Homecomings (4 page)

‘Good morning, Lewis,’ said Mr Knight very faintly.

‘No talking till we get him in,’ Mrs Knight announced.

‘I’m sorry to lay my bones among you,’ whispered Mr Knight.

‘Don’t strain yourself talking, dear,’ said Mrs Knight.

At last the progress ended in an armchair in the drawing-room, where Mr Knight closed his eyes. It was a warm morning, and through a half-open window blew a zephyr breath.

‘Is that too much for you, dear?’ said Mrs Knight, looking accusingly at me.

‘Perhaps a little,’ came a whisper from the armchair. ‘Perhaps a little.’

At once Mrs Knight rammed the window up. She acted as though she had one thought alone, which was to keep her husband alive.

‘How are you?’ I asked, standing by the chair.

‘As you see,’ came the answer, almost inaudible.

‘What do the doctors say?’

‘They know very little, Lewis, they know very little.’

‘So long as we can keep him free from strain,’ said Mrs Knight implacably.

‘I sleep night and day,’ breathed Mr Knight. ‘
Night and day
.’

Once more he composed his clever, drooping, petulant face. Then he whispered, ‘Sheila! Sheila, I haven’t seen my daughter!’ As she came near, he turned his head, as though by a herculean effort, through a few degrees, in order to present her his cheek to be kissed. Sheila stood over him, strained, white-faced. For an instant it looked to me as though she could not force herself. Then she bent down, gave him a token kiss, and retreated out of our circle into the window seat.

To her mother, it seemed unnatural; but in fact Sheila believed he was making a fool of himself, and hated it. Valetudinarian: self-dramatizing: he had been so since her childhood, though not on such a grandiose scale as now, and she did not credit that there was anything wrong with him. In her heart she wanted to respect him, she thought he had wasted his ability because he was so proud and vain. All he had done was marry money: for it was not the pug-faced, coarse-fibred Mrs Knight who had climbed through marriage, but her husband, the self-indulgent and hyper-acute. Sheila could not throw off the last shreds of her respect for him, and at the sight of his performances her insight, her realism, even her humour failed her.

When we were sitting round the dining-room table, she could not make much pretence of conversation. I was on edge because of her, and Mr Knight, with eyes astute and sly, was surreptitiously inspecting us both. He had time to do so, for Mrs Knight would not let him eat more than a slice of cold ham. It was an effort for him to obey, for he was greedy about his food. But there was something genuine in his hypochondria: he would give up even food, if it lessened his fear of death. Disconsolately, he ate his scrap of ham, his eyes under their heavy lids lurking towards his daughter or me, whenever he thought he was unobserved.

Of the four of us, the only person who came carefree from the meal was Mrs Knight. We rested in the drawing-room, looking down the garden towards the river, and Mrs Knight was satisfied. She was displeased with her daughter’s mood, not upset by it, and she was used to being displeased and could ignore it. For the rest she was happy because her husband had revived. She had put away a good meal; she was satisfied at least with her daughter’s kitchen and the bright smart house. In fact, she was jollying me by being prepared to concede that Sheila might have made a worse marriage.

‘I always knew you’d have a success,’ said Mrs Knight. Her memory could not have been more fallacious. When as a poor young man I was first taken by Sheila to the vicarage, Mrs Knight had thought me undesirable in the highest degree, but in our comfortable dining-room she was certain that she was speaking the truth.

Complacently, Mrs Knight called over the names of other men Sheila might have married, none of whom, in her mother’s view, had gone as far as I had. For an instant I looked at Sheila, who recognized my glance but did not smile. Then came Mr Knight’s modulated voice: ‘Is he, is our friend Lewis, content with how far he’s gone?’

‘I should think so,’ said Mrs Knight sturdily.

‘Is he? I never have been, but of course I’ve done nothing that the world can see. I know our friend Lewis has been out there in the arena, but I should like to be certain that he is content?’

What was he getting at? No one had a sharper appraisal of worldly success than Mr Knight.

‘Of course I’m not,’ I said.

‘I rather fancied you might feel that.’ Circuitous, not looking at me, he went on: ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, I am a child in these matters, but I vaguely imagined that between the two activities you’ve chosen, you don’t expect the highest position in either? I suppose there couldn’t be anything in that impression?’

‘It is absolutely true,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ Mr Knight reflected, ‘if one were of that unfortunate temperament, which some of us are spared, that doesn’t feel on terms with life unless it collects the highest prizes, your present course would mean a certain deprivation.’

‘Yes, it would,’ I said.

He was talking at me, painfully near the bone. He knew it: so did Sheila, so did I. But not so Mrs Knight.

‘Most men would be glad to change with Lewis, I know that,’ she said. She called out to Sheila, who was sitting on a pouf in the shadow: ‘Isn’t that true, Sheila?’

‘You’ve just said it.’

‘It’s your fault if it’s not true, you know.’

Mrs Knight gave a loud laugh. But she could see Sheila’s face, pale with the mechanical smile, fixed in the shadow; and Mrs Knight was irritated that she should not look more hearty. Healthy and happy herself, Mrs Knight could see no reason why everyone round her should not be the same.

‘It’s time you two counted your blessings,’ she said.

Mr Knight, uneasy, was rousing himself, but she continued: ‘I’m speaking to you, Sheila. You’re luckier than most women, and I hope you realize it.’

Sheila did not move.

‘You’ve got a husband who’s well thought of,’ said Mrs Knight, undeterred, ‘you’ve got a fine house because your parents were able to make a contribution, you’ve got enough money for anything in reason. What I can’t understand is–’

Mr Knight tried to divert her, but for once she was not attending to him.

‘What I can’t understand is,’ said Mrs Knight, ‘why you don’t set to work and have a child.’

As I listened, the words first of all meant nothing, just badinage, uncomprehending, said in good nature. Then they went in. They were hard enough for me to take; but my wound was nothing to Sheila’s wound. I gazed at her, appalled, searching for an excuse to take her out and be with her alone.

Her father was gazing at her too, glossing it over, beginning some preamble.

To our astonishment Sheila began to laugh. Not hysterically, but matily, almost coarsely. That classical piece of tactlessness had, for the moment, pleased her. Just for an instant, she could feel ordinary among the ordinary. To be thought a woman who, because she wished to be free to travel or because she did not like to count the pounds, had refused to have a child – that made her feel at one with her mother, as hearty, as matter-of-fact.

Meanwhile Mrs Knight had noticed nothing out of the common, and went on about the dangers of leaving it too late. Sheila’s laugh had dried; and yet she seemed ready to talk back to her mother, and to agree to go out with her for an afternoon’s shopping.

As they walked down the path in the sunshine, Sheila’s stride flowing beneath a light green dress, our eyes followed them, and then, in the warm room, all windows still closed to guard Mr Knight’s health, he turned his glance slowly upon me.

‘There they go,’ he said. His eyes were self-indulgent, shrewd, and sad: when I offered him a cigarette, he closed them in reproof.

‘I dare not. I dare not.’

As though in slow motion, his lids raised themselves, and, not looking at me, he scrutinized the garden outside the window. His interest seemed irrelevant, so did his first remark, and yet I was waiting, as in so many of his circumlocutions, for the thrust to come. He began: ‘I suppose that, if this international situation develops as, between ourselves, I believe it must, we shall all have too much on our minds… Even those of us who are compelled to be spectators. It is a curious fate, my dear Lewis, for one to sit by in one’s retreat and watch happen a good deal that one has, without any special prescience, miserably foretold.’

He continued, weaving his thoughts in and out, staying off the point but nevertheless leaving me in apprehension of the point to come. In his fashion, he was speaking with a kind of intimacy, an intimacy expressed in code. As he described his labyrinthine patterns he inserted some good sense about the world politics of that year, and what we had to look forward to; he always had a streak of cool detachment, startling in a selfish, timid man. With no emphasis he said: ‘I suppose that, if things come to the worst, and it’s a morbid consolation for a backwoodsman like myself to find that someone like you, right in the middle of things, agree that it is only the worst they can come to – I suppose that to some it may take their minds, though it seems a frivolous way of putting delicate matters, it may take their minds off their own distress.’

This was the beginning.

‘It may,’ I said.

‘Will that be so with her?’ he asked, still with no emphasis.

‘I do not know.’

‘Nor do I.’ He started off circuitously again. ‘Which ever of us can claim to know a single thought of another human being? Which ever of us can claim that? Even a man like you, Lewis, who has, if I may say so, more than his share of the gift of understanding. And perhaps one might assume that one was not, in comparison with those one meets, utterly deficient oneself. And yet one would not dare to think, and I believe you wouldn’t, that one could share another’s unhappiness, even if one happened to see it under one’s eyes.’

His glance, sly and sad, was on me, and once more he shied off.

‘Perhaps one feels it most,’ he said, ‘when one has the responsibility for a child. One has the illusion that one could know’ – just for a moment the modulated voice hesitated – ‘him or her as one does oneself. Flesh of one’s flesh, bone of one’s bone. Then one is faced by another human being, and what is wrong one can never know, and it is more grievous because sometimes there is the resemblance to one’s own nerves. If ever you are granted a child, Lewis, and you have any cause for anxiety, and you should have to watch a suffering for which you feel responsible, then I think you will grant the accuracy of what I have tried, of course, inadequately, to explain.’

‘I think I can imagine it.’

As he heard my sarcasm, his eyelids dropped. Quietly he said: ‘Tell me, what is her life like?’

‘It hasn’t changed much,’ I said.

He considered. ‘How does she spend her time in this house?’

I said that she had recently found another occupation, she was trying to help a man who had fallen on bad days.

‘She was always good with the unfortunate.’

His mouth had taken on a pursed, almost petulant smile: was he being detached enough to reflect how different she was from himself, with his passionate interest in success, his zest in finding out, each time he met one, exactly what price, on the stock exchange of reputations, one’s own reputation fetched that day?

He began on another circuit, how it might be a danger to become sentimental about failure: but he cut off short, and, his gaze on the middle distance, said: ‘Of course it is not my responsibility any longer, for that has passed to you, which is better for us all, since I haven’t the strength to bear responsibility any longer, and in fact the strain of talking to you confidentially like this means that I am likely to pay the price in my regrettable health. Of course it is your responsibility now, and I know you take it more willingly than most men would. And of course I know my daughter has never been at her best in the presence of my wife. It has been a grief to me, but for the present we must discount that. But even if today has given me a wrong impression, I must not leave undone those things I ought to have done. Because you see, allowing for everything, including the possibility that I may be totally mistaken, there is something which I should feel culpable if I did not say.’

‘What is it?’ I cried out.

‘You told me a few minutes ago that you thought she was much as usual.’

‘Don’t you?’

He said: ‘I’m afraid, I can only hope I’m wrong and I may well be, but I’m afraid that she has gone a little farther from the rest of us than she ever was before.’

He shut his eyes, and as I started speaking shook his head.

‘I can only leave her with you. That’s all I can say,’ he whispered. ‘This room is just a little stuffy, my dear Lewis. Do you think it would be safe to open a window, just the smallest chink?’

ONE evening, soon after the Knights’ visit, I broke my walk home from Millbank at an embankment pub, and there, sitting between the pin-tables and the looking-glass on the back wall, was a group of my acquaintances. As I went up to them, it seemed that their talk damped down; it seemed also that I caught a glance, acute, uneasy, from the one I knew best, a young woman called Betty Vane. Within moments, though, we were all, not arguing, but joining a chorus of politics, the simple, passionate politics of that year, and it was some time before Betty and I left the pub together.

She was a smallish, sharp-featured woman of thirty, with a prow of a nose and fine open eyes. She was not pretty, but she was so warm and active that her face often took on a glow of charm. She did not expect to be admired by men; her marriage had failed, she was so unsure of herself that it prevented her finding anyone to love her.

I had met her first in circumstances very different, at the country house of the Boscastles, to whom she was related. But that whole family-group was savagely split by the political divide, and she was not on speaking terms with half her relations. She had become friendly with me because we were on the same side; she had gone out to find like-minded persons such as the group in the pub. Sometimes it seemed strange to me to meet her in a society which, to Lord Boscastle, would have seemed as incomprehensible as that of the Trobriand Islanders.