by C. P. Snow
One morning in September, soon after I had returned from a holiday, a letter stared from my breakfast tray. My heart pounded as I saw the postmark of her village; but the letter had been redirected from my Inn, and the handwriting was a man’s. It came from Mr Knight, and read:
My dear Eliot, Even one who hides himself in the seclusion of a remote life and simple duties cannot always avoid certain financial consultations. Much as I dislike coming to London I shall therefore be obliged to stay at the club for the nights of Monday and Tuesday next week. Owing to increasing age and disinclination, I know few people outside my immediate circle, and shall be free from all engagements during this enforced visit. It is, of course, too much to hope that you can disentangle yourself from your professional connexions, but if you should remember me and be available, I should be glad to give you the poor hospitality the club can offer at luncheon on either of those days.
Very truly yours.
The letter was signed with a flamboyant ‘Lawrence Knight’.
The ‘club’ was the Athenaeum. I knew that from private jokes with Sheila. He had devoted intense pertinacity to get himself elected, and then never visited it. It was like him to pick up the jargon, particularly the arrogant private-world jargon, of any institution, and become a trifle too slick with it.
He must want to talk of Sheila. He must be deeply troubled to get in touch with me – and he had done it without her knowledge, for she would have told him my address. Reading his elaborate approach again, I guessed that he was making a special journey. He was so proud and vain that only a desperate trouble would make him humble himself so. Was she ill? But if so, surely even he, for all his camouflage, would have told me.
In some ways I was as secretive as Mr Knight, but my instinct in the face of danger was not to lose a second in knowing the worst. When I entered the Athenaeum, I was on tenterhooks to have all my anxieties settled. How was she? What was the matter? Had she spoken of me? But Mr Knight was too adroit for me. I was shown into the smoking-room and he began at once ‘My dear fellow, before we do anything else, I insist on your drinking a glass of this very indifferent sherry. I cannot recommend it. I cannot recommend it. I expect you to resolve my ignorance upon the position of our poor old pound–’
He did not speak hurriedly, but he gave me no chance to break in. He appeared intent on not getting to the point. I listened with gnawing impatience. Of all the interviews at which I had been kept waiting for news, this was the most baffling. Mr Knight was not at home in the Athenaeum, and it was essential for him to prove that no one could be more so. He called waiters by their names, had our table changed, wondered why he kept up his subscription, described a long talk that morning with the secretary. He proceeded over lunch to speculate intricately about the gold standard. On which – though no talk had ever seemed so meaningless – he was far more detached than most of my acquaintances. ‘Of course we shall go off it,’ said Mr Knight, with surprising decision and energy. ‘They’re talking complete nonsense about staying on it. It’s an economic impossibility. At least I should have thought so, but I never think about these things. I gave up thinking long ago, Eliot. I’m just a poor simple country parson. No doubt this nonsense about the gold standard was convenient for removing our late lamented government, that is, if one had no high opinion of their merits.’
Mr Knight went on, with one of his sly darts, to wonder how warmly I regarded them. It was remarkable, in his view, how increased prosperity insensibly produced its own little effect, its own almost imperceptible effect, on one’s political attitude…‘But it’s not for me to attribute causes,’ said Mr Knight.
No talk had ever seemed so far away, as though I were going deaf. At last he took me upstairs for coffee, and we sat outside on one of the small balconies, looking over the corner of Waterloo Place and Pall Mall. The sunshine was hot. Buses gleamed in the afternoon light. The streets smelt of petrol and dust.
Suddenly Mr Knight remarked in an aside: ‘I suppose you haven’t had any experience of psychiatrists, professional or otherwise? They can’t have come your way?’
‘No, but…’
‘I was only asking because my daughter – you remember that she brought you to my house once or twice, perhaps? – my daughter happened to be treated by one recently.’
I was riven by fear, guilt, sheer animal concern.
‘Is she better?’ I cried out of it all.
‘She wouldn’t persevere,’ said Mr Knight. ‘She said that he was stupider than she was. I am inclined to think that these claims to heal the soul…’ He was taking refuge in a disquisition on psychology and medicine, but I had no politeness left.
‘How is she?’ I said roughly. ‘Tell me anything. How is she?’
Mr Knight had been surveying the street. For a moment he looked me in the face. His eyes were self-indulgent but sad.
‘I wish I knew,’ he said.
‘What can I do for her?’
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how well do you know my daughter?’
‘I have loved her ever since I met her. That is seven years ago. I have loved her without return.’
‘I am sorry for you,’ he said.
For the first time I had heard him speak without cover.
In an instant he was weaving his circumlocutions, glancing at me only from the corner of his eye.
‘I am an elderly man,’ he remarked, ‘and it is difficult to shoulder responsibility as one did once. There are times when one envies men like you, Eliot, in the prime of your youth. Even though one may seem favoured not to be bearing the heat and burden of the day. If my daughter should happen to live temporarily in London, which I believe she intends to, it would ease my mind that you should be in touch with her. I have heard her speak of you with respect, which is singular for my daughter. If she has no reliable friends here, I should find my responsibility too much of a burden.’
Mr Knight looked down his nose, and very intently, at the passers-by across the place.
‘It is just possible’, he said, in an offhand whisper, ‘that my daughter may arrive in London this week. She is apt to carry out her intentions rather quickly. She speaks of returning to a house which she has actually lived in before. Yes, she has lived in London for a few months. I think I should like to give you the address, then perhaps if you ever find yourself near – The address is 68 Worcester Street SW1.’
He wrote it on a piece of club paper which he pulled from his pocket. He wrote it very legibly, realizing all the time that I knew that address as well as my own.
44: Beside the Water
I rang the familiar number on the day that Mr Knight hinted that it was ‘just possible’ she might return. She answered. Her voice was friendly. ‘Come round,’ she said, as she might have done at any previous time. ‘How did you guess? I don’t believe it was clairvoyance.’ But she did not press me when we met. She took it for granted that I should be there, and seemed herself unchanged. She made no reference to Hugh, nor to her visit to the psychiatrist.
We sauntered hand in hand that night. For me, there was no future. This precarious innocent happiness had flickered over us inexplicably for a few days, perhaps adding up to a week in all, in our years together. Now it had chosen to visit us again.
She was sometimes airy, sometimes remote, but that had always been so. I did not want to break the charm.
For several days it seemed like first love. I said no word of her plans or mine. If this were an illusion, then let it shine a little longer. People called me clear-sighted, but if this were an illusion I did not want to see the truth.
On a warm September night we dawdled round St James’s Park, and sat by the water at the palace end. It was the calmest and most golden of nights. The lamps threw bars of gold towards us, and other beams swept and passed from cars driving along the Mall. On the quiet water, ducks moved across the golden bars and left a glittering shimmer in their wake.
‘Pretty,’ she said.
The sky was lit up over
the Strand. From the barracks the Irish bagpipers began to play in the distance, marched round until the music was loud, and receded again.
We were each silent, while the band made several circuits. She was thinking. I was enchanted by the night.
She said: ‘Was it you who sent him away?’
I answered: ‘It was.’
The skirling came near, died away, came near again. Our silence went on. Her fingers had been laced in mine, and there stayed. Neither of us moved. We had not looked at each other, but were still gazing over the water. A bird alighted close in front of us, and then another.
She said: ‘It makes it easier.’
I asked: ‘What does it make easier?’
She said: ‘I’m no good now. I never shall be. I’ve played my last cards. You can have me. You can marry me if you like.’
Her tone was not contemptuous, not cruel, not bitter. It was resigned. Hearing her offer in that tone. I was nevertheless as joyful as though, when I first proposed to her in my student’s attic, she had said yes. I was as joyful as though we had suffered nothing – like any young man in the park that halcyon night, asking his girl to marry him and hearing her accept. At the same time, I was melted with concern.
‘I want you,’ I said. ‘More than I’ve ever done. But you mustn’t come to me if you could be happier any other way.’
‘I’ve done you great harm,’ she said. ‘Now you’ve done the same to me. Perhaps we deserve each other.’
‘That is not all of us,’ I said. ‘I have loved you. You have immeasurably enriched my life.’
‘You have done me great harm,’ she said, relentlessly, without any malice, speaking from deep inside. ‘I might have been happy with him. I shall always think it.’
I cried: ‘Let me get him back for you. I’ll bring him back myself. If you want him, you must have him.’
‘I forbid you,’ she said, with all her will.
‘If you want him–’
‘I might find out that it was not true. That would be worse.’
I exclaimed in miserable pity, and put my arm round her. She leant her head on my shoulder; the band approached; a long ripple ran across the pond, and the reflections quivered. I thought she was crying. Soon, however, she looked at me with dry eyes. She even had the trace of a sarcastic smile.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We can’t escape each other. I suppose it’s just.’
She stared at me.
‘I know it’s useless,’ she said. ‘But I want to tell you this. You need a wife who will love you. And look after you. And be an ally in your career. I can do none of those things.’
‘I know.’
‘I’ll try to be loyal,’ she went on. ‘That’s all I can promise. I shan’t be much good at it.’
A couple, arms round each other’s waists, passed very slowly in front of us. When they had gone by, I looked once more at the lights upon the water, and then into her eyes.
‘I know all this,’ I said. ‘I am marrying you because I can do nothing else.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are you marrying me?’
I expected a terrible answer – such as that we had damaged each other beyond repair, that, by turning love into a mutual torment, we were unfit for any but ourselves. In fact, she said: ‘It’s simple. I’m not strong enough to go on alone.’
Part Seven
The Decision
45: An Autumn Dawn
Lying awake in the early morning, I listened to Sheila breathing as she slept. It was a relief that she had gone to sleep at last. There had been many nights since our marriage when I had lain awake, restless because I knew that in the other bed she too was staring into the darkness. It had been so a few hours before, worse because at the end of our party with the Getliffes she had broken down.
The chink in the curtain was growing pale in the first light of day. I could just make out the shape of the room. It was nearly a year since we first slept there, when, after our marriage, we moved into this flat in Mecklenburgh Square. I could make out the shape of the room, and of her bed, and of her body beneath the clothes. I felt for her with tenderness, with familiar tenderness, with pity, and, yes, with irritation, irritation that I was forced to think only of her, that looking after her took each scrap of my attention, that in a few hours I should go to the courts tired out after a night of trying to soothe her.
I had thought that I could imagine what it would be like. One can never imagine the facts as one actually lives them, the moment-by-moment facts of every day. I had known that she dreaded company, and I was ready to give up all but a minimum. It seemed an easy sacrifice. After our marriage, I found it a constant drain upon my tenderness. Each sign of her pain made me less prepared to coax her into another party. She was cutting me off from a world of which I was fond – that did not matter much. She kept me away from the ‘useful’ dinner tables, and professionally I should suffer for it. I saw another thing. She was not getting more confident, but less. More completely since our marriage, she believed that she could not cope.
Often I wondered whether she would have been healed if she had known physical love. Mine she could tolerate at times: she had no joy herself, though there were occasions, so odd is the flesh, when she showed a playful pleasure, which drew us closer than we had ever been. I tried to shake off the failure and remorse, and tell myself that the pundits are not so wise as they pretend. In sexual life there is an infinite variety; and many pairs know the magic of the flesh in ways which to others would be just a mockery. In cold blood, I thought that those who write on these topics must have seen very little of life. But that reflection did not comfort me, when she was too strained for me to touch her.
I hoped for a child, with the unrealistic hope that it might settle all: but of that there was no sign.
She wanted to meet no one – except those she discovered for herself. She had only visited her parents once since we married: that was at Christmas, as she kept some of her sense of formal duty. I myself had seen much more of Mr Knight, for we had struck up a bizarre companionship. Sheila let me go to the vicarage alone, while she hid herself in the flat or else went out in search of some of her nondescript cronies. They were an odd bunch. As in her girlhood, she was more relaxed with the unavailing, the down-and-out, even the pretentious, so long as they were getting nowhere. She would sit for hours in a little café talking to the waiter; she became the confidante of typists from decayed upper-class families who were looking for a man to keep them; she went and listened to writers who somehow did not publish, to writers who did not even write.
Some of my friends thought that, among that army of the derelict, she took lovers. I did not believe it. I did not ask; I did not spy any longer; I should have known. I did not doubt that she was faithful to me. No, from them she gained the pleasure of bringing solace. She had her own curious acid sympathy with the lost. She was touched by those, young and old, whose inner lives like her own were comfortless. It was in part that feeling which drew her to my attic in my student days.
I did not spy on her any longer. My obsessive jealousy had died soon after I possessed her. When she told me, as she still did, of some man who had taken her fancy, I could sympathize now, and stroke her hair, and laugh. I was capable of listening without the knife twisting within. I thought I should be capable, if ever I discovered a man who could give her joy, of bringing him to her arms. I thought I could do that; I who had, less than two years before, watched her window for hours in the bitter night – I who had deliberately set out to break her chance of joy.
Since then I had made love to her. Since then I had lain beside her in such dawns as this. Hugh was gone now, married, dismissed further into the past in her mind than in mine (I was still jealous of him, when all other jealousy was washed away). If ever she felt with another that promise of joy, I believed that I would scheme for her and watch over her till she was happy.
I did not think it was likely to happen. Her fund of interest seemed to have run low
. She had gone farther along life’s road than I had, though we were the same age and though my years had been more packed than hers. It was to me she turned, hoping for a new idea to occupy her. At times she turned to me as though to keep her going, as though I had to live for two. It was that condition of blankness and anxiety that I feared most in her, and which most wore me down. Even in perfect love it would be hard to live for another. In this love it was a tax beyond my strength.
She looked after the flat with the same competence that she spent on her coins. She was abler than I had thought, and picked up any technique very quickly. She did more of the housework than she need have done, for we could have afforded another servant; perhaps as an expiation, perhaps to console me, Mr Knight had surprised us with a lavish marriage settlement, and between us our income was about two thousand pounds a year. She spent little of it on herself. Sometimes she helped out her cronies, or bought records or books. That was almost all. I should have welcomed any extravagance. I should have welcomed anything into which she could pour out her heart.
I had threatened Hugh that if he married her he would never know what to expect when he arrived home. No cruel prophecy had ever recoiled more cruelly. After a year of marriage, I used to stay in Chambers of an evening with one care after another piling upon me. My career. I was slipping: if I were to achieve half my ambition, this was the time when I ought to take another jump forward. It was not happening. My practice was growing very slightly, but no more. I could guess too clearly that I was no longer talked about as a coming man.
There was another care which had become darker since the summer. Hints kept reaching me of a scandal breaking round George Passant and the group. I had made inquiries, and they did not reassure me. George would not confide, but I felt there was danger creeping up. Oblivious and obstinate, George shut me out. I was terrified of what might happen to him.