The Light and the Dark (47 page)

“Reasonably.”

“What does he think?” Roy pointed to the door which led through to the Minister’s room.

“The same.”

“Just so,” said Roy. “He’s a wise old bird. So are you, aren’t you?”

He smiled brilliantly, innocently, laughing at himself and me. He said: “There’s never been a place for me, has there?”

On those afternoons I heard something about his crew. He had become interested in them, realistically, affectionately, with amusement, just as with everyone he met, just as with the inmates of No. 32, Knesebeckstrasse. They were nearly all boys, and the oldest was twenty-six, seven years younger than himself. “I’m getting too old for this game,” said Roy. There was a Canadian among them. Most of them were abnormally inarticulate, and Roy mimicked them to me. Some were extremely brave. “Too brave for me,” he said.

I often speculated about what they thought of him. So far as I could gather, they did not consider him academic, donnish, or learned; it had always surprised people to discover his occupation. But they also did not think him intelligent or amusing. They liked him, they respected him as a pilot, and thought he was a kind, slightly eccentric old thing. I suspected he had gone in for some deliberate dissimulation – partly to stay anonymous, partly to shield them from what he was really like. For instance, they certainly did not know that he was a notorious lover of women. They just placed him as an uxorious married man, devoted to his daughter and inclined to show them photographs of his wife and baby.

He told me that with a smile. It was often, I reflected, odd enough to send a shiver down the spine, when one heard a friend described by other people.

It was as though each of us went about speaking a private language which no one else could understand; yet everyone caught a few words, uttered a cheerful, confident, dismissive judgment, and passed on. It reminded me of the fellows discussing Roy before he was elected. If one heard people talking confidently of another’s character, one realised once for all that human beings were inescapably alone.

Actually, the opinions formed by Roy’s crew were quite explicable. He was devoted to the child, with a strength of feeling that at times astonished me. And he was content and comfortable with Rosalind.

During one of his visits to my office, both he and I were set to write letters that were difficult to put together. For I had heard from Joan the day before that Humphrey Bevill had just died in hospital. He had been decorated again for one of the small boat actions; then, a week or so past, his boat had been sunk and he had spent some hours in the water. His fantastic courage was a courage of the nerves, and he was as frail as he looked. He had died from exposure and loss of blood, when a normally tough young man would have recovered.

“Poor boy,” said Roy. “It must have been dreadful to go out and fight – and then come back in an hour or two. Everything clean and normal. It makes it much harder.”

He said that he felt it acutely himself. In the daytime he would be at home in peace, all tranquil. At night they would be flying out in fear. Next morning he came back home again. It would have been easier if all his life were abnormal, disturbed, spent nearer the dark and cold. It would have been easier in trenches in a foreign country. Here the hours of danger were placed violently side by side with days of clean sheets, in familiar rooms with one’s child, one’s wife and friends.

“Poor boy,” said Roy. “He couldn’t have had a happy life, could he?”

We each wrote separate letters to Lord and Lady Boscastle.

“It’s hard to write,” said Roy. “It will break up Lord B. It’s a mistake to be fond of people. One suffers too much.”

We had no doubt that Lord Boscastle would be terribly afflicted, but even so we were amazed by the manner of his grief. I heard of it from Lady Boscastle, who wrote in reply to my letter of condolence. Herself, she was taking bereavement with her immaculate stoicism – but she seemed overborne, almost stunned, by her husband’s passion of inconsolable misery. He shut himself up in Boscastle, would acknowledge no letters, not even from his family, would see no one except his servant. He had only spoken once to his wife since he heard of Humphrey’s death. It was a rage of misery, misery that was like madness, that made him in sheer ferocity of pain shut himself away from every human touch.

Lady Boscastle was out of her depth. She would have liked to help him; yet, for once in her life, she felt ignorant and inept. She had never been possessed as he was now; for all her adventures, she had never been overmastered by an emotion; she had never abandoned herself to love, as her husband did, with all the wildness of his nature, first in love for her and then for his son. She could not meet such a passion on equal terms. For the first time in their marriage, she was not mistress of the situation.

When Roy next came to see me, it was a warm, sunny day at the end of February; the other side of Whitehall was gilded by the soft, misty, golden light.

I told Roy about Lady Boscastle’s letter.

“She’s too cold,” he said. He had never liked her as I did, though he felt a kind of reluctant, sparring admiration. “She’ll survive. But he’ll live with the dead.”

Roy looked at me, and spoke with extreme gentleness and authority: “You mustn’t live with the dead too much. You could.”

He had seen me live on after my wife’s death; he was the only person who had seen me close to.

“If you lose me as well,” said Roy, “you mustn’t mourn too long. You mustn’t let it haunt you. You must go on.”

He was pale, quiet, burdened that afternoon. He and his crew had moved a few days before to another aerodrome. “They don’t want us to see our losses. They need to keep us cheerful,” he said.

He went on: “If we started with thirty aeroplanes” (he never used the current terms, but always with great precision brought out the outmoded ones, such as “aeroplanes”) “and we notice that two don’t come back each night, they think we mightn’t like it much. Because we’ve got to make thirty trips before they give us a rest. Even if the losses are only five per cent – we might start working out our chances. They’re not good, are they?”

It was such a beautiful afternoon that we went for a walk in St James’s Park. The sky was a light, radiant blue; but, although it was only early afternoon, a mist was creeping on to the brilliant grass.

“Excellent,” said Roy. “I like to see that.”

I misunderstood him.

“It is a lovely day,” I said.

“Not so aesthetic,” said Roy. “I meant – as long as this weather lasts, we shan’t have to fly.”

He walked by my side, over the soft winter turf.

“Some nights,” he said in a moment, “I’m pretty certain that I’m not coming back. I want to ask them to let me stay at home. I need to be safe. I feel like saying that I can’t go through it once again. Those nights, I feel certain that I’m going to die.”

He added: “Somehow I’ve come back, though.”

We walked along through the calm, warm, fragrant air. Roy turned to me, his face quite open.

“Dear old boy, I am afraid, you know,” he said. “I am afraid of my death.”

On Roy’s next visit, nothing of importance happened; he said nothing which struck me at the time; it was a placid evening, but I came to remember it in detail.

He was shown into my office about half-past two on a Saturday afternoon. I should not have been there, but I was preparing a draft for the Minister. Roy saw that I was writing, cocked an eyebrow, and with exaggerated punctiliousness would not come round my side of the desk.

“Too secret,” he said.

“No. Just a speech.”

Roy was light-hearted, and his mood infected me. He had the next four days free, and when he left me that evening was going on to Cambridge. He was so calm and light that I could not stay in a grey, ordinary, workaday mood. I had nearly finished the speech, but I recalled that the Minister had one or two idioms which he always got wrong: “they can’t pull the wool over my ears,” he used to say with great shrewdness. I was fond of him: it occurred to me that those idioms should be inserted in the speech. I told Roy what I was doing.

“I thought you’d become much too responsible.” He smiled with cheerful malice. “Remarkable occupation for a high civil servant. You should model yourself on Houston Eggar. I’m afraid you’ll never catch him up.”

When we went down into the street, Roy said that he needed some books for the next four days. So we took a bus, cut down Charles II Street, and reached the London Library before it closed. Roy bent over a rack of recent books; his nose looked inquisitively long, since the peak of his cap cut off his forehead. He talked about one or two of the books. “Very old-brandy,” he murmured. Then suddenly, with an expression serious and concerned, he pointed to a title. He was pointing to a single word – FISH. “Lewis,” he said, in a clear, audible tone, “I’m losing my grip. I’ve forgotten the Soghdian for fish.” He looked up, and saw a member, fat, stately, in black hat and fur-lined overcoat, walking out with books under his arm. “I wonder if he knows,” said Roy. “I need to ask him.”

Roy stepped lightly in front of the fat man, and gave him a smart salute.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but I have forgotten the Soghdian for fish. Can you help me?”

“The what?”

“Soghdian.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“One ought to keep one’s languages up,” said Roy: his gaze was solemn, reproving, understanding. “It’s terrible how one forgets them. Isn’t it?”

Hypnotised, the member agreed that it was. Roy let him go. On the bus to Dolphin Square, the word returned to Roy. He professed extreme relief. The bus racketed and swayed round the corner by Victoria. Roy said, calm and matter-of-fact: “If I live, I shall go back to the Soghdian, you know. I may as well.”

“I think you should,” I said.

“I shall become extremely eminent. And remarkably rude.”

“I wish you’d study that whole Central Asian civilisation. It must be very interesting – how did it keep alive? and why did it die?”

“You always wanted me to turn into a journalist,” said Roy. “I’m too old to change now. I shall stick to something nice and sharp.”

In my flat, we made a kind of high tea, since Roy was catching a train just after seven. But it was a high tea composed of things we had not eaten for a long time. I had a small hoard of foods that once we ate and did not know how good they were – butter, strawberry jam, a few eggs. We had bought a loaf of bread on our way; we boiled a couple of eggs each, and finished with several rounds of bread and butter and jam.

“Excellent,” said Roy. “This is good stuff.”

We had eaten well together in many places, but it was a delectable meal. Afterwards, we made another pot of tea; Roy lay on the sofa, smoked a cigarette, asked me about my love affair.

For I had fallen in love in the middle of the war. It had given me days of supernatural brilliance among the pain, anxiety and darkness. For hours together, I had been ecstatically happy and blind to everything else.

“You should let me vet them,” said Roy. “I still don’t like the sound of her.”

“She wouldn’t do for you,” I said.

“You like women who wouldn’t do for anyone, old boy. Such as Lady B.”

“Life wouldn’t have been dull,” I said, “with Lady B.”

Roy smiled mockingly, protectively.

“You’ve not tired yourself out, have you?” he said. “So much has happened to you – and yet you still don’t need life to be dull.”

He teased me, gave me advice, made me promise to arrange a dinner with both him and the young woman. Once I turned and caught him watching me, a half-smile on his lips, his eyes intent.

Then he said: “We haven’t had a walk for a long time, have we? Walk with me to the station.”

It was several miles, but I was glad to. We were both active that day. As soon as we got into the open air, we felt the prick of a Scotch mist, almost a drizzle. I asked if he minded about his buttons.

“Never mind them,” he said. “Rosalind will clean them tomorrow. She likes to.”

The drizzle persisted, but the moon was getting up behind the clouds, and the last of the daylight had not quite faded. Along the embankment to Westminster it was not oppressively dark; the derelict houses of Millbank stood blacker than the sky, and on our right there was a sheen upon the water. The tide was running full, and brought a smell from the sea.

“It’s a good night,” said Roy.

We left the river at Westminster, strolled down Whitehall, and then went back to the Embankment as far as Blackfriars Bridge. Trams clanked past us, sparks flashing in the dusk. Now and then a torch shone a beam on the wet road. Roy recalled jokes against us both, predicaments we had run into when we were younger, the various attempts to domesticate us.

“They got me at last,” he said. “They got me at last.”

He talked fondly of his daughter.

“I wonder what she’ll be like,” he said. “She won’t be stupid, will she?”

I smiled.

“I hope not,” said Roy. “I’ve got a feeling she’ll be anxious to please. If so, there’ll be trouble for someone.”

He took my arm, and went on in a light, clear, definite tone: “They mustn’t teach her too much. They mustn’t teach her to hold herself in. I’d like her to be easy. She’s my daughter. She’ll find the dark things for herself.”

Arm-in-arm, we went up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul’s. Roy was talking with affection tender and disrespectful, about one who “held herself in” – Lady Muriel. She must not be let loose on her godchild; he teased me about all her efforts to make me respectable in a way fitting to my station.

“Yet you dote on her,” I said.

“Ah, she needs so much love.”

“And Joan?”

He never laughed much about Joan. Of all the people we knew intimately, she was the only one he never mimicked. Even that evening, when he was so free, when his feelings flowed like quicksilver, he paused.

“And Joan?” I repeated.

“She needs more still,” said Roy.

We passed the cathedral; the rain was pattering down, but by now the invisible moon was high enough to lighten the sky, so that we could see the waste land close by; we stopped on the city side, near what used to be Bread Street, and gazed at the empty expanse under the gentle rain.