Homecomings (32 page)

There were a good many Civil Servants, among them Hector Rose, for once at a disadvantage, abnormally uncomfortable and effusively polite, detesting the sight of any society except in the office and the club. There was George Passant, moving about alone, with that expression unfocused, reverie-laden, absently smiling, which at this time more and more came over him in the proximity of women. There were Gilbert’s relatives, many of them soldiers, small-headed, thin, gravel-voiced. There were Betty’s, the younger women talking in the curious distorted Cockney of their generation of the upper-class, huddled together like a knot of scientists at the British Association anxious not to be interrupted by camp-followers.

In all those faces there was only one I looked for. Soon I discovered her, listening but not participating at the edge of a large circle, her eyes restlessly looking out for me. As at her father’s, we met alone in the crowd.

‘That’s better,’ she said.

‘I wish I could have brought you,’ I said.

‘I was touching wood, I didn’t like to ask for you.’

She was excited; as she lit a cigarette, there was a tremor in her fingers.

‘Who have you been talking to?’

‘Oh, I haven’t got as far as that.’ She was laughing, not only with excitement, but at herself. Even now that she was grown-up, she was still shy. If this had been an ordinary party, not a cover for the two of us to meet, she would still have had to brace herself to cope: though, when once she had started, she revelled in it.

‘We’re here, anyway, and that’s lucky,’ I said.

‘It is lucky,’ she replied with an active restless smile.

I was just telling her that soon we could slip away downstairs and talk, when Betty herself joined us.

‘Lewis, my dear. Won’t you wish me luck?’

She held out her arms, and I kissed her cheek. Then, bright-eyed, she glanced at Margaret.

‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we?’ said Betty.

‘You have,’ I was putting in, when Betty went on: ‘Anyway, I’m sorry, but will you tell me who you are?’

It sounded at best forgetful, it sounded also rude, for Betty’s manner to a stranger was staccato and brusque. Yet she was the least arrogant of women, and I was at the same time astonished by her and upset to see Margaret wilt.

‘My name,’ she said, with her chin sunk down, ‘is Margaret Hollis.’

‘Oh, now I know,’ cried Betty. ‘You used to be Margaret Davidson, didn’t you?’

Margaret nodded.

‘I’ve heard my husband talk about you.’

With the same heartiness, the same apparent lack of perception, Betty went on with meaningless gossip, not caring that Margaret and I were looking strained. Yes, her husband Gilbert was a friend of Margaret’s sister Helen, wasn’t he? Yes, Gilbert had spoken about Helen’s husband. At last Betty broke off, saying to Margaret: ‘Look, there are some people here who I want you to meet. I’ll take you along straightaway.’

Margaret was led off. I had to let her go, without protecting her. It was a bitterness, known only to those in illicit love, not to be able to be spontaneous. I was reckoning how much time I had to allow before I could take her away.

Meanwhile, myself at a loss, I looked round. Gilbert, high-coloured, was surveying his guests with bold, inquisitive eyes. They were the collection of acquaintances of half-a-lifetime; I expected his detective work was still churning on; but I was thinking again, as I had done walking to the house, how this was some sort of end. For Gilbert who, despite his faults, or more precisely because of them, cared as little for social differences as a man can do, had travelled a long way through society, just as I had myself, in the other direction.

So had Betty: the unlucky mattered, politics mattered, friends mattered, and nothing else. When I had first met them both, it had seemed to us all self-evident that society was loosening and that soon most people would be indifferent to class. We had turned out wrong. In our forties we had to recognize that English society had become more rigid, not less, since our youth. Its forms were crystallizing under our eyes into an elaborate and codified Byzantinism, decent enough, tolerable to live in, but not blown through by the winds of scepticism or individual protest or sense of outrage which were our native air. And those forms were not only too cut-and-dried for us: they would have seemed altogether too rigid for nineteenth-century Englishmen. The evidence was all about us, even at that wedding party: quite little things had, under our eyes, got fixed, and, except for catastrophes, fixed for good. The Hector Roses and their honours lists: it was a modern invention that the list should be systematized by Civil Service checks and balances: they had ceased to be corrupt and unpredictable, they were now as hierarchically impeccable as the award of coloured hats at the old Japanese Court. And I did not believe that I was seduced by literary resonances when I imagined that Betty Vane’s and Thomas Bevill’s relatives were behaving like Guermantes.

Just as the men of affairs had fractionated themselves into a group with its own rules and its own New Year’s Day rewards, just as the arts were, without knowing it, drifting into invisible academies, so the aristocrats, as they lost their power and turned into ornaments, shut themselves up and exaggerated their distinguishing marks in a way that to old Bevill, who was grander than any of them, seemed rank bad manners, and what was worse, impolitic. But old Bevill belonged to a generation where the aristocracy still kept some function and so was unselfconscious: in his time it was far more casual, for example, where you went to school; when he told his anecdote about Percy Vane, the school they were both attending was not Eton; yet it was to Eton, without one single exception in the families I knew, that they sent their sons, with the disciplined conformity of a defiant class. With the same conformity, those families were no longer throwing up the rebels that I had been friendly with as a young man; Betty Vane and Gilbert Cooke had no successors.

Looking round their wedding party, I could not shake off a cliché of those years, this was the end of an epoch; I should have liked the company of those who could see one beginning.

A twitch at my arm, and Betty was glancing up at me.

‘All right?’ she said.

‘Are you?’ Angrily, I wanted to ask why she had been rude to Margaret: but once more I had to calculate.

‘Yes, my dear.’

‘I never thought of this happening to you.’

‘I can manage it,’ she said. It was not just her courage and high spirits: she meant it.

She broke off sharp: ‘I’m sorry I had to cart her off. But people were watching you.’

‘Does that matter?’ I replied blank-faced.

‘You ought to know.’

‘What do you expect me to know?’

‘So long as you realize that people were watching you.’

‘I see.’

‘That’s all I can do for you now,’ said Betty.

She was, of course, warning me about her husband. It removed my last doubt that she might not know him right through, and on her account I was relieved. She was too loyal to say more, perhaps this was the one crack in her loyalty I should ever see, and she only revealed it because she thought I was running into danger. She had done me so many good turns; I was touched by this last one.

And yet, I could not be sure why she had been so uncivil to Margaret. It had not been necessary, not even as a ruse. At their only other encounter, she had thought Margaret rude: was she getting her own back? Or had she genuinely forgotten Margaret’s face? No one had indulged less in petty spite – just for a second, had she been doing so?

Just as I had got out of the room, on the balcony on my way downstairs to Margaret, someone intercepted me. For minutes I was pegged there, the glasses tinkling on the trays as they were carried past, the noise climbing in amplitude and pitch, Gilbert leaning from the door and taking note.

Over the banisters, when I broke away, I saw Margaret standing about down below.

‘I feel a bit badgered,’ I said as soon as I reached her, all tension leaving me.

‘So do I.’

‘Still, we’re here, and it’s worth it.’

She called out my name, quietly but with all her force, more of an endearment than any could be. Her expression was brilliant, and until she spoke again I totally misread it.

‘Isn’t it?’ I cried.

In the same quiet and passionate tone, she said: ‘We’re deceiving ourselves, aren’t we?’

‘About what?’

‘About us.’

‘I’ve never been so sure,’ I said.

‘It’s too late. Haven’t we known all along it’s too late?’

‘I haven’t.’

‘I’m just not strong enough,’ she said. I had never known her ask for pity before.

‘You will be,’ I said, but I had lost my nerve.

‘No. It’s too late. I knew it, tonight. I knew it,’ she said.

‘We can’t decide anything now.’ I wanted to soothe her.

‘There’s nothing to decide.’ She used my name again, as though that was all she could tell me.

‘There will be.’

‘No, it’s too hard for me.’

‘Come out with me–’

‘No. Please get me a taxi and let me go home.’

‘We shall have to forget all this.’

For an instant I heard my voice hard.

‘There’s no future in it,’ she cried, using the slang flatly instead of her own words. ‘Let me go home.’

‘I shall speak to you tomorrow.’

‘It will be cruel if you do.’

Guests were passing us on their way out, and looking at her, knowing that she was near breaking-point, I could do nothing. I called out to the porter and asked him to find a cab. She thanked me, almost effusively, but I shook my head, my eyes still on her, trying to make my own choice, trying not to be crippled by the habits of defeat, the recurrent situations, the deepest traps within me.

LISTENING the next afternoon to George Passant talking of his future, I said nothing of mine. For months, almost for years, since my resolve about Margaret began to form, I had not hinted even at a hope, except to her; but it was not only secretiveness that kept me reticent with George, it was something like superstition. For I had telephoned Margaret that morning, insisting that we should meet and talk it out, and she had given way.

‘Assuming that I’m kept in this department, which I take it is reasonable, then I may as well plan on living in London for the rest of my life,’ said George.

His interview was arranged for a fortnight hence; and George, with the optimism which he had preserved undented from his youth, through ill-luck and worse than ill-luck, took the result for granted.

‘I haven’t any idea,’ I said – it was true, but I could not help being alarmed by George’s hubris – ‘what Rose intends to do about you.’

‘Whatever we think of Rose,’ George replied comfortably, ‘we have to admit that he’s a highly competent man.’

‘His personal choices are sometimes odd.’

‘I should have said,’ George was unaffected, ‘that he paid some attention to justice.’

‘I don’t deny that,’ I said. ‘But–’

‘In that case we’re reasonably entitled to consider that he’s pretty well informed of what I’ve done here.’

‘Within limits that’s probably so.’

‘You’re not going to tell me,’ George was getting argumentative, ‘that a man as competent as Rose isn’t going to see a certain slight difference in effectiveness between what I’ve done here and what some of those other nice young gentlemen from upper-class Bastilles (George meant public schools) have twittered about trying to do. Take old Gilbert. He’s not a bad chap to have a drink with, he’s always been exceedingly pleasant to me, but God preserve my eternal soul, I can shift more in an afternoon than Gilbert can manage dimly to comprehend in three weeks’ good hard slogging.’

‘You’re preaching to the converted,’ I said.

‘Well, if you’re handsome enough to concede that simple point,’ George replied, ‘you can perhaps understand why I don’t propose to indulge in unnecessary worry.’

Yet I, who was upset by George’s kind of hope, lived with my own; I found it driving me almost as though I were obeying another person’s instructions: I found it driving me, a little absurdly, to talk to a lawyer about divorce. Just as it was slipping out of control, I asserted some caution, even more absurdly: so that, setting out to talk to a lawyer, I did not go to one of the divorce experts whom I had known when I was practising at the Bar, but instead, as though avoiding going under a ladder at the last minute, just paid as it were a friendly call on my old master, Herbert Getliffe.

The morning was dark: murk hung over the river, and in chambers the lights were on. It might have been one of the autumn mornings nearly twenty years before, when I sat there, looking out of the window, with nothing to do, avid for recognition, bitter because it would not come. But I felt no true memory of that past: somehow, although I had not revisited the place for years, no trigger released the forces of past emotion, my sense of faint regret was general and false. No trigger clicked, even when I read the list of names at the foot of the staircase, a list where my own name had stood as late as the end of the war: Mr Getliffe, Mr W Allen…they had been there before my time. No trigger clicked, even when I went into Getliffe’s room, smelt the tobacco once so familiar, and met the gaze of the bold, opaque and tricky eyes.

‘Why, it’s old L S,’ said Herbert Getliffe, giving me his manly, forthright handshake. He was the only man alive who called me by my initials: he did it with an air both hearty and stern, as though he had just been deeply impressed by a code of gravitas. In fact, he was a man of immense cunning, mercurial and also impressionable. His face was fat and rubbery, his lips red and, despite himself, even in his most magisterial acts there was an imp not far from his eyes. When I had worked in his chambers he had treated me with a mixture of encouragement and lavish unscrupulousness: since then we had kept an affection, desultory and suspicious, for each other. Even now, it surprised me that he was one of the more successful silks at the common law bar: but that was the fact.

I had only seen him once or twice since the night of the Barbican dinner before the war, when I went home to Sheila drunk and elated. I asked how he was getting on.