Time of Hope (45 page)

They all went as early as they decently could. As soon as the front door closed, Sheila went straight into the spare room, without a word.

I waited a few minutes, and then followed her in. She was not crying: she was tense, still, staring-eyed, lying on the divan by her gramophone. She was just replacing a record. I stood beside her. When she was so tense, it did harm to touch her.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘I tell you, it doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m no good to you. I’m no good to myself. I never shall be.’ She added, ferociously: ‘Why did you bring me into it?’

I began to speak, but she interrupted me: ‘You should have left me alone. It’s all I’m fit for.’

As I had so often done, I set myself to ease her. I had to tell her once again that she was not so strange. It was all that she wanted to hear. At last I persuaded her to go to bed. Then I listened, until she was breathing in her sleep.

She slept better than I did. I dozed off, and woke again, and watched the room lighten as the morning light crept in. Pity, tenderness, morbid annoyance crowded within me, took advantage of my tiredness, as I lay and saw her body under the clothes. The evening would do me harm, and she had not a single thought for that. She turned in her sleep, and my heart stirred.

It was full dawn. By ten o’clock I had to be in court.

One night that autumn I arrived home jaded and beset. I had been thinking all day of the rumours about George Passant. One explanation kept obtruding itself that: George had shared with Jack Cotery in a stupid, dangerous fraud. George – in money dealings the most upright of men. Often it seemed like a bad dream. That night I could not laugh it away.

Sheila brought me a drink. It was not one of her light-hearted days, but I had to talk to her.

‘I’m really anxious,’ I said.

‘What have I done?’

‘Nothing special.’ I could still smile at her. ‘I’m seriously anxious about old George.’

She looked at me, as though her thoughts were remote. I had to go on.

‘I can hardly believe it,’ I said, ‘but he and some of the others do seem to have got themselves into a financial mess. I hope to God it’s not actionable. There are rumours that they’ve gone pretty near the edge.’

‘Silly of them,’ she said.

I was angry with her. My own concerns, the lag in my career, the dwindling of my prospects, those she could be indifferent to, and I was still bound to cherish her. But now at this excuse my temper flared, for the first time except in play since we were married. I cried ‘Will you never have a spark of ordinary feelings? Can’t you forget yourself for a single instant? You are the most self-centred woman that I have ever met.’

She stared at me.

‘You knew that when you married me.’

‘I knew it. And I’ve been reminded of it every day since.’

‘It’s your own fault,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have married someone who didn’t pretend to love you.’

‘Anyone who married you’, I said, ‘would have found the same. Even if you fancied you loved him. You’re so self-centred that you’d be a drag on any man alive.’

She said in a clear, steady voice: ‘I suppose you’re right.’

For several days she was friendly and subdued. She asked me about one of my cases. Then, after sitting silent through a breakfast time, she said, just as I was leaving for Chambers ‘I’m going away. I might come back. I don’t know what I shall do.’

I said little in reply, except that I should always be there. My first emotion was of measureless relief. Walking away from Mecklenburgh Square, I felt free, light-footed, a little sad, above all exhilarated that my energies were my own again.

My sense of relief endured. I wrote an opinion that day with a total concentration such as I had not been capable of for months. I felt a spasm of irritation at the thought of explaining to the maid that Sheila was taking a holiday: I was too busy for that kind of diplomacy. But I was free. I had a long leisurely dinner with a friend that night, and returned late to Mecklenburgh Square. The windows of the flat were dark. I went into each room, and they were empty. I made myself some tea, relaxed and blessed because I need not care.

I did a couple of hours’ good work before I went to bed. It was lonely to see her empty bed, lonely but a relief.

So I went on for several days. I missed her, but I should have said, if Charles March had examined me, that I missed her as I missed the seashore of my illness, with the nostalgia of the prison. I should have said that I was better off without her. But habits are more obstinate than freedoms: the habits of patience, stamina, desire, protective love. I told myself that my cruel words had driven her away. I could not trust my temper even now. I had made the accusations which would hurt her most; they were true, but I had done her enough harm before. I did not like the thought of her wandering alone.

In much that I thought, I was deceiving myself. She was still dear to me, selfishly dear, and that was truer than tenderness or remorse. Yet even so my relief was so strong that I did not act as I should have done only a few months earlier. I worked steadily in Chambers and in the flat at night. I wrote for news of George. I did not walk among the crowds in the imbecile hope of seeing her face. All I did was telephone her father: they had had no word. Mr Knight’s sonorous voice came down the wire, self-pitying and massively peevish, reproaching me and fate that his declining years and delicate health should be threatened by such a daughter. Then I inquired of some of her acquaintances, and called at the cafés where she liked to hide. No one had seen her.

I began to be frightened about her. Through my criminal cases I had some contact with the police, and I confided in an inspector at the Yard whom I knew to be sensible. They had no information. I could only go home and wait.

I became angry with her. It was her final outrage not to let me know. I was frightened. She was not fit to be alone. I sat in the flat at night, pretending to work, but once more, and for a different reason, her shadow came between me and the page.

Six days after she left, I was sitting alone. The front door clicked, and I heard a key in the lock. She walked into the room, her face grey and strained, her dress bedraggled. Curiously, my first emotion was again of relief, of tried but comforting relief.

‘I’ve come back,’ she said.

She came towards me with a parcel in her hands.

‘Look, I’ve brought something for you,’ she said.

Under her eyes, I unwrapped the paper. She had kept a childlike habit of bringing me presents at random. This was a polished, shining, rosewood box: I threw open the lid, and saw a curious array of apparatus. There were two fountain pens lying in their slots, bottles of different coloured inks, writing pads, a circular thermometer, a paper-weight in the shape of a miniature silver-plated yacht. It was the least austere and the most useless of collections, quite unlike her style.

‘Extremely nice,’ I said, and drew her on to my knees.

‘Moderately nice,’ she corrected me, and buried her head in my shoulder.

I never knew exactly where she had spent those days. She had certainly slept two or three nights in a low lodging house near Paddington Station. It was possible that she tried to find a job. She was not in a state to be questioned. She was miserable and defeated. Once more I had to find something to which she could look forward. Make her look forward – that was all I could do for her. Should we go abroad at Christmas? Should we leave this flat, where, I said, bad luck had dogged us, and start again in a new house?

It astonished me, but that night she caught almost hysterically at the idea. She searched through the newspapers, and would have liked me to telephone one agent without waiting till the morning. Midnight had gone, but she was full of plans. To buy a house – it seemed to her like a solution. She felt the pathetic hope that sets the heartbroken off to travel.

So, on the next few afternoons, I had to get away early from Chambers in order to inspect houses along the Chelsea reach. The wind was gusty, and the autumn leaves were being whirled towards the bright cloud-swept sky. I begrudged the time. Once again, it meant a brief prepared ten per cent less completely than if I were settled. Yet it was a joy, in those windy evenings, to see her safe. She had decided on Chelsea; she had decided that we must have a view of the river; and we looked at houses all along the embankment from Antrobus Street to Battersea Bridge. In a few days she discovered what she wanted, at the east end of Cheyne Walk, It was a good-looking early-Victorian house with a balcony and a strip of garden, thirty yards by ten, running down to the pavement. I had to pay for a fifteen-year lease. I borrowed the money from Mr Knight. He agreed with me that, if this house might make her tranquil, she must have it. Avaricious as he was, he would have lent more than that so as not to have her on his conscience.

As I signed the lease, I wondered where she and I would be living in fifteen years.

We moved in by the middle of November. On our first evening the fog rolled up from the river, so thick that, walking together up and down the garden, we could not make out people passing by outside. We heard voices, very clear, from a long way down the embankment. Now and then the fog was gilded as a car groped past. We were hidden together as we walked in the garden; we might have been utterly alone; and there, in the cold evening, in the dark night, I embraced her.

When we went in to dinner, we left the curtains undrawn, so that the fire shone on the writhing fog behind the panes. On the river a boat’s horn gave a long stertorous wail. We were at peace.

That visitation of happiness remained for a few days. Then all became as it had been in the flat. Once more I dreaded to go home, for fear of what awaited me. The familiar routine took charge. Once more the night was not over until I knew she was asleep. In the new house, she sat alone beside her gramophone in a high bright room.

One December evening, I was reading, trying to pluck up the fortitude to go into that room and calm her, when the telephone rang. It was to tell me that the police had begun their inquiries into George Passant’s affairs, that I was needed that night and must catch the next train.

George’s friends had sent for me because I was a lawyer. Before I had talked to him for half an hour that night, I thought it more likely than not that he would be prosecuted. I was relieved that I had something to do, that I was forced to think of professional action. It would have been harder just to listen helplessly to his distress.

He was both massive and persecuted. He was guarding his group: sometimes he showed his old unrealistic optimism, and believed that this ‘outrage’ would blow over. I could not be certain how much he was concealing from me, though he was pathetically grateful for my affection. Even in the fear of disgrace, his mind was as powerful and precise as ever. It was astonishing to listen to a man so hunted, and hear a table of events, perfectly clear and well ordered, in which he and Jack Cotery had taken part for four years past.

I did not understand it all until near the end of the trial; but from George’s account, in that first hour, I could put together most of the case that might be brought against them.

George and Jack had been engaged in two different schemes for making money; and the danger was a charge of obtaining this money by false pretences, and (for technical reasons) of conspiracy to defraud.

The schemes were dissimilar, though they had used the same financial technique. After giving up his partnership with Eden, Martineau had played with some curious irrelevant ventures before he finally made his plunge and renounced the world; one of those was a little advertising agency, which had attached to it the kind of small advertising paper common in provincial towns.

Jack Cotery had persuaded George that, if they could raise the money and buy out Martineau’s partner, the agency was a good speculation. In fact, it had turned out to be so. They had met their obligations and made a small, steady profit. It looked like a completely honest business, apart from a misleading figure in the statement on which they had raised money. No sensible prosecution, I thought both then and later, would bring a charge against them on that count – if there existed one single clinching fact over the other business.

They had gone on from their first success to a project bigger altogether; they had decided to buy the farm and some other similar places and run them as a chain of youth hostels. In George’s mind it was clear that one main purpose had been to possess the farm in private, so as to entertain the group. Jack had ranged about among their acquaintances, given all kinds of stories of attendances and profits, and on the strength of them borrowed considerable sums of money. I could imagine him doing it; I had little doubt that, whatever George knew of those stories, Jack Cotery had not kept within the limits of honesty, though he might have been clever enough to have covered his tracks. From the direction of the first inquiries, there seemed a hope that nothing explicitly damning had come to light. Looking at the two businesses together, however, I was afraid that the prosecution would have enough to go on. I went from George to Eden’s house, where I was staying the night; and there, by the fireside in the drawing-room, where I had once waited with joy for Sheila, I told Eden the story to date, and what I feared.

‘These things will happen,’ said Eden, with his usual impenetrable calm. ‘Ah well! These things will happen.’

‘What do you think?’

‘You’re right, of course, we’ve got to be prepared.’

His only sign of emotion was a slight irritability; I was surprised that he was not more upset about the credit of his firm. ‘I must say they’ve been very foolish. They’ve been foolish whatever they’ve been doing. They oughtn’t to try these things without experience. It’s the sort of foolishness that Passant would go in for. I’ve told you that before–’