The Light and the Dark (35 page)

“Hullo,” he said, from a far distance.

“I think you should know,” I said. “Joan will be here in an hour or two.”

“Who?”

I repeated my message. It was like waking him from sleep.

At last he spoke, but still darkly, wearily, from a depth no one could reach.

“I don’t want to see her.”

Some time afterwards he repeated: “I don’t want to see her. I saw her in Berlin. It made things worse. I’ve done her enough harm.”

“Roy,” I said, pressingly, “I’m afraid you must.”

His answer came after a long interval.

“I won’t see her. It will be worse for her. It will be worse for both of us. I’m not fit to see anyone.”

“You can’t just turn her away,” I said. “She’s trying to care for you. You must be good to her.”

Another long interval.

“I’m not fit to see anyone.”

“You must,” I said. “You’ve meant too much to her, you know.”

Up to then I had had very little hope. In a moment I should have given up. But then I saw an astonishing thing. With a prodigious strain, as though he were calling frantically on every reserve of body and mind, Roy seemed to bring himself back into the world. He did not want to leave his stupor: there he had escaped, perhaps for hours: but somehow he forced himself. The strain lined him with grief and suffering. He returned to searing miseries, to the appalling melancholy. Yet he was himself normal in speech, quiet, sad, able to smile, very gentle.

“I need to put a face on it,” he said. “Poor dear. I shouldn’t have brought her to this.”

He glanced at me, almost mischievously: “Am I fit to be seen now?”

“I think so.”

“I’ve got to look pretty reasonable when Joan comes. It’s important, Lewis. She mustn’t think I’m ill.” He added, with a smile: “She mustn’t think I’m – mad.”

“It will be all right.”

“If she thinks I’m really off it,” again he smiled, “she will want to look after me. And I might want her to. That mustn’t happen, Lewis. I owe her more than the others. I can’t inflict myself upon her now.”

He went on: “She will try to persuade me. But it would do us both in. I was never free with her. And I should get worse. I don’t know why it is.”

Nor did I. Of all women, she was most his equal. Yet she was the only one with whom he was not spontaneous. Somehow she had invaded him, she had not let him lose himself; by the very strength of her devotion, by her knowledge of him, by her share in his struggle, she had brought him back to the self he craved to throw away.

“Poor dear,” he said. “I shall never find anyone like her. I must make her believe that I’m all right without her. If there’s no other way, I must tell her I’m better without her. That’s why I’ve got to look reasonable, Lewis. I’ve done her enough harm. She must get free of me now. It doesn’t matter what she thinks of me.”

He smiled at me with sad and mischievous irony. Then he spoke in a tone that was matter-of-fact, quiet, and utterly and intolerably unguarded.

“I hate myself,” said Roy. “I’ve brought unhappiness to everyone I’ve known. It would have been better if I’d never lived. I should be wiped out so that everyone could forget me.”

I could not go through the pretence of consoling him, I could not reply until he spoke again. He had spoken so quietly and naturally that a shiver ran down my spine. It was anguish to hear such naked, simple anguish. He said: “You would have been much happier if I’d never lived, old boy. You can’t deny it. This isn’t the time to be hearty, is it?”

“Never mind about happiness,” I said. “It can cut one off from too much. My life would have been different without you. I prefer it as it is.”

For a second, his face lit up.

“You’ve done all you could,” he said. “I needed to tell you that – before it’s too late. You’ve done more than anyone. You’ve done more even than she did. Now I must send her away. There will only be you whom I’ve ever talked to.”

He was sitting back in his chair. The limpness had gone, and his whole body was easy and relaxed. His face was smoothed by the golden evening light.

“You won’t sack me just now, will you?” he said. “Whatever I do? I shall need you yet.”

I went back to my rooms, and from the window seat watched Joan enter the court. The undergraduates were in hall, she was alone on the path, walking with her gawky, sturdy step. She passed out of sight on her way to Roy’s staircase. I sat there gazing down; I had missed dinner myself, I could not face high table that night; the court gleamed in the summer evening. The silence was broken as men came out of hall; they shouted to each other, sat on the edge of the grass; then they went away. Lights came on in some of the dark little rooms, though it was not yet sunset and bright in the court. Beside one light I could see a young man reading: the examinations were not yet finished, and the college was quiet for nine o’clock on a summer night.

I turned my thoughts away from Roy and Joan, and then they tormented me again. Would she see that he was acting? Would she feel the desperate effort of pretence? Did she know that tomorrow he would be half-deranged?

At last I saw her pass under my window again. She was alone. Her face was pallid, heavy and set, and her feet were dragging.

Lady Muriel’s observations on Roy might once have amused me. I should like to have told him that, for the first occasion since we met her, she had noticed something she had not been told; and he would have laughed lovingly at her obtuseness, her clumsiness, the pent-in power of her stumbling, hobbled feelings.

In fact, that afternoon she had made me more alarmed. Roy must be visibly worse than I imagined. Living by his side day after day, I had become acclimatised to much; if one lives in the hourly presence of any kind of suffering, one grows hardened to it in time. I knew that too well, not only from him. It is those who are closest and dearest who see a fatal transformation last of all.

I reassured myself a little. Apart from Arthur Brown, no one in the college seemed to have detected anything unusual in Roy’s state that summer. He dined in hall two or three nights a week, and, except for his views on Germany, passed under their eyes without evoking any special interest. For some reason he stayed preternaturally silent when he dined (I once taxed him with it, and he whispered “lanthanine is the word for me”), but nevertheless it was curious they should observe so little. They were, of course, more used than most men to occasional displays of extreme eccentricity; most of our society, like any other college at this period, were comfortable, respectable, solid middle-aged men, but they had learned to put up with one or two who had grown grotesquely askew. It was part of the secure, confident air.

After Lady Muriel talked to me, I was preparing myself for a disaster. I tried to steady myself by facing it in the cold merciless light of early morning: this will be indescribably worse than what has happened before, this will be sheer disaster. I might have to accept any horror. What I feared and expected most was an outburst about Germany and the war – a speech in public, a letter to the press, a public avowal of his feeling for the Reich. I feared it most for selfish reasons – at that period, such an outburst would be an excruciating ordeal for me.

After he sent Joan away, he was sunk in the abyss of depression. But he did nothing. The day that the Boscastles arrived, he even sustained with Lord Boscastle a level, realistic and sober conversation about the coming war.

The Boscastles had invited us to lunch, and Lady Muriel and Humphrey were there as well.

Through the beginning of the meal Lord Boscastle and Roy did all the talking. They found themselves in a strong and sudden sympathy about the prospect of war. They could see no way out, and they were full of a revulsion almost physical in its violence. Lady Muriel looked startled that men should talk so frankly about the miseries of war: but she knew that her brother had been decorated in the last war, and it would never even have occurred to her that men would not fight bravely if it was their duty.

“It will be frightful,” said Roy. Throughout he had spoken moderately and sensibly; he had said no more than many men were saying; he had remarked quietly that he did not know his own courage – it might be adequate, he could not tell.

“It will be frightful.” Lord Boscastle echoed the phrase. And I saw his eyes leave Roy and turn with clouded, passionate anxiety upon his son. Humphrey Bevill was still good-looking in his frail, girlish way; his skin was pink, smooth and clear; he had his father’s beaky nose, which somehow did not detract from his delicacy. His eyes were bright china blue, like his mother’s. He had led a disreputable life in Cambridge. He had genuine artistic feeling without, so far as I could discover, a trace of talent.

Lord Boscastle stared at his son with anxiety and longing; for Lord Boscastle could not restrain his strong instinctive devotion, and for him war meant nothing more nor less than danger to his beloved son.

I watched Lady Boscastle mount her lorgnette and regard them both, with a faint, charming, contemptuous, coolly affectionate quiver on her lips.

Then Lord Boscastle took refuge in his own peculiar brand of stoicism. He asked Humphrey to show him again the photograph of that year’s Athenaeum. This bore no relation to the Athenaeum where I had tea with the old Master, the London club of successful professional men. The Cambridge Athenaeum was the ultra-fashionable élite of the most fashionable club for the gilded youth; it was limited to twenty, and on the photograph of twenty youthful, and mainly titled, faces Lord Boscastle cast a scornful and dismissive eye.

At any rate, he appeared to feel, there was still time to reject these absurd pretensions to be classed among their betters. Several of them had names much more illustrious than that of Bevill; but it took more than centuries of distinction to escape Lord Boscastle’s jehovianic strictures that afternoon. “Who is this boy, Humphrey? I’m afraid I can’t for the life of me remember his name.” He was told “Lord Arthur–” “Oh, perhaps that accounts for it, should you have thought? They have never really quite managed to recover from their obscurity, should you think they have?” He pointed with elaborate distaste to another youth. “Incorrigibly parvenu, I should have said. With a certain primitive cunning in financial matters. Such as they showed when they fleeced my great-grandfather.”

Lord Boscastle placed the photograph a long way off along the table, as though he might get a less displeasing view.

“Not a very distinguished collection, I’m afraid, Humphrey. I suppose it was quite necessary for you to join them? I know it’s always easier to take the course of least resistance. I confess that I made concessions most of my life, but I think it’s probably a mistake for us to do so, shouldn’t you have thought?”

The Boscastles, Lady Muriel and I were all dining with Roy the following night. I did not see any more of him for the rest of that day, and next morning Bidwell brought me no news. Bidwell was, however, full of the preparations for the dinner. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. It will be a bit like the old times. Mr Calvert is the only gentleman who makes me think back to the old times, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so. It will be a pleasure to wait on you tonight, I don’t mind telling you, sir.”

So far as I could tell, Roy was keeping to his rooms all day. I hesitated about intruding on him; in the end, I went down to Fenner’s for a few hours’escape. It was the Free Foresters’match. Though it was pleasant to chat and sit in the sunshine, there was nothing noteworthy about the play. Two vigorous ex-blues, neither of them batsmen of real class, were clumping the ball hard to extra cover. If one knew the game, one could immerse oneself in points of detail. There could not have been a more peaceful afternoon.

Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“They told me I should find you here, but I didn’t really think I should.” The voice had a dying fall; I looked round and saw the smile on Rosalind’s face, diffident, pathetic, impudent. I apologised to my companion, and walked with Rosalind round the ground.

“I wonder if I could beg a cup of tea?” she said.

I gave her tea in the pavilion; with the hearty appetite that I remembered, she munched several of the cricketers’ buns. She talked about herself and me, not yet of Roy. Her manner was still humorously plaintive, as though she were ill-used, but she had become more insistent and certain of herself. Her determination was not so far below the surface now. She had been successful in her job, and had schemed effectively for a better one. She was making a good many hundreds a year. Her eyes were not round enough, her voice not enough diminuendo, to conceal as effectively as they used that she was a shrewd and able woman. And there was another development, minor but curious. She was still prudish in her speech, still prudish when her eyes gave a shameless hint of lovemaking – but she had become remarkably profane.

She looked round the pavilion, and said: “We can’t very well talk here, can we?”

Which, since several of the Free Foresters’ team were almost touching us, seemed clear. I took her to a couple of seats in the corner of the ground: on the way, Rosalind said: “I know I oughtn’t to have interrupted you, really. But it is a long time since I saw you, Lewis, isn’t it? Did you realise it, I very nearly tracked you down that day at Boscastle?”

“It’s a good job you didn’t,” I said. “Lady Muriel was just about ready to take a stick to you.”

Rosalind swore cheerfully and grinned.

“She’s in Cambridge now, by the way,” I said.

“I knew that.”

“You’d better be careful. If you mean to marry Ralph Udal.”

“Of course I mean to marry him. Why ever do you say such horrid things?” She opened her eyes wide.

“Come off it,” I said, copying Roy’s phrase. It was years since I had been her confidant, but at a stroke we had gone back to the old terms.

“No, I shall marry Ralph, really I shall. Mind you, I’m not really in love with him. I don’t think I shall ever really fall in love again. I’m not sure that I want to. It’s pretty bloody, being too much in love, isn’t it? No, I shall settle down with Ralph all right. You just won’t know me as the vicar’s wife.”