Homecomings (20 page)

She was not using the word in a physical sense.

‘And you – you wouldn’t do for everyone, would you, but you can match her all along the line, you’re the one person she needn’t limit herself with, and I believe that’s why it was so wonderful for her. She’d be lucky to have a second chance.

‘I don’t think that she’d even look for one,’ Helen went on. ‘But I wasn’t thinking mainly of her.’

Helen’s tone was for a second impatient and tart, she was in control of herself: and I was taken aback. All along I had assumed that she had forced herself to tax me for Margaret’s sake. ‘I think it’s you who stand to lose,’ she said. ‘You see, she wouldn’t expect so much again, and so long as she found someone to look after, she could make do with that.’

I thought of the men Margaret liked, the doctor Geoffrey Hollis, other friends.

‘Could you make do?’ Helen asked insistently.

‘I doubt it.’

After Helen’s intervention I tried to hearten both Margaret and myself. Sometimes I was hopeful, I could show high spirits in front of her: but my spirits were by nature high, despite my fears. I had lost my judgement: sometimes I remembered how Sheila had lost hers, I remembered the others I had seen at a final loss, the unavailing and the breakdowns: now I knew what it was like.

I tried to bring her back, and she tried with me. When I was with her she made-believe that she was happy, so as to fight the dread of another sadness, the menace of a recurrent situation. I wanted to believe in her gaiety, sometimes I did so: even when I knew she was putting it on for my sake.

One evening I went to her, the taxi jangling in the cold March light. As soon as I saw her, she was smiling, and on the instant the burden fell away. After we had made love, I lay there in the dark, in the quiet, comforted by a pleasure as absolute as any I had known. Drowsily I could shake off the state in which, somewhere deep among my fears, she took the place of Sheila. At first I had seemed to pick her out because she was so unlike; yet of late there had been times in which I saw Sheila in my dreams and knew that it was Margaret. I had even, not dreaming but in cold blood, discovered points of identity between them; I had gone so far as to see resemblances in Margaret’s face.

I was incredulous that I could have thought so, feared so, as I lay there with her warm against my arms.

In the extreme quiet I heard a catch of her breath, and another. At once I shifted my hand and drew it lightly over her cheek: it was wet and slippery with tears.

The last hour was shattered. I looked down at her, but we had no fire that night, the room was so dark that I could scarcely see her face, even for the instant before she turned it further from me.

‘You know how easily I cry,’ she muttered. I tried to soothe her; she tried to soothe me.

‘This is a pity,’ she said in anger: then she cried again.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said mechanically. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

I could not find the loving kindness to know that for her physical delight was a mockery, when there was this distance between us.

I had no self-knowledge left. I felt only uselessness and what seemed like self-contempt. Walking with her in the park later that night, I could not speak.

WHEN she walked with me across the park that night, and on other nights in the weeks that followed, the cold spring air taunted us; often we hoped that all would come well, that we should have confidence in each other again.

Then, one morning in May, I heard of Roy Calvert’s death. He had been my closest friend: though my friendships with George Passant and Charles March and my brother had been strong, this was different in kind. I had come to know him when I was most distracted about Sheila; he had seemed the most fortunate of men, he had given me sympathy more penetrating than anyone else’s, but he too was afflicted, with a melancholy that in the end made his life worthless. I had tried to support him; for a while, perhaps, I was some use, but not for long. Now he was dead, and I could not get away from my sadness. It stayed like smoked glass between me and the faces in the streets.

In the past two years I had seen him little, for he was flying in the Air Force, and, though Margaret and he knew what the other meant to me, they had never met. Yet it was true that each had disliked the sound of the other’s name. Roy was not fond of women of character, much less if they had insight too; if I were to marry again, he would have chosen for me someone altogether more careless, obtuse, and easy-going.

In return she suspected him of being a poseur, a romantic fake without much fibre, whose profundity of experience she mostly discounted and for the rest did not value. In her heart, she thought he encouraged in me much that she struggled with.

At the news of his death she gave no sign, so far as I could see through the smear of grief, of her dislike, and just wanted to take care of me. I could not respond. I was enough of an official machine – as I had been in the weeks after Sheila’s death – to be civil and efficient and make sharp remarks at meetings: as soon as I was out of the office I wanted no one near me, not even her. I recalled Helen’s warning; I wanted to pretend, but I could not.

It did not take her long to see.

‘You want to be alone, don’t you?’ she said. It was no use denying it, though it was that which hurt her most. ‘I’m less than no help to you. You’d better be by yourself.’

I spent evenings in my own room, doing nothing, not reading, limp in my chair. In Margaret’s presence I was often silent, as I had never been with her before. I saw her looking at me, wondering how she could reach me, clutching at any sign that I could give her – and wondering also whether all had gone wrong, and if this was the last escape.

On a close night, near mid-summer, the sky was not quite dark, we walked purposelessly round the Bayswater streets and then crossed over to Hyde Park and found an empty bench. Looking down the hollow towards the Bayswater Road we could see the scurf of newspapers, the white of shirts and dresses in couples lying together, shining out from the grass in the last of the light. The litter of the night, the thundery closeness: we sat without looking at each other: each of us was alone, with that special loneliness, containing both guilt and deprivation, containing also dislike and a kind of sullen hate, which comes to those who have known extreme intimacy, and who are seeing it drift away. In that loneliness we held each other’s hand, as though we could not bear the last token of separation.

She said quietly, in a tone of casual gossip, ‘How is your friend Lufkin?’

We knew each other’s memories so well. She was asking me to recall that once, months before, when we were untroubled, we had met him by chance, not here, but on the path nearer the Albert Gate.

‘I haven’t seen him.’

‘Does he still feel misunderstood?’

Again she was making me recall. She had taught me so much, I told her once. She had said: ‘So have you taught me.’ Most of the men I talked to her about had never come near her father’s world: she had not realized before what they were like.

‘I’m sure he does.’

‘
Snakes-in-the-grass
.’ It was one of Lufkin’s favourite exclamations, confronted with yet another example, perpetually astonishing to him, of others’ duplicity, self-seeking, and ambition. Margaret could not believe that men so able could live cut off from their own experience. It had delighted her, and, searching that night for something for us to remember, she refound the phrase and laughed out loud.

For a while we talked, glad to be talking, of some of the characters I had amused her with. It was a strange use for those figures, so grand in their offices, so firm in their personae, I thought later, to be smiled over by the two of us, clutching on to the strand of a love-affair, late at night out in the park.

We could not spin it out, we fell back into silence. I had no idea of how the time was passing, now that the night had come down. I could feel her fingers in mine, and at last she called my name, but mechanically, as though she were intending an endearment but was remote. She said: ‘A lot has happened to you.’

She did not mean my public life, she meant the deaths of Sheila and Roy Calvert.

‘I suppose so.’

‘It was bound to affect you, I know that.’

‘I wish,’ I said, ‘that I had met you before any of it happened.’

Suddenly she was angry.

‘No, I won’t listen. We met when we did, and this is the only time together we shall ever have.’

‘I might have been more–’

‘No. You’re always trying to slip out of the present moment, and I won’t take it any more.’

I answered sullenly. The present moment, the existent moment – as we sat there, in the sultry darkness, we could neither deal with it nor let it be. We could not show each other the kindness we should have shown strangers: far less could we allow those words to come out which, with the knowledge and touch of intimacy, we were certain could give the other a night’s peace. If she could have said to me, it doesn’t matter, leave it, some day you’ll be better and we’ll start again – If I could have said to her, I will try to give you all you want, marry me and somehow we shall come through – But we could not speak so, it was as though our throats were sewn up.

We stayed, our hands touching, not tired so much as stupefied while the time passed: time not racing hallucinatorily by, as when one is drunk, but just pressing on us with something like the headaching pressure of the thundery air in which we sat. Sometimes we talked, almost with interest, almost as though we were going out for the first time, for the first meal together, about a play that ought to be seen or a book she had just read. After another bout of silence, she said in a different tone: ‘Before we started, I asked what you wanted from me.’

I said yes.

‘You said, you didn’t want anything one-sided, you didn’t want the past all over again.’

I replied: ‘Yes, I said that.’

‘I believed you,’ she said.

Over Park Lane the sky was not so densely black, there was a leaden light just visible over the roofs. The sight struck more chilly than the dark had been. The midsummer night was nearly over. She asked: ‘It looks as though we have come to a dead end?’

Even then, we wanted to hear in each other the sound of hope.

WITHOUT seeing Margaret again I went off travelling on duty, and it was a fortnight before I returned to London. The day I got back, I found a note on my desk. Margaret had telephoned, would I meet her that evening in the foyer of the Café Royal? At once I was startled. We had never gone there before, it was a place without associations.

Waiting, a quarter of an hour before the time she fixed, I stared at the swinging door and through the glass at the glare outside. The flash of buses, the dazzle of cars’ bonnets, the waft of the door as someone entered but not she – I was at the stretch of waiting. When at last the door swung past and showed her, minutes early, I saw her face flushed and set; but her step, as she came across the floor, was quick, light, and full of energy.

As she greeted me her eyes were intent on mine; they had no light in them, and the orbits had gone deeper and more hollow.

‘Why here?’ I broke out.

‘You must know. I hope you know.’

She sat down: I had a drink ready, but she did not touch it.

‘I hope you know,’ she said.

‘Tell me then.’

She was speaking, so was I, quite unlike the choked hours in the park: we were speaking at our closest.

‘I am going to get married.’

‘Who to?’

‘Geoffrey.’

‘I knew it.’

Her face at the table came at me in the brilliant precision of a high temperature, sharp edged, so vivid that sight itself was deafening.

‘It is settled, you know,’ she said. ‘Neither of us could bear it if it wasn’t, could we?’

She was speaking still with complete understanding, as though her concern for me was at its most piercing, and mine for her; she was speaking also as one buoyed up by action, who had cut her way out of a conflict and by the fact of acting was released.

I asked: ‘Why didn’t you write and tell me?’

‘Don’t you know it would have been easier to write?’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I couldn’t let you get news like that over your breakfast and by yourself.’

I looked at her. Somehow, as at a long distance the words made me listen to what I was losing – it was like her, maternal, irrationally practical, principled, a little vain. I looked at her not yet in loss, so much as in recognition.

She said: ‘You know you’ve done everything for me, don’t you?’

I shook my head.

‘You’ve given me confidence I should never have had,’ she went on. ‘You’ve taken so many of the fears away.’

Knowing me, she knew what might soften the parting for me.

Suddenly she said: ‘I wish, I wish that you could say the same.’

She had set herself to be handsome and protective to the end, but, she could not sustain it. Her tears had sprung out. With a quick, impatient, resolved gesture, she was on her feet.

‘I hope all goes well with you.’

The words, doubtful and angry in their tone, heavy with her concern, were muffled in my ears. They were muffled, like a sad forecast, as I watched her leave me and walk to the door with a firm step. Not looking back, she pushed the door round, so hard that, after I had lost sight of her, the empty segments sucked round before my eyes, sweeping time away, leaving me with nothing there to see.

Condition of a Spectator

AFTER Margaret gave me up, I used to go home alone when I left the office on a summer evening. But I had plenty of visitors to my new flat, people I cared for just enough to be interested to see, friendly acquaintances, one or two protégés. For me they were casual evenings, making no more calls on me than a night’s reading.