by C. P. Snow
I was in a delicate position that afternoon. I should have liked to be brutal; but all I could safely do was to demonstrate that he ought to bear me in mind. For Sheila was not ready to cut her losses. It was not a matter of the money, which was trivial, nor of any feeling for him, which had not decided her in the first place and had turned to repulsion now. But her will had always been strong, and she had set it to do something for this man. He had turned out more monstrous than she reckoned on, but that was neither here nor there; her will would not let her go.
All I could do was listen while Robinson and Sheila discussed a manuscript, which he admired and she thought nothing of. He said goodbye to us at the top of the stairs, gleaming and deprecatory, like a host after a grand party. I was sure that, the instant the door closed behind him, he grinned at Miss Smith, congratulating himself on how he had ridden off the afternoon.
That summer, while I was reading the papers with an anxiety which grew tighter each month, Sheila paid less and less attention to the news. Her politics had once been like mine, she had hoped for and feared much the same things. But in the August and September of ’38, when for the first time I began listening to the wireless bulletins, she sat by as though uninterested, or went out to continue reading a manuscript for Robinson.
On the day of Munich she disappeared without explanation in the morning, leaving me alone. I could not go out myself, because for some days I had been seized with lumbago, which had become a chronic complaint of mine, and which gave me nights so painful that I had to move out of our room during an attack. All that day of Munich, I was lying on a divan in what, when we first bought the house, had been Sheila’s sitting-room; but since it was there that I had once told her I could stand it no longer, a decision I went back on within an hour, she no longer used it, showing a vein of superstition that I had not seen in her before.
Like those of our bedroom, the windows looked over the garden, the trees on the embankment road, the river beyond; from the divan, as the hours passed that day, I could see the tops of the plane trees against the blue indifferent sky.
The only person I spoke to from morning to late evening was our housekeeper, Mrs Wilson, who brought me lemonade and food which I could not eat. She was a woman of sixty, whose face bore the oddity that a mild, seeping, lifelong discontent had not aged, but had rather made it younger; the corners of her mouth and eyes ran down, her mouth was pinched, and yet she looked like a woman in early middle age whose husband was neglecting her.
Just after she had come up with tea, I heard her step on the stairs again, quick instead of, as usual, reproachfully laborious. When she entered her cheeks were flushed, her expression was humorous and attractive, and she said: ‘They say there isn’t going to be a war.’ She went on, repeating the word which was going through the streets, that the Prime Minister was off to Munich. I asked her to fetch me an evening paper. There it was, as she said, in the stop-press news. I lay there, looking at the trees, which were now gilded by the declining sun, the pain lancinating my back, forgetting Sheila, lost in the fear of what would come, as lost as though it were a private misery.
About seven o’clock, when through the window the sky was incandescent in the sunset, Sheila’s key turned in the lock downstairs. Quickly I took three aspirins, so as to be free from pain for half an hour. When she came she said, bringing a chair to the side of the divan: ‘How have you been?’
I said, not comfortable. I asked how her day had gone. Not bad, she said. She volunteered the information (in my jealous days, I had learned how she detested being asked) that during the afternoon she had called at Maiden Lane. He still insisted that he would bring out a book in the spring. She did not guarantee it, she said, with a jab of her old realism.
I was impatient, not able to attend. I said: ‘Have you heard the news?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s as bad as it can be.’
Since tea-time I had wanted to talk to a friend who thought as I did. Now I was speaking to Sheila as I should have spoken years before, when she still had part of her mind free. It would have been a little surcease, to speak out about my fears.
‘It’s as bad as it can be,’ I repeated.
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘Don’t you think it is?’ I was appealing to her.
‘I suppose so.’
‘If you can have much hope for the future–’
‘It depends how much the future interests you,’ said Sheila.
Her tone chilled me; but I was so desolate that I went on.
‘One can’t live like that,’ I cried.
Sheila replied: ‘You say so.’
As she stared down at me, with the sunset at her back, I could not make out her expression. But her voice held a brittle pity, as she said: ‘Try and rest. Anyway, this will give us a bit of time.’
‘Do you want a bit of time on those terms?’
She said: ‘It might give us time to get R S R a book out.’
It sounded like a frivolity, a Marie-Antoinettish joke in bad taste: but that would have been preferable. For she had spoken out of all that was left of her to feel, out of dread, obsessive will, the inner cold.
I shouted: ‘Is that all you’re thinking of, tonight of all nights?’ She did not speak again. She filled my glass with lemonade, and inspected the aspirin bottle to see that I had enough. For a time she sat silently beside me, in the room now taken over by the darkness. At last she said: ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’
I said no, and in poised, quiet steps she left me.
It was hot that night, and I did not sleep more than an hour or two. The attacks of pain kept mounting, so that I writhed on the bed and the sweat dripped off me; in the periods of respite, I lay with thoughts running through my mind, dark and lucid after the day’s news, lucid until the next bout of pain. For a long time I did not think of Sheila. I was working out repetitively, uselessly, how much time there was, when the next Munich night would follow, what the choice would be. As the hours passed, I began to ask myself, nearer the frontier of sleep, how much chance there was that we should be left – no, not we, I alone – with a personal life? More and more as the morning came, the question took on dream-shapes but stayed there: if this happened or that, what should I do with Sheila?
I took it for granted that I was tied to her. In the past years when I faced, not just the living habit of marriage, but the thought of it, I knew that other men would have found it intolerable: that did not support me, for it made me recognize something harsher, that this was what my nature had sought out. Not because I took responsibility and looked after others: that was true but superficial, it hid the root from which the amiable and deceptive parts of my character grew.
The root was not so pretty. It was a flaw or set of flaws, which both for good and ill, shaped much of how I affected others and the way my life had gone. In some ways I cared less for myself than most men. Not only to my wife, but to my brother, to my friend Roy Calvert, to others, I devoted myself with a lack of self-regard that was, so far as it went, quite genuine. But deeper down the flaw took another shape. Had Sheila been thinking of it when, in our bedroom, she broke out about people helping others for reasons of their own?
At the springs of my nature I had some kind of pride or vanity which not only made me careless of myself but also prevented me going into the deepest human relation on equal terms. I could devote myself; that was all right; so long as I was not in turn understood, looked after, made to take the shames as well as the blessedness of an equal heart.
Thus, so far as I could see within, I had been in search of such a marriage as I found with Sheila – where I was protecting her, watching her face from day to day, and getting back no more interest, often indeed far less, than she would spend on her housekeeper or an acquaintance in a Chelsea pub. It was a marriage in which I was strained as far as I could bear it, constantly apprehensive, often dismally unhappy; and yet it left me with a reserve and strength of spirit, it w
as a kind of home.
There was a lot of chance, I knew, in human relations; one cannot have seen much unless one believed in chance; I might have been luckier and got into a relation less extreme; but on the whole, I had to say of myself what I should have said of others – in your deepest relations, there is only one test of what you profoundly want: it consists of what happens to you.
And yet, no one can believe himself utterly foredoomed. I was not ready to accept that I was my own prisoner. In the early morning, after the night of Munich, I recognized the question, which now formed itself quite clear: what shall I do with Sheila? interspersed among the shapes of the future. Once I had tried to leave her; I could not do so again. Often, though, I had let myself imagine a time in which I might be set free.
Now, in that desolate night, among the thoughts of danger, there entered the inadmissible hope, that somehow I should get relief from the strain of watching over her. In the darkness of the months to come, I might at least (I did not will it, but the hope was there) be freed from the sight of her neurosis. It could happen that I need be responsible no more. As the pain abated and the sky lightened I lay on the threshold of sleep, with the dream-thought that, throwing responsibility away, I should then find something better.
6: Frown under the Bedside Lamp
FEW of my acquaintances liked Sheila. Many men had been attracted to her and several had loved her, but she had always been too odd, too self-centred and ungiving, to evoke ordinary affection. As she grew older and the bones of her character showed through, that was more than ever true. Some of the helpless whom she was kind to idolized her, and so did those who worked for her, including Mrs Wilson, who was the last person to express unconsidered enthusiasm. Apart from them, I had no one to talk to about her when the rumours began to spread; no one I knew in the Chelsea bars and parties would defend her, except one or two, like Betty Vane, who would do so for my sake.
That autumn, I could not discover how much the rumours were alive. I had the impression that after Sheila had confronted Robinson there had been a lull. But Robinson – it was only now that I realized it clearly – became so merry with gossip that he never let it rest for long; exaggerating, transmogrifying, inventing, he presented the story, too luscious to keep, to anyone who met him; everything became a bit larger than life, and I heard, through a chain of word-of-mouth which led back to him, that Sheila’s private income was £4,000 a year, when in fact it was £700.
Thus I thought it likely that Sheila was still being traduced; watching her, I was convinced that she knew it, and that none of her attempts to forget herself had exposed her so. Sometimes, towards the end of the year, I fancied that she was getting tired of it. Even obsessions wear themselves out, I was thinking, just as, in the unhappiest love affair, there comes eventually a point where the forces urging one to escape unhappiness become infinitesimally stronger than those which immerse one in it.
In fact, Sheila’s behaviour was becoming more than ever strange. She went out less, but she was not playing her records hour after hour, which was her final refuge. She seemed to have a new preoccupation. Twice, returning home earlier than usual from Millbank, I heard her footsteps running over the bedroom floor and the sounds of drawers shutting, as though she had been disturbed by my arrival and was hiding something.
It was not safe to ask, and yet I had to know. Mrs Wilson let fall that Sheila had taken to going, each morning, into the room we used as a study; and one day, after starting for the office, I came back as though by accident. Mrs Wilson said that, following her new routine, Sheila was upstairs in the study. It was a room at the back of the house, and I went along the landing and looked in. Beside the window, which looked over the Chelsea roofs, Sheila was sitting at the desk. In front of her was an exercise book, an ordinary school exercise book ruled with blue lines; her head thrown back because of her long sight, she was looking at the words she had just written, her pen balanced over the page. So far as I could see from across the room, it was not continuous prose she was writing, nor was it verse: it looked more like a piece of conversation.
Suddenly she realized that the door was open, that I was there. At once she slammed the exercise book shut and pressed her hand on it.
‘It’s not fair,’ she cried, like an adolescent girl caught in a secret.
I asked her something neutral, such as whether I could change my mind and dine at home that night. ‘It’s not fair,’ Sheila repeated, clutching her book. I said nothing. Without explanation she went across into the bedroom, and there was a noise of a drawer being unlocked and locked again.
But it did not need explanation. She was trying both to write and to keep it secret: was she thinking of Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson? Had she a sisterly feeling for women as indrawn as herself? Usually, when we had spoken of them, she had – it was cool, I thought, coming from her – shown no patience with them, and felt that if they had got down to earth they might have done better.
Anyway, neither she nor I referred to her writing, until the night of the Barbican dinner. The Barbican dinner was one of the festivals I had to attend, because of my connexion with Paul Lufkin. The Barbican was an organization consisting largely of members of banks, investment trusts and insurance companies, which set out to make propaganda for English trade overseas. To this January dinner Lufkin was invited, as were all his senior executives and advisors, and those of his bigger competitors.
I would have got out of it if I could; for the political divide was by this time such that even people like me, inured by habit to holding their tongues, found it a strain to spend a social evening with the other side. And this was the other side. Among my brother and his fellow scientists, in the Chelsea pubs, in the provincial back streets where my oldest friends lived – there we were all on one side. At Cambridge, or even among Betty Vane’s aristocratic relatives, there were plenty who, to the test questions of those years, the Spanish Civil War, Munich, Nazism, gave the same answer as I did myself. Here there was almost none.
I could hear my old master in Chambers, Herbert Getliffe, the rising silk, wise with the times as usual: he was singing in unison, as it were, and so were the active, vigorous, virile men round him: yes, Churchill was a menace and a war-monger and must be kept out at all costs: yes, war was getting less likely every day: yes, everything had been handled as well as it possibly could be handled, everyone knew we were ready to play ball.
I was frightened just as I had been on the night of Munich. I knew some of these men well: though they were less articulate than my friends, though they were trained to conform rather than not to conform, they were mostly able: they were tougher and more courageous than most of us: yet I believed that, as a class, they were self-deceived or worse.
Of all those I knew, there was only one exception. It was Paul Lufkin himself. He had taken his time, had tried to stay laodicean, but at last he had come down coldly among the dissidents. No one could guess whether it was a business calculation or a human one or both. There he sat, neat-headed, up at the benefactors’ table, listening to the other bosses, impassively aware that they sneered about how he was trying to suck up to the Opposition, indifferent to their opinion or any other.
But he was alone, up among the tycoons: so was I, three or four grades down. So I felt a gulp of pleasure when I heard Gilbert Cooke trumpeting brusquely, on the opposite side of the table not far from me, telling his neighbours to make the most of the drinks, since there would not be a Barbican dinner next year.
‘Why not?’
‘We shall be fighting,’ said Gilbert.
‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ said someone.
‘Let’s hope it will,’ said Cooke, his face imperative and flushed. Men were demurring, when he brought his hand down on the table.
‘If it doesn’t come to that,’ he said, ‘we’re sunk.’
He gazed round with hot eyes: ‘Are you ready to see us being sunk?’
He was the son of a regular soldier, he went ab
out in society, he was less used to being over-awed than the people round him. Somehow they listened, though he badgered and hectored them, though he was younger than they were.
He saw me approving of him, and gave a great impudent wink. My spirits rose, buoyed up by this carelessness, this comradeship.
It was not his fault that recently I had seen little of him. He had often invited me and Sheila out, and it was only for her sake that I refused. Now he was signalling comradeship. He called out across the table, did I know the Davidsons? Austin Davidson?
It was a curious symbol of alliance tossed over the heads of those respectable businessmen. Davidson was an art connoisseur, a member of one of the academic dynasties, linked in his youth with high Bloomsbury. No, I called out, I knew his work, of course, but not him. I was recalling to myself the kind of gibes we used to make a few years before about those families and that group: how they carried fine feelings so far as to be vulgar: how they objected with refined agony to ambition in others, and slipped as of right into the vacant place themselves. Those were young men’s gibes, gibes from outside a charmed circle. Now they did not matter: Davidson would have been an ally at that dinner; so was Gilbert, brandishing his name.
When Gilbert drove me home I had drunk enough to be talkative and my spirits were still high. We had each been angry at the dinner and now we spoke out, Gilbert not so anxious as I about the future but more enraged; his fighting spirit heartened me, and it was a long time since I had become so buoyant and reassured.
In that mood I entered the bedroom, where Sheila was lying reading, her book near the bedside lamp, as it had been the evening we quarrelled over Robinson: but now the rest of the room was in darkness, and all I could see was the lamp, the side of her face, her arm coming from the shoulder of her nightdress.
I sat on my bed, starting to tell her of the purgatorial dinner – and then I became full of desire.