Homecomings

48: Birth of a Son

WAITING in the dark bedroom I heard Margaret’s steps as she returned to bed. I asked if anything was the matter, and in a matter-of-fact whisper she told me to cover my eyes, she was going to switch on the light.

Then she said: ‘Well, it’s no use saying that I hope I’m not going to disturb you.’ Her tone was sarcastic and calm. For an instant, not calm myself, I nevertheless recalled her father laughing at me in the same tone, one afternoon when he interrupted my work at the office.

‘I’m pretty certain,’ she said, ‘that it’s coming early.’

She was a fortnight from he r time, and I was startled.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing to upset you. I’m quite glad.’

She sounded so happy, above all so calm, that I could not help but respond. What could I do for her, I asked?

‘I think it might be as well to ask Charles March to come round.’

Charles March, who had moved to a practice north of the park, had looked after her during her pregnancy: when we were waiting for him after I had telephoned, I told Margaret, trying to match her nerve, that I only seemed to meet him at the crises of my life.

‘This isn’t a bad one, though,’ she said.

‘I touch wood more than you do,’ I replied.

‘You are superstitious, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘When I first noticed it, I couldn’t believe it. And I daren’t ask you, because I thought I must be wrong.’

I had drawn the curtains. Outside the window a red-brick parapet solidified the first morning sunshine: below and beyond were gardens misty, washed-out in the dawn, but glaring bricks glowed near, a starling stood immobile on the wall, harshly outlined as if it were cardboard.

Margaret was sitting up in bed, pillows behind her, twitting me not only to give me reassurance, but also because she was steady-hearted and full of a joy I could not share. For her the child was living now, something to love.

As Charles March examined her, and I stood gazing down from the sitting-room into the park, I felt afraid for her because we were happy. I was afraid for the child because I wanted it. I had a special reason for fear, as Charles March had told me that we ought not to have another.

Down below, the first bus sped along in the milky light. Since she came to me, we had been happy. Beforehand, we had both taken it for granted that to reshape a life took effort, humility, and luck; I did not know whether I could manage it. That we should stay together, was certain: in the world’s eyes we should bring it off, but we should judge ourselves by what we saw in each other’s. Up to now we had been blessed.

In a true relation — I had evaded it for so long — one could not absent oneself, one could not be above the battle, one fought it out. It was hard for me to learn, but we were able to know each other so. Only in one aspect, I thought, had she found me absenting myself — and only she would have perceived it. She perceived it when she saw me with her boy, Maurice, Geoffrey’s child; for with him I was not natural, I did not let myself go. I was well-disposed to him through conscience, not through nature, and she knew it. I was as considerate as I could be, but that was my old escape, turning myself into a benevolent spectator.

It made us more than ever anxious for children of our own.

After we married, in the late summer of the year she came to me, which was 1947, four months passed before she conceived. She had watched me play with the little boy during those months: he liked me because I was patient and more even-tempered than she was. When she became pregnant she felt happiness for me first, and only later love for the coming child.

That September dawn, listening to the rumble of Charles’ voice through the walls, I left the sitting-room window and found myself restlessly dawdling into Maurice’s nursery: his cot was empty and most of his toys had gone, for Helen had taken him for the next fortnight. There I was glancing at one of his picture-books when Charles March found me.

He was not shaved, his eyes were sharp with a doctor’s interest, with his own fellow-feeling: he would drive her to the clinic, he said, and, with a sarcastic flick not unlike hers, added that it was better to err on the safe side.

It was only lately, when he had been married for years, that he had had a family himself. There had been a time during my separation from Margaret when he and I had sympathized with each other, knowing that we both wanted children and might be deprived of them. As I looked at him I remembered that we had spoken without reserve.

Nevertheless, if he had just been a doctor and not an intimate friend, I should have asked more questions. As it was, I went into the bedroom, where Margaret had nearly finished packing her dressing-case. She was wearing a coat over her nightgown: as I held her in my arms, she said: ‘You might as well go to that dinner tonight.’

Then she added: ‘I’d rather be there than where I shall be. Yes, I’d even rather be at Lufkin’s.’

It might have been intended as a jibe, but as I held her, it told me more. I did not need even to think or reply: this was the communication, deeper than emotion or sensuality, though there is sensuality in it, which two people close together cannot save each other from. I knew that her nerve for once had faltered: her imagination was showing her a lonely, hygienic room, the bedside light. Brave in so many ways, she had her phobias, she dreaded a lonely room: she even felt the sense of injustice that cropped up in her, in and out of place. Why did she have to go through with it, while others were enjoying themselves?

Enjoying themselves at Lufkin’s — it was, however, not a reasonable description of people’s behaviour there; it never had been, it still was not. I arrived ready to be elated, with the peculiar lightheadedness of an ordeal put off: for at breakfast time, a few hours after Margaret arrived at the clinic, they had told me that the child might be born within forty-eight hours, then at five o’clock had said that it was not likely for a week and that I could safely spend the night out.

Just as there used to be in Lufkin’s suite, there was drink, there was noise: in my light-headedness I could take the first and put up with the second, but as for elation, it did not bear up in many under Lufkin’s inflexible gaze. The curious thing was that he believed it did. When the women left us, and Lufkin, as always indifferent to time, began a business talk that lasted an hour, he had a satisfied smile as though all his guests were feeling jolly.

Nearly all of them belonged to his own staff. He had not been forgiven by his fellow-tycoons for taking an honour from their enemies and socially they cold-shouldered him. Not that he gave any sign of caring: he just went on inviting to dinner the younger bosses with whom by now he had filled the top places in his firm: men more educated, more articulate than the old ones, looking and speaking more like Civil Servants, and in his presence sounding less like a chorus of sycophantic cherubim. And yet, when he made a pronouncement which they believed to be nonsense and which everyone round the table knew they believed to be nonsense, none of them said so, though several of them had gone so far that Lufkin could do them neither harm nor good. His mana was as strong as ever.

I was glad to watch it all again. It gave me — I was relaxed, I should enjoy my sleep that night, the worry of the dawn, because it was put off, was washed away — the luxury of recalling a past less happy. Nights at that damped-down table before the war: other able men choosing their words: back to the Chelsea house. It seemed to me strange that I could have lived that life.

I had another reminder of it, before Lufkin let us go from the table. There had been talk of a legal case the firm was concerned with, and, among the names of the barristers, Herbert Getliffe’s came up.

‘You devilled for that chap once, Lewis, or am I wrong?’ said Lufkin. On such points he was never wrong.

I asked whether he knew Getliffe. To nod to, said Lufkin.

I asked whether Getliffe would soon be going to the Bench.

Not on your life, said Lufkin.

He sounded positive, even for him.

‘What’s happened?’ I inquired.

‘Well, within these four walls, he’s blotted his copy-book. He’s been doing some jiggery pokery with his income tax, and they’ve had to be persuaded not to prosecute him.’ Lord Lufkin said it not so much with malice, as with the certainty and satisfaction of inside knowledge. ‘I’ve got no pity for the damned fool. It not only does him harm, which I can bear reasonably philosophically, but it does harm to the rest of us. Anyway, he won’t be able to live this one down.

‘That chap’s finished,’ said Lufkin, declaring the conversation closed.

When, after midnight, the party broke up he drove me home himself, less off-handed with me than the others because I was no longer a member of his court. Sitting back as the car paced through the Mall, up St James’s, past the club windows, I felt a moment’s disquiet, mysterious and heavy, the first that night; and then once more the sense of privilege and power which I still was subject to in his company. The car, as opulent as he was austere, moved up Piccadilly, past the Ritz, the Green Park. There were not enough men for the top jobs, Lufkin was saying: the number of top jobs was going up as society became more complex, and the number of competent men had not gone up at all. True, the rewards weren’t much these days: perhaps we should have to deal out a few perks. If we didn’t find enough good men to run the show, Lufkin said, the country was sunk.

For once his tone had lost its neutrality and become enthusiastic; but when the car drew up in front of my flat, he spoke as bleakly as though I were a stranger. What he said was: ‘Give my regards to your charming wife.’

As I thanked him for the dinner, he went on: ‘She’ll have received some flowers from me this evening.’ He said it just as bleakly, as though his only gratification was that he had mastered the etiquette and had all the apparatus of politeness at his command.

Out of a deep sleep, into which I had fallen as soon as I left Lufkin and went straight to bed, I heard a distant burr, and my heart was thudding with dread before I was awake enough to be conscious that it was the telephone. As I stumbled across the room, across the hall, switched on and was dazzled by the light, my throat was sewn-up. The telephone burred loudly now, like all the bad news I had ever had to hear.

As I took up the receiver Charles March’s voice came at once, unusually loud even for him, so that I had to hold the instrument inches away: ‘Lewis? Is that you?’

‘Yes?’

‘You’ve got a son.’

‘Are they safe?’

‘I think they’re pretty well.’

His voice came to me, still loud, but affectionate and warm: ‘You’ve had good luck for once and I envy you.’

His own children were girls, he had wanted a son and had apologized for it as a piece of Jewish atavism: but he knew that I did too.

I could not see them until the morning, he said. He told me the time her labour started, and the time of the birth; he was full of happiness because he could give me some. ‘It’s not often we’ve had anything good to tell each other, don’t you agree?’ His voice spoke out of our long friendship. He said that I could do with some rest myself and that I was to get back to bed now.

I neither could nor wanted to. I dressed and went down into the street, where the night air was thundery and close. Just as, when expecting a joy and suddenly dashed with disappointment, one has moments when the joy is still expected — just so, the shadow of fear can survive the opposite shock, the shock of happiness. I was still shaken, out of comparison more so than I had been at Lufkin’s table: for an instant, it reached me that this was a happy night, and then I reverted to feeling, with a hallucinatory sharpness, that it had not yet occurred.

As I walked across the park the thundery cloud-cap was so low that it was hard to make out the interlocking couples on the grass; I passed close by, in the headaching and stale air, the seat where Margaret and I had sat in the desolating night when it seemed that we had worn each other out. Yet that was unrealizable too, as unrealizable as Charles March’s news.

Retracing without intention the way Lufkin had driven me, I came to the mouth of St James’s Street. It was empty now, and not one of the club windows was alight; all of a sudden I stopped repressing the disquiet that had seized me in Lufkin’s car. For, looking into those windows from the car, I had not dared to think of another evening when I had dined out without my wife — when I had dined with Gilbert Cooke, and simultaneously Sheila was dying. Now I could let the past come back blank and harmless, so that, going slowly down the street, I did at last credit my reason for happiness.

It was not until I saw Margaret next morning, however, that I felt happy. Suddenly the sight of her in bed, her hair straight as a schoolgirl’s, her collar-bone plain where the bedjacket and nightgown had fallen away, made the tear glands smart, and I cried out. I said that I had not seen her look like that; then when I let her go and gazed at her again, I had to ask: ‘How are you?’

‘What century do you think you’re living in?’

She was tired, she spoke with the indulgence of not concentrating. She went on: ‘I wish I could have another for you.’

I interrupted her, and then she said, inspecting me: ‘What do you think you’ve been doing?’

‘Walking about.’

‘If you’d listen to me—’ but she could not go on teasing me. When had I heard? What exactly had I been doing when I heard? Who told me? What did I say? She cried out: ‘He’s a dear little boy and I love him very much.’

Sitting up, she turned her head on the bank of pillows and looked out of the window into the clinic garden. The cloud-cap was still dense, ominous over the trees. She said: ‘The room where I first saw you — it must be somewhere in the wing over there.’

It was part of the same establishment; until that morning I had not been near it again.

‘It must have been about four in the afternoon, but it was earlier in the month, wasn’t it?’ she said, exact in her memory because she was happy.

She added: ‘I liked you. But I don’t believe I thought I should ever be your wife.’

She said, in a tone relaxed and both diffident and proud: ‘At any rate, I’ve done something for you now.’

Soon afterwards she rang and asked the nurse to bring the baby in. When she did so, I stood up and, without finding anything to say, stared at him for what seemed a long time. The nurse — she had a smooth and comely Italianate face — was saying that he was not a whopper, but a fine boy, ‘all complete and perfect as they say’: I scarcely listened, I was looking at the eyes unfocused, rolling and unstable, the hands waving slowly and aimlessly as anemones. I felt utterly alien from this being in her arms: and at the same time I was possessed by the insistence, in which there was nothing like tenderness, which was more savage and angry than tender, that he must live and that nothing bad should happen to him.

As the nurse gave him to Margaret his head inclined to her, and I saw his side-face, suddenly transfigured into a cartoon of an adult’s, determined, apprehensive. Grasping him, Margaret looked at him with an expression that was no longer youthful, that held responsibility and care, as though the spontaneous joy with which she had spoken about him had been swallowed up in pity.

I stood and watched her holding the child. Partly I felt I could not get used to it, it was too much for me, it had been too quick, this was only a scene of which I was a spectator. Partly I felt a tug at the fibres, as though I were being called on in a way I did not understand; as though what had entered into me could not yet translate itself into an emotion, into terms of anything I could recognize and feel.

49: A Child Looking at the Moon

WHEN, fifteen months after the child’s birth, I received a letter from Mrs Knight saying that her husband had been very ill and wished to see me, I did not think twice before going. They were staying, so she told me in the letter, at Brown’s Hotel — ‘so as to get him to the seaside by easy stages. Of course, he has such a sense of duty, he says he must get back to his parish work. But I trust you not to encourage him in this. He is not to think of returning to the Vicarage until the summer.’

Apparently he was not to think of retiring either, it occurred to me, though by this time he was nearly seventy: they had never needed the stipend, it was negligible beside her income: but that did not prevent Mr Knight from clinging on to it. As for his cure of souls, for years he had found that his ill-health got worse when confronted with most of his daily tasks, except those, such as preaching and giving advice, which he happened to enjoy.

When I first caught sight of him in the hotel that afternoon he looked neither specially old nor ill, although he was lying stretched out on his bed and only whispered a greeting. Mrs Knight plunged straight into the drama of his illness. They were doing themselves well, I noticed: they had taken a suite, and I walked through a sitting-room lavish with flowers on the way to their bedroom. By Mr Knight’s bed stood grapes, books, medicine bottles, and tubes of drugs: by Mrs Knight’s stood magazines, a box of chocolates, a bottle of whisky and a syphon of soda. It had an air of subfusc comfort, of indulgences no longer denied, that I had seen before in elderly couples travelling.

Mrs Knight sat on her bed, describing her husband’s symptoms: in a dressing-gown, his coat and collar off, Mr Knight lay on his, his eyes closed, his clever petulant mouth pulled down; he lay on his back, his legs relaxed, like a figure on a tomb or one in a not disagreeable state of hebephrenia.

According to Mrs Knight’s account, he had for a long time past been starting up in the middle of the night with his heart racing.

‘I take his pulse, of course,’ she said energetically to me. ‘Ninety! A hundred! Sometimes more!

‘I decided,’ she looked at me with her active innocent eyes, ‘that I ought to keep a diary of his health. I thought it would help the doctors.’ She showed me a quarto day-book, two days to the page, and in it some of the entries in her large hand…

‘L woke up as usual: pulse 104. Quietened down to 85 in twenty minutes…’ ‘Better day. I got his heart steady for twenty-four hours…’

It sounded to me like the physical condition of a highly strung and hyperaesthetic man, but it would not have been profitable to tell Mrs Knight so. Apart from ‘good afternoon’, she had said nothing to me since I arrived that did not concern her husband’s health.

‘It was always the same, though,’ she cried. ‘We couldn’t stop it! Him waking up in the middle of the night with his heart pounding away like this—’

Sitting on the bed she moved both her thick, muscular arms up and down, the palms of her hands facing the floor, at the rate of hundreds a minute. For the first time, the silent figure on the other bed joined in: Mr Knight used one arm, not two, and without opening his eyes flapped a hand to indicate the rapid heart-beats, but not so quickly as his wife, not in time.

‘And I couldn’t get him to be examined properly,’ she said. ‘He’s always been frightened of his blood pressure, of course. He wouldn’t let the doctors take it. Once I thought I had persuaded him to, but just as the doctor was putting the bandage round his arm he shouted “Take it away! Take it away!”’

Mr Knight lay absolutely still.

‘Then one night three months ago, it was in September because he was just thinking about his harvest thanksgiving sermon, it was a nice warm night and he’d had a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner, I woke up and I didn’t hear him at all, but I knew he was awake. As a rule, of course, he calls out to me, and I knew — it was just like second sight — I knew there was something wrong because he didn’t call out. Then I heard him say, quite quietly, just as though he were asking me for a glass of water: “Darling, I think I’m going.”’

A sigh came from the other bed.

‘I didn’t say “I think I’m going”,’ came a whisper from Mr Knight. ‘I said “Darling, I think I’m dying”.’

Still good-tempered, still urgent, Mrs Knight accepted the correction: she told me of the visit of the doctor, of his opinions, encouragements, and warnings, her own activity, Mr Knight’s behaviour. Oddly enough, despite her hero-worship of her husband, her narrative was strictly factual, and pictured him as comporting himself with stoicism perceptably less than average. After his one protest he did not object or open his eyes again, until at last he said, faintly but firmly: ‘Darling, I should like to talk to Lewis just for a little while.’

‘As long as it doesn’t tire you.’

‘I don’t think it need tire me, if we’re careful,’ said Mr Knight — with a concern that equalled hers.

‘Perhaps it won’t be too much for you,’ she said. ‘Anyway I shan’t be far away.’

With injunctions to me, she removed herself to the sitting-room: but she did not go out of sight, she left the door open and watched as though she were a policeman invigilating an interview in gaol. Very painstakingly Mr Knight hitched his head higher upon the pillow; his eyes were no longer shut, he appeared to be staring out of the window, but he gave me an oblique glance that was, just as I remembered it, shrewd, malicious, and sharp with concealed purpose.

‘I don’t receive much news nowadays, naturally, Lewis, but all I hear of you suggests that you’re prospering.’

He began again, just as I remembered, some distance from the point; I was ready for him to weave deviously until his opening came. ‘Should you say that, allowing for the uncertainties of life and not claiming too much, that that was true?’

‘In many ways it is.’

‘I am glad for you, I am glad.’

In part, I thought, he meant it; he had always had an affection for me. Then, probing again, he said: ‘In many ways?’

‘In more than I reckoned on.’

‘There is bound to be much that you and I find difficulty in asking each other, for reasons that would distress us both to think of, and yet I should like to think that you perhaps have known what it is to have the gift of a happy marriage?’

I was sure that this was not the point he was winding towards. He asked it quite gently, and in the same tone I said yes, I was coming to know it.

‘It is the only good fortune I’ve been given, but I’ve been given it more completely than most men,’ said Mr Knight. ‘And if you will let me tell you, Lewis, there is nothing to compare with it.’

He was whispering, his wife could not hear: but again, singular as it might have seemed to a spectator, he meant it. He went on: ‘I seem to remember, forgive my meanderings if I am wrong, that I caught sight of the announcement of a birth in The Times — or the Telegraph, was it? Or perhaps both? — that somehow I connected with your name. Could that possibly be so?’

I said yes.

‘I seem to remember, though again you must forgive any mistakes I make, it was of the male sex?’

I said yes.

‘It seems to come back to me that you announced his names as Charles George Austin. Somehow, not knowing anything of your recent adventures, of course, I connected the name George with that eccentric figure Passant, whom I recalled as being an associate of yours in the days that I first heard about you.’

Yes, I said, we had called him after George Passant.

‘Not bad,’ Mr Knight gave a satisfied smile, ‘for an old man in a country vicarage, long out of touch with all of you and the world.’

But he was still skirmishing, right away from his point of attack. He went on: ‘I hope your boy gives you cause to be proud of him. You may be one of those parents whose children bring them happiness.’

Then he changed direction again. He said, in a light, reflective tone: ‘Sometimes, when I’ve heard mention of an achievement of yours, I go back to those days when you first came into my house, should you say that’s because I’ve had nothing to occupy me? Does it occur to you that it was a quarter of a century ago? And sometimes, with all respect to your achievements and acknowledgement of the position you’ve secured for yourself, I find myself wondering, Lewis, whether all that time ago you did not contemplate even more of the world’s baubles than — well, than have actually accrued to you. Because at that age there was a formidable power within you. Of course I know we all have to compound with our destinies. But still, I sometimes felt there might have been hours when you have looked at yourself and thought, well, it could have gone worse, but nevertheless it hasn’t gone perfectly, there have been some disappointments one didn’t expect.’

I was wondering: was this it? I replied: ‘Yes. At that age I should have expected to cut more of a figure by now.’

‘Of course,’ Mr Knight was reflecting, ‘you’ve carried a heavy private load so much of your life. And I suppose, if you’d been going to take a second wind and really go to the top, you wouldn’t at your present age have readjusted yourself to a wife and child.’

Was this it? Had he got me there simply to remind me that my public career had not been wonderful?

If so, I could bear it, more easily than he imagined. But somehow I thought he was still fencing. It was just that at seventy, believing himself ill, taking such care of his life that he had no pleasure left, he nevertheless could not resist, any more than in the past, tapping the barometer of an acquaintance’s worldly situation. And he was, also as in the past, just as good at it as Rose or Lufkin. He had never been outside his parish, he had been too proud and vain to compete, but at predicting careers he was as accurate as those two masters of the power-ladder.

Curiously, when any of the three of them made mistakes, it was the same type of mistake. They all tended to write men off too quickly: they said, with a knell not disagreeable to themselves, he’s finished, and so far as his climbing the ladder in front of him went, they were nearly always right. But they forgot, or undervalued, how resilient human beings were. Herbert Getliffe would never be a judge: Gilbert Cooke would never be more than an assistant secretary: George Passant would stay as a managing clerk at eight or nine hundred a year until he retired: but each of them had reserves of libido left. They were capable of breaking out in a new place: it was not so certain as the prognosticians thought that we had heard the last of them.

‘Should you say,’ Mr Knight continued to delve, ‘we are likely to hear more of you in high affairs?’

‘Less rather than more,’ I said.

His lids drooped down, his expression had saddened.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘if it hadn’t been for my daughter, you would have got a better start.’

‘It would have made no difference in the end,’ I replied.

‘I can’t help thinking how you must have been held back.’

‘In the long run, I should have done much the same,’ I said.

Just for an instant he turned his head and looked at me with eyes wide open.

‘I think of her and ask myself about her,’ he said. ‘And I’ve wondered if you do also.’

At last. This was the point. Now he had led up to it, it turned out not to be a dig at me.

‘I have done often,’ I said.

‘I know you ask yourself what you did wrong, and how you ought to have helped her.’

I nodded.

‘But you’re not to blame, I can’t put the blame on you. Time after time I’ve gone over things she said to me, and how she looked when she was a girl. She had become strange before ever you met her or she brought you to my house.’

He was speaking more directly than I had heard him speak.

‘I keep asking myself, what I should have done for her. I suppose I pretended to myself that she was not so very strange. But I don’t know to this day what I should have done. As a very little girl she was remote from either of us. When I told her she was pretty, she shrank away from me. I remember her doing that when she was six or seven. I was very proud of her, and I used to enjoy saying she was beautiful. I can see her eyes on me now, praying that I should stop. I don’t know what I should have done. I ought to have found some way to reach her, but I never could.’

He added: ‘I ought to have helped her, but I never could. I believe now I did her more harm than good.’

He asked: ‘What could I have done?’

Just then Mrs Knight came bustling out of the sitting-room, scolding him because he was tiring himself, indicating to me that it was time I left him to rest.

In an instant the veil of self-concern came over Mr Knight.

‘Perhaps I have talked too much,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I have.’

On my way home across the edge of the park I was moved because I had seen Mr Knight, the most hypochondriacal and selfish of men, bare a sorrow. How genuine was it? In the past his behaviour had baffled me often, and it had that afternoon. Yet I thought his sorrow lived with him enough so that he had to summon me to listen to it. I found myself sorry for him. It was the heaviest feeling I took away with me, although, when his invitation came and I knew that I should be reminded of Sheila, I had not been certain how much it would disturb me.

It seemed that I might feel the same pain as that which seized me the night I caught sight of R S Robinson at the party. But in fact I had felt it not at all, or very little.

Talking to her father, I had thought of Sheila with pity and love: but the aura which had surrounded her in my imagination, which had survived her death and lasted into the first years with Margaret, had gone altogether now. Once her flesh had seemed unlike any other’s, as though it had the magic of someone different in kind. Now I thought of her physically with pity and love, as though her body was alive but had aged as ours had aged, as though I wished she were comfortable but found that even my curiosity about her had quite gone.

When I arrived, Margaret was in the nursery playing with the children. I did not talk to her about the Knights at once, although she detected at a glance that I was content. We did not speak intimately in front of Maurice because anxiously, almost obsessively, she planned to keep him from jealousy. Her nerves were often on the stretch for him; she not only loved him, but could not shut out warning thoughts about him.

That afternoon, we both paid him attention before I spoke to Charles. Maurice was sitting at a little table with a set of bricks and steel rods. He was now five and had lost none of the beauty he showed when I first saw him. By what seemed an irony, he had shown no perceptible jealousy of his half-brother. His temper, which had been violent in infancy, had grown neither better nor worse. Whenever he was placid a load lifted from Margaret’s brow; that afternoon, he was building with a mechanic’s interest, and in peace. We turned to Charles, lifted him from his pen, and let him run between us.

Looking at him, I was suffused with pleasure, pleasure unqualified. In the days when Margaret and I first lay together watching the firelight on the ceiling, I thought that I had not known before the sweetness of life, and that here it was. Here it was also, as I looked at the little boy. He had learned to walk, but although he was laughing, he would not move until we were both in place; he beamed, he was jolly, but he was also sharp-eyed and cautious. Rotating an arm, head back, he ran, trusting us at last.

He had none of Maurice’s beauty. His face was shield-shaped, plain and bright: he had eyes of the hard strong blue common in my family. A few minutes later, when Maurice had gone into another room, Margaret touched my arm and pointed — the child’s eyes were concentrated and had gone darker, he was staring out of the window where the moon had come up among a lattice of winter trees. He kept reiterating a sound which meant ‘light’, he was concentrated to the depth of his fibres.

It was then, in happiness, that I reported to Margaret how Mr Knight had pointed out the extent to which I had failed to live up to my promise, and the number of disappointments I had known.

‘He doesn’t know much about you now,’ she cried.

‘He knows something,’ I said.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said there was a good deal in it.’

She read my expression and smiled, happy herself.

I added: ‘I didn’t tell him what I might have done — that I think I could accept most miseries now, except—’ I was watching the child — ‘except anything going wrong with him.’

She began to speak and stopped. Her face was swept clean of happiness: she was regarding me protectively, but also with something that looked like fright.

50: Comparison of Marriages

WHEN I was alone, I thought sometimes of the warning Margaret had not spoken. But neither of us so much as hinted at it, until a night over a year later, a night still unshadowed, when we had Gilbert and Betty Cooke to dinner.

To my surprise — I had expected the worst, and got it wrong — that marriage was lasting. They often came to see us since — also to my surprise — Betty and Margaret had become reconciled. Thus, by the most unexpected of back doors, Gilbert’s inquisitiveness at last found our house wide open. That inquisitiveness, however, had lost its edge. We had looked for every reason for his wanting to marry Betty except the simple one; but he was devoted to his wife, and humbly, energetically, gratefully, he was engrossed in making the marriage comfortable for her.

On the surface, it was a curious relation. They quarrelled and snacked. They had decided not to have children and spent much thought, disagreeing with each other, on food and drink and how to decorate their flat. With an income much less than ours, they had achieved twice the standard of luxury, and they went on adding to it, simultaneously attending to and criticizing each other. It was easy to imagine them at sixty, when Gilbert retired, knowing just the hotels to squeeze the last pound’s worth out of his pension, badgering restaurant proprietors all over Europe, like the Knights without the hypochondria, a little cantankerous, a little scatty except about their comforts, carping at each other but, to any remark by any intruder, presenting a united front. It might have seemed a comedown, compared with Betty in her twenties, so kind and slap-dash, so malleable, anxious for a husband to give purpose to her existence: or compared with Gilbert at the same age who, enormities and all, was also a gallant and generous young man.

But they had done better than anyone saw. They were each of them unvain, almost morbidly so: the prickles and self-assertiveness which made them snack did not stop them depending on each other and coming close. They were already showing that special kind of mutual dependence occasionally seen in childless marriages, where neither the partners nor relations ever seem to quite grow up, but where, in compensation, they preserve for each other the interest, the absorption, the self-centredness, the cantankerous sweetness of young love.

Looking at them at our dinner table I saw Gilbert, in his middle forties, getting fatter and redder in the face; Betty, well over forty, her eyes still fine, but her nose dominating, more veins breaking through the skin, the flesh thickening on her shoulders. And yet Margaret, in years and looks so much the younger, was older in all else — so that, watching them, one had to keep two time-scales in one’s head, one non-physiological: and on the latter, Betty, with her gestures as unsubdued as when she was young, allied with Gilbert in a conspiracy to secure life’s minor treats, was standing delectably still.

That night they had come a little late, so as to avoid seeing the children; increasingly, like two self-indulgent bachelors, they were cutting out exercises which they found boring. But for politeness’ sake Betty asked questions about the boys, in particular about mine: and Gilbert did his bit by examining and hectoring us about our plans for their education.

‘There’s nothing to hesitate about,’ he said, bullying and good-natured. ‘There’s only one school you need think about,’ he went on, referring to his own. ‘You can afford it, I can’t conceive what you’re hesitating for.

‘That is,’ he said, his detective passion suddenly spurting out, gazing at Margaret with hot eyes, ‘if you’re not going to have a big family—’

‘No, I can’t have any more,’ Margaret told him directly.

‘Well, that’s all right then,’ cried Gilbert.

‘No, it hangs over us a bit,’ she said.

‘Come on, two’s enough for you,’ he jollied her along.

‘Only one is Lewis’,’ she replied, far less tight-lipped, though still far shyer, than I was. ‘It would be safer if he had more than one.’

‘Anyway, what about this school?’ said Betty briskly, a little uneasily, as though shearing away from trouble she did not wish to understand.

‘It’s perfectly obvious they can well afford it, there’s only one school for them.’ Gilbert was talking across the table to her, and across the table she replied.

‘You’re overdoing it,’ she said.

‘What am I overdoing?’

‘You think it’s all too wonderful. That’s the whole trouble, none of you ever recover from the place.’

‘I still insist,’ Gilbert was drawing a curious triumph out of challenging her, he looked plethoric and defiant, ‘that it’s the best education in the country.’

‘Who’s to say so?’ she said.

‘Everyone says so,’ he replied. ‘The world says so. And over these things the world is usually right,’ added Gilbert, that former rebel.

They went on arguing. Betty had reserved her scepticism more than he had; she recalled days when, among aristocrats of her own kind, intellectuals like the Davidsons, it was common form to dislike the class subtleties of English education; she had known friends of ours who had assumed that, when they had families, they would break away from it. She said to Gilbert: ‘You’re just telling them to play the same game with their children as everyone round them.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

Betty said: ‘If anyone can afford not to play the same game, Lewis and Margaret can.’

Duty done, with relief they grumbled about their last weekend. But I was absent-minded, as I had been since Margaret spoke about the child. The talk went on, a dinner-party amiable, friendly, without strain, except that which gripped me.

‘It would be safer—’ She had meant something more difficult, I knew clearly, than that it would be a life-long risk, having an only son. That was obvious and harsh enough.

But it was not that alone of which Margaret was afraid. No, she was afraid of something which was not really a secret between us but which, for a curious reason, she would not tell me.

The reason was that she distrusted her motive. She knew that she expected perfection more than I did. She had sacrificed more than I had; it was she who had, in breaking her marriage, taken more responsibility and guilt; she watched herself lest in return she expected too much.

But in fact, though she distrusted herself, her fear was not that I should be compelled to lose myself in my son, but that, in a final sense, I should desire to. She knew me very well. She had recognized, before I did, how much suffering a nature can bring upon itself just to keep in the last resort untouched. She had seen that the deepest experiences of my early life, unrequited love, the care I spent on an afflicted friend, my satisfaction in being a spectator, had this much in common, that whatever pain I went through I need answer to myself alone.

If it had not been for Margaret, I might not have understood. It had taken a disproportionate effort — because under the furrows of such a nature as mine there is hidden an inadmissible self-love — to think that it was not good enough. Without her I should not have managed it. But the grooves were cut deep: how easy it would be, how it would fit part of my nature like a skin, to find my own level again in the final one-sided devotion, the devotion to my son.

When Betty and Gilbert, each half-drunk and voluble, had at last left us, at the moment when, after drawing back the curtains, I should have started gossiping about them, the habit of marriage as soothing as the breath of the night air, I said instead: ‘Yes, it is a pity that we’ve only the one.’

‘You ought to have been a bit of a patriarch, oughtn’t you?’ she said. She was giving me the chance to pass it off, but I said: ‘It needn’t matter to him, though, need it?’

‘He’ll be all right.’

‘I think I’ve learned enough not to get in his way.’

I added: ‘And if I haven’t learned by now, I never shall.’

She smiled, as though we were exchanging ironies: but she understood, the mistakes of the past were before us, she wished she could relieve me of them. And then I seemed to change the subject, for I said: ‘Those two’ — I waved the way Betty and Gilbert had gone ‘— they’ll make a go of it now, of course.’

On the instant, she knew what I was doing, getting ready to talk, through the code of a discussion of another marriage, about our own.

It was stuffy in the room, and we went down into the street, our arms round each other, refreshed: the night was close, cars were probing along the pavement, we struck in towards one of the Bayswater squares and then walked round, near to each other as we spoke of Betty and Gilbert.

Yes, she repeated, it was a triumph in its way. She thought that what had drawn them together was not desire, though they had enough to get some fun, was nothing more exalted than their dread of being lonely. Betty was far too honourable to like Gilbert’s manoeuvres, but they were lonely and humble spirited, they would fly at each other, but in the long run they would confide and she would want him there. If they had had children, or Betty had had a child by her first marriage, they might not have been so glued together, I said: I was trying to tell the truth, not to make things either too easy for myself or too hard: they were going to need each other more, at the price of being more selfish towards everyone else.

In the square, which had once been grand and had now become tenement flats, the last lights were going out. There was no breeze at all: we were holding hands, and talking of those two, we met each other, and spoke of our self-distrust.

51: Listening to the Next Room

AS we walked round the square that night, both children were well. A fortnight later we took them to visit their grandfather, and the only illness on our minds was his. In the past winter Davidson had had a coronary thrombosis: and, although he survived, it was saddening to be with him now. Not that he was not stoical: he was clear-sighted about what he could expect for the rest of his life: the trouble was, he did not like what his clear sight told him, his spirits had gone dark and he would have thought it unreasonable if they had not.

Up to the sixties he had lived the life of a young man. His pleasures had been a young man’s, even his minor ones, his games and his marathon walks. He looked more delicate than most men, but there was a pagan innocence about him, he had not been compelled to adjust himself to getting old. Then it had happened at a blow.

He was out of comparison more stoical than Mr Knight. Though Davidson believed that when he died he was going into oblivion, he feared death less than the old clergyman. He had found life physically delightful until he was sixty-five, while Mr Knight had immobilized himself in hypochondria more than twenty years before. But of the two it was Davidson who had no consolation in the face of a sick old age.

What he did was concentrate fanatically on any of his pastimes still within his power. No one could strike another spark of interest out of him; that Saturday afternoon Margaret was screwing herself up to try.

As we entered his study with the children, he was playing the war game against Helen, the board spread out on a table so that he could be comfortable in an armchair. In the quiet both boys backed shyly to Margaret, and momentarily the only noise we heard was Davidson’s breathing, a little shorter, a little more strenuous than a healthy man’s, just audible on the close air.

The silence cracked as Maurice went straight to Helen, to whom he talked more fluently than any other adult, while the little boy advanced and stared from the board to Davidson. While Helen took Maurice away into the corner, Charles asked: ‘What is Grandpa doing?’

‘Nothing very dazzling, Carlo.’

Although Davidson’s voice had none of the spring and tone it used to have, although the words were mysterious to him, the child burbled with laughter: being called ‘Carlo’ made him laugh as though he were being tickled. He cried out that his grandfather called him Carlo, he wanted the joke repeated. Then Davidson coughed and the child looked at him, transparent indigo irises turned upon opaque sepia ones, the old man’s face sculptured, the child’s immediate and aware, so unlike that they seemed not to have a gene in common.

‘Are you better?’ the child asked.

‘Not really. Thank you,’ Davidson replied.

‘Not quite better?’

‘No, not quite better.’

‘A little better?’

For once not replying with the exact truth, Davidson said: ‘Perhaps a little better.’

‘Better soon,’ said the child, and added, irrelevantly and cheerfully: ‘Nanny is a little better.’ It was true that the nurse who came in half the week had been ill with influenza.

‘I’m very glad to hear that, Carlo.’

I wanted to distract the child from his grandfather. I could hear — beneath Davidson’s tone, off-hand rather than polite, which he used to the infant not yet three as to a Nobel Prize winner — I could hear a discomfort which by definition, as Davidson himself might say, was beyond help. So I asked the little boy to come and talk to me instead.

He replied that he would like to talk to his grandfather. I said that I would show him pictures. He smiled but said: ‘Grandpa called me Carlo.’

He went round the board, nearer to Davidson, staring applaudingly into his face. Then Margaret spoke to Charles, explaining that he could come back later and that I had splendid new pictures for him.

‘Go with daddy,’ she told him.

The child gazed at me, his eyes darkened almost to black.

As a rule he was amenable, but he was enjoying the clash of wills. He was searching for words, there was a glint in his eye which in an adult one would have suspected as merry, obstinate, perceptibly sadic.

‘Go with daddy,’ Margaret said.

Clearly and thoughtfully he replied: ‘I don’t know who daddy is.’

Everyone laughed, me included: for the instant I was as hurt as I had been at eighteen, asking a girl to dance and being turned down. Then I was thinking how implacable one’s egotism is, thinking from mine just wounded to this child’s.

Gazing at him beside his grandfather’s chessboard, I felt unusual confidence, without any premonition, that, as he grew up, he would be good-natured: within the human limits, he would be amiable and think of others. But one had to learn one’s affections: the amiability and gentleness one dressed up in, but the rapacious egotism had been there all the time beneath. It protruded again, naked as in infancy, as one got into old age. Looking from the smiling little boy to his grandfather, dispirited and indrawn, I thought that by a wretched irony we were seeing its re-emergence in that man, so stoical and high-principled, who only a year before had been scarcely middle-aged.

As we tried to persuade the child away from his grandfather’s side, he was bad-tempered in a manner uncommon with him. He cried, he was fractious, he said he had a cough like grandpa, he practised it, while Margaret listened, not knowing how much was genuine, except that he had woken up with the faint signs of a cold that morning.

She put her hand to his forehead, and so did I. He seemed just warm with passion. Through anger, he kept telling us he would like to stay with grandpa: he repeated, as though it were a reason for staying, that he had a cough like grandpa, and produced it again.

‘I think he’s over-excited, I don’t think it can be more than that,’ said Margaret to me in an undertone, hesitating whether to look after him or her father, her forehead lined. Then she made up her mind; she had come to speak to her father, she could not shirk it and leave him with his spirits dead. She called to Helen, telling her that Charles was upset, would she take care of him for half an hour? Helen nodded, and got up. It was curious to see her, trim yet maternally accomplished as Margaret would never be, since Helen’s instinct was so sure that it left her no room for wondering whether she might not be taking the wrong course, saying the wrong thing. As effortlessly as a hypnotist, she led him and Maurice out of the room, other attractions wiped out of Charles’ mind as though his memory were cut off.

Left with her father, Margaret’s first act was to take Helen’s side of the war game, at which she was the only person who could give Davidson a run. In silence, they finished the game. Davidson’s expression had lightened a little: partly it was that Margaret was his favourite daughter, partly the anodyne of the game — but also, where many men would have drawn comfort from their grandchildren, to him the sight of them seemed a reminder of mortality.

He and Margaret were staring down at the board: his profile confronted hers, each of them firm and beautiful in their ectomorphic lines, their diagonals the mirror-image of each other. He had a winning position, but she contrived to make the end respectable.

‘For neatness,’ said Davidson, his tone lively again, ‘I give that finish 65 out of a 100.’

‘Nothing like enough,’ said Margaret. ‘I want 75 at least.’

‘I’m prepared to compromise on 69.’

He sounded revivified. He looked at the clock and said eagerly: ‘If we’re quick, there’s time for another one.’

Reluctantly Margaret said no, they’d better leave it till next week, and his face went heavy, as though the skin were at last bagging out over the architecture of the bones. Afterwards, she had to ask him questions to keep him from sinking numb into his thoughts. His replies were uninterested and dull. Were there any pictures we ought to see? One exhibition, he said flatly, was possibly worth our time. When would he be able to go himself? Not yet. When? Margaret asked. They said — his reply was indifferent — that in a month or two he might be able to take a taxi and then walk through a couple of rooms. You must do that as soon as you can, she said. He hadn’t the slightest inclination to, he said.

She understood that she was on the wrong tack. He had said all he had to say about pictures when he was well; he had written about them at the height of his powers; he could do so no more, and it was better to cut it out absolutely, not to taunt himself by seeing a picture again.

Casting about, she mentioned the general election of the past winter, and then the one she thought must soon follow.

‘I should have thought,’ said Davidson, ‘that one had to be a morbidly good citizen to find the prospect beguiling.’

‘I don’t think anyone does,’ said Margaret.

‘I should have thought that it would lack picturesque features to a remarkable extent.’ He was making an effort to keep up the conversation now.

‘No,’ he added, ‘there would be one mildly picturesque feature as far as I’m concerned. That is, if I had the strength to get as far as voting, which I must say seems improbable. But if I did manage to vote, I should be voting Conservative for the first time in my life.’

I was thinking how most of those I knew, certainly eight out of ten of my professional acquaintances, were moving to the right.

Margaret, taking advantage of the chance with Davidson, broke in.

‘Going back to your voting,’ she said, ‘it would have seemed incredible thirty years ago, wouldn’t it?’

‘Quite incredible,’ he replied.

‘You and your friends didn’t have much idea of the way things would actually go, did you?’

‘By and large,’ he said, ‘they’ve gone worse than we could possibly have imagined.

‘Thirty years ago,’ he added, ‘it looked as though they would turn out sensibly.’

‘If you had your time again,’ she said, ‘how would you change what you were all thinking?’

‘In my present form,’ he was not speaking dully now, she had stung him, ‘the thought of having one’s time over again is fairly near the bone.’

‘I know it,’ she said: her tone was as sharp. ‘That’s why you’ve got to tell us. That’s why you’ve got to write it down.’

‘I don’t trust the views of a man who’s effectively done for.’

‘For some things,’ she said, throwing all gentleness away, ‘they’re the only views one can trust.’

She went on: ‘You know very well, I’ve never much liked what your friends stand for. I think on all major issues you’ve been wrong. But don’t you see how valuable it would be to see what you think—’

‘Since the future doesn’t interest me any more.’ They were each being stark; she was tired with the effort to reach him, she could not go much farther, but his eyes were shining with interest, with a kind of fun.

‘On most major issues,’ he caught her phrase, ‘we were pretty well right.’ He gazed at her. After a pause he said: ‘It might be worth thinking about.’

Another pause, in which we could hear his breathing. His head was bent down, but in his familiar posture, not in dejection.

‘It might give me something to think about,’ he said.

With a sigh, she said that now she must go and find the children.

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Davidson. ‘Mind you, I can’t promise. It’d be a bit of a tax physically and I don’t suppose I’m up to it.’

He said goodbye to me, and then turned to Margaret.

‘I’m always very glad to see you,’ he said to her. It was a curious parting from his favourite daughter: it seemed possible that he was not thinking of her as his daughter, but as the only person who looked straight at him in his illness and was not frightened off.

We went into the drawing-room, where I had not been since the evening Margaret said she would come to me. In the summer afternoon, with Helen and the children playing on the floor, it seemed much smaller, as diminished as one of childhood’s rooms revisited.

In the contracted room, Helen was saying that Charles did seem a little out of sorts: perhaps we ought to take him home soon. The child, picking up most of the conversation, cried because he did not want to go; he cried again, in inexplicable bursts, in the taxi; in the nursery his cheeks were flushed, he laughed with a hysterical echo, but was asking, with a customary reasonableness, where Auntie Helen was and when he would see her again. Then he said, with a puzzled and complaining expression: ‘My feet hurt.’

There seemed nothing wrong with his feet, until Maurice said that he meant they were cold, and Margaret rubbed them between her hands.

‘Clever boy,’ Margaret said to Maurice, already ambivalent about being praised.

‘Shall we clap him?’ said Charles, but his laughter again got out of control. He cried, became quiet, and then, with a return of the complaining expression, said: ‘My head hurts.’

Under our eyes his cold was growing worse. His nose ran, he coughed, his temperature was a little up. Without speaking to each other, Margaret and I were thinking of his nurse’s influenza. At once, no worry in her voice, Margaret was arranging for Maurice to sleep in the spare room: still not hurrying, as though she were ticking off her tasks, she had a word with me alone before she put Charles to bed.

‘You are not to be too anxious,’ she said.

Her face, like many whose nerves are near the surface, was always difficult to read, far more so than the poker faces of Rose or Lufkin, because it changed so quickly. Now it was as calm as when she spoke to the children. Yet, though she was steady, and I was letting my anxiety go, I suddenly knew that for no reason — not because of any of his symptoms, nor anything she knew or noticed which I had not — her anxiety was deeper.

‘If he’s not better tomorrow, we’ll have Charles March in straightaway,’ I said.

‘Just to give you a decent night,’ she said, ‘perhaps we might as well have him in now.’

Charles March had arrived and was in the nursery before Margaret had finished putting the child to bed. Standing in the drawing-room I listened to their voices, insistent, incomprehensible, more ominous than if I could have picked out the words, just as their voices had been when I listened in this same room, the morning before he was born. It seemed longer than on that morning until they came to join me, but at once Charles gave me a kind, protective smile.

‘I don’t think it’s anything very terrible,’ he said.

Just for an instant I felt total reassurance, like that of a jealous man who has had the moment’s pretext for jealousy wiped away.

He sat down and, his eyes sharp and cautious, asked me about the nurse’s flu. What was it like? More catarrhal than usual? Had any of us had it? Yes, Margaret replied, she had, mildly: it had been going round the neighbourhood.

‘Yes,’ said Charles, ‘several of my patients have had it.’

He was thinking out what he could safely say. It caught my eye that his suit was old and shabby, fading at the lapels: he was seedier to look at than when I first knew him as a smart young man: but the seediness did not matter and he was wearing well: his hair was still thick and fair, his eyes bright. This life he had chosen, which had once seemed to me quixotic and voulu, was suiting him.

‘Well, obviously,’ he said, ‘it would be slightly far-fetched to look for anything else in the boy’s case. I am a bit of an old woman, and with very small children I can’t help thinking of the rare things that might just possibly happen to them. But I can’t see any justification for suspecting any of them here. No, we may as well call it flu, this brand of flu that seems to be in the air.’

As he spoke, he was setting out to reassure me. But, as well as being a man of strong feeling, he had made himself a good doctor. He knew that he started by being both over-cautious and over-ingenious. With any child — more than ever with the child of a close friend — his temptation had been to spend time over remote dangers. It had meant alarm, it was bad medicines, it was a private irritation. For Charles was a devoted man, but he had an appetite, personal as well as professional, for being right.

When Charles March had gone, the child had a bout of crying, and Margaret went to sit beside him. Afterwards she read to Maurice until his bed-time, making it up to him for having been so long away. It was not until eight o’clock, having spent herself on each in turn, that she came to me.

We were listening for a cry in the next room. She had gone dead tired; she talked, not of the child, but of her father: had she done him any good? When she spoke as she had had to speak to him, she did not like herself much. Ought she just to have left him to himself? She was tired out, she was asking nothing deep or new, just a guilty question from a daughter who had broken loose. I was listening to the next room, but that worry was a little lulled, and she wanted me to strengthen her. To her, who took so much responsibility, to whom much of love meant that, it was a final release of love to shed it.

Listening to the next room, I could lull that worry enough to attend to Margaret. And yet, for both of us, it was only just lulled, so that by a consent unspoken we did not allow ourselves any of the ordinary evening’s pleasure, as though even a glass of wine with our meal, or standing outside on the roof garden and smelling the flowers in the humid air, were a provocation to fate.

52: Photophobia

THE child woke three times during the night, but he had no more than a sleep-flush when we went in to him in the morning. He was lying on his back talking to himself and when we looked down into the cot he smiled. I found myself asking him, as though he were an adult, how he was feeling: mechanically, imitating his nurse, he replied very well, thank you. I asked if his head were hurting: he looked surprised and then troubled, but at last said no.

When Margaret had taken his temperature, reading the thermometer by the window in the morning sunlight, she cried: ‘It’s gone down. It’s only just over 99.’

Her joy filled the room. Delighted with her because she told good news, I thought how absolute was her capacity for joy. Many thought of her as gentle and responsible: some, who knew her better, saw the fibre of her will: but perhaps one had to love her to feel her capacity for joy. I loved it in her.

I asked, didn’t he seem easier? The catarrh was less, the look of strain had gone. After the night before, no adult would have looked as bright. Yes, we weren’t imagining it, he was far brighter, she said.

As we talked about him over his head, the child had been listening: he knew that we were pleased with him. With something like vanity or gratification, he said: ‘Better now.’

Then he told us that grandpa was a little better, nanny was a little better. Amiably he asked: ‘Are we a little better? Are we quite better?’

He did not object, however, when Margaret told him that he was to stay in his cot. He was content to lie there while we read to him and showed him his toys: as it was Sunday morning Maurice was at home, and so I stayed alone in the nursery, reading Charles’ favourite books time after time, watching for any change in his cough, his hand moving to his head or ear, with an intensity of observation that coexisted with boredom, with an emotion so strong that it seemed incredible I could at one and the same time be bored.

About midday Charles March called. The temperature was still down, and he was satisfied. He was so satisfied that he spoke to us sternly, as though we were careless or indifferent parents, and ordered us to ring him up at once if there were any deterioration. My tongue lightened, I said it was the most unnecessary advice that even he had ever given me: and as Margaret and I laughed he was taken off guard, his professional authority departed, he blushed and then guffawed.

We were standing in the hall, and from the nursery came the child’s voice, shouting for his mother and father. As Margaret opened the door, he called out: ‘What were they laughing at?’

‘Someone made a joke, that’s all,’ she said.

‘They laughed.’

‘Yes, we shouldn’t have made such a noise,’ she said.

The child produced an artificial ‘ha-ha-ha’ which led to a genuine one, not hysterical, but somehow real mirth self-induced.

All that afternoon and evening, there was no change that either she or I could be sure of, I felt in myself, I knew it in her, that state of physical constraint in which one is aware of one’s own footsteps, even knows that one’s own breath is catching. I had seen it before, in a man who was waiting to be arrested. But in us it was a denial of the moment, the more we secretly thought that next day he might be well.

Most of the afternoon I played with Maurice, whilst she took her spell at the bedside. Among his birthday presents Maurice had been given a game similar to the halma I remembered in my own childhood: suddenly that sunny afternoon, refusing to walk with me to the Serpentine, he developed an obsession for it. When I won, he became ill-tempered and muttered to himself, but insisted on more; for a long time I sat there with him — the air brilliant over the park, the sun streaming into the room, our corner shaded — not resenting the occupation, time dripping by that way as well as any other, letting him win. He mentioned the child only once, when without any explanation he referred to him by a pet name, and said: ‘Will he have to stay in his cot tomorrow?’

‘I expect so,’ I said.

‘And the day after that?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And lots and lots of days?’

He did not seem to be speaking out of either malice or affection, but something more like scientific curiosity.

‘Lewis,’ he asked, his handsome face lit up with interest, ‘has anyone had to stay in bed for a thousand days?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Has anyone I know?’

He pursued his researches. Had I ever had to? Or Margaret? Or his father? Or his grandfather? Raptly, he asked: ‘Has anyone ever had to stay in bed for a million days?’

‘People don’t live as long as that.’

He thought again: ‘If I had a space-ship, I could get to the moon in a thousand days.’

‘Yes, you could.’

‘No, I couldn’t. You’re wrong,’ he cried with superiority and triumph. ‘Of course, I could get farther than the moon in a thousand days. I could get to Venus, you ought to know that, anyone knows that.’

Charles did not go to sleep at his usual time, and cried for his mother to stay with him: he was restless and cried again before nine o’clock; but neither her eyes nor mine could find any change. We stayed up for some time, but there was no sound, and at last we went to bed. Waking out of my first sleep, I was listening at once, but there was still no sound: all was quiet, I did not hear Margaret breathing in her sleep.

Trying to rouse myself, I said: ‘Are you awake?’

‘Yes,’ she replied.

‘Haven’t you been to sleep?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Is anything the matter with him?’

‘No, I’ve been in to see him once, he’s sleeping.’ Her voice was clear, but also, now that I was awake myself, I could hear how wakeful it was, and tight with care.

‘What are you thinking of?’ I asked.

After a pause she replied: ‘Yes, there is something.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I think he’s on the mend, and we probably shan’t need it. Perhaps we needn’t say anything. But I’ve been thinking, if he should have a set-back, I don’t want you to mind, I want you to let me have Geoffrey in to see him.’

In the words, jagged with anxiety, I could hear the hours of her sleepless night: but now I was turned hard and angry.

‘It seems strange,’ I replied.

‘I don’t care what it seems, he’s a first-class children’s doctor.’

‘There are other first-class children’s doctors.’

‘He’s the best I’ve seen.’

‘There are others as good and better.’

My anger was sullen, hers on the flash-point. But it was she, more violent than I was, who controlled herself first.

‘This is a good time to quarrel,’ she said in the darkness.

‘We mustn’t quarrel,’ I said.

‘Let me try and come out with it.’

But she could not make a clear explanation. She had been thinking, she said, just as I had been thinking, what it would be like if he got worse. And there was Maurice, she wanted to be sure that he was looked after. If Charles got worse, it would be too much to bear, unless she had complete confidence in a doctor. Her voice was shaking.

‘Would it have to be Geoffrey?’

‘I should know we’d done the best we could.’

For each of us, the choice was dense with the past. I was jealous of him, yes: jealous as one can be of someone one has misused. Even the mention of him reminded me of the time I had lost her, my paralysis, the period in my life that, looking back, I liked the least. I had avoided seeing him since Margaret came to me. It was part of his bargain, in letting her keep Maurice, that he should visit him when he wanted. He made a regular visit each week, but on those days I had not once been there.

On her side, although she liked Charles March, she felt for him a fainter jealousy, the jealousy for parts of my youth that, except at second-hand, were for her unknown and irrecoverable.

There was something else. In a fashion that seemed right out of character, but one I had noticed in older women, she liked to hero-worship her doctor, make a cult of him; perhaps because of the past, she could not manage to do that with Charles March.

‘All that matters,’ I said, ‘is that he is looked after. We can forget everything else.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you should need Geoffrey, then you’d better have him.’

Very soon, not more than five minutes after, she was sleeping for the first time that night, but it was a long time before I got to sleep again.

In the morning, when we went in together to see the child, that anxiety in the darkness seemed remote. He looked as he had done the day before, he greeted us, his temperature was the same. As soon as Maurice had gone to school, the two of us sat beside the cot all the morning, watching him.

His cough had slackened, but his nose was still running. Otherwise he did not grumble, he lay there being read to, at times apathetic. At other times he became impatient with reading, stopping us when we were half-way through a book, demanding that we start again. It was a trick, I insisted to myself, that he often did.

Just after midday, looking down at him, I could not keep back the question — was he more flushed than ten minutes before?

For an instant I glanced at Margaret; our eyes met, fell away, turned back to the cot; neither dared to speak. Twice I took my eyes away from the child, to the floor, anywhere, while I counted the instants, in the hope that when I looked again I should see it had been an illusion.

Since my first alarm — not more than a few minutes past — I had not looked at Margaret. She was gazing at him. She too had seen. When our eyes met this time, each saw nothing but fear. When we looked back at the child, his expression was also strained with something like fear. His cheeks were flushed, and his pupils were dilating.

I said to Margaret: ‘I’ll ring up Charles March. If he’s not already on the way, I’ll tell him we want Geoffrey too.’

She muttered thanks. As soon as I had returned, she would get on to Geoffrey.

Charles was on his rounds, so his wife told me. He would be calling at his house before coming to us, so I could leave a message. As I was re-entering the nursery the child was crying resentfully: ‘His head hurts.’

‘We know, dear,’ said Margaret, with the steadiness in which no nerve showed.

‘It hurts.’

‘The doctors will help you. There will be two doctors soon.’

Suddenly he was interested: ‘Who are two doctors?’

Then he began crying, hands over his eyes, holding his head. As Margaret went to the telephone, she whispered to me that his temperature was right up; for a second she gripped my hand, then left me with him.

Crying with his head turned to the pillow, he asked where she was, as though he had not seen her for a long time. I told him that she had gone to fetch another doctor, but he did not seem to understand.

Some minutes passed, while I heard the trill of telephone bells as Margaret made calls, and the child’s whimpering. Whatever I said to him, he did not make clear replies. Then, all of a sudden, he was saying something feverish, urgent, which seemed to have meaning, but which I could not understand. Blinking his eyes, his hand over them, he was pointing to the window, demanding something, asking something. He was in pain, he could not grasp why I would not help him, his cries were angry and lost.

Myself, I felt lost too, lost, helpless, and abject.

Once more he asked, imploring me in a jumble of words. This time he added ‘Please, please’, in anger and fever, utterly unlike a politeness; it was a reflex, produced because he had learned it made people do things for him.

I begged him to speak slowly. Somehow, half-lucid, he made an effort, his babble moderated. At last I had it.

‘Light hurts.’ He was still pointing to the window.

‘Will you turn light off? Light hurts. Turn light off. Please. Please.’

As I heard, I drew the curtains. Without speaking, he laid his face away from me. I waited beside him in the tawny dark.

53: Act of Courage

SOON after Margaret returned, the child vomited. As she cleaned him, I saw that his neck was stiff, strained like a senile man eating. The flush was crimson, his fingers pushed into his eye sockets, then his temples.

‘Head hurts,’ he cried angrily.

He was crying with a violent rhythm that nothing she said to him interrupted. In the middle of it, a few minutes later, he broke into a new fierce complaint.

‘My back hurts.’

In the same tone, he cried: ‘Stop it hurting. It is hurting me.’

When either of us came close to him, he shouted in irritation and anger: ‘What are they doing?’

The regular crying hooted up to us; neither she nor I could take our glance from him, his face fevered. We watched his hands pushing unavailingly to take away the pain. Without looking at Margaret I knew, as of something within one’s field of vision, that her expression was smooth and young with anguish.

We were standing so, it was just on two o’clock, when Charles March came in. Impatiently he cut short what I was telling him; he glanced at the child, felt the stiff neck, then said to me, in a tone heavy, brotherly, and harsh: ‘It would be better if you weren’t here, Lewis.’

As I left them, I heard him beginning to question Margaret: was there any rash? How long had his neck been rigid?

I was dazzled by the afternoon light in the drawing-room; I lit a cigarette, the smoke rose blue through a gleam of sun. The child’s crying ululated; I thought I noticed that since I first entered the gleam of sun had moved just perceptibly along the wall. All of a sudden, the ululation broke, and there came, pressing like a shock-wave, a hideous, wailing scream.

I could not bear to be away. I was just on my way back to the child, when Charles March met me at the drawing-room door.

‘What was that?’ I cried.

The scream had died down now.

‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ said Charles. ‘I gave him penicillin, that’s all.’

But there was nothing careless or even professional in his voice now, and his face was etched with sadness.

‘If it could have waited I wouldn’t have done it, I’d have left it for Hollis,’ he said.

He added that I did not need telling that his diagnosis had been wrong. He did not explain that it was a reasonable mistake; he could not get over what he felt he had brought upon me. He said in a flat tone: ‘I’ve done the only thing for him that we can do on the spot. Now I shall be glad to see Hollis arrive.’

‘He’s seriously ill, of course?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Will he get over it?’

‘He ought to stand a good chance — but I can’t tell you much—’

He looked at me.

‘No,’ he said, ‘if we’ve got it in time he ought to be all right.’

He said: ‘I’m desperately sorry, Lewis. But what I’m feeling doesn’t exist by the side of what you are.’

He had been an intimate friend since we were very young men. At any other time I should have known that, both because of his tender-heartedness and his pride, he was ravaged. But I had no attention to spare for him; I was only interested in what he had done for the child, whether he had taken away any of the suffering, whether he was being any use to us.

In the same animal fashion, when at that moment I heard Geoffrey Hollis arrive, I felt nothing like embarrassment or remorse, but just a kind of dull hope, that here might be someone bringing help.

As we all four of us gathered in the hall, it was Geoffrey alone who seemed uncomfortable, the others were too far gone. As he nodded to me his manner was off-hand, but not as certain as usual; his fair head looked as unchangingly youthful, but his poise was not as jaunty. It was with something like relief that he listened to Margaret’s first words, which were: ‘It’s worse than I told you.’

Once more I stood in the drawing-room, staring at the beam of sunlight along the wall. There was another scream, but this time it was minutes — I knew the exact time, it was five past three — before they joined me, Geoffrey speaking in an undertone to Charles March. The child’s crying died down, the room was as quiet as when Charles had given us his opinion there less than forty-eight hours before. Through the open window came the smell of petrol, dust, and summer lime.

‘Shall I begin or will you?’ said Geoffrey to Charles March, in a manner informal and friendly: there was no doubt of the answer. Geoffrey was speaking without pomposity, but also, even to Margaret, quite impersonally.

‘The first thing is,’ he said, ‘that everything has been done and is being done that anyone possibly can. He’ll have to be moved as soon as we have checked the diagnosis and my people have got ready for him in the isolation ward. You’ll be able to drive round with the sample straightaway?’

Charles inclined his head. He was a man of natural authority and if they had met just as human beings he would have overweighted this younger man. But now Geoffrey had the authority of technique.

‘I might as well say that the original diagnosis is one which we should all have made in the circumstances two days ago. The symptoms were masked to begin with and then they came on three or four hours ago, after that intermission yesterday, which is quite according to type, except that they came on with a rather unusual rush. If I had seen him on Saturday, I should never have thought this was a serious possibility myself.’

Charles’ face, drawn and pallid, did not move.

‘And I shouldn’t yesterday, and it’s out of the question that anyone would. We ought to thank our lucky stars that Dr March got the penicillin into him when he did. We may be glad of that extra half hour.’

It was, I remembered later, impersonally cordial, a little patronizing, and scientifically true. But at the moment I actually heard it, I was distracted by this wind-up. I said: ‘What has he got?’

‘Oh, neither Dr March nor I think there is much doubt about that. Don’t you agree?’ He turned to Charles March, who nodded again without his expression changing.

‘It’s a meningitis,’ said Geoffrey Hoffis. ‘A straightforward one, we think.

‘Mind you,’ he said to me, not unkindly, with a curious antiseptic lightness, ‘it’s quite bad enough. If this had happened twenty years ago I should have had to warn you that a large percentage of these cases didn’t recover. But nowadays, with a bit of good fortune, we reckon to cope.’

It was after Charles March had left, and Geoffrey had rung up the hospital, telling them to expect him and the case, that he said: ‘That’s all we can do just now. I’ve got to see another patient. I’ll be back to take the boy along in a couple of hours.’

He spoke to Margaret.

‘You must stop Maurice coming here until we’ve got things straight.’

‘I was going to ask you,’ she said.

He was businesslike, he said that he did not intend them to take even a negligible risk: Maurice had already been exposed to infection; she was to watch him for a vestige of a cold, take his temperature night and morning: at any sign, right or wrong, they would inject him.

As she listened, he could not have doubted that all he said would be carried out. He gave a smile of relief, and said that he must go.

I longed for him to stay. With him in the room, the edge of waiting was taken off. It did not matter that he was talking to her about their son. I said, hoping against hope that he would stay with us, that I had better go in and see the child.

‘I’ll do that myself on the way out,’ he said, again not unkindly, ‘but I don’t see the point of it for you.’

He added: ‘I shouldn’t if I were you. You’ll only distress yourself, and you can’t do any good. It’s not pretty to watch. Mind you, we don’t know what they feel in these conditions, possibly nature is more merciful than it looks.’

In the hours when Margaret and I sat alone by the cot, the child did not cry so regularly: much of the time he lay on his side, moving little, muttering names of people, characters from his books, or bits of nursery verses. Frequently he complained that his head hurt, and three times that his back did. When either of us spoke to him his pupils, grossly dilated, confronted us as though he had not heard.

He seemed to be going deaf: I began to think that he no longer recognized us. Once he gave a drawn-out scream, so violent and rending that it seemed as though he were not only in agony, but horribly afraid. During the screams Margaret talked to him, tried piteously to reach him: so did I, my voice mounting until it was a shout. But he did not know us: when the scream was over, and he was babbling to himself again, his words were muddled, his mind had become confused.

When Geoffrey came back to us at a quarter to five, I felt an instant’s dependence and overmastering relief. He glanced down at the child: his long, smooth, youthful face looked almost petulant, he clicked his teeth with something like disapproval.

‘It’s not working much yet,’ he said.

He had a nurse waiting outside, he told us: they would take him at once: he looked again at the child with an expression not specially compassionate or grave, more like that of someone whose will was being crossed. He said that he would give him his second shot of penicillin as soon as they got him into his ward; it would be early, but worth trying. He added casually: ‘The diagnosis is as I thought, by the way.’

‘Yes,’ said Margaret. Then she asked: ‘Can we come with him now?’

Geoffrey looked at her deliberately, without involvement, without memory, competent with his answer as if she had been nothing but the mother of a patient.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You’d only be slightly in the way. In any case, when we’ve got him settled, I couldn’t let you see him.’

‘You’ll ring us up if there’s any change,’ she said steadily, ‘for better or worse?’

For once his tone was personal. ‘Of course I shall.’

He told us, once more antiseptic, that we could telephone the ward sister at any time, but there was no point in doing so before that night. If it was any relief to us, he himself would be glad to see us at the hospital the following morning.

After the ambulance drove away, my sense of time was deranged. Sitting in the early evening with Margaret and Maurice, I kept looking at my watch as though feeling my pulse in an illness; hoping for a quarter of an hour to have passed, I found it had only been minutes. Sometimes I was so much afraid that I wanted time to be static.

All the time I was watching Margaret look after her other boy. Before he came in, she was so sheet-pale that she had made up more than usual, so as not to alarm him. She had explained how Charles had been taken away with a bad cold, and how she would have to take his own temperature and fuss over him a bit. Then she sat with him, playing games, not showing him any anxiety, looking very pretty, the abnormal colour under her cheekbones becoming her; her voice was level, even full, and the only sign of suffering was the single furrow across her forehead.

She was thankful that Maurice’s temperature was normal, that he seemed in the best of health.

Watching them, I resented it because she was so thankful. I took my turn playing with the boy: though I could not entertain him much, I could stick at the game and go through the motions: but I was resenting it also that he could sit there handsome and untouched, above all that he should be well. With a passion similar in kind to my mother’s, who in an extreme moment of humiliation had once wanted a war to blot it out and destroy us all, so I wanted the danger to my son to hang over everyone round me: if he was not safe, then no one should be: if he should die, then so should the rest.

When she took Maurice to bed I sat in the drawing-room doing nothing, in that state of despondency and care combined, which tied one’s limbs and made one as motionless as a catatonic, reduced to a single sense, with which I listened to the telephone. Without either of us speaking, Margaret came and sat down opposite to me, on the other side of the fireplace; she was listening with an attention as searing as mine, she was looking at me with another care.

The telephone rang. She regarded me with a question on her face, then answered it. The instant she heard the voice on the wire, her expression changed to disappointment and relief: it was a woman acquaintance asking her to dinner the next week. Margaret explained that the little boy was ill, we couldn’t go out anywhere because of the risk of letting our host down: she was as gentle and controlled as when she played with Maurice. When she returned to her chair, she mentioned the woman’s name, who was a private joke between us, hoping to get a smile from me. All I could do was shake my head.

The vigil lasted. Towards nine o’clock she said, after calling out my name: ‘Don’t forget we should have heard if he were any worse.’

I had been telling myself so. But hearing it from her I believed her, I clutched at the comfort.

‘I suppose so.’

‘I know we should. Geoffrey promised—’ she had reminded me of this already, with the repetitiveness with which, in the either-or of anxiety, one repeats the signs in favour as though they were incantations. ‘He’d be utterly reliable about anything like this.’

‘I think he would.’ I had said it before: it heartened me to say it again.

‘He would.’

She went on: ‘This means he’s got nothing to tell us yet.’

She said: ‘Look, there can’t be anything much to hear, but would you like to ring up the nurse and see what she says?’

I hesitated. I said: ‘I daren’t.’

Her face was strained and set. She asked: ‘Shall I?’

I hesitated for a long time. At last I nodded. At once she went towards the telephone, dialled the number, asked for the ward. Her courage was without a flaw: but I took in nothing, except what her expression and tone would in an instant mean.

She said she wanted to inquire about the child. There was a murmur in a woman’s voice, which I could not catch.

For an instant Margaret’s voice was hard.

‘What does that mean?’

Another murmur.

‘You can’t tell me anything more?’

There was a longer reply.

‘I see,’ said Margaret. ‘Yes, we’ll ring up tomorrow morning.’

Simultaneously with the sound of the receiver going down, she told me: ‘They said that he was holding his own.’

The phrase fell dank between us. She took a step towards me, wanting to comfort me: but I could not move, I was incapable of letting her.

54: ‘Come With Me’

IN the middle of the night, Margaret was at last asleep. We had both lain for a long time, not speaking; in the quiet I knew she was awake, just as I had listened and known years before, when Sheila was beside me in insomnia. But in those nights I had only her to look after, as soon as she was asleep my watch was over: that night, I lay wide awake, Margaret’s breathing steady at last, in a claustrophobia of dread.

I dreaded any intimation of sound that might turn into the telephone ringing. I dreaded the morning coming.

I should have dreaded it less — the thoughts hemmed me in, as though I were in a fever or nightmare — if I had been alone.

It had been easier when I had just had to look after Sheila. Of the nights I had known in marriage, this was the most rending. Margaret had been listening too, lying awake, until she could be sure I was safe out of consciousness: it was only exhaustion that had taken her first: she wanted to look after me, she was thinking not only of the child but of me also.

She wanted to look after me but I could not let her. In this care and grief I had recessed, back to the time when I wanted to keep my inner self inviolate.

As a child I had not taken a sorrow to my mother, I had kept my sorrows from her, I had protected her from them. When I first loved I found, and it was not an accident, someone so self-bound that another’s sorrows did not exist.

But with Margaret they existed, they were at the core of our marriage: if I kept them from her, if I did not need her, then we had failed.

In the darkness I could think of nothing but the child. The anxiety possessed me flesh and bone: I had no room for another feeling: it drove me from any other person, it drove me from her.

I thought of his death. In the claustrophobia of dread, it seemed that it would be an annihilation for me too. I should want to lose myself in sadness, have no one near me, I should not have the health to admit the claim of the living again. In sadness I should be alone: I should be finally and at last alone.

I thought of his death, as the light whitened round the curtains. The room pressed me in; I had a picture, sudden and sharp as an hallucination, it might have been a memory or a trick with time, of myself walking along a strip, not of sand but of pavement, by the sea. I did not know whether I was young or an old man: I was walking by myself on the road, with the sea, leaden but calm, on my right hand.

I slept a little, woke with an instant’s light-heartedness, and then remembered. Margaret was already dressing. As she looked at me, and saw the realization come into my face, hers went more grey. But she still had her courage: without asking me this time she said that she would ring the ward. Remaining in the bedroom I heard her voice speaking, the words indistinguishable, the cling of the bell as she rang off, the sound of her feet returning: they were not light, I dreaded to see her eyes. She told me: ‘She said there’s no change to speak of.’

All I could make myself reply was a question about our visiting Geoffrey at the hospital: when would she be ready to leave? I heard my voice deaden, I could see her regarding me with pity, with injury and rejection, with her own pain.

Whilst she gave Maurice breakfast and got him off to school, I did not move from the bedroom. At last she returned to me there: I said that it was time we were setting out.

She looked at me with an expression I could not read. She said: ‘I think perhaps it would be better if you went alone.’

All of a sudden I knew that she understood. The night’s dreads — she had divined them. She had endured her own suffering about the child, and mine also. What could she do now either for the child or me? She could not bear, any more than I could, not to be with him; yet she was trying to tend me. Her tone was tight, she was admitting as much as she could bear.

It was a moment in which I could not pretend. To refuse her offer just because she craved I should — that was not in me. To refuse out of duty, or the ordinary kind surface of love — that was not in me either. There was only one force out of which I could refuse, and that was not love, but need.

All of a sudden, I knew that the fugue of the night was over. That part of me, which she understood even if it cost her her last hope, was not overmastering now.

Somehow the moment held not only the strains of our past, but something like a prophecy. I thought of the child’s death, as I had in the night. If I lost him, I knew — it was the certainty of the fibres, not of thought — I should not be much good to her, but I should need her.

‘No,’ I said, ‘come with me.’

55: Effects of an Obligation

THROUGH the underground corridor of the hospital, which smelt of brick dust and disinfectant, Margaret and I were finding our way to Geoffrey’s office. Along the passage, whose walls, as bare as those of a tube railway, carried uncovered water-pipes, went mothers with children. At a kind of junction or open space sat a group of women, their children in pushchairs, as though expecting nothing, waiting endlessly, just left there, children not specially ill, their fate not specially tragic, waiting with the resignation that made hospitals seem like forgotten railway stations littered with the poor and unlucky camping out for the weekly train. Nurses, their faces high-coloured and opaque, moved past them with strong, heavy-thighed steps as though they did not exist.

When at last we saw a notice, turned down a subsidiary passage and reached the office, which was still underground, Geoffrey’s secretary told us that he was with the child, that he had been giving him his sixth injection. That if we liked, we could wait in the doctor’s room until he returned. Like the nurses in the corridor, she was a strong young woman, her face comely and composed with minor power. When she spoke to us it was in a tone which was brisk and well ordered, but which held an undertone of blame, as though we were obscurely responsible for our ill fortune. It was the tone which is not far distant from most of us, when we have to witness suffering and address it, as though when the veils of good nature were off we believed that the suffering were merely culpable, and suffering a sin.

In the office so small that the walls pressed round us, the light was switched on although through a window one could look up to the sky. The room glistened under the light, both naked and untidy — a glass-fronted bookcase full of text-books and sets of journals, a couple of tubular chairs, a medical couch. We sat down, she put her hand on mine: there we stayed like those others in the corridor, waiting as they were, not expecting to be picked up, too abject to draw attention to ourselves.

I was aware of her palm touching the back of my hand: of my own breathing: of the sheets of typescript on the desk, which looked like a draft of a scientific paper, and the photograph of a woman, handsome, dashing, luxurious.

The telephone rang, the secretary swept in and answered it. It was the mother of a patient: there was a misunderstanding about an address and the secretary was confused. As it happened, I knew the answer: I could not get the words out. It was not malice, I wanted to help, I even wanted to propitiate her, but I was dumb.

When she went out, having at length solved the problem, I muttered to Margaret that I had known all along, but she did not understand. At last she had become no braver than I was, all she could do was press my hand. We had each got to the point of apprehensiveness which was as though we were not thinking any more, as though we were no longer waiting for release. This was all we knew, sitting there together; we were incapable of looking for an end to it.

There was a noise outside, and Geoffrey banged the door open. As soon as I saw his face, I realized. He was shining with a smile of triumph and elation, with a kind of repleteness such as one might see in a man who has just won a tennis match.

Margaret’s fingers touched me. Suddenly our hands were slippery with sweat. Without a word said, we were certain.

In the same instant, Geoffrey cried: ‘He’ll be all right. He’ll do.’

Margaret exclaimed, the tears spilled down her cheeks, but Geoffrey was oblivious of them.

‘It’s interesting,’ he said, ‘I’ve noticed it before, how the very instant the objective signs are beginning to go right, then the child seems to know it himself, one’s only got to look at his face. It’s interesting, one might have thought there’d be a time lag. But the minute that the count in the lumbar fluid showed we had really got this one under control, then the boy was able to hear again and his mind began to clear.’

Suddenly he said, still wrapped up in his triumph: ‘By the way, you needn’t worry, there oughtn’t to be any after-effects. He’s a fine boy.’

It was not a compliment, it was just his statement of biological fact. He was brimming with his own triumph at seeing the child recover: but also, uninterested in so many things which preoccupied the rest of us, not reading the news, contemptuous of politics, laughing off art as a plaything, he nevertheless was on the side of the species. He drew his most unselfcentred happiness, with a kind of biological team spirit, from the prospect of a strong and clever child.

I was giddy with Margaret’s joy, which resonated with mine, so that I could not have distinguished which was which. I wanted to abandon myself to praise of Geoffrey: I was in the sublime state in which all my extravagance, so long pent in, was pelting against the wall of tact, or even of ordinary human consideration. I wanted to patronize him and be humble; I wanted to ask him outright whether he intended to marry the woman in the photograph. I should have liked to ask him if I could be of any use to him.

But I was moved by a compulsion which came from something deeper among the three of us.

‘He’s a fine boy,’ Geoffrey repeated. I was compelled to say: ‘So is yours.’

For an instant he was surprised.

‘Yes, I suppose he is.’

He added, with his head tossed back, with his student vanity: ‘But then, I should have expected him to be.’

He was staring at Margaret. Her tears were not dry, her expression was brilliant with rapture and pain. She said: ‘I’m watching for the first sign of anything wrong with him.’

‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘If nothing happens within a fortnight from now, then he’s clear.’

‘I shall do anything you tell me,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘I’d better see him two or three times a week until the period of incubation is over.’

She cried: ‘We must save him from anything we can!’

She had known, when she came to me, the loads that she was taking; some could shrug them off, not she: even now, in the midst of rapture, they lay on her, lay on her more heavily, perhaps, because she was uplifted. Somehow the boy’s chance of infection stood before her like an emblem. When she spoke of it, when she said we must save him from anything in our power, she was speaking, not only of the disease, but of the future.

I said: ‘Yes, we must save him from everything we can.’

It was a signal of understanding between us. But Geoffrey, who had also heard her affirmation, appeared to have missed it. He replied, as though illness was the only point: ‘Well, even if he does show any signs, which incidentally is much less likely than not, you needn’t take it too tragically. We should be pretty incompetent if we didn’t get it in time. And children are very tough animals, you ought to remember that.’

He said it with detached satisfaction. Then, in a totally different tone, he said: ‘I’m glad I was able to do something for your child.’

In the constricted office, he was sitting on the desk, above us, and, as he spoke he looked down first at her, then at me. In the same tone which was sharp, insistent, not so much benevolent as condescending, he said: ‘I’m glad I was able to do something for you.’

He was free with us now. Before, he had been constrained, because he was a man, light-natured but upright, who did not find forgiveness easy, who indeed felt not revengeful but inferior and ineffective in the presence of those whom he could not forgive. Now he had us under an obligation. His was the moral initiative. He was ready to be fond of her again: he was even ready to like me. He felt happy, released, and good.

So, it might have seemed incongruous, did we. She, and I also, had previously felt for him that resentment which one bears towards someone to whom one has done wrong and harm — a resentment in which there lurks a kind of despising mockery, a dislike in which one makes him smaller than he is. Now he had been powerful when we were abject. We had been in his hands; and, for both of us, for her more violently, but for me also, the feeling swept hidden shame away.

He sat there, above us, his head near the light bulb. Margaret and I looked up at him; her face was blanched with sleeplessness and anxiety, her irises were blood-streaked; so must mine have been. He showed no sign of a broken night: as usual, vain about his appearance, he had his hair elegantly brushed and parted, he smelt of shaving powder.

He was happy: we were sleepy with joy.

56: The Short Walk Home

JUST over a fortnight later, on a humid July afternoon, the clouds so dense that some windows were already lit at six o’clock, Margaret called at my office to take me home. She was wearing a summer frock, and in the heat she was relaxed with pleasure, with delectable fatigue, coming from the hospital, where she had been arranging for the child to return to us next day.

He was well and cheerful, she said. So was Maurice, who had escaped the infection altogether: there was no one in her charge to worry her now, she was lazy with pleasure, just as she had been when Gilbert first brought her into my sick-room.

Just then there sounded Rose’s punctilious tap at the door. As soon as he saw Margaret, whom as it happened he had not met, he broke into apologies so complex and profuse that even I began to feel embarrassed. He was so extremely sorry: he had looked forward all these years to the pleasure of meeting Mrs Eliot: and now he had just butted in, he was making a nuisance of himself, he only wanted to distract her husband for a moment, but even that was an infliction. They had neither of them got better at casual introductions: Rose, inflexibly, wearing his black coat and striped trousers in the steaming heat, went on talking according to his idea of gallantry, his eyes strained; Margaret faced him as she might as a girl at one of her father’s exhibitions, hating the social forms, doing her best to be easy with an awkward and aspiring clerk.

I saw that they mildly liked each other, but only as partners in distress. When Rose had finished his piece of business with me, which with his usual economy took five minutes, he made his protracted and obsequious goodbyes. After he had at last departed, I told her that he was one of the most formidable men I had known, in some ways the most formidable: she had heard it before, but now in the flesh she could not credit it. But she was too tired, too happy to argue; she did not want to disagree, even on the surface: she said, let us go home.

As soon as we had left the well-like corridors of the old building and went into the street, we pushed against the greenhouse air: sweat pricked at the temples: it was in such weather, I remembered, holding Margaret’s arm, that I first walked from Lufkin’s office to the Chelsea house, getting on for twenty years before.

Now, in the same weather, we turned the other way, sauntered up Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square, and there got a bus. I told her how I had once sat on a bus close by with old Bevill, and he had mentioned her father’s name, which gave me a card of re-entry into her life. As the bus spurted and braked up Regent Street, we talked about the child as we might have done in bed between waking and sleeping, the diary of his days, the conspiracy of hope which, during his illness, we had put away as though we had never played with it.

We talked of the children and then put them aside: along Oxford Street we were talking of ourselves. We talked at random, of the first nights we spent together, of what we had feared for each other in the last month, of thoughts of each other during the years we were separated.

As we got off at Marble Arch and walked along the pavement rustling with litter, under the trees, Margaret gave a smile of pretended sarcasm, and said: ‘Yes, I suppose there are some who’d say we had come through.’

I put my arm round her and held her to me as we walked slowly, as slowly as though we planned to spin the evening’s happiness out. The vestigial headache, seeping in with the saturated air, seemed like a sensual ache. There was a smell of hot grass and fumes, and, although the lime was almost over, just once I fancied that I caught the last of it.

Her smile sharp, she said: ‘I suppose some would really say that we’d come through.’

She had more courage than I had. She was not anything like so given to insuring herself: her spirit was so strong that when she rejoiced, she rejoiced without qualification. To her, victories were absolute; at that moment, as we walked together, she had all of them she wanted: she wanted no more than this. And yet, by a perversity which she would not lose, she, whose fibres spoke of complete happiness, could not use the words.

That evening she had to dissimulate her faith, put on a smile that tried to be ironic, and deny the moment in which we stood. Just as I had done so often: but now it was I, out of comparison more suspicious of fate than she was, who spoke without troubling to placate it.

We were in sight of home. A light was shining in one room: the others stood black, eyeless, in the leaden light. It was a homecoming such as, for years, I thought I was not to know. Often in my childhood, I had felt dread as I came near home. It had been worse when I went, as a young man, towards the Chelsea house. Now, walking with Margaret, that dread had gone. In sight of home my steps began to quicken, I should soon be there with her.

It was a homecoming such as I had imagined when I was lonely, but as one happening to others, not to me.