Homecomings

14: Loan of a Book

OUTSIDE the window, in the September sunshine, a couple of elderly men were sitting in deckchairs drinking tea. From my bed, which was on the ground floor of a London clinic, I could just see past them to a bed of chrysanthemums smouldering in the shadow. The afternoon was placid, the two old men drank with the peace of cared-for invalids; for me it was peaceful to lie there watching them, free from pain. True, Gilbert Cooke would be bringing me work, I should have to be on my feet by Thursday; but there was nothing the matter with me, I could lie idle for another twenty-four hours.

That day was Tuesday, and I had only entered the clinic on the previous Saturday afternoon. Since Sheila’s death nearly two years before (this was the September of 1941) I had been more on the move than ever in my life, and the pain in my back had not been giving me much rest. It was faintly ludicrous: but, in the months ahead, I was going to be still more occupied, and it was not such a joke to think of dragging myself through meetings as I had been doing, or, on the bad days, holding them round my office sofa. It was not such a joke, and also it watered one’s influence down: in any kind of politics, men listened to you less if you were ill. So I had set aside three days, and a surgeon had tried manipulating me under an anaesthetic. Although I was incredulous, it seemed to have worked. Waiting for Cooke that afternoon, I was touching wood in case the pain returned.

When Gilbert Cooke came in, he had a young woman with him whose name, when he made an imperious gobbled introduction, I did not catch. In fact, taking from him at once some papers marked urgent, I only realized some moments afterwards, absent in my reading, that I had not heard her name. Then I only asked for it with routine politeness. Margaret Davidson. He had mentioned her occasionally, I recalled; she was the daughter of the Davidson whom he had talked of at the Barbican dinner and whom I had been surprised to hear that Gilbert knew.

I glanced up at her, but she had withdrawn to near the window, getting out of our way.

Meanwhile Gilbert stood by my bed, a batch of papers in his hand haranguing me with questions.

‘What have they been doing to you?’

‘Are you fit for decent company at last?’

‘You realize you must stay here until you’re well enough not to embarrass everyone?’

I said I would take the committee on Thursday. He replied that it was out of the question. When I told him how I should handle that day’s business he said that, even if I were fool enough to attend, I could not use those methods.

‘You can’t get away with it every time,’ he said, jabbing his thumb at me in warning. He stood there, his massive shoulders humped, his plethoric face frowning at me. After the fussy, almost maternal concern with which he looked after my health, as he had done since he came into my office, he turned brusquer still. He was talking to me like a professional no-man, just as he used to talk to Paul Lufkin. He did so for the same reason — because he regarded me as a success.

Working under me for nearly two years of war, Gilbert had seen me promoted; he had his ear close to the official gossip. He magnified both what I had done and what was thought of it, but it was true enough that I had made, in those powerful anonymous couloirs, some sort of reputation. Partly I had been lucky, for anyone as close to the Minister as I was could not help but attract attention: partly, I had immersed myself in the job, my life simplified for the first time since I was a boy, with no one to watch over, no secret home to distract me.

To Gilbert, who had joined my branch soon after Sheila died, I now seemed an important man. As a consequence, he was loyal and predatory about my interests when I was not present, but face to face insisted on back-chat.

On the coming Thursday we should have to struggle with a problem of security. Some people in one of the ‘private armies’ of the time were busy with a project that none of us believed in; but they had contrived so to enmesh themselves in security that we could not control them. I knew about their project: they knew that I knew: but they would not talk to me about it. I told Gilbert that their amour propre might be satisfied if we went through a solemn minuet: they must be asked to explain themselves to the Minister, which they could not refuse to do: he would then repeat the explanation to me: then on Thursday both they and I could hint obliquely at the mystery.

It was the kind of silly tactic that any official was used to. I made some remark that it was dangerous to give secrets to anyone with exaggerated self-esteem: it was bad for business, and worse for his character.

I heard a stirring by the window. I looked at the young woman, who had been sitting quietly there without a word, and to my astonishment saw her face transfigured by such a smile that I felt an instant of ease, almost of expectancy and happiness. Never mind that my piece of sarcasm had been mechanical: her smile lit up her eyes, flushed her skin, was kind, astringent, lively, content.

Until that moment I had scarcely seen her, or seen her through gauze as one sees a stranger one does not expect to meet again. Perhaps I should have noticed that her features were fine-cut. Now I looked at her. When she was not smiling her face might have been austere, except for the accident that her upper lip was short, so that I could not help watching the delicate lines of her nostril and the peak of her lip. As she smiled her mouth seemed large, her face lost its fine moulding: it became relaxed with good nature and also with an appetite for happiness.

Looking at her, I saw how fine her skin was. She had used very little make-up, even on the lips. She was wearing a cheap plain frock — so cheap and plain that it seemed she had not just picked up the first in sight, but deliberately chosen this one.

As she sat by the window, her amusement drying up, she had a curious gaucheness, like an actor who does not know what to do with his hands. This posture, at the same time careless and shy, made her look both younger and frailer than she was in fact. The little I knew of her was collecting in my mind. She must be about twenty-four, I thought, twelve years younger than Gilbert or me. When she laughed again, and her head was thrown back, she did not look frail at all.

I smiled at her. I began to talk to her and for her. I was beating round for something to link us. She was working in the Treasury — no, she was not easy about the people or her job.

Acquaintances in Cambridge — we exchanged names, but no more.

How should I occupy myself tomorrow, I asked, staying here in this room?

‘You oughtn’t to do anything,’ she said.

‘I’m not good at that,’ I replied.

‘You ought to do as Gilbert tells you.’ She had taken care to bring him in, she broke the duologue, she smiled at him. But she spoke to me again: she was positive.

‘You ought to rest all the week.’

I shook my head; yet a spark had flashed between us.

No, I said, I should just have tomorrow to bask in and read — I was short of books, what would be best for the day in bed? She was quick off the mark.

‘You want something peaceful,’ she said.

Not a serious novel, we agreed — not fiction at all, maybe — journals that one could dip into, something with facts in them. Which were the most suitable journals, Bennett’s, Gide’s, Amiel’s?

‘What about the Goncourts?’ she asked.

‘Just what I feel like,’ I said.

I asked, how could I possibly lay my hand on the books by tomorrow?

‘I’ve got them at home,’ she said.

Suddenly the air held promise, danger, strain. I had not enough confidence to go ahead; I needed her to make the running, to give me the sign I longed for; I was waiting for her to say that she would bring a book, or send it to me. Yet I could feel, as she folded her fingers in her lap, that she was diffident too.

If it had been Sheila when I first knew her — some half memory made me more constrained — she would not have given a thought that Gilbert had brought her into the room: she would have announced, in ruthlessness and innocence, that she would deliver the book next morning. But Margaret would not treat Gilbert so, even though their relation appeared to be quite slight. She was too good-mannered to give me the lead I sought. But, even if Gilbert had not been present, could she have done so? She was not only too gentle, but perhaps also she was too proud.

Looking at her, her head no longer thrown back, her eyes studying me, I felt that she had a strong will, but no more confidence that moment than I had myself.

It was Gilbert who snapped the tension off. He would arrange, he said, brusque and cheerful, to get the books round to the clinic first thing next morning. Soon afterwards they left, Margaret saying goodbye from the door: as soon as I heard their steps in the corridor, I was suffused with happiness.

In a beam of evening sun which just missed my bed, the motes were spinning. Outside it, in the twilight, I cherished my happiness, as though by doing so I could stretch it out, as though, by letting myself live in the moment of recognition between this young woman and me half an hour before, I could stay happy.

Several times since Sheila’s death, my eyes had lit up at the sight of a woman, but I had not been able to free myself enough, it had come to nothing. The qualms were not buried; this could come to nothing too. But, just as the old do not always or even most of the time feel old, so someone whose nerve is broken can forget past disasters and cherish the illusions of free will. I felt as free to think of this young woman as if I had not met Sheila, as if I were beginning.

It occurred to me that I had never been able to remember my first meeting with Sheila. It was the second time I could remember, her face already lined, handsome and painted, at nineteen looking older than Margaret in the middle twenties. Yes, I was comparing Margaret with her, as I did when letting my imagination dwell on any woman; it appeared that I had to make sure there was no resemblance, to be convinced that anyone I so much as thought of was totally unlike what I had known.

There was the same comparison in my mind as I thought of Margaret’s nature. She had enough spirit to be exciting — but she seemed tender, equable, easy-going. An hour after she had left, I was making day-dreams of her so.

That evening, lying in bed outside the beam of sunlight, I basked in a kind of uncommitted hope; sometimes homesick images of the past filtered in, as well as the real past that I feared. But I was happy with the illusion of free will, as though with this girl who had just left me bliss was mine if I chose it.

Nevertheless I need do nothing; I had admitted nothing to myself beyond recall; I could refrain from seeing her again without more than a spasm of regret and reproach for my own cowardice.

For that night, I could rest in an island of peace, hoarding my chance of bliss as I used to hoard sweets as a child, docketing them away in a bookshelf corner so that they were ready when I felt inclined.

15: Confidential Offer

STILL acting as though uncommitted, I invited Margaret and Gilbert Cooke together, three times that autumn. For me, there was about those evenings the suspense, the inadmissible charm, that abides in a period of waiting for climactic news, as it were an examination result, from which one is safe until the period is up. The meeting in a pub, where Gilbert and I went together from the office and found her waiting: the communiqués in the evening papers: the wartime streets at night: the half-empty restaurants, for London was not crowded that year: the times at dinner when we spoke of ourselves, the questions unspoken: the return alone to Pimlico in the free black night.

One evening in late November Gilbert had accompanied me out of the office for a drink in my club, as he often did. That day, as on most others, we went on discussing our work, for we were engrossed in it. Much of the time since Sheila’s death, I had thought of little else: nor had Gilbert, intensely patriotic, caught up in the war. He had by now picked up some of the skills and language of the professional Civil Servants we were working with: our discussion that evening, just as usual, was much like the discussions of two professionals. I valued his advice: he was both tough and shrewd, and tactically his judgement was better than mine.

There was just one point, however, at which our discussion was not simply business-like. Gilbert had developed Napoleonic ambitions, not for himself, but for me: he saw me rising to power, with himself as second-in-command: he credited me with the unsleeping cunning he had once seen in Paul Lufkin, and read hidden meanings in moves that were quite innocent. Either as result or cause, his curiosity about my behaviour was proliferating so that I often felt spied upon. He was observant quite out of the ordinary run. He would not ask a disloyal question, but he had a gossip-writer’s nose for information. I was fond of him, I had got used to his inquisitiveness, but lately it had seemed to be swelling into a mania.

We could be talking frankly about policy, with no secrets between us, when I happened to mention a business conversation with the Minister. A look, knowing and inflamed, came into Gilbert’s eyes: he was wondering how he could track down what we had said. He was even more zestful about my relations with the Permanent Secretary, Sir Hector Rose. Gilbert knew that the Minister wished me well; he was not so sure how I proposed to get on terms with Rose. About any official scheme, Gilbert asked me my intentions straight out, but in pursuit of a personal one he became oblique. He just exhibited his startling memory by quoting a casual remark I had made months before about Hector Rose, looked at me with bold, hinting eyes, and left it there.

So that I was taken unawares that night when, after we had settled a piece of work, he darted a glance round the bar, making certain no one had come in, and said: ‘How much are you interested in Margaret?’

I should have been careful with anyone, with him more than most.

‘She’s very nice,’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘She’s distinctly intelligent.’

Gilbert put down his tankard and stared at me.

‘What else?’

‘Some women would give a lot for her skin and features, don’t you think?’ I added: ‘I suppose some of them would say she didn’t make the best of herself, wouldn’t they?’

‘That’s not the point. Are you fond of her?’

‘Yes. Aren’t you?’

His face overcast and set so that one could see the double chins, Gilbert stared at the little round table on which our tankards stood. He said: ‘I’m not asking you just for the fun of it.’

With angry energy he was twisting into the carpet the heel of one foot, a foot strong but very small for so massive a man.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said and meant it, but I could go no further. Ill-temperedly, he said: ‘Look here, I’m afraid you might be holding off her because of me. I don’t want you to.’

I was saying something neutral, when he went on: ‘I’m telling you not to worry. She’d make someone a wonderful wife, but it won’t be me. I should slip away, whether you want to do anything about it or not.’

He faced me with a fierce opaque gaze of one about to insist on giving a confidence.

‘You’re wondering why she wouldn’t be the wife for me?’

He answered the question: ‘I should be too frightened of her.’

He had started the conversation intending to be kind, not only to me, but to Margaret. For he did not like the spectacle of lonely people: he could not help stirring himself and being a matchmaker. Yet, getting on towards forty, he was still a bachelor himself. People saw this self-indulgent, heavy-fleshed, muscular man, taking women out, dropping them, returning to his food and drink and clubs: and some, the half-sophisticated, wrote him down as a homosexual. They were crass. The singular thing was that Gilbert was better understood by less sophisticated persons; Victorian aunts who had scarcely heard of the aberrations of the flesh would have understood him better than his knowledgeable acquaintances.

In fact, if one forgot his inquisitiveness, he was much like some of his military Victorian forebears. He was as brave as those Mutiny soldiers, and like them good-natured, more than that, sentimental with his friends: and he could have been as ferocious as they were. His emotional impulses were strong beyond the normal, his erotic ones on the weak side. It was that disparity which gave him his edge, made him formidable and also unusually kind, and which, of course, kept him timorous with women.

He wanted to explain, he went on to tell me so over the little table in the bar, that he was frightened of Margaret because she was so young. She would expect too much: she had never had to compromise with her integrity: she had not seen her hopes fail, her spirits were still overflowing.

But, if she had been older and twice married, he would have been even more frightened of her — and would have given another reason just as eloquent and good.

16: Fog Above the River

IN the week after that talk with Gilbert, I wrote twice to Margaret, asking her to come out with me, and tore the letters up. Then, one afternoon at the end of December, I could hold back no longer, but, as though to discount the significance of what I was doing, asked my secretary to ring up Margaret’s office. ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t find her,’ I said. ‘If she’s not in, don’t leave a message. It doesn’t matter in the least.’ As I waited for the telephone to ring, I was wishing to hear her voice, wishing that she should not be there.

When she spoke, I said: ‘I don’t suppose you happen to be free tonight, do you?’

There was a pause. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘Come and see me then. We’ll go out somewhere.’

‘Lovely.’

It sounded so easy, and yet, waiting for her that night in my flat in Dolphin Square, where I had moved after Sheila’s death, I was nervous of what I did not know. It was not the nervousness that I should have felt as a younger man. I longed for an unexacting evening: I hoped that I could keep it light, with no deep investment for either of us. I wished that I knew more of her past, that the preliminaries were over, with no harm done.

Restlessly I walked about the room, imagining conversations, as it might have been in a day-dream, which led just where I wanted. The reading-lamp shone on the backs of my books, on the white shelves; the room was cosy and confined, the double curtains drawn.

It was seven by my watch, and on the instant the door-bell buzzed. I let her in, and with her the close smell of the corridor. She went in front of me into the sitting-room, and, her cheeks pink from the winter night, cried: ‘Nice and warm.’

When she had thrown off her coat and was sitting on the sofa, we had less to say to each other than on the nights we had dined à trois. Except for a few minutes in restaurants, this was the first time we had been alone, and the words stuck. The news, the bits of government gossip, rang like lead; the conversations I had imagined dropped flat or took a wrong turn; I felt she also had been inventing what she wanted us each to say.

She asked about Gilbert, and the question had a monotonous sound as though it had been rehearsed in her mind. When those fits and starts of talk, as jerky as an incompetent interview, seemed to have been going on for a long time, I glanced at my watch, hoping it might be time for dinner. She had been with me less than half an hour.

Soon after, I got up and went towards the bookshelves, but on my way turned to her and took her in my arms. She clung to me; she muttered and forced her mouth against mine. She opened her eyes with a smile: I saw the clear and beautiful shape of her lips. We smiled at each other with pleasure but much more with an overmastering, a sedative relief.

Although the lids looked heavier, her eyes were bright; flushing, hair over her forehead, she began to laugh and chatter. Enraptured, I put my hands on her shoulders.

Then, as if she were making a painful effort, her face became sharp and serious, her glance investigatory. She looked at me, not pleading, but screwing herself up to speak. She said: ‘I want to ask you something. It’s important.’

Since I touched her, I had thought all was going as I imagined it. She was pliant, my reverie was coming true at last. I was totally unprepared to see her face me, a person I did not know.

My face showed my surprise, my let down, for she cried: ‘You don’t think I want to upset you, do you, now of all times?’

‘I don’t see why you should,’ I said.

‘I’ve got to ask — before it’s too late.’

‘What is it?’

‘When you were with Sheila’ — I had not talked much of her, but Margaret spoke as though she knew her — ‘you cared for her, I mean you were protecting her all the while. There wasn’t any more to it, was there?’

After a pause, I said: ‘Not much.’

‘Not many people could have done it,’ she said. ‘But it frightens me.’

Again I did not want to speak: the pause was longer, before I said: ‘Why should it?’

‘You must know that,’ she said.

Her tone was certain, not gentle — my experience and hers might have been open before us.

‘It wasn’t a relationship,’ she went on. ‘You were standing outside all the time. Are you looking for the same thing again?’ Before I had replied, she said: ‘If so—’ Tears had come to her eyes. ‘It’s horrible to say it, but it’s no good to me.’

Still crying, she said: ‘Tell me. Are you looking for the same thing again?’

In my own time, in my own fashion, I was ready to search down into my motives. With pain, certainly with resentment, I knew I had to search in front of her, for her. This answer came slower even than my others, as though it had been dragged out. I said: ‘I hope not.’ After a silence, I added: ‘I don’t think so.’

Her face lightened, colour came back to her cheeks, although the tears still marked them. She did not ask me to repeat or explain: she took the words as though they were a contract. Her spirits bubbled up, she looked very young again, brilliant-eyed, delighted with the moment in which we both stood.

In a sharp, sarcastic, delighted voice, she said: ‘No wonder they all say how articulate you are.’

She watched me and said: ‘You’re not to think I’m rushing you. I don’t want you bound to anything — except just that one thing. I think I could stand any tangle we get into, whatever we do — but if you had just needed someone to let you alone, just a waif for you to be kind to, then I should have had to duck from under before we start.’

She was smiling and crying. ‘You see, I shouldn’t have had a chance. I should have lost already, and I couldn’t bear it.’

She stroked my hand, and I could feel her shaking. She would have let me make love to her, but she had called on her nerves so hard that what she wanted most, for the rest of the night, was a breathing space.

Going out of the flat to dinner, we walked, saying little, as it were absently, along the embankment. It was foggy, and in the blackout, the writhing fog, our arms were round each other; her coat was rough under my hand, as she leant over the parapet, gazing into the high, dark water.

17: Business on New Year’s Day

ON the morning of New Year’s Day, when I entered the Minister’s office, he was writing letters. The office was not very grand; it was a cubby hole with a coal fire, the windows looking out over Whitehall. The Minister was not, at a first glance, very grand either. Elderly, slight, he made a profession of being unassuming. When he left the office he passed more unnoticed even than his Civil Servants, except in a few places: but the few places happened to be the only ones where he wanted notice, and included the Carlton Club and the rooms of the party manager.

His name was Thomas Bevill, and he was a cunning, tenacious, happy old man; but mixed with his cunning was a streak of simplicity that puzzled one more the closer one came. That morning of 1 January 1942, for instance, he was writing in his own round schoolboyish hand to everyone he knew whose name was in the Honours List.

No one was more hard-baked about honours than Bevill, and no one was more skilled in obtaining them for recipients convenient to himself. ‘Old Herbert had better have something, it’ll keep him quiet.’ But when on New Year’s Day the names came out, Bevill read them with innocent pleasure, and all the prizewinners, including those he had so candidly intrigued for, went up a step in his estimation. ‘Fifty-seven letters to write, Eliot,’ he said with euphoria, as though knowing that number in the Honours List reflected much credit both on them and him.

A little later his secretary came in with a message: ‘Mr Paul Lufkin would be grateful if the Minister could spare time to see him, as soon as possible.’

‘What does this fellow want?’ Bevill asked me.

‘One thing is certain,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t want to see you just to pass the time of day.’

At that piece of facetiousness, Bevill gave a simple worldly chuckle.

‘I expect he wants to know why his name isn’t in the list this morning.’ His mind wandered back. ‘I expect he wants to be in next time.’

To me, that did not sound in the least like Lufkin’s style. He was after bigger prizes altogether; he was not so much indifferent to the minor rewards as certain they must come.

I had no doubt that he meant business; and I was anxious that we should find out what the business was, before the Minister received him. Make an excuse for today and prepare the ground, I said.

I did not want the Minister to get across Lufkin: even less did I want him to waffle. I had good reasons: Lufkin was rising to power, his opinion was one men listened to, and on the other hand Bevill’s position was nothing like invulnerable. There were those who wanted him out of office. I had many reasons, both selfish and unselfish, for not giving them unnecessary openings.

However, the old man was obstinate. He had made such a technique of unpretentiousness that he liked being available to visitors at an hour’s notice: he was free that morning, why shouldn’t he see ‘this fellow’? On the other hand, he was still suspicious about a personal approach on the Honours List and he did not want a tête-à-tête, so he asked me to be at hand, and, when Lufkin was shown in, remarked lightly: ‘I think you know Eliot, don’t you?’

‘Considering that you stole him from me,’ Lufkin replied, with that off-hand edginess which upset many, but which bounced off the Minister.

‘My dear chap,’ said Bevill, ‘we must try to make up for that. What can I do for you now?’

He settled Lufkin in the armchair by the fire, put on a grimy glove and threw on some coal, sat himself on a high chair and got ready to listen.

To begin with there was not much to listen to. To my surprise, Lufkin, who was usually as relevant as a high Civil Servant, seemed to have come with a complaint in itself trivial and which in any case was outside the Minister’s domain. Some of his key men were being called up: not technicians, whom the Minister could have interfered about, but managers and accountants. Take away a certain number, said Lufkin, and in a highly articulated industry you came to a critical point — efficiency dropped away in an exponential curve.

Bevill had no idea what an exponential curve was, but he nodded wisely.

‘If you expect us to keep going, it doesn’t make sense,’ said Lufkin.

‘We don’t just expect you to keep going, we rely on you,’ said Bevill.

‘Well then.’

‘I don’t mind telling you one thing,’ said Bevill. ‘That is, we mustn’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.’

He added: ‘I can’t promise anything, my dear chap, but I’ll put in a word in the right quarter.’

Uneasily I felt that they were under-rating each other. Bevill was an aristocrat; he had an impersonal regard for big business, but in his heart rarely liked the company of a businessman. In Lufkin’s presence, as in the presence of most others of the human race, Bevill could sound matey; he was not feeling so, he wanted to keep on amiable terms because that was the general principle of his life, but in fact he longed to bolt off to his club. While Lufkin, who had made his way by scholarships and joined his firm at seventeen, felt for politicians like Bevill something between envy and contempt, only softened by a successful man’s respect for others’ success.

Nevertheless, although he made Bevill uncomfortable, as he did most people, he was not uncomfortable himself. He had come for a purpose and he was moving into it.

He said: ‘There is one other point, Minister.’

‘My dear chap?’

‘You don’t bring us into your projects soon enough.’

‘You’re preaching to the converted, you know. I’ve sown seeds in that direction ever since the war started — and I’ve still got hope that one or two of them may come home to roost.’

The old man’s quiff of hair was standing up, cockatoo-like; Lufkin gazed at him, and said: ‘I’m glad to hear you say that, Minister.’ He went on, and suddenly he had brought all his weight and will into the words: ‘I’m not supposed to know what you’re doing at Barford. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know until it’s time for me to do so. But I do know this — if you’re going to get any results in time for this war, you ought to bring us in the instant you believe you can produce anything. Your people can’t do big-scale chemical engineering. We can. We should have gone out of business if we couldn’t.’

‘Well, that’s a prospect that’s never cost any of us an hour’s sleep,’ said Bevill, gaining time to think, smiling with open blue eyes. In fact, the old man was worried, almost shocked. For Lufkin was speaking as though he knew more than he should. Barford was the name of the establishment where the first experiments on atomic fission had been started, nine months before; apart from the scientists on the spot, only a handful of people were supposed to have a glimmer of the secret, a few Ministers, Civil Servants, academic scientists, less than fifty in all. To Bevill, the most discreet of men, it was horrifying that even the rumour of a rumour should have reached Lufkin. Bevill never quite understood the kind of informal intelligence service that radiated from an industrialist of Lufkin’s power; and he did not begin to understand that it was one of Lufkin’s gifts, perhaps his most valuable one, to pick up hints that were floating through the technical air. For recognizing others’ feelings Lufkin had no antennae; but he had an extra set, more highly sensitized than those of anyone round him, for catching the first wave of a new idea.

That morning Bevill was determined to play for time, hiding behind his smoke-screen of platitudes like an amiable old man already a bit ga-ga. Even if the Barford project came off, even if they had to invoke the big firms, he was not sure whether he would include Lufkin. For the present he was not prepared to trust him, or anyone outside the secret, with so much as a speculation about Barford.

‘My dear chap,’ he said, more innocent than a child, ‘I’m not feeling so inclined to count my chickens yet awhile, and believe me, if we don’t mention any of these little games to our colleagues in industry, or want anyone else to breathe a word about them’ (that was Bevill’s way of telling a tycoon to keep his mouth shut) ‘it’s because it is all Lombard Street to a china orange that they’ll turn out to be nothing but hot air.’

‘I suggest that it’s a mistake,’ said Lufkin, ‘to act on the basis that you’re going to fail.’

‘No, but we think too much of you to waste your time—’

‘Don’t you think we’re capable of judging that?’

‘Your great company,’ said the Minister, ‘is doing so much for us already.’

‘That isn’t a reason,’ replied Lufkin, deliberately losing his temper, ‘why you should leave us out of what may be the most important business you’ll ever be responsible for.’

The tempers of men of action, even the hard contrived temper of Lufkin, had no effect on Bevill, except to make him seem slightly more woolly. But he was now realizing — it was my only reassurance that morning — that Lufkin was a formidable man, and that he would not be able to stonewall forever. Expert in judging just how much protests were going to matter, Bevill knew that, if he consulted other firms before Lufkin’s, there was certain to be trouble, and probably trouble of a kind that no politician of sense would walk into.

He knew that Lufkin was set in his purpose. It was not simply that, if the Barford project turned into hardware, there would be, not in a year, not during the war, but perhaps in twenty years, millions of pounds in it for firms like Lufkin’s. It was not simply that — though Lufkin calculated it and wanted more than his share. It was also that, with complete confidence, he believed he was the man to carry it out. His self-interest did not make him hesitate, nothing would have seemed to him more palsied. On the contrary his self-interest and his sense of his own powers fused, and gave him a kind of opaque moral authority.

Throughout that interview with the Minister, despite the old man’s wiliness, flattery and distrust, it was Lufkin who held the moral initiative.

18: The Sweetness of Life

ON the ceiling, the wash of firelight brightened; a shadow quivered and bent among the benign and rosy light; there was the noise of a piece of coal falling, the ceiling flickered, faded, and then glowed. It might have been a holiday long forgotten or an illness in childhood, as I lay there in a content so absolute that it was itself a joy, not just a successor of joy, gazing up at the ceiling. In the crook of my arm Margaret’s neck was resting; she too was gazing up.

Despite the blaze the air in the room was cold, for Margaret had to eke out her ration of coal, and the fire had not been lighted until we arrived. Under the bedclothes our skins touched each other. It was nine o’clock, and we had come to her room two hours before, as we had done often on those winter evenings. The room was on the ground floor of a street just off Lancaster Gate, and in the distance, through the cold wartime night, came the sough of traffic, washing and falling like the tide over a pebbly beach.

She was speaking, in spasms of talk that trailed luxuriously away, of her family, and how blissful and intimate they had been. Her hair on my shoulder, her hip against mine, that other bliss was close too; she had slipped into talking of it, once I had given her a cue. For I had mentioned, grumbling lazily in bed, that soon I should have some quite unnecessary exertion, since the Chelsea house I used to live in had been damaged in a raid the year before and its effective owner had begun pestering me with another list of suggestions.

‘That’s Sheila’s father?’ Margaret had said.

I said yes, for an instant disturbed because I had let the name creep in. Without any constraint, she asked: ‘How did they get on?’

‘Not well.’

‘No, I shouldn’t have thought they would,’ she said.

Running through my mind were letters from the rectory, business-like, ingenious, self-pitying, assuming that my time was at Mr Knight’s disposal. Reflectively, Margaret was saying: ‘It was different with me.’ She had always loved her father — and her sister also. She spoke of them, both delicately and naturally; she was not inhibited by the comparison with Sheila; she had brought it to the front herself.

Yet she too had rebelled, I knew by now — rebelled against her father’s disbeliefs. It was not as easy as it sounded, when she told me their family life used to be intense and happy, and that anyone who had not known it so could not imagine what they had missed.

It was nine o’clock, and there was another hour before I need go out into the cold. By half past ten I had to be back in my own flat in case the Minister, who was attending a cabinet committee after dinner, wanted me. I had another hour’s grace in which I could hide in this voluptuous safety, untraceable, unknown. Though it was not only to be safe and secret that we came to her room rather than mine, but also because she took pleasure in it, because she seized the chance, for two or three hours among the subterranean airless working days, of looking after me.

I gazed at her face, her cheekbones sharp in the uneven light; she was relaxed because I was happy, just as I had seen her abandoned because she was giving me pleasure. Used as I was to search another’s face for signs of sadness, I had often searched hers, unable to break from the habit, the obsession, sensitive beyond control that she might be miserable.

One night, not long before, this obsession had provoked a quarrel, our first. All that evening she had been subdued, although she smiled to reassure me; as we whispered in each other’s arms, her replies came from a distance. At last she got up to dress, and I lay in bed watching her. Sitting naked in front of the looking-glass, with her back to me, her body fuller and less girlish than it appeared in clothes, she was brushing her hair. As she sat there, I could feel, with the twist of tenderness, how her carelessness about dress was a fraud. She made up little, but that was her special vanity; she had that curious kind of showing-off which wraps itself in the unadorned, even the shabby, but still gleams through. It was a kind of showing-off that to me contained within it some of the allure and mystery of sensual life.

In the looking-glass I saw the reflection of her face. Her smile had left her, the sweet and pleasure-giving smile was wiped away, and she was brooding, a line tightened between her eyebrows. I cried out: ‘What’s the matter?’

She muttered an endearment, tried to smooth her forehead, and said: ‘Nothing.’

‘What have I done?’

I expected her moods to be more even than mine. I was not ready for the temper which broke through her.

She turned on me, the blood pouring up into her throat and cheeks, her eyes snapping.

‘You’ve done nothing,’ she said.

‘I asked you what was the matter.’

‘It’s nothing to do with us. But it soon will be if you assume that you are to blame every time I’m worried. That’s the way you can ruin it all, and I won’t have it.’

Shaken by her temper, I nevertheless pressed her to tell me what was on her mind. She would not be forced. Her wiry will stood against mine. At last, however, seeing that I was still anxious, with resentment she told me; it was ludicrously hard for me to believe. The next day, she was due to go to a committee as the representative of her branch, and she was nervous. Not that she had ambition in her job, but she felt humiliated if she could not perform creditably. She detested ‘not being equal to things’. She was, as the Civil Servants said, ‘good on paper’, but when it came to speaking in committee, which men like me had forgotten could ever be a strain, she was so apprehensive that she spent sleepless hours the night before.

It occurred to me, thinking her so utterly unlike Sheila as to be a diametrical opposite, that I had for once caught her behaving precisely as Sheila would have done.

After she had confided, she was still angry: angry that I was so nervous about causing her unhappiness. It was not a show of temper just for a bit of byplay; it had an edge and foreboding that seemed to me, feeling ill-used, altogether out of proportion.

This night, as we lay together watching the luminescence on the ceiling, the quarrel was buried. When I looked at her face, the habit of anxiety became only a tic, for in her eyes and on her mouth I saw my own serenity. She was lazier than usual; as a rule when I had to make my way back to my telephone at Dolphin Square, she accompanied me so as to make the evening longer, though it might mean walking miles in the cold and dark; that night, stretching herself with self-indulgence, she stayed in bed. As I said good night I pulled the blankets round her, and, looking down at her with peace, saw the hollow of her collar-bone shadowed in the firelight.

19: Two Sisters

IT was not until a Saturday afternoon in May that Margaret could arrange for me to meet her elder sister. At first we were going for a walk in the country, but a despatch-box came in, and I had to visit the Permanent Secretary’s office after lunch. As I sat there answering Hector Rose’s questions, I could see the tops of the trees in St James’s Park, where I knew the young women were waiting for me. It was one of the first warm days of the year and the windows were flung open, so that, after the winter silence in that office, one seemed to hear the sounds of spring.

Before Rose could write his minute to the Minister, he had to ring up another department. There was a delay, and as we sat listening for the telephone Rose recognized the beauty of the afternoon.

‘I’m sorry to bring you back here, my dear chap,’ he said. ‘We ought to be out in the fresh air.’ Disciplined, powerful, polite, he did not really mind; but he was too efficient a man to stay there working for the sake of it, or to keep me. He worked fourteen hours a day in wartime, but there was nothing obsessive about it; he just did it because it was his job and the decisions must be made. The only thing obsessive about him was his superlative politeness. That afternoon, with Margaret and her sister outside in the park, Rose many times expressed his sorrow and desolation at taking up my time.

He was forty-five that year, one of the youngest of heads of departments, and looked even younger. His eyes were heavy-lidded and bleached blue, his fair hair was smoothed back. He was one of the best-thought-of Civil Servants of his day. I had much respect for him, and he some for me, but our private relation was not comfortable, and while we were waiting for the telephone call we had nothing spontaneous to say to each other.

‘I really am most exceedingly sorry,’ he was saying.

The words sounded effusive and silly: in fact he was the least effusive and silly of men, and, of those I knew, he was with Lufkin the one with most aptitude for power. Since the war began he had been totally immersed in it, carrying responsibility without a blink. It was a lesson to me, I sometimes thought, about how wrong one can be. For, in the great political divide before the war, it was not only Lufkin’s business associates who were on the opposite side to me. Bevill, the old aristocratic handyman of a politician, had been a Municheer: so had Rose and other up-and-coming Civil Servants. I had not known Rose then: if I had done, I should have distrusted him when it came to a crisis. I should have been dead wrong. Actually, when war came, Bevill and Rose were as whole-hearted as men could be. Compared with my friends on the irregular left, their nerves were stronger.

Rose continued to apologize until the call came through. Then, with remarkable speed, he asked me for one fact and wrote his comment to the Minister. He wrote it in the form of a question: but it was a question to which only a very brash minister could have given the wrong answer.

‘Ah well,’ said Rose, ‘that seems to conclude your share in the proceedings, my dear Eliot. Many many many thanks. Now I hope you’ll go and find some diversions for a nice Saturday afternoon.’

His politeness often ended with a malicious flick: but this was just politeness for its own sake. He was not interested in my life. If he had known, he would not have minded: he was not strait-laced, but he had other things to speculate about.

Released into the park, I was looking for Margaret — among the uniforms and summer frocks lying on the grass, I saw her, crowded out some yards away from our rendezvous. She was stretched on her face in the sunshine, her head turned to her sister’s, both of them engrossed. Watching the two faces together, I felt a kind of intimacy with Helen, although I had not spoken to her. Some of her expressions I already knew, having seen them in her sister’s face. But there was one thing about her for which Margaret had not prepared me at all.

Sitting erect, her back straight, her legs crossed at the ankles, she looked smart: unseasonably, almost tastelessly smart in that war-time summer, as if she were a detached observer from some neutral country. The black dress, the large black hat, clashed against that background of litter, the scorched grass, the dusty trees.

She was twenty-nine that year, four years older than Margaret, and she seemed at the same time more poised and more delicate. In both faces one could see the same shapely bones, but whereas in Margaret’s the flesh was firm with a young woman’s health, in her sister’s there were the first signs of tightness — the kind of tightness that I had seen a generation before among some of my aunts, who stayed cared-for too long as daughters and settled down at Helen’s age to an early spinsterhood. Yet Helen had married at twenty-one, and Margaret had told me that the marriage was a happy one.

They were so engrossed that Margaret did not notice me on the path. She was talking urgently, her face both alive and anxious. Helen’s face looked heavy, she was replying in a mutter. Their profiles, where the resemblance was clearest, were determined and sharp. I called out, and Margaret started, saying, ‘This is Lewis.’

At once Helen smiled at me; yet I saw that it was an effort for her to clear her mind of what had gone before. She spoke one or two words of formal greeting. Her voice was lighter than Margaret’s, her speech more clipped; but she intimated by the energy with which she spoke a friendliness she was too shy, too distracted, to utter.

As I sat down — ‘Be careful,’ she said, ‘it’s so grimy, you have to take care where you sit.’

Margaret glanced at her, and laughed. She said to me: ‘We were clearing off some family business.’

‘Dull for other people,’ said Helen. Then, afraid I should think she was shutting me out, she said quickly, ‘Dull for us, too, this time.’

She smiled, and made some contented-seeming remark about the summer weather. Only a trace of shadow remained in her face; she did not want me to see it, she wanted this meeting to be a successful one.

Yet each of the three of us was tongue-tied, or rather there were patches of silence, then we spoke easily, then silence again. Helen might have been worrying over her sister and me, but in fact it was Margaret who showed the more concern. Often she looked at Helen with the clucking, scolding vigilance that an elder sister might show to a beloved younger one, in particular to one without experience and unable to cope for herself.

As we sat together in the sunshine, the dawdling feet of soldiers and their girls scrabbling the path a few yards away, Helen kept being drawn back into her thoughts; then she would force herself to attend to Margaret and me, almost as though the sight of us together was a consolation. Indeed, far from worrying over her sister, she seemed happiest that afternoon when she found out something about us. Where had we met, she had never heard? When exactly had it been?

Shy as she was, she was direct with her questions, just as I had noticed in other women from families like theirs. Some of the concealments which a man of my kind had learned, would have seemed to Helen, and to Margaret also, as something like a denial of integrity. Helen was diffident and not specially worldly: but, if Margaret had hidden from her that she and I were living together, she would have been not only hurt but shocked.

For minutes together, it pulled up her spirits, took her thoughts out of herself, to ask questions of Margaret and me: I believed that she was making pictures of our future. But she could not sustain it. The air was hot, the light brilliant; she sat there in a brooding reverie.

20: A Darkening Window

HOPING that Helen might talk to her sister if they were alone, I left them together in the Park, and did not see Margaret again until the following Monday evening. She had already told me over the telephone that she would have to dine with Helen that night: and when we met in a Tothill Street pub Margaret said straight away: ‘I’m sorry you had to see her like this.’

‘I like her very much,’ I said.

‘I hoped you would.’ She had been looking forward for weeks to my meeting with Helen: she wanted me to admire her sister as she did herself. She told me again, anxious for me to believe her, that Helen was no more melancholy than she was, and far less self-centred.

‘No one with any eyes would think she was self-centred.’

‘It’s such an awful pity!’ she cried.

I asked her what it was.

‘She thought she was going to have a child at last. Then on Saturday she knew she wasn’t.’

‘It’s as important as that, is it?’ I said. But she had told me already how her sister longed for children.

‘You saw for yourself, didn’t you?’

‘How much,’ I asked, ‘is it damaging her marriage?’

‘It’s not. It’s a good marriage,’ she said. ‘But still, I can’t help remembering her when she was quite young, even when she was away at school, she used to talk to me about how she’d bring up her family.’

She was just on the point of going away to meet Helen when Betty Vane came in.

As I introduced them, Betty was saying that she had telephoned the office, got Gilbert Cooke and been told this was one of my favourite pubs — meanwhile she was scrutinizing Margaret, her ears sharp for the tone in which we spoke. Actually Margaret said little: she kept glancing at the clock above the bar: very soon she apologized and left. It looked rude, or else that she was deliberately leaving us together: it meant only that, if she had had to seem off-hand to anyone, she would make sure it was not to her sister.

‘Well,’ said Betty.

For an instant I was put out by the gust of misunderstanding. I made an explanation, but she was not accepting it. She said, her eyes friendly and appraising: ‘You’re looking much better, though.’

I had not seen her for some time, though now I was glad to. When Sheila died, it had been Betty who had taken charge of me. She had found me my flat, moved me out of the Chelsea house; and then, all the practical help given and disposed of, she got out of my way; she assumed I did not want to see her or anyone who reminded me of my marriage. Since then I had met her once or twice, received a couple of letters, and that was all.

Unlike most of our circle, she was not working in London, but in a factory office in a Midland town. The reason for this was singular: she, by a long way the most loftily born of my friends, was the worst educated; in the schoolroom at home she had scarcely been taught formally at all; clever as she was, she did not possess the humblest of educational qualifications, and would have been hard-pushed to acquire any.

Here she was in the middle thirties, opposite me across the little table in the pub, her nose a bit more peaked, her beautiful eyes acute. She had always liked her drink and now she was putting down bitter pint for pint with me: she did not mention Sheila’s name or any trouble she had seen me through, but she enjoyed talking of the days past; she had a streak of sentiment, not about any special joy, but just about our youth.

There was a haze of home-sickness over us, shimmering with pleasure, and it stayed as we went out to eat. Out to eat better than I had eaten all that year, for Betty, even though she was not living in London, kept an eye on up-and-coming restaurants; she took as much care about it, I thought, as a lonely, active and self-indulgent man. Thus, at a corner table in Percy Street, we questioned each other with the content, regard, melancholy, and comfort of old friends — edged by the feeling, shimmering in the home-sick haze, that with different luck we might have been closer.

I inquired about the people she was meeting and what friends she had made, in reality inquiring whether she had found a lover or a future husband. It sounded absurd of me to be euphemistic and semi-arch, as circuitous as Mr Knight, to this woman whom I knew so well and whose own tongue was often coarse. But Betty was coarse about the body — and about her emotions as inhibited as a schoolgirl. She just could not utter, I knew from long ago, anything that she felt about a man. Even now, she sounded like a girl determined not to let herself be teased. Yes, she had seen a lot of people at the factory: ‘Some of them are interesting,’ she said.

‘Who are they?’

‘Oh, managers and characters like that.’

‘Anyone specially interesting?’ I was sure she wanted to talk.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she blurted out, ‘there’s someone I rather like.’

I asked about him — a widower, a good deal older than she was, moderately successful.

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘you’ve never met people of that kind before.’

‘He’s a nice man.’

‘It sounds all right,’ I said affectionately.

‘It might be all right,’ she said with a touch of the hope she never quite lost, with absolute lack of confidence.

‘My dear, I beg you,’ I broke out, ‘don’t think so little of yourself.’

She smiled with embarrassment. ‘I don’t know about that—’

‘Why in God’s name shouldn’t it be all right?’

‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘I’m not everyone’s cup of tea.’

She spoke out firmly. She was relieved to have confessed a little, even in such a strangulated form. She shut up, as though abashed at her own outpouringness. Sharply, she began to talk about me. In a moment she was saying: ‘What about that girl who rushed out of the pub?’

‘I met her last autumn,’ I replied.

‘Is it serious?’

‘Yes, it is.’

Betty nodded.

She said, in a companionable, almost disapproving tone: ‘You have had such a rotten time. This isn’t another of them, is it?’

‘Far from it.’

She stared at me.

‘It would be nice,’ she said, her voice going suddenly soft, ‘if you could be happy.’

She added: ‘There’s no one who deserves it more.’

In the restaurant corner, the air was warm with a sentimental glow. Betty was a realistic woman: about herself realistic to an extent that crippled her: to most people she did not give the benefit of the doubt. But about me her realism had often been blurred, and she thought me a better man than I was.

How much better than I was — I could not avoid a glint of recognition an hour after. I had gone glowing from the restaurant to Margaret’s room, where she was talking to Helen. When I arrived they were happy. Helen’s spirits had revived; like Margaret, she did not give up easily. I gathered she had been to a doctor; and then she refused to talk further that evening of her own worry. When I came in, it was clear that they had been talking instead — with pleasure and amusement — about Margaret and me.

In the midsummer evening, the folding door between Margaret’s bedroom and sitting-room was thrown open; their chairs were opposite each other round the empty grate in the sitting-room, which in the winter we had never used. Outside in the street, still light although it was getting on for ten, children were playing, and just across the area, close to the window and on a level with our chairs, passed the heads and shoulders of people walking along the pavement. It might have been the ‘front room’ of my childhood.

In it, Helen, dressed with the same exaggerated smartness as in the park, looked more than ever out of place. I thought for an instant how different they were. Despite her marriage, despite her chic, something of my first impression of her lingered, the touch of the clever, delicate, and spinsterish. And yet they had each the same independence, the same certainty that they were their own judges, bred in through the family from which Margaret, more than her sister, had rebelled, bred in each one just as much as the mole over the hip which she had told me was a family mark. About Helen there was nothing of Margaret’s carelessness; and yet in other ways so unlike her sister, Margaret, who rejoiced in giving me pleasure, who had the deep and guiltless sensuality of those women to whom giving pleasure is a major one, answered just as deliberately for herself.

‘You oughtn’t to live like this, you know,’ Helen said, glancing about the room, ‘it is really rather messy. Miles says you’d do far better—’

‘Oh, Miles,’ Margaret said. ‘He would.’ They were speaking of Helen’s husband, whom they both appeared to regard with a kind of loving depreciation, as though they were in some way leagued in a pact to save him from himself. Yet from what I had heard he was a successful man, amiable, self-sufficient, regarding responsibility as a kind of privilege. ‘It’s lucky he chose the right one of us.’

‘Very lucky,’ said Helen, ‘you would have made him quite miserable.’ When she spoke of him her face grew tender, content. It was a maternal contentment: like a warm-hearted and dutiful child, he gave her almost all she desired.

Margaret smiled back at her, and for a second I thought I saw in her face a longing for just such a contentment, just such a home; ordered, settled, the waiting fire, the curtains drawn against the night.

‘It wouldn’t have been my sort of thing,’ she said.

It was at this moment that I felt my talk with Betty, which had left me in such a glow, had suddenly touched a trigger and released a surge of sadness and self-destruction.

It seemed like another night, drinking with Betty, going home to Sheila — not a special night, more like many nights fused together, with nothing waiting for me but Sheila’s presence.

That night lay upon this. I was listening to Margaret and Helen, my limbs were heavy, for an instant I felt in one of those dreams where one is a spectator but cannot move.

When Margaret had talked, earlier that evening, of the children her sister wanted, she was repeating what she had told me before; and, just as before, she was holding something back.

I had thought, when I saw them together in that room half an hour before, that, unlike in so much, they were alike in taking their own way. But they were alike at one other point. It was not only Helen who longed for children; Margaret was the same. Once we had spoken of it, and from then on, just as tonight, she held back. She did not wish me to see how much she looked forward to her children. If she did let me see it, it would lay more responsibility upon me.

Listening to them, I felt at a loss with Helen because she was confident I should make her sister happy.

When she got up to go, I said how much I had enjoyed the evening. But Margaret had been watching me: after seeing her sister to the door, she returned to the empty sitting-room and looked at me with concern.

‘What is the matter?’ she said.

I was standing up. I took her in my arms and kissed her. Over her head, past the folding doors, I could see the bed and the windows beyond, lit up by the afterglow in the west. With an effort, disproportionately great, I tried to throw off the heaviness, and said: ‘Isn’t it time we talked too?’

‘What about?’

‘We ought to talk about us.’

She stood back, out of my arms, and looked at me. Her eyes were bright but she hesitated. She said: ‘You don’t want to yet.’

I went on: ‘We can’t leave it too long.’

For an instant her voice went high.

‘Are you sure you’re ready?’

‘We ought to talk about getting married.’

It was some instants before she spoke, though her eyes did not leave me. Then her expression, which had been grave, sharp with insight, suddenly changed: her face took on a look of daring, which in another woman might have meant the beginning of a risky love affair.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I want you. But I want you in your freedom.’

That phrase, which we had just picked up, she used to make all seem more casual to us both. But she was telling me how much she knew. She knew that, going about in high spirits, I still was not safe from remorse, or perhaps something which did not deserve that name and which was more like fear, about Sheila. That misery had made me morbidly afraid of another; Margaret had more than once turned her face away to conceal the tears squeezing beneath her eyelids, because she knew that at the sight of unhappiness I nowadays lost confidence altogether.

She accepted that, just as she accepted something else, though it was harder. It was that sometimes I did not have fear return to me with the thought of Sheila, but joy. Cheated by memory, I was transported to those times — which had in historical fact been negligible in the length of our marriage — when Sheila, less earthbound than I was, had lifted me off the earth. Cheated by memory, I had sometimes had that mirage-joy, the false-past, shine above a happy time with Margaret, so that the happiness turned heavy.

She knew all that; but what she did not know was whether I was getting free. Was I capable of a new start, of entering the life she wanted? Or was I a man who, in the recesses of his heart, manufactured his own defeat? Searching for that answer, she looked at me with love, with tenderness, and without mercy for either of us.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, putting her arms round me, ‘there’s plenty of time.’

She muttered, her head against my chest: ‘I’m not very patient, you know that now, don’t you? But I will be.’

Below my eyes her hair was smooth; the window had darkened quickly in the past minutes; I was grateful to her.

21: The Acquiescent Versus the Opaque

THROUGH the spring and summer, the Minister had been able to go on stalling with Paul Lufkin. The Barford project had run into a blind alley, it looked likely that there would be no development in England, and nothing for the industrialists to do. All of which was true and reasonable, and Lufkin could only accept it; but he was alert when, in the autumn, a new rumour went round. It was that a fresh idea had sprung up at Barford, which some people, including Bevill himself, wanted to invest in.

As usual, Lufkin’s information was something near accurate. None of us was certain whether Barford would be saved or the scientists sent to America, but in October the struggle was going on; and while we were immersed in it, Lufkin did not visit the Minister again but out of the blue invited me to dinner.

When I received that note, which arrived a week before the decision over Barford was to be made, I thought it would be common prudence to have a word with Hector Rose, So, on an October morning, I sat in the chair by his desk. Outside the window, against a windy sky, the autumn leaves were turning. Even by his own standards Hector Rose looked spruce and young that day — perhaps because the war news was good, just as in the summer there had been days when, tough as he was, he had sat there with his lips pale and his nostrils pinched. The flower bowl was always full, whatever the news was like; that morning he had treated himself to a mass of chrysanthemums.

‘Well, my dear Eliot,’ he was saying, ‘it’s very agreeable to have you here. I don’t think I’ve got anything special, but perhaps you have? I’m very glad indeed to have the chance of a word.’ I mentioned Lufkin’s invitation. In a second the flah-flah dropped away — and he was listening with his machine-like concentration. I did not need to remind him that I had, not so long ago, been a consultant for Lufkin, nor that Gilbert Cooke had been a full-time employee. Those facts were part of the situation; he was considering them almost before I had started, just as he was considering Lufkin’s approaches to the Minister.

‘If our masters decide to persevere with Barford’ — Rose spoke as though some people, utterly unconnected with him, were choosing between blue or brown suits: while he was totally committed on Barford’s side, and if the project survived he would be more responsible, after the scientists, than any single man — ‘if they decide to persevere with it, we shall have to plan the first contact straightaway, that goes without saying.

‘We shall have to decide,’ added Rose coldly, ‘whether it is sensible to bring Lufkin in.’

He asked: ‘What’s your view, Eliot? Would it be sensible?’

‘So far as I can judge, it’s rather awkward,’ I said. ‘His isn’t obviously the right firm — but it’s not out of the question.’

‘Exactly,’ said Rose. ‘This isn’t going to be an easy one.’

‘I think most people would agree that his firm hasn’t got the technical resources of the other two—’ I named them.

‘What has Lufkin got?’

‘I’m afraid the answer to that is, Lufkin himself: He’s much the strongest figure in the whole game.’

‘He’s a good chap,’ said Hector Rose incongruously. He was not speaking of Lufkin’s moral nature, nor his merits as a companion: Rose meant that Lufkin was a pantocrator not dissimilar from himself.

He stared at me.

‘My dear Eliot,’ he said, ‘I’m sure it’s unnecessary for me to advise you, but if you do decide that he is the right man for us, then of course you’re not to feel the least embarrassment or be too nice about it. The coincidence that you know something about him — the only significance of that is, that it makes your judgement more valuable to us. It’s very important for us not to fall over backwards and, for quite inadequate reasons, shirk giving the job to the right man, that is, if we finally decide that he does turn out to be the right man.’

I was a little surprised. No one could have doubted that Hector Rose’s integrity was absolute. It would have been high farce to try to bribe him; he assumed the same of me. Nevertheless, I expected him to be more finicky about the procedure, to talk about the necessity of justice not only being done, but being seen to be done. In fact, as the war went on and the state became more interleaved with business, Civil Servants like Rose had made themselves tougher-minded; nothing would get done if they thought first how to look immaculate.

In the same manner, when I asked whether I might as well let Lufkin entertain me, Rose replied: ‘The rule is very simple, my dear Eliot, and it remains for each of us to apply it to himself. That is, when some interested party suddenly becomes passionately desirous of one’s company. The rule is, do exactly as you would if the possibility of interest did not exist. If you wouldn’t normally accept an invitation from our excellent friend, don’t go. If you would normally accept, then do go, if you can bear it. I can’t say that I envy you the temptation,’ said Rose, whose concept of an evening out was a table for two and a bottle of claret at the Athenaeum.

When I came to spend the evening at Lufkin’s, I would have compounded for a table for two myself. As in the past when I was one of his entourage, I found his disregard of time, which in anyone else he would have bleakly dismissed as ‘Oriental’, fretting me. In his flat at St James’s Court, his guests were collected at eight o’clock, which was the time of the invitation, standing about in the sitting-room drinking, nine of us, all men. Lufkin himself was there, standing up, not saying much, not drinking much, standing up as though prepared to do so for hours, glad to be surrounded by men catching his eye. Then one of his staff entered with a piece of business to discuss: and Lufkin discussed it there on the spot, in front of his guests. That finished, he asked the man to stay, and beckoned the butler, standing by the dinner-table in the inner room, to lay another place. Next, with the absence of fuss and hurry of one in the middle of a marathon, which he showed in all his dealings, he decided to telephone: still standing up, he talked for fifteen minutes to one of his plants.

Meanwhile the guests, most of whom were colleagues and subordinates, stood up, went on drinking and exchanged greetings to each others’ wives. ‘Give my regards to Lucille.’ ‘How is Brenda?’ ‘Don’t forget to give my love to Jacqueline.’ It went on, just as it used when I attended those dinners, and men heartily inquired after Sheila and sent messages to her: not that they knew her, for, since she never went to a party, they could only have met her for a few minutes, and by accident. But, according to their etiquette, they docketed her name away and afterwards punctiliously inquired about her, as regularly as they said good evening. No doubt most of those husband-to-husband questions that night, so hearty, so insistent, were being asked about women the speakers scarcely knew.

It was nearly half past nine when Lufkin said: ‘Does anyone feel like eating? I think we might as well go in.’

At the crowded table Lufkin sat, not at the head, but in the middle of one side, not troubling to talk, apparently scornful of the noise, and yet feeling that, as was only right, the party was a success. There was more food and drink than at most wartime dinners: I thought among the noise, the hard male laughter, how little any of these men were giving themselves away. Orthodox opinions, collective gibes, a bit of ribbing — that was enough to keep them zestful, and I had hardly heard a personal remark all night. It made me restless, it made me anxious to slither away, not only to avoid conversation with Lufkin, but also just to be free.

The walls pressed in, the chorus roared round me: and, in that claustrophobia, I thought longingly of being alone with Margaret in her room. In a kind of rapturous day-dream, I was looking forward to marrying her. In the midst of this male hullabaloo my confidence came back. I was telling myself, almost as one confides, brazenly, confidently, and untruthfully to an acquaintance on board ship, that it was natural I should trust myself so little about another marriage after the horror of the first.

Listening to someone else’s history, I should not have been so trustful about the chances of life. Thinking of my own, I was as credulous as any man. Sitting at that table, responding mechanically and politely to a stranger’s monologue, I felt that my diffidence about Margaret was gone.

When one of Lufkin’s guests said the first good night, I tried to go out with him. But Lufkin said: ‘I’ve hardly had a minute with you, Eliot. You needn’t go just yet.’

That company was good at recognizing the royal command. Within a quarter of an hour, among thanks and more salutations to wives, the flat was empty, and we were left alone. Lufkin, who had not stirred from his chair as he received the goodbyes, said: ‘Help yourself to another drink and come and sit by me.’

I had drunk enough, I said. As for him, he always drank carefully, though his head was hard for so spare and unpadded a man. I sat in the chair on his right, and he turned towards me with a creaking smile. We had never been intimate, but there was a sort of liking between us. As usual, he had no small talk whatsoever; I made one or two remarks, about the war, about the firm, to which he said yes and no. He started off: ‘Quite frankly, I still don’t like the way Barford is being handled.’

He said it quietly and dryly, with a note of moral blame that was second nature to him.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said.

‘It’s no use being sorry,’ he replied. ‘The thing is, we’ve got to get it right.’

‘I’m at a bit of a disadvantage,’ I said, ‘not being able to say much about it.’

‘You can say quite enough for the purpose.’

I asked straight out: ‘How much do you know?’

‘I hear,’ Lufkin replied, in his bluntest and most off-hand tone, ‘that you people are wasting your own time and everyone else’s debating whether to shut the place up or not.’

‘I hope they’ll come down in favour,’ I said, feeling my way. ‘But I’m by no means sure.’

‘In that case you’re losing your grip,’ Lufkin gave a cold, jeering smile. ‘Of course they’ll keep it going.’

‘Why do you say that?’

For a second I did not put it past him to have inside knowledge, but he answered: ‘No one ever closes a place down. Governments can’t do it; that’s one of the things that’s wrong with them.’ He went on: ‘No, you’d better assume that they’ll keep it ticking over. But not putting enough behind it, blowing hot and cold the whole wretched time. That’s what I call making the worst of both worlds.’

‘You may be right,’ I said.

‘I’ve been right before now,’ he said. ‘So it won’t be much satisfaction.’

In his negotiations Lufkin made much use of the charged silence, and we fell into one now. But it was not my tactic that night to break it; I was ready to sit mute as long as he cared. In time he said: ‘We can assume they’re going to hopelessly underestimate their commitment, and unless someone steps in they’ll make a mess of it. The thing is, we’ve got to save them from themselves.’

Suddenly his eyes, so sad and remote in his hard, neat, skull-like head, were staring into mine, and I felt his will, intense because it was canalized into this one object, because his nature was undivided, all of a piece.

‘I want you to help,’ he said.

Again I did not reply.

He went on: ‘I take it the decisions about how this job is done, and who makes the hardware, are going to be bandied about at several levels.’

Lufkin, with his usual precision and realism, had made it his business to understand how government worked; it was no use, he had learned years before, to have the entrée to cabinet ministers unless you were also trusted by the Hector Roses and their juniors.

‘I’m not prepared to let it go by default. It’s not my own interests I’m thinking of. It’s a fourth-class risk anyway, and, so far as the firm goes, there’s always money for a good business. As far as I go myself no one’s ever going to make a fortune again, so it’s pointless one way or the other. But I’ve got to be in on it, because this is the place where I can make a contribution. That’s why I want your help.’

It sounded hypocritical: but Lufkin behaved just as he had to Bevill the previous New Year’s Day, not altering by an inch as he talked to a different man, just as stable and certain of his own motives. It sounded hypocritical, but Lufkin believed each word of it, and that was one of his strengths.

For myself, I could feel a part of me, a spontaneous part left over from youth, which sympathized with him and wanted to say yes: Even now the temptation was there — one that Lufkin had never felt. But, since I was a young man, I had had to learn how, in situations such as this, to harden myself. Just because I had to watch my response, which was actually too anxious to please, which wanted to say yes instead of no, I had become practised at not giving a point away: in a fashion different from Lufkin’s, and for the opposite reasons, I was nearly as effective at it as he was himself.

That night, I still had not decided whether I ought to throw in my influence, such as it was, for him or against him.

‘I can’t do much just yet,’ I said. ‘And if I tried it would certainly not be wise.’

‘I’m not sure I understand you.’

‘I’ve been associated with you,’ I told him, ‘and some people will remember that at the most inconvenient time. You can guess the repercussions if I overplayed my hand—’

‘What would you say, if I told you that was cowardly?’

‘I don’t think it is,’ I said.

For his own purposes, he was a good judge of men, and a better one of situations. He accepted that he would not get further just then and, with no more ill grace than usual, began to talk at large.

‘What shall I do when I retire?’ he said. He was not inviting my opinion; his plans were as precise as those he sent to his sales managers, although he was only forty-eight; they were the plans such as active men make, when occasionally they feel that all their activity has done for them is carve out a prison, In reality Lufkin was happy in his activity, he never really expected that those plans would come about — and yet, through making them, he felt that the door was open.

As I heard what they were, I thought again that he was odder than men imagined; he did not once refer to his family or wife; although I had never heard scandal, although he went down to his country house each weekend, his plans had been drawn up as though she were dead.

‘I shall take a flat in Monaco,’ he announced briskly. ‘I don’t mean just anywhere in the principality, I mean the old town. It isn’t easy to get a place there for a foreigner, but I’ve put out some feelers.’

It was curious to hear, in the middle of the war.

‘Whatever shall you do?’ I said, falling into the spirit of it.

‘I shall walk down to the sea and up to the Casino each day, there and back,’ he said. ‘That will give me three miles’ walking every day, which will do for my exercise. No man of fifty or over needs more.’

‘That won’t occupy you.’

‘I shall play for five hours a day, or until I’ve won my daily stipple, whichever time is the shorter.’

‘Shan’t you get tired of that?’

‘Never,’ said Lufkin.

He went on, bleak and inarticulate: ‘It’s a nice place. I shan’t want to move, I might as well die there. Then they can put me in the Protestant cemetery. It would be a nice place to have a grave.’ Suddenly he gave a smile that was sheepish and romantic. In a curt tone, as though angry with me, he returned to business.

‘I’m sorry,’ he put in as though it were an aside, ‘that you’re getting too cautious about the Barford project. Cold feet. I didn’t expect yours to be so cold.’

I had set myself neither to be drawn nor provoked. Instead I told him what he knew already, that at most points of decision Hector Rose was likely to be the most influential man — and after him some of the Barford technicians. If any firm, if Lufkin’s firm, were brought in, its technicians would have to be approved by the Barford ones. Lufkin nodded: the point was obvious but worth attending to. Then he said, in a cold but thoughtful tone: ‘What about your own future?’

I replied that I simply did not know.

‘I hear that you’ve been a success at this job — but you’re not thinking of staying in it, there’d be no sense in that.’

I repeated that it was too early to make up my mind.

‘Of course,’ said Lufkin, ‘I’ve got some right to expect you to come back to me.’

‘I haven’t forgotten that,’ I said.

‘I don’t understand all you want for yourself,’ said Lufkin. ‘But I can give you some of it.’

Looking at him, I did not know whether it was his harsh kindness, or a piece of miscalculation.

22: Mention of a Man’s Name

WAKING, I blinked my eyes against the light, although it was the dun light of a winter afternoon. By the bedside Margaret, smiling, looked down on me like a mother.

‘Go to sleep again,’ she said.

It was Saturday afternoon, the end of a busy week; the day before, Barford’s future had been settled, and, as Lufkin had forecast, we had got our way. Soon, I was thinking, lying there half-asleep in Margaret’s bed, we should have to meet Lufkin officially –

‘Go to sleep again,’ she said.

I said that I ought to get up.

‘No need.’ She had drawn an armchair up to the bed, and was sitting there in her dressing-gown. She stroked my forehead, as she said: ‘It’s not a sensible way to live, is it?’

She was not reproaching me, although I was worn out that afternoon, after the week’s meetings and late nights, dinner with Lufkin, dinner with the Minister. She pretended to scold me, but her smile was self-indulgent, maternal. It was pleasure to her to look after anyone; she was almost ashamed, so strong was that pleasure, she tried to disparage it and called it a lust. So, when I was tired and down-and-out, any struggle of wills was put aside, she cherished me; often to me, who had evaded my own mother’s protective love, who had never been cared for in that sense in my life, it was startling to find her doing so.

Yet that afternoon, watching her with eyes whose lids still wanted to close, letting her pull the quilt round my shoulders, I was happy, so happy that I thought of her as I had at Lufkin’s, in her absence. For an interval, rare in me, the imagination and the present flesh were one. It must go on always, I thought, perhaps this was the time to persuade her to marry me.

She was gazing down at me, and she looked loving, sarcastic, in charge.

No, I thought, I would not break this paradisal state; let us have it for a little longer; it did not matter if I procrastinated until later that night, or next week, so long as I was certain we should he happy.

Thus I did not ask her. Instead, in the thickness of near-sleep, in the luxury of fatigue, I began gossiping about people we knew. Her fingers touching my cheeks, she joined in one of those conspiracies of kindness that we entered into when we were at peace, as though out of gratitude for our own condition we had to scheme to bring the same to others. Was there anything we could do for Helen? And couldn’t we find someone for Gilbert Cooke? We were retracing old arguments, about what kind of woman could cope with him, when, suddenly recalling another aspect of my last talk with Lufkin, I broke out that Gilbert might soon have a different kind of problem on his hands.

I explained that, like me, he would be engaged in the negotiations over which firm to give the contract to — which, now that the decision had gone in favour of the project, was not just a remote debating point but something we should have to deal with inside a month. Just as Lufkin was too competent not to know my part in the negotiations, so he would know Gilbert’s; it might be small, but it would not be negligible. And Gilbert, after the war, would certainly wish to return to Lufkin’s firm: would he be welcome, if he acted against Lufkin now?

I told Margaret of how, right at the end of our tête-à-tête, when we were both tired and half-drunk, Lufkin had let fly his question about my future, and I still could not be sure whether it was a threat. Gilbert might easily feel inclined to be cautious.

Margaret smiled, but a little absently, a little uncomfortably, and for once brushed the subject aside, beginning to talk of a man she had just met, whose name I had not heard. He was a children’s doctor, she said, and I did not need telling how much she would have preferred me to live such a life. The official world the corridors of power, the dilemmas of conscience and egotism — she disliked them all. Quite indifferent to whether I thought her priggish, she was convinced that I should be a better and happier man without them. So, with a touch of insistence, she mentioned this new acquaintance’s work in his hospital. His name was Geoffrey Hollis; perhaps it was odd, she admitted, that so young a man should devote himself to children. He was as much unlike Gilbert as a man could be, except that he was also a bachelor and shy.

‘He’s another candidate for a good woman,’ she said.

‘What is he like?’

‘Not much your sort,’ she replied, smiling at me.

Years before, each time Sheila had thrown the name of a man between us, I had been pierced with jealousy. She had meant me to be, for, in the years before we married and I loved her without return, she was ruthless, innocent and cruel. What had passed between us then had frightened me of being jealous, and with Margaret, though sometimes I had watched for it, I had been almost immune.

Nevertheless, the grooves of habit were worn deep. Hearing of Hollis, even though her face was holding nothing back, I wished that I had asked her to marry me half an hour before, when there was not this vestigial cramp keeping me still, when I had not this temptation, growing out of former misery and out of a weakness that I was born with, to retreat into passiveness and irony.

I was gazing at her, sitting by the bedside in the cold and browning light. Slowly, as her eyes studied mine, her mouth narrowed and from it edged away the smile of a loving girl, the smile of a mother. Upon us seeped — an instant suddenly enlarged in the rest and happiness of the afternoon — the sense of misunderstanding, injustice, illimitable distance, loss.

In time she said, still grave: ‘It’s all right.’

‘Yes,’ I answered.

She began to smile again and asked, putting Gilbert’s dilemma aside, what I was going to do about Lufkin and how much I minded. She had never pressed me before about what I should choose to do when the war ended. I could break with the past now, there were different ways of earning a living ahead of me, she had been content to leave it so; but now in the half-light, her hands pressing mine, she wanted me to talk about it.

23: Gigantesque

THE Minister tended to get irritated with me when there was an issue which he had to settle but wished to go on pretending did not exist. His manner remained matey and unpretentious but, when I had to remind him that the Barford contract must be placed within a fortnight, that two major firms as well as Lufkin’s were pressing for an answer, Bevill looked at me as though I had made a remark in bad taste.

‘First things first,’ he said mysteriously, as though drawing on fifty years of political wisdom, the more mysteriously since in the coming fortnight he had nothing else to do.

In fact, he strenuously resented having to disappoint two or three influential men. Even those like me who were fond of the old man did not claim that political courage was his most marked virtue. To most people’s astonishment, he had shown some of it in the struggle over Barford; he had actually challenged opinion in the Cabinet and had both prevailed and kept his job; now that was over, he felt it unjust to be pushed into more controversy, to be forced to make more enemies. Enemies — old Bevill hated even the word. He wished he could give the contract to everyone who wanted it.

Meanwhile, Sir Hector Rose was making up his own mind. The secret Barford file came down to me, with a request from Rose for my views on the contract.

It did not take me much time to think over. I talked to Gilbert, who knew the inside of Lufkin’s firm more recently than I did. He was more emphatic than I was, but on the same side. It was an occasion, I decided without worry, to play safe both for my own sake and the job’s.

So at last I did not hedge, but wrote that we ought not to take risks; this job did not need the special executive flair that Lufkin would give it, but hundreds of competent chemical engineers, where the big chemical firms could outclass him; at this stage he should be ruled out.

I suspected that Rose had already come to the same opinion. All he committed himself to, however, were profuse thanks on the telephone and an invitation to come myself, and bring Cooke, to what he called ‘a parley with Lufkin and his merry men’.

The ‘parley’ took place on a bitter December morning in one of the large rooms at the back of our office, with windows looking out over the Horse Guards towards the Admiralty: but at this date most of the glass had been blown in, the windows were covered with plasterboard, so that little light entered but only the freezing air. The chandeliers shone on to the dusty chairs: through the one sound window the sky was glacial blue: the room was so cold that Gilbert Cooke, not over-awed enough to ignore his comfort, went back for his greatcoat.

Lufkin had brought a retinue of six, most of them his chief technicians; Rose had only five, of whom a Deputy Secretary, myself and Cooke came from the Department and two scientists from Barford. The Minister sat between the two parties, his legs twisted round each other, his toes not touching the ground; turning to his right where Lufkin was sitting, he began a speech of complicated cordiality. ‘It’s always a pleasure, indeed it’s sometimes the only pleasure of what they choose to call office,’ he said, ‘to be able to sit down round a table with our colleagues in industry. You’re the chaps who deliver the goods and we know a willing horse when we see one and we all know what to do with willing horses.’ The Minister continued happily, if a trifle obscurely; he had never been a speaker, his skill was the skill of private talks but he enjoyed his own speech and did not care whether he sounded as though his head were immersed in cotton-wool. He made a tangential reference to a ‘certain project about which the less said the better’, but he admitted that there was an engineering job to be done. He thought, and he hoped Mr Lufkin would agree, that nothing but good could accrue if they all got together round the table and threw their ideas into the pool.

Then he said blandly, with his innocent old man’s smile, ‘But now I’ve got to say something which upsets me, though I don’t expect it will worry anyone else.’

‘Minister?’ said Lufkin.

‘I’m afraid I must slip away,’ said Bevill. ‘We all have our masters, you know.’ He spoke at large to Lufkin’s staff. ‘You have my friend Lufkin, and I’m sure he is an inspiring one. I have mine and he wants me just on the one morning when I was looking forward to a really friendly useful talk.’ He was on his feet, shaking hands with Lufkin, saying that they would never miss him with his friend and colleague, Hector Rose to look after them, speaking with simple, sincere regret at having to go, but determined not to stay in that room five minutes longer. Spry and active, he shook hands all the way round and departed down the cold corridor, his voice echoing briskly back, ‘Goodbye all, goodbye all!’

Rose moved into the chair. ‘I think the ceremonies can be regarded as having been properly performed,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it would set us going if I try to clear the air.’ For once he was not at his most elaborately polite. I felt certain it was only just before the meeting that he had heard of the Minister’s intention to flit. But his statement was as lucid and fair as usual, and no one there could have guessed whether he was coming down for or against Lufkin. There was just one single job to be performed, he said; not much could be said, but, to make possible some kind of rational exchange, he took it on his own responsibility to tell Lufkin’s technicians a bare minimum. There was no money in it; the Government would pay as for a development contract. Further, the best expert opinion did not think this method economically viable in peacetime.

‘So that, whoever we ask to take this job on, we are not exactly conferring a benefit on them.’

‘It is a matter of duty,’ said Lufkin, sounding hypocritical and yet believing every word. ‘That’s why I’m prepared to undertake it.’

‘You could do it, with your existing resources?’

Lufkin replied: ‘I could do it.’

When he spoke like that, off-handedly but with confidence and weight, men could not help but feel his power, not just the power of position, but of his nature.

For some time the parties exchanged questions, most of them technical: how long to build a plant in Canada, how pure must the heavy water be, what was the maximum output. Listening, I thought there was an odd difference between the Civil Servants and the businessmen. Lufkin’s staff treated him with extreme, almost feudal deference, did not put questions on their own account, but made their comments to him. Whereas the Civil Servants, flat opposite to the others’ stereotype of them, spoke with the democratic air of everyone having his say, and as though each man’s opinion was as worth having as Sir Hector Rose’s.

This was even true of John Jones. Jones was over fifty, had just become a Deputy Secretary, and would not go farther. The wonder to me was that he had gone so far. He had a pleasant rosy-skinned face, an air of one about to throw away all constraint and pretence and speak from the bottom of his heart. But when he did speak, it was usually in praise of some superior.

Yet even he kept at least a tone of independence and like many in the Department called Rose, the least hearty of men, by his Christian name, which would have been not so much improper as unthinkable from Lufkin’s subordinates towards the boss.

Sitting by me, sprawled back in his chair but with his chins thrust into his chest, Gilbert Cooke had been making a noise as though half sniffing, half grunting to himself. As the discussion went on, he sniffed more impatiently, ceased to sprawl back as though in the bar at White’s, and hunched himself over the committee table, a great stretch of back filling out the vicuna coat.

‘I don’t understand something you said,’ he suddenly shot out across the table to Lufkin.

‘Don’t you?’ Lufkin twitched his eyebrows.

‘You said you can do it with your existing resources.’

‘I did.’

‘You can’t, you know, if by resources you include men, which you’ve got to.’

‘Nonsense.’ Lufkin shrugged it off and was speaking to Rose, but Gilbert interrupted.

‘Oh no. For the serious part of this job you’ve only got three groups of men you can possibly use, the—’s and—.’ Rapidly, inquisitively, Gilbert was mentioning names, meaningless to most people there. He said: ‘You’ve got no option, if you’re not going to make a hash of this job, you’ve got to transfer eighty per cent of them. That means taking them off your highest priority jobs, which other Departments won’t bless any of us for, and you’ll come rushing to us demanding replacements which we shall have to extract from other firms. It is bound to make too much havoc whatever we do, and I don’t see rhyme or reason in it.’

Lufkin looked at the younger man with a sarcastic, contemptuous rictus. They knew each other well: often in the past it had surprised me that they were so intimate. Within a few moments both had become very angry, Lufkin in cold temper, Gilbert in hot.

‘You are talking of things you know nothing about,’ said Lufkin.

Furiously Gilbert said: ‘I know as much as you do.’

Then, his temper boiling over, he made a tactical mistake; and to prove that he remembered what he had known about the business four years before, he insisted on producing more strings of names.

Recovering himself, sounding irritated but self-contained, Lufkin said to Rose: ‘I don’t see that these details are likely to help us much.’

‘Perhaps we can leave it there, can we, Cooke?’ Rose said, polite, vexed, final.

Lufkin remarked, as though brushing the incident aside: ‘I take it, all you want from me about personnel is an assurance that I’ve got enough to do the job. I can give you that assurance.’

Rose smoothly asked: ‘Without making any demands on us for men, either now or later?’

Lufkin’s face showed no expression. He replied: ‘Within reason, no.’

‘What is reason?’ Rose’s voice was for an instant as sharp as the others.

‘I can’t commit myself indefinitely,’ said Lufkin calmly and heavily, ‘and nor can any other man in my position.’

‘That is completely understood, and I am very very grateful to you for the statement,’ said Rose, returning to his courtesy. With the same courtesy, Rose led the discussion away. The morning went on, the room became colder, several times men stamped their numbing feet. Rose would not leave an argument unheard, even if his mind was made up at the start. It was well after one o’clock when he turned to Lufkin.

‘I don’t know how you feel, but it seems to me just possible that this is about as far as we can go today.’

‘I must say, I think we’ve covered some ground,’ said John Jones.

‘When do we meet again?’ said Lufkin.

‘I shall, of course, report this morning’s proceedings to my master.’ Rose said the word with his customary ironic flick; but he was not the man to scurry to shelter. Unlike the Minister, he did not mind breaking bad news. Indeed, under the ritual minuet, he did it with a certain edge. ‘I’m sure he will want to go into it further with you. Perhaps you and he, and I think I might as well be there, could meet before the end of the week? I can’t anticipate what we shall arrive at as the best course for all of us, but it seems to me just possible — of course I am only thinking aloud — that we might conceivably feel that we are making such demands on you already that we should not consider it was fair to you to stretch you in a rather difficult and unprofitable direction, just for the present at least. We might just conceivably suggest that your remarkable services ought to be kept in reserve, so that we could invoke them at a slightly later stage.’

I wondered if Lufkin recognized that this was the end. At times his realism was absolute: but, like other men of action, he seemed to have the gift of switching it off and on at will. Thus he could go on, hoping and struggling, long after an issue was settled; and then stupefy one by remarking that he had written the business off days before. At that moment he was speaking to Rose with the confidence and authority of one who, at a break in a negotiation, assumed that he will with good management get his way.

The same evening Gilbert came into my office. It was about the time I was leafing through my in-tray, packing up for the night; it was about the time that, the year before, when he and I and Margaret used to go out together, he habitually called in and sat waiting for me.

For months past he had not done so. Often, when I lunched with him or when we walked in the park afterwards, he jabbed in a question about me and Margaret, led up to traps where I had to lie or confide; he knew her, he knew her family and acquaintances, it could not be a secret that she and I spent many evenings together, but, taking that for granted, I responded to him as though there were nothing else of interest to tell.

Seeing him loom there, outside the cone of light from the desk lamp, I felt very warm to him.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we shouldn’t have won without you.’

‘I don’t believe anyone was listening to my piece,’ Gilbert replied. It rang mock-shy, like someone wanting praise for a drawing-room turn. In fact, it was genuine. Gilbert found it hard to credit that men paid attention to him.

Then he gave the hoarse high laugh one often hears from very strong, fleshy, active men.

‘Damn it, I enjoyed it,’ he cried.

‘What exactly?’

‘I enjoyed throwing a spanner into the works!’

‘You did it all,’ I told him.

‘No, I just supplied the comic act.’

He had no idea that his courage was a support to more cautious people. I wanted to reassure him, to tell him how much I admired it. So I said that I happened to be going out that night with Margaret: would he care to come too?

‘I’d love it,’ said Gilbert.

Without concealment, he did love it, sitting between us at the restaurant. Although he was so large a man he seemed to be burrowing between us, his sharp small eyes sensitive for any glance we exchanged. He enjoyed his food so much that he automatically raised his standard of living, for men obscurely felt that they owed him luxury they would never aspire to themselves; even that night, right in the middle of the war, I managed to stand him a good bottle of wine. It was freezing outside, but the nights had been raidless for a long time; in London it was a lull in the war, the restaurant was crowded and hot, we sat in a corner seat and Gilbert was happy. He infected me, he infected Margaret, and we basked in his well-being.

Suddenly, towards the end of the meal, with eyes glistening he said to me: ‘I’ve stolen a march on you.’

‘What have you been up to?’

‘I’ve been inside a house you might be interested in.’

I shook my head.

‘The house of a family that means something to you,’ said Gilbert, knowing, hot-eyed, imperious. Then he said, gazing straight at Margaret: ‘Nothing to do with you.’

For an instant, I wondered whether he had met the Knights.

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘Put him out of his misery,’ said Margaret, also on edge.

‘He ought to be able to guess,’ said Gilbert, disappointed, as though his game were not quite a success.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, then,’ Gilbert spoke to Margaret. ‘He’s got a new secretary. I’ve found out about her young man and his family. I’ve had tea with them.’

It was such an anticlimax that I laughed out loud. Even so, the whole performance seemed gigantesque. It was true that I had a new secretary, a young widow called Vera Allen: I did not know anything about her life. Gilbert told us that she was in love with a young man in the office, whose family he had tracked down.

When Gilbert described the visit, which he had planned like a military operation, his curiosity — for that alone had driven him on made him appear more gigantesque, at times a little mad. Telling us with glee of how he had traced their address, made an excuse for an official visit to Kilburn, called at the house, found they were out, traced them to a pub and persuaded them to take him home for a pot of tea, he was not in the slightest gratifying a desire to go slumming. He would have gone off on the same chase if the young man’s father had been a papal count.

Gilbert’s inquisitiveness was so ravening that he was as happy, as unceremonious, wherever it led him, provided he picked up a scrap of human news. Having an evening pot of tea with this young man’s parents, he felt nothing but brotherliness, except that hot-eyed zest with which he collected gossip about them, Helen, her marriage, perhaps at fourth-hand about Margaret and me.

‘You are a menace,’ said Margaret, but with indulgence and a shade of envy for anyone who could let himself rip so far.

When we went out from the restaurant into the bitter throat-catching air, we were still happy, all three of us. Gilbert continued to talk triumphantly of his findings and, walking between us, Margaret took his arm as well as mine.

24: Mild Wind after a Quarrel

ROSE worked fast after the meeting, and within a fortnight the contract was given to one of Lufkin’s rivals. During that fortnight, several of the Minister’s colleagues were rumoured to have gone to dinner at St James’s Court; the Minister’s own position was precarious and some of those colleagues did not wish him well. But, once the contract was signed, I thought it unlikely that Lufkin would waste any more time intriguing against the old man. Lufkin was much too practical a person to fritter himself away in revenge. For myself, I expected to be dropped for good, but no worse than that. Lufkin cut his losses, psychological as well as financial, with a drasticness that was a taunt to more contemplative men.

With that business settled and my mind at ease, I walked early one Saturday afternoon along the Bayswater Road to Margaret’s flat. It was mid-December, a mild wet day with a south-west wind; the street, the park, lay under a lid of cloud; the soft mild air blew in my face, brought a smell from the park both spring-like and rich with autumnal decay. It was a day on which the nerves were quite relaxed, and the mild air lulled one with reveries of pleasures to come.

For a couple of days I had not seen Margaret; that morning she had not telephoned me as she usually did on Saturday, but the afternoon arrangement was a standing one, and relaxed, comfortable with expectancy, I got out the latchkey and let myself into her room. She was sitting on the stool in front of her looking-glass: she did not get up or look round: the instant I saw her reflection, strained and stern, I cried: ‘What is the matter?’

‘I have something to ask you.’

‘What is it?’

Without turning round, her voice toneless, she said: ‘Is it true that Sheila killed herself?’

‘What do you mean?’

Suddenly she faced me, her eyes dense with anger.

‘I heard it last night. I heard it for the first time. Is it true?’

Deep in resentment, I stood there without speaking. At last I said: ‘Yes. It is true.’

Few people knew it; as Mr Knight had suggested that night we talked while Sheila’s body lay upstairs, the newspapers had had little space for an obscure inquest; I had told no one.

‘It is incredible that you should have kept it from me,’ she cried.

‘I didn’t want it to hang over you—’

‘What kind of life are we supposed to be living? Do you think I couldn’t accept anything that has happened to you? What I can’t bear is that you should try to censor something important. I can’t stand it if you insist on living as though you were alone. You make me feel that these last twelve months I have been wasting my time.’

‘How did you hear?’ I broke out.

‘We’ve been pretending—’

‘How did you hear?’

‘I heard from Helen.’

‘She can’t have known,’ I cried out.

‘She took it for granted that I did. When she saw I didn’t, what do you think it was like for both of us?’

‘Did she say how she’d heard?’

‘How could you let it happen?’

Our voices were raised, our words clashed together.

‘Did she say how she’d heard?’ I shouted again.

‘Gilbert told her the other day.’

She was seared with distress, choked with rage. And I felt the same sense of outrage; though I had brought the scene upon myself, I felt wronged.

Suddenly that desolation, that dull fury, that I wanted to visit on her, was twisted on to another.

‘I won’t tolerate it,’ I shouted. Over her shoulder I saw my face in her looking-glass, whitened with anger while hers had gone dark.

‘I’ll get rid of him. I won’t have him near me.’

‘He’s fond of you—’

‘He won’t do this again.’

‘He’s amused you often enough before now, gossiping about someone else.’

‘This wasn’t a thing to gossip about.’

‘It’s done now,’ she said.

‘I’ll get rid of him. I won’t have him near me.’

I said it so bitterly that she flinched. For the first time she averted her glance: in the silence she backed away, rested an arm on the window-sill, with her body limp. As I looked at her, unseeing, my feelings clashed and blared — protests, antagonism, the undercurrent of desire. Other feelings swept over those — the thought of Gilbert Cooke spying after Sheila’s death, searching the local paper, tracking down police reports, filled my mind like the image of a monster. Then a wound re-opened, and I said quietly: ‘There was someone else who went in for malice.’

‘What are you talking about?’

In jerky words, I told her of R S Robinson.

‘Poor Sheila,’ Margaret muttered, and then asked, more gently than she had spoken that afternoon: ‘Did it make much difference to her?’

‘I’ve never known,’ I said. I added: ‘Perhaps not. Probably not.’

Margaret was staring at me with pity, with something like fright; her eyes were filled with tears; in that moment we could have come into each other’s arms.

I said: ‘I won’t have such people near me. That is why I shall get rid of Gilbert Cooke.’

Margaret still stared at me, but I saw her face harden, as though, by a resolution as deliberate as that on the first evening we met alone but more painful now, she was drawing on her will. She answered: ‘You said nothing to me about Robinson either, or what you went through then.’

I did not reply. She called out an endearment, in astonishment, in acknowledgment of danger.

‘We must have it out,’ she said.

‘Let it go.’

After a pause she said, her voice thickening: ‘That’s too easy. I can’t live like that.’

‘Let it go, I tell you.’

‘No.’

As a rule people thought her younger than she was, but now she looked much older. She said: ‘You can’t get rid of Gilbert.’

‘I don’t think that anything can stop me.’

‘Except that it would be a wrong and unfair thing to do. And you are not really so unfair.’

‘I’ve told you my reason,’ I cried.

‘That’s not your reason. You’re lying to yourself.’

My temper was rising again. I said: ‘I’m getting tired of this.’

‘You’re pretending that Gilbert was acting out of malice, and you know it isn’t true.’

‘I know more of men like Gilbert than you ever will. And I know much more of malice.’

‘He’s been perfectly loyal to you in every way that matters,’ she said, conceding nothing. ‘There’s no excuse on earth for trying to shift him out of your office. I couldn’t let you do it.’

‘It is not for you to say.’

‘It is. All Gilbert has done is just to treat you as he treats everyone else. Of course he’s inquisitive. It’s all right when he’s being inquisitive about anyone else, but when he touches you — you can’t bear it. You want to be private, you don’t want to give and take like an ordinary man.’ She went on: ‘That’s what has maddened you about Gilbert. You issue bulletins about yourself, you don’t want anyone else to find you out.’ She added: ‘You are the same with me.’

Harshly I tried to stop her, but her temper was matching mine, her tongue was cooler. She went on: ‘What else were you doing, hiding the way she died from me?’

I had got to the pitch of sullen anger when I did not speak, just stood choked up, listening to her accusations.

‘With those who don’t want much of you, you’re unselfish, I grant you that,’ she was saying. ‘With anyone who wants you altogether, you’re cruel. Because one never knows when you’re going to be secretive, when you’re going to withdraw. With most people you’re good,’ she was saying, ‘but in the end you’ll break the heart of anyone who loves you.

‘I might be able to stand it,’ she was saying, ‘I might not mind so much, if you weren’t doing yourself such harm.’

Listening to her, I was beyond knowing where her insight was true or false. All she said, her violence and her love, broke upon me like demands which pent me in, which took me to a breaking point of pride and anger. I felt as I had done as a boy when my mother invaded me with love, and at any price I had, the more angry with her because of the behaviour she caused in me, to shut her out.

‘That’s enough,’ I said, hearing my own voice thin but husky in the confining room, as without looking at her I walked to the door.

In the street the afternoon light was still soft, and the mild air blew upon my face.

25: Catch of Breath in the Darkness

SOON I went back to her, and when we took Helen out to dinner in January, we believed that we were putting a face on it, that we were behaving exactly as in the days of our first happiness. But, just as subtle bamboozlers like R S Robinson waft about in the illusion that their manoeuvres are impenetrable, whereas in fact they are seen through in one by the simplest of men — so the controlled, when they set out to hide their moods, take in no one but themselves.

Within a few weeks, Helen rang me up at the office saying that she was in London for the day, and anxious to talk to me. My first impulse was to put her off. It was uneasily that I invited her to meet me at a restaurant.

I had named the Connaught, knowing that of all her family she was the only one who liked the atmosphere of the opulent and the smart. When I arrived there, finding her waiting in the hall, I saw she was on edge. She was made up more than usual, and her dress had a rigid air of stylishness. She might like the atmosphere, but she could not help the feeling that she had been brought up to despise it; perhaps the slight edge of apprehension, of unfamiliarity, with which, even after all these years, she was troubled whenever she entered a world which was not plain living and high thinking, was one of its charms for her. She did not, as Betty Vane did, take it for granted; for her it had not lost its savour. But added to this temperamental unease, was uneasiness at what she had to say to me.

Sheltered in a corner in the inner dining-room, she did not speak much. Once, as though apologizing for her shyness, she gave me a smile like her sister’s, at the same time kind and sensuous. She made some remark about the people round us, commented admiringly on a woman’s clothes, then fell into silence, looking down at her hands, fiddling with her wedding-ring.

I asked her about her husband. She replied as directly as usual, looking a little beyond my face as if seeing him there, seeing him with a kind of habitual, ironic affection. I believed that she had known little of physical joy.

Suddenly she raised her eyes, which searched mine as Margaret’s did. She said: ‘You’d like it better if I didn’t speak.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

‘If I thought I could make things worse, I wouldn’t come near either of you — but they’re as bad as they can be, aren’t they?’

‘Are they?’

‘Could things be worse, tell me?’

‘I don’t think it’s as bad as that.’

To Margaret and me, holding to each other with the tenacity that we each possessed, truly it did not seem so bad: but Helen was watching me, knowing that words said could not be taken back, that there are crystallizations out of love, as well as into it. She knew of my deception over Sheila’s suicide: did she think that this was such a crystallization? That as a result Margaret could not regain her trust?

‘You know, Lewis, I mind about you both.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

It was easy, it was a relief, to reply with her own simplicity.

‘When I first saw you together,’ she said, ‘I was so happy about it.’

‘So was I.’ I added: ‘I think she was too.’

‘I know she was.

‘I thought you had been lucky to find each other, both of you,’ she was saying. ‘I thought you had both chosen very wisely.’

She leant towards me.

‘What I’m afraid of,’ she broke out, quietly and clearly, ‘is that you are driving her away.’

I knew it, and did not know it. Margaret was as tenacious as I was; but she was also more self-willed, and far less resigned. In a human relation she was given to action, action came as naturally and was as much a release as in a more public setting it came to Paul Lufkin or Hector Rose. Sometimes I felt that, although her will was all set to save us, she was telling herself that soon she must force the issue. Once or twice I thought I had detected in her what I had heard called ‘the secret planner’, who exists in all of us often unrecognized by ourselves and who, in the prospect of disaster, even more so in the prospect of continuing misery, is working out alternative routes which may give us a chance of self-preservation, a chance of health.

‘There’s still time,’ said Helen, and now she was nerving herself even harder, since there was a silence to break, ‘to stop driving her away.’ She pulled on her left glove and smoothed it up to the elbow, concentrating upon it as if its elegance gave her confidence, made her the kind of woman with a right to say what she chose.

‘I hope there is.’

‘Of course there is,’ she said. ‘Neither of you will ever find the same again, and you mustn’t let it go.’

‘That is true for me. I am not sure it’s true for her.’

‘You must believe it is.’

She was frowning, speaking as though I were obtuse.

‘Look, Lewis,’ she said, ‘I love her, and of course I’m not satisfied about her, because what you are giving each other isn’t enough for her, you know that, don’t you? I love her, but I don’t think I idealize her. She tries to be good, but I don’t think she was given the sort of goodness that’s easy and no trouble. She can’t forget herself enough for that, perhaps she wants too many different things, perhaps she is too passionate.’

She was not using the word in a physical sense.

‘And you — you wouldn’t do for everyone, would you, but you can match her all along the line, you’re the one person she needn’t limit herself with, and I believe that’s why it was so wonderful for her. She’d be lucky to have a second chance.

‘I don’t think that she’d even look for one,’ Helen went on. ‘But I wasn’t thinking mainly of her.’

Helen’s tone was for a second impatient and tart, she was in control of herself: and I was taken aback. All along I had assumed that she had forced herself to tax me for Margaret’s sake. ‘I think it’s you who stand to lose,’ she said. ‘You see, she wouldn’t expect so much again, and so long as she found someone to look after, she could make do with that.’

I thought of the men Margaret liked, the doctor Geoffrey Hollis, other friends.

‘Could you make do?’ Helen asked insistently.

‘I doubt it.’

After Helen’s intervention I tried to hearten both Margaret and myself. Sometimes I was hopeful, I could show high spirits in front of her: but my spirits were by nature high, despite my fears. I had lost my judgement: sometimes I remembered how Sheila had lost hers, I remembered the others I had seen at a final loss, the unavailing and the breakdowns: now I knew what it was like.

I tried to bring her back, and she tried with me. When I was with her she made-believe that she was happy, so as to fight the dread of another sadness, the menace of a recurrent situation. I wanted to believe in her gaiety, sometimes I did so: even when I knew she was putting it on for my sake.

One evening I went to her, the taxi jangling in the cold March light. As soon as I saw her, she was smiling, and on the instant the burden fell away. After we had made love, I lay there in the dark, in the quiet, comforted by a pleasure as absolute as any I had known. Drowsily I could shake off the state in which, somewhere deep among my fears, she took the place of Sheila. At first I had seemed to pick her out because she was so unlike; yet of late there had been times in which I saw Sheila in my dreams and knew that it was Margaret. I had even, not dreaming but in cold blood, discovered points of identity between them; I had gone so far as to see resemblances in Margaret’s face.

I was incredulous that I could have thought so, feared so, as I lay there with her warm against my arms.

In the extreme quiet I heard a catch of her breath, and another. At once I shifted my hand and drew it lightly over her cheek: it was wet and slippery with tears.

The last hour was shattered. I looked down at her, but we had no fire that night, the room was so dark that I could scarcely see her face, even for the instant before she turned it further from me.

‘You know how easily I cry,’ she muttered. I tried to soothe her; she tried to soothe me.

‘This is a pity,’ she said in anger: then she cried again.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said mechanically. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

I could not find the loving kindness to know that for her physical delight was a mockery, when there was this distance between us.

I had no self-knowledge left. I felt only uselessness and what seemed like self-contempt. Walking with her in the park later that night, I could not speak.

26: From the Last Light to the First

WHEN she walked with me across the park that night, and on other nights in the weeks that followed, the cold spring air taunted us; often we hoped that all would come well, that we should have confidence in each other again.

Then, one morning in May, I heard of Roy Calvert’s death. He had been my closest friend: though my friendships with George Passant and Charles March and my brother had been strong, this was different in kind. I had come to know him when I was most distracted about Sheila; he had seemed the most fortunate of men, he had given me sympathy more penetrating than anyone else’s, but he too was afflicted, with a melancholy that in the end made his life worthless. I had tried to support him; for a while, perhaps, I was some use, but not for long. Now he was dead, and I could not get away from my sadness. It stayed like smoked glass between me and the faces in the streets.

In the past two years I had seen him little, for he was flying in the Air Force, and, though Margaret and he knew what the other meant to me, they had never met. Yet it was true that each had disliked the sound of the other’s name. Roy was not fond of women of character, much less if they had insight too; if I were to marry again, he would have chosen for me someone altogether more careless, obtuse, and easy-going.

In return she suspected him of being a poseur, a romantic fake without much fibre, whose profundity of experience she mostly discounted and for the rest did not value. In her heart, she thought he encouraged in me much that she struggled with.

At the news of his death she gave no sign, so far as I could see through the smear of grief, of her dislike, and just wanted to take care of me. I could not respond. I was enough of an official machine — as I had been in the weeks after Sheila’s death — to be civil and efficient and make sharp remarks at meetings: as soon as I was out of the office I wanted no one near me, not even her. I recalled Helen’s warning; I wanted to pretend, but I could not.

It did not take her long to see.

‘You want to be alone, don’t you?’ she said. It was no use denying it, though it was that which hurt her most. ‘I’m less than no help to you. You’d better be by yourself.’

I spent evenings in my own room, doing nothing, not reading, limp in my chair. In Margaret’s presence I was often silent, as I had never been with her before. I saw her looking at me, wondering how she could reach me, clutching at any sign that I could give her — and wondering also whether all had gone wrong, and if this was the last escape.

On a close night, near mid-summer, the sky was not quite dark, we walked purposelessly round the Bayswater streets and then crossed over to Hyde Park and found an empty bench. Looking down the hollow towards the Bayswater Road we could see the scurf of newspapers, the white of shirts and dresses in couples lying together, shining out from the grass in the last of the light. The litter of the night, the thundery closeness: we sat without looking at each other: each of us was alone, with that special loneliness, containing both guilt and deprivation, containing also dislike and a kind of sullen hate, which comes to those who have known extreme intimacy, and who are seeing it drift away. In that loneliness we held each other’s hand, as though we could not bear the last token of separation.

She said quietly, in a tone of casual gossip, ‘How is your friend Lufkin?’

We knew each other’s memories so well. She was asking me to recall that once, months before, when we were untroubled, we had met him by chance, not here, but on the path nearer the Albert Gate.

‘I haven’t seen him.’

‘Does he still feel misunderstood?’

Again she was making me recall. She had taught me so much, I told her once. She had said: ‘So have you taught me.’ Most of the men I talked to her about had never come near her father’s world: she had not realized before what they were like.

‘I’m sure he does.’

‘Snakes-in-the-grass.’ It was one of Lufkin’s favourite exclamations, confronted with yet another example, perpetually astonishing to him, of others’ duplicity, self-seeking, and ambition. Margaret could not believe that men so able could live cut off from their own experience. It had delighted her, and, searching that night for something for us to remember, she refound the phrase and laughed out loud.

For a while we talked, glad to be talking, of some of the characters I had amused her with. It was a strange use for those figures, so grand in their offices, so firm in their personae, I thought later, to be smiled over by the two of us, clutching on to the strand of a love-affair, late at night out in the park.

We could not spin it out, we fell back into silence. I had no idea of how the time was passing, now that the night had come down. I could feel her fingers in mine, and at last she called my name, but mechanically, as though she were intending an endearment but was remote. She said: ‘A lot has happened to you.’

She did not mean my public life, she meant the deaths of Sheila and Roy Calvert.

‘I suppose so.’

‘It was bound to affect you, I know that.’

‘I wish,’ I said, ‘that I had met you before any of it happened.’

Suddenly she was angry.

‘No, I won’t listen. We met when we did, and this is the only time together we shall ever have.’

‘I might have been more—’

‘No. You’re always trying to slip out of the present moment, and I won’t take it any more.’

I answered sullenly. The present moment, the existent moment — as we sat there, in the sultry darkness, we could neither deal with it nor let it be. We could not show each other the kindness we should have shown strangers: far less could we allow those words to come out which, with the knowledge and touch of intimacy, we were certain could give the other a night’s peace. If she could have said to me, it doesn’t matter, leave it, some day you’ll be better and we’ll start again — If I could have said to her, I will try to give you all you want, marry me and somehow we shall come through — But we could not speak so, it was as though our throats were sewn up.

We stayed, our hands touching, not tired so much as stupefied while the time passed: time not racing hallucinatorily by, as when one is drunk, but just pressing on us with something like the headaching pressure of the thundery air in which we sat. Sometimes we talked, almost with interest, almost as though we were going out for the first time, for the first meal together, about a play that ought to be seen or a book she had just read. After another bout of silence, she said in a different tone: ‘Before we started, I asked what you wanted from me.’

I said yes.

‘You said, you didn’t want anything one-sided, you didn’t want the past all over again.’

I replied: ‘Yes, I said that.’

‘I believed you,’ she said.

Over Park Lane the sky was not so densely black, there was a leaden light just visible over the roofs. The sight struck more chilly than the dark had been. The midsummer night was nearly over. She asked: ‘It looks as though we have come to a dead end?’

Even then, we wanted to hear in each other the sound of hope.

27: View of a Swinging Door

WITHOUT seeing Margaret again I went off travelling on duty, and it was a fortnight before I returned to London. The day I got back, I found a note on my desk. Margaret had telephoned, would I meet her that evening in the foyer of the Café Royal? At once I was startled. We had never gone there before, it was a place without associations.

Waiting, a quarter of an hour before the time she fixed, I stared at the swinging door and through the glass at the glare outside. The flash of buses, the dazzle of cars’ bonnets, the waft of the door as someone entered but not she — I was at the stretch of waiting. When at last the door swung past and showed her, minutes early, I saw her face flushed and set; but her step, as she came across the floor, was quick, light, and full of energy.

As she greeted me her eyes were intent on mine; they had no light in them, and the orbits had gone deeper and more hollow.

‘Why here?’ I broke out.

‘You must know. I hope you know.’

She sat down: I had a drink ready, but she did not touch it.

‘I hope you know,’ she said.

‘Tell me then.’

She was speaking, so was I, quite unlike the choked hours in the park: we were speaking at our closest.

‘I am going to get married.’

‘Who to?’

‘Geoffrey.’

‘I knew it.’

Her face at the table came at me in the brilliant precision of a high temperature, sharp edged, so vivid that sight itself was deafening.

‘It is settled, you know,’ she said. ‘Neither of us could bear it if it wasn’t, could we?’

She was speaking still with complete understanding, as though her concern for me was at its most piercing, and mine for her; she was speaking also as one buoyed up by action, who had cut her way out of a conflict and by the fact of acting was released.

I asked: ‘Why didn’t you write and tell me?’

‘Don’t you know it would have been easier to write?’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I couldn’t let you get news like that over your breakfast and by yourself.’

I looked at her. Somehow, as at a long distance the words made me listen to what I was losing — it was like her, maternal, irrationally practical, principled, a little vain. I looked at her not yet in loss, so much as in recognition.

She said: ‘You know you’ve done everything for me, don’t you?’

I shook my head.

‘You’ve given me confidence I should never have had,’ she went on. ‘You’ve taken so many of the fears away.’

Knowing me, she knew what might soften the parting for me.

Suddenly she said: ‘I wish, I wish that you could say the same.’

She had set herself to be handsome and protective to the end, but, she could not sustain it. Her tears had sprung out. With a quick, impatient, resolved gesture, she was on her feet.

‘I hope all goes well with you.’

The words, doubtful and angry in their tone, heavy with her concern, were muffled in my ears. They were muffled, like a sad forecast, as I watched her leave me and walk to the door with a firm step. Not looking back, she pushed the door round, so hard that, after I had lost sight of her, the empty segments sucked round before my eyes, sweeping time away, leaving me with nothing there to see.