Homecomings (38 page)

Standing by the sitting-room window I looked down at the road, where the lights of cars kept giving form to the bushes by the park edge. The cars and lorries went by below: above them, the lamps suspended over the middle of the road swung in the night wind: watching them, I was happy without resistance. I had woken into a luminous happiness, and it stayed with me.

Another Homecoming

WAITING in the dark bedroom I heard Margaret’s steps as she returned to bed. I asked if anything was the matter, and in a matter-of-fact whisper she told me to cover my eyes, she was going to switch on the light.

Then she said: ‘Well, it’s no use saying that I hope I’m not going to disturb you.’ Her tone was sarcastic and calm. For an instant, not calm myself, I nevertheless recalled her father laughing at me in the same tone, one afternoon when he interrupted my work at the office.

‘I’m pretty certain,’ she said, ‘that it’s coming early.’

She was a fortnight from he r time, and I was startled.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing to upset you. I’m quite glad.’

She sounded so happy, above all so calm, that I could not help but respond. What could I do for her, I asked?

‘I think it might be as well to ask Charles March to come round.’

Charles March, who had moved to a practice north of the park, had looked after her during her pregnancy: when we were waiting for him after I had telephoned, I told Margaret, trying to match her nerve, that I only seemed to meet him at the crises of my life.

‘This isn’t a bad one, though,’ she said.

‘I touch wood more than you do,’ I replied.

‘You are superstitious, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘When I first noticed it, I couldn’t believe it. And I daren’t ask you, because I thought I must be wrong.’

I had drawn the curtains. Outside the window a red-brick parapet solidified the first morning sunshine: below and beyond were gardens misty, washed-out in the dawn, but glaring bricks glowed near, a starling stood immobile on the wall, harshly outlined as if it were cardboard.

Margaret was sitting up in bed, pillows behind her, twitting me not only to give me reassurance, but also because she was steady-hearted and full of a joy I could not share. For her the child was living now, something to love.

As Charles March examined her, and I stood gazing down from the sitting-room into the park, I felt afraid for her because we were happy. I was afraid for the child because I wanted it. I had a special reason for fear, as Charles March had told me that we ought not to have another.

Down below, the first bus sped along in the milky light. Since she came to me, we had been happy. Beforehand, we had both taken it for granted that to reshape a life took effort, humility, and luck; I did not know whether I could manage it. That we should stay together, was certain: in the world’s eyes we should bring it off, but we should judge ourselves by what we saw in each other’s. Up to now we had been blessed.

In a true relation – I had evaded it for so long – one could not absent oneself, one could not be above the battle, one fought it out. It was hard for me to learn, but we were able to know each other so. Only in one aspect, I thought, had she found me absenting myself – and only she would have perceived it. She perceived it when she saw me with her boy, Maurice, Geoffrey’s child; for with him I was not natural, I did not let myself go. I was well-disposed to him through conscience, not through nature, and she knew it. I was as considerate as I could be, but that was my old escape, turning myself into a benevolent spectator.

It made us more than ever anxious for children of our own.

After we married, in the late summer of the year she came to me, which was 1947, four months passed before she conceived. She had watched me play with the little boy during those months: he liked me because I was patient and more even-tempered than she was. When she became pregnant she felt happiness for me first, and only later love for the coming child.

That September dawn, listening to the rumble of Charles’ voice through the walls, I left the sitting-room window and found myself restlessly dawdling into Maurice’s nursery: his cot was empty and most of his toys had gone, for Helen had taken him for the next fortnight. There I was glancing at one of his picture-books when Charles March found me.

He was not shaved, his eyes were sharp with a doctor’s interest, with his own fellow-feeling: he would drive her to the clinic, he said, and, with a sarcastic flick not unlike hers, added that it was better to err on the safe side.

It was only lately, when he had been married for years, that he had had a family himself. There had been a time during my separation from Margaret when he and I had sympathized with each other, knowing that we both wanted children and might be deprived of them. As I looked at him I remembered that we had spoken without reserve.

Nevertheless, if he had just been a doctor and not an intimate friend, I should have asked more questions. As it was, I went into the bedroom, where Margaret had nearly finished packing her dressing-case. She was wearing a coat over her nightgown: as I held her in my arms, she said: ‘You might as well go to that dinner tonight.’

Then she added: ‘I’d rather be there than where I shall be. Yes, I’d even rather be at Lufkin’s.’

It might have been intended as a jibe, but as I held her, it told me more. I did not need even to think or reply: this was the communication, deeper than emotion or sensuality, though there is sensuality in it, which two people close together cannot save each other from. I knew that her nerve for once had faltered: her imagination was showing her a lonely, hygienic room, the bedside light. Brave in so many ways, she had her phobias, she dreaded a lonely room: she even felt the sense of injustice that cropped up in her, in and out of place. Why did she have to go through with it, while others were enjoying themselves?

Enjoying themselves at Lufkin’s – it was, however, not a reasonable description of people’s behaviour there; it never had been, it still was not. I arrived ready to be elated, with the peculiar lightheadedness of an ordeal put off: for at breakfast time, a few hours after Margaret arrived at the clinic, they had told me that the child might be born within forty-eight hours, then at five o’clock had said that it was not likely for a week and that I could safely spend the night out.

Just as there used to be in Lufkin’s suite, there was drink, there was noise: in my light-headedness I could take the first and put up with the second, but as for elation, it did not bear up in many under Lufkin’s inflexible gaze. The curious thing was that he believed it did. When the women left us, and Lufkin, as always indifferent to time, began a business talk that lasted an hour, he had a satisfied smile as though all his guests were feeling jolly.

Nearly all of them belonged to his own staff. He had not been forgiven by his fellow-tycoons for taking an honour from their enemies and socially they cold-shouldered him. Not that he gave any sign of caring: he just went on inviting to dinner the younger bosses with whom by now he had filled the top places in his firm: men more educated, more articulate than the old ones, looking and speaking more like Civil Servants, and in his presence sounding less like a chorus of sycophantic cherubim. And yet, when he made a pronouncement which they believed to be nonsense and which everyone round the table knew they believed to be nonsense, none of them said so, though several of them had gone so far that Lufkin could do them neither harm nor good. His
mana
was as strong as ever.

I was glad to watch it all again. It gave me – I was relaxed, I should enjoy my sleep that night, the worry of the dawn, because it was put off, was washed away – the luxury of recalling a past less happy. Nights at that damped-down table before the war: other able men choosing their words: back to the Chelsea house. It seemed to me strange that I could have lived that life.

I had another reminder of it, before Lufkin let us go from the table. There had been talk of a legal case the firm was concerned with, and, among the names of the barristers, Herbert Getliffe’s came up.

‘You devilled for that chap once, Lewis, or am I wrong?’ said Lufkin. On such points he was never wrong.

I asked whether he knew Getliffe. To nod to, said Lufkin.

I asked whether Getliffe would soon be going to the Bench.

Not on your life, said Lufkin.

He sounded positive, even for him.

‘What’s happened?’ I inquired.

‘Well, within these four walls, he’s blotted his copy-book. He’s been doing some jiggery pokery with his income tax, and they’ve had to be persuaded not to prosecute him.’ Lord Lufkin said it not so much with malice, as with the certainty and satisfaction of inside knowledge. ‘I’ve got no pity for the damned fool. It not only does him harm, which I can bear reasonably philosophically, but it does harm to the rest of us. Anyway, he won’t be able to live this one down.

‘That chap’s finished,’ said Lufkin, declaring the conversation closed.

When, after midnight, the party broke up he drove me home himself, less off-handed with me than the others because I was no longer a member of his court. Sitting back as the car paced through the Mall, up St James’s, past the club windows, I felt a moment’s disquiet, mysterious and heavy, the first that night; and then once more the sense of privilege and power which I still was subject to in his company. The car, as opulent as he was austere, moved up Piccadilly, past the Ritz, the Green Park. There were not enough men for the top jobs, Lufkin was saying: the number of top jobs was going up as society became more complex, and the number of competent men had not gone up at all. True, the rewards weren’t much these days: perhaps we should have to deal out a few perks. If we didn’t find enough good men to run the show, Lufkin said, the country was sunk.

For once his tone had lost its neutrality and become enthusiastic; but when the car drew up in front of my flat, he spoke as bleakly as though I were a stranger. What he said was: ‘Give my regards to your charming wife.’

As I thanked him for the dinner, he went on: ‘She’ll have received some flowers from me this evening.’ He said it just as bleakly, as though his only gratification was that he had mastered the etiquette and had all the apparatus of politeness at his command.

Out of a deep sleep, into which I had fallen as soon as I left Lufkin and went straight to bed, I heard a distant burr, and my heart was thudding with dread before I was awake enough to be conscious that it was the telephone. As I stumbled across the room, across the hall, switched on and was dazzled by the light, my throat was sewn-up. The telephone burred loudly now, like all the bad news I had ever had to hear.

As I took up the receiver Charles March’s voice came at once, unusually loud even for him, so that I had to hold the instrument inches away: ‘Lewis? Is that you?’

‘Yes?’

‘You’ve got a son.’

‘Are they safe?’

‘I think they’re pretty well.’

His voice came to me, still loud, but affectionate and warm: ‘You’ve had good luck for once and I envy you.’

His own children were girls, he had wanted a son and had apologized for it as a piece of Jewish atavism: but he knew that I did too.

I could not see them until the morning, he said. He told me the time her labour started, and the time of the birth; he was full of happiness because he could give me some. ‘It’s not often we’ve had anything good to tell each other, don’t you agree?’ His voice spoke out of our long friendship. He said that I could do with some rest myself and that I was to get back to bed now.

I neither could nor wanted to. I dressed and went down into the street, where the night air was thundery and close. Just as, when expecting a joy and suddenly dashed with disappointment, one has moments when the joy is still expected – just so, the shadow of fear can survive the opposite shock, the shock of happiness. I was still shaken, out of comparison more so than I had been at Lufkin’s table: for an instant, it reached me that this was a happy night, and then I reverted to feeling, with a hallucinatory sharpness, that it had not yet occurred.

As I walked across the park the thundery cloud-cap was so low that it was hard to make out the interlocking couples on the grass; I passed close by, in the headaching and stale air, the seat where Margaret and I had sat in the desolating night when it seemed that we had worn each other out. Yet that was unrealizable too, as unrealizable as Charles March’s news.

Retracing without intention the way Lufkin had driven me, I came to the mouth of St James’s Street. It was empty now, and not one of the club windows was alight; all of a sudden I stopped repressing the disquiet that had seized me in Lufkin’s car. For, looking into those windows from the car, I had not dared to think of another evening when I had dined out without my wife – when I had dined with Gilbert Cooke, and simultaneously Sheila was dying. Now I could let the past come back blank and harmless, so that, going slowly down the street, I did at last credit my reason for happiness.

It was not until I saw Margaret next morning, however, that I felt happy. Suddenly the sight of her in bed, her hair straight as a schoolgirl’s, her collar-bone plain where the bedjacket and nightgown had fallen away, made the tear glands smart, and I cried out. I said that I had not seen her look like that; then when I let her go and gazed at her again, I had to ask: ‘How are you?’

‘What century do you think you’re living in?’

She was tired, she spoke with the indulgence of not concentrating. She went on: ‘I wish I could have another for you.’

I interrupted her, and then she said, inspecting me: ‘What do you think you’ve been doing?’

‘Walking about.’

‘If you’d listen to me–’ but she could not go on teasing me. When had I heard? What exactly had I been doing when I heard? Who told me? What did I say? She cried out: ‘He’s a dear little boy and I love him very much.’

Sitting up, she turned her head on the bank of pillows and looked out of the window into the clinic garden. The cloud-cap was still dense, ominous over the trees. She said: ‘The room where I first saw you – it must be somewhere in the wing over there.’