by C. P. Snow
With those cares upon me, I would leave Chambers at last, and set out home. I wanted someone to talk to, with the comfort of letting the despondency overflow. ‘My girl,’ I wanted to say, ‘things are going badly. My bit of success may have been a flash in the pan. And there’s worse news still.’ I wanted someone to talk to, and, in fact, when I got home, I might find a stranger. A stranger to whom I was bound, and with whom I could not rest until I had coaxed her to find a little peace. She might, at the worst, be absolutely still, neither reading nor smoking, just gazing into the room. She might have gone out to one of her down-at-heel friends. I could never sleep until she returned, although she tiptoed into the spare room, there to spend the night on the divan. Once or twice I had found her there in the middle of the night, smoking a chain of cigarettes, playing her records still fully dressed.
There was not one night that autumn of 1932, when I could reckon on going back to content.
My unperceptive friends saw me married to a beautiful and accomplished woman, and envied me. My wiser friends were full of resentment. One or two, guessing rightly that I was less a prisoner than before my marriage, dangled other women in front of me. They thought that I was being damaged beyond repair. Not even Charles March, whose temperament was closest to my own, had much good to say of her. No one was wise enough to realize that there was one sure way to please me and to win my unbreakable gratitude: that was to say not that they loved her – she received enough of that – but simply that they liked her. I wanted to hear someone say that she was sweet, and tried to be kind, and that she was harming only herself. I wanted them to be sorry for her, not for me.
Yet, lying beside her, I did not know how long I could stand it.
I was facing the corrosion of my future.
What idea had she of my other life? It seemed to her empty, and my craving for success vulgar. She did not invade me, she did not possess me, she did not wish to push me on. She knew me as a beseeching lover: she turned to me because I knew her and was not put off. For the rest, she left me inviolate and with my secrets. There was none of the give and take of equal hearts.
Lying beside her in the silver light of the October dawn, I did not know how long I could stand it.
She bore the same sense of formal duty to me as to her parents. Just as she visited them for Christmas, so she offered, once or twice, to entertain some legal acquaintances. ‘You want me to. I shall do it,’ she said. I did want it, but I knew before her first dinner party that nothing would be more of an ordeal. It was only recently that I had let her try again: and the result had been our dinner of the previous night.
I had mentioned that it was months since Henriques sent me a brief. She made some indifferent response; and then, some days later, she asked if she should invite the Henriques to the flat. I was so touched by the sign of consideration that I said yes with gusto, and told her (for the sake of some minor plan) to ask the Getliffes as well. For forty-eight hours before the dinner, she was wretched with apprehension. It tore open her diffidence, it exposed her as crippled and inept.
Before they arrived, Sheila stood by the mantelpiece; I put an arm round her, tried to tease her into resting, but she was rigid. She drank four or five glasses of sherry standing there. It was rare for her to drink at all. But for a time the party went well. Mrs Getliffe greeted us with long, enthusiastic stares from her doglike brown eyes, and cooed about the beauties and wonders of the flat. Her husband was the most valuable of guests; he was always ready to please, and he conceived it his job to make the party go. Incidentally, he provided me with a certain amusement, for I had often heard him profess a cheerful anti-Semitism. In the presence of one of the most influential of Jewish solicitors, I was happy to see that his anti-Semitism was substantially modified.
We gave them a good meal. With her usual technical competence, Sheila was a capable cook, and though I knew little of wine I had learned where to take advice. At any party, Getliffe became half-drunk with his first glass, and stayed in that expansive state however much he drank. He sat by Sheila’s side; he had a furtive eye for an attractive woman, and a kindly one for a self-conscious hostess who needed a bit of help. He chatted to her, he drew the table into their talk. He was not the kind of man she liked, but he set her laughing. I had never felt so warm to him.
Henriques was his subdued, courteous, and observant self. I hoped that he was approving. With his wife, I exchanged gossip about the March family. I smiled down the table at Sheila, to signal that she was doing admirably, and she returned the smile.
It was Getliffe, in the excess of his bonhomie, who brought about the change. We had just finished the sweet, and he looked round the table with his eyes shining and his face open.
‘My friends,’ he said, ‘I’m going to call you my friends at this time of night’ – he gazed at Henriques with his frank man-to-man regard. ‘I’ve just had a thought. When I wake up in the night, I sometimes wonder what I should do if I could have my time over again. I expect we all do, don’t we?’
Someone said yes, of course we did.
‘Well then,’ said Getliffe triumphantly, ‘I’m going to ask you all what you’d really choose – if God gave you the chance on a plate. If He came to you in the middle of the night and said “Look here, Herbert Getliffe, you’ve seen round some of this business of life by now. You’ve done a lot of silly little things. Now you can have your time over again. It’s up to you. You choose.”’
Getliffe gave a laugh, fresh, happy, and innocent.
‘I’ll set the ball rolling,’ he said. ‘I should make a clean sweep. I shouldn’t want to struggle for the prizes another time. Believe me, I should just want to do a bit of good. I should like to be a country parson – like your father’ – he beamed at Sheila: she was still – ‘ready to stay there all my life and giving a spot of comfort to a few hundred souls. That’s what I should choose. And I bet I should be a happier man.’
He turned to Mrs Henriques, who said firmly that she would devote herself to her co-religionists, instead of trying to forget that she was born a Jewess. I came next, and said that I would chance my luck as a creative writer, in the hope of leaving some sort of memorial behind me.
On my left, Mrs Getliffe gazed adoringly at her husband. ‘No, I shouldn’t change at all. I should ask for the same again, please. I couldn’t ask anything better than to be Herbert’s wife.’
Surprisingly, Henriques said that he would elect to stay at Oxford as a don.
We were all easy and practised talkers, and the replies had gone clockwise round at a great pace. Now it was Sheila’s turn. There was a pause. Her head was sunk on to her chest. She had a wineglass between her fingers; she was not spinning it, but tipping it to and fro. As she did so, drops of wine fell on the table. She did not notice. She went on tipping her glass, and the wine fell.
The pause lasted. The strain was so acute that they turned their eyes from her.
At last: ‘I pass.’ The words were barely distinguishable, in that strangulated tone.
Quick to cover it up, Getliffe said: ‘I expect you’re so busy taking care of old L S – you can’t imagine anything else, either better or worse, can you! For better, for worse,’ he said, cheerfully allusive. ‘Why, I remember when L S first pottered into my Chambers–’
The evening was broken. She scarcely spoke again until they said goodbye. Getliffe did his best, the Henriques kept up a steady considerate flow of talk, but they were all conscious of her. I talked back, anything to keep the room from silence; I even told anecdotes; I mentioned with a desperate casualness places and plays to which Sheila and I had been and how we had argued or agreed.
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.
46: The New House
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 de
cided 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.