Homecomings (5 page)

Upon the two of us, as we walked by the river, each with private worries, the public ones weighed down too; and yet, I was thinking, in other times Betty would have been as little political as Mrs Knight. She had dropped into her long, jostling stride that was almost mannish; yet there was no woman less mannish than she. It was her immediate self-protective manner, drawn out of the fear that I or any man might think her ready to make advances. It was only as the evening went on that her gait and her speech became relaxed, and she was warmed by the feeling that she had behaved serenely.

We had fallen into silence when I asked: ‘Were you talking about me when I came in just now?’

She had dropped out of step with me: she gave a skip to right herself. ‘Not exactly,’ she said. She looked down. I saw her lips tighten.

‘What about, then?’ As she did not at once reply I repeated: ‘What about?’

It was an effort for her to look up at me, but when she did so her glance was honest, troubled, steady.

‘You must know.’

‘Sheila?’

She nodded. I knew she did not like Sheila: but I asked what was being said.

‘Nothing. Only nonsense. You know what people are.’

I was silent.

She burst out, in a curiously strident, social voice, as if rallying a stranger at a party: ‘I don’t in the least want to tell you!’

‘That makes it harder for me.’

Betty stopped walking, put her hand on the embankment wall, and faced me. ‘If I do tell you I shan’t be able to wrap it up.’ She knew I should be angry, she knew I had a right to hear. She was unwilling to spoil the evening for herself and could not keep out of her voice resentment that I should make her do it.

I told her to go on.

‘Well, then’ – she reverted to her social tone – ‘as a matter of
fact
, they say she’s as good as left you.’

I had not expected that, and I laughed and said, ‘Nonsense.’

‘Is it nonsense?’

‘Whom is she supposed to be leaving me for?’

She replied, still in the same social, defensive voice: ‘They say she prefers women.’

There was not a word of truth in it, and I told Betty so.

She was puzzled, cross because I was speaking so harshly, though it was only what she had foreseen.

I cross-questioned her. ‘Where did this start?’

‘Everyone says so.’

‘Who does? Where do they get it from?’

‘I’m not making it up,’ she said. It was a plea for herself, but I did not think of her then.

I made her search her memory for the first rumour.

The effort of searching calmed her: in a moment her face lightened a little. ‘I’m sure it came,’ she said, ‘from someone who knew her. Isn’t she working with someone? Hasn’t she something to do with that man who looks like a frog? The second-hand bookseller?’

Robinson had had a shop once, but had given it up years before: I could scarcely believe what I seemed to be hearing, but I exclaimed: ‘Robinson? Do you mean him?’

‘Robinson? He’s got beautiful white hair, parted in the middle? He knows her, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, he started the word round that she’s mad about women.’

I parted from Betty at the corner of Tite Street without taking her to her flat, blaming her because she had brought bad news. The falser the gossip, it sometimes seemed, the more it seared. On my way home, I continued angry with Betty: I should have liked to have believed that she had garbled it, she who was both truthful and loyal.

But Robinson? It made no sense: he could not have done it, for reason of self-interest alone. No one had more to risk from upsetting her.

I wondered whether I should tell Sheila the rumour, and decided not to. Maybe in itself it would not disturb her much; I was not sure: we had both lived in a society which set out to tolerate all the kinds of sex. And yet gossip, this gossip that pawed, had something degrading about it, especially for one like Sheila. The story that it originated in Robinson, credible or incredible, had been shameful for me to hear, let alone Sheila; if I could, I wanted to spare her that.

Instead of telling her the gossip that night, I listened to her invoking my help for Robinson. He planned to start with three books in the following spring. ‘That may be all he ever does,’ said Sheila, with her business feet on the ground, ‘but if they are all right–’ She meant, though she did not finish, for the phrase was too high-falutin for her, that she would have achieved a purpose: she thought she would have saved his self-respect.

The trouble was, of the foreign books he had counted on, he had only acquired the rights of one. The balloons he had blown up at our dinner table had most of them exploded, she admitted that; he had believed in his own fancies, he always did, he had only to wish for a property hard enough to feel that he possessed it. Yet, in another sense, he kept his judgement. Nothing would make him substitute bad, or even mediocre, books for those he had fancied were in the bag; either something good, or nothing.

Could I help him find an author? There must be one or two pioneer works going begging, and she knew that I had friends among writers. In fact, although she neither had, nor pretended to have, even a remote acquaintance with my official life, she assumed that it was to writing I should devote myself in the end. Mysteriously, the thought gave her some pleasure.

Could I help Robinson?

I wrote several letters on his behalf, because Sheila had asked me; one reply was encouraging enough for her to act on. Then, a fortnight later, I had other news of him.

I was working in the Lufkin suite, when a telephone call came through. Betty Vane was speaking in a sharp, agitated, seemingly angry voice: could she see me soon? That same afternoon she sat in an armchair by my desk, telling me that she was unlucky. More gossip had reached her, and in decency she could not keep it from me. She did not say it, but she knew my temperament, she had watched me last time: I should not be pleased with her for bringing such news. Still, there seemed to her no choice.

By now the rumours were proliferating. Sheila was not only eccentric but unbalanced, the gossip was going round. She had spent periods in the hands of mental specialists; she had been in homes. This explained the anomalies in our married life, why we had given up entertaining, why she was not seen outside the house for weeks at a time, why we had not dared to have a family.

Some of the rumours referred to me, such as that I had married her, knowing her condition, only because her parents had bribed me with a settlement. Mainly they aimed at her, and the most cruel was that, if we had been poor and without influence, she would have been certified.

Nearly all this gossip was elaborate, circumstantial, spun out with rococo inventiveness, at one or two points just off-true; much of it an outsider could believe without bearing her any ill will, once he had observed that she was strange. One or two of the accretions, notably the more clinical, seemed to have been added as the rumours spread from the point of origin. But the original rumours, wonderfully and zestfully constructed, with a curious fluid imagination infusing them, were unlike any I had heard.

This time I could not pretend doubt to myself, not for a minute; there was only one man who could have begun to talk in such a style. I knew it, and Betty knew I knew it.

She said that she had denied the stories where she could.

‘But who believes you when you deny a good story?’ she asked, realistic, obscurely aggrieved.

Walking along the river that evening, the summer air touching the nostrils with pollen, with the rotting, sweet water smell, I found my steps heavy. That morning, I had left Sheila composed, but now I had to warn her; I could see no way out. It had become too dangerous to leave her ignorant. I did not know how to handle the news, or her.

I went upstairs to our bedroom, where she was lying on her bed, reading. Although it was rarely that I had her – (as our marriage went on, it was false to speak of making love, for about it there was, though she did not often refuse me, the one-sidedness of rape) – nevertheless she was easier if I slept in the same room. That evening, sitting on my own bed, I watched her holding her book under the reading-lamp, although the sunlight was beginning to edge into the room. The windows were wide open, and through them came the smell of lime and petrol; it was a hot still night.

It was the heat, I took it for granted, that had sent Sheila to lie down. She was wearing a dressing-gown, smoking a cigarette, with a film of sweat on her forehead. She looked middle-aged and plain. Suddenly, I felt close to her, close with the years of knowledge and the nights I had seen her so, and my heart and body yearned for her.

‘Hot,’ she said.

I lay back, longing not to break the peace of the moment.

In the room, the only sound was Sheila’s turning a page: outside, the skirl of the embankment traffic. On her bed, which was the farther from the window, Sheila’s back was half turned to me, so as to catch the lamplight on the book.

In time – perhaps I put off speaking for half an hour – I called her name.

‘Hallo,’ she said, without stirring.

‘We ought to talk a bit.’

‘What about?’ She still spoke lazily, she had caught nothing ominous yet.

‘Robinson.’

All of a sudden she turned on her back, with her eyes staring at the ceiling.

‘What about him?’

I had been thinking out the words to use, and I answered: ‘If I were you, I should be careful how much you confide in him.’

There was a long silence. Sheila’s face did not move, she gave no sign that she had heard.

At last she said, in a high cold voice: ‘You’re telling me nothing that I don’t know.’

‘Do you know what he’s actually said?’

‘What does it matter?’ she cried.

‘He’s been spreading slander–’

‘I don’t want to hear.’ Her voice rose, but she remained still.

After a pause, she said, into the silent room: ‘I told you that he wouldn’t be grateful.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was right.’

Her laugh was splintered. I thought how those like her, who insisted on baring the harsher facts of the human condition, are those whom those facts ravish most.

She sat up, her back against the bed-head, her eyes full on me.

‘Why should he be grateful?’

‘He’s tried to do you harm.’

‘Why should he be grateful?’ Her glacial anger was rising: it was long since I had seen it. ‘Why should he or anyone else be grateful just because someone interferes with his life? Interferes, I tell you, for reasons of their own. I wasn’t trying to do anything for R S R’s sake, I just wanted to keep myself from the edge, and well you know it. Why shouldn’t he say anything he wants? I don’t deserve anything else.’

‘You do,’ I said.

Her eyes had not left me; her face had gone harsh and cruel.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You’ve given years of your life to taking care of me, haven’t you?’

‘I shouldn’t call it that.’

‘What else would you call it? You’ve been taking care of someone who’s useless by herself. Much good has it done you.’ In a cold, sadic tone, she added: ‘Or me either.’

‘I know that well enough.’

‘Well, you’ve sacrificed things you value, haven’t you? You used to mind about your career. And you’ve sacrificed things most men want. You’d have liked children and a satisfactory bed. You’ve done that for me? – Why?’

‘You know the reason.’

‘I never have known, but it must be a reason of your own.’ Her face looked ravaged, vivid, exhausted, as she cried out: ‘And do you think I’m grateful?’

After that fierce and contemptuous cry, she sat quite still. I saw her eyes, which did not fall before mine, slowly redden, and tears dropped on to her cheeks. It was not often that she cried, but always in states like this. It frightened me that night even though I had watched it before – that she did not raise a hand but sat unmoving, the tears running down her cheeks as down a window pane, wetting the neck of her dressing-gown.

At the end of such an outburst, as I knew by heart, there was nothing for me to do. Neither tenderness nor roughness helped her; it was no use speaking until the stillness broke, and she was reaching for a handkerchief and a cigarette.

We were due at a Soho restaurant at half past eight, to meet my brother. When I reminded her, she shook her head.

‘It’s no use. You’ll have to go by yourself.’

I said that I could put him off without any harm done. ‘You go,’ she said. ‘You’re better out of this.’

I was uneasy about leaving her alone in that state, and she knew it.

‘I shall be all right,’ she said.

‘You’re sure?’

‘I shall be all right.’

So with the familiar sense of escape, guilty escape, I left her: three hours later, with the familiar anxiety, I returned.

She was sitting in almost the same position as when I went away. For an instant I thought she had stayed immobile, but then, with relief, I noticed that she had fetched in her gramophone; there was a pile of records on the floor.

‘Had a good time?’ she asked.

She inquired about my brother, as though in a clumsy inarticulate attempt to make amends. In the same constrained but friendly fashion, she asked: ‘What am I to do about R S R?’

She had been saving up the question.

‘Are you ready to drop him?’

‘I leave it to you.’

Then I knew she was not ready. It was still important for her, keeping him afloat; and I must not make it more difficult than need be.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you knew what he was like all along, and perhaps it doesn’t alter the position, when he’s behaving like himself–’

She smiled, lighter-hearted because I had understood.

Then I told her that one of us must let Robinson know, as explicitly as we could speak, that we had heard of his slanders and did not propose to stand them. I should be glad, and more than glad, to talk to him; but it would probably do more good if she took it on herself. ‘That goes without saying,’ she said.

She got up from her bed, and walked round to the stool in front of her looking-glass. From there she held out a hand and took mine, not as a caress, but as though she was clinching a bargain. She said in an uninflected tone: ‘I hate this life. If it weren’t for you, I don’t think I should stay in it.’