Homecomings (39 page)

It was part of the same establishment; until that morning I had not been near it again.

‘It must have been about four in the afternoon, but it was earlier in the month, wasn’t it?’ she said, exact in her memory because she was happy.

She added: ‘I liked you. But I don’t believe I thought I should ever be your wife.’

She said, in a tone relaxed and both diffident and proud: ‘At any rate, I’ve done something for you now.’

Soon afterwards she rang and asked the nurse to bring the baby in. When she did so, I stood up and, without finding anything to say, stared at him for what seemed a long time. The nurse – she had a smooth and comely Italianate face – was saying that he was not a whopper, but a fine boy, ‘all complete and perfect as they say’: I scarcely listened, I was looking at the eyes unfocused, rolling and unstable, the hands waving slowly and aimlessly as anemones. I felt utterly alien from this being in her arms: and at the same time I was possessed by the insistence, in which there was nothing like tenderness, which was more savage and angry than tender, that he must live and that nothing bad should happen to him.

As the nurse gave him to Margaret his head inclined to her, and I saw his side-face, suddenly transfigured into a cartoon of an adult’s, determined, apprehensive. Grasping him, Margaret looked at him with an expression that was no longer youthful, that held responsibility and care, as though the spontaneous joy with which she had spoken about him had been swallowed up in pity.

I stood and watched her holding the child. Partly I felt I could not get used to it, it was too much for me, it had been too quick, this was only a scene of which I was a spectator. Partly I felt a tug at the fibres, as though I were being called on in a way I did not understand; as though what had entered into me could not yet translate itself into an emotion, into terms of anything I could recognize and feel.

WHEN, fifteen months after the child’s birth, I received a letter from Mrs Knight saying that her husband had been very ill and wished to see me, I did not think twice before going. They were staying, so she told me in the letter, at Brown’s Hotel – ‘so as to get him to the seaside by easy stages. Of course, he has such a sense of duty, he says he must get back to his parish work. But I trust you not to encourage him in this. He is not to think of returning to the Vicarage until the summer.’

Apparently he was not to think of retiring either, it occurred to me, though by this time he was nearly seventy: they had never needed the stipend, it was negligible beside her income: but that did not prevent Mr Knight from clinging on to it. As for his cure of souls, for years he had found that his ill-health got worse when confronted with most of his daily tasks, except those, such as preaching and giving advice, which he happened to enjoy.

When I first caught sight of him in the hotel that afternoon he looked neither specially old nor ill, although he was lying stretched out on his bed and only whispered a greeting. Mrs Knight plunged straight into the drama of his illness. They were doing themselves well, I noticed: they had taken a suite, and I walked through a sitting-room lavish with flowers on the way to their bedroom. By Mr Knight’s bed stood grapes, books, medicine bottles, and tubes of drugs: by Mrs Knight’s stood magazines, a box of chocolates, a bottle of whisky and a syphon of soda. It had an air of subfusc comfort, of indulgences no longer denied, that I had seen before in elderly couples travelling.

Mrs Knight sat on her bed, describing her husband’s symptoms: in a dressing-gown, his coat and collar off, Mr Knight lay on his, his eyes closed, his clever petulant mouth pulled down; he lay on his back, his legs relaxed, like a figure on a tomb or one in a not disagreeable state of hebephrenia.

According to Mrs Knight’s account, he had for a long time past been starting up in the middle of the night with his heart racing.

‘I take his pulse, of course,’ she said energetically to me. ‘Ninety! A hundred! Sometimes more!

‘I decided,’ she looked at me with her active innocent eyes, ‘that I ought to keep a diary of his health. I thought it would help the doctors.’ She showed me a quarto day-book, two days to the page, and in it some of the entries in her large hand…

‘L woke up as usual: pulse 104. Quietened down to 85 in twenty minutes…’ ‘Better day. I got his heart steady for twenty-four hours…’

It sounded to me like the physical condition of a highly strung and hyperaesthetic man, but it would not have been profitable to tell Mrs Knight so. Apart from ‘good afternoon’, she had said nothing to me since I arrived that did not concern her husband’s health.

‘It was always the same, though,’ she cried. ‘We couldn’t stop it! Him waking up in the middle of the night with his heart pounding away like this–’

Sitting on the bed she moved both her thick, muscular arms up and down, the palms of her hands facing the floor, at the rate of hundreds a minute. For the first time, the silent figure on the other bed joined in: Mr Knight used one arm, not two, and without opening his eyes flapped a hand to indicate the rapid heart-beats, but not so quickly as his wife, not in time.

‘And I couldn’t get him to be examined properly,’ she said. ‘He’s always been frightened of his blood pressure, of course. He wouldn’t let the doctors take it. Once I thought I had persuaded him to, but just as the doctor was putting the bandage round his arm he shouted “Take it away! Take it away!”’

Mr Knight lay absolutely still.

‘Then one night three months ago, it was in September because he was just thinking about his harvest thanksgiving sermon, it was a nice warm night and he’d had a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner, I woke up and I didn’t hear him at all, but I knew he was awake. As a rule, of course, he calls out to me, and I knew – it was just like second sight – I knew there was something wrong because he didn’t call out. Then I heard him say, quite quietly, just as though he were asking me for a glass of water: “Darling, I think I’m going.”’

A sigh came from the other bed.

‘I didn’t say “I think I’m
going
”,’ came a whisper from Mr Knight. ‘I said “Darling, I think I’m
dying
”.’

Still good-tempered, still urgent, Mrs Knight accepted the correction: she told me of the visit of the doctor, of his opinions, encouragements, and warnings, her own activity, Mr Knight’s behaviour. Oddly enough, despite her hero-worship of her husband, her narrative was strictly factual, and pictured him as comporting himself with stoicism perceptably less than average. After his one protest he did not object or open his eyes again, until at last he said, faintly but firmly: ‘Darling, I should like to talk to Lewis just for a little while.’

‘As long as it doesn’t tire you.’

‘I don’t think it need tire me, if we’re careful,’ said Mr Knight – with a concern that equalled hers.

‘Perhaps it won’t be too much for you,’ she said. ‘Anyway I shan’t be far away.’

With injunctions to me, she removed herself to the sitting-room: but she did not go out of sight, she left the door open and watched as though she were a policeman invigilating an interview in gaol. Very painstakingly Mr Knight hitched his head higher upon the pillow; his eyes were no longer shut, he appeared to be staring out of the window, but he gave me an oblique glance that was, just as I remembered it, shrewd, malicious, and sharp with concealed purpose.

‘I don’t receive much news nowadays, naturally, Lewis, but all I hear of you suggests that you’re prospering.’

He began again, just as I remembered, some distance from the point; I was ready for him to weave deviously until his opening came. ‘Should you say that, allowing for the uncertainties of life and not claiming too much, that that was true?’

‘In many ways it is.’

‘I am glad for you, I am glad.’

In part, I thought, he meant it; he had always had an affection for me. Then, probing again, he said: ‘In
many
ways?’

‘In more than I reckoned on.’

‘There is bound to be much that you and I find difficulty in asking each other, for reasons that would distress us both to think of, and yet I should like to think that you perhaps have known what it is to have the gift of a happy marriage?’

I was sure that this was not the point he was winding towards. He asked it quite gently, and in the same tone I said yes, I was coming to know it.

‘It is the only good fortune I’ve been given, but I’ve been given it more completely than most men,’ said Mr Knight. ‘And if you will let me tell you, Lewis, there is nothing to compare with it.’

He was whispering, his wife could not hear: but again, singular as it might have seemed to a spectator, he meant it. He went on: ‘I seem to remember, forgive my meanderings if I am wrong, that I caught sight of the announcement of a birth in
The Times
– or the
Telegraph
, was it? Or perhaps both? – that somehow I connected with your name. Could that possibly be so?’

I said yes.

‘I seem to remember, though again you must forgive any mistakes I make, it was of the male sex?’

I said yes.

‘It seems to come back to me that you announced his names as Charles George Austin. Somehow, not knowing anything of your recent adventures, of course, I connected the name George with that eccentric figure Passant, whom I recalled as being an associate of yours in the days that I first heard about you.’

Yes, I said, we had called him after George Passant.

‘Not bad,’ Mr Knight gave a satisfied smile, ‘for an old man in a country vicarage, long out of touch with all of you and the world.’

But he was still skirmishing, right away from his point of attack. He went on: ‘I hope your boy gives you cause to be proud of him. You may be one of those parents whose children bring them happiness.’

Then he changed direction again. He said, in a light, reflective tone: ‘Sometimes, when I’ve heard mention of an achievement of yours, I go back to those days when you first came into my house, should you say that’s because I’ve had nothing to occupy me? Does it occur to you that it was a quarter of a century ago? And sometimes, with all respect to your achievements and acknowledgement of the position you’ve secured for yourself, I find myself wondering, Lewis, whether all that time ago you did not contemplate even more of the world’s baubles than – well, than have actually accrued to you. Because at that age there was a formidable power within you. Of course I know we all have to compound with our destinies. But still, I sometimes felt there might have been hours when you have looked at yourself and thought, well, it could have gone worse, but nevertheless it hasn’t gone perfectly, there have been some disappointments one didn’t expect.’

I was wondering: was this it? I replied: ‘Yes. At that age I should have expected to cut more of a figure by now.’

‘Of course,’ Mr Knight was reflecting, ‘you’ve carried a heavy private load so much of your life. And I suppose, if you’d been going to take a second wind and really go to the top, you wouldn’t at your present age have readjusted yourself to a wife and child.’

Was this it? Had he got me there simply to remind me that my public career had not been wonderful?

If so, I could bear it, more easily than he imagined. But somehow I thought he was still fencing. It was just that at seventy, believing himself ill, taking such care of his life that he had no pleasure left, he nevertheless could not resist, any more than in the past, tapping the barometer of an acquaintance’s worldly situation. And he was, also as in the past, just as good at it as Rose or Lufkin. He had never been outside his parish, he had been too proud and vain to compete, but at predicting careers he was as accurate as those two masters of the power-ladder.

Curiously, when any of the three of them made mistakes, it was the same type of mistake. They all tended to write men off too quickly: they said, with a knell not disagreeable to themselves, he’s finished, and so far as his climbing the ladder in front of him went, they were nearly always right. But they forgot, or undervalued, how resilient human beings were. Herbert Getliffe would never be a judge: Gilbert Cooke would never be more than an assistant secretary: George Passant would stay as a managing clerk at eight or nine hundred a year until he retired: but each of them had reserves of libido left. They were capable of breaking out in a new place: it was not so certain as the prognosticians thought that we had heard the last of them.

‘Should you say,’ Mr Knight continued to delve, ‘we are likely to hear more of you in high affairs?’

‘Less rather than more,’ I said.

His lids drooped down, his expression had saddened.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘if it hadn’t been for my daughter, you would have got a better start.’

‘It would have made no difference in the end,’ I replied.

‘I can’t help thinking how you must have been held back.’

‘In the long run, I should have done much the same,’ I said.

Just for an instant he turned his head and looked at me with eyes wide open.

‘I think of her and ask myself about her,’ he said. ‘And I’ve wondered if you do also.’

At last. This was the point. Now he had led up to it, it turned out not to be a dig at me.

‘I have done often,’ I said.

‘I know you ask yourself what you did wrong, and how you ought to have helped her.’

I nodded.

‘But you’re not to blame, I can’t put the blame on you. Time after time I’ve gone over things she said to me, and how she looked when she was a girl. She had become strange before ever you met her or she brought you to my house.’

He was speaking more directly than I had heard him speak.

‘I keep asking myself, what I should have done for her. I suppose I pretended to myself that she was not so very strange. But I don’t know to this day what I should have done. As a very little girl she was remote from either of us. When I told her she was pretty, she shrank away from me. I remember her doing that when she was six or seven. I was very proud of her, and I used to enjoy saying she was beautiful. I can see her eyes on me now, praying that I should stop. I don’t know what I should have done. I ought to have found some way to reach her, but I never could.’