Homecomings (7 page)

That autumn, I could not discover how much the rumours were alive. I had the impression that after Sheila had confronted Robinson there had been a lull. But Robinson – it was only now that I realized it clearly – became so merry with gossip that he never let it rest for long; exaggerating, transmogrifying, inventing, he presented the story, too luscious to keep, to anyone who met him; everything became a bit larger than life, and I heard, through a chain of word-of-mouth which led back to him, that Sheila’s private income was £4,000 a year, when in fact it was £700.

Thus I thought it likely that Sheila was still being traduced; watching her, I was convinced that she knew it, and that none of her attempts to forget herself had exposed her so. Sometimes, towards the end of the year, I fancied that she was getting tired of it. Even obsessions wear themselves out, I was thinking, just as, in the unhappiest love affair, there comes eventually a point where the forces urging one to escape unhappiness become infinitesimally stronger than those which immerse one in it.

In fact, Sheila’s behaviour was becoming more than ever strange. She went out less, but she was not playing her records hour after hour, which was her final refuge. She seemed to have a new preoccupation. Twice, returning home earlier than usual from Millbank, I heard her footsteps running over the bedroom floor and the sounds of drawers shutting, as though she had been disturbed by my arrival and was hiding something.

It was not safe to ask, and yet I had to know. Mrs Wilson let fall that Sheila had taken to going, each morning, into the room we used as a study; and one day, after starting for the office, I came back as though by accident. Mrs Wilson said that, following her new routine, Sheila was upstairs in the study. It was a room at the back of the house, and I went along the landing and looked in. Beside the window, which looked over the Chelsea roofs, Sheila was sitting at the desk. In front of her was an exercise book, an ordinary school exercise book ruled with blue lines; her head thrown back because of her long sight, she was looking at the words she had just written, her pen balanced over the page. So far as I could see from across the room, it was not continuous prose she was writing, nor was it verse: it looked more like a piece of conversation.

Suddenly she realized that the door was open, that I was there. At once she slammed the exercise book shut and pressed her hand on it.

‘It’s not fair,’ she cried, like an adolescent girl caught in a secret.

I asked her something neutral, such as whether I could change my mind and dine at home that night. ‘It’s not fair,’ Sheila repeated, clutching her book. I said nothing. Without explanation she went across into the bedroom, and there was a noise of a drawer being unlocked and locked again.

But it did not need explanation. She was trying both to write and to keep it secret: was she thinking of Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson? Had she a sisterly feeling for women as indrawn as herself? Usually, when we had spoken of them, she had – it was cool, I thought, coming from her – shown no patience with them, and felt that if they had got down to earth they might have done better.

Anyway, neither she nor I referred to her writing, until the night of the Barbican dinner. The Barbican dinner was one of the festivals I had to attend, because of my connexion with Paul Lufkin. The Barbican was an organization consisting largely of members of banks, investment trusts and insurance companies, which set out to make propaganda for English trade overseas. To this January dinner Lufkin was invited, as were all his senior executives and advisors, and those of his bigger competitors.

I would have got out of it if I could; for the political divide was by this time such that even people like me, inured by habit to holding their tongues, found it a strain to spend a social evening with the other side. And this was the other side. Among my brother and his fellow scientists, in the Chelsea pubs, in the provincial back streets where my oldest friends lived – there we were all on one side. At Cambridge, or even among Betty Vane’s aristocratic relatives, there were plenty who, to the test questions of those years, the Spanish Civil War, Munich, Nazism, gave the same answer as I did myself. Here there was almost none.

I could hear my old master in Chambers, Herbert Getliffe, the rising silk, wise with the times as usual: he was singing in unison, as it were, and so were the active, vigorous, virile men round him: yes, Churchill was a menace and a war-monger and must be kept out at all costs: yes, war was getting less likely every day: yes, everything had been handled as well as it possibly could be handled, everyone knew we were ready to play ball.

I was frightened just as I had been on the night of Munich. I knew some of these men well: though they were less articulate than my friends, though they were trained to conform rather than not to conform, they were mostly able: they were tougher and more courageous than most of us: yet I believed that, as a class, they were self-deceived or worse.

Of all those I knew, there was only one exception. It was Paul Lufkin himself. He had taken his time, had tried to stay laodicean, but at last he had come down coldly among the dissidents. No one could guess whether it was a business calculation or a human one or both. There he sat, neat-headed, up at the benefactors’ table, listening to the other bosses, impassively aware that they sneered about how he was trying to suck up to the Opposition, indifferent to their opinion or any other.

But he was alone, up among the tycoons: so was I, three or four grades down. So I felt a gulp of pleasure when I heard Gilbert Cooke trumpeting brusquely, on the opposite side of the table not far from me, telling his neighbours to make the most of the drinks, since there would not be a Barbican dinner next year.

‘Why not?’

‘We shall be fighting,’ said Gilbert.

‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ said someone.

‘Let’s hope it will,’ said Cooke, his face imperative and flushed. Men were demurring, when he brought his hand down on the table.

‘If it doesn’t come to that,’ he said, ‘we’re sunk.’

He gazed round with hot eyes: ‘Are you ready to see us being sunk?’

He was the son of a regular soldier, he went about in society, he was less used to being over-awed than the people round him. Somehow they listened, though he badgered and hectored them, though he was younger than they were.

He saw me approving of him, and gave a great impudent wink. My spirits rose, buoyed up by this carelessness, this comradeship.

It was not his fault that recently I had seen little of him. He had often invited me and Sheila out, and it was only for her sake that I refused. Now he was signalling comradeship. He called out across the table, did I know the Davidsons? Austin Davidson?

It was a curious symbol of alliance tossed over the heads of those respectable businessmen. Davidson was an art connoisseur, a member of one of the academic dynasties, linked in his youth with high Bloomsbury. No, I called out, I knew his work, of course, but not him. I was recalling to myself the kind of gibes we used to make a few years before about those families and that group: how they carried fine feelings so far as to be vulgar: how they objected with refined agony to ambition in others, and slipped as of right into the vacant place themselves. Those were young men’s gibes, gibes from outside a charmed circle. Now they did not matter: Davidson would have been an ally at that dinner; so was Gilbert, brandishing his name.

When Gilbert drove me home I had drunk enough to be talkative and my spirits were still high. We had each been angry at the dinner and now we spoke out, Gilbert not so anxious as I about the future but more enraged; his fighting spirit heartened me, and it was a long time since I had become so buoyant and reassured.

In that mood I entered the bedroom, where Sheila was lying reading, her book near the bedside lamp, as it had been the evening we quarrelled over Robinson: but now the rest of the room was in darkness, and all I could see was the lamp, the side of her face, her arm coming from the shoulder of her nightdress.

I sat on my bed, starting to tell her of the purgatorial dinner – and then I became full of desire.

She heard it in my voice, for she turned on her elbow and stared straight at me.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ she said, cold but not unfriendly, trying to be kind.

On her bed, just as I was taking her, too late to consider her, I saw her face under mine, a line between her eyes carved in the lamplight, her expression worn and sad.

Then I lay beside her, on us both the heaviness we had known often, I the more guilty because I was relaxed, because, despite the memory of her frown, I was basking in the animal comfort of the nerves.

In time I asked: ‘Anything special the matter?’

‘Nothing much,’ she said.

‘There is something?’

For an instant I was pleased. It was some sadness of her own, different from that which had fallen on us so many nights, lying like this.

Then I would rather have had the sadness we both knew – for she turned her head into my shoulder, so that I could not watch her face, and her body pulsed with sobbing.

‘What is the matter?’ I said, holding her to me. She just shook her head.

‘Anything to do with me?’ Another shake.

‘What then?’

In a desperate and rancorous tone, she said: ‘I’ve been weak-minded.’

‘What have you done?’

‘You knew that I’d been playing with some writing. I didn’t show it to you, because it wasn’t for you.’

The words were glacial, but I held her and said, ‘Never mind.’

‘I’ve been a fool. I’ve let R S R know.’

‘Does that matter much?’

‘It’s worse than that, I’ve let him get it out of me.’

I told her that it was nothing to worry about, that she must harden herself against a bit of malice, which was the worst that could happen. All the time I could feel her anxiety like a growth inside her, meaningless, causeless, unreachable. She scarcely spoke again, she could not explain what she feared, and yet it was exhausting her so much that, as I had known happen to her before in the bitterness of dread, she went to sleep in my arms.

WHEN Sheila asked Robinson for her manuscript back, he spent himself on praise. Why had she not written before? This was short, but she must continue with it. He has always suspected she had a talent. Now she had discovered it, she must be ready to make sacrifices.

Reporting this to me, she was as embarrassed and vulnerable as when she confessed that she had let him blandish the manuscript out of her. She had never learned to accept praise, except about her looks. Hearing it from Robinson she felt half-elated, she was vain enough for that, and half-degraded.

Nevertheless, he had not been ambivalent; he had praised with a persistence he had not shown since he extracted her promise of help. There was no sign of the claw beneath. It made nonsense of her premonition, that night in my arms.

Within a fortnight, there was a change. A new rumour was going round, more detailed and factual than any of the earlier ones. It was that Sheila had put money into Robinson’s firm (one version which reached me multiplied the amount by three) but not really to help the arts or out of benevolence. In fact, she was just a dilettante who was supporting him because she wrote amateur stuff herself and could not find an easier way to get it published.

That was pure Robinson, I thought, as I heard the story – too clever by half, too neat by half; triumphant because he could expose the ‘lie in life’. To some women, I thought also, it would have seemed the most innocuous of rumours. To Sheila – I was determined she should not have to make the comparison. I telephoned Robinson at once, heard from his wife that he was out for the evening, and made an appointment for first thing next day. This time I meant to use threats.

But I was too late. Sitting in the drawing-room when I got home, Sheila was doing nothing at all. No book, no chess-men, not even her gramophone records – she was sitting as though she had been there for hours, staring out of the lighted room into the January night.

After I had greeted her and settled down by the side of the fire, she said: ‘Have you heard his latest?’

She spoke in an even tone. It was no use my pretending.

I said yes.

‘I’m handing in my resignation,’ she said.

‘I’m glad of that,’ I replied.

‘I’ve tried as much as I can,’ she said, without any tone.

In the same flat, impassive voice, she asked me to handle the business for her. She did not wish to see Robinson. She did not care what happened to him. Her will was broken. If I could manage it, I might as well get her money back. She was not much interested.

As she spoke, discussing the end of the relation with no more emotion than last week’s accounts, she pointed to the grate, where there lay a pile of ash and some twisted, calcined corners of paper.

‘I’ve been getting rid of things,’ she said.

‘You shouldn’t have done,’ I cried.

‘I should never have started,’ she said.

She had burned all, her own holograph and two typescripts. But, against the curious farcical intransigence of brute creation, she had not found it so easy as she expected. The debris in the grate represented a long time of sitting before the fire, feeding in papers. In the end, she had had to drop most of the paper into the boiler downstairs. Even that night, she thought it faintly funny.

However, she had destroyed each trace, so completely that I never read a sentence of hers, nor grasped for certain what kind of book it was. Years later, I met the woman who had once been Miss Smith and Robinson’s secretary, and she mentioned that she had glanced through it. According to her, it had consisted mostly of aphorisms, with a few insets like ‘little plays’. She had thought it was ‘unusual’, but had found it difficult to read.

The morning after Sheila burned her manuscript, I kept my appointment with Robinson. In the Maiden Lane attic, the sky outside pressed down against the window; as I entered, Robinson switched on a single light in the middle of the ceiling.