Homecomings

37: Smell of Leaves in the Rain

IN the hall of Davidson’s house the brightness, clashing with the noise of the party within, took me aback; it was Davidson himself who came to greet me.

‘You decided it was worth while, did you?’ he asked.

As I was putting my coat down, he said: ‘I met someone who knew you this morning.’ He gave the name of an elderly acquaintance. ‘She was anxious to get in touch with you. I’d better hand this over before I forget.’ It was a card with an address and telephone number.

I asked if it could wait, but Davidson had discharged his commission and was not interested any more.

‘If you fancy yourself at the telephone, there’s one under the stairs,’ he said. He spoke in a severe minatory voice, as though telephony were a difficult art, and it was presumptuous on my part to pretend to have mastered it. In fact Davidson, who was so often the spokesman of the modern, whose walls were hung with the newest art, had never come to terms with mechanical civilization. Not only did he go deaf if he put a receiver to his ear: even fountain pens and cigarette lighters were white-man’s magic which he would have no dealings with.

While I was making my call, which turned out to be of no possible importance, I was by myself listening to the continuum of noise from the unknown rooms. I felt a prickle of nervousness not, it seemed, because Margaret might be there, but just as though I had ceased to be a man of forty, experienced at going about amongst strangers: I felt as I might have done when I was very young.

When at last I went in I stayed on the outskirts of the room trying to put myself at ease. I looked away from the picture, from the unknown people, out through the window to a night so dark, although it was only nine o’clock in July, that the terrace was invisible: in the middle distance twinkled the lamps along Regent’s Park. Down below the window lights, the pavement was bone-white, the rain had still not fallen.

Then I walked round the room, or rather the two rooms which, for the show, had had their dividing doors folded. There must have been sixty or seventy people there, but apart from Davidson, alert and unpompous among a knot of young men, I did not see a face I knew. Along one long wall were hung a set of non-representational paintings, in which geometrical forms were set in a Turnerian sheen. Along the other were some thickly painted portraits, not quite naturalistic but nearly so. Trying to clamp myself down to study them, I could not settle to it.

I found myself falling back into the refuge I had used at twenty. I used to save my self-respect by the revenges of my observation, and I did so now. Yes, most of the people in these rooms were different animals from those one saw at Lufkin’s dinners or round the committee tables with Hector Rose: different animals in an exact, technical sense: lighter-boned, thinner, less heavily muscled, their nerves nearer the surface, their voices more pent-in: less exalting in their bodies strength than so many of Lufkin’s colleagues — and yet, I was prepared to bet, in many cases more erotic. That was one of the paradoxes which separated these persons from the men of action; I thought of acquaintances of mine in Lufkin’s entourage who walked with the physical confidence, the unself-conscious swagger, of condottieri; but it was not they who were driven, driven to obsession by the erotic life, but men as it might be one or two I saw round me that night, whose cheeks were sunken and limbs shambling, who looked, instead of bold and authoritative like Lufkin’s colleagues, much younger than their years.

Soon someone recognized me, and, opposite one of the non-representational patterns, I was caught up in an argument. In a group of five or six I was the oldest man, and they treated me with respect, one even called me ‘sir’. It was an argument such as we knew by heart in those years, about the future of abstract art. I was talking with the fluency of having been through those tricks before, talking with the middle-aged voice, the practised party voice. They called me ‘sir’, they thought me heterodox, they were not as accustomed to debating or so ready for shock tactics. None of them knew that, five minutes before, I had been nervous and lost.

All the time I was arguing, I was staring over them and past them, just as though I were a young man on the make, looking out at a party for someone more useful than his present company. I had seen no sign of her, but, as the minutes seeped on, I could not keep my glance still.

At last I saw her. She came out of the crowd by the wall opposite ours and farther down the room; she was speaking to a woman, and she spread out her hands in a gesture I had often seen, which suddenly released her animation and gaiety. As she talked my glance was fixed on her: it was many instants before her eyes came my way.

She hesitated in front of a neglected picture and stood there by herself. A young man at my side was speaking insistently, heckling me with polite questions. She was walking towards us. As she came inside our group, the young man halted his speech.

‘Go on,’ said Margaret.

Someone began to introduce me to her.

‘We’ve known each other for years,’ she said, protectively and gently. ‘Go on, I don’t want to interrupt.’

As she stood, her head bent down and receptive, I saw her for an instant as though it were first sight. Excitement, a mixture of impatience and content, had poured into my nerves — but that seemed disconnected from, utterly uncaused by, this face which might have been another stranger’s. Pale, fine rather than pretty, just missing beauty, lips and nostrils clean-cut, not tender until she smiled — it was an interesting face, but not such a face as in imagination I admired most, not even one that, away from her, I endowed her with.

Then the first sight shattered, as I thought she had changed. Five years before, when I had first met her, she could have passed for a girl: but now, at thirty, she looked her full age. Under the light, among the dark hair glinted a line of silver; her skin which, with her blend of negligence and subfusc vanity she used to leave untouched, was made up now, but there were creases round her mouth and eyes. Suddenly I remembered that when I knew her there were some broken veins just behind her cheekbones, odd for so young and fine-skinned a woman; but now under the powder they were hidden.

Standing in the middle of this group she was not embarrassed, as she would have been once. She rested there, not speaking much nor assertively, but a woman among a crowd of younger men: now there was no disguising her energy, her natural force.

The light seemed brighter on the eyes, the pictures farther away, the crowd in the room noisier, voices were high around me, questions came at me, but I had dropped out of the argument. Once, glancing at Margaret, I met her eyes: I had not spoken to her alone. At last the group moved on, and we were left just for an instant isolated, no one listening to us. But now the chance had come, I could not speak: the questions I wanted to ask, after three years of silence, would not come to the tongue, I was like a stutterer needing to bring out his dreaded consonant. We gazed at each other, but I could not utter. The silence tightened between us.

Foolishly I creaked out some remark about the pictures, asking how she liked them, as banal a question as though she was a boring acquaintance with whom I had to make my ration of conversation. In the midst of that nonsense my voice broke away from me, and I heard it sound intense, intimate and harsh.

‘How are you?’

Her tone was kinder, but just as edged: ‘No, how are you?’

Her eyes would not leave mine. Each willed the other to answer first; I gave way.

‘I haven’t much to tell you,’ I said.

‘Tell me what there is.’

‘It could be worse.’

‘You’ve always been ready to bear it, haven’t you?’

‘No, my life isn’t intolerable,’ I said, trying to tell her the precise truth.

‘But what?’

‘There’s not much in it,’ I replied.

‘Yes, I was afraid so.’

‘Were you?’

‘People often talk about you, you know.’

The crowd pressed upon us, they parted me from her, although before we had to talk at large, she was muttering about something she wished for me. She had begun to say it with an impatient, eager smile.

As I was speaking to the newcomers, I noticed a tall youngish man detach himself from another group and whisper to Margaret, who was glancing in my direction.

She looked tired, she seemed to be wanting to go home, but soon she beckoned to me.

‘You haven’t met Geoffrey, have you?’ she said to me. He was a couple of inches taller than my six feet, very thin, long-handed, and long-footed; he was thirty-five, good-looking in a lantern-jawed fashion, with handsome eyes and deep folds in his cheeks. The poise of his head was arrogant, other men would judge him pleased with his looks; but there was nothing arrogant about him as we shook hands, he was as short of conversation as I had been with Margaret a few minutes before, and just as I had opened imbecilely about the pictures, so did he. He had known about me and Margaret long before he married her; now his manner was apologetic, quite unlike his normal, so I fancied, as he asked my opinion of the pictures, in which his interest was, if possible, less than mine.

Margaret said they must be going soon, Helen would be waiting up for them.

‘That’s my sister-in-law,’ Geoffrey explained to me, still over-embarrassed, over-considerate. ‘She’s sitting in with the infant.’

‘She still hasn’t any of her own?’ I asked Margaret. I recalled the times when, joyful ourselves, we had arranged her sister’s well-being, the conspiracies of happiness. Margaret shook her head: ‘No, poor dear, she had no luck.’

Geoffrey caught her eye, and he said, in what I took to be his confident doctor’s voice: ‘It’s a thousand pities she didn’t get some sensible advice right at the beginning.’

‘But yours is well?’ I spoke to both of them, but once more I was asking Margaret.

It was Geoffrey who replied.

‘He’s all right,’ he said. ‘Of course, if you’re not used to very young children, you might get him out of proportion. Actually, for general development, he’d certainly be in the top ten per cent of two-year-olds, but probably not in the top five.’

His tone was exaggeratedly dry and objective, but his eyes were innocent with love. He went on, with the pretence of objectivity which professionals believe conceals their pride: ‘Only yesterday, it’s simply an example, he took a flash lamp to pieces and put it together again. Which I couldn’t have done at the age of four.’

Conscious of Margaret’s silence, I expressed surprise. Geoffrey’s tone changed, and as he spoke to me again I thought I heard something hard, jaunty, almost vindictive: ‘You’d better come and see him for yourself.’

‘No, he wouldn’t enjoy it,’ said Margaret quickly.

‘Why shouldn’t he come for lunch, then he can inspect the boy?’

‘It would be very inconvenient for you.’ Margaret spoke straight to me.

I replied to Geoffrey: ‘I’d like to come.’

Soon afterwards, sharply, Margaret said again that they must be going home. I walked with them out of the room, into the hall, where, through the open door, we could hear the rain pelting down. Geoffrey ran out to bring the car round, and Margaret and I stood side by side staring out into the dark terrace, seeing the rain shafts cut through the beam of light from the doorway. On the pavement the rain hissed and bounced; the night had gone cool; a clean smell came off the trees, making me feel for an instant calm when, knowing nothing else for certain, I knew I was not that.

Neither of us turned towards the other. The car came along the kerb, veils of rain shimmering across the headlights.

‘I shall see you then,’ she said, in a flat, low voice.

‘Yes,’ I said.

38: Significance of a Quarrel

AS I sat between Margaret and Geoffrey Hollis at their dining-table, I wanted to speak amiably to him.

Outside the sun was shining, it was a sleepy middle-of-the-day; no one was to be seen in the Summer Place gardens; the only sound, through the open windows, was the soporific sweep of buses along the Fulham Road. I had only arrived a quarter of an hour before, and we spoke, all three of us, as though we were subdued by the heat. Geoffrey was sitting in a shirt open at the neck, and Margaret in a cotton frock; we ate boiled eggs and salad and drank nothing but iced water. In between times Geoffrey and I exchanged polite curiosity about our working days.

In the dining-room, which was like a pool of coolness after the streets, all we said sounded civil. I was hearing what it meant to be a children’s doctor, the surgery hours, the hospital rounds, the proportion of nights he could expect a call. It was useful, it was devoted, it was no more self-indulgent than the meal he ate. Nor was the way he talked about it. He had admitted that in some respects he was lucky. ‘Compared with other doctors anyway,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Any other sort of doctor is dealing with patients who by and large are going to get worse. With children most of them are going to get better. It gives it quite a different flavour, you see, and that’s a compensation.’

He was provoking me: it was enviable, it was admirable: I wanted to prove it wasn’t.

Suspicious of myself, I changed the subject. Just to keep the conversation easy, I asked him what he thought of some news from the morning’s paper.

‘Oh yes,’ he said indifferently, ‘a parent who came in mentioned it.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I haven’t any idea.’

‘It’s pretty plain, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘But, you see, I haven’t read a morning paper.’

‘Are you as busy as all that?’ I tried to be companionable.

‘No,’ he said, with pleasure, tilting his head back like someone who had taken a finesse. ‘It’s a matter of general policy. Twelve months ago we decided not to take a daily paper. It seemed to me that far more days than not, it was going to make me slightly miserable without any gain to anyone, and with just conceivably a fractional loss of efficiency to myself. In any case I don’t believe in adding to the world’s stock of misery, even if it’s through my own. So we decided the sensible course was to stop the paper.’

‘I couldn’t do that,’ I broke out.

‘Quite seriously,’ said Geoffrey, ‘if a lot of us only bit off what we could chew, and simply concentrated on the things we can affect, there’d be less tension all round, and the forces of sweetness and light would stand more chance.’

‘I believe you’re dangerously wrong,’ I said.

Again he was provoking me; the irritation, which would not leave me alone at that table, was jagging my voice; this time I felt I had an excuse. Partly it was that this kind of quietism was becoming common among those I knew and I distrusted it. Partly Geoffrey himself seemed to me complacent, speaking from high above the battle; and, like many people who led useful and good lives, even like many who had a purity of nature, he seemed insulated by his self-regard.

Suddenly Margaret spoke to me.

‘He’s absolutely right,’ she said.

She was smiling, she was trying to speak easily, as I tried to speak to Geoffrey, but she was worried and angry.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘We’ve got to deal with things that are close enough to handle,’ she said.

‘I don’t believe,’ I said, getting angrier, ‘that you can cut yourself off from the common experience around you. And if you do, I am sure you lose by it.’

‘Lose by it how?’

‘Lose by it as a person. Just like very optimistic people who shut off anything that is painful to see. I should have thought you’d diminish yourself unless you suffer your sufferings as well as enjoy your joys.’

Margaret gave a smile half malicious, as though gratified that my temper had gone higher than hers.

‘The trouble,’ she said, ‘with the very realistic men who live in this world, like you, is that they’re so hopelessly unpractical when it comes to the point. You don’t think Geoffrey’s realistic, but he’s so much more practical than you are that you don’t begin to start. He likes dealing with children and he likes being happy. Hasn’t it occurred to you that no one except you worries whether they’re “diminishing themselves” or not?’

I was getting the worst of it; I could not overbear her — I was hurt because she had taken his side with such an edge.

In return, I found myself talking to hurt.

I reminded her that I had never been comfortable about recipes for the good life — like those of her father’s friends twenty years before — which depended on one’s being an abnormally privileged person.

‘To be honest,’ I looked at Geoffrey and then at her, ‘yours doesn’t seem to me a great improvement. Your whole attitude would be unthinkable unless you happened to have one of the very few jobs which is obviously benevolent, and unless both of you happened to come from families who were used to doing good rather than having good done to them.’

‘Lewis,’ she called out my name for the first time for three years, but furiously, ‘that’s quite unfair!’

‘Is it?’ I asked her, watching the flush mount from her neck.

‘Well, I wouldn’t deny,’ said Geoffrey, with exasperating fairness and a contented, judicious smile, ‘that there may be something in it.’

‘Do you really say that I patronize anyone?’ she cried.

‘With individuals, no, I shouldn’t say so. But when you think about social things, of course you do.’

Her eyes were dark and snapping; her cheeks were flushed; it was as I remembered her when angry, the adrenalin was pumping through her, all pallor had left her and she looked spectacularly well.

‘I must say,’ Geoffrey remarked pacifically, ‘I’m inclined to think he’s right.’

‘I suppose you’ll say I’m a snob next?’ Her eyes, still snapping, were fixed on me.

‘In a rarefied sense, yes.’

Geoffrey reminded her that it was half past one, time to give Maurice his meal. Without speaking, her shoulders set with energy, with anger against me, she took the tray and led us to the nursery.

‘There he is,’ said Geoffrey, as I got my first glance at the child.

His pen was just outside a strong diagonal of sunlight; sitting with his back to the bars, like an animal retreating at the zoo, he was slowly tearing a magazine to pieces. I had only my brother’s boy to compare him with, and despite what I had heard of his manual precocity, I could not see it. I just saw him tearing up the paper with that solemn, concentrated inefficiency characteristic of infants, which made his hand and elbow movements look like those of a drunken man photographed in slow motion.

I did not go up to him, but went on watching as, after Margaret spoke to him, he continued obsessively with his task. He was, and the sight wounded me though I had prepared for it, a most beautiful child. The genes had played one of their tricks, and had collected together in him the best looks of parents and grandparents, so that already, under the india-rubber fat, one could pick out the fine cheekbones of his mother and the poise of his father’s neck. It was easy to imagine him as a young man, dark, indrawn, hard to approach and gaining admirers just because of that.

Margaret was telling him that his meal was ready, but he replied that he did not want it.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, with that matter-of-fact gentleness she showed to a lover.

The little boy was gripping a ping-pong ball, and, as soon as she lifted him from his pen, he began to lam it at a looking-glass over the mantelpiece, and then at a picture near the cot.

Geoffrey left, to fetch something missing from the tray, but the boy paid no notice, and went on throwing the ball. As he let fly, I was scrutinizing the boneless movement of his shoulder, as fluid as though he were double-jointed. Margaret said to me: ‘It’s a nice way for him to be.’

‘Isn’t he rather strong?’ I asked.

She was smiling at me, the quarrel smoothed away by the animal presence of her son. As she stood with him thigh-high beside her, she could not conceal — what at her father’s party she remained silent about, when Geoffrey was so voluble — her passion for the child. It softened and filled out her face, and made her body lax. Pained again, as by the boy’s good looks, I knew that I had not seen her look more tender.

‘It’s nice for him just to chuck himself about,’ she said.

I caught her meaning. Like many of the sensitive, she had wished often, especially before she gained the confidence that she could make a man happy, that her own childhood had been less refined, had been coarser and nearer the earth.

I put in a remark, to let her know I understood, She smiled again: but Maurice began shouting, violent because she was talking away from him.

While he had his meal I remained outside the circle of attention, which was lit by the beam of sun gilding the legs of the high chair. Geoffrey sat on one side, Margaret in front, the child facing her with unflickering eyes. After two or three spoonfuls he would not eat until she sang; as I listened, it occurred to me that, when I had known her, I had not once heard her singing voice. She sang, her voice unexpectedly loud and deep; the child did not take his eyes off her.

The robust sound filled the room: Geoffrey, smiling, was watching the boy: the beam of sunlight fell on their feet, as though they were at the centre of a stage, and the spotlight had gone slightly off the mark.

The meal was over, Geoffrey gave the child a sweet, for an instant the room went dead quiet. They were still sitting with the sunlight round their feet, as Margaret gazed at her son, either unselfconscious or thinking she was not observed. Then after a moment she raised her head, and I felt rather than saw, for I had looked away, that her glance had moved from the child to me. I turned towards her: her eyes did not fall, but her face went suddenly sad. It was only for a second. She gazed again at the little boy, and took his hand.

It had only been for a second, but I knew. I should have known before, when we parted after her father’s party, certainly when she quarrelled with me in defence of Geoffrey at the dining-table, if I had not desired it too much: I knew now that she was not free of me, any more than I of her.

In the hot room, noisy now with the boy’s demands, I felt, not premonition, not responsibility, not the guilt that would have seemed ineluctable if I had seen another in my place, but an absolute exaltation, as though, all in one move, I had joy in my hands and my life miraculously simple. I did not recognize any fear mixed with the joy, I just felt happy and at one.

39: Illusion of Invisibility

IT was a September afternoon when I was waiting, for the first time since her marriage, to meet Margaret alone. It was the day on which I had been helping to interview Gilbert Cooke. Half an hour before I was due at our rendezvous he entered, having already heard from Hector Rose that he was safe.

‘So I diddled them, did I?’ he said, not so much with pleasure as a kind of gloating triumph: which was the way in which he, who did not expect much success, greeted any that came to him. Actually, this was more than a success, for in fact, though not in form, it settled his career for life. Hector Rose was deciding his final judgement on each of the men in the Department who wished to be established in the service; once a week, a committee of four of us sat and interviewed; George Passant’s turn would arrive soon.

‘It can’t come unstuck now, can it?’ Gilbert said, flushed, his eyes bloodshot. I told him that Rose’s nomination would have to be accepted.

‘Damn it,’ cried Gilbert, ‘I never reckoned on finishing up as a Civil Servant.’

‘What did you reckon on?’ I knew he would scarcely be able to answer: for in his career he had always been a curiously vague and unselfseeking man.

‘Oh,’ he said, looking badgered, ‘there was a time when I thought I might make something of it as a soldier. That was before the doctors did me in the eye. And then I thought I might collect some cash with that old shark Lufkin. I don’t know. But the last thing I should ever have dreamt of was finding myself here for good. To tell you the honest truth,’ he burst out, ‘I should never have credited that I was clever enough!’

Oddly, in a certain restricted sense, he was not: he had nothing of the legalistic accuracy and lucidity of the high-class Civil Servant: the deficiency would stop him going very far, as Rose and the others had agreed that day: he would most likely get one rung higher and stop there.

Nevertheless, he had put up a good performance before those men so different from himself. He was so little stiff that Rose felt his own stiffness soften, and enjoyed the sensation: sometimes his refusal to stay at a distance, his zest for breathing down one’s neck, made him paradoxically welcome to correct and buttoned natures. Hector Rose and his colleagues did not over-value him much; they were too experienced, and their judgement too cool for that; they were probably right to keep him; but still, there was no doubt that, if the decision had been a closer thing, he had the advantage that respectable men liked him.

I wondered what they would have thought, if they had guessed at his wilder activities. For instance, it would have startled them to know that, sitting in my office that afternoon, I — after being a friend for a dozen years and his boss for several — was frightened of him. Frightened, that is, of his detective work. I did not dare let out a hint that I was slipping away for tea. Even then I was still nervous of his antennae, as though they might pick up the secret in the air.

Thus, sweating and fretted, I was late when at last I reached the café opposite St James’s Park tube station. Margaret was sitting there, stubs of cigarettes in the ashtray. She looked anxious, but unreproachful and glad.

‘I’ll tell you why I was late,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter, you’re here now.’

‘No, I’d better tell you.’ I could not have got away from Gilbert, I explained, without the danger of his finding out that I was meeting her.

‘Oh well,’ she said. She spoke as though she had not admitted to herself the thought of concealment. At the same moment, her face was flushed with happiness and a kind of defiant shame. Firmly, she began to ask me what I had been doing.

‘I told you, nothing that matters.’

‘No,’ she said, still with energy and animation, ‘I don’t even know where you’re living. You know much more about me than I do about you.’

I told her what I was busy with. I said that I was not held any longer by the chessboard of power: I had gone as far as I intended in the official life.

‘I thought so,’ she said with pleasure, understanding my present better than my past.

‘I am not sure that it would have happened but for you.’

‘It would,’ she said. The cups of tea steamed, a cigarette end smouldered against the metal ashtray, the smell was acrid: I saw her as though the smoked glass of care had been snatched from in front of my eyes. Twenty minutes before I had been on edge lest anyone, as it might be Gilbert, should pass the window and see us sitting there. Now, although we were smiling at each other and our faces would have given us away to an acquaintance, I felt that secrets did not matter, or more exactly that no one could notice us; I had been taken by one of those states, born of understanding, desire, and joy, in which we seem to ourselves anonymous and safe. It was a state which I had seen dangerous to discreet men going through an illicit love-affair, when suddenly, in a fugue of astonished bliss, such a man can behave as if he believed himself invisible.

Her hand was on the table, and I touched her fingers. We had made love together many times, we had none of that surprise to come: but, at the touch, I shivered as though it were a complete embrace.

‘Let me talk to you,’ I said.

‘Can’t we leave it?’ she cried.

‘Can we?’

‘It’d be better to leave it, just for a while.’ She spoke in a tone I had not heard — it held both joy and fear, or something sharper than fear.

‘I used to be pretty expert at leaving things just for a while,’ I said, ‘and it wasn’t an unqualified success.’

‘We’re peaceful now,’ she broke out.

She added: ‘When a thing is said, we can’t come back where we were.’

‘I know it.’ There was a hush. I found myself trying to frame the words, just as when she first forced me on that evening years before — with an inarticulateness more tormenting to one used to being articulate, with the dumbness I only knew when I was compelled to dredge my feelings. ‘It is the same with me,’ I said at length, ‘as when I first met you.’

She did not move or utter.

‘I hope,’ I said, the words dragging out, ‘it is the same with you.’

She said: ‘You don’t hope: you know.’

The room was dark; in the street the sun had gone out. She cried — her voice was transformed, it was light with trust, sharp with the curiosity of present joy: ‘When were you certain it was the same with you?’

‘Some time ago.’

‘Was it that night at my father’s?’

‘If not before,’ I answered. ‘I’ve thought of you very much. But I was afraid my imagination might be cheating me.’

‘What time that night?’

‘I think when you were standing there, before we spoke.’

I asked: ‘When were you certain?’

‘Later.’

She added: ‘But I wanted you to come that night.’

‘If we hadn’t met again there, we should have soon,’ I said.

‘I talked about you to my father. I lied to myself, but I was trying to improve the chances of meeting you—’

‘You needn’t worry, I should have seen to it that we did.’

‘I’m not worrying,’ she said. ‘But I wanted to tell you that we’re both to blame.’

To both of us, blame seemed remote or rather inconceivable; the state of happiness suffused us with its own virtue.

We said no more except chit-chat. Yes, when she could get Helen to look after the child again, she would let me know. It was time for her to go. We went out into the street, where the light had that particular density which gives both gentleness and clarity to the faces of passers-by. The faces moved past us, softly so it seemed, as I watched Margaret put her foot on the taxi-step and she pressed my hand.

40: Happiness and Make-believe

IN the same café a week later Margaret sat opposite me, her face open and softened, as though breathing in the present moment. When I first met her I had been enraptured by her capacity for immediate joy, and so I was now. There had been none of the dead blanks of love between us, such as a man like me might have run into. Once there had been struggle, resentment, and dislike, but not the dead blank.

In the aura from the table-lamp, she was smiling. Outside the window the afternoon light was muted, so that on the pavement faces stood out with a special delicacy. She took the sight in, content and rapacious, determined to possess the moment.

‘It’s like last week,’ she cried. ‘But last week it was a few shades darker, wasn’t it?’

We had not much time. She would have to be home by six, to let her sister go. With a mixture of triumph, humility, and confusion she had told Helen that it was I she was meeting.

She was not used to lying, I thought. She had not before done anything unstraightforward or that caused her shame.

She was happy sitting there opposite me. But I knew that she was, to an extent and for the first time, making believe. What she had replied, when I had declared myself the week before, was true. As we talked, she felt a joy she could not restrain: together, we were having an intimation of a life more desirable than we had known. But I knew that for her, though not for me, it was not quite real. It was a wonderful illusion; but the reality was when she got back to her husband and the child.

In a marriage unhappier than hers, I could not forget how, returning to Sheila in the evening, I gained just one recompense, a feeling of moral calm: and I was sure that in Margaret’s own home, in a marriage which was arid but for the child, it was just that moral calm which she knew. It came upon her when she went home after our meeting, at the first sight of the child. It did not so much wipe away the thought of our meeting as make it seem still delectable but unreal.

It was that which I had to break. I did not want to: we were in a harmony that seemed outside of time: we could go on talking as though it were a conversation more serene than any the most perfect marriage could give, with no telephone bell, no child’s voice, to interrupt. But my need was too great, I could not leave it there.

Once more I was dredging for what I had to say.

‘When I told you,’ I began, ‘that it was the same with me, there is one difference.’

‘Is there?’ She said it with doubt and reluctance.

I went on: ‘In our time together you were right and I was wrong.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes, it does, because there is a difference now. I hope I’ve changed a little in myself, I know I’ve changed in what I want.’

Her eyes were as brilliant as when she was angry: she did not speak.

I said: ‘I want for us exactly what you always did.’

‘I never thought I should hear you say that!’

She had cried out with joy: then, in an instant, her tone was transformed.

‘Other things have changed too,’ she said.

She looked straight at me, and asked: ‘Are you sure?’

In a time so short that I could not measure it, her mood had flickered as I had never seen in her, from triumphant joy to bitterness and shame, and then to concern for me.

‘No,’ she broke out, ‘I take that back, I shouldn’t have said it. Because you couldn’t have done this unless you were sure.’

‘I’m sure of what I want,’ I repeated. ‘As I say, I hope I have changed in myself, but of that I can’t be sure, it’s very hard to know what’s happening in one’s own life.’

‘That’s rather funny, from you.’ Again her mood had switched, she was smiling with affectionate sarcasm. She meant that, herself used to being in touch with her own experience, she had discovered the same in me. On the surface so unlike, at that level we were identical. Perhaps it was there, and only there, that each of us met the other half of self.

‘Once or twice,’ I said, ‘I’ve woken up and found my life taking a course I’d never bargained on. Once upon a time I thought I knew the forces behind me pretty well — but now it seems more mysterious than it used to, not less. Isn’t that so with you?’

‘It may be.’ She added: ‘If it is, it’s frightening.’

‘For me, it’s made me less willing to sit down to—’

I stumbled for a moment.

‘Sit down to what?’

‘To my own nature: or anyway the side of it which did us both such harm.’

‘It wasn’t all your doing,’ she said.

I answered: ‘No, not all. I agree, I won’t take all the responsibility, not more than I have to.’

We fell into a silence, one of those doldrums that sometimes take over in a mutual revelation, just as in a scene of violence.

She began, in a manner gentle and apparently realistic: ‘If it were possible for us to start again, you’d look very foolish, wouldn’t you? Especially to those who know our story.’

I nodded.

‘It would seem inconceivably foolish at the best,’ she said.

‘They’d have a certain justice,’ I replied.

‘You haven’t had much practice at looking foolish, have you? Have you begun to imagine how humiliating it would be? Particularly when people think you’re so wise and stable?’

‘I can ride that,’ I said.

‘It might not be so nice.’

She went on: ‘Those who love you would blame poor Sheila — and those who don’t would say there’d always been something wrong with you and now you’ve come out into the open and shown it.’

‘One’s enemies are often righter than one’s friends.’

‘They’re not. That’s the sort of remark that sounds deep and is really very shoddy.’ She said it with love.

The café was emptying, our time was running out. She said, in a sharp, grave tone: ‘But what they would think of you, perhaps you’re right, that’s not the real point. The real point is, you’ve not had much practice at behaving badly, have you?’

I said: ‘I’ve done bad things.’

‘Not like what this would be.’

‘The way I behaved to you before,’ I said, ‘was worse than anything I have to do now.’

‘This way,’ she said, ‘you know what you would be asking me to do.’ She meant — do harm to others, act against her nature and beliefs.

‘Do you think I haven’t faced that?’

She said: ‘I was not absolutely sure.’

Yet, though she seemed to be speaking realistically, there was a haze of happiness round her, and me also. Incongruously I recalled the night when Lufkin, at the height of his power, indulged a romantic dream of retiring to Monaco. She too was speaking of a future that in her heart she did not expect to see. Usually her spirit was nakeder than mine: for once it was the other way about. Her face, her skin, her eyes were happy: yet she was levitated with something like the happiness of a dream.

I did not doubt that, in my absence, she would have to listen again to what I had said.

Once more she spoke gently, reasonably, intimately.

‘If we could make a new start, I should be afraid for you.’

‘I need it—’

‘You’d know,’ she said, ‘you’ve just said you know, what it would mean for me to come to you. You’d be committed more than anyone ought to be. If things ever went wrong, and it might be harder for you day by day than you could possibly foresee, then I’m afraid you’d feel obliged to endure forever.’

‘You can’t be much afraid,’ I said.

‘I should be, a little.’

She could keep her words honest, so could I — while, with the lamp on the table between us, our hopes were expanding, sweeping us with them into a gigantic space of well-being. Our hopes no longer had any connexion with the honest, doubting words we said.

41: End of an Epoch

AFTER that second meeting, and before we could contrive another, a chance to be unclandestine came along, for we were invited to the same wedding-party. In itself, the occasion would have been startling enough: when I saw the invitation I felt fooled. The party was to announce the marriage that had taken place, weeks before, in secret — the marriage of Gilbert Cooke and Betty Vane.

As I walked along the river to the house they had borrowed for the night, a house near Whistler’s, which in those years had become just a place to be hired, I was both elated, because of Margaret, and faintly sad, self-indulgently in tune with the autumn night. It was drizzling and warm, the leaves slippery on the pavement, the smell of must all round; it was an autumn night which held more sensual promise than the spring.

I was not thinking much about Betty and Gilbert. When I first heard the news I had been piqued because she had not confided in me. Maybe she had, it occurred to me, a year or more ago: more likely than not, this was what she meant by her chance to settle down. Should I have told her that I did not believe the marriage could work? She was so shrewd, she would know what I felt without my saying it. I knew too well, however, that the shrewd and clear-sighted, if they are unhappy and unsettled and lonely enough, as she was, can delude themselves at least as much as, perhaps more than, less worldly people.

Yet, as I went towards the party, the lights from the windows shimmering out into the drizzle, I was aware of other thoughts drifting through my mind, as though this marriage were an oddly final thing. For me it seemed to call out time, it was the end of an epoch. I had known them each so long, Betty for nearly twenty years. We had seen in each other youth passing, causes dribbling out, hopes cutting themselves down to fit our fates: our lives had interleaved, we had seen each other in the resilience of youth’s flesh, on and off for years we had, in the other’s trouble, helped pick up the pieces. Now we saw each other when the covers and disguises were melting away, when the bones of our nature were at last showing through.

Our life of the thirties, our wartime life, was over now. Somehow the gong sounded, the door clanged to, more decisively through her marriage than through any fatality to those who touched me to the roots — through her, who was just a comrade, someone I had been fond of without fuss.

In the house, the first person I recognized was old Bevill, drinking a glass of champagne at the bottom of the stairs and talking to a pretty girl. The downstairs rooms were already full of people, and I had to push my way upstairs to reach the main origin of noise. As I passed him, Bevill told me that Gilbert and his wife were ‘up above’. He said: ‘I always wondered when our friend would succumb. Do you know, Lewis, I’ve been married forty-eight years. It makes you think.’

The old man was radiant with champagne and the company of the young. He began to tell us the story about Betty Vane’s father — ‘We were at school together, of course. We never thought he’d come into the title, because there was that cousin of his who went off his head and stayed off his head for thirty years. So it didn’t look much of a cop for Percy Vane. We didn’t call him Percy, though, we called him Chinaman Vane — though I haven’t the faintest idea why, he didn’t look like a Chinaman, whatever else they could say about him.’

This incongruity struck Bevill as remarkably funny, and his bald head flushed with his chortles: he was content to stand in the hall without inserting himself into the grander circles of the party. But there were others who were not: the main room upstairs was packed with immiscible groups, for Gilbert and Betty had invited guests from all the strata they had lived among. There was Lord Lufkin and some of his court, from Gilbert’s business past: acquaintances from Chelsea before the war, the radicals, the ill-fitting, the lumpen-bourgeoisie.

There were a good many Civil Servants, among them Hector Rose, for once at a disadvantage, abnormally uncomfortable and effusively polite, detesting the sight of any society except in the office and the club. There was George Passant, moving about alone, with that expression unfocused, reverie-laden, absently smiling, which at this time more and more came over him in the proximity of women. There were Gilbert’s relatives, many of them soldiers, small-headed, thin, gravel-voiced. There were Betty’s, the younger women talking in the curious distorted Cockney of their generation of the upper-class, huddled together like a knot of scientists at the British Association anxious not to be interrupted by camp-followers.

In all those faces there was only one I looked for. Soon I discovered her, listening but not participating at the edge of a large circle, her eyes restlessly looking out for me. As at her father’s, we met alone in the crowd.

‘That’s better,’ she said.

‘I wish I could have brought you,’ I said.

‘I was touching wood, I didn’t like to ask for you.’

She was excited; as she lit a cigarette, there was a tremor in her fingers.

‘Who have you been talking to?’

‘Oh, I haven’t got as far as that.’ She was laughing, not only with excitement, but at herself. Even now that she was grown-up, she was still shy. If this had been an ordinary party, not a cover for the two of us to meet, she would still have had to brace herself to cope: though, when once she had started, she revelled in it.

‘We’re here, anyway, and that’s lucky,’ I said.

‘It is lucky,’ she replied with an active restless smile.

I was just telling her that soon we could slip away downstairs and talk, when Betty herself joined us.

‘Lewis, my dear. Won’t you wish me luck?’

She held out her arms, and I kissed her cheek. Then, bright-eyed, she glanced at Margaret.

‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we?’ said Betty.

‘You have,’ I was putting in, when Betty went on: ‘Anyway, I’m sorry, but will you tell me who you are?’

It sounded at best forgetful, it sounded also rude, for Betty’s manner to a stranger was staccato and brusque. Yet she was the least arrogant of women, and I was at the same time astonished by her and upset to see Margaret wilt.

‘My name,’ she said, with her chin sunk down, ‘is Margaret Hollis.’

‘Oh, now I know,’ cried Betty. ‘You used to be Margaret Davidson, didn’t you?’

Margaret nodded.

‘I’ve heard my husband talk about you.’

With the same heartiness, the same apparent lack of perception, Betty went on with meaningless gossip, not caring that Margaret and I were looking strained. Yes, her husband Gilbert was a friend of Margaret’s sister Helen, wasn’t he? Yes, Gilbert had spoken about Helen’s husband. At last Betty broke off, saying to Margaret: ‘Look, there are some people here who I want you to meet. I’ll take you along straightaway.’

Margaret was led off. I had to let her go, without protecting her. It was a bitterness, known only to those in illicit love, not to be able to be spontaneous. I was reckoning how much time I had to allow before I could take her away.

Meanwhile, myself at a loss, I looked round. Gilbert, high-coloured, was surveying his guests with bold, inquisitive eyes. They were the collection of acquaintances of half-a-lifetime; I expected his detective work was still churning on; but I was thinking again, as I had done walking to the house, how this was some sort of end. For Gilbert who, despite his faults, or more precisely because of them, cared as little for social differences as a man can do, had travelled a long way through society, just as I had myself, in the other direction.

So had Betty: the unlucky mattered, politics mattered, friends mattered, and nothing else. When I had first met them both, it had seemed to us all self-evident that society was loosening and that soon most people would be indifferent to class. We had turned out wrong. In our forties we had to recognize that English society had become more rigid, not less, since our youth. Its forms were crystallizing under our eyes into an elaborate and codified Byzantinism, decent enough, tolerable to live in, but not blown through by the winds of scepticism or individual protest or sense of outrage which were our native air. And those forms were not only too cut-and-dried for us: they would have seemed altogether too rigid for nineteenth-century Englishmen. The evidence was all about us, even at that wedding party: quite little things had, under our eyes, got fixed, and, except for catastrophes, fixed for good. The Hector Roses and their honours lists: it was a modern invention that the list should be systematized by Civil Service checks and balances: they had ceased to be corrupt and unpredictable, they were now as hierarchically impeccable as the award of coloured hats at the old Japanese Court. And I did not believe that I was seduced by literary resonances when I imagined that Betty Vane’s and Thomas Bevill’s relatives were behaving like Guermantes.

Just as the men of affairs had fractionated themselves into a group with its own rules and its own New Year’s Day rewards, just as the arts were, without knowing it, drifting into invisible academies, so the aristocrats, as they lost their power and turned into ornaments, shut themselves up and exaggerated their distinguishing marks in a way that to old Bevill, who was grander than any of them, seemed rank bad manners, and what was worse, impolitic. But old Bevill belonged to a generation where the aristocracy still kept some function and so was unselfconscious: in his time it was far more casual, for example, where you went to school; when he told his anecdote about Percy Vane, the school they were both attending was not Eton; yet it was to Eton, without one single exception in the families I knew, that they sent their sons, with the disciplined conformity of a defiant class. With the same conformity, those families were no longer throwing up the rebels that I had been friendly with as a young man; Betty Vane and Gilbert Cooke had no successors.

Looking round their wedding party, I could not shake off a cliché of those years, this was the end of an epoch; I should have liked the company of those who could see one beginning.

A twitch at my arm, and Betty was glancing up at me.

‘All right?’ she said.

‘Are you?’ Angrily, I wanted to ask why she had been rude to Margaret: but once more I had to calculate.

‘Yes, my dear.’

‘I never thought of this happening to you.’

‘I can manage it,’ she said. It was not just her courage and high spirits: she meant it.

She broke off sharp: ‘I’m sorry I had to cart her off. But people were watching you.’

‘Does that matter?’ I replied blank-faced.

‘You ought to know.’

‘What do you expect me to know?’

‘So long as you realize that people were watching you.’

‘I see.’

‘That’s all I can do for you now,’ said Betty.

She was, of course, warning me about her husband. It removed my last doubt that she might not know him right through, and on her account I was relieved. She was too loyal to say more, perhaps this was the one crack in her loyalty I should ever see, and she only revealed it because she thought I was running into danger. She had done me so many good turns; I was touched by this last one.

And yet, I could not be sure why she had been so uncivil to Margaret. It had not been necessary, not even as a ruse. At their only other encounter, she had thought Margaret rude: was she getting her own back? Or had she genuinely forgotten Margaret’s face? No one had indulged less in petty spite — just for a second, had she been doing so?

Just as I had got out of the room, on the balcony on my way downstairs to Margaret, someone intercepted me. For minutes I was pegged there, the glasses tinkling on the trays as they were carried past, the noise climbing in amplitude and pitch, Gilbert leaning from the door and taking note.

Over the banisters, when I broke away, I saw Margaret standing about down below.

‘I feel a bit badgered,’ I said as soon as I reached her, all tension leaving me.

‘So do I.’

‘Still, we’re here, and it’s worth it.’

She called out my name, quietly but with all her force, more of an endearment than any could be. Her expression was brilliant, and until she spoke again I totally misread it.

‘Isn’t it?’ I cried.

In the same quiet and passionate tone, she said: ‘We’re deceiving ourselves, aren’t we?’

‘About what?’

‘About us.’

‘I’ve never been so sure,’ I said.

‘It’s too late. Haven’t we known all along it’s too late?’

‘I haven’t.’

‘I’m just not strong enough,’ she said. I had never known her ask for pity before.

‘You will be,’ I said, but I had lost my nerve.

‘No. It’s too late. I knew it, tonight. I knew it,’ she said.

‘We can’t decide anything now.’ I wanted to soothe her.

‘There’s nothing to decide.’ She used my name again, as though that was all she could tell me.

‘There will be.’

‘No, it’s too hard for me.’

‘Come out with me—’

‘No. Please get me a taxi and let me go home.’

‘We shall have to forget all this.’

For an instant I heard my voice hard.

‘There’s no future in it,’ she cried, using the slang flatly instead of her own words. ‘Let me go home.’

‘I shall speak to you tomorrow.’

‘It will be cruel if you do.’

Guests were passing us on their way out, and looking at her, knowing that she was near breaking-point, I could do nothing. I called out to the porter and asked him to find a cab. She thanked me, almost effusively, but I shook my head, my eyes still on her, trying to make my own choice, trying not to be crippled by the habits of defeat, the recurrent situations, the deepest traps within me.

42: Apparent Choice

LISTENING the next afternoon to George Passant talking of his future, I said nothing of mine. For months, almost for years, since my resolve about Margaret began to form, I had not hinted even at a hope, except to her; but it was not only secretiveness that kept me reticent with George, it was something like superstition. For I had telephoned Margaret that morning, insisting that we should meet and talk it out, and she had given way.

‘Assuming that I’m kept in this department, which I take it is reasonable, then I may as well plan on living in London for the rest of my life,’ said George.

His interview was arranged for a fortnight hence; and George, with the optimism which he had preserved undented from his youth, through ill-luck and worse than ill-luck, took the result for granted.

‘I haven’t any idea,’ I said — it was true, but I could not help being alarmed by George’s hubris — ‘what Rose intends to do about you.’

‘Whatever we think of Rose,’ George replied comfortably, ‘we have to admit that he’s a highly competent man.’

‘His personal choices are sometimes odd.’

‘I should have said,’ George was unaffected, ‘that he paid some attention to justice.’

‘I don’t deny that,’ I said. ‘But—’

‘In that case we’re reasonably entitled to consider that he’s pretty well informed of what I’ve done here.’

‘Within limits that’s probably so.’

‘You’re not going to tell me,’ George was getting argumentative, ‘that a man as competent as Rose isn’t going to see a certain slight difference in effectiveness between what I’ve done here and what some of those other nice young gentlemen from upper-class Bastilles (George meant public schools) have twittered about trying to do. Take old Gilbert. He’s not a bad chap to have a drink with, he’s always been exceedingly pleasant to me, but God preserve my eternal soul, I can shift more in an afternoon than Gilbert can manage dimly to comprehend in three weeks’ good hard slogging.’

‘You’re preaching to the converted,’ I said.

‘Well, if you’re handsome enough to concede that simple point,’ George replied, ‘you can perhaps understand why I don’t propose to indulge in unnecessary worry.’

Yet I, who was upset by George’s kind of hope, lived with my own; I found it driving me almost as though I were obeying another person’s instructions: I found it driving me, a little absurdly, to talk to a lawyer about divorce. Just as it was slipping out of control, I asserted some caution, even more absurdly: so that, setting out to talk to a lawyer, I did not go to one of the divorce experts whom I had known when I was practising at the Bar, but instead, as though avoiding going under a ladder at the last minute, just paid as it were a friendly call on my old master, Herbert Getliffe.

The morning was dark: murk hung over the river, and in chambers the lights were on. It might have been one of the autumn mornings nearly twenty years before, when I sat there, looking out of the window, with nothing to do, avid for recognition, bitter because it would not come. But I felt no true memory of that past: somehow, although I had not revisited the place for years, no trigger released the forces of past emotion, my sense of faint regret was general and false. No trigger clicked, even when I read the list of names at the foot of the staircase, a list where my own name had stood as late as the end of the war: Mr Getliffe, Mr W Allen…they had been there before my time. No trigger clicked, even when I went into Getliffe’s room, smelt the tobacco once so familiar, and met the gaze of the bold, opaque and tricky eyes.

‘Why, it’s old L S,’ said Herbert Getliffe, giving me his manly, forthright handshake. He was the only man alive who called me by my initials: he did it with an air both hearty and stern, as though he had just been deeply impressed by a code of gravitas. In fact, he was a man of immense cunning, mercurial and also impressionable. His face was fat and rubbery, his lips red and, despite himself, even in his most magisterial acts there was an imp not far from his eyes. When I had worked in his chambers he had treated me with a mixture of encouragement and lavish unscrupulousness: since then we had kept an affection, desultory and suspicious, for each other. Even now, it surprised me that he was one of the more successful silks at the common law bar: but that was the fact.

I had only seen him once or twice since the night of the Barbican dinner before the war, when I went home to Sheila drunk and elated. I asked how he was getting on.

‘It would be ungrateful to grumble,’ he replied in a stately fashion. ‘One manages to earn one’s bread and butter’ — as usual, he could not keep it up, and he winked — ‘and a little piece of cake.’

‘What about you, L S?’ He was genuinely curious about others, it was one of his strengths. ‘Every time I hear about you, you seem to be flourishing.’

Yes, I said, things had gone comparatively well.

‘You go from power to power, don’t you? Backstairs secrets and gentlemen in little rooms with XYZ after their names, all clamping collars round our necks,’ he said, with a kind of free association. He broke out: ‘There was a time when I used to think you’d become an ornament here.’ He grinned: ‘In that case, just about this year of grace we should have begun to cut each other’s throats.’

‘I’m sure we should,’ I said.

Getliffe, his mood changing within the instant, looked at me in reproach.

‘You mustn’t say those things, L S. You mustn’t even think them. There’s always room at the top and people like you and me ought to help each other.

‘Do you know,’ he added in a whisper, ‘that just now one has to turn down cases one would like to take?’

‘Too busy?’

‘One’s never too busy for a thousand smackers,’ said Getliffe frowning: he was, unexpectedly so after the first impression he made, one of the most avaricious of men.

‘Well then?’

‘One comes to a stage when one doesn’t want to drop any bricks.’

He was coy, he repeated his allusion, looked at me boldly like a child expecting to be caught out, but would not explain. Then I realized. There would be vacancies on the Bench soon, Getliffe was in the running, and throughout his whole career he would have sacrificed anything, even his great income, to become a judge. As he sat there that morning I thought I was seeing him almost on top of his world, Getliffe in excelsis, one of the few men I had ever seen in sight of all he wanted. It was to him at that moment that I had to let my secret out.

‘Herbert,’ I mentioned it casually, ‘I may want, it isn’t certain but I may, a bit of advice about a divorce case.’

‘I thought your poor wife was dead,’ Getliffe replied, and his next words overlay the first: ‘I’m very sorry to hear it, L S.’

‘I may want some professional advice about how to get it through as painlessly as possible.’

‘I’ve always been happily married,’ Getliffe reproved me. ‘I’m thankful to say that the thought of divorce has never come into either of our heads.’

‘Anyone would like to be in your position,’ I told him. ‘But—’

‘I always say,’ Getliffe interrupted, ‘that it takes a sense of humour to make a success of marriage. A sense of humour, and do-unto-others — especially one other — as-you-would-they-should-do-unto-you. That’s what it takes.’

‘Some of us aren’t quite as lucky.’

‘Anyway,’ said Getliffe, suddenly curious, ‘what position are you in?’

I knew that, although tricky, he was also discreet. I told him that I had known a woman, whose name did not matter at present, before her marriage: she had been married under four years and had a child not yet three: now she and I had met again, and wished to get married ourselves.

‘Well, L S, I’ve got to tell you what I think as man-to-man, and I’ve got to tell you that your decent course is to get out.’

‘No, I shan’t do that,’ I said.

‘I’ve thought of you as a fellow-sinner, but I’ve never thought of you as heartless, you know.’

He looked at me without expression, and for an instant his tricks, his moral indignation and boasting dropped away: ‘Tell me, old chap, is this desperately important for you?’

I said the one word: ‘Yes.’

‘I see.’ His tone was kind.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s no use saying any more about what I think. I can tell you the best chap to go to, of course, but you probably know that yourself. But, if you must, I should go to — Do you know that he’s pulling in £20,000 a year these days? It’s a very easy side of the profession, L S, and sometimes one wishes that one hadn’t started off with one’s principles.’

‘At this stage,’ I said, ‘I doubt if he could say anything that you and I don’t know. You see, the woman I want to marry has nothing to complain of from her husband.’

‘Will he play? Between you and me and these four walls, I shouldn’t if I were in his shoes.’

‘It wouldn’t be reasonable to ask him, even if we felt able to,’ I replied. ‘He happens to be a doctor.’

Getliffe regarded me with a hot-eyed, flustered look: ‘Tell me, L S, are you co-habiting with her?’

‘No.’

I was not sure that he believed me. He was, at one and the same time, deeply religious, prudish, and sensual: and, as a kind of combined result, he was left with the illusion that the rest of mankind, particularly those not restrained by faith, spent their whole time in regulated sexual activity.

Recovering from his excitement, he became practical about legal ways and means, which I was conversant with, which normally I should have found tiresome or grittily squalid, but which that morning gave me a glow of confidence. The smoke-dark sky, the reading-lamp on Getliffe’s desk, the tobacco smell: the hotel evidence we should want: the delay between the suit being filed and the hearing: the time-lag before the decree absolute: as I discussed them, I had forgotten how much I had invented, talking to Getliffe. It sounded down-to-earth, but for me it was the opposite.

The next afternoon, the November cloud-cap still lay low over the town, and looking out from my flat, past the reflection of the lamp in the window whose curtains were not drawn, I saw the park prematurely grey. Each instant I was listening for the lift outside, for Margaret for the first time had promised to come to me there. She was not yet due, it was only ten to four, but I had begun to listen for her early. With five minutes still to go, I heard the grinding and cranking of the antique machine, and went out on to the dark landing. The lights of the lift slowly moved up; there she was in the doorway, her cheeks pink from the cold air, hands tucked inside her fur coat, her eyes brilliant as though she were relaxed at being in the warm.

Straightaway she came into my arms, the fur comforting under my palms as I held her. After we had kissed, but while she was still close to me, she said: ‘I’ve thought about being with you.’

She added: ‘It’s been a long time.’

As she took off her coat her movements were assured, flowing and without nerves: she was enjoying herself; she was so different from the woman who had left me at the party that I was both delighted and taken aback. Somehow I felt that, high as her spirits were, they were still deluding her.

Sitting on the sofa, she held out her feet to the electric fire, and I took my place beside her and put my arm round her. It was all as simple, as domestic, as though we had never parted.

‘I’m sorry about that night,’ she said.

‘I was afraid.’

‘You needn’t have been.’

‘I didn’t believe it was the end.’

‘It’s not so easy to end as all that, is it?’ she said, with a sarcastic smile but her eyes light.

‘I hope it’s not,’ I said. ‘I don’t only hope it, but I think it.’

‘Go on thinking it,’ she cried, leaning back against my arm.

We were both looking across the room towards the windows, where, the sky having darkened and closed in, we saw nothing but the images of the room’s lights. We were each in that state — and we knew it in the other — which was delectable and deceptive, lazy on the tide of unadmitted desire.

‘I don’t want to move,’ she said.

It was some time, it might only have been seconds, before she made herself sit straight and look at me. She had the air of positive resolve which comes to one when cutting through a tangle. She had gone through nights, just as I had, when all seemed simple: then next morning the tangle was unresolvable again. That afternoon, she had come feeling all was clear.

‘Whatever we do, it isn’t going to be easy, is it?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘nothing can be easy when we have so many people to think of.’

I was not ready to reply, when she reiterated: ‘It isn’t only ourselves, there are two others I’m bound to care for.’

‘You don’t think I’ve forgotten about Geoffrey and the child, do you?’

‘You can’t ask me to hurt either of them. I’ll do anything for you if I don’t have to hurt them. I’m all yours.’

Her face was passionate and self-willed. She said: ‘That’s the proposition I’ve got to make. We’ve got to hide it. I never thought I should want to hide anything, but I’ll do it for you, I’ll do it because I need you. It will take some hiding, I shall have to let Helen into it so that I can get away, I shan’t be able to come to you more than once or twice a week, but that will make up for everything. It’ll rescue us, we can go on forever, and we’re luckier than most people ever will be in their lives.’

The sight of the flush on her cheeks, usually so pale, excited me.

I went to the fireplace. As I looked down at her, I had never wanted her more. I was seized with memories of taking her, the words we had muttered; I was shaken by one memory, a random one, not specially ecstatic, of lifting her naked in front of a looking-glass, which came from so deep as to be almost tactile.

I was thinking also how perfectly it would suit me to have her as my mistress, a relation which would give me the secretive joy I doted on, make no new claims on me, leave me not struggling any more to reshape my life.

It seemed as near a choice as I had had.

I heard my own voice, thick and rough: ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It must be all or nothing.’

‘How can it be either?’

‘It must be.’

‘You’re asking too much.’

‘Have you begun to think,’ I asked, ‘what a secret affair would mean to you? It would have its charm to start with, of course it would, everyone who’s lived an open life always hankers after concealments and risks. But you’d soon get over that, and then you’d find it meant lies upon lies. Corroding every other relation you had in order to sustain one that you began to dislike more and more. You haven’t been used to playing confidence tricks. It would mean for you that you’d never behave again as you like to behave—’

‘I dare say it would mean all that,’ she said. ‘But, if it avoids pain for others, do you think I should be put off?’

My hand gripping the mantelpiece, I said as simply as I could: ‘It would not avoid pain for me.’

‘I was afraid of that.’

‘I don’t mean jealousy, I mean deprivation. If I took you on your terms, I should lose what I want most of all. I’m not thinking of you at all now, I’m just thinking of myself.’

‘I’m glad,’ she said.

‘I want you to be with me all the time. I believe we shall be happy, but I can’t promise it. But you know it better than anyone will ever do, I’m not good at living face-to-face with another human being. Unless you’re with me I shall never do it.’

As I spoke, she had bent her head into her hands, so that I could only see her hair.

‘I can’t be sad, I can’t be,’ she said at last. ‘But I don’t see that there is a way through.’

She looked up, her eyes lucid, and said: ‘I can’t get out of talking to you about Geoffrey, though you won’t like it.’

‘Go on,’ I replied.

‘I don’t want to make it too dramatic. I’m fond of him, but I’m not driven to him as I am to you. I’m not even sure how much he depends on me—’

‘Well then.’

‘It may be a good deal. I must tell you this, I used to hope it was.’

She went on: ‘I don’t know him, I never have done, as well as I do you. I don’t know how strong his feelings are. His senses are strong, he enjoys himself very easily, he’s inclined to be impatient with people who don’t find life as easy as he does.’

She wanted to believe that that was all. She was trying not to give herself the benefit of the doubt. The words she said — just as when we first met secretly in the café — were honest. But once again her hopes, and mine also, were stronger than the words. She wanted to believe that he did not need her much. I wanted to believe it too.

Then she burst out — ‘He’s never done a thing to me or said a thing to me that isn’t as considerate as it could be. He’s not given me a single bad hour to hold against him. How can I go to him and say, “Thank you, you’ve been good to me, now for no reason that I can possibly give you I intend to leave you cold.”’

‘I am ready to speak to him,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said violently. ‘I won’t be talked over.’

For an instant, temper, something deeper than temper, blazed from her eyes. She smiled at me: ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I wish I could be angry with him, and it makes me angry with you instead.

‘As for talking me over,’ she added, ‘he might not mind, he might regard it as civilized. But you and I aren’t civilized enough for that.’

‘I will do anything to bring him to the point,’ I said.

‘Not that.’

‘Then will you?’

‘After what I’ve said, you oughtn’t to ask me.’

As I stood by the mantelpiece in the bright room, watching her on the sofa, the curtains still not drawn and the winter sky black above the park, the air was heavy between us, heavy in a way no tenderness could light.

‘Do you think I like you having the harder part?’ I said.

‘I’ll do anything but that.’

‘It’s our only hope.’

‘I beg you,’ she said, ‘let’s try my way.’

It was a long time before, in the heavy thudding air, I could reply.

‘No,’ I said.

43: Visit from a Well-wisher

ONE afternoon in the following week, when I was still in suspense, my secretary came into the office and said that Mr Davidson was asking to see me. Behind my papers, for I was busy that day, I welcomed him, apprehensive of the mention of Margaret’s name which did not come.

I was incredulous that he had dropped in just because he was in tearing spirits and liked my company.

‘Am I interrupting you?’ he said, and chuckled.

‘That’s an unanswerable question,’ he broke out. ‘What does one say, when one’s quite openly and patently in the middle of work, and some ass crassly asks whether he’s interrupting you?’

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘this can all wait.’

‘The country won’t stop?’ With a gesture as lively as an undergraduate’s, he brushed the quiff of grey hair off his forehead. ‘You see, I’m looking for someone to brag to. And there’s no one else in this part of London whom I can decently brag to, at least for long enough to be satisfactory.’

He had just, calling at the Athenaeum, received the offer of an honorary degree, not from his own university but from St Andrews. ‘Which is entirely respectable,’ said Davidson. ‘Of course, it doesn’t make the faintest difference to anything I’ve tried to do. If in twenty years five people read the compositions of an obsolete critic of the graphic arts, it won’t be because some kind academic gentleman gave him an LL.D. In fact, it’s dubious whether critics ought to get any public recognition whatever. There’s altogether too much criticism now, and it attracts altogether too much esteem. But still, if any criticism is going to attract esteem, I regard it as distinctly proper that mine should.’

I smiled. I had witnessed a good many solid men receive honours, men who would have dismissed Davidson as bohemian and cranky: solid men who, having devoted much attention to winning just such honours, then wondered whether they should accept them, deciding, after searching their souls, that they must for their wives’ and colleagues’ sakes. By their side, Austin Davidson was so pure.

‘The really pressing problem is,’ said Davidson, ‘to make sure that all one’s acquaintances have to realize the existence of this excellent award. They have a curious tendency not to notice anything agreeable which comes one’s way. On the other hand, if someone points out in a very obscure periodical that Austin Davidson is the worst art critic since Vasari, it’s quite remarkable how everyone I’ve ever spoken to has managed to fix his eyes on that.

‘Of course,’ Davidson reflected happily, ‘I suppose one would only be kept completely cheerful if they had a formula to include the name in most public announcements. Something like this. “Since the Provost and Fellows of Eton College have been unable to secure the services of Mr Austin Davidson, they have appointed as Headmaster…” Or even “Since HM has not been successful in persuading Mr Austin Davidson of the truths of revealed religion, he has elevated to the See of Canterbury…”’ He was so light-hearted, I did not want to see him go, the more so as I knew now he had detected nothing about Margaret and me. A few months before, I had been hyper-aesthetized for the opposite reason, hoping to hear him bring out her name.

Enjoying himself, he also did not want to part. It was getting too late for tea in the cafés near Whitehall, and Davidson drank little: so I suggested a place in Pimlico, and, as Davidson had a passion for walking, we started off on foot. He lollopped along, his steps thudded on the dank pavement; his fancies kept flicking out. When we passed the dilapidated rooms-by-the-hour-or-night hotels of Wilton Road, he jerked with his thumb at one, a little less raffish, with its door shut and the name worse for wear over the fanlight.

‘How much should I have to pay you to spend a night there?’

‘You pay the bill too?’

‘Certainly I pay the bill.’

‘Well then, excluding the bill, three pounds.’

‘Too much,’ said Davidson severely, and clumped on.

I had wanted to escape that meeting, and it turned out a surprise: so did another which I did not want to escape — with his daughter Helen. When she telephoned and said, not urgently so far as I could hear, that she would like to see me, I was pleased: and I was pleased when I greeted her on the landing of my flat.

It was years since I had seen her; and, as soon as I could watch her face under my sitting-room light, I wondered if I should have guessed her age. She was by now in her late thirties, and her cheeks and neck were thinning; her features, which had always had the family distinction without her sister’s bloom, had sharpened. Yet, in those ways passing or already passed into scraggy middle-age, she nevertheless had kept, more than any of us, the uncovered-up expression of her youth: she had taken on no pomp at all, not even the simple pomp of getting older: there was nothing deliberate about her, except for the rebellious concern about her clothes, which, I suspected, had by now become automatic, even less thought-about than Margaret’s simplicity. Her glance and smile were as light as when she was a girl.

‘Lewis,’ she said at once, ‘Margaret has told me about you two.’

‘I’m glad of it.’

‘Are you?’ She knew enough about me to be surprised: she knew that, holding this secret, I would not have shared it with my own brother, intimate though we were.

‘I’m glad that someone knows whom we can trust.’

Staring at me over the sofa-head, Helen realized that I meant it, and that this time, unlike all others, the secrecy was pressing me in. The corners of her eyes screwed up: her mouth was tart, almost angry, with the family sarcasm.

‘That’s not the most fortunate remark ever made,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I wasn’t very anxious to come to see you today.’

‘Have you brought a message from her?’ I cried.

‘Oh, no.’

For an instant I was relieved; she was more tense than I was.

‘Margaret knows that I was coming here,’ she said. ‘And I believe she knows what I was going to say.’

‘What is it?’

She spoke fast, as though beset until she had it out: ‘What you’re planning with Margaret is wrong.’

I gazed at her without recognition and without speaking.

After a time, she said, quite gently, now she had put the worst job behind her: ‘Lewis, I think you ought to answer for yourself.’

‘Ought I?’

‘I think so. You don’t want to frighten me off, do you? You’ve done enough of that with other people, you know.’

I had always had respect for her. After a pause, I said: ‘You make moral judgements more easily than I do.’

‘I dare say I overdo it,’ said Helen. ‘But I think you go to the other extreme. And that has certain advantages to you when you’re planning what you’re planning now.’

‘Do you think I’m specially pleased with myself about it?’

‘Of course you’re worried.’ She studied me with her sharp bright eyes. ‘But I don’t know, I should have said you seemed much happier than you used to be.’

She went on: ‘You know I wish you to be happy, don’t you?’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘And I wish it for her too,’ said Helen.

Suddenly, across the grain of feeling she smiled.

‘When a woman comes to anyone in your predicament and says “Of course, I wish both of you well, I couldn’t wish anyone in the world better, but—” it means she’s trying to break it up. Quite true. But still I love her very much, and I was always fond of you.’

There was a silence.

She cried out, sharp, unforgiving: ‘But the child’s there. That’s the end of it.’

‘I’ve seen him—’ I began.

‘It didn’t stop you?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t understand you.’ Then the edge of her voice turned away. ‘I’m ready to believe that you and she could make something more valuable for each other than she and Geoffrey ever could. I always hoped that you’d get married in the first place.’

She said: ‘But just because you’re probably right for each other, just because you’re capable of being good to and for each other, you can’t go back to it now.’

For the first time I was irritated and confused, I stumbled to find an answer in her own terms.

‘You can’t,’ she said, pushing my retort aside, ‘take the slightest risk about the child. It’s not only for his sake, it’s for hers, because you know what it would mean for her, if anything went wrong with him.’

‘I’m not afraid that anything would go wrong.’

‘You can’t take the risk.’ She went on: ‘If things didn’t go right for the child, then it wouldn’t matter if you felt it wasn’t your fault and that he’d never have coped anyway. What do you think she would feel?’

She said: ‘She must see this as well as I do. I can’t understand her.’

I began to answer her. Whatever Margaret and I did, I said, there was no way open of behaving as we wished to behave. Each of us knew the responsibilities, I said.

‘If anything went wrong with him, she’d never forgive herself.’

‘Whether she does—’

‘It would be there, coming between you, for the rest of your lives,’ Helen said.

‘I’ve imagined even that,’ I replied.

‘You’ve no right to do it,’ she burst out. I had been forcing down anger, but hers had broken loose.

‘You must let us answer for ourselves,’ I said.

‘That’s too easy,’ she cried. She was gentler than her sister; I had seen violent temper released in her before. ‘I’d better tell you now, if you go ahead with this, I won’t give either of you the slightest help, I won’t make things easier for you by half an hour.’

‘Do you hope that will change our minds?’

‘I hope so very much,’ she said. ‘If I can stop her coming to you, I shall do it.’

I tried to control myself, and meet her case.

As I spoke, I was thinking that in Helen maternal love was stronger beyond comparison than any other. It was her unassuageable deprivation that she had not had children, and she still went from doctor to doctor. She had the maternal devotion of a temperament emotional but sexually cool; she could not but help feel that the love for a child was measured on the same plane as sexual love.

To Margaret that would have been meaningless. For her, those loves were different in kind. Almost as maternal as her sister, she had scarcely spoken to me about the boy, and yet all along she had been thinking what Helen had just threatened us with. Her feeling for the child was passionate. It had more ferocity than Helen’s would have had, yet it could not cancel out that other feeling which pulled her as it were at right angles — that feeling which, unlike Helen’s idea of it, was at root neither gentle nor friendly, that feeling which, although it contained an element of maternal love, was in totality no nearer to that love than it was to self-destruction or self-display.

Helen’s insight was acute. I was thinking; she had learnt more than most, and all she said about human actions you could trust — unless they were driven by sex. Then it was as though the drawing-pins had worked loose, the drawing-pins which fitted so accurately when she charted a description of a nephew sucking up to an aunt. Suddenly, if she had to describe sexual feeling, the paper was flapping, she was not hopelessly far away but the point never quite fitted. Somehow she sketched out friendships and trust and a bit of play and imagined that was sexual love. I remembered how many observers I had listened to and read, whose charts flapped loose exactly as hers did — observers wicked as well as high-minded, married as well as Jane Austen’s men and women. Often their observations sounded cosy when you were not in trouble, but when you were they might as well have been nonsense verse.

Yet I could not shrug off Helen’s warning about the child. When I was younger, I might have thought that, by explaining to myself why she felt so deeply, I was explaining it away. Now I could not delude myself so conveniently.

I had to answer something to which there was no straight answer, telling her that for my part I would accept the penalties and guilt, and that I believed the tie between us would bear what the future laid upon it.

I had made up my mind, I told her: I did not know whether Margaret would come to me, but I was waiting for her.

44: Second Interview of George Passant

NEXT morning after breakfast — the sky over the park was so brilliant in November sunshine that I hushed the give-away words, the secret irked me more — I rang up Margaret: I had to tell her of my conversation with her sister, without softening any of her sister’s case.

‘I knew she was against us,’ came Margaret’s voice.

‘She said nothing that we hadn’t thought,’ I said, reporting Helen’s words about the child.

‘Perhaps we should have told each other.’

‘It has made no difference.’

‘I never expected her to be so much against us.’ There was a note of rancour in Margaret’s tone, a note almost of persecution, very rare in her. Anxiously, I thought that the weeks of deception were wearing her down: they had begun to tell on me, who was better adapted for them: in so many ways she was tougher, and certainly braver, than I was, but not in this.

I said that we must meet. No, there was no one to look after the child. Tomorrow? Doubtful.

‘We must settle it,’ I said, for the first time forcing her.

‘It will be easier next week.’

‘That’s too long.’

The receiver went dead, as though we had been cut off. Then she said a word and stopped. She, usually so active, could not act: she was in a state I also knew, when it was easier to think of disrupting one’s life, so long as the decision were a week ahead, than to invent an excuse to go for a walk that afternoon.

At last: ‘Lewis.’ Her voice had the hardiness, the hostility of resolve. When I replied, it came again: ‘I’ll go for tea to my father’s on Friday, you can call and find me there.’

For the moment relieved, waiting for the Friday which was two days ahead, I arrived at Whitehall in the dazzling morning: odd, it struck me sometimes, to arrive there after such a scene, to meet one’s colleagues with their shut and public faces, and confront them with one’s own.

That particular morning, as it happened, was not routine: I had to go straight to Rose’s room, where I was required for two interviews of which the second was to be George Passant’s.

On Rose’s desk chrysanthemums bulged from the vases, the burnt smell bit into the clean, hygienic air, along with Rose’s enthusiastic thanks to me for sparing time that morning, which in any case I was officially obliged to do.

‘Perhaps we might as well get round the table,’ he said, as usual punctual, as usual unhurried. The two others took their places, so did I, and the first interview began. I knew already — I had heard Rose and Jones discuss the man — that the result was not in doubt. He was an ex-regular officer who had entered the Department late in the war, and they agreed — his work had not come my way — that he was nowhere near the standard of the administrative class.

Polite, patient, judicious, Rose and the others questioned him, their expressions showing neither encouragement nor discouragement, neither excessive interest nor dismissal. They were all three sensible at judging men, or at least at judging men as creatures to do business with. They were on their own ground, selecting for the bureaucratic skills in which not only Rose, but also the youngest of the three, Osbaldiston, was expert.

The third was John Jones, who was now Sir John and a year off retirement: still looking handsome and high-coloured, and as though bursting with a heterodox opinion, a revelation straight from the heart, but after forty years of anxiety to please hypnotized by his own technique, unable to take his eye away from watching Rose’s response. Rose found him agreeable: granted Jones’ modest degree of talent, he had got on a good deal better as a snurge than he would have done as a malcontent, and it was romantic to think otherwise: but, when it came to serious business, his view did not count with Rose by the side of Osbaldiston’s, who was twenty-five years younger.

Osbaldiston, a recent arrival, was an altogether more effective man. Unlike Rose or Jones, he had not started in a comfortable professional family, and socially he had travelled a long way farther than me or my friends: born in the East End, a scholarship, Oxford, the Civil Service examination. In the Treasury he had fitted so precisely that it seemed, though it was not, a feat of impersonation: Christian names, the absence of jargon, the touch of insouciant cultivation carried like a volume in the pocket — they all sounded like his native speech. Long, thin, unworn, he seemed to many above the battle and a bit of a dilettante. He was as much above the battle as a Tammany boss and as much a dilettante as Paul Lufkin. He was so clever that he did not need to strain, but he intended to have Rose’s success and more than Rose’s success. My private guess was that he was for once over-estimating himself: nothing could prevent him doing well, one could bet on his honours, one could bet that he would go as high as Jones — but perhaps not higher. It might be that, in the next ten years when he was competing with the ablest, he would just lack the weight, the sheer animal force, to win the highest jobs.

The first interview closed in courtesies from Rose to the candidate. As the door closed, Rose, without expression, looked round the table. Osbaldiston at once shook his head: I shook mine, then Jones shook his.

‘I’m afraid the answer is no,’ said Rose, and without any more talk began writing on the nomination form.

‘He’s a nice chap,’ said Osbaldiston.

‘Charming,’ said Jones.

‘He’s been quite useful within his limits,’ said Rose, still writing.

‘He’s got a service pension of seven hundred pounds, as near as makes no matter,’ said Osbaldiston. ‘He’s forty-six, and he’s got three children, and it’s a bit of a fluke whether he collects another job or not. What I can’t see, Hector, is how on those terms we’re going to recruit an officer corps at all.’

‘It’s not our immediate pigeon,’ replied Rose from his paper, ‘but we shall have to give it a bit of thought.’

The curious thing was, I knew that they would.

‘Well,’ said Rose, signing his name, ‘I think we’ll have Passant in now.’

When George entered, he wore a diffident, almost soapy smile, which suggested that, just as on his first appearance in the room, he expected to be tripped up inside the door. As he sat in the vacant chair, he was still tentatively smiling: it was not until he answered Rose’s first question that his great head and shoulders seemed to loom over the table, and I could, with my uneasiness lulled, for an instant see him plain. His forehead carried lines by now, but not of anxiety so much as turbulence. Looking from Osbaldiston’s face and Rose’s to George’s, one could see there the traces of experiences and passions they had not known — and yet also, by the side of those more disciplined men, his face, meeting the morning light, seemed mysteriously less mature.

Rose had begun by asking him what he considered his ‘most useful contribution so far’ to the work of the Department.

‘The A— job I’m doing now is the neatest,’ said George, as always relishing the present, ‘but I suppose that we got farther with the original scheme for Tube Alloys’ (that is, the first administrative drafts about atomic energy).

‘Would you mind running over the back history, just to get your part and the Department’s part in something like perspective?’ Rose inquired with unblinking politeness. ‘Perhaps you’d better assume that our colleague here’ — he looked at Osbaldiston — ‘is pretty uninformed about the early stages, as he wasn’t in at the beginning.’

‘Perhaps you’d better,’ said Osbaldiston offhandedly. ‘Though as a matter of fact I’ve done some of my homework since.’

Starting to enjoy himself, George gave the history of the atomic energy project from the time he entered the office. Even to me, his feat of memory was fantastic; my own memory was better than most, I had been as close to this stuff as he had, but I could not have touched that display of recapitulation. I could feel that, round the table, they were each impressed, and all took for granted that it was unthinkable for him to give a date or a paper fact wrong. But he was a shade too buoyant, and I was not quite easy. It was partly that, unlike Osbaldiston, he had not taken on a scrap of protective coloration; given the knowledge, he would have made his exposition in the identical manner, in the same hearty voice, when I first met him in a provincial street twenty-five years before. And also — this made me more uneasy — he had not put our part in the project in exact proportion: we had been modestly important, but not quite so important as he thought.

George was beaming and at ease. Jones, who I knew liked him, put in some questions about method which might have been designed to show George at his most competent. George’s answer was lucidly sober. Just then it seemed to me unthinkable that any body of men, so fair-minded as these, could reject him.

Jones had lit a pipe, so that the chrysanthemum smell no longer prevailed over the table; outside the windows at our back, the sun must have been brilliant to make the room so light. Rose continued with the interview: present work? how much could be dispensed with? One answer business-like, another again too buoyant and claiming too much, the third fair and good. At all interviews Rose was more than ever impassive, but he gave a slight acquiescent nod: so at once did Jones.

Then, as though lackadaisically, Osbaldiston spoke.

‘Look here,’ he said to George, ‘there’s something we are bound to have at the back of our minds, and it’s far better to have it in the open, I should have thought. You’re obviously an intelligent chap, if I may say so. But with due respect you don’t seem to have done much with your life until you got dragged here by the war, and then you were forty-three already. It’s bound to strike all of us as curious. Why was it? Can you give us some sort of lead?’

George stared at him.

‘I’m afraid,’ George said, with diffidence, ‘that I didn’t get much of a start.’

‘Nor did a lot of us, you know.’

‘I’ve got to make it clear that my family was very poor.’

‘I bet it wasn’t as poor as mine.’ Osbaldiston made a point of not being snobbish about his origin. It was for that reason that he was more pressing about George’s lack of ambition than Rose had been in the first interview three years ago.

‘And of course,’ said George, ‘everyone at school thought that becoming a solicitor’s clerk was a step up in the world for me, a bit above my station, as a matter of fact. No one ever pointed out, even if they knew, which I’m inclined to doubt, that there was anything else open to me.’

‘I suppose schools were worse in your time,’ said Osbaldiston. ‘And afterwards you were with your firm, Eden and Martineau, for over twenty years and I take it the job is still open for you — I confess I’m still puzzled that you didn’t see your way out.’

‘Perhaps I didn’t give it as much attention as others might have done, but at first there were things which interested me more. Somehow the right chance never seemed to present itself—’

‘Bad luck,’ said Osbaldiston casually, but they were looking at each other with incomprehension, the young man who, wherever you put him, knew how the successful world ticked, George who was always a stranger there.

Osbaldiston told Rose that he had no more questions: punctiliously Rose asked George if he had anything more he wished to tell us. No, said George, he thought he had been given a very full hearing. With a curious unobsequious and awkward grace, George added: ‘I should like to say that I am grateful for your consideration.’

We listened to George’s footsteps down the corridor. When they had died away, Rose, again without expression and in a tone utterly neutral, said: ‘Well, what do you think of him?’

Quick off the mark and light-toned, Osbaldiston said: ‘At any rate, he’s not a nobody.’

‘I thought he interviewed rather well,’ said Jones.

‘Yes. He had his ups and downs,’ said Osbaldiston. ‘On the whole he interviewed much as you’d expect. He showed what we knew already, that there’s something in him.’

Rose said nothing, while Osbaldiston and Jones agreed that George’s mind was powerful, that he would have done well in any academic course. If he had sat for the competitive examination as a young man at the regulation age, he would have got in comfortably, Osbaldiston reflected, and had an adequate career.

‘What do you think, Hector?’ Jones inquired.

Rose was still sitting silent, with his arms folded on his chest. ‘Perhaps he would,’ he said after a pause. ‘But of course that isn’t the point. He’s not a young man now, he’s a middle-aged one of forty-seven, and I think it’s fair to say a distinctly unusual one.

‘I’m inclined to think,’ Rose added, his face blank, ‘that the answer this time isn’t immediately obvious.’

At once, I knew what I was in for. Indeed, I had known it while Rose sat, politely listening to the other’s views, non-committal in his quietness. For, in the long run, the decision was his: the rest of us could advise, argue, persuade: he would listen to the sense of opinion, but his was the clinching voice. Though it did not sound like it, though the manners were egalitarian and not court manners, this was as much a hierarchy as Lufkin’s firm, and Rose’s power that morning, concealed as it was, was as free as Lufkin’s.

The only chance was for me to match will against will. He had opposed George’s entry right at the beginning; Rose was not the man to forget his own judgements. In that one impartial comment of his, I could hear him believing inflexibly that he had been right.

Yet within the human limits he was a just man: and, screwing myself up for the argument, there were some fears which I could wipe away. I could rely on it that he would not mention George’s prosecution fourteen years before: he had been acquitted, that was good enough. I could also rely on it that neither he nor the others would be much put off by rumours of George’s womanizing. Compared with those three round the table that morning, not many men, it struck me afterwards, would have been so correct, uninquisitive, unbiased.

‘It might help us,’ said Rose, ‘if Lewis, who has seen more of Passant’s work than any of us, would give us his views. I’m very anxious,’ he said to me, ‘that you should feel we’ve been seized of all the information we ought to have.’

Addressing myself to Rose, I made my case. Probably I should have made it more fluently for anyone but George. I was not relaxed, I had to force myself into the professional idiom.

I described his work, trying to apportion his responsibility, remembering that to Rose it would not seem right if I did not also demarcate my own. I said that he was a man of immense capacity. It was true — I was straining not to overstate my case — that his immediate judgement was not always first-class, he hadn’t the intuitive feel for what could or could not be done. But he had two qualities not often combined — zest for detail and executive precision, together with a kind of long-term imagination, a forecaster’s insight into policy. In the area between detail and the long term, he was not so good as our run-of-the-mill administrators: but nevertheless his two qualities were so rare that he was more valuable than any of them.

I had been talking on the plane of reason, but I heard my own voice harsh, emphatic without helping the sense.

‘We’re most grateful to you for that piece of exposition, my dear Lewis. We really are very, very much obliged to you.’

Jones sucked at his pipe: one could feel him sniffing dissension in the air. He said: ‘I imagine that, if old Passant didn’t get established, he’d just go straight back to those solicitors and it wouldn’t be any terrific hardship for him.’

‘He’d be about £200 a year better off with us,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘but you can knock some of that off for living in London.’

‘I wonder whether it would be really a kindness to establish him?’ Jones was meditating. ‘Because he’s obviously an unusual man, as Hector says, but with the best will in the world we can’t do much for him. He’d have to begin as a principal and he’s nearly fifty now, and at his age he couldn’t possibly go more than one step up. That’s not much for someone who really is a bit of a fellow in his own way.’

‘It may not be much, but he wants it,’ I burst out.

‘All that is off the point,’ said Rose, with untypical irritation. ‘We’re not required to say what is good for him or what isn’t, and we’re not concerned with his motives. He’s applied to be established, and he’s got a right to apply, and our business starts there and ends there. The only conceivable point we have got to decide is whether on his merits we ought to recommend him. I suggest,’ he said, recapturing his politeness but with a flick in his tone, ‘that we shall find the problem quite sufficiently intricate without introducing any psychological complications.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘that I can see a strong enough reason for not having him.’

‘Do you see one, Hector?’ asked Jones.

‘Aren’t you making very heavy weather of it?’ I said, thinking the time for caution had gone. ‘Here’s a man everyone agrees to have some gifts. We’re thinking of him for a not desperately exalted job. As a rule we can pass people, like Cooke for example, without half this trouble. Does anyone really consider that Cooke is a quarter as competent as Passant?’

‘I didn’t want to give my opinion,’ said Rose smoothly and slowly to Jones, ‘before I had some indication of what you others thought. I still don’t want to rush things, but perhaps this is a reasonable time to sketch out the way my mind’s been tending. As for your question, Lewis, I don’t consider that we’ve been making unduly heavy weather of this business. We want to see that this man gets fair treatment: and we also don’t want to take an unjustified risk for the Department. It isn’t entirely easy to reconcile those two objectives. I’m inclined to think that you slightly, not very greatly, but perceptibly, exaggerate Passant’s mental qualities, but I won’t quarrel with the view that he is a distinctly better mind than Cooke, for example, or, as far as that goes, than most of the ordinary principals in the Department. I think I remember saying much the same thing when I first saw him. On the other hand, that doesn’t entirely persuade me that keeping him wouldn’t be a mildly regrettable risk where the Department stands to lose slightly more than it stands to gain. After all, if we keep Passant, we gain a principal in some ways rather better than the average, in some ways, as you very properly pointed out, Lewis, rather worse. And at the same time we take on a definite hazard, not of course a serious one or one likely to materialize in fact, but the kind of hazard that you can’t escape if you commit yourself to a man of, I don’t want to do him an injustice but perhaps I can reasonably say, powerful, peculiar, and perhaps faintly unstable personality. There’s bound to be a finite chance that such a man wouldn’t fit in for his remaining thirteen years or whatever it is. There’s a finite chance that we should be making trouble for ourselves. There might just possibly be some row or commotion that wouldn’t do us any good. I don’t think that it is responsible to take those risks for the sake of an appointment at this level. I think I should conceivably have come down in Passant’s favour if we were able to consider him for something more senior. He’s the sort of man, in fact, who might have been far less trouble as a cabinet minister than he’d be in the slightly more pedestrian ranks of the administrative service.’

‘Well,’ said Jones, ‘I don’t think anyone could add much to a summing up like that.’

While there had seemed a doubt, Osbaldiston had been as painstaking as Rose himself. Now he tilted back his chair, and sounded more than ever offhand.

‘Agreed,’ he said, as if anxious not to waste any more time. ‘Though perhaps it’s a pity that we didn’t catch the chap young.’

‘In that case, with your approval,’ Rose remarked, ‘I propose to report on him to the Commission in terms something like this. I’ll send you a draft. But I propose to say that he has filled a principal’s place here quite up to standard form, and in one or two respects better than standard form. That we consider him intellectually well up to the level of the administrative class. But that at his age, bearing in mind certain features of his personality, we shouldn’t feel entirely easy about fitting him into the Department as an established man.’

‘It might be a friendly thought,’ said Jones, and he was speaking with good nature, ‘to tell him to withdraw and not fag to go up to the Commission. Because there will be nothing they can do but say no.’

‘I agree,’ said Rose.

I began, keeping my voice down, still seeming reasonable, to open the argument again, but in a moment Osbaldiston broke in: ‘It’s no use going over old ground.’

‘I really don’t think it’s very profitable,’ said Rose.

Then I lost my temper. I said they were too fond of the second-rate. I said that any society which deliberately made safe appointments was on the way out.

‘I’m sorry that we can’t carry you with us, Lewis.’ Rose’s eyes were cold, but he was keeping his own temper.

‘You do not realize your own prejudices,’ I cried.

‘No, this isn’t at all profitable and we must agree to differ.’ Rose spoke with exaggerated calm. ‘You’ve had more experience in selecting men than any of your colleagues. As you know, I for one have often been guided by you. But you’d be the first to admit that no man can be infallible. And even very wise people sometimes seem no more infallible than the rest of us, the nearer they get towards home.’

He had permitted himself that last arctic flick. Then, leaning back in his chair, his face smooth, he said: ‘Well, I think that is all for this morning. Thank you all very, very much for sparing your valuable time. Thank you, John. Thank you, Douglas. Thank you very much, Lewis.’

Back in my room, I stared out into the sun-bright Whitehall with the gauze of anger, of something like anxiety, of despondent restless bitterness in front of my eyes. It was the state that I used to know more often, that I had lived in during my worst times. It was a long while since I had been so wretched.

It had come pretty easy, it had not given me much regret, to slip out of the struggles of power — as a rule I did not mind seeing the places of power filled by the Osbaldistons, those who wanted them more. But that morning, gazing blankly down at the sunny street, I was wretched because I was not occupying them myself. Then and only then could I have done something for George and those like him.

The men I sat with in their offices, with their moral certainties, their comfortable, conforming indignation which never made them put a foot out of step — they were the men who managed the world, they were the people who in any society came out on top. They had virtues denied the rest of us: I had to give them my respect. But that morning I was on the other side.

45: Frigid Drawing-room

IN Whitehall the fog was dense: it was a little whiter, I could make out the lights in the shop-fronts, as the taxi nosed up Baker Street. By the time we reached Regent’s Park, the pavements were clear to the view as far as the glowing ground-floor windows. Trying to damp down expectation, I was soothed by the fog shutting me in: instead of the joggle of the taxi, the reminder of adult expectations to which one did not know the end, I felt the sheer cosiness of a childhood’s winter afternoon.

Whatever my expectations had been, I was surprised when I entered Davidson’s study. For Margaret smiled at me, without much trace of trouble: Davidson did not look up: they were playing a game. In the fireplace stood a teapot, cups, a plate of crumpets, but on Davidson’s side the tea had a skin on it. The crumpet’s butter was solid. He was leaning, his face still distinguished even though his mouth was open with concentration, over the board. So far as I could pick up at a glance, the board was home made, something like a chess board but not symmetrical and with at least three times the number of squares on the base line: at some points there appeared to be blanks and hazards. They were using ordinary chessmen, but each had some extra pieces, together with small boxes whose function I did not begin to understand.

As I looked at Margaret’s face, it seemed to me that I remembered returning to the house in Chelsea, finding Sheila staring with psychotic raptness at her chessmen: it was not a jab of pain, it was more like the pleasure (the exact converse of the Dantesque misery) with which, in the company of someone whom one safely loves, one looks in at a place where one has been miserable.

‘She said that you might be coming,’ said Davidson without preamble, gazing up under his eyebrows and then back at the board.

I said, ‘Just for a few minutes’, but Davidson ignored me.

‘You’ll have to play, of course,’ he said sternly. ‘It’s a much better game with three.’

It was, in fact, a war game which Davidson had perversely invented while he and his friends were pacifists in 1914–18. So far as I could judge, who envisaged the game stretching on, the three of us kept speechless there, it was elaborate but neat, crisp because he had a gift for concepts: Davidson wanted to explain it to me in all its beauties, irritated because I did not seem to be attending. I did not even pay enough attention, Davidson indicated, to the names of the two sides. They were Has-beens and Humbugs. The Has-beens were the side Davidson was commanding: their officers were chosen from his allies, associates and teachers, for Davidson, with his usual bleak honesty, knew critical fashion when he saw it. The other side was picked from Davidson’s irremovable aversions, among them D H Lawrence, Jung, Kierkegaard; various Catholic intellectuals and Communist art critics had places as brigadiers.

I did not know enough about the game to lose on purpose. All I knew was that Davidson would never get bored with it.

I could not even guess whether Margaret was willing to break the peace-of-the-moment.

Just then she was threatening one of her father’s rooks, who stood for an academic philosopher known to all three of us.

‘He oughtn’t to be on your side anyway,’ said Margaret.

Davidson studied the battle-plan.

‘Why shouldn’t he?’ he said without attention.

‘He’s going to be the next convert, or so the Warden says.’

‘The Warden,’ Davidson remarked, still preoccupied with his move, ‘is a good second-class liar.’

At last he guarded the rook, and was able to gather together the conversation — ‘he [the philosopher] is about as likely to be converted as I am. He’s a perfectly sensible man.’

‘And you couldn’t say fairer than that, could you?’ Davidson smiled: he liked being teased by his daughter: it was easy to feel how he had liked being teased, perhaps still did, by other women.

‘He was always perfectly sensible,’ he said.

‘However did you know?’

‘I don’t remember him ever saying anything really crass,’ said Davidson.

‘But you all said the same things,’ said Margaret. ‘I always wondered how you could tell each other apart.’

It was the first time I had seen her alone with her father. I had heard her talk of him very often, but never to him: and now I listened to her sounding gay and very much his daughter. Although I should have known better, I was surprised.

It was true that she felt something stronger than dislike for the beliefs of her father and his friends, and still more for their unbeliefs. She had been passionately convinced ever since she was a child that their view of life left out all that made men either horrible or splendid.

And yet, seeing her with her father, upset because I wanted nothing but to speak to her alone, I had to notice one thing — that she was proud of him. Her language was more like his than mine; in some ways her nerves were too.

I noticed something else, as I tried to calculate when the game might end — that she was disappointed for him. By the standards of his friends, he, who in his youth had been one of the most glittering of them, had not quite come off. He was no sort of creative person, he was not the critic that some of them had been. He had no illusion about it: at times, so Margaret divined, he had suffered because of it, and so did she. She could not help feeling that, if she had been a man, she would have been stronger than he. That protest, born of their relation or edged by it, had been too deep for me to see, in our first time together. I imagined her as other people did: all they imagined was true, she was loving, she was happy to look after those she loved — it was all true: but it was also true (and the origin of much that she struggled with) that her spirit was as strong as her father’s or mine, and in the last resort did not give an inch to either of us.

The game continued. Repeatedly Margaret was glancing at me, until suddenly, as though screwing herself to the threshold edge, she said: ‘I want to talk to Lewis for a minute.’

It was Davidson’s move, and with a faint irritation he nodded. In an instant I followed Margaret into the hall; she led me into the drawing-room, which was dark except for a dim luminescence from the street lamp outside, bleared by the fog: the room struck chilly, but her cheek, as my fingers touched it, was hot, and I could feel my own skin flushed. She switched on a light: she looked up at me, and, although we were alone in the long room, although there was no one else in the house except Davidson, her voice was faint.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said.

‘That’s easy to say.’

‘No, it’s not easy to say.’ She had roused herself. Her face was wide open: it might have been smiling or in pain.

‘I tell you,’ she cried, ‘there’s no need to worry!’

I exclaimed.

‘Do you believe me?’ she cried.

‘I want to believe you.’

‘You can.’ Then she added, in a matter-of-fact but exhausted tone: ‘I’ll do it.’

She went on:‘Yes, I’ll tell him.’

We were standing in the corner of the frigid room. I felt for an instant the rip of triumph, then I shared her tiredness. It was the tiredness which comes after suspense, when the news may be good or bad: suddenly the good news comes, and in the midst of exaltation one is so light-headed with fatigue that one cannot read the letter through. I felt that happiness had sponged my face, taking away care like the smell of soap in the morning: I saw her face, also washed with happiness.

We stood quiet, our arms round each other: then I saw there was another purpose, a trouble, forming underneath the look of peace.

She said: ‘I’ll tell him. But you must wait a little.’

‘I can’t wait any longer.’

‘You must be patient, just this once.’

‘No, you must do it straightaway.’

‘It’s not possible,’ she cried.

‘It’s got to be.’

I was gripping her shoulders.

‘No,’ she said, looking at me with knowledge of us both, ‘I don’t want you to, it would be bad. I promise you, it won’t be long.’

‘What are you waiting for?’ To my bewilderment, she replied in a tone sounding like one of her aunts, astringent, cynical: ‘How often have I told you,’ she said, ‘that if you’re going to hurt anyone, it’s no use being timidly considerate over the time you choose to do it?

‘I always told you,’ she could not leave it alone, ‘that you did more harm by trying to be kind. Well, there’s nothing like practising what one preaches.’

She was trapped, so that she could not bring herself to tell the truth to Geoffrey, or even mildly upset him. By a minor irony, the reason was as prosaic as some which had from time to time determined my own behaviour. It happened that Geoffrey was within a fortnight of sitting his examination for Membership, that is, his qualification as a specialist. It happened also that Geoffrey, so confident in general, was a bad and nervous examinee. She had at least to coax him through, take care of him for this last time: it meant dissimilating, which to her was an outrage, it meant not acting, which was like an illness — and yet not to look after him, just then, when he was vulnerable, would mean a strain she could not take.

‘If you must,’ I agreed at last.

She was relieved, she was abandoned to relief. Soon this would be behind us, she said. Then, as though at random, she cried: ‘Now I want to do something.’

‘What?’

‘I want us to go and tell my father.’

Her cheeks and temples had coloured, her eyes were bright with energy, her shoulders were thrown back. She led me back through the house, her steps echoing excitedly in the empty hall, until we threw open the door of the study where her father, his beautiful head sunk on his chest, was staring with a mathematician’s intensity at the board.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.

He made a cordial but uninterested noise.

‘You’ll have to listen. Or have I got to write you a letter about it?’

Reluctantly he looked up, with intelligent, brilliant, opaque eyes. He said: ‘If you’re going to disturb the game, I hope it isn’t something trivial.’

‘Well. Lewis and I want to get married.’

Davidson looked blank-faced. He seemed to have had no intimation whatsoever of the news: she might have been telling him that she had just seen a brontosaurus.

‘Do you, by God?’ he said.

Then he became convulsed with laughter.

‘Perhaps you were within your rights to disturb the game. No, I can’t say that the news is entirely trivial.’

‘I haven’t told Geoffrey yet,’ she said. ‘I can’t for a little while. I don’t know whether he’ll let me go.’

‘He’ll have to,’ said Davidson.

‘It may be difficult.’

‘I should have thought he was a moderately civilized man,’ he replied. ‘In the long run, one’s got no choice in these things, don’t you know?’

She would have preferred her father not to be quite so casual: but telling him had given her the pleasure of action. It was a joy to let us be seen in another’s eyes.

For once her father’s glance had not dropped; he looked at her with a sharp, critical, appreciative smile, and then at me.

‘I’m quite glad,’ he said.

I said: ‘You ought to be prepared for some unpleasantness. We shall be giving anyone who wants plenty to get hold of.’

‘Anyone who wants,’ he replied indifferently, ‘is welcome to it, I should have thought.’

I supposed he did not know our story, but went on: ‘Even well-wishers are going to find it slightly bizarre.’

‘All human relationships are slightly bizarre unless one is taking part,’ said Davidson. ‘I don’t see why yours is any more so than anyone else’s.’

He went on: ‘I’ve never known a situation where it was worth listening to outsiders.’

He was the last man to talk for effect: he meant it. It was a kind of contempt which was much more truly aristocratic than that of Betty Vane’s relatives: it was the contempt of an intellectual aristocracy, who never doubted their values, least of all in sexual matters: who listened to each other, but not at all to anyone outside. Sometimes — it had often alienated his daughter — his lack of regard for opinion implied that those outside the magic ring might as well belong to another species. But, in times of trouble, it made him inflexible, one to whom the temptations of disloyalty did not exist.

‘As a general rule and nonsense apart,’ he said, ‘when people are in your position the only help of any conceivable good is practical.’

With a surprisingly brisk and executive air, he asked: ‘Are you all right for money?’

It sounded more surprising, for Davidson, who had never got acclimatized to fountain-pens or telegrams, seemed the most un-practical of men. In fact, the concentration he applied to art-history or to home-made games went also into his investments and he had been consistently and abnormally successful with them.

I told him that money was not a problem. Still executive, he said: ‘I’ve known it to be useful to have somewhere to live where people don’t expect to find you. I could arrange to let you have this house for six months.’

Margaret said she might take him at his word. She would want somewhere to live with the child until we could be married.

Davidson was satisfied. He had no more to contribute. Once more he studied his daughter’s face with pleasure, then his eyes dropped to their habitual level. Although he did not openly suggest that we should finish the game, his glance began to stray towards the board.

46: Last Train to a Provincial Town

EACH morning, as I telephoned Margaret, the winter sky heavy over the trees outside, I heard her forcing her voice to hearten me. At last, so near the time when I trusted her to come to me, I was jealous. I could not stand the thought of her life from day to day, I had to switch my imagination off. I could not stand the thought of her keeping his spirits up; I went through those prosaic miseries of the imagination in which one is tormented by the hearth-glow of another’s home, even if it is an unhappy home.

I told myself her part was the harder, but I began to be frightened of the telephone, as though it did nothing but force me to think of her home, of the two of them together.

As we talked, I never inquired about the exact date of his Membership. It was partly that I was trying to keep my side of the bargain, she was to choose her time: but it was also that I did not want to know, either that or anything else about him.

Christmas passed. On a morning just as I was getting ready to ring her up, the telephone bell rang. I heard her voice, though it was distorted and forced.

‘It will be all right.’

‘You’ve told him?’ I cried.

‘Yes, I’ve told him.’

‘Is all well?’

‘All will be well.’ She was crying.

‘When?’

‘Soon.’

‘Very soon?’ I burst out. She said: ‘For a long time he wouldn’t believe it.’

‘When shall I fetch you?’

‘I had to make him believe me.’

‘The sooner I’m with you—’

‘He can’t understand why this has happened to him.’

‘Has he accepted it?’

‘Yes, but he’s bitter.’

She had deceived herself when we talked of him, she was saying. I replied, if that was true, I had deceived myself as much. Then crying, sometimes dragged back to the night just past (for they had talked right through it) she was asking, as she had not done before, for me to reassure her, to tell her what we should give each other.

When would she come to me? Not that day, she said, in a tone that made me feel there was one last way in which she was trying to look after him. Not that day, but the next.

‘At last,’ she said, in a tone neither sad nor young.

That same evening, I was having a drink with George Passant, who had served his final day at the office and was returning to the provincial town by the last train. We met in a public house, for George had not adapted himself to clubs: there he sat by the fire, enjoying himself as comfortably as in our youth. I told him again, as I had done many times, how angry I was with the Department, and how I still uselessly thought of methods by which I might have presented the case better.

‘It was a nuisance,’ said George. ‘But anyway I had three interesting years, I wouldn’t have been without them for the world.’

Somehow he could still draw a line across the past, regard it with an invulnerable optimism as though it had happened to someone else.

‘The more I think of it,’ said George, with a complacent smile, ‘the better it seems. I’ve had three remarkably interesting years and done some work which I know the value of better than anyone else. The value in question is incidentally considerable. In the process I’ve been able to estimate the ability of our hierarchical superiors and there’s no danger that I shall be tempted to get them out of proportion. And also I’ve managed to seize the opportunity for a certain amount of private life. Which all constitutes a pretty fair return for a very minor bit of humiliation.’

When he first heard that he had been rejected, he had broken into a comminatory rage, cursing all who had ever been in authority over him, all officials, all members of the new orthodoxy, all who conspired to keep him in the cold. But very soon he had been exaggeratedly reasonable, pointing out ‘Of course, I couldn’t expect anything different…’ and he would produce some ingenious, highly articulated and quite unrealistic interpretation of why Rose, Jones, and Osbaldiston found it necessary to keep him out.

So now he sat comfortably by the fire, drinking his beer, proving to me that he was not damaged.

‘All I hope is that you invite me up here pretty regularly,’ said George. ‘In future, an occasional visit to London will be essential to my well-being.’

It might have been some new night-spot he had discovered: it might have been the balm, mysterious to all but himself, of meeting successful acquaintances: probably it was both, but I did not attend, for I had meant to tell him my news and this was the opening.

‘Of course,’ I said.

I had listened while Margaret, rejoicing in candour, had broken our secret to her father, Myself, I had not said anything, open or implicit, even to my brother or to a friend as old as George — except when, to my own astonishment, I came out with it to Getliffe. Even with George that night I did not wish to talk: I still wanted to be timid with fate: I found myself speaking with an obliqueness I could not quite control.

‘Next time you come,’ I said, ‘there’s just a faint possibility that I may not be alone.’

‘I’ll give you plenty of notice,’ said George obtusely.

‘I mean, I may have someone in my flat.’

George chuckled.

‘Oh well, she won’t be there forever.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘it’s not quite inconceivable, of course, it’s too early to say—’

George was puzzled. He had not often heard me so incoherent; he had not heard me anything like so incoherent twenty years before, when my friends and I told glorious stories of fornications we had not yet in fact committed. At last I made it clear enough, and he was on his feet towards the bar, saying in a great voice: ‘Well, this is a new start, and I’m damned if we don’t have a celebration!’

Superstitiously I tried to stop him, but he turned on me: ‘Is this a new start or isn’t it?’

‘I hope it is.’

‘Don’t sit on the blasted fence. Of course it is, and I’m not going to be done out of celebrating it.’

George continued in that state of noisy argumentative well-being until, when he had drunk more, he said: ‘There’s a certain beautiful symmetry in the way we stand tonight. You’re just coming out of your old phase of existence — just at the precise moment that I am neatly returning to mine.’

He laughed out loud, not rancorously, not enviously, but with a curious pleasure, pleasure it seemed in the sheer pattern of events. He was a happy man: he always had been, but was growing even happier in middle age, when it seemed to all external eyes that he had totally failed. As he said, he was returning to his old existence, to the provincial town, to the firm of solicitors, where he would continue not as partner but as managing clerk: and there, one would have bet that night, George first to do so, he would stay for the rest of his life. But he breathed in a happiness that begins to visit some in middle age: it was the happiness which comes to those who believe they have lived according to their nature. In George’s own view he had been himself, he had lived as himself, more than anyone round him. He blamed his external calamities to that cause and still thought — partly as a consolation, partly because in the happiness of his senses it seemed true — that he had had the best of the bargain.

With five minutes to go before the last train left, we arrived at St Pancras. I told George, as we walked down the platform in the cold, the red lights smeared out by an eruption of sulphur smoke, that this was the identical train I used to catch, going home from London after eating dinners at the Inn. But George’s capacity to respect the past, never large, was full up for one night. He merely said absently: ‘I expect you did,’ and instead gazed with absorption into a first-class carriage. There a fat, high-coloured, pursy man of about thirty, elegantly dressed, was waving a finger with stern, prissy disapproval at a companion, seedy, cheerful-looking, and twenty years older. As we left them to it George, gazing out under the dome, into the smoky dark, yelled with laughter.

‘It might have been me!’ he shouted. ‘It might have been me! That young chap is like A—’

Whistles were blowing, the train was ready to leave London, and he was thinking of nothing but his internal joke.

‘Like A—’ he cried, looking down at me from the window. ‘Like A— expecting me to sympathize because he’s hard pressed on three thousand a year. And immediately giving me advice on how much I ought to save out of eight hundred.’

47: Middle of the Night

THE room was dark as I woke up: at the edge of the curtains lurked the fringes of luminescence which, with a kind of familiar comfort, told me that it was the middle of the night. I felt happy; at the same time I was taking ease and comfort, not only from the familiar fringe of light, but also from a scent in the bedroom which was strange there. Basking, I stretched and sat up, looking down at Margaret asleep. In the dimness I could just make out her face, turned into the pillow, one arm thrown above her head, the other trailing at her side. She was fast asleep, and, when I bent and put my mouth to her shoulder, the warm flesh did not move, her breathing did not so much as catch, went on slow and steady in the relaxed air.

Often in the past months I had woken up, seen the fringe of light round the window curtains, had become conscious of my worries about her and known that it would be a long time before I got off to sleep again. Now I was rested; I had only to turn over — it was odd to look into the darkness with nothing on my mind, to sleep as deeply as she was sleeping.

Just then it was a luxury to stay awake. I got out of bed and went towards the door, which we had left open so that we could hear a sound from the child’s room: he, too, was peacefully asleep. Walking quietly through the dark rooms, I felt there was no resistance between me and the air, just as I had sometimes felt on warm evenings in the streets of towns. Yes, I could think of the problems ahead of us, many of them the same problems over which I had worried through the broken nights: but I thought of them without worry, almost without emotion, as though they were there to be picked up. Perhaps that was a state, it seemed to me later, in which men like Lufkin or Rose lived much of their lives.

Standing by the sitting-room window I looked down at the road, where the lights of cars kept giving form to the bushes by the park edge. The cars and lorries went by below: above them, the lamps suspended over the middle of the road swung in the night wind: watching them, I was happy without resistance. I had woken into a luminous happiness, and it stayed with me.