Homecomings (29 page)

Davidson did not go in for any flourishes: he just formed his opinion, and announced: ‘You’d never have made a living at it, don’t you know.’

I was in suspense; I agreed.

‘It might just be worth your while to come along,’ he said, staring at the pavement in front of him. ‘But only just.’

Waiting in my flat on the evening of the private view I saw the sky over Hyde Park turn dark, sodden with rain to come. Standing by the window, I kept glancing at my watch, although it was still not time to leave, and then gazed out again over the trees into the leaden murk. Then I looked back into the room. On the little table by the sofa the reading-lamp was gleaming, and a book which I had left open shone under the light.

It was peaceful, it never seemed so peaceful. For an instant I wanted to stay there, and not go out. It would be easy to stay; I need only telephone and make an apology, in that party I should not be missed, the significance I was giving it was my own invention, and besides myself no living person knew. I looked at the lamp and the sofa, with a stab almost of envy.

Then I turned back to the window, reading my watch, impatient that it was still not time to go.

The Undetached

IN the hall of Davidson’s house the brightness, clashing with the noise of the party within, took me aback; it was Davidson himself who came to greet me.

‘You decided it was worth while, did you?’ he asked.

As I was putting my coat down, he said: ‘I met someone who knew you this morning.’ He gave the name of an elderly acquaintance. ‘She was anxious to get in touch with you. I’d better hand this over before I forget.’ It was a card with an address and telephone number.

I asked if it could wait, but Davidson had discharged his commission and was not interested any more.

‘If you
fancy yourself
at the telephone, there’s one under the stairs,’ he said. He spoke in a severe minatory voice, as though telephony were a difficult art, and it was presumptuous on my part to pretend to have mastered it. In fact Davidson, who was so often the spokesman of the modern, whose walls were hung with the newest art, had never come to terms with mechanical civilization. Not only did he go deaf if he put a receiver to his ear: even fountain pens and cigarette lighters were white-man’s magic which he would have no dealings with.

While I was making my call, which turned out to be of no possible importance, I was by myself listening to the continuum of noise from the unknown rooms. I felt a prickle of nervousness not, it seemed, because Margaret might be there, but just as though I had ceased to be a man of forty, experienced at going about amongst strangers: I felt as I might have done when I was very young.

When at last I went in I stayed on the outskirts of the room trying to put myself at ease. I looked away from the picture, from the unknown people, out through the window to a night so dark, although it was only nine o’clock in July, that the terrace was invisible: in the middle distance twinkled the lamps along Regent’s Park. Down below the window lights, the pavement was bone-white, the rain had still not fallen.

Then I walked round the room, or rather the two rooms which, for the show, had had their dividing doors folded. There must have been sixty or seventy people there, but apart from Davidson, alert and unpompous among a knot of young men, I did not see a face I knew. Along one long wall were hung a set of non-representational paintings, in which geometrical forms were set in a Turnerian sheen. Along the other were some thickly painted portraits, not quite naturalistic but nearly so. Trying to clamp myself down to study them, I could not settle to it.

I found myself falling back into the refuge I had used at twenty. I used to save my self-respect by the revenges of my observation, and I did so now. Yes, most of the people in these rooms were different animals from those one saw at Lufkin’s dinners or round the committee tables with Hector Rose: different animals in an exact, technical sense: lighter-boned, thinner, less heavily muscled, their nerves nearer the surface, their voices more pent-in: less exalting in their bodies strength than so many of Lufkin’s colleagues – and yet, I was prepared to bet, in many cases more erotic. That was one of the paradoxes which separated these persons from the men of action; I thought of acquaintances of mine in Lufkin’s entourage who walked with the physical confidence, the unself-conscious swagger, of
condottieri
; but it was not they who were driven, driven to obsession by the erotic life, but men as it might be one or two I saw round me that night, whose cheeks were sunken and limbs shambling, who looked, instead of bold and authoritative like Lufkin’s colleagues, much younger than their years.

Soon someone recognized me, and, opposite one of the non-representational patterns, I was caught up in an argument. In a group of five or six I was the oldest man, and they treated me with respect, one even called me ‘sir’. It was an argument such as we knew by heart in those years, about the future of abstract art. I was talking with the fluency of having been through those tricks before, talking with the middle-aged voice, the practised party voice. They called me ‘sir’, they thought me heterodox, they were not as accustomed to debating or so ready for shock tactics. None of them knew that, five minutes before, I had been nervous and lost.

All the time I was arguing, I was staring over them and past them, just as though I were a young man on the make, looking out at a party for someone more useful than his present company. I had seen no sign of her, but, as the minutes seeped on, I could not keep my glance still.

At last I saw her. She came out of the crowd by the wall opposite ours and farther down the room; she was speaking to a woman, and she spread out her hands in a gesture I had often seen, which suddenly released her animation and gaiety. As she talked my glance was fixed on her: it was many instants before her eyes came my way.

She hesitated in front of a neglected picture and stood there by herself. A young man at my side was speaking insistently, heckling me with polite questions. She was walking towards us. As she came inside our group, the young man halted his speech.

‘Go on,’ said Margaret.

Someone began to introduce me to her.

‘We’ve known each other for years,’ she said, protectively and gently. ‘Go on, I don’t want to interrupt.’

As she stood, her head bent down and receptive, I saw her for an instant as though it were first sight. Excitement, a mixture of impatience and content, had poured into my nerves – but that seemed disconnected from, utterly uncaused by, this face which might have been another stranger’s. Pale, fine rather than pretty, just missing beauty, lips and nostrils clean-cut, not tender until she smiled – it was an interesting face, but not such a face as in imagination I admired most, not even one that, away from her, I endowed her with.

Then the first sight shattered, as I thought she had changed. Five years before, when I had first met her, she could have passed for a girl: but now, at thirty, she looked her full age. Under the light, among the dark hair glinted a line of silver; her skin which, with her blend of negligence and subfusc vanity she used to leave untouched, was made up now, but there were creases round her mouth and eyes. Suddenly I remembered that when I knew her there were some broken veins just behind her cheekbones, odd for so young and fine-skinned a woman; but now under the powder they were hidden.

Standing in the middle of this group she was not embarrassed, as she would have been once. She rested there, not speaking much nor assertively, but a woman among a crowd of younger men: now there was no disguising her energy, her natural force.

The light seemed brighter on the eyes, the pictures farther away, the crowd in the room noisier, voices were high around me, questions came at me, but I had dropped out of the argument. Once, glancing at Margaret, I met her eyes: I had not spoken to her alone. At last the group moved on, and we were left just for an instant isolated, no one listening to us. But now the chance had come, I could not speak: the questions I wanted to ask, after three years of silence, would not come to the tongue, I was like a stutterer needing to bring out his dreaded consonant. We gazed at each other, but I could not utter. The silence tightened between us.

Foolishly I creaked out some remark about the pictures, asking how she liked them, as banal a question as though she was a boring acquaintance with whom I had to make my ration of conversation. In the midst of that nonsense my voice broke away from me, and I heard it sound intense, intimate and harsh.

‘How are you?’

Her tone was kinder, but just as edged: ‘No, how are you?’

Her eyes would not leave mine. Each willed the other to answer first; I gave way.

‘I haven’t much to tell you,’ I said.

‘Tell me what there is.’

‘It could be worse.’

‘You’ve always been ready to bear it, haven’t you?’

‘No, my life isn’t intolerable,’ I said, trying to tell her the precise truth.

‘But what?’

‘There’s not much in it,’ I replied.

‘Yes, I was afraid so.’

‘Were you?’

‘People often talk about you, you know.’

The crowd pressed upon us, they parted me from her, although before we had to talk at large, she was muttering about something she wished for me. She had begun to say it with an impatient, eager smile.

As I was speaking to the newcomers, I noticed a tall youngish man detach himself from another group and whisper to Margaret, who was glancing in my direction.

She looked tired, she seemed to be wanting to go home, but soon she beckoned to me.

‘You haven’t met Geoffrey, have you?’ she said to me. He was a couple of inches taller than my six feet, very thin, long-handed, and long-footed; he was thirty-five, good-looking in a lantern-jawed fashion, with handsome eyes and deep folds in his cheeks. The poise of his head was arrogant, other men would judge him pleased with his looks; but there was nothing arrogant about him as we shook hands, he was as short of conversation as I had been with Margaret a few minutes before, and just as I had opened imbecilely about the pictures, so did he. He had known about me and Margaret long before he married her; now his manner was apologetic, quite unlike his normal, so I fancied, as he asked my opinion of the pictures, in which his interest was, if possible, less than mine.

Margaret said they must be going soon, Helen would be waiting up for them.

‘That’s my sister-in-law,’ Geoffrey explained to me, still over-embarrassed, over-considerate. ‘She’s sitting in with the infant.’

‘She still hasn’t any of her own?’ I asked Margaret. I recalled the times when, joyful ourselves, we had arranged her sister’s well-being, the conspiracies of happiness. Margaret shook her head: ‘No, poor dear, she had no luck.’

Geoffrey caught her eye, and he said, in what I took to be his confident doctor’s voice: ‘It’s a thousand pities she didn’t get some sensible advice right at the beginning.’

‘But yours is well?’ I spoke to both of them, but once more I was asking Margaret.

It was Geoffrey who replied.

‘He’s all right,’ he said. ‘Of course, if you’re not used to very young children, you might get him out of proportion. Actually, for general development, he’d certainly be in the top ten per cent of two-year-olds, but probably not in the top five.’

His tone was exaggeratedly dry and objective, but his eyes were innocent with love. He went on, with the pretence of objectivity which professionals believe conceals their pride: ‘Only yesterday, it’s simply an example, he took a flash lamp to pieces and put it together again. Which I couldn’t have done at the age of four.’

Conscious of Margaret’s silence, I expressed surprise. Geoffrey’s tone changed, and as he spoke to me again I thought I heard something hard, jaunty, almost vindictive: ‘You’d better come and see him for yourself.’

‘No, he wouldn’t enjoy it,’ said Margaret quickly.

‘Why shouldn’t he come for lunch, then he can inspect the boy?’

‘It would be very inconvenient for you.’ Margaret spoke straight to me.

I replied to Geoffrey: ‘I’d like to come.’

Soon afterwards, sharply, Margaret said again that they must be going home. I walked with them out of the room, into the hall, where, through the open door, we could hear the rain pelting down. Geoffrey ran out to bring the car round, and Margaret and I stood side by side staring out into the dark terrace, seeing the rain shafts cut through the beam of light from the doorway. On the pavement the rain hissed and bounced; the night had gone cool; a clean smell came off the trees, making me feel for an instant calm when, knowing nothing else for certain, I knew I was not that.

Neither of us turned towards the other. The car came along the kerb, veils of rain shimmering across the headlights.

‘I shall see you then,’ she said, in a flat, low voice.

‘Yes,’ I said.

AS I sat between Margaret and Geoffrey Hollis at their dining-table, I wanted to speak amiably to him.

Outside the sun was shining, it was a sleepy middle-of-the-day; no one was to be seen in the Summer Place gardens; the only sound, through the open windows, was the soporific sweep of buses along the Fulham Road. I had only arrived a quarter of an hour before, and we spoke, all three of us, as though we were subdued by the heat. Geoffrey was sitting in a shirt open at the neck, and Margaret in a cotton frock; we ate boiled eggs and salad and drank nothing but iced water. In between times Geoffrey and I exchanged polite curiosity about our working days.

In the dining-room, which was like a pool of coolness after the streets, all we said sounded civil. I was hearing what it meant to be a children’s doctor, the surgery hours, the hospital rounds, the proportion of nights he could expect a call. It was useful, it was devoted, it was no more self-indulgent than the meal he ate. Nor was the way he talked about it. He had admitted that in some respects he was lucky. ‘Compared with other doctors anyway,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Any other sort of doctor is dealing with patients who by and large are going to get worse. With children most of them are going to get better. It gives it quite a different flavour, you see, and that’s a compensation.’