Homecomings (31 page)

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

‘Let me talk to you,’ I said.

‘Can’t we leave it?’ she cried.

‘Can we?’

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

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

‘We’re peaceful now,’ she broke out.

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

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

She did not move or utter.

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

She said: ‘You don’t hope: you know.’

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

‘Some time ago.’

‘Was it that night at my father’s?’

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

‘What time that night?’

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

I asked: ‘When were you certain?’

‘Later.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That doesn’t matter.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Other things have changed too,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I stumbled for a moment.

‘Sit down to what?’

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

‘It wasn’t all your doing,’ she said.

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

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

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

I nodded.

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

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

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

‘I can ride that,’ I said.

‘It might not be so nice.’

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

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

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

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

I said: ‘I’ve done bad things.’

‘Not like what this would be.’

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

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

‘Do you think I haven’t faced that?’

She said: ‘I was not absolutely sure.’

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

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

Once more she spoke gently, reasonably, intimately.

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

‘I need it–’

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

‘You can’t be much afraid,’ I said.

‘I should be, a little.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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