Homecomings (19 page)

Gilbert’s inquisitiveness was so ravening that he was as happy, as unceremonious, wherever it led him, provided he picked up a scrap of human news. Having an evening pot of tea with this young man’s parents, he felt nothing but brotherliness, except that hot-eyed zest with which he collected gossip about them, Helen, her marriage, perhaps at fourth-hand about Margaret and me.

‘You are a menace,’ said Margaret, but with indulgence and a shade of envy for anyone who could let himself rip so far.

When we went out from the restaurant into the bitter throat-catching air, we were still happy, all three of us. Gilbert continued to talk triumphantly of his findings and, walking between us, Margaret took his arm as well as mine.

ROSE worked fast after the meeting, and within a fortnight the contract was given to one of Lufkin’s rivals. During that fortnight, several of the Minister’s colleagues were rumoured to have gone to dinner at St James’s Court; the Minister’s own position was precarious and some of those colleagues did not wish him well. But, once the contract was signed, I thought it unlikely that Lufkin would waste any more time intriguing against the old man. Lufkin was much too practical a person to fritter himself away in revenge. For myself, I expected to be dropped for good, but no worse than that. Lufkin cut his losses, psychological as well as financial, with a drasticness that was a taunt to more contemplative men.

With that business settled and my mind at ease, I walked early one Saturday afternoon along the Bayswater Road to Margaret’s flat. It was mid-December, a mild wet day with a south-west wind; the street, the park, lay under a lid of cloud; the soft mild air blew in my face, brought a smell from the park both spring-like and rich with autumnal decay. It was a day on which the nerves were quite relaxed, and the mild air lulled one with reveries of pleasures to come.

For a couple of days I had not seen Margaret; that morning she had not telephoned me as she usually did on Saturday, but the afternoon arrangement was a standing one, and relaxed, comfortable with expectancy, I got out the latchkey and let myself into her room. She was sitting on the stool in front of her looking-glass: she did not get up or look round: the instant I saw her reflection, strained and stern, I cried: ‘What is the matter?’

‘I have something to ask you.’

‘What is it?’

Without turning round, her voice toneless, she said: ‘Is it true that Sheila killed herself?’

‘What do you mean?’

Suddenly she faced me, her eyes dense with anger.

‘I heard it last night.
I heard it for the first time
. Is it true?’

Deep in resentment, I stood there without speaking. At last I said: ‘Yes. It is true.’

Few people knew it; as Mr Knight had suggested that night we talked while Sheila’s body lay upstairs, the newspapers had had little space for an obscure inquest; I had told no one.

‘It is incredible that you should have kept it from me,’ she cried.

‘I didn’t want it to hang over you–’

‘What kind of life are we supposed to be living? Do you think I couldn’t accept anything that has happened to you? What I can’t bear is that you should try to censor something important. I can’t stand it if you insist on living as though you were alone. You make me feel that these last twelve months I have been wasting my time.’

‘How did you hear?’ I broke out.

‘We’ve been pretending–’

‘How did you hear?’

‘I heard from Helen.’

‘She can’t have known,’ I cried out.

‘She took it for granted that I did. When she saw I didn’t, what do you think it was like for both of us?’

‘Did she say how she’d heard?’

‘How could you let it happen?’

Our voices were raised, our words clashed together.

‘Did she say how she’d heard?’ I shouted again.

‘Gilbert told her the other day.’

She was seared with distress, choked with rage. And I felt the same sense of outrage; though I had brought the scene upon myself, I felt wronged.

Suddenly that desolation, that dull fury, that I wanted to visit on her, was twisted on to another.

‘I won’t tolerate it,’ I shouted. Over her shoulder I saw my face in her looking-glass, whitened with anger while hers had gone dark.

‘I’ll get rid of him. I won’t have him near me.’

‘He’s fond of you–’

‘He won’t do this again.’

‘He’s amused you often enough before now, gossiping about someone else.’

‘This wasn’t a thing to gossip about.’

‘It’s done now,’ she said.

‘I’ll get rid of him. I won’t have him near me.’

I said it so bitterly that she flinched. For the first time she averted her glance: in the silence she backed away, rested an arm on the window-sill, with her body limp. As I looked at her, unseeing, my feelings clashed and blared – protests, antagonism, the undercurrent of desire. Other feelings swept over those – the thought of Gilbert Cooke spying after Sheila’s death, searching the local paper, tracking down police reports, filled my mind like the image of a monster. Then a wound re-opened, and I said quietly: ‘There was someone else who went in for malice.’

‘What are you talking about?’

In jerky words, I told her of R S Robinson.

‘Poor Sheila,’ Margaret muttered, and then asked, more gently than she had spoken that afternoon: ‘Did it make much difference to her?’

‘I’ve never known,’ I said. I added: ‘Perhaps not. Probably not.’

Margaret was staring at me with pity, with something like fright; her eyes were filled with tears; in that moment we could have come into each other’s arms.

I said: ‘I won’t have such people near me. That is why I shall get rid of Gilbert Cooke.’

Margaret still stared at me, but I saw her face harden, as though, by a resolution as deliberate as that on the first evening we met alone but more painful now, she was drawing on her will. She answered: ‘You said nothing to me about Robinson either, or what you went through then.’

I did not reply. She called out an endearment, in astonishment, in acknowledgment of danger.

‘We must have it out,’ she said.

‘Let it go.’

After a pause she said, her voice thickening: ‘That’s too easy. I can’t live like that.’

‘Let it go, I tell you.’

‘No.’

As a rule people thought her younger than she was, but now she looked much older. She said: ‘You can’t get rid of Gilbert.’

‘I don’t think that anything can stop me.’

‘Except that it would be a wrong and unfair thing to do. And you are not really so unfair.’

‘I’ve told you my reason,’ I cried.

‘That’s not your reason. You’re lying to yourself.’

My temper was rising again. I said: ‘I’m getting tired of this.’

‘You’re pretending that Gilbert was acting out of malice, and you know it isn’t true.’

‘I know more of men like Gilbert than you ever will. And I know much more of malice.’

‘He’s been perfectly loyal to you in every way that matters,’ she said, conceding nothing. ‘There’s no excuse on earth for trying to shift him out of your office. I couldn’t let you do it.’

‘It is not for you to say.’

‘It is. All Gilbert has done is just to treat you as he treats everyone else. Of course he’s inquisitive. It’s all right when he’s being inquisitive about anyone else, but when he touches you – you can’t bear it. You want to be private, you don’t want to give and take like an ordinary man.’ She went on: ‘That’s what has maddened you about Gilbert. You issue bulletins about yourself, you don’t want anyone else to find you out.’ She added: ‘You are the same with me.’

Harshly I tried to stop her, but her temper was matching mine, her tongue was cooler. She went on: ‘What else were you doing, hiding the way she died from me?’

I had got to the pitch of sullen anger when I did not speak, just stood choked up, listening to her accusations.

‘With those who don’t want much of you, you’re unselfish, I grant you that,’ she was saying. ‘With anyone who wants you altogether, you’re cruel. Because one never knows when you’re going to be secretive, when you’re going to withdraw. With most people you’re good,’ she was saying, ‘but in the end you’ll break the heart of anyone who loves you.

‘I might be able to stand it,’ she was saying, ‘I might not mind so much, if you weren’t doing yourself such harm.’

Listening to her, I was beyond knowing where her insight was true or false. All she said, her violence and her love, broke upon me like demands which pent me in, which took me to a breaking point of pride and anger. I felt as I had done as a boy when my mother invaded me with love, and at any price I had, the more angry with her because of the behaviour she caused in me, to shut her out.

‘That’s enough,’ I said, hearing my own voice thin but husky in the confining room, as without looking at her I walked to the door.

In the street the afternoon light was still soft, and the mild air blew upon my face.

SOON I went back to her, and when we took Helen out to dinner in January, we believed that we were putting a face on it, that we were behaving exactly as in the days of our first happiness. But, just as subtle bamboozlers like R S Robinson waft about in the illusion that their manoeuvres are impenetrable, whereas in fact they are seen through in one by the simplest of men – so the controlled, when they set out to hide their moods, take in no one but themselves.

Within a few weeks, Helen rang me up at the office saying that she was in London for the day, and anxious to talk to me. My first impulse was to put her off. It was uneasily that I invited her to meet me at a restaurant.

I had named the Connaught, knowing that of all her family she was the only one who liked the atmosphere of the opulent and the smart. When I arrived there, finding her waiting in the hall, I saw she was on edge. She was made up more than usual, and her dress had a rigid air of stylishness. She might like the atmosphere, but she could not help the feeling that she had been brought up to despise it; perhaps the slight edge of apprehension, of unfamiliarity, with which, even after all these years, she was troubled whenever she entered a world which was not plain living and high thinking, was one of its charms for her. She did not, as Betty Vane did, take it for granted; for her it had not lost its savour. But added to this temperamental unease, was uneasiness at what she had to say to me.

Sheltered in a corner in the inner dining-room, she did not speak much. Once, as though apologizing for her shyness, she gave me a smile like her sister’s, at the same time kind and sensuous. She made some remark about the people round us, commented admiringly on a woman’s clothes, then fell into silence, looking down at her hands, fiddling with her wedding-ring.

I asked her about her husband. She replied as directly as usual, looking a little beyond my face as if seeing him there, seeing him with a kind of habitual, ironic affection. I believed that she had known little of physical joy.

Suddenly she raised her eyes, which searched mine as Margaret’s did. She said: ‘You’d like it better if I didn’t speak.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

‘If I thought I could make things worse, I wouldn’t come near either of you – but they’re as bad as they can be, aren’t they?’

‘Are they?’

‘Could things be worse, tell me?’

‘I don’t think it’s as bad as that.’

To Margaret and me, holding to each other with the tenacity that we each possessed, truly it did not seem so bad: but Helen was watching me, knowing that words said could not be taken back, that there are crystallizations out of love, as well as into it. She knew of my deception over Sheila’s suicide: did she think that this was such a crystallization? That as a result Margaret could not regain her trust?

‘You know, Lewis, I mind about you both.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

It was easy, it was a relief, to reply with her own simplicity.

‘When I first saw you together,’ she said, ‘I was so happy about it.’

‘So was I.’ I added: ‘I think she was too.’

‘I know she was.

‘I thought you had been lucky to find each other, both of you,’ she was saying. ‘I thought you had both chosen very wisely.’

She leant towards me.

‘What I’m afraid of,’ she broke out, quietly and clearly, ‘is that you are driving her away.’

I knew it, and did not know it. Margaret was as tenacious as I was; but she was also more self-willed, and far less resigned. In a human relation she was given to action, action came as naturally and was as much a release as in a more public setting it came to Paul Lufkin or Hector Rose. Sometimes I felt that, although her will was all set to save us, she was telling herself that soon she must force the issue. Once or twice I thought I had detected in her what I had heard called ‘the secret planner’, who exists in all of us often unrecognized by ourselves and who, in the prospect of disaster, even more so in the prospect of continuing misery, is working out alternative routes which may give us a chance of self-preservation, a chance of health.

‘There’s still time,’ said Helen, and now she was nerving herself even harder, since there was a silence to break, ‘to stop driving her away.’ She pulled on her left glove and smoothed it up to the elbow, concentrating upon it as if its elegance gave her confidence, made her the kind of woman with a right to say what she chose.

‘I hope there is.’

‘Of course there is,’ she said. ‘Neither of you will ever find the same again, and you mustn’t let it go.’

‘That is true for me. I am not sure it’s true for her.’

‘You must believe it is.’

She was frowning, speaking as though I were obtuse.

‘Look, Lewis,’ she said, ‘I love her, and of course I’m not satisfied about her, because what you are giving each other isn’t enough for her, you know that, don’t you? I love her, but I don’t think I idealize her. She tries to be good, but I don’t think she was given the sort of goodness that’s easy and no trouble. She can’t forget herself enough for that, perhaps she wants too many different things, perhaps she is too passionate.’