Homecomings (26 page)

A few months past, the young woman he had been pursuing with such adolescent ardour had closed their years of argument and gone back home. She had refused to marry him; she had refused to sleep with him; and George, comically frustrated for a man of passion, seemed to an observer to have got nothing out of it. But that was not what he thought. ‘It’s been a magnificent affair!’ he cried, as though his gusto had mysteriously slipped into the wrong groove. As he grew older, he seemed to luxuriate more and more in his own oddity.

Nevertheless when on an autumn night we went into the Tothill Street pub and I confessed the story, he was surprisingly prosaic.

‘It would be absolutely ridiculous for you to take the slightest risk,’ he said.

I had told him my relations with Vera and Norman as accurately as I could. I had also told him of the police investigations, which I could confide to no one else: with George, however uproarious his own life was being, any secret was safe.

As he listened to me, he looked concerned. It occurred to me that he took pride in my public reputation. He did not like to see me rushing into self-injury as he might have done himself: he had always had a streak of unpredictable prudence: that evening, he was speaking as sensibly as Hector Rose.

‘If you could make any effective difference to the old man’s [Lacey’s] chance of getting off then we might have to think again,’ said George, ‘though I warn you I should be prepared to make a case against that too. But that question doesn’t arise, and there is obviously only one reasonable course of action.’

George ordered pints of beer, facing me with his aggressive optimism, as though the sane must triumph.

‘I’m not so sure,’ I said.

‘Then you’re even more incapable of reason than I ever suspected.’

‘They’ll feel deserted,’ I said. ‘Especially the young man. It may do him a certain amount of harm.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said George, ‘I can’t take into account every personal consequence of every action. Particularly as the poor chap’s going to have such harm done him anyway that I can’t believe your demonstrating a little common sense would matter a button in the general catastrophe.’

‘There’s something in that,’ I replied.

‘I’m glad you’re showing signs of recognition.’

‘But I took them both up,’ I said. ‘It’s not so good to amuse myself with them when they’re not asking anything – and then not to stand by them now.’

‘I can’t admit that they’ve got the slightest claim on you.’ George’s voice rose to an angry shout. He pulled down his waistcoat and, his tone still simmering, addressed me with a curious formality.

‘It’s some considerable time since I have spoken to you on these matters. I should like to make it clear that everyone who has had your friendship has had the best of the bargain. I am restricting myself to talking of your friendships, I had better emphasize that. With some of your women, I couldn’t give you such a testimonial. So far as I can make out, you treated Margaret Davidson badly and stupidly. I shouldn’t be surprised if the same weren’t true of Betty Vane and others. I expect you ought to reproach yourself over some of those.’

I was thinking, George was not so inattentive as he seemed.

‘But I don’t admit that anyone alive has any right to reproach you about your friendships. I should like to see anyone contradict me on that point,’ said George, still sounding angry, as though he were making a furious debating speech. But his face was open and heavy with affection. ‘I can work it out, I might remind you that I can work it out as well as anyone in London, exactly what you’ve given to those two. You’ve been available to them whenever they’ve wanted you, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve never protected yourself, have you? You’ve let them come to you when you’ve been tired and ill?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘You’ve let them take precedence over things you enjoy. You’ve kept away from smart parties because of them, I should be surprised very much if you haven’t.’

I smiled to myself. Even now, George kept a glittering image of ‘smart parties’ and of the allure they must have for me. Yet he was exerting his whole force, he was speaking with a thumping sweetness.

‘I know what you’ve given them. A good many of us can tell from personal experience, and don’t forget my experience of you goes back farther than the others. Sometimes I’ve thought that you haven’t the faintest idea of how people appreciate what you’ve done for them. I should like to inform you that you are known to be a preposterously unselfish friend. I have the best of reasons for knowing it.’

George was a human brother. He fought with his brother men, he never wanted to be above the battle. He did not understand the temptation, so insidious, often so satisfying to men like me, of playing God: of giving so much and no more: of being considerate, sometimes kind, but making that considerateness into a curtain with which to shut off the secret self I could not bear to give away. Some of what he said was true: but that was because, in most of the outward shows of temperament, what one loses on the swings one gains on the roundabouts. Because I had been so tempted to make myself into a looker-on, I asked little of those I was with. I was good-natured, sometimes at a cost to myself, though not at a fundamental cost. I had become unusually patient. I was fairly tolerant by temperament, and the curve of my own experience made me more so. Judged by the ordinary human standards, I was interested and reliable. All that, I had gained – it was what George saw, and it was not quite negligible – by non-participation. But what George did not see was that I was being left with a vacuum inside me instead of a brother’s heart.

In the end, I gave the evidence. I tried to accept my responsibility to Vera and Norman as though I felt it. So far as the gossip reached me, I did not lose much; although I did not recognize it for months to come, I gained something.

That winter, sitting alone in my room, I thought often of myself as I had done on the night of Munich; but had learned more of myself now, and disliked it more. I could not help seeing what had gone wrong with me and Margaret and where the profound fault lay. It could have seemed the legacy that Sheila had left me: that was an excuse; the truth was meaner, deeper, and without any gloss at all. It was the truth that showed itself in my escape into looking-on. I knew now how much there was wrong with those who became spectators. Mr Knight was a spectator of the world of affairs, because he was too proud and diffident to match himself against other men: and I could see how his pride-and-diffidence was as petty as vanity, he would not match himself because they might see him fail. Superficially, unlike Mr Knight, I was not vain: but in my heart, in my deepest relations, it was the same with me.

There was another comparison distinctly less congenial. There was someone else who looked on, and felt lifted above ordinary mortals as she did so. Mrs Beauchamp – yes, we had something in common. Yes, Mr Knight and she and I were members of the same family.

Lonely in that first winter of peace, I thought of how joyful Margaret and I had been at first, and how towards the end I had gone to her, the taxi racketing in the steely light, guilt beating on me like rain upon the window. I could understand more of it now. First I had tried to make her into a dream image, a kind of anti-Sheila: then I had transformed her into Sheila come again: I had been afraid to see her as she was, just herself, someone whose spirit was as strong as mine.

Although I did not know it, I was gaining something.

Just as, when Margaret at last admitted defeat about our relation, I had seen in her a secret planner devising (almost unknown to herself) a way out – so now, myself defeated, disliking what I had come to, the secret planner began to work in me.

Often, when a branch of one’s life has withered, it is others who first see the sap rise again. One is unconscious of a new start until it is already made: or sometimes, in the same instant, one knows and does-not-know. Perhaps when, believing myself preoccupied over Vera and Norman, I furled through the telephone directory for Margaret’s address, I was already committing myself to a plan which might reshape my life; perhaps, months earlier, when I stood outside the house of my first marriage and thought I had no hope of any other home, hope was being born.

Perhaps I knew and did-not-know. But, in fact, the first signs of the secret planner which I observed, as though I were watching an intruder and a somewhat tiresome one, were a little absurd. For all of a sudden I became discontented with my flat at Mrs Beauchamp’s. Instead of being able to put up with anything, I could scarcely wait to make a change. Restlessly, quite unlike myself, I called on agents, inspected half a dozen flats in an afternoon, and took one before night. It was on the north side of Hyde Park, just past Albion Gate, and too large for me, with three bedrooms and two sitting-rooms, but I told myself that I liked the view over the seething trees, over the Bayswater Road, along which I used to walk on my way to Margaret.

That night, for the first time, I was in search of Mrs Beauchamp and not she of me. I rapped on her door, rattled the letter-box, called her name, but, although I did not believe that she was out, got no reply. So I left a note and, feeling that her technique was well-proved and that I might pay her a last compliment by copying it, sat with the door open listening for her steps. Even then I did not hear her until the scuffle of her slippers was just outside my door.

‘Mr Eliot, I found your little letter saying that you wanted to speak to me,’ she whispered.

I asked if she had been out, knowing for certain that she could not have been.

‘As a matter of fact, I haven’t, Mr Eliot,’ she said. ‘To tell you the honest truth, I’ve been getting so worried about the catering that I just can’t sleep until daylight, and so I have been allowing myself a little doze before I have to set about my bit of an evening meal.’

Whatever she had been doing, I believed it was not that. Her expression was confident, impenetrable, wide-awake. ‘Catering’ meant getting my morning tea, and her remark was a first move towards stopping it.

‘I’m sorry to drag you down,’ I said.

‘It’s part of my duty,’ she replied.

‘I thought I ought to tell you at once,’ I said, ‘that I shall have to leave you soon.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear you say that, Mr Eliot.’ She gazed at me with a firm glance, disapproving, almost inimical, but also a little pitying.

‘I shall be sorry to go.’

I said it as a civility: oddly, Mrs Beauchamp compelled civility, it was impossible to suggest to her what I thought of her and her house.

‘I shall be sorry to go,’ I repeated. Then I felt a pang of genuine, ridiculous, irrational regret.

‘No one has to live where they don’t want to, Mr Eliot.’

Her expression showed no diminution of confidence. If I felt a pang of sadness, she had never appeared less sad. Others might find any parting a little death, but not Mrs Beauchamp.

‘If you don’t mind me asking, after the little talks we’ve had when you’ve been lonely and I was trying to cheer you up,’ her tone was soft as ever, perhaps a shade less smooth, ‘but if you don’t mind me asking, I was wondering if you intended to get married again?’

‘I haven’t been thinking of it.’

‘Well then, that’s something, and, without pushing in where I’m not welcome, that’s the wisest thing you’ve said tonight or for many a long night, Mr Eliot. And I hope you’ll remember me if any woman ever gets you in her clutches and you can’t see a glimpse of the open door.
Never notice their tears
, Mr Eliot.’

After that exhortation, Mrs Beauchamp said briskly: ‘Perhaps we ought to have a little chat about the catering, Mr Eliot, because you’ll be here another two or three weeks, I suppose.’

Most people, on being given notice, served their time out with a good grace, I was thinking: in fact, they were more obliging in that last fortnight than ever before. But Mrs Beauchamp’s was a tough nature. She had decided that making my morning tea was too much for her; the fact that I was leaving soon did not weaken her. In a good-natured whisper she told me that I should get a nice breakfast, much nicer than she had been able to do for me, over in Dolphin Square. She looked at me with a sly, unctuous smile.

‘Well, Mr Eliot, I’m sure you’ll live at better addresses than this, if I may say so. But, though I suppose I’m not the right person to tell you and it doesn’t come too well from me, I just can’t help putting it to you, that a lot of water will have to flow under the bridges, before you find a place where you’ll be as much at home!’

WHEN I decided to take up again with Gilbert Cooke, I knew what I was doing. Or at least I thought I did. I had left open no other line of communication with Margaret; he would have news of her; I had to hear it. Beyond that, my foresight was cut off.

So I telephoned to his new office late on a May afternoon. Was he free that night? His voice was stiff. No, he was not certain. Yes, he could find time for a quick meal. Soon we were walking together across the park; under the petrol-smell of a London summer there was another, mixed from the grass and the wall-flowers, sharpened by the rain. It brought back walking in London as a student, the smell of the park promising and denying, taunting to a young man still chaste.

Massive beside me, his light feet scuffing the ground, Gilbert was saying little: unless I asked a question, his lips were squashed together under the beaky nose. I had forgotten that he was proud. He was not prepared to be dropped and then welcomed back. I had forgotten also that he was subtle and suspicious.

He did not believe that I suddenly wanted him for his own sake. He guessed that I was after something, perhaps he had an inkling of what it was. He was determined not to let me have it.

Yet he could not resist letting me know that he still had his ear to the ground. As we climbed the Duke of York’s Steps he said, out of the blue: ‘How’s the new flat?’

I said – irked that he could still surprise me – all right.