Time of Hope

Part Seven The Decision

Lying awake in the early morning, I listened to Sheila breathing as she slept. It was a relief that she had gone to sleep at last. There had been many nights since our marriage when I had lain awake, restless because I knew that in the other bed she too was staring into the darkness. It had been so a few hours before, worse because at the end of our party with the Getliffes she had broken down.

The chink in the curtain was growing pale in the first light of day. I could just make out the shape of the room. It was nearly a year since we first slept there, when, after our marriage, we moved into this flat in Mecklenburgh Square. I could make out the shape of the room, and of her bed, and of her body beneath the clothes. I felt for her with tenderness, with familiar tenderness, with pity, and, yes, with irritation, irritation that I was forced to think only of her, that looking after her took each scrap of my attention, that in a few hours I should go to the courts tired out after a night of trying to soothe her.

I had thought that I could imagine what it would be like. One can never imagine the facts as one actually lives them, the moment-by-moment facts of every day. I had known that she dreaded company, and I was ready to give up all but a minimum. It seemed an easy sacrifice. After our marriage, I found it a constant drain upon my tenderness. Each sign of her pain made me less prepared to coax her into another party. She was cutting me off from a world of which I was fond — that did not matter much. She kept me away from the ‘useful’ dinner tables, and professionally I should suffer for it. I saw another thing. She was not getting more confident, but less. More completely since our marriage, she believed that she could not cope.

Often I wondered whether she would have been healed if she had known physical love. Mine she could tolerate at times: she had no joy herself, though there were occasions, so odd is the flesh, when she showed a playful pleasure, which drew us closer than we had ever been. I tried to shake off the failure and remorse, and tell myself that the pundits are not so wise as they pretend. In sexual life there is an infinite variety; and many pairs know the magic of the flesh in ways which to others would be just a mockery. In cold blood, I thought that those who write on these topics must have seen very little of life. But that reflection did not comfort me, when she was too strained for me to touch her.

I hoped for a child, with the unrealistic hope that it might settle all: but of that there was no sign.

She wanted to meet no one — except those she discovered for herself. She had only visited her parents once since we married: that was at Christmas, as she kept some of her sense of formal duty. I myself had seen much more of Mr Knight, for we had struck up a bizarre companionship. Sheila let me go to the vicarage alone, while she hid herself in the flat or else went out in search of some of her nondescript cronies. They were an odd bunch. As in her girlhood, she was more relaxed with the unavailing, the down-and-out, even the pretentious, so long as they were getting nowhere. She would sit for hours in a little café talking to the waiter; she became the confidante of typists from decayed upper-class families who were looking for a man to keep them; she went and listened to writers who somehow did not publish, to writers who did not even write.

Some of my friends thought that, among that army of the derelict, she took lovers. I did not believe it. I did not ask; I did not spy any longer; I should have known. I did not doubt that she was faithful to me. No, from them she gained the pleasure of bringing solace. She had her own curious acid sympathy with the lost. She was touched by those, young and old, whose inner lives like her own were comfortless. It was in part that feeling which drew her to my attic in my student days.

I did not spy on her any longer. My obsessive jealousy had died soon after I possessed her. When she told me, as she still did, of some man who had taken her fancy, I could sympathize now, and stroke her hair, and laugh. I was capable of listening without the knife twisting within. I thought I should be capable, if ever I discovered a man who could give her joy, of bringing him to her arms. I thought I could do that; I who had, less than two years before, watched her window for hours in the bitter night — I who had deliberately set out to break her chance of joy.

Since then I had made love to her. Since then I had lain beside her in such dawns as this. Hugh was gone now, married, dismissed further into the past in her mind than in mine (I was still jealous of him, when all other jealousy was washed away). If ever she felt with another that promise of joy, I believed that I would scheme for her and watch over her till she was happy.

I did not think it was likely to happen. Her fund of interest seemed to have run low. She had gone farther along life’s road than I had, though we were the same age and though my years had been more packed than hers. It was to me she turned, hoping for a new idea to occupy her. At times she turned to me as though to keep her going, as though I had to live for two. It was that condition of blankness and anxiety that I feared most in her, and which most wore me down. Even in perfect love it would be hard to live for another. In this love it was a tax beyond my strength.

She looked after the flat with the same competence that she spent on her coins. She was abler than I had thought, and picked up any technique very quickly. She did more of the housework than she need have done, for we could have afforded another servant; perhaps as an expiation, perhaps to console me, Mr Knight had surprised us with a lavish marriage settlement, and between us our income was about two thousand pounds a year. She spent little of it on herself. Sometimes she helped out her cronies, or bought records or books. That was almost all. I should have welcomed any extravagance. I should have welcomed anything into which she could pour out her heart.

I had threatened Hugh that if he married her he would never know what to expect when he arrived home. No cruel prophecy had ever recoiled more cruelly. After a year of marriage, I used to stay in Chambers of an evening with one care after another piling upon me. My career. I was slipping: if I were to achieve half my ambition, this was the time when I ought to take another jump forward. It was not happening. My practice was growing very slightly, but no more. I could guess too clearly that I was no longer talked about as a coming man.

There was another care which had become darker since the summer. Hints kept reaching me of a scandal breaking round George Passant and the group. I had made inquiries, and they did not reassure me. George would not confide, but I felt there was danger creeping up. Oblivious and obstinate, George shut me out. I was terrified of what might happen to him.

With those cares upon me, I would leave Chambers at last, and set out home. I wanted someone to talk to, with the comfort of letting the despondency overflow. ‘My girl,’ I wanted to say, ‘things are going badly. My bit of success may have been a flash in the pan. And there’s worse news still.’ I wanted someone to talk to, and, in fact, when I got home, I might find a stranger. A stranger to whom I was bound, and with whom I could not rest until I had coaxed her to find a little peace. She might, at the worst, be absolutely still, neither reading nor smoking, just gazing into the room. She might have gone out to one of her down-at-heel friends. I could never sleep until she returned, although she tiptoed into the spare room, there to spend the night on the divan. Once or twice I had found her there in the middle of the night, smoking a chain of cigarettes, playing her records still fully dressed.

There was not one night that autumn of 1932, when I could reckon on going back to content.

My unperceptive friends saw me married to a beautiful and accomplished woman, and envied me. My wiser friends were full of resentment. One or two, guessing rightly that I was less a prisoner than before my marriage, dangled other women in front of me. They thought that I was being damaged beyond repair. Not even Charles March, whose temperament was closest to my own, had much good to say of her. No one was wise enough to realize that there was one sure way to please me and to win my unbreakable gratitude: that was to say not that they loved her — she received enough of that — but simply that they liked her. I wanted to hear someone say that she was sweet, and tried to be kind, and that she was harming only herself. I wanted them to be sorry for her, not for me.

Yet, lying beside her, I did not know how long I could stand it.

I was facing the corrosion of my future.

What idea had she of my other life? It seemed to her empty, and my craving for success vulgar. She did not invade me, she did not possess me, she did not wish to push me on. She knew me as a beseeching lover: she turned to me because I knew her and was not put off. For the rest, she left me inviolate and with my secrets. There was none of the give and take of equal hearts.

Lying beside her in the silver light of the October dawn, I did not know how long I could stand it.

She bore the same sense of formal duty to me as to her parents. Just as she visited them for Christmas, so she offered, once or twice, to entertain some legal acquaintances. ‘You want me to. I shall do it,’ she said. I did want it, but I knew before her first dinner party that nothing would be more of an ordeal. It was only recently that I had let her try again: and the result had been our dinner of the previous night.

I had mentioned that it was months since Henriques sent me a brief. She made some indifferent response; and then, some days later, she asked if she should invite the Henriques to the flat. I was so touched by the sign of consideration that I said yes with gusto, and told her (for the sake of some minor plan) to ask the Getliffes as well. For forty-eight hours before the dinner, she was wretched with apprehension. It tore open her diffidence, it exposed her as crippled and inept.

Before they arrived, Sheila stood by the mantelpiece; I put an arm round her, tried to tease her into resting, but she was rigid. She drank four or five glasses of sherry standing there. It was rare for her to drink at all. But for a time the party went well. Mrs Getliffe greeted us with long, enthusiastic stares from her doglike brown eyes, and cooed about the beauties and wonders of the flat. Her husband was the most valuable of guests; he was always ready to please, and he conceived it his job to make the party go. Incidentally, he provided me with a certain amusement, for I had often heard him profess a cheerful anti-Semitism. In the presence of one of the most influential of Jewish solicitors, I was happy to see that his anti-Semitism was substantially modified.

We gave them a good meal. With her usual technical competence, Sheila was a capable cook, and though I knew little of wine I had learned where to take advice. At any party, Getliffe became half-drunk with his first glass, and stayed in that expansive state however much he drank. He sat by Sheila’s side; he had a furtive eye for an attractive woman, and a kindly one for a self-conscious hostess who needed a bit of help. He chatted to her, he drew the table into their talk. He was not the kind of man she liked, but he set her laughing. I had never felt so warm to him.

Henriques was his subdued, courteous, and observant self. I hoped that he was approving. With his wife, I exchanged gossip about the March family. I smiled down the table at Sheila, to signal that she was doing admirably, and she returned the smile.

It was Getliffe, in the excess of his bonhomie, who brought about the change. We had just finished the sweet, and he looked round the table with his eyes shining and his face open.

‘My friends,’ he said, ‘I’m going to call you my friends at this time of night’ — he gazed at Henriques with his frank man-to-man regard. ‘I’ve just had a thought. When I wake up in the night, I sometimes wonder what I should do if I could have my time over again. I expect we all do, don’t we?’

Someone said yes, of course we did.

‘Well then,’ said Getliffe triumphantly, ‘I’m going to ask you all what you’d really choose — if God gave you the chance on a plate. If He came to you in the middle of the night and said “Look here, Herbert Getliffe, you’ve seen round some of this business of life by now. You’ve done a lot of silly little things. Now you can have your time over again. It’s up to you. You choose.”’

Getliffe gave a laugh, fresh, happy, and innocent.

‘I’ll set the ball rolling,’ he said. ‘I should make a clean sweep. I shouldn’t want to struggle for the prizes another time. Believe me, I should just want to do a bit of good. I should like to be a country parson — like your father’ — he beamed at Sheila: she was still — ‘ready to stay there all my life and giving a spot of comfort to a few hundred souls. That’s what I should choose. And I bet I should be a happier man.’

He turned to Mrs Henriques, who said firmly that she would devote herself to her co-religionists, instead of trying to forget that she was born a Jewess. I came next, and said that I would chance my luck as a creative writer, in the hope of leaving some sort of memorial behind me.

On my left, Mrs Getliffe gazed adoringly at her husband. ‘No, I shouldn’t change at all. I should ask for the same again, please. I couldn’t ask anything better than to be Herbert’s wife.’

Surprisingly, Henriques said that he would elect to stay at Oxford as a don.

We were all easy and practised talkers, and the replies had gone clockwise round at a great pace. Now it was Sheila’s turn. There was a pause. Her head was sunk on to her chest. She had a wineglass between her fingers; she was not spinning it, but tipping it to and fro. As she did so, drops of wine fell on the table. She did not notice. She went on tipping her glass, and the wine fell.

The pause lasted. The strain was so acute that they turned their eyes from her.

At last: ‘I pass.’ The words were barely distinguishable, in that strangulated tone.

Quick to cover it up, Getliffe said: ‘I expect you’re so busy taking care of old L S — you can’t imagine anything else, either better or worse, can you! For better, for worse,’ he said, cheerfully allusive. ‘Why, I remember when L S first pottered into my Chambers—’

The evening was broken. She scarcely spoke again until they said goodbye. Getliffe did his best, the Henriques kept up a steady considerate flow of talk, but they were all conscious of her. I talked back, anything to keep the room from silence; I even told anecdotes; I mentioned with a desperate casualness places and plays to which Sheila and I had been and how we had argued or agreed.

They all went as early as they decently could. As soon as the front door closed, Sheila went straight into the spare room, without a word.

I waited a few minutes, and then followed her in. She was not crying: she was tense, still, staring-eyed, lying on the divan by her gramophone. She was just replacing a record. I stood beside her. When she was so tense, it did harm to touch her.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘I tell you, it doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m no good to you. I’m no good to myself. I never shall be.’ She added, ferociously: ‘Why did you bring me into it?’

I began to speak, but she interrupted me: ‘You should have left me alone. It’s all I’m fit for.’

As I had so often done, I set myself to ease her. I had to tell her once again that she was not so strange. It was all that she wanted to hear. At last I persuaded her to go to bed. Then I listened, until she was breathing in her sleep.

She slept better than I did. I dozed off, and woke again, and watched the room lighten as the morning light crept in. Pity, tenderness, morbid annoyance crowded within me, took advantage of my tiredness, as I lay and saw her body under the clothes. The evening would do me harm, and she had not a single thought for that. She turned in her sleep, and my heart stirred.

It was full dawn. By ten o’clock I had to be in court.

One night that autumn I arrived home jaded and beset. I had been thinking all day of the rumours about George Passant. One explanation kept obtruding itself that: George had shared with Jack Cotery in a stupid, dangerous fraud. George — in money dealings the most upright of men. Often it seemed like a bad dream. That night I could not laugh it away.

Sheila brought me a drink. It was not one of her light-hearted days, but I had to talk to her.

‘I’m really anxious,’ I said.

‘What have I done?’

‘Nothing special.’ I could still smile at her. ‘I’m seriously anxious about old George.’

She looked at me, as though her thoughts were remote. I had to go on.

‘I can hardly believe it,’ I said, ‘but he and some of the others do seem to have got themselves into a financial mess. I hope to God it’s not actionable. There are rumours that they’ve gone pretty near the edge.’

‘Silly of them,’ she said.

I was angry with her. My own concerns, the lag in my career, the dwindling of my prospects, those she could be indifferent to, and I was still bound to cherish her. But now at this excuse my temper flared, for the first time except in play since we were married. I cried ‘Will you never have a spark of ordinary feelings? Can’t you forget yourself for a single instant? You are the most self-centred woman that I have ever met.’

She stared at me.

‘You knew that when you married me.’

‘I knew it. And I’ve been reminded of it every day since.’

‘It’s your own fault,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have married someone who didn’t pretend to love you.’

‘Anyone who married you’, I said, ‘would have found the same. Even if you fancied you loved him. You’re so self-centred that you’d be a drag on any man alive.’

She said in a clear, steady voice: ‘I suppose you’re right.’

For several days she was friendly and subdued. She asked me about one of my cases. Then, after sitting silent through a breakfast time, she said, just as I was leaving for Chambers ‘I’m going away. I might come back. I don’t know what I shall do.’

I said little in reply, except that I should always be there. My first emotion was of measureless relief. Walking away from Mecklenburgh Square, I felt free, light-footed, a little sad, above all exhilarated that my energies were my own again.

My sense of relief endured. I wrote an opinion that day with a total concentration such as I had not been capable of for months. I felt a spasm of irritation at the thought of explaining to the maid that Sheila was taking a holiday: I was too busy for that kind of diplomacy. But I was free. I had a long leisurely dinner with a friend that night, and returned late to Mecklenburgh Square. The windows of the flat were dark. I went into each room, and they were empty. I made myself some tea, relaxed and blessed because I need not care.

I did a couple of hours’ good work before I went to bed. It was lonely to see her empty bed, lonely but a relief.

So I went on for several days. I missed her, but I should have said, if Charles March had examined me, that I missed her as I missed the seashore of my illness, with the nostalgia of the prison. I should have said that I was better off without her. But habits are more obstinate than freedoms: the habits of patience, stamina, desire, protective love. I told myself that my cruel words had driven her away. I could not trust my temper even now. I had made the accusations which would hurt her most; they were true, but I had done her enough harm before. I did not like the thought of her wandering alone.

In much that I thought, I was deceiving myself. She was still dear to me, selfishly dear, and that was truer than tenderness or remorse. Yet even so my relief was so strong that I did not act as I should have done only a few months earlier. I worked steadily in Chambers and in the flat at night. I wrote for news of George. I did not walk among the crowds in the imbecile hope of seeing her face. All I did was telephone her father: they had had no word. Mr Knight’s sonorous voice came down the wire, self-pitying and massively peevish, reproaching me and fate that his declining years and delicate health should be threatened by such a daughter. Then I inquired of some of her acquaintances, and called at the cafés where she liked to hide. No one had seen her.

I began to be frightened about her. Through my criminal cases I had some contact with the police, and I confided in an inspector at the Yard whom I knew to be sensible. They had no information. I could only go home and wait.

I became angry with her. It was her final outrage not to let me know. I was frightened. She was not fit to be alone. I sat in the flat at night, pretending to work, but once more, and for a different reason, her shadow came between me and the page.

Six days after she left, I was sitting alone. The front door clicked, and I heard a key in the lock. She walked into the room, her face grey and strained, her dress bedraggled. Curiously, my first emotion was again of relief, of tried but comforting relief.

‘I’ve come back,’ she said.

She came towards me with a parcel in her hands.

‘Look, I’ve brought something for you,’ she said.

Under her eyes, I unwrapped the paper. She had kept a childlike habit of bringing me presents at random. This was a polished, shining, rosewood box: I threw open the lid, and saw a curious array of apparatus. There were two fountain pens lying in their slots, bottles of different coloured inks, writing pads, a circular thermometer, a paper-weight in the shape of a miniature silver-plated yacht. It was the least austere and the most useless of collections, quite unlike her style.

‘Extremely nice,’ I said, and drew her on to my knees.

‘Moderately nice,’ she corrected me, and buried her head in my shoulder.

I never knew exactly where she had spent those days. She had certainly slept two or three nights in a low lodging house near Paddington Station. It was possible that she tried to find a job. She was not in a state to be questioned. She was miserable and defeated. Once more I had to find something to which she could look forward. Make her look forward — that was all I could do for her. Should we go abroad at Christmas? Should we leave this flat, where, I said, bad luck had dogged us, and start again in a new house?

It astonished me, but that night she caught almost hysterically at the idea. She searched through the newspapers, and would have liked me to telephone one agent without waiting till the morning. Midnight had gone, but she was full of plans. To buy a house — it seemed to her like a solution. She felt the pathetic hope that sets the heartbroken off to travel.

So, on the next few afternoons, I had to get away early from Chambers in order to inspect houses along the Chelsea reach. The wind was gusty, and the autumn leaves were being whirled towards the bright cloud-swept sky. I begrudged the time. Once again, it meant a brief prepared ten per cent less completely than if I were settled. Yet it was a joy, in those windy evenings, to see her safe. She had decided on Chelsea; she had decided that we must have a view of the river; and we looked at houses all along the embankment from Antrobus Street to Battersea Bridge. In a few days she discovered what she wanted, at the east end of Cheyne Walk, It was a good-looking early-Victorian house with a balcony and a strip of garden, thirty yards by ten, running down to the pavement. I had to pay for a fifteen-year lease. I borrowed the money from Mr Knight. He agreed with me that, if this house might make her tranquil, she must have it. Avaricious as he was, he would have lent more than that so as not to have her on his conscience.

As I signed the lease, I wondered where she and I would be living in fifteen years.

We moved in by the middle of November. On our first evening the fog rolled up from the river, so thick that, walking together up and down the garden, we could not make out people passing by outside. We heard voices, very clear, from a long way down the embankment. Now and then the fog was gilded as a car groped past. We were hidden together as we walked in the garden; we might have been utterly alone; and there, in the cold evening, in the dark night, I embraced her.

When we went in to dinner, we left the curtains undrawn, so that the fire shone on the writhing fog behind the panes. On the river a boat’s horn gave a long stertorous wail. We were at peace.

That visitation of happiness remained for a few days. Then all became as it had been in the flat. Once more I dreaded to go home, for fear of what awaited me. The familiar routine took charge. Once more the night was not over until I knew she was asleep. In the new house, she sat alone beside her gramophone in a high bright room.

One December evening, I was reading, trying to pluck up the fortitude to go into that room and calm her, when the telephone rang. It was to tell me that the police had begun their inquiries into George Passant’s affairs, that I was needed that night and must catch the next train.

George’s friends had sent for me because I was a lawyer. Before I had talked to him for half an hour that night, I thought it more likely than not that he would be prosecuted. I was relieved that I had something to do, that I was forced to think of professional action. It would have been harder just to listen helplessly to his distress.

He was both massive and persecuted. He was guarding his group: sometimes he showed his old unrealistic optimism, and believed that this ‘outrage’ would blow over. I could not be certain how much he was concealing from me, though he was pathetically grateful for my affection. Even in the fear of disgrace, his mind was as powerful and precise as ever. It was astonishing to listen to a man so hunted, and hear a table of events, perfectly clear and well ordered, in which he and Jack Cotery had taken part for four years past.

I did not understand it all until near the end of the trial; but from George’s account, in that first hour, I could put together most of the case that might be brought against them.

George and Jack had been engaged in two different schemes for making money; and the danger was a charge of obtaining this money by false pretences, and (for technical reasons) of conspiracy to defraud.

The schemes were dissimilar, though they had used the same financial technique. After giving up his partnership with Eden, Martineau had played with some curious irrelevant ventures before he finally made his plunge and renounced the world; one of those was a little advertising agency, which had attached to it the kind of small advertising paper common in provincial towns.

Jack Cotery had persuaded George that, if they could raise the money and buy out Martineau’s partner, the agency was a good speculation. In fact, it had turned out to be so. They had met their obligations and made a small, steady profit. It looked like a completely honest business, apart from a misleading figure in the statement on which they had raised money. No sensible prosecution, I thought both then and later, would bring a charge against them on that count — if there existed one single clinching fact over the other business.

They had gone on from their first success to a project bigger altogether; they had decided to buy the farm and some other similar places and run them as a chain of youth hostels. In George’s mind it was clear that one main purpose had been to possess the farm in private, so as to entertain the group. Jack had ranged about among their acquaintances, given all kinds of stories of attendances and profits, and on the strength of them borrowed considerable sums of money. I could imagine him doing it; I had little doubt that, whatever George knew of those stories, Jack Cotery had not kept within the limits of honesty, though he might have been clever enough to have covered his tracks. From the direction of the first inquiries, there seemed a hope that nothing explicitly damning had come to light. Looking at the two businesses together, however, I was afraid that the prosecution would have enough to go on. I went from George to Eden’s house, where I was staying the night; and there, by the fireside in the drawing-room, where I had once waited with joy for Sheila, I told Eden the story to date, and what I feared.

‘These things will happen,’ said Eden, with his usual impenetrable calm. ‘Ah well! These things will happen.’

‘What do you think?’

‘You’re right, of course, we’ve got to be prepared.’

His only sign of emotion was a slight irritability; I was surprised that he was not more upset about the credit of his firm. ‘I must say they’ve been very foolish. They’ve been foolish whatever they’ve been doing. They oughtn’t to try these things without experience. It’s the sort of foolishness that Passant would go in for. I’ve told you that before—’

‘He’s one of the biggest men I’ve met. That still holds after meeting a few more,’ I said, more harshly than I had ever spoken to Eden. For a moment, his composure was broken.

‘We won’t argue about that. It isn’t the time to argue now. I must consider what ought to be done,’ he said; his tone, instead of being half-friendly, half-paternal, as I was used to, had become the practised cordial one of his profession. He did not like his judgement questioned, especially about George. ‘I can’t instruct you myself. My firm can’t take any responsible part. But I can arrange with someone else to act for Passant. And I shall give instructions that you’re to be used from the beginning. That is, if this business develops as we all hope it won’t…’

I wanted to take the case. For, above all, I knew what to conceal.

I knew that the case might turn ugly. George was frightened of his legal danger: he was a robust man, and it was the simple danger of prison that frightened him most; but there was another of which he was both terrified and ashamed. The use of the farm; the morals and ‘free life’ of the group; they might all be dragged through the court. It would not be pretty, for the high thinking and plain living of my time had changed by now. The flirtations which had been the fashion in the idealistic days had not satisfied the group for long. Jack’s influence had step by step played on George’s passionate nature. Jack had never believed in George’s ideals for an instant; and in that relation there could only be one winner. George had his great gift for moral leadership, but he was weak, a human brother, a human hypocrite, uncertain of the intention of his own desires. With someone like Jack who had no doubt of his desires or George’s or any man’s, George was in the long run powerless. And so it happened that he, who was born to be a leader, was in peril of being exposed to ridicule and worse than ridicule as the cheapest kind of provincial Don Juan.

I tried to think of any tactic that would save him. Back in London I sat over the papers night after night. Sheila was in her worst mood, but I could do little for her, and made nothing of an attempt. I could not drag myself to her room, if it only meant the usual routine. For once I prayed for someone who would give me strength, instead of bleeding away such as I had.

For some days Hotchkinson, the solicitor to whom Eden had deputed the case, sent me no news. I had a fugitive hope that the police had found the case too thin. Then a telegram arrived in Chambers to say ‘clients arrested applying for bail’. It was the middle of December, and term would soon be over. After that morning, the next hearing in the magistrates’ court was fixed for 29 December. I had no case in London till January; I thought I could be more use if I lived in the town for the next fortnight.

I went home to Chelsea to tell Sheila so. I wondered if she would perceive the true reason — that only away from her could I be free enough to work for them all out. I could suffer no distraction now.

She was quiet and sensible that morning, when I told her of the arrests.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s been worrying you.’

I smiled a little.

‘I did my best to warn you,’ I said.

‘I’ve been a bit — caged in.’ It was the word she often used; she was ruthless in talking of herself, but sometimes she wanted to domesticate her own behaviour.

I said that I ought to stay at Eden’s until the New Year.

‘Why?’

‘I must win this case.’

‘Will it help you? Going away like that?’ She was staring at me.

‘It’s rather a tangled case. Remember, they’ll tell me everything they can—’

‘Is it more tangled than all the others? You’ve never been away before.’

She said nothing more, except that she would go to her parents for Christmas Day. ‘If you think that my father won’t find out that you’re staying at Eden’s,’ she said with her old sarcastic grin, ‘you’re very much mistaken. I’m not going to make your excuses for you. You’d better come over at Christmas and have a shot yourself.’

In the next fortnight I spent much of my time with George, and I saw Jack whenever he wanted me. Step by step they came to feel secure, as though I were still among them. George learned to believe that I had not altered, and both then and always was on his side. So far as I had altered, in fact, it was in a direction that brought me nearer to him in his trouble. When I was younger and he had known me best, I was struggling, but failure was an experience that I neither knew nor admitted as possible for myself. I believed with a hard, whole, confident heart that success was to be my fortune. I had the opaqueness of the successful, and the impatience of the successful with those so feeble and divided that they fell away. Since then, in my weeks of illness, I had acknowledged absolute surrender — and that I could not forget. I had known the depth of failure, and from that time I was bound to anyone who started with gifts and hope, and then felt his nature break him; I was bound not by compassion or detached sympathy, but because I could have been his like, and might still be. So, in those threatening days, I came near to George.

And yet, as I walked from Eden’s to George’s through the harsh familiar streets, I was often hurt by the changes in his life — not the fraud, but the transformation of his ideal society into a Venusberg. I wished that it had not happened. I was hurt out of proportion, considering the world in which I lived. Did I, who thought I could take the truth about any human being, wish to shut my eyes to half of George? Or was I trying to preserve the days of my young manhood, when George was spinning his innocent, altruistic, Utopian plans, and I was happy and expectant because of the delights to come?

It was that pain, added to George’s, which led me into an error in legal tactics. I knew quite well that the prosecution’s case was likely to be so strong that we had no chance of getting it dismissed in the police court on the 29th. The only sane course was to hold our defence and let it go to the assizes; on the other hand, if the lucky chance came off, and we defended and won in the police court, we might keep most of the scandal hidden. It was a false hope, and I was wrong to have permitted it. But George’s violence and suffering over-persuaded me: if the prosecution in the police court was weaker than we feared, I might risk going for an acquittal there.

It did no positive harm to hold out such a hope. But I had to explain it to Eden and Hotchkinson. They were cool-headed men, and they strongly disagreed. It was much wiser, they said, to make up our minds at once. The case was bound to go to the assizes. Surely I must see that? Eden was troubled. I was young, but I had a reputation for good legal judgement. Both he and Hotchkinson thought I had been a more brilliant success at the Bar than was the fact. They treated me with an uneasy respect. Nevertheless, they were sound, sensible solicitors. They believed that I was wrong in considering such tactics for a moment; they believed that I was wrong, said so with weight, and firmly advised me against it.

That discussion took place on Christmas Eve. During my stay so far, I had not felt like visiting my relations and acquaintances in the town, and after the disagreement I felt less so than ever. But I wanted to avoid attending Eden’s party, and so I went off to call on Aunt Milly and my father. I had to tell them about the case, which had already been mentioned in the local papers. Aunt Milly, very loyal when once she had given her approval, was indignant about George. She was sure that he was innocent, and could only have been involved through unscrupulous persons who had presumed on his good nature and what she called his ‘softness’. Aunt Milly was now in the sixties, but still capable of vigorous and noisy indignation. ‘My word!’ said my father, full of simple wonder that I should be appearing in public in the town. ‘Well, I’ll be blowed!’ He was just about to slink out of Aunt Milly’s house for a jocular Christmas Eve going round singing with the waits. Getting me alone for two minutes, he at once asked me to join the party. ‘Some of these houses do you proud,’ said my father, with an extremely knowing look. ‘I know where there’s a bottle or two in the kitchen—’

I spent next day at the Knights’. It was the most silent time I had known inside that house. The four of us were alone. I was hag-ridden by the case.

When I looked at Sheila, I saw only an inward gaze. She had not made a single inquiry throughout the day. We walked for a few minutes in the rose garden. She said that she would have liked to talk to me. Not one word about the case. I was angry with her, angry and tired. I could not rouse myself to say that soon I should have time, soon I should be home refreshed and ready to console her.

All that day I wanted to get her out of my sight.

Mrs Knight was unusually quiet. She knew that something was wrong with our marriage, and, though she blamed me, it was out of her depth. As for Mr Knight, he would scarcely speak to me. Not because his daughter was miserable. Not because I was so beset that my voice was dead. No, Mr Knight would not speak to me for the simple reason that he was huffed. And he was huffed because I had chosen to live in Eden’s house and not in his.

No explanation was any good — that I must see George and the others night and day, that I could not drive in and out from the country, that, whatever happened, even if we got them off, Eden was George’s employer and it was imperative for me to keep his good will. No explanation appeased Mr Knight. And, to tell the truth, I was too far gone to make many.

‘No one bothers to see me,’ he said. ‘No one bothers to see me. I’m not worth the trouble. I’m not worth the trouble.’

He only broke his dignified silence because his inquisitiveness became too strong. No one loved a scandal, or had a shrewder eye for one, than Mr Knight. Despite being affronted, he could not rest when he had the chief source of secret information at his dinner table.

I drank a good deal that night, enough to put me to sleep as soon as we went to bed. When I woke, Sheila was regarding me with a quizzical smile.

‘The light’s rather strong isn’t it?’ she said.

She made me a cup of tea. There were occasions when she enjoyed nursing me. She said ‘You got drunk. You got drunk on purpose.’ She stared at me, and said: ‘You’ll get over it.’

As I kissed her goodbye, I reminded her that the case came up on the 29th. In a tone flatter and more expressionless than she had used that morning, she wished me luck.

In the police court, I had not listened to the prosecutor’s speech for half an hour before I knew that Eden and Hotchkinson had been right. There was no chance of an acquittal that day. There never had been a chance. I should have to reserve our defence until the assizes. At the lunch break I said so, curtly because it was bitter to wound him more, to George.

When I told Eden, he remarked: ‘I always thought you’d take the sensible view before it was too late.’

The next night Eden and I had dinner together in his house. He was at his most considerate. He said that I had been ‘rushing about’ too much; it was true that I was worn by some harrowing scenes in the last twenty-four hours. He took me into the drawing-room, and stoked the fire high in the grate. He gave me a substantial glass of brandy. He warmed his own in his hands, swirled the brandy round, smelt and tasted, with a comfortable, unhurried content. Just as unhurriedly, he said ‘How do you feel about yesterday?’

‘It looks none too good.’

‘I completely agree. As a matter of fact,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I’ve been talking to Hotchkinson about it during the afternoon. We both consider that we shall be lucky if we can save those young nuisances from what, between ourselves, I’m beginning to think they deserve. But I don’t like to think of their getting it through the lack of any possible effort on our part. Don’t you agree?’

I knew what was coming.

Eden’s voice was grave and cordial. He did not like distressing me, and yet he was enjoying the exercise of his responsibility.

‘Well then, that’s what Hotchkinson and I have been considering. And we wondered whether you ought to have a little help. You’re not to misunderstand us, young man. I’d as soon trust a case to you as anyone of your age, and Hotchkinson believes in you as well. Of course, you were a trifle over-optimistic imagining you might get a dismissal in the police court, but we all make our mistakes, you know. This is going to be a very tricky case, though. It’s not going to be just working out the legal defence. If it was only doing that in front of a judge, I’d take the responsibility of leaving you by yourself—’

Eden entered on a disquisition about the unpredictable behaviour of juries, their quirks and obstinacies and prejudices. I wanted to be spared that, in my impatience, in my wounded vanity. Soon I broke in ‘What do you suggest?’

‘I want you to stay in the case. You know it better than anyone already, and we can’t do without you. But I believe, taking everything into consideration, you ought to have someone to lead you.’

‘Who?’

‘I was thinking of your old chief — Getliffe.’

Now I was savage.

‘It’s sensible to get someone,’ I said with violence, ‘but Getliffe — seriously, he’s a bad lawyer.’

‘No one’s a hero to his pupils, you know,’ said Eden. He pointed out, as was true, that Getliffe was already successful as a silk.

‘I dare say I’m unfair. But this is important. There are others who’d do it admirably.’ I rapped out several names.

‘They’re clever fellows.’ Eden gave a smile, obstinate, displeased, unconvinced. ‘But I don’t see any reason to go beyond Getliffe. He’s always done well with my briefs.’

I was ashamed that the disappointment swamped me. I had believed that I was entirely immersed in the danger to my friends. I had lain awake at night, thinking of George’s suffering, of how he could be rescued, of plans for his life afterwards. I believed that those cares had driven all others from my mind. And in fact they were not false.

Yet, when I heard Eden’s decision, I could think of nothing but the setback to myself. It was no use pretending. No one can hide from himself which wound makes him flinch more. This petty setback overwhelmed their disaster. It was a wound in my vanity, it was a wound in my ambition. By its side, my concern for George had been only the vague shadow of an ache.

It lay bare the nerve both of my vanity and of my ambition. Much had happened to me since first in this town they had begun to drive me on; sometimes I had forgotten them; now they were quiveringly alive. They were, of course, inseparable; while one burned, so must the other. In all ambitions, even those much loftier than mine, there lives the nerve of vanity. That I should be thought not fit to handle a second-rate case! That I should be relegated in favour of a man whom I despised! I stood by the fire in Eden’s drawing-room after he had gone to bed. If I had gone further, I thought, they would not have considered giving me a leader. I knew, better than anyone, that I had stood still this last year, and longer than that. They had not realized it, they could not have heard the whiffs of depreciation that were beginning to go round. But if I had indisputably arrived, they would not have passed me over.

There was one reason, and one reason only, I told myself that night, why I had not indisputably arrived. It was she. The best of my life I had poured out upon her. I had lived for two. I had not been left enough power to throw into my ambition. She not only did not help; she was the greatest weight I carried. She alone could have kept me back. ‘Without her, I should have been invulnerable now. It was she who was to blame.

In the assize court, Getliffe began badly. He took nearly all the examinations himself, he did not allow me much part. Once, when he was leading me, he had said with childlike earnestness: ‘It’s one of my principles, L S — if one wants anything done well, one must do it oneself.’ The case went dead against us. Getliffe became careless, and in his usual fashion got a name or figure wrong. It did us harm. At those moments — though once in court I was passing him a junior’s correcting notes, I was carried along by my anxiety about George’s fate — I felt a dart of degrading satisfaction. They might think twice before they passed me over for an inferior again.

But then Getliffe stumbled on to a piece of luck. Martineau was still wandering on his religious tramps, but he had been tracked down, and he attended to give evidence about the advertising agency. In the box he allowed Getliffe to draw from him an explanation of the most damning fact against George — for Martineau took the fault upon himself. It was he who had misled George.

From that point, Getliffe believed that he could win the case. Despite the farm evidence which he could not shift; in fact, he worried less about that evidence than about the revelations of the group’s secret lives. The scandals came out, and George’s cross-examination was a bitter hour. They had raised much prejudice, as Getliffe said. Nevertheless, he thought he could ‘pull something out of the bag’ in his final speech. If he could smooth the prejudice down, Martineau’s appearance ought to have settled it. It was the one thing the jury were bound to remember, said Getliffe with an impish grin.

It had actually made an impression on Getliffe himself. Like many others, he could not decide whether Martineau had committed perjury in order to save George.

Before the end of the trial, I was able to settle that doubt. I listened to a confession, not from George or Jack but from their chief associate.

George had started the agency venture in complete innocence; but he realized the truth before they had raised the whole sum. He realized that the statement he had quoted, on Martineau’s authority, was false. He tried to stop the business then, but Jack’s influence was too strong. From that time forward, Jack was George’s master. He was the dominant figure in the farm transactions — Jack’s stories, on which they borrowed the money, were conscious lies, and George knew of them.

In his final speech, Getliffe kept his promise and ‘pulled something out of the bag’. Yet he believed what he said; in his facile emotional fashion, he had been moved by the stories both of Martineau and of George, and he just spoke as he felt. It was his gift, naïve, subtle, and instinctive, that what he felt happened to be convenient for the case. He let himself go; and as I listened, I felt a kind of envious gratitude. As the verdict came near, I was thankful that he was defending them. He had done far better than I should ever have done.

He dismissed the charge over the agency, and the one over the farm, already vague and complicated enough, he made to sound unutterably mysterious. Then we expected him to sit down; but instead he set out to fight the prejudice that George’s life had roused. He did so by admitting the prejudice himself. ‘I want to say something about Mr Passant, because I think we all realize he has been the leader. He is the one who set off with this idea of freedom. It’s his influence that I’m going to try to explain. You’ve all seen him… He could have done work for the good of the country and his generation — no one has kept him from it but himself. No one but himself and the ideas he has persuaded himself to believe in: because I’m going a bit further. It may surprise you to hear that I do genuinely credit him with setting out to create a better world.

‘I don’t pretend he has, mind you. You’re entitled to think of him as a man who has wasted every gift he possesses. I’m with you.’ Getliffe went on to throw the blame on to George’s time. As he said it, he believed it, just as he believed in anything he said. He was so sincere that he affected others. It was one of the most surprising and spontaneous of all his speeches.

The jury were out two hours. Some of the time, Getliffe and I walked about together. He was nervous but confident. At last we were called into court.

The door clicked open, the feet of the jury clattered and drummed across the floor. Nearly all of them looked into the dock.

The clerk read the first charge, conspiracy over the agency. The foreman said, very hurriedly: ‘Not guilty.’

After the second charge (there were nine items in the indictment), the ‘Not guilty’ kept tapping out, mechanically and without any pause.

It was not long before George and I got out of the congratulating crowd, and walked together towards the middle of the town. The sky was low and yellowish-dark. Lights gleamed into the sombre evening. We passed near enough to see the window of the office where I had worked. For a long time we walked in silence.

Then George said, defiantly, that he must go on. ‘I’ve not lost everything,’ he said. ‘Whatever they did, I couldn’t have lost everything.’

Then I heard him rebuild his hopes. He could not forget the scandal; curiously, it was Getliffe’s speech, that perhaps saved him from prison, which brought him the deepest rancour and the deepest shame. From now on, he would often have to struggle to see himself unchanged. Yet he was cheerful, brimming with ideas and modest plans, as first of all he thought of how he would earn a living. He wanted to leave the town, find a firm similar to Eden’s, and then work his way through to a partnership.

He developed his plans with zest. I was half-saddened, half-exalted, as I listened. It brought back the nights when he and I had first walked in those streets. Just as he used to be, he was eager for the future, and yet not anxious. He was asking only a minor reward for himself. That had always been so; I remembered evenings similar to this, with the shop windows blazing and the sky hanging low, when George was brimful of grandiose schemes for the group, of grandiose designs for my future. For himself, he had never asked more than the most improbable of minor rewards, a partnership with Eden. I remembered nights so late that all the windows were dark; there were no lights except on the tram standards; we had walked together, George’s great voice rang out in that modest expectation — and the dark streets were lit with my own ravenous hopes.

Walking by his side that evening, I felt the past strengthen me now. Just as I used to be, I was touched and impatient at his diffidence, heartened by his appetite for all that might come. Yet, even for him, it would be arduous beyond any imagining to rebuild a life. With the strength and hope he had given me as a young man and which, even in his downfall, he gave me still, I thought of his future — and of mine.

We went into a café, sat by an upstairs window, and looked over the roofs out to the wintry evening sky. George was facing what it would cost to rebuild his life. As he came to think of his private world, the group that had started as Utopia and ended in scandal, his face was less defiant and sanguine than his words. He could not blind himself to what he must go through, and yet he said: ‘I’m going to work for the things I believe in. I still believe that most people are good, if they’re given the chance. No one can stop me helping them, if I think another scheme out carefully and then put my energies into it again. I haven’t finished. You’ve got to remember I’m not middle-aged yet. I believe in goodness. I believe in my own intelligence and will. You don’t mean to tell me that I’m bound to acquiesce in crippling myself?’

He was so much braver than I was. He was facing self-distrust, which as a young man he had scarcely known at all. He realized that there were to be moments when he would ask what was to become of him. Yet he would cling to some irreducible fragment of his hope. It was born with him, and would die only when he died. And it strengthened me, sitting by him in the café that evening, as I heard it struggle through, as I heard that defiant voice coming out of his scandal, downfall, and escape.

It strengthened me in my different fashion. I should never be so brave, nor have so many private refuges. My life up to now had been more direct than his. I had to come to terms with a simpler conflict. Listening to George that evening, I was able to think of my ambition and my marriage more steadily than I had ever done.

My ambition was as imperative now as in the days when George first helped me. I did not need proof of that — but if I had, Eden’s decision would have made it clear. It was not going to dwindle. If I died with it unfulfilled, I should die unreconciled: I should feel that I had wasted my time. I should never be able to comfort myself that I had grown up, that I had gone beyond the vulgarities of success. No, my ambition was part of my flesh and bone. In ten years, the only difference was that now I could judge what my limits were. I could not drive beyond them. They seemed to be laid down in black and white, that evening after George’s trial.

Much of what I had once imagined for myself was make-believe. I never should be, and never could have been, a spectacular success at the Bar. That I had to accept. At the very best, I could aim at going about as far as Getliffe. It was an irony, but such was my limit. With good luck I might achieve much the same status — a large junior practice, silk round forty, possibly a judgeship at the end.

That was the maximum I could expect. It would need luck, It would mean that my whole life should change before too late. As it was now, with Sheila unhinging me, I should not come anywhere near. As it was now — steadily I envisaged how I should manage. One could make it too catastrophic, I knew. I should not lose much of my present practice. I might even, as my friends became more influential, increase it here and there. Perhaps, as the years went on, I should harden myself and be able to work at night without caring how she was. At the worst, even if she affected me as in the last months, I could probably earn between one thousand pounds and two thousand pounds a year, and do it for the rest of my life. I should become known as a slightly seedy, mediocre barrister — with the particular seediness of one who has a brilliant future behind him.

Could I leave her? I thought of her more lovingly now than in my anger after Eden’s decision. I remembered how she had charmed me. But the violence of my passion had burned out. Yes, I could leave her — with sorrow and with relief. At the thought, I felt the same emancipation as when, that morning at breakfast, she announced that she might not return. I should be free of the moment-by-moment extortion. I could begin, without George’s bravery but with my own brand of determination, to rebuild my hopes — not the ardent hopes of years before, nothing more than those I could retain, now I had come to terms. They were enough for me, once I was free.

There was nothing against it, I thought. She was doing me harm. I had tried to look after her, and had failed. She would be as well off without me. As for the difference to me — it would seem like being made new.

George and I were still sitting by the café window. Outside, the sky had grown quite dark over the town. More and more as I grew older, I had come to hide my deepest resolves. George was always the most diffident of men at receiving a confidence — and that day of all days, he had enough to occupy him.

Yet suddenly I told him that my only course was to separate from Sheila, and that I should do so soon.

I waited. I told myself that I wished to make the break seem unforced: I was waiting for an occasion when, for her as well as me, it would be natural to part. Perhaps I hoped that she would go off again herself. Nothing was much changed. Week after week I went to Chambers tired and came home heavy-hearted. All the old habits returned, the exhausted pity, the tenderness that was on the fringe of temper, the reminder of passionate and unrequited love. It was a habit also to let it drift. For my own sake, I thought, I had to fix a date.

In the end, it was the early summer before I acted, and the occasion was much slighter than others I had passed by. I had given up any attempt to entertain at our house, or to accept invitations which meant taking her into society. More and more we had come to live in seclusion, as our friends learned to leave us alone. But I had a few acquaintances from my early days in London, who had been kind to me then. Some of them had little money, and had seen me apparently on the way to success, and would be hurt if I seemed to escape them. Theirs were the invitations I had never yet refused, and since our marriage Sheila had made the effort to go with me. Indeed, of all my various friends, these had been the ones with whom she was least ill at ease.

At the beginning of June we were asked to such a party. It meant travelling out to Muswell Hill, just as I used to when I was penniless and glad of a hearty meal in this same house. I mentioned it to Sheila, and as usual we said yes. The day came round; I arrived home in the evening, an hour before we were due to set out. She was sitting in the drawing-room, thrown against the side of an armchair, one hand dangling down. It was a windy evening, the sky dark over the river, so that I did not see her clearly until I went close to. Of late she had been neglecting her looks. That evening her hair was not combed, she was wearing no make-up; on the hand dangling beside her chair, the nails were dirty. Once she had been proud of her beauty. Once she had been the most fastidious of girls.

I knew what I should hear.

‘It’s no use,’ she said. ‘I can’t go tonight. You’d better cry off.’

I had long since ceased to persuade and force her. I said nothing, but went at once to the telephone. I was practised in excuses: how many lies had I told, to save her face and mine? This one, though, was not believed. I could hear the disappointment at the other end. It was an affront. We had outgrown them. They did not believe my story that she was ill. They were no more use or interest to us, and without manners we cancelled a date.

I went back to her. I looked out of the window, over the embankment. It was a grey, warm, summer evening, and the trees were swaying wavelike in the wind.

This was the time.

I drew up a chair beside her.

‘Sheila,’ I said, ‘this is becoming difficult for me.’

‘I know.’

There was a pause. The wind rustled.

I said slowly: ‘I think that we must part.’

She stared at me with her great eyes. Her arm was still hanging down, but inch by inch her fingers clenched.

She replied: ‘If you say so.’

I looked at her. A cherishing word broke out of me, and then I said: ‘We must.’

‘I thought you mightn’t stand it.’ Her voice was high, steady, uninflected. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘If I were making you happy, I could stand it,’ I said. ‘But — I’m not. And it’s ruining me. I can’t even work—’

‘I warned you what it would be like,’ she said, implacably and harshly.

‘That is not the same as living it.’ I was harsh in return, for the first time that night.

She said: ‘When do you want me to go?’

No, I said, she should stay in the house and I would find somewhere to live.

‘You’re turning me out,’ she replied. ‘It’s for me to leave.’ Then she asked: ‘Where shall I go?’

Then I knew for certain that she was utterly lost. She had taken it without a blench. She had made none of the appeals that even she, for all her pride, could make in lesser scenes. She had not so much as touched my hand. Her courage was cruel, but she was lost.

I said that she might visit her parents.

‘Do you think I could?’ she flared out with hate. ‘Do you think I could listen to them?’ She said: ‘No, I might as well travel.’ She made strange fantasies of places she would like to see. ‘I might go to Sardinia. I might go to Mentone. You went there when you were ill, didn’t you?’ she asked, as though it were infinitely remote. ‘I made you unhappy there.’ All of a sudden, she said clearly: ‘Is this your revenge?’

I was quiet while the seconds passed. I replied: ‘I think I took my revenge earlier, as you know.’ Curiously, she smiled.

‘You’ve worried about that, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, at times.’

‘You needn’t.’

She looked at me fixedly, with something like pity.

‘I’ve wondered whether that was why you’ve stood me for so long,’ she said. ‘If you hadn’t done that, you might have thrown me out long ago.’

Again I hesitated, and then tried to tell the truth.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

Then she said: ‘I shall go tonight.’

I said that it was ridiculous.

She repeated: ‘I shall go tonight.’

I said: ‘I shan’t permit it.’

She said: ‘Now it is not for you to permit.’

I was angry, just as I always had been when she was self-willed to her own hurt. I said that she could not leave the house with nowhere to go. She must stay until I had planned her movements. She said the one word, no. My temper was rising, and I went to take hold of her. She did not flinch away, but said: ‘You cannot do that, now.’

My hands dropped. It was the last stronghold of her will.

Without speaking, we looked at each other.

She got up from her chair.

‘Well, it’s over,’ she remarked. ‘You’d better help me pack.’

Her attention was caught by the wind, as mine had been, and she glanced out of the window. The trees swayed to and fro under the grey sky. They were in full June leaf, and the green was brilliant in the diffuse light. Through the window blew the scent of lime.

‘I liked this house,’ she said, and with her strong fingers stroked the window sill.

We went into her sitting-room. It was more dishevelled than I had noticed it; until that evening, I had not fully realized how her finicky tidiness had broken down; just as a husband might not observe her looks deteriorate, when it would leap to the eye of one who had not seen her for a year.

She walked round the room. Though her dress was uncared for, her step was still active, poised, and strong. She asked me to guard her coins. They were too heavy, and too precious, to take with her if she was moving from hotel to hotel. The first thing she packed was her gramophone.

‘I shall want that,’ she said. Into the trunk she began to pack her library of records. As I handed some to her, she gave a friendly smile, regretful but quite without rancour. ‘It’s a pity you weren’t musical,’ she said.

I wanted her to think of clothes.

‘I suppose I shall need some,’ she said indifferently. ‘Fetch me anything you like.’

I put a hand on her shoulder.

‘You must take care of yourself.’ Despite the parting, I was scolding her as in our occasional light-hearted days.

‘Why should I?’

‘You’re not even troubling about your face.’

‘I’m tired of it,’ she cried.

‘For all you can do, it is still beautiful.’ It was true. Her face was haggard, without powder, not washed since that morning or longer, but the structure of the bones showed through; there were dark stains, permanent now, under her eyes, but the eyes themselves were luminous.

‘I’m tired of it,’ she said again.

‘Men will love you more than ever,’ I said, ‘but you mustn’t put them off too much.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘You know that you’ve always attracted men—’

‘I know. If I had attracted them less, it might have been better for me. And for you as well.’

She went on stacking books in the trunk, but I stopped her.

‘Listen to me once more. I hope you will find a man who will make you happy. It is possible, I tell you.’

She looked at me, her face still except for the faint grimace of a smile.

‘You must believe that,’ I said urgently. ‘We’ve failed. But this isn’t the end.’

She said: ‘I shan’t try again.’

She sat down and began, with the competence that had once surprised me, to discuss the matter-of-fact arrangements. She would finish packing within an hour, and would spend that night at an hotel. I did not argue any more. Her passport was in order, and she could travel tomorrow. I would transfer money to her in Paris. It was summer, too hot for her to go south immediately. I thought it strange that, even now, she should be governed by her dislike of the heat. She would probably spend the summer in Brittany, and wait till October before she made her way to Italy. After that, she had no plans. She assumed that sooner or later I should want to marry again. If so, I could divorce her whenever I wished.

‘If you are in trouble,’ I said, ‘you must send for me.’

She shook her head.

‘I shan’t do that.’

‘I should want you to.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I might want to, but I shan’t. I’ve done you enough harm.’

She rose and turned her face from me, looking out of the window, away from the room. Her shoulders were rigid, and her back erect.

‘You may need—’

‘It doesn’t matter what I need.’

‘Don’t say that,’

Quite slowly she turned again to face me.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She spoke with absolute control. Her head was high. ‘For a good reason. You said that this wasn’t the end for me, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were wrong.’

She was seeing her future; she was asking for nothing. She did not move an inch towards me. She stood quite straight, with her arms by her sides.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said in a clear voice. ‘I’ll call you when I go.’

I walked in the garden. As I turned at the bottom, by the street gate, I saw that Sheila had switched on a light, so that her window shone into the premature dusk. Out of doors, in the moist air, the scent of lime was overpoweringly sweet. Sometimes the warm wind carried also a whiff of the river smell; but over all that night hung the sweet and heavy scent, the scent of a London June.

I could not send her away. I could not manage it. I knew with complete lucidity what it meant. If I were ever to part from her, this was the time. I should not be able to change my mind again. This had been my chance: I could not take it. I was going to call her back, and fall into the old habit. I was about to sentence myself for life.

Yet there was no conflict within me. I was not making a decision. Like all the other decisions of my life, this had been taken before I admitted it — perhaps when I knew that she was lost, certainly when I saw her, upright in her pride, asserting that there was nothing for her. She faced it without pretence. I had never known her pretend. And she would set her will to live accordingly. She would move from hotel to hotel, lonely, more eccentric as each year passed.

I could not bear to let her. There was no more to it than that. Whatever our life was like, it was endurable by the side of what she faced. I must stay by her. I could do no other. I accepted it, as the warm wind blew in my face and I smelt the lime. There was no getting out of it now. Somehow I should have to secure some rest for myself: now it was for life, I must find some way of easing it. In my practical and contriving fashion, I was already casting round — I could bear it better if she did not imprison me quite. But that would be only a relief. It was for life, and I must be there when she wanted me.

I sneezed. Some pollen had touched my nostrils. Perhaps it brought back the sensation of the chalky air in Marion’s classroom, ten years before. Anyway, for a second, I remembered how I had challenged the future then. I had longed for a better world, for fame, for love. I had longed for a better world; and this was the summer of 1933. I had longed for fame: and I was a second-rate lawyer. I had longed for love: and I was bound for life to a woman who never had love for me and who had exhausted mine.

As I remembered, I was curiously at one with myself. I smiled. No one could call it a good record. The world’s misfortunes, of course, had nothing to do with me — but my own, yes, they were my fault. Another man in my place would not have chosen them. I had not seen enough of my life yet to perceive the full truth of what my nature needed. I could not distinguish the chance from the inevitable. But I already knew that my bondage to Sheila was no chance. Somehow I was so made that I had to reject my mother’s love and all its successors. Some secret caution born of a kind of vanity made me bar my heart to any who forced their way within. I could only lose caution and vanity, bar and heart, the whole of everything I was, in the torment of loving someone like Sheila, who invaded me not at all and made me crave for a spark of feeling, who was so wrapped in herself that only the violence and suffering of such a love as mine brought the slightest glow.

My suffering over Sheila was the release of my vanity. At twenty-eight, walking in the garden on that night after I had tried to escape, they were the deepest parts of myself that I had so far seen. It was not the picture that others saw, for I passed as a man of warm affections, capable of sympathy and self-effacingness. That was not altogether false — one cannot act a part for years; but I knew what lay in reserve. It was not tenderness that was to stop me sending Sheila away, at this time when I knew the cost of keeping her and when my passion was spent. It was simply that she touched the depth of my vanity and suffering, and that this was my kind of love. Yet, like George after his trial, I was still borne up by hope. More realistic than he was, I had seen something of myself, and something of my fate. In detail, I did not burke the certain truths. I should never be able to shelve my responsibility for her. That was permanent — but did I think that one day I should find true love in another? I should now never make a success at the Bar — did I think one day I might get a new start?

I was twenty-eight, and I could still hope. Those random encouragements were blowing in the warm wind, and I felt, as well as the strength of acceptance, a hope of the fibres, a hope of young manhood. That night, I had come to terms with what I must do. But I breathed the scent of the limes, and the half-thought visited me: ‘She said that she had come to the end. As for me, I am nowhere near the end.’

I looked up at her window. I had delayed going in to her, but I could delay no longer. The house was quiet. I opened the door of her room. She was standing, so still that she might have been frozen, by the trunk.

She said: ‘I told you to leave me alone.’

I said: ‘I can’t let you go.’

For a second her face was smooth as though with shock. Then it hardened again.

‘I’ve told you, I shall go tonight.’

I said: ‘I can’t let you go at all.’

She asked: ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’

I said: ‘I know very well.’ I added: ‘I’m saying that I shall never speak to you as I did tonight. Not as long as we live.’

‘You know what you’ll lose?’

I repeated: ‘I know very well.’

‘I trust you,’ she cried. ‘I trust you.’ Her control was near to snapping, but suddenly she braced herself again and said harshly: ‘It won’t be any different. I can’t make it any easier for you.’

I nodded my head, and then smiled at her.

In the same harsh tone, she said: ‘You’re all I’ve got.’ Her face was working. She said again: ‘You’re all I’ve got.’

She crumpled up, almost as if she were fainting. I sat on the sofa, and she sank her head into my lap, without another word or sound. Time and time again I stroked her hair. Outside the window, the tops of the trees were swaying in the wind.