Homecomings (13 page)

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

‘She’s very nice,’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘She’s distinctly intelligent.’

Gilbert put down his tankard and stared at me.

‘What else?’

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

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

‘Yes. Aren’t you?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a pause. ‘Yes, I am.’

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

‘Lovely.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t see why you should,’ I said.

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

‘What is it?’

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

After a pause, I said: ‘Not much.’

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

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

‘You must know that,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well then.’

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

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

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