by C. P. Snow
‘Why is he the answer?’ I could not keep the question back.
She answered: ‘It’s like finding part of myself.’
She was rapt, she wanted me to rejoice with her. ‘I must show you his photograph,’ she said. ‘I’ve hidden it when you came. Usually it stands–’ She pointed to a shelf at the head of the divan on which she slept. ‘I like to wake up and see it in the morning.’
She was more girlish, more delighted to be girlish, than a softer woman might have been. She went to a cupboard, bent over, and stayed for a second looking at the photograph before she brought it out. Each action and posture was, as I had observed the first time I visited that room, more flowing and relaxed than a year ago. When I first observed that change, I did not guess that she was in love. Her profile was hard and clear, as she bent over the photograph; her lips were parted, as though she wanted to gush without constraint. ‘It’s rather a nice face,’ she said, handing me the picture. It was a weak, and sensitive face. The eyes were large, bewildered, and idealistic. I gave it back without a word. ‘You can see’, she said, ‘that he’s not much good at looking after himself. Much less me. I know it’s asking something, but I want you to help. I’ve never listened to anyone else, but I listen to you. And so will he.’
She tried to make me promise to meet him. I was so much beside myself that I gave an answer and contradicted myself and did not know what I intended. It was so natural to look after her; to shield this vulnerable happiness, to preserve her from danger. At the same time, all my angry heartbreak was pent up. I had not uttered a cry of that destructive rage.
She was satisfied. She felt assured that I should do as she asked. ‘Now what shall I do for you?’ she cried in her rapture. ‘I know,’ she said, with a smile half-sarcastic, half-innocent as she brought out her anticlimax. ‘I shall continue your musical education.’ Since my first visit to Worcester Street, she had played records each time I went – to disguise her love. Yet it had been a pleasure to her. She knew I was unmusical, often she had complained that it was a barrier between us, and she liked to see me listening. She could not believe that the sound meant nothing. She had only to explain, and my deafness would fall away.
That afternoon, after her cry ‘What shall I do for you?’, she laid out the records of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Side by side, we sat and listened. Sheila listened, her eyes luminous, transfigured by her happiness. She listened and was in love.
The noise pounded round me. I too was in love.
The choral movement opened. As each theme came again, Sheila whispered to make me recognize it. ‘Dismisses it,’ she said, sweeping her hand down, as the first went out. ‘Dismisses it,’ she said twice more. But at the first sound of the human voice, she sat so still that she might have gone into a trance.
She was in love, and rapt. I sat beside her, possessed by my years of passion and devotion, consumed by tenderness, by desire, and by the mania of revenge, possessed by the years whose torments had retraced themselves to breaking point as she stood that night, oblivious to all but her own joy. She was carried away, into the secret contemplation of her love. I sat beside her, stricken and maddened by mine.
Part Six
A Single Act
41: The Sense of Power
That night, after Sheila told me she was in love, I stayed in the street, my eyes not daring to leave her lighted window. The music had played round me; I had said goodbye; but when I came out into the cold night, I could not go home. Each past storm of jealousy or desire was calm compared to this. The evening when I slipped away from George and stood outside the vicarage, just watching without purpose – that was nothing but a youth’s lament. Now I was driven.
I could find no rest until I saw with my own eyes whether or not another man would call on her that night. No rest from the calculations of jealousy: ‘I shall want some tea,’ she had said, and that light phrase set all my mind to work, as though a great piece of clockwork had been wound up by a turn of the key. When would she make him tea? That night? Next day? No test from the torments, the insane reminders, of each moment when her body had allured me; so that standing in the street, looking at her window, I was maddened by sensual reveries.
It was late. A drizzle was falling, silver and sleety as it passed the street lamps. Time upon time I walked as far up the street as I could go, and still see the window. Through the curtains her light shone – orange among the yellow squares of other windows, the softest, the most luxurious, of all the lights in view. Twice a man came down the pavement, and as he approached her house my heart stopped. He passed by. A desolate prostitute, huddled against the raw night, accosted me. Some of the lights went out, but hers still shone.
The street was deserted, At last – in an instant when I turned my eyes away – her window had clicked into darkness. Relief poured through me, inordinate, inexpressible relief. I turned away; and I was drowsing in the taxi before I got home.
For days in Chambers I was driven, as violently as I had been that night. Writing an opinion, I could not keep my thoughts still. At a conference, I heard my leader talk, I heard the clients inquiring – between them and me were images of Sheila, images of the flesh, the images that tormented my senses and turned jealousy into a drill within the brain. And in the January nights I was driven to walk the length of Worcester Street, back and forth, hypnotized by the lighted window; it was an obsession, it was a mania, but I could not keep myself away.
One night, in the tube station at Hyde Park Corner, I imagined that I saw her in the crowd. There was a thin young man, of whom I only saw the back, and a woman beside him. She was singing to herself. Was it she? They mounted a train in the rush, I could not see, the doors slid to.
Soon afterwards – it was inside a week since she broke her news – the telephone rang at my lodgings. The landlady shouted my name, and I went downstairs. The telephone stood out in the open, on a table in the hall. I heard Sheila’s voice: ‘How are you?’
I muttered.
‘I want to know: how are you, physically?’
I had scarcely thought of my health. I had been acting as though I were tireless. I said that I was all right, and asked after her.
‘I’m very well.’ Her voice was unusually full. There was a silence, then she asked: ‘When am I going to see you?’
‘When you like.’
‘Come here tonight. You can take me out if you like.’
Once more an answer broke out.
‘Shall you be alone?’ I said.
‘Yes.’ In the telephone the word was clear; I could hear neither gloating nor compassion.
When I entered her room that evening she was dressed to dine out, in a red evening frock. Since I had begun to earn money, we had taken to an occasional treat. It was the chief difference in my way of life, for I had not changed my flat, and still lived as though in transit. She let me do it; she knew that I had my streak of childish ostentation, and that it flattered me to entertain her as the Marches might have done. For herself, she would have preferred our old places in Soho and round Charlotte Street; but, to indulge me, she would dress up and go to fashionable restaurants, as she had herself proposed that night.
She was bright-eyed and smiling. Before we went out, however, she said in a quiet voice: ‘Why did you ask whether I should be alone?’
‘You know.’
‘You’re thinking’, she said, her eyes fixed on me, ‘of what I did to you once? At the Edens’ that night – with poor Tom Devitt?’
I did not reply.
‘I shan’t do that again,’ she said. She added: ‘I’ve treated you badly. I don’t need telling it.’
She walked into the restaurant at the Berkeley with me behind her. Just then, at twenty-five, she was at the peak of her beauty. For a young girl, her face had been too hard, lined, and over-vivid. And I often thought, trying to see the future, that long before she was middle-aged her looks would be ravaged. But now she was at the age which chimed with her style. That night, as s
he walked across the restaurant, all eyes followed her, and a hush fell. She made the conversation. Each word she said was light with her happiness, more than ever capricious and sarcastic. Sometimes she drew a smile, despite myself. Then, in the middle of the meal, she leaned across the table, her eyes full on me, and said, quietly and simply: ‘You can do something for me.’
‘What?’
‘Will you?’ she begged.
I stared at her.
‘You can be some good to me,’ she said.
‘What do you want?’
She said: ‘I want you to see Hugh.’
‘I can’t do it,’ I burst out.
‘It might help me,’ she said.
My eyes could not leave hers.
‘You’re more realistic than I am,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell me what he feels about me. I don’t know whether he loves me.’
‘What do you think I am?’ I cried, and violent words were quivering behind my lips.
‘I trust you,’ she said. ‘You’re the only human being I’ve ever trusted.’
There was silence. She said ‘There is no one else to ask. No one else would be worth asking.’
In exhaustion, I replied at last: ‘All right. I’ll see him.’
She was docile with delight. When could I manage it? She would arrange any time I liked. ‘I’m very dutiful to Hugh,’ she said, ‘but I shall make him come – whenever you can manage it.’ What about that very night? She could telephone him, and bring him to her room. Would I mind, that night?
‘It’s as good as any other,’ I said.
She rang up. We drove back to Worcester Street. In the taxi I said little, and I was as sombre while we sat in her room and waited.
‘He’s highly strung,’ she said. ‘He may be nervous of you.’
A car passed along the street, coming nearer, and I listened. Sheila shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’ll come by bus.’ She asked: ‘Shall I play a record?’
‘If you like.’
She grimaced, and began to search in her shelf. As she did so, there pattered a light step down below. ‘Here he is,’ she said.
He came in with a smile, quick and apologetic. Sheila and I were each standing, and for a second he threw an arm round her waist. Then he faced me, as she introduced us.
‘Lewis, this is Hugh Smith.’
He was as tall as me, but much slighter. His neck was thin and his chest sunken. He was very fair. His upper lip was petulant and vain, but when he smiled his whole face was merry, boyish, and sweet. He looked much younger than his years, much younger than either Sheila or me.
He was taken up with Sheila’s dress.
‘I’ve not seen you in that before, have I?’ he said. ‘Yes, it’s very very nice. Let me see. Is it quite right at the back–?’ he went on with couturier’s prattle.
Sheila laughed at him.
‘You’re much more interested than my dressmaker,’ she said.
Hugh appealed to me: ‘Aren’t you interested in clothes?’
His manner was so open that I was disarmed.
He went on talking about clothes, and music, and the plays we had seen. Nothing could have been lighter-hearted, more suited to a polite party. She made fun of him, more gentle fun than I was used to. I asked a question about his job, and he took at once to the defensive; I gave it up, and he got back to concerts again. Nothing could have been more civilized.
I was watching them together. I was watching them with a desperate attention, more concentrated than I had ever summoned and held in all my life before. Around them there was no breath of the heaviness and violence of a passion. It was too friendly, too airy, too kind, for that. Towards him she showed a playful ease which warmed her voice and set her free. When she turned to him, even the line of her profile seemed less sharp. It was an ease that did not carry the deep repose of violent love; it was an ease that was full of teasing, half-kittenish and half-maternal. I had never seen her so for longer than a flash.
I could not be sure of what he felt for her. He was fond of her, was captivated by her charm, admired her beauty, liked her high spirits – that all meant little. I thought that he was flattered by her love. He was conceited as well as vain. He lapped up all the tributes of love. He was selfish; very amiable; easily frightened, easily overweighted, easily overborne.
Sheila announced that she was going to bed. She wanted Hugh and me, I knew, to leave together, so that I could talk to him. It was past midnight; the last buses had gone; he and I started to walk towards Victoria. It was a crisp frosty night, the black sky glittering with stars.
On the pavement in Lupus Street, he spoke, as though for safety, of the places we lived in and how much we paid for our flats. He was apprehensive of the enmity not yet brought into the open that night. He was searching for casual words that would hurry the minutes along. I would have welcomed it so. But I was too far gone. I interrupted ‘How long have you known her?’
‘Six months.’
‘I’ve known her six years.’
‘That’s a long time,’ said Hugh, and once more tried to break on to safe ground. We had turned into Belgrave Road.
I did not answer his question, but asked: ‘Do you understand her?’
His eyes flickered at me, and then away.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’
‘Do you understand her?’
‘She’s intelligent, isn’t she? Don’t you think she is?’ He seemed to be probing round for answers that would please me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I think she’s very sweet. She is sweet in her way, isn’t she?’
Our steps rang in the empty frost-bound street.
‘She’s not much like the other girls I’ve known!’ he ventured. He added with his merry childlike smile: ‘But I expect she wants the same things in the end. They all do, don’t they?’
‘I expect so.’
‘They want you to persuade them into bed. Then they want you to marry them.’
I said: ‘Do you want to marry her?’
‘I think I’d like to settle down, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘And she can be very sweet, can’t she?’ He added: ‘I’ve always got out of it before. I suppose she’s a bit of a proposition. Somehow I think it might be a good idea.’
The lights of the empty road stretched ahead, the lights under the black sky.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I’m frightfully sorry if I’ve been poaching. I am sorry if I’ve got in your way. These things can’t be helped, though, can they?’
For minutes the lights, the sky, had seemed shatteringly bright, reelingly dark, as though I were dead drunk.
Suddenly my mind leapt clear.
‘I should like to talk about that,’ I said. ‘Not tonight. Tomorrow or the next day.’
‘There isn’t much to talk about, is there?’ he said, again on the defensive.
‘I want to say some things to you.’
‘I don’t see that it’ll do much good, you know,’ he replied.
‘It’s got to be done,’ I said.
‘I’m rather full up this week–’
‘It can’t be left,’ I said.
‘Oh, if you want,’ he gave way, with a trace of petulance. Before we parted, we arranged to meet. He was shy of the place and time, but I made him promise – my flat, not tomorrow but the evening after.
The fire was out when I returned to my room. I did not think of sleep, and I did not notice the cold. Still in my overcoat, I sat on the head of the sofa, smoking.
I stayed without moving for many minutes. My thoughts were clear. They had never seemed so clear. I believed that this man was right for her. Or at least with him she might get an unexacting happiness. Knowing her with the insight of passionate love, I believed that I saw the truth. He was lightweight, but somehow his presence made her innocent and free. Her best chance was to marry him.
Would he marry her? He was wavering. He could be forced either way. He was self
ish, but this time he did not know exactly what he wanted for himself. He had made love to her, but was not physically bound. She had little hold on him; yet he was thinking of her as his wife. He was irresolute. He was waiting to be told what to do.
Thinking back on that night, as I did so often afterwards, I had to remember one thing. It was easy to forget, but in fact many of my thoughts were still protective. Her best chance was to marry him. I thought of how I could persuade him, the arguments to use, the feelings to play on. Did he know that she would one day be rich? Would he not be flattered by my desire to have her at any price, would not my competition raise her value? I imagined her married to him, light and playful as she had been that night. It was a sacrificial, tender thought.
If I played it right, my passion to marry her would spur him on.
Yes. Her best chance was to marry him. I believed that I could decide it. I could bring it off – or destroy it.
With the cruellest sense of power I had ever known, I thought that I could destroy it.
42: Steaming Clothes Before the Fire
I had two days to wait. Throughout that time, wherever I was, to whomever I was speaking, I had my mind fixed, my whole spirit and body, bone and flesh and brain, on the hour to come. The sense of power ran through my bloodstream. As I prepared for the scene, my thoughts stayed clear. Underneath the thoughts, I was exultant. Each memory of the past, each hope and resolve remaining – they were at one. All that I was, fused into the cruel exultation.
I went into Chambers each of those mornings, but only for an hour. I conferred with Percy. On Thursday we were to hear judgement in an adjourned case: that would be the morning after Hugh’s visit, I thought, as Percy and I methodically arranged my timetable. February would be a busy month.
‘They’re coming in nicely,’ said Percy.