, clutching her book. I said nothing. Without explanation she went across into the bedroom, and there was a noise of a drawer being unlocked and locked again.

But it did not need explanation. She was trying both to write and to keep it secret: was she thinking of Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson? Had she a sisterly feeling for women as indrawn as herself? Usually, when we had spoken of them, she had — it was cool, I thought, coming from her — shown no patience with them, and felt that if they had got down to earth they might have done better.

Anyway, neither she nor I referred to her writing, until the night of the Barbican dinner. The Barbican dinner was one of the festivals I had to attend, because of my connexion with Paul Lufkin. The Barbican was an organization consisting largely of members of banks, investment trusts and insurance companies, which set out to make propaganda for English trade overseas. To this January dinner Lufkin was invited, as were all his senior executives and advisors, and those of his bigger competitors.

I would have got out of it if I could; for the political divide was by this time such that even people like me, inured by habit to holding their tongues, found it a strain to spend a social evening with the other side. And this was the other side. Among my brother and his fellow scientists, in the Chelsea pubs, in the provincial back streets where my oldest friends lived — there we were all on one side. At Cambridge, or even among Betty Vane’s aristocratic relatives, there were plenty who, to the test questions of those years, the Spanish Civil War, Munich, Nazism, gave the same answer as I did myself. Here there was almost none.

I could hear my old master in Chambers, Herbert Getliffe, the rising silk, wise with the times as usual: he was singing in unison, as it were, and so were the active, vigorous, virile men round him: yes, Churchill was a menace and a war-monger and must be kept out at all costs: yes, war was getting less likely every day: yes, everything had been handled as well as it possibly could be handled, everyone knew we were ready to play ball.

I was frightened just as I had been on the night of Munich. I knew some of these men well: though they were less articulate than my friends, though they were trained to conform rather than not to conform, they were mostly able: they were tougher and more courageous than most of us: yet I believed that, as a class, they were self-deceived or worse.

Of all those I knew, there was only one exception. It was Paul Lufkin himself. He had taken his time, had tried to stay laodicean, but at last he had come down coldly among the dissidents. No one could guess whether it was a business calculation or a human one or both. There he sat, neat-headed, up at the benefactors’ table, listening to the other bosses, impassively aware that they sneered about how he was trying to suck up to the Opposition, indifferent to their opinion or any other.

But he was alone, up among the tycoons: so was I, three or four grades down. So I felt a gulp of pleasure when I heard Gilbert Cooke trumpeting brusquely, on the opposite side of the table not far from me, telling his neighbours to make the most of the drinks, since there would not be a Barbican dinner next year.

‘Why not?’

‘We shall be fighting,’ said Gilbert.

‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ said someone.

‘Let’s hope it will,’ said Cooke, his face imperative and flushed. Men were demurring, when he brought his hand down on the table.

‘If it doesn’t come to that,’ he said, ‘we’re sunk.’

He gazed round with hot eyes: ‘Are you ready to see us being sunk?’

He was the son of a regular soldier, he went about in society, he was less used to being over-awed than the people round him. Somehow they listened, though he badgered and hectored them, though he was younger than they were.

He saw me approving of him, and gave a great impudent wink. My spirits rose, buoyed up by this carelessness, this comradeship.

It was not his fault that recently I had seen little of him. He had often invited me and Sheila out, and it was only for her sake that I refused. Now he was signalling comradeship. He called out across the table, did I know the Davidsons? Austin Davidson?

It was a curious symbol of alliance tossed over the heads of those respectable businessmen. Davidson was an art connoisseur, a member of one of the academic dynasties, linked in his youth with high Bloomsbury. No, I called out, I knew his work, of course, but not him. I was recalling to myself the kind of gibes we used to make a few years before about those families and that group: how they carried fine feelings so far as to be vulgar: how they objected with refined agony to ambition in others, and slipped as of right into the vacant place themselves. Those were young men’s gibes, gibes from outside a charmed circle. Now they did not matter: Davidson would have been an ally at that dinner; so was Gilbert, brandishing his name.

When Gilbert drove me home I had drunk enough to be talkative and my spirits were still high. We had each been angry at the dinner and now we spoke out, Gilbert not so anxious as I about the future but more enraged; his fighting spirit heartened me, and it was a long time since I had become so buoyant and reassured.

In that mood I entered the bedroom, where Sheila was lying reading, her book near the bedside lamp, as it had been the evening we quarrelled over Robinson: but now the rest of the room was in darkness, and all I could see was the lamp, the side of her face, her arm coming from the shoulder of her nightdress.

I sat on my bed, starting to tell her of the purgatorial dinner — and then I became full of desire.

She heard it in my voice, for she turned on her elbow and stared straight at me.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ she said, cold but not unfriendly, trying to be kind.

On her bed, just as I was taking her, too late to consider her, I saw her face under mine, a line between her eyes carved in the lamplight, her expression worn and sad.

Then I lay beside her, on us both the heaviness we had known often, I the more guilty because I was relaxed, because, despite the memory of her frown, I was basking in the animal comfort of the nerves.

In time I asked: ‘Anything special the matter?’

‘Nothing much,’ she said.

‘There is something?’

For an instant I was pleased. It was some sadness of her own, different from that which had fallen on us so many nights, lying like this.

Then I would rather have had the sadness we both knew — for she turned her head into my shoulder, so that I could not watch her face, and her body pulsed with sobbing.

‘What is the matter?’ I said, holding her to me. She just shook her head.

‘Anything to do with me?’ Another shake.

‘What then?’

In a desperate and rancorous tone, she said: ‘I’ve been weak-minded.’

‘What have you done?’

‘You knew that I’d been playing with some writing. I didn’t show it to you, because it wasn’t for you.’

The words were glacial, but I held her and said, ‘Never mind.’

‘I’ve been a fool. I’ve let R S R know.’

‘Does that matter much?’

‘It’s worse than that, I’ve let him get it out of me.’

I told her that it was nothing to worry about, that she must harden herself against a bit of malice, which was the worst that could happen. All the time I could feel her anxiety like a growth inside her, meaningless, causeless, unreachable. She scarcely spoke again, she could not explain what she feared, and yet it was exhausting her so much that, as I had known happen to her before in the bitterness of dread, she went to sleep in my arms.

7: Triumph of R S Robinson

WHEN Sheila asked Robinson for her manuscript back, he spent himself on praise. Why had she not written before? This was short, but she must continue with it. He has always suspected she had a talent. Now she had discovered it, she must be ready to make sacrifices.

Reporting this to me, she was as embarrassed and vulnerable as when she confessed that she had let him blandish the manuscript out of her. She had never learned to accept praise, except about her looks. Hearing it from Robinson she felt half-elated, she was vain enough for that, and half-degraded.

Nevertheless, he had not been ambivalent; he had praised with a persistence he had not shown since he extracted her promise of help. There was no sign of the claw beneath. It made nonsense of her premonition, that night in my arms.

Within a fortnight, there was a change. A new rumour was going round, more detailed and factual than any of the earlier ones. It was that Sheila had put money into Robinson’s firm (one version which reached me multiplied the amount by three) but not really to help the arts or out of benevolence. In fact, she was just a dilettante who was supporting him because she wrote amateur stuff herself and could not find an easier way to get it published.

That was pure Robinson, I thought, as I heard the story — too clever by half, too neat by half; triumphant because he could expose the ‘lie in life’. To some women, I thought also, it would have seemed the most innocuous of rumours. To Sheila — I was determined she should not have to make the comparison. I telephoned Robinson at once, heard from his wife that he was out for the evening, and made an appointment for first thing next day. This time I meant to use threats.

But I was too late. Sitting in the drawing-room when I got home, Sheila was doing nothing at all. No book, no chess-men, not even her gramophone records — she was sitting as though she had been there for hours, staring out of the lighted room into the January night.

After I had greeted her and settled down by the side of the fire, she said: ‘Have you heard his latest?’

She spoke in an even tone. It was no use my pretending.

I said yes.

‘I’m handing in my resignation,’ she said.

‘I’m glad of that,’ I replied.

‘I’ve tried as much as I can,’ she said, without any tone.

In the same flat, impassive voice, she asked me to handle the business for her. She did not wish to see Robinson. She did not care what happened to him. Her will was broken. If I could manage it, I might as well get her money back. She was not much interested.

As she spoke, discussing the end of the relation with no more emotion than last week’s accounts, she pointed to the grate, where there lay a pile of ash and some twisted, calcined corners of paper.

‘I’ve been getting rid of things,’ she said.

‘You shouldn’t have done,’ I cried.

‘I should never have started,’ she said.

She had burned all, her own holograph and two typescripts. But, against the curious farcical intransigence of brute creation, she had not found it so easy as she expected. The debris in the grate represented a long time of sitting before the fire, feeding in papers. In the end, she had had to drop most of the paper into the boiler downstairs. Even that night, she thought it faintly funny.

However, she had destroyed each trace, so completely that I never read a sentence of hers, nor grasped for certain what kind of book it was. Years later, I met the woman who had once been Miss Smith and Robinson’s secretary, and she mentioned that she had glanced through it. According to her, it had consisted mostly of aphorisms, with a few insets like ‘little plays’. She had thought it was ‘unusual’, but had found it difficult to read.

The morning after Sheila burned her manuscript, I kept my appointment with Robinson. In the Maiden Lane attic, the sky outside pressed down against the window; as I entered, Robinson switched on a single light in the middle of the ceiling.

‘How are you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve conquered that fibrositis, it must have made life miserable.’

Courteous and also cordial, he insisted on putting me in the comfortable chair and fitting a cushion to ease the backache of six months before. His eyes were suspicious, but struck me as gay rather than nervous.

I began: ‘I was coming to see you on my own account—’

‘Any time you’ve got nothing better to do,’ said Robinson.

‘But in fact I’ve come on my wife’s.’

‘I haven’t seen her for two or three weeks; how is she?’

‘She wants,’ I said, ‘to finish any connexion with you or what you call your firm or anything to do with you.’

Robinson blushed, as he had done at our dinner party. That was the one chink in his blandness. Confidentially, almost cheerfully, he asked: ‘Shouldn’t you say that was an impulsive decision?’

He might have been a friend of years, so intimate that he knew what my life had been, enduring an unbalanced wife.

‘I should have advised her to take it.’

‘Well,’ said Robinson, ‘I don’t want to touch on painful topics, but I think perhaps you’ll agree that it’s not unreasonable for me to ask for an explanation.’

‘Do you think you deserve it?’

‘Sir,’ he flared up, like a man in a righteous temper, ‘I don’t see that anything in our respective positions in the intellectual world entitles you to talk to me like that.’

‘You know very well why my wife is quitting,’ I said. ‘You’ve made too much mischief. She isn’t ready to stand any more.’

He smiled at me sympathetically, putting his temper aside as though it were a mackintosh.

‘Mischief?’ he said.

‘Mischief,’ he repeated, reflectively, like one earnestly weighing up the truth. ‘It would help me if you could just give me an example of what sort of mischief I’m supposed to be guilty of, just as a rough guide.’

I said that he had spread slander about her.

‘Remember,’ he said, in a friendly merry manner, ‘remember you’re a lawyer, so you oughtn’t to use those words.’

I said that his slander about the book had sickened her.

‘Do you really think,’ he said, ‘that a sane man would be as foolish as you make me out to be? Do you think I could possibly go round blackguarding anyone who was supporting me? And blackguarding her very stupidly, according to your account, because for the sum she lent me she could have published her book several times over. I’m afraid, I don’t like to say it, but I’m afraid you’ve let Sheila’s difficulties infect you.’

For a second his bland reasonableness, his trick of making his own actions sound like a neurotic’s invention, his sheer euphoria, kept me silent.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ve let poor Sheila’s state infect you. I suppose it is the beginning of schizophrenia, isn’t it?’

‘I am not going to discuss my wife,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think it profitable to discuss your motives—’

‘As for her book,’ he said, ‘I assure you, it has real merit. Mind you, I don’t think she’ll ever become a professional writer, but she can say original things, perhaps because she’s a little different from most of us, don’t you know?’

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you,’ I said. ‘Except to arrange how you can pay my wife’s money back.’

‘I was afraid she might feel like that—’

‘This is final,’ I said.

‘Of course it is,’ said Robinson with his gay, wholehearted laugh. ‘Why, I knew you were going to say that the very moment you came into the room!’

I had been strung up for a quarrel. It was a frustration to hear my words bounce back. If he had been a younger man, I might have hit him. As it was, he regarded me with sympathy, with humour in his small, elephantine eyes, the middle parting geometrically precise in his grandfatherly hair.

‘You’ve done her harm,’ I said in extreme bitterness, and regretted the words as soon as they were out.

‘Harm?’ he inquired. ‘Because of her association with me? What kind of harm?’

He spread out his hands.

‘But, as you said, this isn’t the time or place to consider the troubles of poor Sheila. You came here to take her money out, didn’t you? Always recognize the inevitable, I’m a great believer in that. Don’t you think it’s time we got down to business?’

I had run into another surprise. As I sat beside his desk, listening to Robinson’s summary of his agreement with Sheila and his present situation, I realized he was a man of unusual financial precision and, so far as I could judge, of honesty. It was true that, cherishing his own secretiveness, he concealed from me, just as he had originally concealed from Sheila, some of his sources of income and his expectations of money to come. Somehow he had enough money to continue in his office and to pay Miss Smith; meanwhile, he was postponing his first ‘list’ until the autumn; it struck me, was he glad of the excuse? Daydreaming, planning, word-spinning about the revival of past glories, that was one thing. Putting it to the test was another. Maybe he would like that date deferred.

No one could have procrastinated less, however, about repaying Sheila: he offered to write her a cheque for £300 that day, and to follow it with two equal instalments on 1 June and 1 September.

‘Interest?’ he asked, beaming.

‘She wouldn’t take it.’

‘I suppose she wouldn’t,’ said Robinson with curiosity.

At once he proposed that we should go round to his solicitor’s. ‘I never believe in delay,’ said Robinson, putting on a wide-brimmed hat, an old overcoat trimmed with fur at the collar and sleeves. Proud of his incisiveness, behaving like his idea of a businessman (although it was as much like Paul Lufkin’s behaviour as a Zulu’s), he walked by my side through Covent Garden, the dignified little figure not up to my shoulder. Twice he was recognized by men who worked in the publishers’ or agents’ offices round about. Robinson swept off his grand hat.

‘Good morning to you, sir,’ he cried affably, with a trace of patronage, just as R S Robinson, the coterie publisher, might have greeted them in 1913.

His face gleamed rosy in the drab morning. He looked happy. It might have seemed bizarre to anyone but him that he should have spent all his cunning on acquiring a benefactor, and then used equal ingenuity in driving the benefactor away. Yet I believed he had done it before, it was one of the patterns of his career. To him it was worth it. The pleasures of malice, the pleasures of revenge against one who had the unbearable impertinence to lean down to him — they were worth a bigger price than he had ever had to pay.

And more than that, I thought, as we sniffed the smell of fruit and straw in the raw air, Robinson walking with the assurance of one going to a reputable business rendezvous, it was not only the pleasure of revenge against a benefactor. There was something more mysterious which sustained him. It was a revenge, not against Sheila, not against a single benefactor, but against life.

When I reached home that afternoon, I heard the gramophone playing. That worried me; it worried me more when I found her not in the drawing-room, not in our bedroom, but in the sitting-room where I had spent the night of Munich and which to her was a place of bad luck. In front of her, the ash-tray must have held thirty stubs. I began to say that I had settled with Robinson. ‘I don’t want to hear anything about it,’ she said, in a harsh flat tone.

I tried to amuse her, but she said: ‘I don’t want to hear anything about it.’

She put on another record, shutting out, not only the history of Robinson, but me too.

8: ‘You’ve Done All You Could’

IN the summer, I no longer spent half my time away from Sheila. We were waiting for the war to begin; I slept each night in our bedroom, saw her waking and sleeping without break, as I had not done for years. As soon as war came, I assumed that I should go on living beside her in the Chelsea house, as long as one could foresee.

Those September nights, we were as serene, as near happy, as ever in our marriage. I used to walk, not from Millbank now but Whitehall, for I had already taken up my government job, all along the embankment, often at eight o’clock and after; the air was still warm, the sky glowed like a cyclorama; Sheila seemed glad to see me. She was even interested in the work I was doing.

We sat in the garden, the night sounding more peaceful than any peace-time night, and she asked about the Department, how much the Minister did, to what extent he was in the pocket of his Civil Servants, just where I — as one of his personal assistants — came in. I told her more of my own concerns than I had for a long while. She laughed at me for what she called my ‘automatic competence’, meaning that I did not have to screw myself up to find my way about the world.

I was too much immersed in my new job to notice just when and how that mood broke up. Certainly I had no idea until weeks later that to herself she thought of a moment of collapse as sharp as the crack of a broken leg — and she thought also of as sharp a cause. All I knew was that, in the well-being of September, she had, unknown to me, arranged to join someone’s staff on the first of January. It was work that needed good French, which she had, and seemed more than usually suitable. She described it to me with pleasure, almost with excitement. She said: ‘I expect it will turn out to be R S R all over again,’ but she spoke without shadow. It was a gibe she could only have made in confidence and optimism.

Soon afterwards, not more than a fortnight later, I came home night following night to what seemed to me signs of the familiar strain, no different from what we each knew. I was disappointed the first time I came home to it; I was irritated, because I wanted my mind undistracted; I set myself to go through the routine of caring for her. Persuading her to leave her records and come to bed: talking to her in the darkness, telling her that, just as worse bouts had passed, so would this: discussing other people whose lives were riven by angst — it domesticated her wretchedness a little to have that label to pin on. It was all repetitive, it was the routine of consolation that I knew by heart, and so did she. Sometimes I thought you had to live by the side of one like Sheila to understand how repetitive suffering is.

All the time I was looking after her, absent-mindedly, out of habit; it seemed like all the other times; it did not occur to me to see a deterioration in her, or how far it had gone. Not even when she tried to tell me.

One night, early in November, I came out of my first sleep, aware that she was not in her bed. I listened to her outside the door, heard a match strike. None of this was novel, for when she could not sleep she walked about the house smoking, considerate of me because I disliked the smell of tobacco smoke at night. The click of the bedroom door, the rasp of a match, the pad of feet in the corridor — many nights they had quietly woken me, and I did not get to sleep again until she was back in bed. This time it was no different, and according to habit I waited for her. The click of the door again: the slither of bedclothes, the spring of the bed. At last, I thought, I can go back to sleep: and contentedly, out of habit, called out — ‘All right?’

For an instant she did not answer; then her voice came: ‘I suppose so.’

I was jerked back into consciousness, and again I asked: ‘Are you all right?’

There was a long pause, in the dark. At last a voice: ‘Lewis.’

It was very rare for her to address me by my name. I said, already trying to soothe her: ‘What is it?’

Her reply sounded thin but steady: ‘I’m in a pretty bad way.’

At once I switched on my bedside lamp, and went across to her. In the shadow, for my body came between the light and her face, I could see her, pale and still; I put my arm round her, and asked what was the matter.

All of a sudden her pride and courage both collapsed. Tears burst from her eyes and, in the transformation of moments, her face seemed decaying, degenerate, almost as though it were dissolving.

‘What is the matter?’

‘I’m worried about January 1st.’

She meant the job she had to take up that day.

‘Oh, that!’ I said, unable to keep down an edge of anticlimax, of sheer boredom.

I ought to have known that anything could be a trigger for her anxiety: but nothing, I knew also, was more boring than an anxiety one did not share.

‘You must understand,’ she cried, for once making an appeal.

I tried to speak in the tone that she would trust. Soon — in those states she was easy to persuade — she trusted me as she had done before.

‘You do see, don’t you?’ she cried, the tears stopping as she broke into speech that was incoherent, excited, little like her own. ‘The other day, three weeks ago next Monday, it was in the afternoon just after the post came, I realized that on January 1st I was going to get into the same state as I did over R S R. It is bound to happen, you do see that, don’t you? There will be just the same kind of trouble, and it will all gather round me day after day.’

‘Look,’ I said, reasoning with her carefully, for long ago I had found the way that reassured her most, ‘I daresay there’ll be trouble, but it won’t be the same kind. There’s only one R S R, you know.’

‘There’s only one me,’ she said, with a splinter of detachment. ‘I suppose I was really responsible for the fiasco.’

‘Truly I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Robinson would have behaved the same to me.’

‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘I’ve never done any good.’

Her face was excited and pressing. ‘You must understand, as soon as I get among new people, I shall be caught in the same trap again.’

I was shaking my head, but she broke out, very high: ‘I tell you, I realized it that afternoon just after the post came. And I tell you, in the same second I felt something go in my brain.’

She was trembling, although she was not crying any more. I asked her, with the sympathy of one who has heard it before and so is not frightened, about her physical symptoms. Often, in a state of anxiety, she had complained of hard bands constricting her head. Now she said that there had been continual pressure ever since that afternoon, but she would not describe the physical sensation that began it. I thought she was shy, because she had been exaggerating. I did not realize that she was living with a delusion, in the clinical sense. I had no idea, coaxing her, even teasing her, how much of her judgement had gone.

I reminded her how many of her fears had turned out nonsense. I made some plans for us both after the war. Her body was not trembling by this time, and I gave her a tablet of her drug and stayed by her until she went off to sleep.

Next morning, although she was not anxiety-free, she discussed her state equably (using her domesticating formula — ‘about twenty per cent angst today’) and seemed a good deal restored. That evening she was strained, but she had a good night, and it was not for several days that she broke down again. Each night now, I had to be prepared to steady myself. Sometimes there were interludes, for as long as a week together, when she was in comfortable spirits, but I was tensed for the next sign of strain.

My work at the office was becoming more exacting; the Minister was using me for some talks face-to-face where one needed nothing else to think about and no tugs at the nerves; when I left Sheila in the morning, I wished that I were made so that I could forget her all through the day — but at some time, in the careful official conversation, a thought of her would swim between me and the man I was trying to persuade.

More than once, I found myself bitter with resentment against her. When we first married she had drained me of energy and nerve, and had spoiled my chance. Now, when I could least afford it, she was doing so again. That resentment seemed to exist simultaneously, almost to blend, with pity and protective love.

The first week in December, I was in the middle of a piece of business. One afternoon, about half past five, when I was counting on working for an hour or two more, the telephone rang. I heard Sheila’s voice, brittle and remote.

‘I’ve got a cold,’ she said.

She went on: ‘I suppose you couldn’t come home a bit early? I’ll make you some tea.’

It was abnormal for her to telephone me at all, much less ask me to see her. She was so unused to asking that she had to make those attempts at the commonplace.

I took it for granted that something more was wrong, abandoned my work, and took a taxi to Chelsea. There I found that, although she was wretched and her tic did not leave her mouth, she had nothing new to say. She had fetched me home just to work over the moving belt of anxiety — the bits and pieces came round and round before us — Robinson, January 1st, her ‘crack-up’. My impatience not quite suppressed, dully I said: ‘We’ve been over all this before.’

‘I know it,’ she said.

‘I’ve told you,’ I said mechanically, ‘worse things have passed, and so will this.’

‘Will it?’ She gave a smile, half-trusting, half-contemptuous, then broke out: ‘I’ve got no purpose. You’ve got a purpose. You can’t pretend you haven’t.’ She cried out: ‘I’ve said before, I’ve handed in my resignation.’

I was tired of it, unable to make the effort of reassurance, irked that she had dragged me from the work I wanted to do. With the self-absorption that had now become complete, she dismissed all my life except the fraction of it I spent supporting her. We were sitting by the fire in the drawing-room. I heard myself using words that, years before, I had used in her old sitting-room. For there, in my one attempt to part from her, I had said that our life together was becoming difficult for me. Now I was near repeating myself.

‘This is difficult for me,’ I said, ‘as well as for you.’

She stared at me. Whether or not the echo struck her, I did not know. Perhaps she was too drawn into herself to attend. Or perhaps she was certain that, after all that had happened, all that had changed, I could no longer even contemplate leaving her.

‘It is difficult for me,’ I said.

‘I suppose it is,’ she replied.

On that earlier occasion, I had been able to say that for my own sake I must go. But now, as we both knew, I could not. While she was there, I had to be there too. All I could say was: ‘Make it as easy for me as you can.’

She did not reply. For a long time she gazed at me with an expression I could not read. She said, in a hard and final tone: ‘You’ve done all you could.’

9: A Goodbye in the Morning

UP to 20 December there was no change that I noticed. As I lived through those days they seemed no more significant than others. Later, when I tried to remember each word she and I said, I remembered also the signs of distress she showed about January 1st, and the new job. She was still too proud to ask outright, but she was begging me to find an excuse to get her out of it.

Otherwise she had fits of activity, as capricious as they used to be. She put on a mackintosh, in weather that was already turning into bitter winter, walked all day along the river, down to the docks, past Greenwich, along the mud-flats. When she got home, flushed with the cold, she looked as she must have done as a girl, after a day’s hunting. She was cheerful that night, full of the enjoyment of her muscles; she shared a bottle of wine with me and fell asleep after dinner, a little drunk and happily tired. I did not believe in those flashes of cheerfulness, but also I did not totally believe in her distress. It did not seem, as I watched her, to have the full weight of her nature behind it.

Her moods fluctuated, not as my friend Roy Calvert’s did in cycles of depression, but in splinters from hour to hour; more exactly, her moods could change within a single moment, they were not integral; sometimes she spoke unlike an integral person. But that had always been so, though it was sharper now. She still made her gibes, and, the instant she did so, I felt the burden of worry evanesce. This phase was nothing out of the ordinary, I thought, and we should both come through it, much as we had done for the past years.

In fact, I behaved as I had seen others do in crises, acting as though the present state of things would endure for ever, and occasionally, as it were with my left hand and without recognizing it, showing a sense of danger.

One day I got away from my meetings and confided in Charles March, one of the closest friends of my young manhood, who was at this time a doctor in Pimlico. I told him, in sharper tones than I used to myself, that Sheila was in a state of acute anxiety, and I described it: was it any use bringing in another psychiatrist? The trouble was, as he knew, she had consulted one before, and given him up with ridicule. Charles promised to find someone, who would have to be as clever and as strong-willed as she was herself, whom she might just conceivably trust. But he shook his head. ‘I doubt if he’ll be able to do much for her. All he might do is take some of the responsibility off you.’

On 20 December, Charles rang me up at the office and gave me a doctor’s name and address. It happened to be the day I was bringing my first substantial piece of departmental business — the business from which Sheila had called me away a fortnight before — to an issue. In the morning I had three interviews, in the afternoon a committee. I got my way, I was elated, I wrote a minute to my superior. Then I telephoned the doctor whom Charles had recommended; he was not at his surgery and would not be available for a fortnight, but he could see my wife in the first week in January, 4 January. That I arranged, and, with a throb of premonition, my own work shelved for a day or two, free to attend to her, I telephoned home.

I felt an irrational relief when she answered. I asked: ‘How are you?’

‘Much the same.’

‘Nothing’s happened?’ I asked.

‘What could have happened?’

Her voice sharpened: ‘I should like to see you. When shall you be here?’

‘Nothing wrong since this morning?’

‘No, but I should like to see you.’

I knew her tone, I knew she was at her worst. I tried to coax her, as sometimes one does in the face of wretchedness, into saying that she was not so bad.

Flatly the words came to my ear: ‘I’m not too bad to cope.’

She added: ‘I want to see you. Shall you be long?’

When I went into the hall, she was waiting there for me.

She began to speak before I had taken my coat off, and I had to put my arm round her shoulders and lead her into the drawing-room. She was not crying, but I could feel beneath my hand the quiver of her fibres, the physical sign that frightened me most.

‘It’s been a bad day,’ she was saying. ‘I don’t know whether I can go on. It’s no use going on if it’s too hard.’

‘It won’t be too bad,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

I was ready with the automatic consolation.

‘Have I got to go on? Can I tell them I shan’t be able to come on January 1st?’

That was what she meant, I had assumed, by ‘going on’; she spoke like that, whenever she winced away from this ordeal to come, so trivial to anyone else.

‘I don’t think you ought,’ I said.

‘It wouldn’t matter much to them.’ It was as near pleading as she had come.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘if you get out of this, you’ll get out of everything else in the future, except just curling up into yourself, now won’t you? It’s better for you to come through this, even if it means a certain amount of hell. When you put it behind you, all will be well. But this time you mustn’t give up.’

I was speaking sternly. I believed what I said; if she surrendered over this test, she would relapse for good and all into her neurosis; I was hoping, by making my sympathy hard, to keep her out of it. But also I spoke so for a selfish reason. I wanted her to take this job so that she would be occupied and so at least partially off my hands. In secret, I looked forward to January as a period of emancipation.

I thought of mentioning the doctor whom Charles March had recommended, and the appointment that I had made. Then I decided against.

‘You ought to go through with it,’ I said.

‘I knew you’d say that.’ She gave me a smile, not bitter, not mechanical, quite transformed; for a second her face looked youthful, open, spiritual.

‘I’m sorry for giving you so much trouble,’ she said, with a curious simplicity. ‘I should have been luckier if I could have cracked up altogether, shouldn’t I?’ Her imagination had been caught by an acquaintance who had solved her problems by what they called a ‘nervous breakdown’, and now seemed happy and at peace. ‘I couldn’t pull that off somehow. But I ought to have been able to manage by myself without wearing you out so much.’

As I listened I was moved, but, still trying to stiffen her nerve, I did not smile or show her much affection.

That night we played a couple of games of chess, and were in bed early. She slept quietly and next morning got up to have breakfast with me, which was unusual. Across the table her face looked more ravaged and yet more youthful without its makeup. She did not refer to what had been said the evening before; instead, she was talking, with amusement that seemed light and genuine, about my arrangements for the coming night. Gilbert Cooke had invited me to dinner at his club; getting back to Chelsea, I said, in the blackout, having had a fair amount of drink, was not agreeable. Perhaps it would be better if I slept at my own club. How much should I have had to drink? Sheila wanted to know — with a spark of the inquisitiveness about male goings-on, the impudence that one saw sometimes in much younger women, high-spirited, not demure, but brought up in households without brothers.

On those light, teasing terms, we said goodbye. I kissed her and, in her dressing-gown, she came to the door as I went down the path. At the gate I waved, and standing with her arms by her sides, poised, erect and strong, she smiled. It was too far away to see her clearly, but I thought her expression was both friendly and jibing.

10: No Letter in the Room

AT White’s that night, Gilbert Cooke and I had a convivial dinner. He had invited me for a specific reason and yet, despite his unselfconscious raids into other people’s business, he could not confess this bit of his own until I helped him out. Then he was loose and easy, a man with an embarrassing task behind him; he ordered another bottle of wine and began to talk more confidentially and imperiously.

The favour he asked would not have weighed so heavy on most men. It appeared that he had been trying all ways to get into uniform, but he kept being turned down because he had once had an operation for mastoid. Gilbert was ashamed and sorry. He wanted to fight, with a lack of pretence that men of our age had felt twenty-five years before; in 1939 the climate, the social pressures, had changed; most other men I met in Gilbert’s situation blessed their luck, but he felt deprived.

However, by this time, he had accepted his loss; since he could not fight, he wished to do something in the war. Stay with Paul Lufkin?

‘Why does he want me to?’ Gilbert Cooke inquired with his suspicious, knowing, hot-eyed glance.

‘Because you’re useful to him, of course.’

‘No, he’s thinking out something deeper than that. I’d give fifty quid to know just what.’

‘Why in God’s name should he not want you to stay?’

‘Haven’t you realized he thinks about all of us five moves ahead?’

Gilbert’s face was shining, as he filled his glass and pushed the bottle across. I did not realize what he wanted me to (which seemed to me conspiratorial nonsense), but instead I did realize another thing. Which was that Gilbert, despite his independent no-man air in Paul Lufkin’s company, was at heart more than normally impressionable: he gave Lufkin brusque advice, but in private thought he was a great man: so that Lufkin received the pleasures of not being flattered, and of being deeply flattered, at one and the same time.

But Gilbert, as well as being susceptible to personality, was a sincere and patriotic man. The country was at war and with Lufkin, although Gilbert was hypnotized by the human drama, he was not doing anything useful. So this lavish bachelor dinner, this elaborate wind-up, led to nothing but a humble question, which he was too diffident to do more than hint at.

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that you’d like a job in a government department?’

‘If they’d possibly have me.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

‘Oh, I was never up to their clan as a brain, I don’t see why they should.’

In fact, able active men of thirty-five, with decent academic careers, permanently exempt from call-up, were bound soon to be at a premium. I told him so.

‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ said Cooke.

‘They’d take you as a principal tomorrow.’

‘How could they think I was any use to them?’

A little drunk, half-irritated that he would not trust my judgement, half-touched by his modesty, I said: ‘Look here. Would you like to work in my place?’

‘You don’t mean there would be a chance?’

‘I can take the first step tomorrow.’

Gilbert regarded me with bold eyes, determined to see the catch in it, diffident about thanking me. From that instant he just wanted a comradely evening. Brandy by the fire: half-confidences: the stories, gilded at the edges, of youngish men on a happy alcoholic night. One thing struck me about Gilbert’s stories. He was an adventurous, versatile man, always on the move: but he was meticulously pure in speech, and, although he spoke of women with liking, he did not talk openly of sex.

Next morning, in the breakfast-room of my club, the coal-fire crackled and spurted: the unfolded newspapers glinted on the table under the light; in the street outside the pavement looked dark with cold. Although I had a headache, it was not enough to put me off my breakfast, and food was still good, so early in the war. I ate the kidneys and bacon, and, indulging my thirst, went on drinking tea; the firelight was reflected back from the grey morning mist outside the windows. Acquaintances came to the tables, opening their Times. It was all warmed and cared-for, and I enjoyed stretching out the minutes before I rang up Sheila. At a quarter past nine, I thought, she would be getting up. In comfort, I drank another cup of tea.

When I got through to our house, the telephone burred out perhaps twenty times, but I was not anxious, thinking that Sheila must still be asleep. Then I heard Mrs Wilson’s voice.

‘Who is it?’

I asked, was Sheila up.

‘Oh, Mr Eliot,’ came the thin, complaining voice.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Something’s happened. I think you ought to come back straightaway. I think you must.’

I knew.

‘Is she all right physically?’

‘No.’

‘Is she dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s killed herself?’

‘Yes.’

I was sick with shock, with the first numbness; I heard myself asking: ‘How did she do it?’

‘It must have been her sleeping tablets, there’s the empty bottle lying by the side of her.’

‘Have you called a doctor?’

‘I’m afraid she’s been dead for hours, Mr Eliot. I only found her ten minutes ago, and I didn’t know what to do.’

I said that I would arrange everything, and be with her in half an hour.

‘I’m very sorry about it myself. I was very fond of her, poor soul. It was a great shock for me, finding her,’ came Mrs Wilson’s voice, in a tone of surprise, aggrievement, injury. ‘It was a great shock for me.’

At once I rang up Charles March. I must have a doctor whom I could trust, I thought. As I waited, it occurred to me that neither Sheila nor I had used a regular doctor in London. Apart from my lumbago, we had been physically healthy people.

Charles was out at a patient’s. I left a message, saying that I needed him with extreme urgency. Then I went into the street and took a taxi home. In the freezing morning the desolate Park skimmed by, Exhibition Road, the knot of shop-lights by South Kensington Station. Twice the smell of the taxi’s leather made me retch. I seemed at a distance from my own pain: somehow, dimly, numbly, I knew that grief and remorse were gnawing inside me, twisting my bowels with animal deprivation, with the sensual misery of loss. And also I felt the edge of a selfish and entirely ignoble fear. I was afraid that her suicide might do me harm; I shied from thinking of what kind of harm, but the superstitious reproach hung upon me, mingled with remorse. The fear was sharp, practical and selfish.

In the hall, Mrs Wilson’s eyes were bloodshot, and she squeezed her handkerchief and pressed it into the corner of one eye and then the other: but her manner had the eagerness, the zest, of one living close to bad news.

‘She’s not in the bedroom, Mr Eliot,’ she whispered. ‘She did it in her old sitting-room.’

I wondered whether it was a chance, or whether she had chosen it.

‘Did she leave any letters?’ I asked, and I also was near whispering.

‘I couldn’t see anything, I looked round, of course, but I couldn’t see a piece of paper in the room. I went up with her tea, Mr Eliot, and I knocked on the bedroom door, and no one answered, and I went in and there was no one there—’

Although Mrs Wilson wished to follow me, I went upstairs alone. The sitting-room curtains were drawn, though I did not know by whom, it might have been by Mrs Wilson a few minutes before. In the half-light I was struck by the dread that came on me as a child when I went into the room where my grandfather’s body was stretched out. Before looking at her, I pulled the curtains open; the room stood bare to the leaden light. At last I forced my eyes towards the divan.

She was lying on her back, dressed in a blouse and skirt such as she wore in the house on an ordinary afternoon, her head a quarter turned towards the window. Her left hand was by her side and her right fell across her breast, the thumb wide apart from the fingers. The lines of her face were so softened by death that they had become only grazes, as though her living face had been photographed through muslin; her cheeks, which had never hollowed, now were as full as when she was a girl. Her eyes were open and enormous: on her mouth there was a defensive, deprecatory, astonished grin, exactly the grin she wore when she was taken at a loss and exclaimed ‘Well, I’m damned’.

There was, just visible because of the tablets she had taken, a dried trickle of saliva down the side of her chin, as though she had dribbled in her sleep.

I stared for a long time, gazing down at her. However one read her expression, the moment of death seemed not to have been tragic or unhappy. I did not touch her; perhaps, if she had looked sadder, I should have done.

By the divan stood the bedside table, just as on the night of Munich, when she had placed my bottle of aspirin there for me. Now another bottle rested on the cherry wood, but empty and without its stopper, which she must have dropped on to the floor. Beside the bottle was a tumbler, containing about three fingers’ depth of water, stale with the night’s bubbles. There was nothing else at all. Into that room she brought nothing but her bottle and the glass of water.

I searched for a note as though I were a detective. In that room — in the bedroom — in my study — I studied the envelopes in the wastepaper baskets, looking for any line to her parents or me. In her handbag I found her pen unfilled. On her writing-desk the paper was blank. She had gone without a word.

Suddenly I was angry with her. I was angry, as I looked down at her. I had loved her all my adult life; I had spent the years of my manhood upon her; with all the possessive love that I had once felt for her, I was seared because she had not left me a goodbye.

Waiting for Charles March, I was not mourning Sheila. I had room for nothing but that petty wound, because I had been forgotten; the petty wound, and also the petty fear of the days ahead. As I waited there, I was afraid of much, meeting the Knights, going to the office, even being seen by my friends.

11: Claustrophobia in an Empty House

WHILE Charles March was examining her I went into the bedroom, where I gazed out of the window, aware of nothing but fears and precautions. The only recognition that I gave to Sheila was that my eyes kept themselves away from any glance at her bed, at the undisturbed immaculate bed.

There I stayed until Charles’ step outside warned me. I met the concerned glance from his sharp, searching eyes, and we walked together to the study.

‘This is bound to be a horror for you,’ he said. ‘And nothing that I or anyone else can say is going to alter that, is it?’

Nowadays Charles and I did not see each other often. When I first came to London as a poor young man to read in chambers, he had befriended me. We were the same age, but he was rich and had influential relatives. Since then he had changed his way of life, and become a doctor. When we met, the old intuitive sympathy sparked between us. But that morning he did not realize how little I was feeling, or what that little was.

‘There is no doubt, I suppose?’ I asked.

‘You don’t think so yourself?’ he answered.

I shook my head, and he said: ‘No, there’s no doubt. None at all.’

He added, with astringent pity: ‘She did it very competently. She had a very strong will.’

‘When did she do it?’ I had gone on speaking with neutrality. He was studying me protectively, as though he were making a prognosis.

‘Some time last night, I think.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was out for the evening. I was having a cheerful time at a club, as a matter of fact.’

‘I shouldn’t take that to heart, if I were you.’

He leaned forward in his chair, his eyes brilliant in the dark room, and went on: ‘You know, Lewis, it wasn’t such an intolerable wrench for her to die as it would be for you or me. She wasn’t so tied to life as we are. People are as different in the ways they die as in the ways they live. Some go out as though they were shrugging their shoulders. I imagine that she did. I think she just slipped out of life. I don’t think she suffered much.’

He had never liked her, he had thought her bad for me, but he was speaking of her with kindness. He went on: ‘You’re going to suffer a lot more, you know.’

He added: ‘The danger is, you’ll feel a failure.’

I did not respond.

‘Whatever you’d done or been, it wouldn’t have helped her,’ he said, with energy and insistence.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘that doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters, if you’re going to feel you’ve failed. And no one but yourself can be any good to you there.’

Again I did not respond.

He gazed at me sternly: he knew that my emotions were as strong as his: he had not seen them dead before. He was using his imagination to help me, he did not speak for some time, his glance stayed hard and appraising as he reached a settlement in his own mind.

‘The only thing I can do for you now is superficial, but it might help a little,’ he said, after a silence.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Does anyone else know about her?’

‘Only Mrs Wilson,’ I said.

‘Would she keep quiet?’

‘It’s possible,’ I replied.

‘If necessary, could you guarantee it?’

I did not reply at once. Then I said: ‘If necessary, I think I could.’

Charles nodded. He said: ‘I expect it will make you just a little worse to have other people knowing about her death, I know it would me. You’ll feel that your whole life with her is open to them, and that they’re blaming you. You’re going to take too much responsibility on yourself whatever happens, but this will make it worse.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘Well, I can save you that,’ he broke out.

He went on: ‘It won’t help much, but it will a little. I’m willing to sign a certificate that she died a natural death.’

Charles was a bold man, who lived in close touch with moral experiences. Perhaps he had that special boldness, that ability to act in moral isolation, that one found most commonly in men born rich. Between perjuring himself, which he would dislike more than most, and leaving me exposed he had made his choice.

I was not altogether surprised: in fact, in sending for him rather than for any of the doctors near, I had some such hope half-concealed.

I was tempted. Quickly I was running through the practical entanglements: if there was any risk to him professionally I could not let him run it. We had each been thinking of that, while he questioned me. Could I answer absolutely for Mrs Wilson? Who else need know the truth? The Knights must, as soon as they arrived. But they would keep the secret for their own sakes.

I thought it over. As I did so, I had little insight into my own motives. It was not entirely, or even mainly, because of practical reasons or scruples about Charles’ risk that I answered: ‘It’s not worth it.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

Charles went on persuading me until he was convinced that my mind was made up. Then he said that he was relieved. He left to inquire about the inquest, while I telephoned the Knights. I told Mrs Knight the bare news and asked them to come that afternoon. She sounded reliable and active in the face of shock, but she cried: ‘I don’t know how he’ll get through it.’

That same afternoon I had to go to a committee, among civil, sensible strangers.

Back in the house, blacked-out early on the December night, I could not stay still until the Knights came. Mrs Wilson had gone out to shop, getting a meal ready for them, and I was alone in the empty house. Yet no house seemed empty while someone lay dead: the reverse was true, there was a claustrophobic pressure, although I had not visited the sitting-room again.

In my restlessness I turned over Sheila’s books once more, re-read the letters in her desk, in the silly hope that I might find news of her. By a fluke, I did find just a little, not among her books or papers, but in her bag. Expecting nothing, I picked out her engagement diary and rifled through it; most of the pages shone bare, since the appointments with Robinson in January and February: since then, she had seen almost no one. But in the autumn pages I caught sight of a few written words — no, not just words, whole sentences.

It was an ordinary small pocket book, three inches by two, and she had scaled down her writing, which as a rule was elegant but had a long-sighted tallness. There were only seven entries, beginning in October, a week after the afternoon which she referred to as her ‘crack-up’. As I read, I knew that she had written for herself alone. Some of the entries were mere repetitions.

4 November: Ten days since the sensation in my head. No good. No one believes me.

12 November: January 1st bad enough anyway. Seems hopeless after something snapped in head.

28 November: Told I must go on. Why should I? That’s the one comfort, I needn’t go on.

5 December: Bit better. Perhaps I can go on. It’s easier, when I know I needn’t.

Nothing more than that — but for the first time I knew how fixed her delusion was. I knew also that she had contemplated suicide for weeks past, had had it in her mind when I tried to hearten her.

Perhaps even when she first said she was handing in her resignation, that was a hint, as much as eight months ago. Had she intended me to understand her? But she was not certain, she had done no more than hint, even to herself. Had she been certain two nights before, when I told her again she must go on? Had she been certain next morning at breakfast, the last time I saw her alive, when she was making fun of me?

I heard Mrs Wilson’s step downstairs. I did not look at Sheila’s writing any more: it was not to think, it was because of the claustrophobic pressure upon me in the house, that I went out of the front door and walked along the Embankment in a night as calm as the last night, as calm as when, quite untroubled, I had walked up St James’s Street with Gilbert Cooke. The sky was dark, so was the river, so were the houses.

12: The Smell of Herb Tobacco

WHEN I got back to the house there was a sliver of light between the black-out curtains of the drawing-room; as soon as I stood inside the hall I heard a woman’s voice, Mrs Knight’s, raised, sustained, unrelenting. The instant I entered the room, she stopped: there was a silence: she had been talking about me.

Mr Knight was sitting in an armchair by the fire, and she had drawn up the sofa so as to be beside him. Her eyes fixed on mine and did not budge, but his gazed into the fire. It was he who spoke.

‘Excuse me if I don’t get up, Lewis,’ he said, still without looking at me, and the polite whisper fell ominously into the silent room. Still politely, he said that they had caught an earlier train and I could not have expected them at this time. His eyes had stayed hidden, but his expression was pouched and sad. He said: ‘Your housekeeper has shown us—’

‘Yes.’

The intimations of pain and sorrow, so weak all day, quite left me. I felt nothing but guilt, and irrational fear.

‘She left no word for anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Not for you or us?’

I shook my head.

‘I don’t understand that. I don’t understand that.’

I wondered if he believed me, if he suspected that I had destroyed a note. Certainly Mrs Knight, suddenly set loose, suspected it.

‘Where were you last night?’

I replied that I was dining out — the jolly carefree evening came back to me.

‘Why did you leave her? Hadn’t you any consideration for her?’

I could not answer.

Why hadn’t I looked after her? Mrs Knight asked, angry and denouncing. All through our marriage, why had I left her to herself? Why hadn’t I carried out what I promised? Why hadn’t I taken the trouble to realize that she wanted looking after? Couldn’t I have given her even a modicum of care?

‘Oh no, he’s done that,’ whispered Mr Knight, with his eyes closed.

‘You’ve left her alone in this empty house,’ Mrs Knight went on.

‘He’s done as much as anyone could have.’ Mr Knight spoke up, a little louder, defending me. She looked baffled, even frustrated, and began another attack.

‘Please, my dearest,’ he ordered her in a loud voice, and she gave way. Then with the gentleness he always showed to her, he said, as though explaining: ‘It is his affliction as well as ours.’

Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at me, and murmured: ‘The last time I saw her’ — he meant the visit eighteen months before — ‘I couldn’t help thinking she was in a bad state. I believe I mentioned it, didn’t I, Lewis, or did I just think it to myself? The last time I saw her. I wish that I had been wrong.’

And yet, the fact that he had been perceptive, more perceptive than I or anyone else had been, gave him a vestigial comfort; even that night his vanity glowed for an instant.

‘She shouldn’t have done it,’ cried Mrs Knight, in anger but with the only tears I had seen in her eyes.

‘I have no comfort to give you, dearest,’ he said. ‘Or you either.’ Once more he was gazing into the fire, the corner of his eyes sidling towards me. In my hearing he had not once spoken of the consolations of his religion. The room was quiet, all we heard was the ticking of the clock. Somehow we had passed into a patch of those doldrums which often lurk in the path, not only of a quarrel, but of any scene of violent feeling.

Breaking the quiet, Mrs Knight asked whether there would have to be an inquest. I said yes. When? I told her that it was already arranged, for the following afternoon. Mr Knight half-raised his lids with a speculative expression, looked as though he had something to say but had thought better of it. Then he mentioned casually: ‘Tomorrow afternoon? Not that I want anyone to give it a thought except my doctor, but it will presumably be a considerable strain on me.’

‘You’ve stood it well so far,’ said Mrs Knight.

‘If Ross [his doctor] were here, he would tell us it was dangerous,’ Mr Knight continued. ‘I’m morally certain he would forbid it. But he won’t have to know until he has to patch me up afterwards.’

In a new kind of numbness I exclaimed: ‘Never mind, don’t take any risks. I can get through it by myself.’

Mrs Knight cried: ‘No, we can’t think of leaving you.’

Mr Knight muttered: ‘I wouldn’t willingly think of leaving you, it would throw all of it on to your shoulders—’

Mrs Knight broke in: ‘We can’t do it.’

Mr Knight went on: ‘One doesn’t like to think of it, but Lewis, in case, in the remote case, that my wretched heart was getting beyond its degree of tolerance tomorrow afternoon, are you sure that you could if need be manage by yourself?’

So Mr Knight, whose empathy was such that he knew more than most men both what my life with Sheila had been and what my condition was that night, was only anxious to escape and leave me to it: while Mrs Knight, who blamed me for her daughter’s unhappiness and death, felt in her fibres that they ought to stand by me in the end, give their physical presence if they could give nothing else. She felt it so primally that for once she gave up thinking of her husband’s health.

There were those, among whom I had sometimes been one, who believed that, if she had not pampered his hypochondria, he would have forgotten his ailments half the time and lived something near a normal life. We were wrong. She had a rough, simple nature, full of animal force: but, despite her aggressiveness, she had always been, and was now as much as ever, under his domination. It was he who felt his own pulse, who gave the cry of alarm, and she who in duty and reverence echoed it. Even that night he could not subdue it, and for a few moments she was impatient with him.

In the end, of course, he got his way. She soon realized that the inquest would tax his heart more than she could allow; she became convinced that it was he who out of duty insisted on attending, and she who was obliged to stop him; she would have to forbid his doing anything so quixotic, even if I was prostrate without them.

As it was, I said that I would settle it alone, and they arranged to return home next morning. I did not mention Charles March’s offer to give a false certificate, so that we could have avoided the inquest. I wondered how Mr Knight would have reconciled his conscience, in order to be able to accept that offer.

In his labyrinthine fashion, Mr Knight asked how much publicity we had to be prepared for. I shrugged it off.

‘No,’ said Mr Knight, ‘it will hurt you as much and more than us, isn’t that true?’

It was, but I did not wish to admit it, I did not like the times that day when the thought of it drove out others.

Perhaps the war-news would be a blessing to us, Mr Knight was considering. I said I would do my best with my Press acquaintances. The Knights could go home next morning: I would do what could be done.

Relieved, half-resentful, half-protective, Mr Knight began inquiring where I would sleep tomorrow night, whether I could take a holiday and get some rest. I did not want, I could not bear, to talk of myself, so I made an excuse and left them alone.

At dinner none of us spoke much, and soon afterwards, it must have been as early as nine o’clock, Mrs Knight announced that she was tired and would go straight to bed. Of all women, she was the least well designed for subterfuges: she proclaimed her piece of acting like a blunt, embarrassed, unhappy schoolgirl. But I had no attention to spare for her; Mr Knight was determined to speak to me in intimacy, and I was on guard.

We sat in the drawing-room, one each side of the fireplace, Mr Knight smoking a pipe of the herb-tobacco which out of valetudinarian caution he had taken to years before. The smell invaded me and I felt a tension nearly intolerable, as though this moment of sense, the smell of herb tobacco, was not to be endured, as though I could not wait to hear a word. But when he did speak, beginning with one of his circuitous wind-ups, he astonished me: the subject he wanted to get clear before they left next day was no more intimate than the lease of the house.

When I married Sheila, I had had no capital, and Mr Knight had lent us the money to buy a fourteen years’ lease, which had been in Sheila’s name. This lease still had six years to run, and Mr Knight was concerned about the most business-like course of action. Presumably, after all that had happened, and regardless of the fact that the house was too large for a man alone, I should not wish to go on living there? If it were his place to advise me, he would advise against. In that case, we ought to take steps about disposing of the lease. Since the loan had been for Sheila’s sake as well as mine, he would consider it wiped off, but perhaps I would think it not unreasonable, as he did himself, particularly as Sheila’s own money would come to me under her will, that any proceeds we now derived from the lease should go to him?

Above all, said Mr Knight, there was a need for speed. It might be possible to sell a house before the war developed: looking a few months ahead, none of us could guess the future, and any property in London might be a drug on the market. I had always found him one of the most puzzling and ungraspable of men, but never more so than now, when he took that opportunity to show his practical acumen. I promised to put the house in the agents’ hands within a few days.

‘I’m sorry to lay this on your shoulders too,’ he said, ‘but your shoulders are broad — in some ways—’

His voice trailed away, as though in the qualification he might be either envying me or pitying me. I was staring into the fire, not looking at him, but I felt his glance upon me. In a quiet tone he said: ‘She always took her own way.’

I did not speak.

‘She suffered too much.’

I cried out: ‘Could any man have made her happy?’

‘Who can say?’ replied Mr Knight.

He was trying to comfort me, but I was bitter because that one cry had escaped against my will.

‘May she find peace,’ he said. For once his heavy lids were raised, he was looking directly at me with sad and acute eyes.

‘Let me say something to you,’ he remarked, his words coming out more quickly than usual, ‘because I suspect you are one of those who take it on themselves to carry burdens. Perhaps one is oneself, perhaps one realizes the danger of those who won’t let themselves forget.’

For an instance his tone was soft, indulgent with self-regard. Then he spoke sharply: ‘I beg you, don’t let this burden cripple you.’

I neither would nor could confide. I met his glance as though I did not understand.

‘I mean the burden of my daughter’s death. Don’t let it lie upon you always.’

I muttered. He made another effort: ‘If I may speak as a man thirty years older, there is this to remember — time heals most wounds, except the passing of time. But only if you can drop the burdens of the past, only if you make yourself believe that you have a life to live.’

I was gazing, without recognition, into the fire; the smell of herb tobacco wafted across. Mr Knight had fallen silent. I reckoned that he would leave me alone now.

I said something about letting the house. Mr Knight’s interest in money did not revive; he had tried for once to be direct, an ordeal for so oblique a man, and had got nowhere.

For minutes, ticked off by the clock, again the only sound in the room, we stayed there; when I looked at him his face was sagging with misery. At last he said, after neither of us had spoken for a long while, that we might as well go to bed. As we went out to the foot of the stairs, he whispered: ‘If one doesn’t take them slowly, they are a strain on one’s heart.’

I made him rest his hand on my shoulder, and cautiously, with trepidation, he got himself from tread to tread. On the landing he averted his eyes from the door of the room in which her body lay.

Again he whispered: ‘Good night. Let us try to sleep.’

13: A Smooth Bedcover

IT was three nights later when, blank to all feeling, I went into the bedroom and switched on the light. Blankly, I pulled off the cover from my own bed; then I glanced across at hers, smooth, apple-green under the light, undisturbed since it was made four days before. All of a sudden, sorrow, loss, tore at me like a spasm of the body. I went to the bed and drew my hands along the cover, tears that I could not shed pressing behind my eyes, convulsed in the ravening of grief. At last it had seized me. The bed was smooth under the light. I knelt beside it, and wave after wave of a passion of the senses possessed me, made me grip the stuff and twist it, scratch it, anything to break the surface, shining quietly under the light.

Once, in an exhausted respite, I had a curious relief. The week to come, some friends had invited us to dinner. If she had been alive, she would have been anxious about going, she would have wanted me to make excuses and lie her out of the evening, as I had done so many times.

Then the grief flooded through me again. In the derangement of my senses, there was no time to come: all time was here, in this moment, now, beside this bed.

I learned then, in that devastation, that one could not know such loss without craving for an after-life. My reason would not give me the illusion, not the fractional hope of it — and yet I longed to pray to her.