Homecomings (37 page)

‘If you must,’ I agreed at last.

She was relieved, she was abandoned to relief. Soon this would be behind us, she said. Then, as though at random, she cried: ‘Now I want to do something.’

‘What?’

‘I want us to go and tell my father.’

Her cheeks and temples had coloured, her eyes were bright with energy, her shoulders were thrown back. She led me back through the house, her steps echoing excitedly in the empty hall, until we threw open the door of the study where her father, his beautiful head sunk on his chest, was staring with a mathematician’s intensity at the board.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.

He made a cordial but uninterested noise.

‘You’ll have to listen. Or have I got to write you a letter about it?’

Reluctantly he looked up, with intelligent, brilliant, opaque eyes. He said: ‘If you’re going to disturb the game, I hope it isn’t something trivial.’

‘Well. Lewis and I want to get married.’

Davidson looked blank-faced. He seemed to have had no intimation whatsoever of the news: she might have been telling him that she had just seen a brontosaurus.

‘Do you, by God?’ he said.

Then he became convulsed with laughter.

‘Perhaps you were within your rights to disturb the game. No, I can’t say that the news is entirely trivial.’

‘I haven’t told Geoffrey yet,’ she said. ‘I can’t for a little while. I don’t know whether he’ll let me go.’

‘He’ll have to,’ said Davidson.

‘It may be difficult.’

‘I should have thought he was a moderately civilized man,’ he replied. ‘In the long run, one’s got no choice in these things, don’t you know?’

She would have preferred her father not to be quite so casual: but telling him had given her the pleasure of action. It was a joy to let us be seen in another’s eyes.

For once her father’s glance had not dropped; he looked at her with a sharp, critical, appreciative smile, and then at me.

‘I’m quite glad,’ he said.

I said: ‘You ought to be prepared for some unpleasantness. We shall be giving anyone who wants plenty to get hold of.’

‘Anyone who wants,’ he replied indifferently, ‘is welcome to it, I should have thought.’

I supposed he did not know our story, but went on: ‘Even well-wishers are going to find it slightly bizarre.’

‘All human relationships are slightly bizarre unless one is taking part,’ said Davidson. ‘I don’t see why yours is any more so than anyone else’s.’

He went on: ‘I’ve never known a situation where it was worth listening to outsiders.’

He was the last man to talk for effect: he meant it. It was a kind of contempt which was much more truly aristocratic than that of Betty Vane’s relatives: it was the contempt of an intellectual aristocracy, who never doubted their values, least of all in sexual matters: who listened to each other, but not at all to anyone outside. Sometimes – it had often alienated his daughter – his lack of regard for opinion implied that those outside the magic ring might as well belong to another species. But, in times of trouble, it made him inflexible, one to whom the temptations of disloyalty did not exist.

‘As a general rule and nonsense apart,’ he said, ‘when people are in your position the only help of any conceivable good is practical.’

With a surprisingly brisk and executive air, he asked: ‘Are you all right for money?’

It sounded more surprising, for Davidson, who had never got acclimatized to fountain-pens or telegrams, seemed the most un-practical of men. In fact, the concentration he applied to art-history or to home-made games went also into his investments and he had been consistently and abnormally successful with them.

I told him that money was not a problem. Still executive, he said: ‘I’ve known it to be useful to have somewhere to live where people don’t expect to find you. I could arrange to let you have this house for six months.’

Margaret said she might take him at his word. She would want somewhere to live with the child until we could be married.

Davidson was satisfied. He had no more to contribute. Once more he studied his daughter’s face with pleasure, then his eyes dropped to their habitual level. Although he did not openly suggest that we should finish the game, his glance began to stray towards the board.

EACH morning, as I telephoned Margaret, the winter sky heavy over the trees outside, I heard her forcing her voice to hearten me. At last, so near the time when I trusted her to come to me, I was jealous. I could not stand the thought of her life from day to day, I had to switch my imagination off. I could not stand the thought of her keeping his spirits up; I went through those prosaic miseries of the imagination in which one is tormented by the hearth-glow of another’s home, even if it is an unhappy home.

I told myself her part was the harder, but I began to be frightened of the telephone, as though it did nothing but force me to think of her home, of the two of them together.

As we talked, I never inquired about the exact date of his Membership. It was partly that I was trying to keep my side of the bargain, she was to choose her time: but it was also that I did not want to know, either that or anything else about him.

Christmas passed. On a morning just as I was getting ready to ring her up, the telephone bell rang. I heard her voice, though it was distorted and forced.

‘It will be all right.’

‘You’ve told him?’ I cried.

‘Yes, I’ve told him.’

‘Is all well?’

‘All will be well.’ She was crying.

‘When?’

‘Soon.’

‘Very soon?’ I burst out. She said: ‘For a long time he wouldn’t believe it.’

‘When shall I fetch you?’

‘I had to make him believe me.’

‘The sooner I’m with you–’

‘He can’t understand why this has happened to him.’

‘Has he accepted it?’

‘Yes, but he’s bitter.’

She had deceived herself when we talked of him, she was saying. I replied, if that was true, I had deceived myself as much. Then crying, sometimes dragged back to the night just past (for they had talked right through it) she was asking, as she had not done before, for me to reassure her, to tell her what we should give each other.

When would she come to me? Not that day, she said, in a tone that made me feel there was one last way in which she was trying to look after him. Not that day, but the next.

‘At last,’ she said, in a tone neither sad nor young.

That same evening, I was having a drink with George Passant, who had served his final day at the office and was returning to the provincial town by the last train. We met in a public house, for George had not adapted himself to clubs: there he sat by the fire, enjoying himself as comfortably as in our youth. I told him again, as I had done many times, how angry I was with the Department, and how I still uselessly thought of methods by which I might have presented the case better.

‘It was a nuisance,’ said George. ‘But anyway I had three interesting years, I wouldn’t have been without them for the world.’

Somehow he could still draw a line across the past, regard it with an invulnerable optimism as though it had happened to someone else.

‘The more I think of it,’ said George, with a complacent smile, ‘the better it seems. I’ve had three remarkably interesting years and done some work which I know the value of better than anyone else. The value in question is incidentally considerable. In the process I’ve been able to estimate the ability of our hierarchical superiors and there’s no danger that I shall be tempted to get them out of proportion. And also I’ve managed to seize the opportunity for a certain amount of private life. Which all constitutes a pretty fair return for a very minor bit of humiliation.’

When he first heard that he had been rejected, he had broken into a comminatory rage, cursing all who had ever been in authority over him, all officials, all members of the new orthodoxy, all who conspired to keep him in the cold. But very soon he had been exaggeratedly reasonable, pointing out ‘Of course, I couldn’t expect anything different…’ and he would produce some ingenious, highly articulated and quite unrealistic interpretation of why Rose, Jones, and Osbaldiston found it necessary to keep him out.

So now he sat comfortably by the fire, drinking his beer, proving to me that he was not damaged.

‘All I hope is that you invite me up here pretty regularly,’ said George. ‘In future, an occasional visit to London will be essential to my well-being.’

It might have been some new night-spot he had discovered: it might have been the balm, mysterious to all but himself, of meeting successful acquaintances: probably it was both, but I did not attend, for I had meant to tell him my news and this was the opening.

‘Of course,’ I said.

I had listened while Margaret, rejoicing in candour, had broken our secret to her father, Myself, I had not said anything, open or implicit, even to my brother or to a friend as old as George – except when, to my own astonishment, I came out with it to Getliffe. Even with George that night I did not wish to talk: I still wanted to be timid with fate: I found myself speaking with an obliqueness I could not quite control.

‘Next time you come,’ I said, ‘there’s just a faint possibility that I may not be alone.’

‘I’ll give you plenty of notice,’ said George obtusely.

‘I mean, I may have someone in my flat.’

George chuckled.

‘Oh well, she won’t be there forever.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘it’s not quite inconceivable, of course, it’s too early to say–’

George was puzzled. He had not often heard me so incoherent; he had not heard me anything like so incoherent twenty years before, when my friends and I told glorious stories of fornications we had not yet in fact committed. At last I made it clear enough, and he was on his feet towards the bar, saying in a great voice: ‘Well, this is a new start, and I’m damned if we don’t have a celebration!’

Superstitiously I tried to stop him, but he turned on me: ‘Is this a new start or isn’t it?’

‘I hope it is.’

‘Don’t sit on the blasted fence. Of course it is, and I’m not going to be done out of celebrating it.’

George continued in that state of noisy argumentative well-being until, when he had drunk more, he said: ‘There’s a certain beautiful symmetry in the way we stand tonight. You’re just coming out of your old phase of existence – just at the precise moment that I am neatly returning to mine.’

He laughed out loud, not rancorously, not enviously, but with a curious pleasure, pleasure it seemed in the sheer pattern of events. He was a happy man: he always had been, but was growing even happier in middle age, when it seemed to all external eyes that he had totally failed. As he said, he was returning to his old existence, to the provincial town, to the firm of solicitors, where he would continue not as partner but as managing clerk: and there, one would have bet that night, George first to do so, he would stay for the rest of his life. But he breathed in a happiness that begins to visit some in middle age: it was the happiness which comes to those who believe they have lived according to their nature. In George’s own view he had been himself, he had lived as himself, more than anyone round him. He blamed his external calamities to that cause and still thought – partly as a consolation, partly because in the happiness of his senses it seemed true – that he had had the best of the bargain.

With five minutes to go before the last train left, we arrived at St Pancras. I told George, as we walked down the platform in the cold, the red lights smeared out by an eruption of sulphur smoke, that this was the identical train I used to catch, going home from London after eating dinners at the Inn. But George’s capacity to respect the past, never large, was full up for one night. He merely said absently: ‘I expect you did,’ and instead gazed with absorption into a first-class carriage. There a fat, high-coloured, pursy man of about thirty, elegantly dressed, was waving a finger with stern, prissy disapproval at a companion, seedy, cheerful-looking, and twenty years older. As we left them to it George, gazing out under the dome, into the smoky dark, yelled with laughter.

‘It might have been me!’ he shouted. ‘It might have been me! That young chap is like A—’

Whistles were blowing, the train was ready to leave London, and he was thinking of nothing but his internal joke.

‘Like A—’ he cried, looking down at me from the window. ‘Like A— expecting me to sympathize because he’s hard pressed on three thousand a year. And immediately giving me advice on how much I ought to save out of eight hundred.’

THE room was dark as I woke up: at the edge of the curtains lurked the fringes of luminescence which, with a kind of familiar comfort, told me that it was the middle of the night. I felt happy; at the same time I was taking ease and comfort, not only from the familiar fringe of light, but also from a scent in the bedroom which was strange there. Basking, I stretched and sat up, looking down at Margaret asleep. In the dimness I could just make out her face, turned into the pillow, one arm thrown above her head, the other trailing at her side. She was fast asleep, and, when I bent and put my mouth to her shoulder, the warm flesh did not move, her breathing did not so much as catch, went on slow and steady in the relaxed air.

Often in the past months I had woken up, seen the fringe of light round the window curtains, had become conscious of my worries about her and known that it would be a long time before I got off to sleep again. Now I was rested; I had only to turn over – it was odd to look into the darkness with nothing on my mind, to sleep as deeply as she was sleeping.

Just then it was a luxury to stay awake. I got out of bed and went towards the door, which we had left open so that we could hear a sound from the child’s room: he, too, was peacefully asleep. Walking quietly through the dark rooms, I felt there was no resistance between me and the air, just as I had sometimes felt on warm evenings in the streets of towns. Yes, I could think of the problems ahead of us, many of them the same problems over which I had worried through the broken nights: but I thought of them without worry, almost without emotion, as though they were there to be picked up. Perhaps that was a state, it seemed to me later, in which men like Lufkin or Rose lived much of their lives.