Homecomings (40 page)

He added: ‘I ought to have helped her, but I never could. I believe now I did her more harm than good.’

He asked: ‘What could I have done?’

Just then Mrs Knight came bustling out of the sitting-room, scolding him because he was tiring himself, indicating to me that it was time I left him to rest.

In an instant the veil of self-concern came over Mr Knight.

‘Perhaps I have talked too much,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I have.’

On my way home across the edge of the park I was moved because I had seen Mr Knight, the most hypochondriacal and selfish of men, bare a sorrow. How genuine was it? In the past his behaviour had baffled me often, and it had that afternoon. Yet I thought his sorrow lived with him enough so that he had to summon me to listen to it. I found myself sorry for him. It was the heaviest feeling I took away with me, although, when his invitation came and I knew that I should be reminded of Sheila, I had not been certain how much it would disturb me.

It seemed that I might feel the same pain as that which seized me the night I caught sight of R S Robinson at the party. But in fact I had felt it not at all, or very little.

Talking to her father, I had thought of Sheila with pity and love: but the aura which had surrounded her in my imagination, which had survived her death and lasted into the first years with Margaret, had gone altogether now. Once her flesh had seemed unlike any other’s, as though it had the magic of someone different in kind. Now I thought of her physically with pity and love, as though her body was alive but had aged as ours had aged, as though I wished she were comfortable but found that even my curiosity about her had quite gone.

When I arrived, Margaret was in the nursery playing with the children. I did not talk to her about the Knights at once, although she detected at a glance that I was content. We did not speak intimately in front of Maurice because anxiously, almost obsessively, she planned to keep him from jealousy. Her nerves were often on the stretch for him; she not only loved him, but could not shut out warning thoughts about him.

That afternoon, we both paid him attention before I spoke to Charles. Maurice was sitting at a little table with a set of bricks and steel rods. He was now five and had lost none of the beauty he showed when I first saw him. By what seemed an irony, he had shown no perceptible jealousy of his half-brother. His temper, which had been violent in infancy, had grown neither better nor worse. Whenever he was placid a load lifted from Margaret’s brow; that afternoon, he was building with a mechanic’s interest, and in peace. We turned to Charles, lifted him from his pen, and let him run between us.

Looking at him, I was suffused with pleasure, pleasure unqualified. In the days when Margaret and I first lay together watching the firelight on the ceiling, I thought that I had not known before the sweetness of life, and that here it was. Here it was also, as I looked at the little boy. He had learned to walk, but although he was laughing, he would not move until we were both in place; he beamed, he was jolly, but he was also sharp-eyed and cautious. Rotating an arm, head back, he ran, trusting us at last.

He had none of Maurice’s beauty. His face was shield-shaped, plain and bright: he had eyes of the hard strong blue common in my family. A few minutes later, when Maurice had gone into another room, Margaret touched my arm and pointed – the child’s eyes were concentrated and had gone darker, he was staring out of the window where the moon had come up among a lattice of winter trees. He kept reiterating a sound which meant ‘light’, he was concentrated to the depth of his fibres.

It was then, in happiness, that I reported to Margaret how Mr Knight had pointed out the extent to which I had failed to live up to my promise, and the number of disappointments I had known.

‘He doesn’t know much about you now,’ she cried.

‘He knows something,’ I said.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said there was a good deal in it.’

She read my expression and smiled, happy herself.

I added: ‘I didn’t tell him what I might have done – that I think I could accept most miseries now, except–’ I was watching the child – ‘except anything going wrong with him.’

She began to speak and stopped. Her face was swept clean of happiness: she was regarding me protectively, but also with something that looked like fright.

WHEN I was alone, I thought sometimes of the warning Margaret had not spoken. But neither of us so much as hinted at it, until a night over a year later, a night still unshadowed, when we had Gilbert and Betty Cooke to dinner.

To my surprise – I had expected the worst, and got it wrong – that marriage was lasting. They often came to see us since – also to my surprise – Betty and Margaret had become reconciled. Thus, by the most unexpected of back doors, Gilbert’s inquisitiveness at last found our house wide open. That inquisitiveness, however, had lost its edge. We had looked for every reason for his wanting to marry Betty except the simple one; but he was devoted to his wife, and humbly, energetically, gratefully, he was engrossed in making the marriage comfortable for her.

On the surface, it was a curious relation. They quarrelled and snacked. They had decided not to have children and spent much thought, disagreeing with each other, on food and drink and how to decorate their flat. With an income much less than ours, they had achieved twice the standard of luxury, and they went on adding to it, simultaneously attending to and criticizing each other. It was easy to imagine them at sixty, when Gilbert retired, knowing just the hotels to squeeze the last pound’s worth out of his pension, badgering restaurant proprietors all over Europe, like the Knights without the hypochondria, a little cantankerous, a little scatty except about their comforts, carping at each other but, to any remark by any intruder, presenting a united front. It might have seemed a comedown, compared with Betty in her twenties, so kind and slap-dash, so malleable, anxious for a husband to give purpose to her existence: or compared with Gilbert at the same age who, enormities and all, was also a gallant and generous young man.

But they had done better than anyone saw. They were each of them unvain, almost morbidly so: the prickles and self-assertiveness which made them snack did not stop them depending on each other and coming close. They were already showing that special kind of mutual dependence occasionally seen in childless marriages, where neither the partners nor relations ever seem to quite grow up, but where, in compensation, they preserve for each other the interest, the absorption, the self-centredness, the cantankerous sweetness of young love.

Looking at them at our dinner table I saw Gilbert, in his middle forties, getting fatter and redder in the face; Betty, well over forty, her eyes still fine, but her nose dominating, more veins breaking through the skin, the flesh thickening on her shoulders. And yet Margaret, in years and looks so much the younger, was older in all else – so that, watching them, one had to keep two time-scales in one’s head, one non-physiological: and on the latter, Betty, with her gestures as unsubdued as when she was young, allied with Gilbert in a conspiracy to secure life’s minor treats, was standing delectably still.

That night they had come a little late, so as to avoid seeing the children; increasingly, like two self-indulgent bachelors, they were cutting out exercises which they found boring. But for politeness’ sake Betty asked questions about the boys, in particular about mine: and Gilbert did his bit by examining and hectoring us about our plans for their education.

‘There’s nothing to hesitate about,’ he said, bullying and good-natured. ‘There’s only one school you need think about,’ he went on, referring to his own. ‘You can afford it, I can’t conceive what you’re hesitating for.

‘That is,’ he said, his detective passion suddenly spurting out, gazing at Margaret with hot eyes, ‘if you’re not going to have a big family–’

‘No, I can’t have any more,’ Margaret told him directly.

‘Well, that’s all right then,’ cried Gilbert.

‘No, it hangs over us a bit,’ she said.

‘Come on, two’s enough for you,’ he jollied her along.

‘Only one is Lewis’,’ she replied, far less tight-lipped, though still far shyer, than I was. ‘It would be safer if he had more than one.’

‘Anyway, what about this school?’ said Betty briskly, a little uneasily, as though shearing away from trouble she did not wish to understand.

‘It’s perfectly obvious they can well afford it, there’s only one school for them.’ Gilbert was talking across the table to her, and across the table she replied.

‘You’re overdoing it,’ she said.

‘What am I overdoing?’

‘You think it’s all too wonderful. That’s the whole trouble, none of you ever recover from the place.’

‘I still insist,’ Gilbert was drawing a curious triumph out of challenging her, he looked plethoric and defiant, ‘that it’s the best education in the country.’

‘Who’s to say so?’ she said.

‘Everyone says so,’ he replied. ‘The world says so. And over these things the world is usually right,’ added Gilbert, that former rebel.

They went on arguing. Betty had reserved her scepticism more than he had; she recalled days when, among aristocrats of her own kind, intellectuals like the Davidsons, it was common form to dislike the class subtleties of English education; she had known friends of ours who had assumed that, when they had families, they would break away from it. She said to Gilbert: ‘You’re just telling them to play the same game with their children as everyone round them.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

Betty said: ‘If anyone can afford not to play the same game, Lewis and Margaret can.’

Duty done, with relief they grumbled about their last weekend. But I was absent-minded, as I had been since Margaret spoke about the child. The talk went on, a dinner-party amiable, friendly, without strain, except that which gripped me.

‘It would be safer–’ She had meant something more difficult, I knew clearly, than that it would be a life-long risk, having an only son. That was obvious and harsh enough.

But it was not that alone of which Margaret was afraid. No, she was afraid of something which was not really a secret between us but which, for a curious reason, she would not tell me.

The reason was that she distrusted her motive. She knew that she expected perfection more than I did. She had sacrificed more than I had; it was she who had, in breaking her marriage, taken more responsibility and guilt; she watched herself lest in return she expected too much.

But in fact, though she distrusted herself, her fear was not that I should be compelled to lose myself in my son, but that, in a final sense, I should desire to. She knew me very well. She had recognized, before I did, how much suffering a nature can bring upon itself just to keep in the last resort untouched. She had seen that the deepest experiences of my early life, unrequited love, the care I spent on an afflicted friend, my satisfaction in being a spectator, had this much in common, that whatever pain I went through I need answer to myself alone.

If it had not been for Margaret, I might not have understood. It had taken a disproportionate effort – because under the furrows of such a nature as mine there is hidden an inadmissible self-love – to think that it was not good enough. Without her I should not have managed it. But the grooves were cut deep: how easy it would be, how it would fit part of my nature like a skin, to find my own level again in the final one-sided devotion, the devotion to my son.

When Betty and Gilbert, each half-drunk and voluble, had at last left us, at the moment when, after drawing back the curtains, I should have started gossiping about them, the habit of marriage as soothing as the breath of the night air, I said instead: ‘Yes, it is a pity that we’ve only the one.’

‘You ought to have been a bit of a patriarch, oughtn’t you?’ she said. She was giving me the chance to pass it off, but I said: ‘It needn’t matter to him, though, need it?’

‘He’ll be all right.’

‘I think I’ve learned enough not to get in his way.’

I added: ‘And if I haven’t learned by now, I never shall.’

She smiled, as though we were exchanging ironies: but she understood, the mistakes of the past were before us, she wished she could relieve me of them. And then I seemed to change the subject, for I said: ‘Those two’ – I waved the way Betty and Gilbert had gone ‘– they’ll make a go of it now, of course.’

On the instant, she knew what I was doing, getting ready to talk, through the code of a discussion of another marriage, about our own.

It was stuffy in the room, and we went down into the street, our arms round each other, refreshed: the night was close, cars were probing along the pavement, we struck in towards one of the Bayswater squares and then walked round, near to each other as we spoke of Betty and Gilbert.

Yes, she repeated, it was a triumph in its way. She thought that what had drawn them together was not desire, though they had enough to get some fun, was nothing more exalted than their dread of being lonely. Betty was far too honourable to like Gilbert’s manoeuvres, but they were lonely and humble spirited, they would fly at each other, but in the long run they would confide and she would want him there. If they had had children, or Betty had had a child by her first marriage, they might not have been so glued together, I said: I was trying to tell the truth, not to make things either too easy for myself or too hard: they were going to need each other more, at the price of being more selfish towards everyone else.

In the square, which had once been grand and had now become tenement flats, the last lights were going out. There was no breeze at all: we were holding hands, and talking of those two, we met each other, and spoke of our self-distrust.

AS we walked round the square that night, both children were well. A fortnight later we took them to visit their grandfather, and the only illness on our minds was his. In the past winter Davidson had had a coronary thrombosis: and, although he survived, it was saddening to be with him now. Not that he was not stoical: he was clear-sighted about what he could expect for the rest of his life: the trouble was, he did not like what his clear sight told him, his spirits had gone dark and he would have thought it unreasonable if they had not.