Homecomings

28: A Change of Taste

AFTER Margaret gave me up, I used to go home alone when I left the office on a summer evening. But I had plenty of visitors to my new flat, people I cared for just enough to be interested to see, friendly acquaintances, one or two protégés. For me they were casual evenings, making no more calls on me than a night’s reading.

Sometimes, in the midst of a long official gathering, I thought, not without a certain enjoyment, of how baffled these people would be if they saw the acquaintances with whom I proposed to spend that night. For now I had been long enough in the office to be taken for granted: since the Minister lost his job, I did not possess as much invisible influence as when I was more junior, but in official eyes I had gone up, and the days were stable, full of the steady, confident voices of power. Then I went home from one of Hector Rose’s committees, back to the dingy flat.

Just after Margaret said goodbye, I had to move out of the Dolphin block and, not in a state to trouble, I took the first rooms I heard of, in the square close by. They took up the ground floor of one of the porticoed Pimlico houses; the smell of dust was as constant as a hospital smell; in the sitting-room the sunlight did not enter, even in high summer, until five o’clock. In that room I listened to the acquaintances who came to see me; it was there that Vera Allen, my secretary, suddenly broke out of her reserve and told me of the young man whom Gilbert had identified. He seemed to love her, Vera cried, but he would neither marry nor make love to her. That was, on the surface, a story commonplace enough, in contrast to some of the others which came my way.

Of my old friends, the only one I saw much of was Betty Vane, who came in to make the flat more liveable, just as she had busied herself for me after Sheila’s death. She knew that I had lost Margaret: about herself she volunteered nothing, except that she had left her job and found another in London, leaving me to assume that she and I were in the same state.

Irritable, undemanding, she used to clean up the room and then go with me round the corner to the pub on the Embankment. Through the open door the starlings clamoured: we looked at each other with scrutiny, affection, blame. We had been friends on and off for so long, and now we met again it was to find that the other had got nowhere.

When she or any other visitor let herself out last thing at night, there was likely to be a pad and scuffle outside my door and a soft, patient, insidious knock. Then round the door would insinuate a podgy shapeless face, a great slack heavy body wrapped in a pink satin dressing-gown. It was Mrs Beauchamp, my landlady, who lived on the floor above mine and who spent her days spying from her room above the portico and her nights listening to steps on the stairs and sounds from her tenants’ rooms.

One night, just after Betty had left, she went through her routine: ‘I was just wondering, Mr Eliot, I know you won’t mind me asking, but I was just wondering if you had a drop of milk?’

The question was a matter of form. With each new tenant, she cherished a hope of heart speaking unto heart, and, as the latest arrival, I was going through the honeymoon period. As a matter of form, I asked her if she could manage without the milk for that night’s supper.

‘Ah, Mr Eliot,’ she breathed, a trifle ominously, ‘I’ll do what I can.’

Then she got down to business.

‘That was a very nice young lady if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Eliot, that seemed to be coming to see you when I happened to be looking down the street tonight, or at least, not exactly young as some people call young, but I always say that none of us are as young as we should like to be.’

I told her Betty was younger than I was: but as she thought me ten years older than my real age, Mrs Beauchamp was encouraged.

‘I always say that people who aren’t exactly young have feelings just the same as anyone else, and sometimes their feelings give them a lot to think about, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Eliot,’ she said, with an expression that combined salacity with extreme moral disapproval. But she was not yet satisfied.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ she said, ‘if you told me that that nice young lady had come of a very good family.’

‘Shouldn’t you?’

‘Now, Mr Eliot, she does or she doesn’t. I’m sorry if I’m asking things I shouldn’t, but I like to feel that when anyone does the same to me I don’t send them away feeling that they have made a faux pas.’

‘As a matter of fact she does.’

‘Breeding will out,’ Mrs Beauchamp exhaled.

The curious thing was, she was an abnormally accurate judge of social origin. The derelicts who visited me she put down to my eccentricity: the respectable clerks from the lower middle classes, like Vera Allen and her Norman, Mrs Beauchamp spotted at once, and indicated that I was wasting my time. Of my Bohemian friends, she detected precisely who was smart and who was not.

She went on to tell me the glories of her own upbringing, the convent school — ‘those dear good nuns’ — and of Beauchamp, who was, according to her, entitled to wear seventeen distinguished ties. Improbable as Mrs Beauchamp’s autobiography sounded when one saw her stand oozily in the doorway, I was coming to believe it was not totally untrue.

Whenever I answered the telephone in the hall, I heard a door click open on the next floor and the scuffle of Mrs Beauchamp’s slippers. But I could put up with her detective work, much as I used, before he touched a nerve, to put up with Gilbert Cooke’s.

All this time, since the day when he told Margaret’s sister of the suicide, I had been meeting Gilbert in the office; I talked business with him, even gossiped, but I had not once let fall a word to him about my own concerns. He was the first to notice signs of anyone withdrawing, but this time I was not sure that he knew the reason. I was quite sure, however, that he had discovered the break with Margaret, and that he was expending some effort to observe how I was living now.

Coming into my office one evening in the autumn, he said imperiously and shyly: ‘Doing anything tonight?’

I said no.

‘Let me give you dinner.’

I could not refuse and did not want to, for there was no pretence about the kindness that brimmed from him. As well as being kind, he was also, I recognized once more, sensitive: he did not take me to White’s, since he must have imagined — the last thing I should have mentioned to anyone, to him above all — how I linked our dinner there with the night of Sheila’s death. Instead, he found a restaurant in Soho where he could order me one or two of my favourite dishes, the names of which he had stored away in that monstrous memory. He proceeded to bully me kindly about my new flat.

‘It’s near the Dolphin, isn’t it?’ (He knew the address.) ‘It’s one of those eighteen-fortyish houses, I suppose. Not much good in air-raids, you must move out if they start again,’ he said, jabbing his thumb at me. ‘We can’t let you take unnecessary risks.’

‘What about you?’ I said. His own flat was at the top of a ramshackle Knightsbridge house.

‘It doesn’t matter about me.’

Brushing my interruption aside, he got back to the subject, more interesting to him, of my living arrangements.

‘Have you got a housekeeper?’

I said I supposed that one could call Mrs Beauchamp that.

‘Doesn’t she make you comfortable?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘I don’t know,’ he cried impatiently, ‘why you don’t do something about it!’

‘Don’t worry yourself,’ I said, ‘I genuinely don’t mind.’

‘What is she like?’

I wanted to warn him off, so I smiled at him, and said: ‘To put it mildly, she’s just a bit inquisitive.’

When I had spoken I was sorry, since it suddenly struck me as not impossible that Gilbert would find occasion to have a tête-à-tête with Mrs Beauchamp. For the moment, however, he laughed, high-voiced, irritated with me.

The meal went on agreeably enough. We talked official shop and about the past. I thought again, everything Gilbert said was his own; in his fashion he was a creative man. He was being lavish with the drink, and now there was half a bottle of brandy standing before us on the table. It was a long time since I had drunk so much. I was cheerful, I was content for the evening to stretch out. As I was finishing some inconsequential remark I saw Gilbert leaning over the table towards me, his big shoulders hunched. His eyes hot and obsessive, he said: ‘I can tell you something you’ve been waiting to know.’

‘Never mind,’ I replied, but I was taken off guard.

‘Have you seen Margaret since she got married?’

‘No.’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t!’ He laughed, satisfied, on top. ‘Well, you needn’t get too bothered about her. I think she’ll be all right.’

I wanted to cry out, ‘I don’t intend to listen’, just as I had avoided going near anyone who knew her or even hearing the date of her wedding. The only news I had not been able to escape was that she was married. I wanted to shout in front of Gilbert’s inflamed eyes — ‘I can stand it, if I don’t hear.’ But he went on: Geoffrey Hollis had taken a job at a children’s hospital, they were living at Aylesbury.

‘I think she’ll be all right,’ said Gilbert.

‘Good.’

‘He’s head over heels in love with her, of course.’

‘Good,’ I said again.

‘There is one other thing.’

‘Is there?’ I heard my own voice dull, mechanical, protecting me by thrusting news away.

‘She’s going to have a child.’

As I did not reply, he continued: ‘That will mean a lot to her, won’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course,’ said Gilbert, ‘she can’t have started it more than a month or two—’

While he was talking on, I got up and said that I must have an early night. There were no taxis outside, and together we walked up Oxford Street: I was replying to his chat affably if absently: I did not feel inimical; I already knew what I was going to do.

The next morning I sat in my office thinking of how I was going to say it, before I asked Vera Allen to fetch Gilbert in. He slumped down in the easy chair beside my desk, relaxed and companionable.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I want you to transfer to another branch.’

On the instant he was braced, his feet springing on the floor, like a man ready to fight.

‘Why?’

‘Will it do any good to either of us to answer that?’

‘You just mean, that you want to get rid of me, after four years, without any reason, and without any fuss?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean that.’

‘I won’t accept it.’

‘You must.’

‘You can’t force me.’

‘I can,’ I replied. I added: ‘If necessary, I shall.’ I was speaking so that he would believe me. Then I added in a different tone: ‘But I shan’t have to.’

‘Why do you think you can get away with it?’

‘Because I need you to go to make things easier for me.’

‘Good God,’ cried Gilbert, his eyes angry and puzzled, ‘I don’t think I deserve that.’

‘I’ve got great affection for you, you know that,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very good to me in all kinds of ways, and I shan’t forget it. But just now there are parts of my life I don’t want to be reminded of—’

‘Well?’

‘While you’re about, you can’t help reminding me of them.’

‘How do you mean, I can’t help it?’

‘You can see.’

Hotly, angrily, without self-pity or excuse, Gilbert said: ‘It’s my nature. You know how it is.’

I knew better than he thought; for in my youth I had been as tempted as most men by the petty treachery, the piece of malice warm on the tongue at a friend’s expense, the kind of personal imperialism, such as he had shown the night before, in which one imposes oneself upon another. Even more I had been fascinated by the same quicksands in other men. As to many of us when young, the labile, the shifting, the ambivalent, the Lebedevs and the Fyodor Karamazovs, had given me an intimation of the depth and wonder of life. But as I grew up I began to find it not only unmagical, but also something like boring, both in others and myself. At the age when I got rid of Gilbert Cooke I found it hard to imagine the excitement and attention with which, in my young manhood, I had explored the transformation-scene temperament of an early friend. As I got near forty, my tastes in character had changed, I could not give that attention again. If I had still been able to, I could have taken Gilbert as an intimate friend.

29: First Interview of George Passant

WHEN I told Rose that I wished to transfer Gilbert Cooke, I had an awkward time.

‘Of course, I have only a nodding acquaintance with your dashing activities, my dear Lewis,’ said Rose, meaning that he read each paper word by word, ‘but I should have thought the present arrangement was working reasonably well.’

I said that I could see certain advantages in a change.

‘I must say,’ replied Rose, ‘that I should like to be assured of that.’

‘It would do Cooke good to get a wider experience—’

‘We can’t afford to regard ourselves as a training establishment just at present. My humble interest is to see that your singular and admirable activities don’t suffer.’ He gave his polite, confident smile. ‘And forgive me if I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that they will suffer if you let Master Cooke go.’

‘In many ways that’s true,’ I had to say in fairness.

‘I shouldn’t like us to forget that he showed a certain amount of moral courage, possibly a slightly embarrassing moral courage, over that Lufkin complication last year. I scored a point to his credit over that. And I have an impression that he’s been improving. He’s certainly been improving appreciably on paper, and I’ve come to respect his minutes.’

As usual, Hector Rose was just. He was also irritated that I would not let him persuade me. He was even more irritated when he learned how I proposed to fill Gilbert’s place. For, finding me obstinate, and cutting the argument short, he admitted that they could probably give me an ‘adequate replacement’; it was the end of 1943, there were plenty of youngish officers invalided out, or a few capable young women ‘coming loose’.

No, I said, I would not take a chance with anyone I did not know through and through; the job was going to get more tangled, and parts of it were secret; I wanted someone near me whom I could trust as I did myself.

‘I take it that this specification is not completely in the air, and you have some valuable suggestion up your sleeve?’

I gave the name: George Passant. The man who had most befriended me in my youth, although I did not tell Rose that. He had been working as a solicitor’s managing clerk in a provincial town for twenty years. The only point in his favour in Rose’s eyes was that his examination record was of the highest class.

Further, I had to tell Rose that George had once got into legal trouble, but had been found innocent.

‘In that case we can’t count it against him.’ Rose was showing his most frigid fairness, as well as irritation. He dismissed that subject, it was not to be raised again. But sharply he asked what proofs ‘this man’ had given of high ability. His lids heavy, his face expressionless, Rose listened.

‘It isn’t an entirely convincing case, my dear Lewis, don’t you feel that? It would be much easier for me if you would reconsider the whole idea. Will you think it over and give me the benefit of another word tomorrow?’

‘I have thought it over for a long time,’ I replied. ‘If this job’ — I meant, as Rose understood, the projects such as the headquarters administration of Barford which came in my domain — ‘is done as it needs to be done, I can’t think of anyone else who’d bring as much to it.’

‘Very well, let me see this man as soon as you can.’

Just for that instant, Hector Rose was as near being rude as I had heard him, but when, three days later, we were waiting to interview George Passant, he had recovered himself and, the moment George was brought in, Rose reached heights of politeness exalted even for him.

‘My dear Mr Passant, it is really extremely good of you, putting yourself to this inconvenience just to give us the pleasure of a talk. I have heard a little about you from my colleague Eliot, whom I’m sure you remember, but it is a real privilege to have the opportunity of meeting you in person.’

To my surprise George, who had entered sheepishly, his head thrust forward, concealing the power of his chest and shoulders, gave a smile of delight at Rose’s welcome, immediately reassured by a display of warmth about as heartfelt as a bus conductor’s thanks.

‘I don’t get to London very often,’ said George, ‘but it’s always a treat.’

It was a curious start. His voice, which still retained the Suffolk undertone, rolled out, and, as he sat down, he smiled shyly at Rose but also man-to-man. They were both fair, they were both of middle height, strongly built, with massive heads; yet, inside that kind of structural resemblance, it would have been hard to find two men more different.

Even spruced up for the interview, George looked not so much untidy as dowdy, in a blue suit with the trouser legs too tight. His shoes, his tie, separated him from Rose as much as his accent did, and there was not only class, there was success dividing them. George, never at his ease except with protégés or women, was more than ever fiddling for the right etiquette in front of this smooth youngish man, more successful than anyone he had met.

Sitting down, he smiled shyly at Rose, and of all the contrasts between them that in their faces was the sharpest. At forty-six Rose’s was blankly youthful, the untouched front of a single-minded man, with eyes heavy and hard. George, three years younger, looked no more than his age; he was going neither grey nor bald; but there were written on him the signs of one who has found his temperament often too much to manage; his forehead was bland and noble, his nose and mouth and whole expression had a cheerful sensual liveliness — except for his eyes, which, light blue in their deep orbits, were abstracted, often lost and occasionally sad.

With the practised and temperate flow of a Civil Service interview, Rose questioned him.

‘I wonder if you would mind, Mr Passant, just helping us by taking us through your career?’

George did so. He might be shy, but he was lucid as always. His school career: his articles with a Woodbridge solicitor –

‘Forgive me interrupting, Mr Passant, but with a school record like yours I’m puzzled why you didn’t try for a university scholarship?’

‘If I’d known what they were like I might have got one,’ said George robustly.

‘Leaving most of us at the post,’ said Rose with a polite bow.

‘I think I should have got one,’ said George, and then suddenly one of his fits of abject diffidence took him over, the diffidence of class. ‘But of course I had no one to advise me, starting where I did.’

‘I should hope that we’re not wasting material like you nowadays, if you will let me say so.’

‘More than you think.’ George was comfortable again. He went on about his articles: the Law Society examinations; the prizes; the job at Eden and Martineau’s, a firm of solicitors in a midland town, as a qualified clerk.

‘Where you’ve been ever since. That is, since October 1924,’ put in Rose smoothly.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said George.

‘Why haven’t you moved?’

‘You ought to be told,’ said George, without any embarrassment, ‘that I had an unpleasant piece of difficulty ten years ago.’

‘I have been told,’ said Rose, also without fuss. ‘I can perfectly well understand that trouble getting in your way since — but what about the years before?’

George answered: ‘I’ve often asked myself. Of course I didn’t have any influence behind me.’

Rose regarded him as though he wanted to examine his lack of initiative. But he thought better of it, and dexterously switched him on to legal points. Like many high-class Civil Servants, Rose had a competent amateur knowledge of law; I sat by, without any need to intervene, while George replied with his old confidence.

Then Rose said: most countries recruit their bureaucracy almost exclusively from lawyers: our bureaucracy is not fond of them: who is right? It was a topic which Rose knew backwards, but George, quite undeterred, argued as though he had been in Permanent Secretaries’ offices for years: I found myself listening, not to the interview, but to the argument for its own sake: I found also that Rose, who usually timed interviews to the nearest two minutes, was letting this over-run by nearly ten. At last he said, bowing from the waist, as ceremonious as though he were saying goodbye to Lufkin or an even greater boss: ‘I think perhaps we might leave it for the moment, don’t you agree, Mr Passant? It has been a most delightful occasion and I shall see that we let you know whether we can possibly justify ourselves in temporarily uprooting you—’

With a smile George backed out, the door closed, Rose looked not at me but out of the window. His arms were folded on his chest, and it was some moments before he spoke.

‘Well,’ he said.

I waited.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘he’s obviously a man of very high intelligence.’

In that respect, Rose in half an hour could appreciate George’s quality more than his employer in the solicitors’ firm, who had known him half a lifetime. He went on: ‘He’s got a very strong and precise mind, and it’s distinctly impressive. If we took him as a replacement for Cooke, on the intellectual side we should gain by the transaction.’

Rose paused. His summing-up was not coming as fluently as usual.

He added: ‘But I must say, there seems to be altogether too much on the negative side.’

I stiffened, ready to sit it out.

‘What exactly?’

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, a man of his ability who just rests content in a fourth-rate job must have something wrong with him.’

A stranger, listening to the altercation which went on for many minutes, would have thought it business-like, rational, articulate. He might not have noticed, so cool was Rose’s temper, so long had I had to learn to subdue mine, that we were each of us very angry. I knew that I had only to be obstinate to get my way. I could rely on Rose’s fairness. If George had been an impossible candidate, he would have vetoed him. But, although Rose felt him unsuitable and even more alien, he was too fair to rule him out at sight.

That being so, I should get George if I stuck to it; for this was the middle of the war, and I was doing a difficult job. In peace-time, I should have had to take anyone I was given. Rose had been trained not to expect to make a personal choice of a subordinate, any more than of an office chair: it offended him more, because mine was nothing but a personal choice. It was wartime, however; my job was regarded as exacting and in part it was abnormally secret. In the long run I had to be given my head. But I knew that I should have to pay a price.

‘Well, my dear Lewis, I am still distinctly uneasy about this suggestion. If I may say so, I am slightly surprised that you should press it, in view of what I have tried, no doubt inadequately, to explain.’

‘I wouldn’t do so for a minute,’ I replied, ‘if I weren’t unusually certain.’

‘Yes, that’s the impression you have managed to give.’ For once Rose was letting his bitter temper show. ‘I repeat, I am surprised that you should press the suggestion.’

‘I am sure of the result.’

‘Right.’ Rose snapped off the argument, like a man turning a switch. ‘I’ll put the nomination through the proper channels. You’ll be able to get this man started within a fortnight.’

He glanced at me, his face smoothed over.

‘Well, I’m most grateful to you for spending so much time this afternoon. But I should be less than honest with you, my dear Lewis, if I didn’t say that I still have a fear this may prove one of your few errors of judgement.’

That was the price I paid. For Rose, who in disapproval invariably said less than he meant, was telling me, not that I might turn out to have made an error of judgement, but that I had already done so. That is, I had set my opinion against official opinion beyond the point where I should have backed down. If I had been a real professional, with a professional’s ambitions, I could not have afforded to. For it did not take many ‘errors of judgement’ — the most minatory phrase Rose could use to a colleague — docketed in that judicious mind, to keep one from the top jobs. If I became a professional, I should have the future, common enough if one looked round the Pall Mall clubs, of men of parts, often brighter than their bosses, who had inexplicably missed the top two rungs.

I did not mind. When I was a young man, too poor to give much thought to anything but getting out of poverty, I had dreamed of great success at the Bar; since then I had kept an interest in success and power which was, to many of my friends, forbiddingly intense. And, of course, they were not wrong: if a man spends half of his time discussing basketball, thinking of basketball, examining with passionate curiosity the intricacies of basketball, it is not unreasonable to suspect him of a somewhat excessive interest in the subject.

Yet, over the last years, almost without my noticing it, for such a change does not happen in a morning, I was growing tired of it: or perhaps not so much tired, as finding myself slide from a participant into a spectator. It was partly that now I knew I could earn a living in two or three different ways. It was partly that, of the two I had loved most, Sheila had ignored my liking for power, while Margaret actively detested it. But, although I believed that Margaret’s influence might have quickened the change within me, I also believed it would have happened anyway.

Now that I felt a theme in my life closing, I thought it likely that I had started off with an interest in power greater than that of most reflective men, but not a tenth of Lufkin’s or Rose’s, nothing like enough to last me for a lifetime. I expect that I should keep an eye open for the manoeuvres of others: who will get the job? and why? and how? I expected also that sometimes, as I watched others installed in jobs I might once have liked, I should feel regret. That did not matter much. Beneath it all, a preoccupation was over.

As it vanished step-by-step, so another had filled its place. But this other was genuine; I had been clear about it, although I had had to push it out of sight, even when I was a child. I had known that sooner or later I should have some books to write; I did not worry about it; I was learning what I had to say. In trouble, that knowledge had often steadied me, and had given me a comfort greater than any other. Even after Margaret left me, in the middle of the war, when I was too busy to write anything sustained, nevertheless I could, last thing at night, read over my notebooks and add an item or two. It gave me a kind of serenity; it was like going into a safe and quiet room.

After the cold parting with Rose I went to my own office, where George was sitting by the window smoking a pipe.

‘That will be all right, barring accidents,’ I told him at once.

‘He was extraordinarily nice to me,’ said George enthusiastically, as though the manner of his reception by Rose was much more important than the prosaic matter of the result.

‘You’d expect him to be civil, wouldn’t you?’

‘He was extraordinarily nice to me, right from the minute I went in,’ said George, as though he had anticipated being tripped up inside the door.

I realized that George had not speculated on why Rose and I had been discussing him for so long. He was not given to meeting danger halfway; he had been happy, sitting by my window, looking down into Whitehall, waiting for me to bring the news. He was happy also, later that evening, as we walked through the streets under a frigid moon, though not in the way I was. I was happy that night because it took me back through the years to the time when he and I walked the harsher streets of the provincial town, George making grandiose plans for me, his brightest protégé — to the time which seemed innocent now, before I met Sheila, to those years in the early twenties when the world outside us seemed innocent too.

It was unlikely that George gave a thought to that past, for he was not in the least a sentimental man. No, he was happy because he enjoyed my company, my company as a middle-aged man in the here and now; because he had been received politely by an important person; because he saw work ahead on which he could stretch himself; because he was obscurely scoring against all the people who had kept him dim and unrecognized so long; and because, in the moonlit night, he saw soldiers and women pairing off in the London streets. For George, even in his forties, was one of those men who can find romantic magnificence in sex without trappings; the sight of the slit of light around the nightclub door, and he was absent-minded with happiness; his feet stumped more firmly on the pavement, and he cheerfully twirled his stick.

30: Spectator’s Paradise

WE were busy that winter sketching out a new project, and on many nights George Passant and my secretary worked later than I did at the office and then went on to my flat to get a draft finished. At the flat they met some of my acquaintances; George, whose eyes brightened at the sight of Vera Allen, did not know what had happened to me, nor speculate much about it.

It would not have occurred to him that I was getting consolation from being a looker-on. It would have occurred to him even less that, just occasionally, when I was listening, trying to give sensible advice, there came thoughts which I had to use my whole will to shut out. In that rational, looking-on, and on the whole well-intended existence, I would suddenly have my attention drained away, by something more actual than a dream, in which a letter was on the way from Margaret, asking me to join her.

George would have believed none of that. To him I appeared quieter and more sober than I used to be, but still capable of high spirits. He assumed that I must have some secret source of satisfaction, and often, if we were left alone in the flat, he would say with an air of complacence, correct and smug: ‘Well, I won’t intrude on your private life.’

Then he would walk happily off up the square, twiddling his stick and whistling.

On the nights she came home with us, Vera Allen used to leave when she thought George was still occupied, so that he would not have an excuse to walk with her to the bus. He remained good-humoured and aware of her until one evening, when they arrived at the flat half an hour before me, there was a constraint between them so glaring that it was almost tactless not to refer to it. That evening it was George who left first.

When I heard his steps clumping defiantly along the pavement, I gazed with amusement at Vera. She was standing up ready to hand me papers, not showing any tiredness after the night’s work, her figure neat and strong as a dancer’s. It was that figure which made her seem so comely, for her face, with features flattened and open, was not beautiful, was scarcely even pretty; yet behind the openness of her expression, there was some hint — often I had thought it illusory, but that did not matter — of hidden hopes which tempted men, which made a good many speculate on how surprising she might be in one’s arms. But most men, unlike George, knew it was futile.

She was a simple, direct, and modest young woman. Although she was only twenty-seven, her husband had been killed four years before. Now she was in love again, with an absolute blinkered concentration of love, so that she seemed to breathe and eat only as means to the end of having Norman to herself. They were not lovers, but she had not a second’s recognition of the flesh to spare for any other man. She was — as far as I could guess about her — both passionate and chaste. I smiled at her. She trusted me now. I asked: ‘What’s the matter with Mr Passant?’

Vera’s eyes, clear and unblinking, met mine: there might have been a tinge of colour on her cheeks and necks, as she considered.

‘I should have thought he was a little highly strung, Mr Eliot.’

She paused, like a politician issuing a statement, and added: ‘Yes, he is on the highly strung side. I don’t think I can put it better than that.’

I nearly told her I did not think she could have put it worse. Vera, although not sophisticated, was also not coy: but she had a knack of finding insipid words which satisfied herself though no one else, and then of gripping onto them as though they were so many umbrellas. Highly strung. From now on she would firmly produce that egregious phrase whenever George was mentioned. What did it mean? Amorizing, importunate, randy, gallant? Something like that: I doubted if she had made a distinction, or could recognize at sight the difference between a violently sensual man like George and some of her flirtatious hangers-on. She just put them impartially aside. For a woman of her age, she was curiously innocent.

But there was one authority who did not regard her so. Soon after I had asked her about George — she would not give away any more — I let her out, and, as I was returning along the hall-passage to my room, heard an excited, insinuating voice from the next landing.

‘Mr Eliot! Mr Eliot!’

‘Yes, Mrs Beauchamp?’ I called out irritably. I could not see her, this was early in 1944, the black-out was still on, and the only light was from the blue-painted bulb in the hall.

‘I must have, that is if you can spare the time of course, I must have a little private word entre nous.’

I went up the stairs and made her out, in the spectral light, standing outside her own closed door.

‘I think I must tell you, Mr Eliot, I’m sure I shouldn’t be doing my duty if I didn’t.’

‘Don’t worry too much.’

‘But I do worry when it’s my duty, Mr Eliot, I’m the biggest worrier I’ve ever met.’

It was clear that I had not yet found a technique for dealing with Mrs Beauchamp.

‘You see, Mr Eliot,’ she whispered triumphantly, ‘before you came in this evening the door of your room just happened to be open and I just happened to be going upstairs, actually I had just been doing a bit of shopping, not that I should ever think of looking in your room if I didn’t hear a noise, but I thought, I know Mr Eliot would want me to pay attention to that, I know you would, Mr Eliot, if you’d seen what I’d seen.’

‘What did you see?’

‘Always respect another person’s privacy, Major Beauchamp used to say,’ she replied. ‘I’ve always done my best to live up to that, Mr Eliot and I know you have,’ she added puzzlingly as though I, too, had sat under Major Beauchamp’s moral guidance.

‘What did you see?’

‘Écrasez l’infâme,’ said Mrs Beauchamp.

In a whisper, fat-voiced and throbbing, she broke out: ‘Oh, I’m sorry for that poor friend of yours, poor Mr Passant!’

This seemed to me an absurd let-down; to imagine that George, having been turned down, was going out heartbroken into the night, was too much even for Mrs Beauchamp.

‘He’ll get over it,’ I said.

‘I’m sure I don’t quite follow you,’ she replied virtuously.

‘I mean, Mr Passant won’t worry long because a young woman doesn’t feel free to have dinner with him.’

Speaking to Mrs Beauchamp I often found myself, as if hypnotized by her example, becoming more and more genteel.

‘If it were only that!’

Dimly, I could perceive her hands clasped over her vast unconfined bust.

‘Oh, if only it were that!’ She echoed herself.

‘What else could it be?’

‘Mr Eliot, I’ve always been afraid you’d think too well of women. A gentleman like you is always apt to, I know you do if you don’t mind my saying so, you put them on a pedestal and you don’t see their feet of clay. So did Major Beauchamp and I always prayed he’d never have reason to think different, because it would have killed him if he had and I hope it never will you, Mr Eliot. That secretary of yours, I don’t like to speak against someone who you are so good to, but I’m afraid I have had my eyes on her from the start.’

That did not differentiate Vera sharply from any other woman who came to the house, I thought.

‘Looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth,’ said Mrs Beauchamp with a crescendo of indignation. She added: ‘Cherchez la femme!’

‘She’s a friend of mine, and I know her very well.’

‘It takes a woman to know another woman, Mr Eliot. When I looked into the room tonight, with the door happening to be open and hearing that poor man cry out, I saw what I expected to see.’

‘What in God’s name was that?’

‘I saw that young woman, who’s so nice and quiet when she wants to be with gentlemen like you, like a ravening beast seeking for whom she may devour.’

‘What are you wanting to tell me?’ I said. ‘Do you mean that Mr Passant was trying to seduce her, or that she was encouraging him, or what?’

‘Nice people talk about men seducing women,’ Mrs Beauchamp remarked in an oozing, saccharine whisper. ‘Nice people like you, Mr Eliot, can’t believe that it’s the other way round, it’s not even six of one and half a dozen of the other, you should have seen what I saw when I was going up those stairs!’

‘Perhaps I should.’

‘No, you shouldn’t, I should have kept your eyes away from that open door.’

‘Now what was it?’

‘It’s only that I don’t like to tell you, Mr Eliot.’

But Mrs Beauchamp could not hold back any longer.

‘Because I saw that young woman, at least I suppose she’d call herself a young woman, and even from where I was I could see that she was crammed with the lust of the eye and the pride of life, I saw her standing up with her arms above her head, and offering herself with the light full on, ready to gobble up that poor man, and he was cowering away from her, and I could see he was shocked, he was shocked to the soul. If that door hadn’t been open, Mr Eliot, I don’t like to imagine what she would have been doing. As it was, it was a terrible thing for me to have to see.’

I suppose she must have seen something: what the scene had actually been, I could not even guess. Just for an instant, such was the mesmerism of her Gothic imagination, I found myself wondering whether she was right — which, the next day in cold blood, I knew to be about as probable as that I myself should make proposals to Mrs Beauchamp on the landing outside her door. I could make no sense of it. It was conceivable that Vera had been slapping George’s face, but though George was awkward he was not brash, he was slow moving until he was certain a woman wanted him. Anyway, they had somehow planted themselves in a moment of farce; and when I saw them in the office, Vera tweeded and discreet, George bowing his great head over the papers, I should have liked to know the answer.

Constraint or no constraint, they had to work at close quarters, for we were occupied more intensely and secretly than before on a new project. It was in fact not so much a new project, as an administrator’s forecast of what was to be done if the Barford experiment succeeded. It happened to be the kind of forecast for which the collaboration of George and me might have been designed. George was still out of comparison better than I was at ordering brute facts: within weeks, he had comprehended the industrial structures on which we had to calculate with an accuracy and speed that only two men I knew could have competed with, one of those two being Hector Rose. On the other hand, George lacked what I was strong in, a sense of the possible, the nose for what not to waste time thinking about. It was I who had to pick my way through conferences with Lufkin and other firms’ equivalents of Lufkin.

When I had to negotiate with Lufkin, he was as reasonable as though our previous collision had never occurred. For my part I realized that I had been quite wrong in keeping him out: we should have gained three months if the first contract had gone to him. No one held it against me: it had been one of those decisions, correct on the surface, for which one gathered approval instead of blame. Yet I had not made a worse official mistake. It was clear enough now that, if the Barford project came off, we should be fools to keep Lufkin out again.

When, in the late spring, I delivered my report to Rose, he first expressed his usual mechanical enthusiasm: ‘I must thank you and congratulate you, if you will allow me, my dear Lewis, I do thank you most warmly for doing this job for us.’

I was so used to his flourishes, taking the meaning out of words, that I was surprised when he said, in his rarer and dryer tone: ‘This looks about the best piece of work you’ve done here.’

‘I think it may be,’ I said.

‘It really does suggest that we can see our way through the next three years without looking unnecessarily imbecile. It really does look as though we might possibly do ourselves some good.’

He was meaning high praise, the plan seemed to him realistic; and that was praise from a master.

Very pleased, I replied: ‘I don’t deserve much of the credit.’

‘May I inquire who does?’

‘Passant has done at least sixty per cent of the job and probably nearer seventy per cent.’

‘My dear Lewis, that’s very handsome of you, but I don’t think you need indulge in quite such excessive magnanimity.’

He was smiling, polite, rigid, closed.

‘It’s perfectly true,’ I said, and described what George had done. Patient as always, Rose heard me out.

‘I am very much obliged to you for that interesting example of job analysis. And now, my dear chap, you must allow others the pleasure of deciding just how much credit is due to you and how much to your no doubt valuable acquisition.’

Meanwhile George walked about with a chuff smile, complacent because he knew the merit of his work, complacent because he was certain it was recognized. For years he had endured being underestimated and, now that at last he was among his intellectual equals, he felt certain that he would get his due. At one time that impervious optimism had annoyed me, but now I found it touching, and I was determined to make Rose admit how good he was. For Rose, however antagonistic to George, would think it his duty to give him a fair deal.

Oblivious of all this, George went happily about, although, after his first weeks in London, he did not accompany me on reflective bachelor strolls at night. An absent-minded, unfocused look would come into his eyes as we took our after-office drink and, like a sleepwalker, he would go out of the pub, leaving me to walk back to Pimlico alone.

Curiously enough, it was from Vera, wrapped in her own emotions, neither observant nor gossipy, that I received a hint. One evening in May, as she came in for the last letters of the day, she stared out of the window with what — it was quite untypical of her — looked like a simper.

‘We don’t seem to be seeing as much of Mr Passant, do we?’ she said.

‘Haven’t you?’

‘Of course not,’ she flushed. She went on: ‘Actually, there’s a story going about that he has found someone who is keeping him busy.’

When she told me, it sounded both true and the last thing one would have expected. For the girl who was taking up George’s time was a typist in another department, virginal, obstinate, and half his age; their exchanges seemed to consist of a prolonged argument, suitable for the question-and-answers of an old-fashioned women’s magazine, of whether or not he was too old for her. Even to Vera, it seemed funny that George should be so reduced; but, so the story ran, he was captivated, he was behaving as though he were the girl’s age instead of his own. No one would have thought he was a sensualist; he was only eager to persuade her to marry him. I remembered how he had tried to get married once before.

‘Isn’t it amusing?’ said Vera, with fellow-feeling, with a lick of malice. ‘I say good luck to him!’

I was thinking, with a spectator’s impatience, that she and George would have been well matched. She might be dense, or humourless, or self-deceiving, but George would have minded less than most men, and underneath it she was as strong as he was. Instead, she had found someone who it seemed could give her nothing, which was a singular triumph for the biological instinct. Now, to cap it all, George was doing the same. Yet she was totally committed, and so perhaps was he. Speculating about them both, I felt extreme curiosity, irritation, and a touch of envy.

31: Announcement in a Newspaper

INTO my dusty bedroom, where the morning light was reflected on the back wall, Mrs Beauchamp entered with the breakfast tray at times which tended to get later. Breakfast itself had reached an irreducible minimum, a small pot of tea and a biscuit.

‘I do what I can, Mr Eliot,’ said Mrs Beauchamp, not apologetically but with soft and soothing pride.

While she stood there, as though expecting congratulations, and then paddled about on the chance of more exposures of human wickedness, I picked up the newspaper. Each morning, gripped by an addiction I could not control, like one compelled to touch every pillarbox in the street, I had to run my eye down the column of Births, searching for the name of Hollis. After Gilbert’s final piece of gossip, this habit had taken hold of me long before Margaret’s child could possibly be born: and, each morning I did not find the name, I felt a superstitious relief and was ready to pander to Mrs Beauchamp.

One morning in May — we were waiting for the invasion, there was a headline on the outside of The Times — I was giving way to the addiction, the routine tic, scanning through the ‘H’s before I opened the paper.

The name stood there. It stood there unfamiliar, as it might be in an alphabet like Russian, which I did not easily read and had to spell out. Margaret. A son.

‘Anything interesting, Mr Eliot?’ came Mrs Beauchamp’s unctuous voice, as from the end of an immense room.

‘Nothing special.’

‘There never is, is there?’

‘An old friend of mine has just had a child, that’s all.’

‘There was a time when I should have liked a little one, Mr Eliot, if I may put it like that. But then when I saw what they grew up into, I must say I thought I’d had a blessing in disguise.’

When I got rid of her, I read the notice meaninglessly time and time again, the paper still unopened. Despite my resolutions, I could not drive the thought down, the thought of seeing her. I wrote a note, in words that were no different from when I used to write to her, to say I had read the news.

I knew the wisdom of those who cut their losses: how often had I advised others so? Don’t meet, don’t write, don’t so much as hear the name: come to terms, give your imagination to others, dismiss the one who has gone. That was what I had set myself, mainly for my own sake, perhaps with a relic of responsibility for her. It was not much help to remember it now; then at last I managed to tear the letter up.

Walking along the square, I was trying to domesticate the news. She would be very happy: even if she had not been happy without qualification before, which I did not wish to think of, this would make up for it. Maybe her children would become more important than her husband. That might have been so with me. Then as I thought of her, with detachment and almost with pleasure, the possessive anger broke through, as though my stomach had turned over and my throat stopped up. This child ought to have been mine.

I was trying to domesticate the news, to think of her gently as though we had known each other a long time before; she would be an over-careful mother, each mistake she made with the child she would take to heart; she did not believe so much in original endowment as I did, she believed that children were a bit more of a blank sheet; the responsibilities would weigh on her, would probably age her — but, with children, she would not think that her life was wasted.

As I thought of her gently, the anger stayed underneath.

With an attention more deliberate than before, I set myself to squeeze interest out of the people round me. It was then I really got to know the predicament of Vera and Norman. Towards the end of the summer, when the flying-bombs stopped and we could talk in peace, they visited me together several times: and then Norman took to coming alone.

When I first saw them together, I thought that beside her he was insignificant. He was small, with a sallow, delicate face; he had been unfit for the Army and had stayed in his Civil Service job which, like Vera, he had entered at sixteen. He seemed to have nothing to say, although his expression was sensitive and fine; when I tried to lead him on, throwing out casts about books or films, I found he was as uncultivated as she. They went to dances, listened to a little music, walked in the country at weekends; they were each earning about £400 a year, which to them meant comfort, and their lives were oddly free from outside pressure. To me, remembering the friends in my young manhood, whose origins were similar to theirs, Vera’s and Norman’s whole existence, interests and hopes seemed out of comparison more tame.

Even Vera, who was brimful of more emotion than she seemed to understand, was chiefly preoccupied in Norman’s company that night with the unrewarding problems of my domestic arrangements. Why should I live in such discomfort?

‘It’s not logical,’ she said.

I told her that it would not make much difference to me.

‘I’m not convinced about that,’ she said.

I told her that it was sometimes a psychological help not to give a thought about how one lived.

Vera shook her head.

‘You’d be just as independent in a proper service flat,’ she said.

She had missed the point, but I saw Norman looking at me.

‘You want someone to run the place for you,’ said Vera. She added: ‘Please don’t think I’m saying anything against Mrs Beauchamp. She’s as kind as anyone you’ll ever get, I knew that the first time I saw her. Of course, she’s the motherly type.’

I was thinking, Vera was as unperceptive about people as anyone I knew, when suddenly I was distracted by a smile from Norman, a smile which, loving and clear-eyed, reflected precisely the same thought. It was a smile of insight. Suddenly I took to him. I felt a sharper sympathy with him than I could with her.

I encouraged him to come and see me, although I soon knew what I was letting myself in for; most of the time it was hard work.

As I knew him better, I discovered that my impressions had been right, it was true that he had a natural understanding of others: more than that, he often made me feel that he was genuinely good. But that understanding and goodness seemed to be linked in him, as I had known them once or twice before, with a crippling infirmity. He was a neurotic; he was beset by anxiety, so that he could barely cope with his life.

Much as I liked him, honestly as I wished to do my best for him and Vera and see them happy, I found it a tax to listen to the unwindings of an anxiety neurosis, which nearly always to an outsider seemed mechanical and tedious, for hours an evening and for evenings on end. Once he was started on his ‘condition’, as he called it, it was a joke at my expense that I had once thought him inarticulate. Yet, if my listening was any good to him, I had to continue.

I did not know whether I was any use to him, except that anyone ready to listen and not disapprove gave him an hour or two’s relief. He had been to doctors, spending a disproportionate amount of his pay for years, but now he had lost hope in them. He gained hope, though, with a neurotic’s fitfulness, as I told him a few sensible platitudes: that he wasn’t unique, that plenty of others — more than he thought — didn’t find themselves easy to live with. I had not done much better than he had, I told him; he ought to be warned by my example, and not give way to his nature. Otherwise he would fmd himself living as a looker-on, self-indulgent and alone.

The better I knew him, though, the more I liked him and the less I thought of his chances. By the end of the year, when he was repeating to me the stories that I knew by heart, I was coming to believe that he was too far gone.

One night in December, not long after Norman had left me, Mrs Beauchamp’s head came ectoplasmically round the door. She had not made the instantaneous appearance with which she greeted the departure of a woman visitor; it must have been ten minutes since the door clicked to, but I was still sitting in my chair.

‘You’re looking tired, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ she whispered.

I felt it: to be any support to Norman, one needed to have one’s patience completely under control, to show no nerves at all.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find you just a little something to eat, which I’d invite you to have upstairs, if I had got my place quite shipshape, which I haven’t been able to.’

Although I was hungry, I regarded Mrs Beauchamp with qualified enthusiasm. These fits of good nature were spontaneous enough, and had no motive except to cheer one up — but in retrospect she admired them, realized how she had performed services right outside the contract, and so felt justified in lying in bed an hour later.

Mrs Beauchamp returned into my room with a tin of salmon, a loaf of bread, two plates, one fork and one knife.

‘If you don’t mind me cleaning the cutlery after you’ve had a little snack,’ she said. ‘Somehow I haven’t been able to manage all the washing-up.’

Thus I got through my salmon, and then sat by while Mrs Beauchamp munched hers. Despite the shiny look of enjoyment on her face she felt obliged to remark: ‘Of course, it isn’t the same as fresh.’

Suddenly I was reminded of my mother, to whom fresh salmon was one of the emblems of the higher life which she had so proudly longed for.

‘But I like to think of you having something tasty last thing at night. I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but I do my best, Mr Eliot.’

She looked at me with an expression at the same time invulnerable, confident and ingratiating.

‘Some do their best and some don’t, Mr Eliot,’ she whispered. ‘That’s why it’s so unfair on people like you and me, if I may say so of both of us, who really set themselves out to do their best. Do you think anyone appreciates us? Do you think so?’

Mrs Beauchamp was becoming more excited: as she did so her expression stayed firm and impassive, but her eyes popped, and her cheeks became more shiny: her voice sank into a more insidious whisper.

I shook my head.

‘When I think of the help that you try to give people — and so do I, if you don’t mind me saying so, in my own way, without pushing myself forward — when I think of the help we give, and then what certain persons do! Sometimes I wonder if you ever let yourself realize what those people do, Mr Eliot.’

She went on whispering: ‘I scarcely dare think of it.’

Her voice became still more hushed: ‘If we looked out of that window, Mr Eliot, we could see the windows on the other side of the square. Have you ever thought what we should see if we pulled the blinds? It’s terrible to think of. Sometimes I fancy what it would be like if I became invisible, like the man in the film, and had to go and stand in all the rooms in the square, one after another, so that I should be there in the corner and couldn’t help seeing what people do.’

Mrs Beauchamp, day-dreaming of a voyeuse’s paradise, seeping herself into invisibility, sat enormous in her pink satin, cheeks flaming and eyes dense.

‘If I had to watch all that, Mr Eliot,’ she said, ‘I doubt if I should ever be the same again.’

I said that I was sure she would not be.

‘Rather than do what some people do,’ she said, ‘I’d stay as I am for ever with my own little place upstairs, looking after myself as well as I can, and doing my best for my tenants and friends, if you don’t mind me calling you that, Mr Eliot. People may laugh at me for doing my best, but they needn’t think I mind. Some of them don’t like me, you don’t have to pretend, Mr Eliot, I’m not such a softy as I look and I tell you they don’t like me. And I don’t mind that either. If a person does her best it doesn’t matter what people think of her. I expect they believe I’m lonely. But I am happier than they are, Mr Eliot, and they know it. No one’s ever said — there’s poor old Mrs Beauchamp, she wants someone to look after her, she’s not fit to live by herself.’

It was quite true. No one had thought of her so.

‘I shouldn’t be very pleased if anyone did say that,’ Mrs Beauchamp remarked in a whisper, but with ferocity.

Then affable, glutinous again, she said: ‘What I say is, the important thing is to grow old with dignity. I know you will agree with me, Mr Eliot. Of course, when I come to the evening of my life, and I don’t regard myself as quite there yet, if some decent good man had the idea that he and I might possibly join forces, then I don’t say I should turn down the proposition without thinking it over very, very seriously.’

32: Outside the House

ON an evening in May, just after the German war had ended, Betty Vane called on me. I had seen little of her during the spring: once or twice she had rung up, but I had been busy with Vera or Norman or some other acquaintance; Betty, always ready to believe she was not wanted, had been put off. Yet she was one of the people I liked best and trusted most, and that evening when she came in, bustling and quick-footed, I told her that I had missed her.

‘You’ve got enough on your hands without me,’ she said.

It sounded ungracious. She had never been able to produce the easy word. She was looking at me, her eyes uncomfortable in her beaky face.

She said curtly: ‘Can you lend me fifty pounds?’

I was surprised, for a moment — because previously when she was hard-up I had pressed money on her and she would not take it. She was extravagant, whenever she had money she splashed it round: she was constantly harassed about it, she lived in a clutter of card debts, bills, pawnshops, bailiffs. Hers was, however, the poverty of someone used to being dunned for a hundred pounds when behind her there were trusts of thousands. She had invariably refused to borrow from me, or from anyone who had to earn his money. Why was she doing so now? Suddenly I realized. Bad at easy words, bad at taking favours, she was trying to repay what I had just told her: this was her way of saying that she in turn trusted me.

As she put my cheque into her bag, she said in the same curt, forbidding tone: ‘Now you can give me some advice.’

‘What is it?’

‘It involves someone else.’

‘You ought to know by now that I can keep quiet,’ I said.

‘Yes, I know that.’

She went on awkwardly: ‘Well, a man seems to be getting fond of me.’

‘Who is he?’

‘I can’t tell you.’ She would say nothing about him, except that he was about my own age. Her explanation became so constrained as to be almost unintelligible — but now she was speaking of this man ‘liking her’, of how he wanted to ‘settle down’ with her. Every time she had confided in me before, it had been the other way round.

‘What shall I do?’ she asked me.

‘Do I know him?’

‘I can’t tell you anything about him,’ she replied.

‘You’re not giving me much to go on,’ I told her.

‘I’d like to tell you the whole story, but I can’t,’ she said, with the air of a little girl put on her honour.

I was thinking, a good many men were frightened of her, she was so sharp-eyed and suspicious, her self-distrust making her seem distrustful of others. But when she let herself depend on anyone her faith was blind.

‘Do you love him?’ I asked her.

Without hesitation, straight and confiding, she replied: ‘No.’

‘Do you respect him?’ For her, no relation would be tolerable without it. This time she hesitated. At last she said: ‘I think so.’

She added: ‘He’s a curious man.’

I looked at her. She smiled back, a little resentfully.

‘On the face of it,’ I said, ‘I can’t possibly say go ahead, can I? But you know more than I do.’

‘I’ve not been exactly successful so far.’

‘I just don’t see what the advantages are. For you, I mean.’

For the first time that evening she gazed at me with affection.

‘We’re all getting on, you know. You’re nearly forty, and don’t you forget it. I was thirty-seven this March.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good reason.’

‘We haven’t all got your patience.’

‘I still don’t think it’s a good reason for you.’

She gave a cracking curse.

‘I haven’t got all that to look forward to,’ she said.

She was so unsure of herself that she had to break in, before I could reply: ‘Let’s skip it. Let’s go to a party.’

A common acquaintance had invited her, she wanted to take me. In the taxi, on the way to Chelsea, she was smiling with affection, the awkwardness had gone, the resented confidence; we might have just met, I might have been giving her a lift to a party, each of us pleasurably wondering whether anything would come of it. After all the years she had gone to parties, she still had the flush, the bright eye, the excited hope that something, someone, might turn up.

As soon as we arrived at the studio, I saw a man I knew; pushing into the corner of the room, he and I stood outside the crowd and he told me about a new book. While I was listening, I caught a voice from the window-seat behind us. From the first words, I recognized it. It was R S Robinson’s.

He was sitting with his back to me, his beautiful hair shining silver, his neck red. Listening to him was a woman of perhaps thirty, who looked intelligent, amiable and plain. It was soon clear that she had recently published a novel.

‘I have to go back a long way to find a writer who opens the window of experience to me as you do,’ he was saying. ‘Not that you do it all the time. Sometimes you’re rather tantalizing, I must tell you. Sometimes you give me the sensation that you are opening a window but not running up the blinds. But at your best, in those first thirty pages — I have to go back a long way. Who do you think I have to go back to?’

‘You’re making too much of it,’ came the woman’s voice, abashed, well-bred.

‘I have to go back a long way.’ Robinson was speaking with his old authority, with the slightly hectoring note of one whose flattery is rejected and who has to double it: ‘Beyond my dear Joyce — I’m not telling you that your achievement is equal to his, but I do say your vision is nearer to the springs of life. I have to go back beyond him. And beyond poor old Henry James. Certainly beyond George Eliot. They can say what they like, but she was heavy as porridge most of the time, and porridgy writers have to be much greater than she was. Those first pages of yours aren’t porridgy at all, they’re like one’s first taste of first-class pâté. I have to go back a bit beyond her, why I don’t mind going back to — you won’t guess who—’

‘Do tell me.’

‘Mrs Henry Wood.’

Even then, flattering her for his own purposes, he could not resist that piece of diablerie, that elaborate let-down. She sounded a modest woman, but there was disappointment and mild protest in her voice: ‘But she was nothing like so good as George Eliot.’

Robinson rapidly recovered himself.

‘George Eliot had all the talent in the world, and not a particle of genius. Mrs Henry Wood had very little talent and just a tiny vestige of the real blessed thing. That’s what people ought to have said about you, and believe me it’s the most important thing that can be said about any writer. I should like to have the responsibility of making them say it about you. Does anyone realize it?’

‘No one’s ever told me.’

‘I always say it takes an entrepreneur with a bit of his own genius to recognize a writer who has it too. That’s why it’s a providential occasion, you and I meeting here tonight. I should like to put over another piece of the real thing before I die. I’m absolutely sure I could do it for you.’

‘What firm is yours, Mr Robinson?’

Robinson laughed.

‘At present I can’t be said to have a firm. I shall have to revive the one I used to have. Haven’t you heard of R S Robinson?’

She looked embarrassed.

‘Oh dear,’ he said, with one of his bursts of hilarious honesty, ‘if you’d been at a party like this twenty-five years ago and hadn’t heard of me, I should have left you and gone to find someone interesting. But you will hear of R S Robinson’s again. We’re going to do things together, you and I. I assure you, we’re bound to put each other on the map.’

Then I tapped him on the arm. He looked up to see who I was. With complete good humour he cried: ‘Why, it’s Lewis Eliot! Good evening to you, sir!’

I smiled at the young woman, but Robinson, sparkling with cunning, did not intend me to talk to her. Instead, he faced into the room, and said, either full of hilarity or putting on a splendid show of it: ‘Is this a fair sample of the post-war spirit, should you say?’

I broke in: ‘It’s a long time since I met you last.’

Robinson was certain that I was threatening his latest plan, but he was not out-faced. He had not altered since the morning I recovered Sheila’s money; his suit was shabby and frayed at the cuffs, but so were many prosperous men’s after six years of war. He said to the young woman, with candour, with indomitable dignity: ‘Mr Eliot was interested in my publishing scheme a few years ago. I’m sorry to say that nothing came of it then.’

‘What have you been doing since?’ I asked.

‘Nothing much, sir, nothing very much.’

‘What did you do in the war?’

‘Nothing at all.’ He was gleeful. He added: ‘You’re thinking that I was too old for them to get me. Of course I was, they couldn’t have touched me. But I decided to offer my services, so I got a job in — (he gave me the name of an aircraft firm) — and they subsidized me for four years and I did nothing at all.’

The young woman was laughing: he took so much delight in having no conscience that she also felt delight. Just as Sheila used to.

‘How did you spend your time?’ she asked.

‘I discovered how to be a slow clerk. Believe me, no one’s applied real intelligence to the problem before. By the time I left, I could spin a reasonable hour’s work out into at least two days. And that gave me time for serious things, that is, thinking out the programme you and I were talking about before Mr Eliot joined us.’

He grinned at me with malicious high spirits, superiority and contempt.

‘I suppose you’ve been doing your best for your country, sir?’ Just as I remembered him, he felt a match for any man alive.

I inquired: ‘Have you got a job now?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Robinson.

I wondered if, with his bizarre frugality, he had saved money out of his wages at the factory. Then I spoke across him to his companion: ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced, have we?’

Soon after I heard her name I left them, to Robinson’s surprise and relief. I left them with Robinson’s triumphant ‘Good evening to you, sir’ fluting across the room, and muttered to Betty that I was slipping away. Alone in that room, she knew that something had gone wrong for me; disappointed after the promise of the early evening, she could read in my face some inexplicable distress.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

She was right. I had been upset by the sound of the young woman’s name. As soon as I heard it, I knew she was a cousin of Charles March’s.

She was likely, therefore, to be a woman of means, and in fact Robinson would not be pouring flattery over her if she were not. But that did not matter; it would be easy to pass word to Charles about Robinson; it was not for her sake that I left the party, went out into Glebe Place, turned down towards the Embankment, and, without realizing it, towards the house I had lived in years before. I was not driven so because of anything that happened at that party; no, it was because, for the first time for years, my grief over Sheila had come back, as grinding as when, after her death, I went into our empty room.

At the first murmur of Robinson’s voice, I had felt a presentiment; listening to what otherwise might have amused me, I had been rigid, nails against my palms, but still impervious, until, when I asked the young woman her name, the reply set loose a flood of the past. Yet I had only heard that name before in circumstances entirely undramatic, having nothing to do with Sheila or her death: perhaps Charles March had mentioned it in the days we saw each other most often, before either of us had married, walking about in London or at his father’s country-house. That was all; but the flood that name set loose drove me down the dark turning of Cheyne Row towards the river.

Down Cheyne Row the windows were shining, from the pub at the Embankment corner voices hallooed; I was beset as though I were still married and was going through the back streets on my way home.

I was not seeing, nor even remembering: it was not her death that was possessing me: it was just that, walking quickly beside the bright houses, their windows open to the hot evening breeze, I had nothing but a sense of failure, loss, misery. The year before, when I received bad news, fresher and more sharply wounding, the news of Margaret’s child, I could put a face on it, and make myself shove the sadness away. Now this older sadness overcame me: my stoicism would not answer me. I felt as I had not done since I was eight years old, tears on my cheeks.

Soon I was standing outside the house, which, since I left it in the spring after Sheila died, I had not been near, which I had made detours not to see. Yet the sight dulled my pain, instead of sharpening it. One outer wall had been blasted down, so that, where Mrs Wilson used to have her sitting-room, willowherb was growing, and on the first floor a bath jutted nakedly against the cloud-dark sky. The light from an Embankment lamp fell on the garden-path where grass had burst between the flags.

Gazing up at the house, I saw the windows boarded up. Among them I could pick out those of our bedroom and the room next door. In that room Sheila’s body had lain. The thought scarcely touched me, I just looked up at the boards, without much feeling, sad but with a kind of hypnotized relief.

I did not stay there long. Slowly, under the plane trees, past the unpainted and sun-blistered houses, I walked along the Embankment to my flat. The botanical gardens were odorous in the humid wind, and on the bridge the collar of lights was shivering. Once the thought struck me: had I come home? Was it the same home, from which I had not been able to escape? The lonely flat — how different was it from the house I had just stood outside?

33: Pathology of Spectators

DURING the rest of that year, I was on the edge of two dramas. The first was secret, known only by a handful of us, and was going to overshadow much of our lives; it was the result of those meetings of old Bevill’s early in the war, of the intrigues of Lufkin and the science of men like my brother; it was the making of the atomic bomb. The second was public, open each morning for a week to anyone who read newspapers, and important to not more than half a dozen people of whom, although I did not fully realize it till later, I was one.

Innocent, tossed about by blind chance, Norman Lacey, and through him Vera, lost their privacy that autumn — for Norman’s father was tried at the Old Bailey. If he was guilty, the crime was a squalid one; but the after-effects of the trial ravaged those two, so that for a time I thought that Norman at least would not recover. What they went through, how she was strong enough to carry them both, was a story by itself — but for me, the lesson was how poorly I myself behaved.

Norman and Vera asked help from me, help which would be embarrassing, and possibly a little damaging, for me to give. They looked to me to go into court with a piece of evidence which could do neither them, nor Norman’s father, any practical good, and might do me some practical harm. It was evidence so trivial that no lawyer would have subpoenaed me to give it. All it did in effect was to show that I knew them well; clutching at any hope, they had a sort of faith that my name might protect them.

It was the kind of demand which, had it come from an acquaintance, I should have evaded with a clear conscience. I had taken some responsibility for these two; they thought I had given them intimacy, could I just shut it off when otherwise I had to accept the consequences?

As soon as I had smelt the danger ahead of them, I had wanted excuses to absent myself. It was a dilemma I did not like, any more than I liked my own feelings. I did what I had not done for years, and asked advice. I did not want worldly advice; I longed for Margaret’s; indeed, one night I read through the Hollises in the London directory, wondering whether they might have returned to the town, knowing that I had a true reason for writing to her, knowing also that it was a pretext. At last I went with my trouble to George Passant.

A few months past, the young woman he had been pursuing with such adolescent ardour had closed their years of argument and gone back home. She had refused to marry him; she had refused to sleep with him; and George, comically frustrated for a man of passion, seemed to an observer to have got nothing out of it. But that was not what he thought. ‘It’s been a magnificent affair!’ he cried, as though his gusto had mysteriously slipped into the wrong groove. As he grew older, he seemed to luxuriate more and more in his own oddity.

Nevertheless when on an autumn night we went into the Tothill Street pub and I confessed the story, he was surprisingly prosaic.

‘It would be absolutely ridiculous for you to take the slightest risk,’ he said.

I had told him my relations with Vera and Norman as accurately as I could. I had also told him of the police investigations, which I could confide to no one else: with George, however uproarious his own life was being, any secret was safe.

As he listened to me, he looked concerned. It occurred to me that he took pride in my public reputation. He did not like to see me rushing into self-injury as he might have done himself: he had always had a streak of unpredictable prudence: that evening, he was speaking as sensibly as Hector Rose.

‘If you could make any effective difference to the old man’s [Lacey’s] chance of getting off then we might have to think again,’ said George, ‘though I warn you I should be prepared to make a case against that too. But that question doesn’t arise, and there is obviously only one reasonable course of action.’

George ordered pints of beer, facing me with his aggressive optimism, as though the sane must triumph.

‘I’m not so sure,’ I said.

‘Then you’re even more incapable of reason than I ever suspected.’

‘They’ll feel deserted,’ I said. ‘Especially the young man. It may do him a certain amount of harm.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said George, ‘I can’t take into account every personal consequence of every action. Particularly as the poor chap’s going to have such harm done him anyway that I can’t believe your demonstrating a little common sense would matter a button in the general catastrophe.’

‘There’s something in that,’ I replied.

‘I’m glad you’re showing signs of recognition.’

‘But I took them both up,’ I said. ‘It’s not so good to amuse myself with them when they’re not asking anything — and then not to stand by them now.’

‘I can’t admit that they’ve got the slightest claim on you.’ George’s voice rose to an angry shout. He pulled down his waistcoat and, his tone still simmering, addressed me with a curious formality.

‘It’s some considerable time since I have spoken to you on these matters. I should like to make it clear that everyone who has had your friendship has had the best of the bargain. I am restricting myself to talking of your friendships, I had better emphasize that. With some of your women, I couldn’t give you such a testimonial. So far as I can make out, you treated Margaret Davidson badly and stupidly. I shouldn’t be surprised if the same weren’t true of Betty Vane and others. I expect you ought to reproach yourself over some of those.’

I was thinking, George was not so inattentive as he seemed.

‘But I don’t admit that anyone alive has any right to reproach you about your friendships. I should like to see anyone contradict me on that point,’ said George, still sounding angry, as though he were making a furious debating speech. But his face was open and heavy with affection. ‘I can work it out, I might remind you that I can work it out as well as anyone in London, exactly what you’ve given to those two. You’ve been available to them whenever they’ve wanted you, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve never protected yourself, have you? You’ve let them come to you when you’ve been tired and ill?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘You’ve let them take precedence over things you enjoy. You’ve kept away from smart parties because of them, I should be surprised very much if you haven’t.’

I smiled to myself. Even now, George kept a glittering image of ‘smart parties’ and of the allure they must have for me. Yet he was exerting his whole force, he was speaking with a thumping sweetness.

‘I know what you’ve given them. A good many of us can tell from personal experience, and don’t forget my experience of you goes back farther than the others. Sometimes I’ve thought that you haven’t the faintest idea of how people appreciate what you’ve done for them. I should like to inform you that you are known to be a preposterously unselfish friend. I have the best of reasons for knowing it.’

George was a human brother. He fought with his brother men, he never wanted to be above the battle. He did not understand the temptation, so insidious, often so satisfying to men like me, of playing God: of giving so much and no more: of being considerate, sometimes kind, but making that considerateness into a curtain with which to shut off the secret self I could not bear to give away. Some of what he said was true: but that was because, in most of the outward shows of temperament, what one loses on the swings one gains on the roundabouts. Because I had been so tempted to make myself into a looker-on, I asked little of those I was with. I was good-natured, sometimes at a cost to myself, though not at a fundamental cost. I had become unusually patient. I was fairly tolerant by temperament, and the curve of my own experience made me more so. Judged by the ordinary human standards, I was interested and reliable. All that, I had gained — it was what George saw, and it was not quite negligible — by non-participation. But what George did not see was that I was being left with a vacuum inside me instead of a brother’s heart.

In the end, I gave the evidence. I tried to accept my responsibility to Vera and Norman as though I felt it. So far as the gossip reached me, I did not lose much; although I did not recognize it for months to come, I gained something.

That winter, sitting alone in my room, I thought often of myself as I had done on the night of Munich; but had learned more of myself now, and disliked it more. I could not help seeing what had gone wrong with me and Margaret and where the profound fault lay. It could have seemed the legacy that Sheila had left me: that was an excuse; the truth was meaner, deeper, and without any gloss at all. It was the truth that showed itself in my escape into looking-on. I knew now how much there was wrong with those who became spectators. Mr Knight was a spectator of the world of affairs, because he was too proud and diffident to match himself against other men: and I could see how his pride-and-diffidence was as petty as vanity, he would not match himself because they might see him fail. Superficially, unlike Mr Knight, I was not vain: but in my heart, in my deepest relations, it was the same with me.

There was another comparison distinctly less congenial. There was someone else who looked on, and felt lifted above ordinary mortals as she did so. Mrs Beauchamp — yes, we had something in common. Yes, Mr Knight and she and I were members of the same family.

Lonely in that first winter of peace, I thought of how joyful Margaret and I had been at first, and how towards the end I had gone to her, the taxi racketing in the steely light, guilt beating on me like rain upon the window. I could understand more of it now. First I had tried to make her into a dream image, a kind of anti-Sheila: then I had transformed her into Sheila come again: I had been afraid to see her as she was, just herself, someone whose spirit was as strong as mine.

Although I did not know it, I was gaining something.

Just as, when Margaret at last admitted defeat about our relation, I had seen in her a secret planner devising (almost unknown to herself) a way out — so now, myself defeated, disliking what I had come to, the secret planner began to work in me.

Often, when a branch of one’s life has withered, it is others who first see the sap rise again. One is unconscious of a new start until it is already made: or sometimes, in the same instant, one knows and does-not-know. Perhaps when, believing myself preoccupied over Vera and Norman, I furled through the telephone directory for Margaret’s address, I was already committing myself to a plan which might reshape my life; perhaps, months earlier, when I stood outside the house of my first marriage and thought I had no hope of any other home, hope was being born.

Perhaps I knew and did-not-know. But, in fact, the first signs of the secret planner which I observed, as though I were watching an intruder and a somewhat tiresome one, were a little absurd. For all of a sudden I became discontented with my flat at Mrs Beauchamp’s. Instead of being able to put up with anything, I could scarcely wait to make a change. Restlessly, quite unlike myself, I called on agents, inspected half a dozen flats in an afternoon, and took one before night. It was on the north side of Hyde Park, just past Albion Gate, and too large for me, with three bedrooms and two sitting-rooms, but I told myself that I liked the view over the seething trees, over the Bayswater Road, along which I used to walk on my way to Margaret.

That night, for the first time, I was in search of Mrs Beauchamp and not she of me. I rapped on her door, rattled the letter-box, called her name, but, although I did not believe that she was out, got no reply. So I left a note and, feeling that her technique was well-proved and that I might pay her a last compliment by copying it, sat with the door open listening for her steps. Even then I did not hear her until the scuffle of her slippers was just outside my door.

‘Mr Eliot, I found your little letter saying that you wanted to speak to me,’ she whispered.

I asked if she had been out, knowing for certain that she could not have been.

‘As a matter of fact, I haven’t, Mr Eliot,’ she said. ‘To tell you the honest truth, I’ve been getting so worried about the catering that I just can’t sleep until daylight, and so I have been allowing myself a little doze before I have to set about my bit of an evening meal.’

Whatever she had been doing, I believed it was not that. Her expression was confident, impenetrable, wide-awake. ‘Catering’ meant getting my morning tea, and her remark was a first move towards stopping it.

‘I’m sorry to drag you down,’ I said.

‘It’s part of my duty,’ she replied.

‘I thought I ought to tell you at once,’ I said, ‘that I shall have to leave you soon.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear you say that, Mr Eliot.’ She gazed at me with a firm glance, disapproving, almost inimical, but also a little pitying.

‘I shall be sorry to go.’

I said it as a civility: oddly, Mrs Beauchamp compelled civility, it was impossible to suggest to her what I thought of her and her house.

‘I shall be sorry to go,’ I repeated. Then I felt a pang of genuine, ridiculous, irrational regret.

‘No one has to live where they don’t want to, Mr Eliot.’

Her expression showed no diminution of confidence. If I felt a pang of sadness, she had never appeared less sad. Others might find any parting a little death, but not Mrs Beauchamp.

‘If you don’t mind me asking, after the little talks we’ve had when you’ve been lonely and I was trying to cheer you up,’ her tone was soft as ever, perhaps a shade less smooth, ‘but if you don’t mind me asking, I was wondering if you intended to get married again?’

‘I haven’t been thinking of it.’

‘Well then, that’s something, and, without pushing in where I’m not welcome, that’s the wisest thing you’ve said tonight or for many a long night, Mr Eliot. And I hope you’ll remember me if any woman ever gets you in her clutches and you can’t see a glimpse of the open door. Never notice their tears, Mr Eliot.’

After that exhortation, Mrs Beauchamp said briskly: ‘Perhaps we ought to have a little chat about the catering, Mr Eliot, because you’ll be here another two or three weeks, I suppose.’

Most people, on being given notice, served their time out with a good grace, I was thinking: in fact, they were more obliging in that last fortnight than ever before. But Mrs Beauchamp’s was a tough nature. She had decided that making my morning tea was too much for her; the fact that I was leaving soon did not weaken her. In a good-natured whisper she told me that I should get a nice breakfast, much nicer than she had been able to do for me, over in Dolphin Square. She looked at me with a sly, unctuous smile.

‘Well, Mr Eliot, I’m sure you’ll live at better addresses than this, if I may say so. But, though I suppose I’m not the right person to tell you and it doesn’t come too well from me, I just can’t help putting it to you, that a lot of water will have to flow under the bridges, before you find a place where you’ll be as much at home!’

34: Confidential Offer in Reverse

WHEN I decided to take up again with Gilbert Cooke, I knew what I was doing. Or at least I thought I did. I had left open no other line of communication with Margaret; he would have news of her; I had to hear it. Beyond that, my foresight was cut off.

So I telephoned to his new office late on a May afternoon. Was he free that night? His voice was stiff. No, he was not certain. Yes, he could find time for a quick meal. Soon we were walking together across the park; under the petrol-smell of a London summer there was another, mixed from the grass and the wall-flowers, sharpened by the rain. It brought back walking in London as a student, the smell of the park promising and denying, taunting to a young man still chaste.

Massive beside me, his light feet scuffing the ground, Gilbert was saying little: unless I asked a question, his lips were squashed together under the beaky nose. I had forgotten that he was proud. He was not prepared to be dropped and then welcomed back. I had forgotten also that he was subtle and suspicious.

He did not believe that I suddenly wanted him for his own sake. He guessed that I was after something, perhaps he had an inkling of what it was. He was determined not to let me have it.

Yet he could not resist letting me know that he still had his ear to the ground. As we climbed the Duke of York’s Steps he said, out of the blue: ‘How’s the new flat?’

I said — irked that he could still surprise me — all right.

‘Is it going to work?’

‘I think so.’

‘It’ll be all right if the old lady gets better or worse. Because if she gets worse the agents will have to put someone else in. But it’s going to be fatal if she stays moderately ill.’

His information was accurate. Mine was one of four service flats, looked after by a manageress; within the last fortnight, she had gone to bed with a heart-attack.

‘It’s pretty adequate,’ I said, as though apologizing for myself.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Gilbert.

Like other apolaustic men, he had the knack of making one’s living arrangements sound pitiful. I felt obliged to defend mine.

‘It’s better anyway,’ Gilbert conceded. ‘I grant you that, it’s better.’

Although he had dropped into speaking of my physical comforts with his old concern, he would not volunteer a word about any common friends, anyone I might be interested in, let alone Margaret. The May night, the petrol smell, the aphrodisiac smell: as we walked he talked more, but it was putting-off, impersonal talk, deliberately opaque.

As I watched him stretched out in a leather armchair at my club, just as he had been the night he offered to stand down over Margaret, his body was relaxed but his eyes shone, unsoftened, revengeful. There was nothing for me but to be patient. I set myself to speak as easily as when he was working for me. How was he? What was happening to him? What was he planning for his future? He did not mind answering. It gave him a pleasure edged with malice to go on elaborating about his future, knowing that I was getting nowhere near my object. But also, I thought, he was in a difficulty and glad of an opinion. Now that the war was over, he could not settle what to do. Perhaps the Civil Service would keep him; but, if he had the choice, he would prefer to return to Lufkin.

‘The trouble is,’ said Gilbert, ‘I don’t believe for a second he’ll have me.’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

‘What about the bit of fun-and-games when I slipped one under his ribs?’

‘It was fair enough.’

‘Paul Lufkin has his own idea of what’s fair. Opposing him isn’t included.’

‘I got in his way as much as you did,’ I said, ‘and I’m on definitely good terms with him now.’

‘What’s that in aid of?’ said Gilbert. He added: ‘The old thug will never have me back. I wish to God he would.’

‘Why do you want to go back so much?’

He said something about money, he said that he might be marrying at last. At that moment he was speaking cordially, even intimately, his face flushed in the clubroom half-light; I believed that the mention of marriage was not a blind, I even wondered (he kept all clues from me) who the woman might be.

I said: ‘As I told you a minute ago, I get on well with Paul Lufkin nowadays. Better than I used to, if it comes to that. Will you let me feel out the ground about you?’

‘Why should you?’ His glance was suspicious, and at the same time hopeful.

‘Why not?’

He cupped his hands round the tankard on the table.

‘Well,’ he said, with a hesitating, unwilling pleasure, ‘if it’s not too much of an infliction, I should be damned relieved if you would.’

The room, not yet lit up, was cool as a church in the summer evening, but Gilbert glowed in his chair: other men had gone up to dinner and we were left alone. He glowed, he swallowed another pint of beer, in the chilly room he seemed to be exuding warmth; but that was all he gave out. Although he had accepted my offer, he was returning nothing.

I was thinking: I should have to play his game, and bring in her name myself. It meant a bit of humiliation, but that did not matter; what did matter was that he would see too much. It was a risk I ought not to take. As I bought myself a drink, I asked: ‘By the way, have you seen Margaret lately?’

‘Now and again.’

‘How is she?’

‘Is there anything wrong with her?’ His eyes were sparkling.

‘How should I know?’ I replied evenly.

‘Isn’t she much as you’d expect?’

‘I’ve quite lost touch.’

‘Oh.’ He was briskly conversational. ‘Of course, I’ve kept my eye on all of them, I suppose I see them once every two months, or something like that.’ He was spinning it out. He told me, what I knew from the newspapers, that Margaret’s mother had died a year before. He went on to say, with an air of enthusiasm and good-fellowship: ‘Of course, I’ve seen quite a lot of Helen and her husband. You did meet him, didn’t you? He’s a decent bird—’

‘Yes, I met him,’ I said. ‘When did you see Margaret last?’

‘It can’t have been very long ago.’

‘How was she?’

‘I didn’t notice much change.’

‘Was the child all right?’

‘I think so.’

I broke out: ‘Is she happy?’

‘Why shouldn’t she be?’ Gilbert asked affably. ‘I should have thought she had done as well as most of us. Of course you can’t tell, can you, unless you’ve known someone better than I ever did Margaret?’

He knew, of course, how my question had been wrung out of me. He had been waiting for something like it: I might as well have confided straight out that I still loved her. But he was refusing to help. His mouth was smiling obstinately and his eyes, merry and malicious, taunted me.

35: Simple Question on Top of a Bus

I had to honour my offer to Gilbert, and I arranged to call on Paul Lufkin. When I arrived at the Millbank office, where in the past he had kept me waiting so many stretches of hours and from which I used to walk home to Sheila, he was hearty. He was so hearty that I felt the curious embarrassment which comes from the spectacle of an austere man behaving out of character.

Some of his retinue were waiting in the ante-room but I was swept in out of turn, and Lufkin actually slapped me on the back (he disliked physical contact with other males) and pushed out the distinguished visitors’ chair. Now that I was, in his eyes, an independent success, a power in my own right though still minor compared to him, he gave me the appropriate treatment. The interesting thing was, he also truly liked me more.

He said: ‘Well, old chap, sit down and make yourself comfortable.’

He was sitting at his own desk, showing less effects of the last years than any of us, his handsome skull face unravaged, his figure still as bony as an adolescent’s.

‘Believe it or not,’ he went on, ‘I was thinking of asking you to come to one of my little dinner-parties.

‘We must fix it,’ he said, still acting his impersonation of heartiness. ‘We’ve had some pretty jolly parties in our time, haven’t we?’

I responded.

‘There’s a secret I was going to tell you. But now you’ve given me the pleasure of a visit’ — said Lufkin with an entirely unfamiliar politeness — ‘I needn’t wait, I may as well tell you now.’

I realized that he was delighted to have me sitting there. He wanted someone to talk to.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘these people want to send me to the Lords.’

‘These people’ were the first post-war Labour government, and at first hearing it sounded odd that they should want to give Lufkin a peerage. But although he was one of the most eminent industrialists of his day, he had, with his usual long-sightedness, kept a foot in the other camp. He had never been inside the orthodox Conservative party: he had deliberately put some bets on the other side, and since 1940 that policy had been paying off.

In private his politics were the collectivist politics of a supreme manager, superimposed on — and to everyone but himself irreconcilable with — a basis of old-fashioned liberalism.

‘Shall you go?’

‘I don’t see any good reason for turning them down. To tell you the honest truth, I think I should rather like it.’

‘Your colleagues won’t.’

I meant what he must have thought of, that his fellow-bosses would regard him as a traitor for taking honours from the enemy.

‘Oh, that will be a nine days’ wonder. If I’m useful to them, they’ll still want me. And the minute I’m not useful they’ll kick me, whether I’ve got a coronet or not.’

He gave a savage, creaking chuckle.

‘Most of them would give their eyes for one, anyway. The main advantage about these tinpot honours — which I still think it’s time we got rid of—’ he put in, getting it both ways, as so often, ‘isn’t the pleasure they cause to the chaps who get them: it’s the pain they cause to the chaps who don’t.’

He was very happy, and I congratulated him. I was pleased: he was as able in his own line as anyone I knew, in the world’s eye he had gone the farthest, and I had an inexplicable liking for him.

I inquired what title he would choose.

‘Yes, that’s the rub,’ said Lufkin.

‘Haven’t you settled it?’

‘I suppose it will have to be the Baron Lufkin of somewhere or other. Lord Lufkin. It’s a damned awful name, but I don’t see how I can hide it. It might be different if I believed in all this flummery. It would have been rather fun to have a decent-sounding name.’

‘Now’s your chance,’ I teased him, but he snapped: ‘No. We’re too late for that. It’s no use rich merchants putting on fancy dress. It’s damned well got to be Lord Lufkin.’

He had the shamefaced, almost lubricious, grin of a man caught in a bout of day-dreaming. He had been writing down names on his blotter: Bury St Edmunds was his birthplace, how would Lord St Edmunds look? Thurlow, Belchamp, Lavenham, Cavendish, Clare, the villages he knew as a boy: with his submerged romanticism, he wanted to take a title from them. He read them out to me.

‘Pretty names,’ he said, inarticulate as ever. That was all the indication he could emit that they were his Tansonville, his Méséglise, his Combray.

‘Why not have one?’ Just for once I wanted him to indulge himself.

‘It’s out of the question,’ he said bleakly.

I thought he was in a good mood for my mission. I said I had a favour to ask him.

‘Go ahead.’

‘I should like to talk to you about Gilbert Cooke.’

‘I shouldn’t.’ Instantaneously the gracious manner — fingertips together, Lufkin obliging a friend — had broken up. All at once he was gritty with anger.

As though not noticing him, I tried to put my case: Cooke had done well in the Civil Service, he was highly thought of by Hector Rose and the rest –

‘I don’t think we need waste much time on this,’ Lufkin interrupted. ‘You mean, you’re asking me to give Cooke his job back?’

‘I wanted you to hear—’

‘That’s what it boils down to isn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘Well, my answer is short and simple. I wouldn’t pay Cooke in washers.’

It was no use. Implacable, tied up in his anger, as rude as I had seen him, he cut me short.

When I reported the answer to Gilbert, he said: ‘That’s burnt it.’ His face flushed, he went on: ‘I never ought to have let him get the smallest blasted bleat from my direction, I never ought to have let you go near the man. There it is!

‘Well,’ he said defiantly, ‘I’d better make sure that the chaps here want me. I’ve always said that in business you’ve either got to be a tycoon or a born slave, and damn it, I’m not either. I once told P L that.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Offered me a three-year contract.’

On his disappointment Gilbert put a dashing face; when he turned it towards me it was still pursed with comradely malignance. I fancied that, whether I brought him good news or bad from Lufkin, he would not have relented. He had so often relished letting slip a piece of gossip, but he was relishing even more holding on to one.

Before I could search for another link with Margaret there happened what at the time seemed a wild coincidence, a thousand-to-one against chance. One Saturday morning, thinking nothing of it, I was rung up by old Bevill, who, after a period of what he himself described as ‘the wilderness’, had returned to Whitehall as chairman of the atomic energy project. He was just off to the country for the weekend, he said: he had a ‘little job’ he wanted to ‘unload’ on to me: would I mind going with him as far as Charing Cross?

In the circumstances, I thought he might have risen to a taxi: but no, Bevill stood at the bus-stop, briefcase in hand, bowler hat on head, getting a modest pleasure out of his unpretentiousness. At last we mounted a bus, the top deck of which was empty, so that Bevill, instead of waiting until the platform at Charing Cross, was able to confide.

‘I’m being chased, Lewis,’ he said, looking over his shoulder to make sure no one was coming up, and somehow giving the impression that he was really on the run.

‘Who by?’

‘People who always know better than anyone else,’ the old man replied. ‘I don’t know about you, Lewis, but I don’t like people who’re always positive you’re wrong and they’re right. Particularly intellectuals, as I believe they’re called nowadays, or else have the impertinence to call themselves. The nigger in the woodpile is, they can make a hell of a lot of noise.’

‘What do they want?’

‘Do you remember that fellow Sawbridge?’ The question was rhetorical; old Bevill, my brother, and the Barford scientists, Hector Rose, and I were not likely to forget Sawbridge, who had not long since been sent to jail for espionage.

The bus in front of us disappeared out of Whitehall with a swishing scarlet flash: we were stopped at the traffic lights, and Bevill stared up at Nelson’s statue.

‘Now that chap up there, he was a different kettle of fish from Sawbridge. You can’t make me believe he would have betrayed his country.’ In action, the old man could be as capable and cynical as most men: in speech he could be just as banal.

‘You can’t make me believe he would have had any use for intellectuals,’ Bevill went on darkly. ‘Kicked them in the pants, that’s what he would have done.’

As we curved round Trafalgar Square, Bevill told me that some people unspecified were asking ‘silly questions’ about the trials of the atomic spies: why had they all pleaded guilty, why were the prison terms so long?

‘Long,’ said Bevill. ‘If you ask me, they were lucky to get away with their necks.

‘But I tell you, Lewis,’ he went on, more like his patient political self, ‘some people are asking questions, all in the name of civil liberties if you please, and we don’t want any more questions than we can help because of the effect on our friends over the other side. And so it may be a case where a bit of private conversation can save a lot of public fuss, even if it does seem like eating humble-pie.’

He gave a furtive grin, and said: ‘That’s where you come in, my lad.’

‘You want me to talk to them?’

‘No, Lewis, I want you to listen to them. Listening never did any of us any harm, and talking usually does,’ said Bevill, in one of his Polonian asides. ‘Someone’s got to listen to one of those fellows, and you’re the man for the job.

‘You see,’ said Bevill, staring uncomplainingly down at a traffic block, ‘they might trust you, which they’d never begin to do with Rose or me. They’d never get it out of their heads that I was an old die-hard who didn’t understand what they were talking about and didn’t care a kipper for what was bothering them. And I’m not sure,’ said Bevill, with his customary realism and humility, ‘I’m not sure that they’d be far wrong.’

‘Who is it,’ I asked, marking down a tiresome, tricky, but not important date for the following week, ‘that you want me to see?’

‘One of those fellows who write about pictures,’ Bevill replied, pointing intelligently at the National Gallery. ‘His name is Austin Davidson. I expect you’ve heard of him.’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Somehow he gave the impression, or someone else did, that he knew you. Do you know the fellow, Lewis?’

‘I’ve never met him.’

‘I suppose he’s one of those chaps who makes a painter’s reputation and then gets his share of the takings when the prices go up,’ said Bevill, with a simple contempt that he would not have thought of applying to a politician or even a businessman. But I was not paying attention to that accusation, which was about the last that, from Davidson’s eminence, he could ever have imagined being uttered against himself, casually but in cold blood. Instead, staring down at the pavement artist in front of the Gallery, hearing old Bevill bring out the name of Margaret’s father, I was full of an instantaneous warmth, as though I were completely relaxed and could count, so delectably sharp were they, the leaves of grass on the verges down below.

‘Are you positive you haven’t met the chap?’ Bevill was inquiring.

‘Quite.’

‘Well, I got the impression, if I’m not muddling things, that he gave me to understand, or he may have said so to Rose, that you’d be very acceptable as someone to talk to. And that suggests to me that you’d be able to keep those fellows from making any more fuss.’

The bus started, and Bevill was peering through the window, trying to see the clock on Charing Cross.

‘I needn’t tell you,’ he said cheerfully, ‘not to tell them anything they oughtn’t to know.’

36: Reading-lamp Alight in a Peaceful Room

HEARING that Davidson was to be given a private explanation, George Passant stormed with fury.

‘If one of my relations,’ he cursed, ‘had been uncomfortable about the Sawbridge case or any other blasted case, are you going to tell me that that old sunket Bevill would have detailed a high Civil Servant to give them an interview? But this counry doesn’t use the same rules if you come from where I did instead of bloody Bloomsbury.’

It was a long time since I had heard George explode with the radical fervour of his youth.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel inclined to tell this man there’s no reason on God’s earth why he should get special treatment.’

I said no.

‘Your proper answer to these people,’ George cried, ‘when they come begging favours, is Doctor Johnson’s to Lord Chesterfield.’

I was not sure what obscure grievance George was hugging on my behalf.

‘Bloody Bloomsbury’: George’s swear-words crackled out with ‘Bloomsbury’ after each one. George’s political passions were still rooted in the East Anglian earth, where his cousins were farm labourers: like most rooted radicals, he distrusted upper-class ones, he felt they were less solid men than reactionaries such as old Bevill.

Then he simmered down and said, with a bashful friendliness: ‘Well, there’s one thing, I’m glad this didn’t happen when you were still thinking about Margaret. It would have been a bit embarrassing.’ He added comfortably: ‘That’s all over and done with, at any rate.’

Two days later, not waiting for his name to be called out, Davidson walked, head bent, across the floor of my office. He was not looking at me or Vera Allen or anyone or anything: he was so shy that he would not glance up, or go through any formula of introduction.

As he sat in the armchair I could see his grey hair, of which a quiff fell over his forehead, but not his face. He was wearing an old brown suit, and his shirt-sleeves were so long that they covered half his hands; but, among that untidiness, I noticed that the shirt was silk. He said, without any preamble at all, self-conscious and brusque: ‘You used to be a lawyer, didn’t you?’

I said yes.

‘How good were you?’

‘I should never,’ I replied, ‘have been anything like first-class.’

‘Why not?’

Despite his awkwardness, he was a man to whom one did not want to give a modest, padded, hypocritical answer.

‘It’s the sort of career,’ I said, ‘where you’ve got to think of nothing else, and I couldn’t manage it.’

He nodded, and then, for a second, looked up. My first impression of his face was how young it was. At that time he was in his middle sixties, but his skin, under layers of sunburn, was scarcely lined — except that his neck had the roughness of an ageing man’s. My second impression was of a curious kind of beauty. Each of his daughters had inherited his fine bones; but Davidson’s face, at the same time delicate and sculptured, had an abstract beauty which theirs missed. His eyes, quite unlike Margaret’s, which were transparent and light, shone heavily — pigmented, deep sepia brown, opaque as a bird’s.

As he looked up, for an instant his face broke into a grin.

‘That’s not entirely to your discredit,’ he said. Soon he was looking at his knees again, and saying: ‘You’re said to know about this Sawbridge business, is that true?’

‘Yes.’

‘You really do know about it, you haven’t just seen the papers?’

I began: ‘I was present when he was first appointed—’ and again Davidson gave an evanescent grin.

‘That sounds good enough. No wonder you’ve got your reputation as a picker. It would be simplest if you told me about it from there.’

So I told the story, from the time Sawbridge entered Barford after three years’ research in an Oxford laboratory: the first suspicion that he was passing information to a Russian agent, as far back as 1944: the thicker suspicion, a year later: the interrogation, in which my brother, who had been his scientific leader, took a part: his confession, arrest and trial.

All the time I was speaking Davidson did not stir. His head was bent down, I was addressing myself to his grey hair, he moved so little that he might not have heard at all, and when I finished he remained immobile.

At last he said: ‘As an expositor, with Maynard Keynes marked at 100, your score is about 75. No, considering the toughness of the material, I put you up to 79.’ After that surprising evaluation he went on: ‘But none of what you tell me is satisfactory — is it? — unless I can get answers to three questions.’

‘What are they?’

‘To begin with, is this young man really guilty? I don’t mean anything fancy, I just mean, did he perform the actions he was charged with?’

‘I have no doubt about that.’

‘Why haven’t you any doubt? I know he confessed, but I should have thought the one thing we’ve learned in the last ten years is that in suitable circumstances almost anyone can confess to almost anything.’

‘I hadn’t any doubt long before he confessed.’

‘You had some other evidence?’

He looked up, his face troubled, stern, and suspicious.

‘Yes.’

‘What was it?’

‘It was intelligence information. I’m not free to tell you more than that.’

‘That doesn’t seem specially reassuring.’

‘Look—’ I started, stumbled over his name and finally said uneasily ‘Mr Davidson’, as though I were going to my first dinner party and was not sure which fork to use. It was not that he was older; it was not that he was a man of liberal principle, disapproving of me; it was simply that I had loved his daughter, and some odd atavistic sense would not let me address him unceremoniously by his name.

When I had got over my stuttering I told him that most intelligence secrets were nonsense, but that some weren’t: some ways of collecting information any government had to keep tight, so long as we had governments at all: this was a case in point.

‘Isn’t that extremely convenient?’ said Davidson.

‘It must seem so,’ I said. ‘Nevertheless it’s true.’

‘You’re certain of that?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Again he looked at me. As though satisfied, he said: ‘Accepting that, then, I come straight on to the next question. Why did he plead guilty? If he hadn’t, from what you’ve just said, he’d have had you all in difficulties—’

I agreed.

‘Then why did he?’

‘I’ve often wondered,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got no explanation at all.’

‘What I want to be convinced of,’ said Austin Davidson, ‘is that there were no unfair threats — or unfair inducements as far as that goes — before he was tried.’

Once more I did not resent the words, they were too impersonal for that. Instead of replying with official palaver, I was searching for the literal truth. I said that, after Sawbridge was arrested, my first-hand knowledge ended but I thought it very unlikely that anything unfair had been done.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘I’ve seen him since, in prison. And if there had been anything of the sort, I can’t imagine why he shouldn’t complain. It isn’t as though he’s been converted, he’s still a Communist. If he had anything to complain of, I don’t think he’d be excessively considerate about our feelings.’

‘That’s a genuine point,’ said Davidson. I could feel he was believing me, as he continued: ‘Well, I’ve only one more question. Fourteen years seemed to most of us a savage sentence. Was there any influence from government or your official people to suggest that he ought to be made an example of?’

‘On that,’ I replied, ‘I know no more than you do.’

‘I should like to know what you think.’

‘I should be astonished if there were anything said directly,’ I said. ‘The most that can have happened is that judges like all the people round them are affected by a climate of thought.’

Staying very still, Davidson did not speak for some time, until, throwing back his forelock like a boy, he said: ‘Well, I don’t think there’s any more you can tell me, and I’m glad to have found someone who could speak straight.’

He continued: ‘So on the whole you are happy about the Sawbridge business, are you?’

He might have meant it as a formal ending, but I was suddenly provoked. I had not enjoyed defending the establishment: but I was also irked by the arrogance of men of decent feeling like Davidson, who had had the means to cultivate their decent feelings without the social interest or realism to imagine where they led. I spoke sharply, not like an official. I finished up.

‘You ought not to think that I like what we’ve done. Or a good many other things we’re having to do. People of my sort have only two choices in this situation, one is to keep outside and let others do the dirty work, the other is to stay inside and try to keep off the worst horrors and know all the time that we shan’t come out with clean hands. Neither way is very good for one, and if I had a son I should advise him to do what you did, and choose a luckier time and place to be born.’

It was a long time since I heard my own temper running loose. Davidson was looking at me with a friendly and companionable frown.

‘Yes,’ he remarked, ‘my daughter said you must be feeling something like that.

‘I asked her about you,’ he went on casually, and added, with a simplicity that was at the same time arrogant and pure: ‘I’ve never fancied myself at judging people when I first meet them. So I have to find out about them in my own fashion.’

For a fortnight I was immersed in that kind of comfort which is like a luxurious cocoon as one delays before a longed-for and imminent fate, which I had also known after my first meeting with Margaret. I was still not calculating; I, who had calculated so much, went about as though the machine had been switched off; now that I had a card of re-entry into the Davidson family, I still felt the future free.

I still felt so, when I wrote a note to Davidson, telling him I had a little more information about the Sawbridge case, if he chose to call. He did call: he seemed satisfied: afterwards we walked together down Victoria Street. It was a blazing hot day, people were walking in the shade, but Davidson insisted on keeping to the other side.

‘We mustn’t miss a second of this sun,’ he said, as though it were a moral axiom.

He walked with long strides, his head down, his feet clumpingly heavy on the pavement for so spare a man. His shirt-sleeves hung beneath his cuffs, over-long and unbuttoned. Shabby as he was, passers-by noticed him; he was the most striking and handsome figure in the street. I thought how like that shabby carelessness was to Margaret’s.

Suddenly he said: ‘I’m giving a show at my house next week.’ A private view, he explained, for two young painters. ‘Would that interest you?’

‘Very much,’ I said. I said it eagerly, without any guard.

Not looking at me, Davidson lolloped along.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Do you know anything about pictures? It’s a waste of your time and mine if you don’t, don’t you know.’

‘I know a little.’

‘You’re not bluffing, are you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I’d better ask you a few questions.’

There and then, in Victoria Street in the sweating sunshine, as we passed offices of consultant engineers, Davidson gave me a brisk viva. Embarrassed, anxious to pass, doing my best, I nevertheless felt a twinge of amusement, as a comparison struck me. To Davidson, whose taste had no use for concealments, this was a matter to be cleared up in the open; it was just a question of whether I was equipped to look at pictures or not; there were no overtones, no other motives, on his side or mine.

It did not occur to him that I was snatching at the chance to meet his daughter again. Yet he was a man who, so I had heard and I had no reason to doubt it, had once been well-known for his love-affairs. Sheila’s father, the Reverend Laurence Knight, had been a faithful husband, living obscurely all his life in a country vicarage: yet, in Davidson’s place, he would have known precisely what I was after, not now, when it was easy to see, but within minutes of our first meeting. Mr Knight, incidentally, would have tantalized me and then found some excuse for holding back the invitation.

Davidson did not go in for any flourishes: he just formed his opinion, and announced: ‘You’d never have made a living at it, don’t you know.’

I was in suspense; I agreed.

‘It might just be worth your while to come along,’ he said, staring at the pavement in front of him. ‘But only just.’

Waiting in my flat on the evening of the private view I saw the sky over Hyde Park turn dark, sodden with rain to come. Standing by the window, I kept glancing at my watch, although it was still not time to leave, and then gazed out again over the trees into the leaden murk. Then I looked back into the room. On the little table by the sofa the reading-lamp was gleaming, and a book which I had left open shone under the light.

It was peaceful, it never seemed so peaceful. For an instant I wanted to stay there, and not go out. It would be easy to stay; I need only telephone and make an apology, in that party I should not be missed, the significance I was giving it was my own invention, and besides myself no living person knew. I looked at the lamp and the sofa, with a stab almost of envy.

Then I turned back to the window, reading my watch, impatient that it was still not time to go.