by C. P. Snow
Something like that, Humphrey was still convinced, actually was one of his regular exhortations. The detectives must have heard it all before, for weeks past. The young woman he spoke of, they knew who she was. It hadn’t been necessary to say those words to the detectives. It was strangely oblique, but he was saying them to Humphrey.
Briers dismissed the meeting. When he was left alone with Humphrey, except for the sergeant still in attendance, Briers said: ‘There you are. What did you think of that?’
‘Interesting. Very interesting,’ Humphrey replied without expression.
‘I must get to work myself. See you soon, Humphrey.’
Smoothly, the young man took Humphrey out into the road. It had been a peculiar performance, he had been thinking, but it was one way of making a purpose plain.
In the gossip about the police interviews, there was one name which Humphrey had not heard mentioned. Paul Mason had described with some amusement how he had been pressed to answer for a discrepancy (there wasn’t one, his memory was slightly better than their script, he said, for once immodest), but he hadn’t spoken a word about Celia.
It would have been absurd to imagine that she was any sort of suspect. No one ever did think so, then or in the future, even those so credulous that the obvious truth didn’t seem believable enough. Apart from her last social appearance at the dinner at Tom Thirkill’s, none of Humphrey’s friends had met her for weeks. Kate remarked, she seemed to have dropped out of circulation.
In fact, she was to be seen most evenings in a little garden looking over the river, across the road from St George’s Square. Round six o’clock at night, she was making a habit of walking from her house in Cheyne Row along the Embankment, her young son scampering beside her. On that Friday evening, the day of Briers’ briefing, she did just that. People might have noticed a pretty young woman dressed simply, elegantly, in white, body slender and handsome, one hand holding a golf-umbrella, the other a small boy’s wrist, watching steadily for a chance to cross the road. The traffic was heavy, cars streaming out of the town. At last she could get the boy across. In the garden he was safe.
Sitting on a bench, with her clear clinical painter’s eye, Celia regarded the statue of William Huskisson. One shoulder was bare, he was dressed like a Roman senator. Some Victorian mind, some human mind, had considered that appropriate. He had been knocked down and killed by one of the earliest railway engines, travelling at ten miles an hour. Just the sort of thing he would have managed, she thought with detachment. She put up her umbrella to guard herself not from the heat, but the light of the declining sun. She wasn’t using an umbrella in imitation of Lady Ashbrook. Lady Ashbrook might have approved of her style, but she didn’t copy Lady Ashbrook’s. She carried an umbrella because it was functional, and she liked it. She was her own mistress. She was capable of thinking she was now certainly no one else’s.
She was capable of thinking that, but she was sad. Not bitter, not resentful, but sad. She had lost Paul. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t blame herself. It was in the nature of things. Or, rather, in her own nature. She was a loser. Others thought she had everything. Beauty. She dismissed that, but accepted that she was good enough to look at. Fairly intelligent. She could be entertaining with the right companion. She had known, since she was growing up, that she attracted a reasonable number of men. She liked some of them. She could give those she liked what they wanted in the way of sex. There she was easy, not passionate, not cold, so far as she could judge herself. She had done so with her husband. She had loved him. He had left her. She had loved Paul. Now he had left her.
She gazed at her young son, who was kneeling on the grass, carefully stalking a seagull. She loved him, too, more totally, or at least with more self-forgetfulness than she loved either of her men. Would that boy leave her, too? Of course. It would be wrong if he didn’t. While he was a child, she would keep something of him. But afterwards, sons ought not to be attached to their mothers. She couldn’t wish for that. Anyway, she took it for granted that she wouldn’t get him. They all found it easy, compulsory, almost friendly, to leave her.
She was thinking of herself, nothing else. All that had happened to Lady Ashbrook or acquaintances in the Square seemed insignificant, as though it were long ago. She had none of that kind of homesickness or clinging memory. It was only Paul that she remembered. Not with hatred, or violent longing, but as of someone who should be present, and was not. Yes, he had bright, intent, focused eyes, when he was teasing her; nose going white when he was getting urgent about bed. In bed (it seemed out of character) never ceasing to talk, fervently, insistently, right up to the climax.
Paul had left her. She hadn’t been pleased when that girl Susan had been making a play for him; but she had heard that it wasn’t Susan who had got anywhere with him.
If it were not that girl, it would be another, Celia thought acceptantly. Why hadn’t she held him? Why was she a loser?
When they had all been celebrating the good news for Lady Ashbrook (none of them had forgotten that night, and some of them were to go on feeling a kind of guilt), she had tried to confide in Humphrey. She knew already that Paul was slipping away. She wasn’t pitying herself. She had no more pity for herself than for others. It had been a relief to talk to Humphrey, who didn’t pity, either, and didn’t blame. She tried to be honest. And yet, even the most honest, when they were losing, found reasons – to themselves as well as to anyone else – which weren’t quite the reasons. Paul had wanted a bedmate, she had said, in her clinical style. That was fine, that was the easy part. But he also wanted a hostess, and that she couldn’t do, and so sometime they would have to part.
She had been searching herself, and found a lack which concealed a deeper lack. She could have made herself liked by anyone Paul brought in. They might have found her puzzling or far away, but they would have liked her, for she was more liked than, since her childhood, she could ever believe. She accepted that a few men loved her – but, driven into herself, she couldn’t accept that she was also liked. But really it wasn’t that she couldn’t give others what Paul wanted her to give. The trouble was, and this was too much like a trap of fate to recognise, that she couldn’t give it to Paul himself.
He was gifted, usually patient with her, confident. But, confident as he was, sometimes he needed a response, a completely ordinary response, a bit of encouragement, the feeling that the whole of her nature was with him. Occasionally, less often than most, he needed such a simple response; and she could only give him a splinter.
That had always been the trouble. With her parents: she watched them, she could be funny, but when they needed simple love they received another of her splinters. Somehow she could not believe or seem as though she were at one. She had never been able to say, even to herself, what she wanted to do. As a girl, fortunate, courted, pursued, friends had asked her what she intended. The best she could produce – voice high, wandering away – was that she supposd that she would drift into marriage. She had done exactly that. Her husband had been a loving, conscientious man, and very kind. Kinder than Paul, though nothing like so perceptive. She had tried to be loving and conscientious in return. It hadn’t been enough. He hadn’t complained. He had left her.
She had sometimes thought that she would have been less lost at a time everyone really married for life – you made your bed and you lay in it. She wouldn’t have minded if her husband had taken other women – it would have been her fault. She could have made do. She wouldn’t have minded if Paul had taken other women. Again, she could have made do.
There her self-insight left her. It would have surprised even Paul, it didn’t seem to fit her nature, but she was jealous. She had been more than normally jealous when young Susan had been attempting to collect Paul. All Celia had done was given one of her splintered jokes. No more. She couldn’t let him see or hear what she really felt. It might have brought her better luck if she could.
Ah well. She wasn’t going to begin pitying herself. So
mehow one went on. Life might be a disappointing business, but there was no option. She studied her son, now raptly regarding a tug on the oil-smooth river. That was something. She looked again at the Huskisson statue. That really was a most ridiculous creation. Her face was etched into her handsome indrawn smile, which a good many men had found mysterious. Just now, there was nothing mysterious about it. She was smiling at the concept of the statue.
The sun was getting low. Late for the boy’s bedtime. Time for her dinner. She took him out on the pavement. They walked a few yards. He was talking cheerfully. She stopped. They had to cross, to the island in the middle of the road. The boy began to run across the street. A car, travelling very fast, came past a lorry parked against the kerb. She shouted. The boy might not have heard, but he saw the car as it swung towards him. His reaction was quick, he checked his run, his gymshoes held fast on the tarmac. The car passed him, with a foot to spare. The driver made threatening gestures and yelled.
Celia’s stomach had lurched. She was pallid as, the boy’s hand in hers, they stood on the mid-road island. She waited a long time until there was no traffic at all before they crossed to the far side.
When they were walking towards home, the boy said: ‘Anything the matter, Mummy?’
‘Nothing much. You must be very careful crossing the roads. There’s so much traffic. On these main roads, you must always wait for me. Please.’
That was all that she said. The boy gave an intelligent, placatory smile. That was all. She said nothing more.
21
On the Saturday evening, twenty-four hours after Celia had been thinking about her mischances, sitting in the riverside garden, Humphrey and Alec Luria had met for their ritual drink in the pub. By random chance, it happened that Celia’s name was mentioned. Has anything been heard of her, Luria enquired. As curious, it seemed, about former acquaintances as he was about the sociology of English institutions. It was only later that Humphrey thought that there might be rather more to that enquiry. As it was, he replied simply, ‘Not by me.’ She had been friendly, but only through her connection with Paul: now that was broken, she had passed out of contact.
‘What a pity.’ Luria, sipping dutifully at his pint of bitter, looked kind and thoughtful. He had had spells of silence as though he had something on his mind.
The pub was quiet, with a late-summer stupor. A couple of men, who knew them both by sight, had said good evening. A wasp had been whirring round, now gone. Through the window at the far end, the evening was fading gently to twilight: it was as hot as in the weeks before, but as August ended the northern nights were shortening.
Humphrey, comfortable in the quiet, said idly that newcomers didn’t realise how far north London was. Luria nodded. ‘Like Labrador. It’s lucky there’s the Gulf Stream.’ He said it with mechanical competence, but no interest, still preoccupied. He started to speak, then stopped. After a time, he spoke again. ‘Humphrey?’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘There’s something I want to say to you. You’ll have to forgive me.’
For an instant, Humphrey wondered if Luria was going to ask about the case. He was punctilious about official secrets, but maybe his curiosity was getting too active. Anyway, Humphrey had nothing to tell him except guesses, which he could have made himself.
What Luria did say, was this: ‘I’m not in a position to intrude, forgive me, but of course you’re getting very involved with Kate Lefroy? Right?’
It was a long time since Humphrey had been invaded like this. He wasn’t prepared. In spite, or because, of his candour with himself, he guarded his own secrets. All he could reply, with a smile of put-on irony, was: ‘I think we could reasonably say that.’
‘Yes. This is what I have to tell you. I very much wish you would get out of it.’
Again, it was a long time, many years, since Humphrey felt himself blushing. He was taken off balance. His temper broke through, his voice was as hot as his cheeks.
‘In God’s name, what do you mean?’
‘I’m afraid I mean, so far as I can see, there’s no future in it.’
Humphrey’s voice had become calmer but still resentful. ‘She’s one of the nicest women I’ve ever met. I think the nicest.’
‘That’s one of the reasons why I can’t see any future in it.’
‘I may as well tell you,’ Humphrey said, looking at Luria with rancour, ‘that, if these words mean anything, I love her, and I believe that she has some love for me.’
‘My impression is, more than that. But, if I have the situation anything like right, that could make it worse for both of you.’ He was looking at his friend with sombre affection: under the great brow his dark eyes were sunk deep, brimming with melancholy. ‘You don’t think I specially like telling you home truths, do you? You’re about the last person I should choose. But, it doesn’t need me to say, at our age we haven’t infinite time ahead. I don’t want to see you waste too many years.’
Just then, still angry, as a younger man might have been (age made no difference, though, Humphrey thought later in cooler blood), he was nevertheless touched by Alec’s elaborate consideration. He had gone out of his way to speak as though he and Humphrey had the same prospect of future existence: Luria, though one often forgot it, was a dozen years the younger.
‘She’s right for me,’ Humphrey said flatly.
‘If you could get her. But I’m afraid you can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘When it comes to the crunch, I don’t see her able to get away.’
‘You’re not inside the situation.’ He was protesting more harshly since Luria was voicing his own doubts. ‘I’m nearer than you are. There’s nothing left between her and her husband.’
Luria stayed gentle in spite of Humphrey’s anger. ‘You know, sometimes an outsider sees more of the game. I’m asking you not to rely on what you think. Perhaps it’s what you want to think. Listen just a minute. I’ll try and explain how it looks to me. She’s a real woman. She could give you life and fun, and love it. But there’s something else. She has a need for someone to depend on her. She falls for phonies, we’ve gone over that before. Superior phonies like Monty. She could fall for that doctor who fancies himself as a thinker. She seems to worship them. But this is my version. I believe that underneath she feels that they’re no good, and so they have to depend on her. She’s a much stronger character than that phoney husband, and I’m afraid you’ll get it wrong unless you admit the thought that that is what she wants.’
Humphrey had become mutinous and savage, skin dead white with temper. His voice, though, was under control. ‘Life can be very strong,’ he said.
‘You’re not a phoney, no one less so. You’ve never really depended on anyone in your life, and you never will. You would provide everything she’s never had. But I wish I could think that she could tear herself away and leave a derelict behind her.’
Humphrey did not utter. With a hesitation he hadn’t shown before, Luria added: ‘I couldn’t make up my mind whether to speak or not. I won’t say any more.’ Humphrey said, with civility, not with warmth: ‘If that is what you think, you were right to say so. Of course. Thank you.’ He waved to the barman, calling for another drink. There was a lull between them. Then Alec Luria spoke again, deep voice rumbling away, but not so firmly: ‘As a matter of fact, I have a problem of my own.’
‘What’s this?’
Luria gave a curiously sheepish smile. ‘Oh, my wife’s getting rid of me.’
‘Is she, by God?’ Luria’s wife had been absent all summer, Humphrey had met her only twice, and had no knowledge of the relationship. Luria had not been comporting himself like a man deprived. Humphrey went on: ‘I have to ask. How serious is this for you?’
‘It’s not life or death. I can’t pretend that I’m heartbroken. But I do feel several varieties of a fool.’
‘Will it make much difference? Practically, I mean.’
‘Oh, I shan’t see so much of the high li
fe. Unless I marry one of her girlfriends. I shall be pensioned off pretty handsomely, by the way. A couple of million dollars, the lawyers talk about.’
This marriage had lasted five years. The wedding had been a social event in New York. She was part-heiress to one of the older eastern fortunes.
‘That’s something.’ Humphrey did not suppress a satirical grin. ‘That may help you to live modestly in the state of life to which it has pleased God to call you.’
The sheepish, shamefaced smile appeared again, looking entirely inappropriate in the sculptured face.
‘It’s a consolation,’ Alec Luria acquiesced. For an instant he was satirising himself. Then he said: ‘But I tell you, I do feel too many varieties of a fool.’ He was brooding. ‘Tell me, Humphrey, have you had much to do with the very rich?’