Homecomings (25 page)

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

‘What is it?’

‘It involves someone else.’

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

‘Yes, I know that.’

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

‘Who is he?’

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

‘What shall I do?’ she asked me.

‘Do I know him?’

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

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

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

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

‘Do you love him?’ I asked her.

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

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

She added: ‘He’s a curious man.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t think that’s a good reason.’

‘We haven’t all got your patience.’

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

She gave a cracking curse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do tell me.’

‘Mrs Henry Wood.’

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

Robinson rapidly recovered himself.

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

‘No one’s ever told me.’

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

‘What firm is yours, Mr Robinson?’

Robinson laughed.

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

She looked embarrassed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Nothing much, sir, nothing very much.’

‘What did you do in the war?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

I inquired: ‘Have you got a job now?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Robinson.

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

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

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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