by C. P. Snow
She heard it in my voice, for she turned on her elbow and stared straight at me.
‘So that’s it, is it?’ she said, cold but not unfriendly, trying to be kind.
On her bed, just as I was taking her, too late to consider her, I saw her face under mine, a line between her eyes carved in the lamplight, her expression worn and sad.
Then I lay beside her, on us both the heaviness we had known often, I the more guilty because I was relaxed, because, despite the memory of her frown, I was basking in the animal comfort of the nerves.
In time I asked: ‘Anything special the matter?’
‘Nothing much,’ she said.
‘There is something?’
For an instant I was pleased. It was some sadness of her own, different from that which had fallen on us so many nights, lying like this.
Then I would rather have had the sadness we both knew – for she turned her head into my shoulder, so that I could not watch her face, and her body pulsed with sobbing.
‘What is the matter?’ I said, holding her to me. She just shook her head.
‘Anything to do with me?’ Another shake.
‘What then?’
In a desperate and rancorous tone, she said: ‘I’ve been weak-minded.’
‘What have you done?’
‘You knew that I’d been playing with some writing. I didn’t show it to you, because it wasn’t for you.’
The words were glacial, but I held her and said, ‘Never mind.’
‘I’ve been a fool. I’ve let R S R know.’
‘Does that matter much?’
‘It’s worse than that, I’ve let him get it out of me.’
I told her that it was nothing to worry about, that she must harden herself against a bit of malice, which was the worst that could happen. All the time I could feel her anxiety like a growth inside her, meaningless, causeless, unreachable. She scarcely spoke again, she could not explain what she feared, and yet it was exhausting her so much that, as I had known happen to her before in the bitterness of dread, she went to sleep in my arms.
7: Triumph of R S Robinson
WHEN Sheila asked Robinson for her manuscript back, he spent himself on praise. Why had she not written before? This was short, but she must continue with it. He has always suspected she had a talent. Now she had discovered it, she must be ready to make sacrifices.
Reporting this to me, she was as embarrassed and vulnerable as when she confessed that she had let him blandish the manuscript out of her. She had never learned to accept praise, except about her looks. Hearing it from Robinson she felt half-elated, she was vain enough for that, and half-degraded.
Nevertheless, he had not been ambivalent; he had praised with a persistence he had not shown since he extracted her promise of help. There was no sign of the claw beneath. It made nonsense of her premonition, that night in my arms.
Within a fortnight, there was a change. A new rumour was going round, more detailed and factual than any of the earlier ones. It was that Sheila had put money into Robinson’s firm (one version which reached me multiplied the amount by three) but not really to help the arts or out of benevolence. In fact, she was just a dilettante who was supporting him because she wrote amateur stuff herself and could not find an easier way to get it published.
That was pure Robinson, I thought, as I heard the story – too clever by half, too neat by half; triumphant because he could expose the ‘lie in life’. To some women, I thought also, it would have seemed the most innocuous of rumours. To Sheila – I was determined she should not have to make the comparison. I telephoned Robinson at once, heard from his wife that he was out for the evening, and made an appointment for first thing next day. This time I meant to use threats.
But I was too late. Sitting in the drawing-room when I got home, Sheila was doing nothing at all. No book, no chess-men, not even her gramophone records – she was sitting as though she had been there for hours, staring out of the lighted room into the January night.
After I had greeted her and settled down by the side of the fire, she said: ‘Have you heard his latest?’
She spoke in an even tone. It was no use my pretending.
I said yes.
‘I’m handing in my resignation,’ she said.
‘I’m glad of that,’ I replied.
‘I’ve tried as much as I can,’ she said, without any tone.
In the same flat, impassive voice, she asked me to handle the business for her. She did not wish to see Robinson. She did not care what happened to him. Her will was broken. If I could manage it, I might as well get her money back. She was not much interested.
As she spoke, discussing the end of the relation with no more emotion than last week’s accounts, she pointed to the grate, where there lay a pile of ash and some twisted, calcined corners of paper.
‘I’ve been getting rid of things,’ she said.
‘You shouldn’t have done,’ I cried.
‘I should never have started,’ she said.
She had burned all, her own holograph and two typescripts. But, against the curious farcical intransigence of brute creation, she had not found it so easy as she expected. The debris in the grate represented a long time of sitting before the fire, feeding in papers. In the end, she had had to drop most of the paper into the boiler downstairs. Even that night, she thought it faintly funny.
However, she had destroyed each trace, so completely that I never read a sentence of hers, nor grasped for certain what kind of book it was. Years later, I met the woman who had once been Miss Smith and Robinson’s secretary, and she mentioned that she had glanced through it. According to her, it had consisted mostly of aphorisms, with a few insets like ‘little plays’. She had thought it was ‘unusual’, but had found it difficult to read.
The morning after Sheila burned her manuscript, I kept my appointment with Robinson. In the Maiden Lane attic, the sky outside pressed down against the window; as I entered, Robinson switched on a single light in the middle of the ceiling.
‘How are you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve conquered that fibrositis, it must have made life miserable.’
Courteous and also cordial, he insisted on putting me in the comfortable chair and fitting a cushion to ease the backache of six months before. His eyes were suspicious, but struck me as gay rather than nervous.
I began: ‘I was coming to see you on my own account–’
‘Any time you’ve got nothing better to do,’ said Robinson.
‘But in fact I’ve come on my wife’s.’
‘I haven’t seen her for two or three weeks; how is she?’
‘She wants,’ I said, ‘to finish any connexion with you or what you call your firm or anything to do with you.’
Robinson blushed, as he had done at our dinner party. That was the one chink in his blandness. Confidentially, almost cheerfully, he asked: ‘Shouldn’t you say that was an impulsive decision?’
He might have been a friend of years, so intimate that he knew what my life had been, enduring an unbalanced wife.
‘I should have advised her to take it.’
‘Well,’ said Robinson, ‘I don’t want to touch on painful topics, but I think perhaps you’ll agree that it’s not unreasonable for me to ask for an explanation.’
‘Do you think you deserve it?’
‘Sir,’ he flared up, like a man in a righteous temper, ‘I don’t see that anything in our respective positions in the intellectual world entitles you to talk to me like that.’
‘You know very well why my wife is quitting,’ I said. ‘You’ve made too much mischief. She isn’t ready to stand any more.’
He smiled at me sympathetically, putting his temper aside as though it were a mackintosh.
‘Mischief ?’ he said.
‘Mischief,’ he repeated, reflectively, like one earnestly weighing up the truth. ‘It would help me if you could just give me an example of what sort of mischief I’m supposed to be guilty of, just as a rough g
uide.’
I said that he had spread slander about her.
‘Remember,’ he said, in a friendly merry manner, ‘remember you’re a lawyer, so you oughtn’t to use those words.’
I said that his slander about the book had sickened her.
‘Do you really think,’ he said, ‘that a sane man would be as foolish as you make me out to be? Do you think I could possibly go round blackguarding anyone who was supporting me? And blackguarding her very stupidly, according to your account, because for the sum she lent me she could have published her book several times over. I’m afraid, I don’t like to say it, but I’m afraid you’ve let Sheila’s difficulties infect you.’
For a second his bland reasonableness, his trick of making his own actions sound like a neurotic’s invention, his sheer euphoria, kept me silent.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ve let poor Sheila’s state infect you. I suppose it is the beginning of schizophrenia, isn’t it?’
‘I am not going to discuss my wife,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think it profitable to discuss your motives–’
‘As for her book,’ he said, ‘I assure you, it has real merit. Mind you, I don’t think she’ll ever become a professional writer, but she can say original things, perhaps because she’s a little different from most of us, don’t you know?’
‘I’ve got nothing to say to you,’ I said. ‘Except to arrange how you can pay my wife’s money back.’
‘I was afraid she might feel like that–’
‘This is final,’ I said.
‘Of course it is,’ said Robinson with his gay, wholehearted laugh. ‘Why, I knew you were going to say that the very moment you came into the room!’
I had been strung up for a quarrel. It was a frustration to hear my words bounce back. If he had been a younger man, I might have hit him. As it was, he regarded me with sympathy, with humour in his small, elephantine eyes, the middle parting geometrically precise in his grandfatherly hair.
‘You’ve done her harm,’ I said in extreme bitterness, and regretted the words as soon as they were out.
‘Harm?’ he inquired. ‘Because of her association with me? What kind of harm?’
He spread out his hands.
‘But, as you said, this isn’t the time or place to consider the troubles of poor Sheila. You came here to take her money out, didn’t you? Always recognize the inevitable, I’m a great believer in that. Don’t you think it’s time we got down to business?’
I had run into another surprise. As I sat beside his desk, listening to Robinson’s summary of his agreement with Sheila and his present situation, I realized he was a man of unusual financial precision and, so far as I could judge, of honesty. It was true that, cherishing his own secretiveness, he concealed from me, just as he had originally concealed from Sheila, some of his sources of income and his expectations of money to come. Somehow he had enough money to continue in his office and to pay Miss Smith; meanwhile, he was postponing his first ‘list’ until the autumn; it struck me, was he glad of the excuse? Daydreaming, planning, word-spinning about the revival of past glories, that was one thing. Putting it to the test was another. Maybe he would like that date deferred.
No one could have procrastinated less, however, about repaying Sheila: he offered to write her a cheque for £300 that day, and to follow it with two equal instalments on 1 June and 1 September.
‘Interest?’ he asked, beaming.
‘She wouldn’t take it.’
‘I suppose she wouldn’t,’ said Robinson with curiosity.
At once he proposed that we should go round to his solicitor’s. ‘I never believe in delay,’ said Robinson, putting on a wide-brimmed hat, an old overcoat trimmed with fur at the collar and sleeves. Proud of his incisiveness, behaving like his idea of a businessman (although it was as much like Paul Lufkin’s behaviour as a Zulu’s), he walked by my side through Covent Garden, the dignified little figure not up to my shoulder. Twice he was recognized by men who worked in the publishers’ or agents’ offices round about. Robinson swept off his grand hat.
‘Good morning to you, sir,’ he cried affably, with a trace of patronage, just as R S Robinson, the coterie publisher, might have greeted them in 1913.
His face gleamed rosy in the drab morning. He looked happy. It might have seemed bizarre to anyone but him that he should have spent all his cunning on acquiring a benefactor, and then used equal ingenuity in driving the benefactor away. Yet I believed he had done it before, it was one of the patterns of his career. To him it was worth it. The pleasures of malice, the pleasures of revenge against one who had the unbearable impertinence to lean down to him – they were worth a bigger price than he had ever had to pay.
And more than that, I thought, as we sniffed the smell of fruit and straw in the raw air, Robinson walking with the assurance of one going to a reputable business rendezvous, it was not only the pleasure of revenge against a benefactor. There was something more mysterious which sustained him. It was a revenge, not against Sheila, not against a single benefactor, but against life.
When I reached home that afternoon, I heard the gramophone playing. That worried me; it worried me more when I found her not in the drawing-room, not in our bedroom, but in the sitting-room where I had spent the night of Munich and which to her was a place of bad luck. In front of her, the ash-tray must have held thirty stubs. I began to say that I had settled with Robinson. ‘I don’t want to hear anything about it,’ she said, in a harsh flat tone.
I tried to amuse her, but she said: ‘I don’t want to hear anything about it.’
She put on another record, shutting out, not only the history of Robinson, but me too.
8: ‘You’ve Done All You Could’
IN the summer, I no longer spent half my time away from Sheila. We were waiting for the war to begin; I slept each night in our bedroom, saw her waking and sleeping without break, as I had not done for years. As soon as war came, I assumed that I should go on living beside her in the Chelsea house, as long as one could foresee.
Those September nights, we were as serene, as near happy, as ever in our marriage. I used to walk, not from Millbank now but Whitehall, for I had already taken up my government job, all along the embankment, often at eight o’clock and after; the air was still warm, the sky glowed like a cyclorama; Sheila seemed glad to see me. She was even interested in the work I was doing.
We sat in the garden, the night sounding more peaceful than any peace-time night, and she asked about the Department, how much the Minister did, to what extent he was in the pocket of his Civil Servants, just where I – as one of his personal assistants – came in. I told her more of my own concerns than I had for a long while. She laughed at me for what she called my ‘automatic competence’, meaning that I did not have to screw myself up to find my way about the world.
I was too much immersed in my new job to notice just when and how that mood broke up. Certainly I had no idea until weeks later that to herself she thought of a moment of collapse as sharp as the crack of a broken leg – and she thought also of as sharp a cause. All I knew was that, in the well-being of September, she had, unknown to me, arranged to join someone’s staff on the first of January. It was work that needed good French, which she had, and seemed more than usually suitable. She described it to me with pleasure, almost with excitement. She said: ‘I expect it will turn out to be R S R all over again,’ but she spoke without shadow. It was a gibe she could only have made in confidence and optimism.
Soon afterwards, not more than a fortnight later, I came home night following night to what seemed to me signs of the familiar strain, no different from what we each knew. I was disappointed the first time I came home to it; I was irritated, because I wanted my mind undistracted; I set myself to go through the routine of caring for her. Persuading her to leave her records and come to bed: talking to her in the darkness, telling her that, just as worse bouts had passed, so would this: discussing other people whose lives were riven by angst –
it domesticated her wretchedness a little to have that label to pin on. It was all repetitive, it was the routine of consolation that I knew by heart, and so did she. Sometimes I thought you had to live by the side of one like Sheila to understand how repetitive suffering is.
All the time I was looking after her, absent-mindedly, out of habit; it seemed like all the other times; it did not occur to me to see a deterioration in her, or how far it had gone. Not even when she tried to tell me.
One night, early in November, I came out of my first sleep, aware that she was not in her bed. I listened to her outside the door, heard a match strike. None of this was novel, for when she could not sleep she walked about the house smoking, considerate of me because I disliked the smell of tobacco smoke at night. The click of the bedroom door, the rasp of a match, the pad of feet in the corridor – many nights they had quietly woken me, and I did not get to sleep again until she was back in bed. This time it was no different, and according to habit I waited for her. The click of the door again: the slither of bedclothes, the spring of the bed. At last, I thought, I can go back to sleep: and contentedly, out of habit, called out – ‘All right?’
For an instant she did not answer; then her voice came: ‘I suppose so.’
I was jerked back into consciousness, and again I asked: ‘Are you all right?’
There was a long pause, in the dark. At last a voice: ‘Lewis.’
It was very rare for her to address me by my name. I said, already trying to soothe her: ‘What is it?’
Her reply sounded thin but steady: ‘I’m in a pretty bad way.’
At once I switched on my bedside lamp, and went across to her. In the shadow, for my body came between the light and her face, I could see her, pale and still; I put my arm round her, and asked what was the matter.
All of a sudden her pride and courage both collapsed. Tears burst from her eyes and, in the transformation of moments, her face seemed decaying, degenerate, almost as though it were dissolving.