The Light and the Dark (22 page)

“I don’t mind,” I said, knowing that it was safe.

“Perhaps you’d better have it.”

Winslow pushed it towards me, but did not give another glance as I walked to the fireplace, and put a match to it over the empty grate.

I went up to Roy’s room. He was lying on his sofa, stretched out and relaxed. He jumped up and greeted me with a smile contrite and remorseful.

“Have I dished everything?” he said.

He was quite equable now, affectionate, and happy because the shadow had passed over.

“Have I dished everything?” he said.

“I think I’ve settled it,” I said, in tiredness and strain. I could let myself go at last. I felt overwhelmed by responsibility, I knew that I was ageing before my time. “But you’ll do something one day that I can’t settle.”

“I’m frightened of that too,” said Roy.

“I shan’t always be there to pick up the pieces,” I said.

“You look pretty worn. I need to order you some strawberries for tea,” he said with tender, mocking concern. He went into his bedroom to telephone, and talked to the kitchens in the voice of the senior fellow, ludicrously like the life. I could not help but smile, despite fatigue and worry and unreasonable anger. He came back and stood looking down at me.

“It’s very hard on you, dear old boy,” he said, suddenly but very quietly. “Having me to look after as well as poor Sheila. There’s nothing I can say, is there? You know as much about it as I do. Or at least, if you don’t now, you never will, you know.”

“Never mind,” I said.

“Of course,” said Roy, with a joyous smile, “just at this minute I feel that I shall never be depressed again.”

In the next few days he spent much of his time with me. He was inventive and entertaining, as though to show me that I need not worry. He was quite composed and even-spirited, but not as carefree as after the first outburst. The innocence, the rapture, the hope, did not flood him and uplift him. He put on his fireworks for my benefit, but underneath he was working something out. What it was I could not guess. I caught him looking at me several times with a strange expression – protective, concerned, uneasy. There was something left unsaid.

On a night early in July, he invited me out to dinner in the town. It was strange for us to dine together in a restaurant in Cambridge: we had not done so since he became a fellow. It was stranger still for Roy to be forcing the conversation, to be unspontaneous, anxious to make a confidence and yet held back. He was specially anxious to look after me; he had brought a bottle of my favourite wine, and had chosen the dinner in advance out of dishes that I liked. He told me some gleeful anecdotes of people round us. But we came to the end of the meal and left the restaurant: he had still not managed to speak.

It was a fine and glowing evening, and I suggested that we should walk through one of the colleges down to the river. Roy shook his head.

“We’re bound to meet someone if we do,” he said. “They’ll catch us. Some devils will catch us.” He was smiling, mocking himself. “I don’t want to be caught. I need to say something to you. It’s not easy.”

So we walked to Garret Hostel Bridge. There was no one standing there, though some young men and girls on bicycles came riding over. Roy looked down into the water. It was burnished in the bright evening light, and the willows and bridges seemed to be painted beneath the surface, leaf by leaf and line by line: it was the time, just as the sun was dying, when all colours gained a moment of enhancement, and the reflections of the trees were brilliant.

“Well?” I said.

“I suppose I need to talk,” said Roy.

In a moment he said: “I know what you think. About my nature. About the way I’m made.”

“Then you know more than I do,” I said, trying to distract him, but he turned on me in a flash with a sad, teasing, acute smile.

“That’s what you say when you want someone to think you’re nice and kind and a bit of an old buffer. I’ve heard you do it too often. It’s quite untrue. You mustn’t do it now.”

He looked into the water again.

“I know enough to be going on with,” he said. “I know you reasonably well, old boy. I have seen what you believe about me.”

I did not answer. It was no use pretending.

“You believe I’ve got my sentence, don’t you? I may get time off for good conduct – but you don’t believe that I can get out altogether. A bit of luck can make a difference on the surface. And I need to struggle, because that can make a little difference too. But really, whatever happens to me, I can never change. I’m always sentenced to be myself. Isn’t that what you believe? Please tell me.”

I did not reply for a moment. Then I said: “I can’t alter what you say – enough to matter.”

“Just so,” he said.

He cried: “It’s too stark for me. I can’t believe it.”

He said quietly: “I can’t believe as you do, Lewis. It would make life pointless. My life isn’t all that important, but I know it better than anyone else’s. And I know that I’ve been through misery that I wouldn’t inflict on a living soul. No one could deserve it. I couldn’t deserve it, whatever I’ve done or whatever I shall do. You know that–”

“Yes, I know that,” I said, with anguished pity.

“If you’re right, I’ve gone through that quite pointlessly. And I shall again. I can’t leave it behind. If you’re right, it could happen to others. There must be others who go through the same. Without reason, according to you. Just as a pointless joke.”

“It must happen to a few,” I said. “To a few unusual men.”

“I can’t accept a joke like that,” he said. “It would be like living in a prison governed by an imbecile.”

He was speaking with passion and with a resentment I had never heard. Now I could feel what the terrible nights had done to him. Yet they had not left him broken, limp, or resigned. He was still choosing the active way. His whole body, as he leaned over the bridge, was vigorous with determination and purpose.

Neither of us spoke for some time. I too looked down. The brilliant colours had left the sky and water, and the reflections of the willows were dark by now.

“There’s something else,” said Roy. His tone was sad and gentle.

He added, after a pause: “I don’t know how I’m going to say it. I’ve needed to say it all night. I don’t know how I can.”

He was still gazing down into the water.

“Dear old boy,” he said, “you believe something that I’m not strong enough to believe. There might come a time – there might come a time when I was held back – because of what you believe.”

I muttered.

“I’ve got a chance,” he said. “But it will be a near thing. I need to have nothing hold me back. You can see that, can’t you?”

“I can see that,” I said.

“You believe in predestination, Lewis,” he said. “It doesn’t prevent you battling on. It would prevent me, you know. You’re much more robust than I am. If I believed as you believe, I couldn’t go on.”

He went on: “I think you’re wrong. I need to act as though you’re wrong. It may weaken me if I know what you’re thinking. There may be times when I shall not want to be understood. I can’t risk being weakened, Lewis. Sooner than be weakened, I should have to lose everything else. Even you.”

A punt passed under the bridge and broke the reflections. The water had ceased swirling before he spoke again.

“I shan’t lose you,” he said. “I don’t think I could. You won’t get rid of me. I’ve never felt what intimacy means, except with you. And you–”

“It is the same with me.”

“Just so,” said Roy.

He added very quietly: “I wouldn’t alter anything if I could help it. But there may come a time when I get out of your sight. There may come a time when I need to keep things from you.”

“Has that time come?” I asked.

He did not speak for a long time.

“Yes,” he said.

He was relieved to have it over. As soon as it was done, he wanted to assure me that nearly everything would be unchanged. On the way back to the college, he arranged to see me in London with an anxiety, a punctiliousness, that he never used to show. Our meetings had always been casual, accidental, comradely: now he was telling me that they would go on unchanged, our comradeship would not be touched; the only difference was that some of his inner life might be concealed.

It was the only rift that had come between us. During the time we had known each other, his life had been wild and mine disordered, but our relation had been profoundly smooth, beyond anything in my experience. We had never had a quarrel, scarcely an irritable word.

It made his rejection of intimacy hard for me to bear. I was hurt, sharply, sickly and bitterly hurt. I had the same sense of deprivation as if I had been much younger. Perhaps the sense of deprivation was stronger now; for, while as a younger man my vanity would have been wounded, on the other hand I should still have looked forward to intimacies more transfiguring even than this of ours; now I had seen enough to know that such an intimacy was rare, and that it was unlikely I should ever take part in one again.

Yet he could do no other than draw apart from me. If he were to keep his remnant of hope, he could do nothing else. For I could not hope on his terms: he had seen into me, and that was all.

It had been bitter to watch him suffer and know I could not help. That was a bitterness we all taste, one of the first facts we learn of the human condition. It was far more bitter to know that my own presence might keep him from peace of mind. It was the harshest of ironies: for he was he, and I was I, as Montaigne said, and so we knew each other: just because of that mutual knowledge, I stood in his way.

I had thought I was a realistic man – and yet I took it with dismay and cursed that we are as we are. But I tried not to make the change harder for him. As I told Joan in the spring, I had learned more from Roy than he from me. I had watched the absolute self-forgetfulness with which he spent himself on another, the self-forgetfulness he had so often given to me. I was not capable of his acts of selflessness, I was not made like him. But I could try to mutate him in practice. There was no question what I must do. I had to preserve our comradeship in the shape he wished, without loss of spirits and without demur. I had to be there, without trouble or pride, if he should want me.

Roy and Joan became lovers during that summer. I wondered who had taken the initiative – but it was a question without meaning. Roy was ardent, fond of women, inclined to let them see that he desired them, and then wait for the next move: in his self-accusation to Winslow, he said that he “coaxed invitations” from women, and that was no more than the truth. At the same time, Joan was a warm-blooded young woman, direct and canalised in all she felt and did. She was not easily attracted to men; she was fastidious, diffident, desperately afraid that she would lack physical charm to those she loved. But she had been attracted to Roy right back in the days when she thought he was frivolous and criticised his long nose. She had not known quite what it meant, but gradually he came to be surrounded by a haze of enchantment; of all men he was the first she longed to touch. She stayed at her window to watch him walk through the court. She thought of excuses to take a message to his rooms.

She told herself that this was her first knowledge of lust. She had a taste for the coarse and brutal words, the most direct and uncompromising picture of the facts. This was lust, she thought, and longed for him. She saw him with Rosalind and others, women who were elegant, smart, alluring, and she envied them ferociously, contemptuously and with self-abasement. She thought they were fools; she thought none of them could understand him as she could; and she could not believe that he would ever look at her twice.

She found, incredulously, that he liked her. She heard him make playful love to her, and she repeated the words, like a charm, before she went to sleep at night. At once her longing for him grew into dedicated love, love undeviating, whole-hearted, romantic and passionate. And that love became deeper, richer, pervaded all her thoughts, during the months her father lay dying and Roy sat with them in the Lodge.

For she was not blinded by the pulse of her blood. Some things about him she did not see, for no girl of twenty could. But others she saw more vividly, with more strength of fellow-feeling, even with more compassion, than any woman he had known. She could throw aside his caprices and whims, for she had seen him comfort her mother with patience, simplicity and strength. She had seen him suffer with them. She had heard him speak from the depth of feeling, not about her, but about her father’s state and human loneliness: after his voice, she thought, all others would seem dull, orotund and complacent. She had watched his face stricken, or, as she put it, “possessed by devils” that she did not understand. She wanted to spend her life in comforting him.

So her love filled her and drove her on. I thought it would be like her if, despite her shrinking diffidence, she finally asked to become his mistress. It was too easy to imagine her, with no confidence at all, talking to him as though fiercely and choosing the forthright words. But that did not really mean that she had taken the initiative. Their natures played on each other. Somehow it would have happened. There was no other end.

From the beginning, Roy felt a deeper concern for her than for anyone he loved. She was, like her mother, strong and defenceless. Stronger and abler than her mother, and even less certain of love. Roy was often irresponsible in love, with women who took it as lightly as he did. But Joan was dependent on him from the first time he kissed her. He could not pretend otherwise. Perhaps he did not wish it otherwise, for he was profoundly fond of her. He was amused by her sulkiness and fierceness, he liked to be able to wipe them away. He had gone through them to the welling depths of emotion, where she was warm, tempestuous, violent and tender. He found her rich beyond compare.

Like her, he too had been affected by their vigil in the Lodge. It had surrounded her, and all that passed between them, with its own kind of radiance – the radiance of grief, suffering, intense feeling, and ineluctable death. In that radiance, they had talked of other things than love. He had told her more than he had told any woman of his despair, his search, his hope. He was moved to admiration by her strength, which never turned cold, never wilted, stayed steady through the harsh months in the Lodge. There were times when he rested on that strength himself. He came to look upon her as an ally, as someone who might take his hand and lead him out of the dark.