Homecomings

by C. P. Snow

  In the past two years I had seen him little, for he was flying in the Air Force, and, though Margaret and he knew what the other meant to me, they had never met. Yet it was true that each had disliked the sound of the other’s name. Roy was not fond of women of character, much less if they had insight too; if I were to marry again, he would have chosen for me someone altogether more careless, obtuse, and easy-going.

  In return she suspected him of being a poseur, a romantic fake without much fibre, whose profundity of experience she mostly discounted and for the rest did not value. In her heart, she thought he encouraged in me much that she struggled with.

  At the news of his death she gave no sign, so far as I could see through the smear of grief, of her dislike, and just wanted to take care of me. I could not respond. I was enough of an official machine – as I had been in the weeks after Sheila’s death – to be civil and efficient and make sharp remarks at meetings: as soon as I was out of the office I wanted no one near me, not even her. I recalled Helen’s warning; I wanted to pretend, but I could not.

  It did not take her long to see.

  ‘You want to be alone, don’t you?’ she said. It was no use denying it, though it was that which hurt her most. ‘I’m less than no help to you. You’d better be by yourself.’

  I spent evenings in my own room, doing nothing, not reading, limp in my chair. In Margaret’s presence I was often silent, as I had never been with her before. I saw her looking at me, wondering how she could reach me, clutching at any sign that I could give her – and wondering also whether all had gone wrong, and if this was the last escape.

  On a close night, near mid-summer, the sky was not quite dark, we walked purposelessly round the Bayswater streets and then crossed over to Hyde Park and found an empty bench. Looking down the hollow towards the Bayswater Road we could see the scurf of newspapers, the white of shirts and dresses in couples lying together, shining out from the grass in the last of the light. The litter of the night, the thundery closeness: we sat without looking at each other: each of us was alone, with that special loneliness, containing both guilt and deprivation, containing also dislike and a kind of sullen hate, which comes to those who have known extreme intimacy, and who are seeing it drift away. In that loneliness we held each other’s hand, as though we could not bear the last token of separation.

  She said quietly, in a tone of casual gossip, ‘How is your friend Lufkin?’

  We knew each other’s memories so well. She was asking me to recall that once, months before, when we were untroubled, we had met him by chance, not here, but on the path nearer the Albert Gate.

  ‘I haven’t seen him.’

  ‘Does he still feel misunderstood?’

  Again she was making me recall. She had taught me so much, I told her once. She had said: ‘So have you taught me.’ Most of the men I talked to her about had never come near her father’s world: she had not realized before what they were like.

  ‘I’m sure he does.’

  ‘Snakes-in-the-grass.’ It was one of Lufkin’s favourite exclamations, confronted with yet another example, perpetually astonishing to him, of others’ duplicity, self-seeking, and ambition. Margaret could not believe that men so able could live cut off from their own experience. It had delighted her, and, searching that night for something for us to remember, she refound the phrase and laughed out loud.

  For a while we talked, glad to be talking, of some of the characters I had amused her with. It was a strange use for those figures, so grand in their offices, so firm in their personae, I thought later, to be smiled over by the two of us, clutching on to the strand of a love-affair, late at night out in the park.

  We could not spin it out, we fell back into silence. I had no idea of how the time was passing, now that the night had come down. I could feel her fingers in mine, and at last she called my name, but mechanically, as though she were intending an endearment but was remote. She said: ‘A lot has happened to you.’

  She did not mean my public life, she meant the deaths of Sheila and Roy Calvert.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘It was bound to affect you, I know that.’

  ‘I wish,’ I said, ‘that I had met you before any of it happened.’

  Suddenly she was angry.

  ‘No, I won’t listen. We met when we did, and this is the only time together we shall ever have.’

  ‘I might have been more–’

  ‘No. You’re always trying to slip out of the present moment, and I won’t take it any more.’

  I answered sullenly. The present moment, the existent moment – as we sat there, in the sultry darkness, we could neither deal with it nor let it be. We could not show each other the kindness we should have shown strangers: far less could we allow those words to come out which, with the knowledge and touch of intimacy, we were certain could give the other a night’s peace. If she could have said to me, it doesn’t matter, leave it, some day you’ll be better and we’ll start again – If I could have said to her, I will try to give you all you want, marry me and somehow we shall come through – But we could not speak so, it was as though our throats were sewn up.

  We stayed, our hands touching, not tired so much as stupefied while the time passed: time not racing hallucinatorily by, as when one is drunk, but just pressing on us with something like the headaching pressure of the thundery air in which we sat. Sometimes we talked, almost with interest, almost as though we were going out for the first time, for the first meal together, about a play that ought to be seen or a book she had just read. After another bout of silence, she said in a different tone: ‘Before we started, I asked what you wanted from me.’

  I said yes.

  ‘You said, you didn’t want anything one-sided, you didn’t want the past all over again.’

  I replied: ‘Yes, I said that.’

  ‘I believed you,’ she said.

  Over Park Lane the sky was not so densely black, there was a leaden light just visible over the roofs. The sight struck more chilly than the dark had been. The midsummer night was nearly over. She asked: ‘It looks as though we have come to a dead end?’

  Even then, we wanted to hear in each other the sound of hope.

  27: View of a Swinging Door

  WITHOUT seeing Margaret again I went off travelling on duty, and it was a fortnight before I returned to London. The day I got back, I found a note on my desk. Margaret had telephoned, would I meet her that evening in the foyer of the Café Royal? At once I was startled. We had never gone there before, it was a place without associations.

  Waiting, a quarter of an hour before the time she fixed, I stared at the swinging door and through the glass at the glare outside. The flash of buses, the dazzle of cars’ bonnets, the waft of the door as someone entered but not she – I was at the stretch of waiting. When at last the door swung past and showed her, minutes early, I saw her face flushed and set; but her step, as she came across the floor, was quick, light, and full of energy.

  As she greeted me her eyes were intent on mine; they had no light in them, and the orbits had gone deeper and more hollow.

  ‘Why here?’ I broke out.

  ‘You must know. I hope you know.’

  She sat down: I had a drink ready, but she did not touch it.

  ‘I hope you know,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me then.’

  She was speaking, so was I, quite unlike the choked hours in the park: we were speaking at our closest.

  ‘I am going to get married.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Geoffrey.’

  ‘I knew it.’

  Her face at the table came at me in the brilliant precision of a high temperature, sharp edged, so vivid that sight itself was deafening.

  ‘It is settled, you know,’ she said. ‘Neither of us could bear it if it wasn’t, could we?’

  She was speaking still with complete understanding, as though her concern for me was at its most piercing, and mine for her; she was speaking also as one
buoyed up by action, who had cut her way out of a conflict and by the fact of acting was released.

  I asked: ‘Why didn’t you write and tell me?’

  ‘Don’t you know it would have been easier to write?’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I couldn’t let you get news like that over your breakfast and by yourself.’

  I looked at her. Somehow, as at a long distance the words made me listen to what I was losing – it was like her, maternal, irrationally practical, principled, a little vain. I looked at her not yet in loss, so much as in recognition.

  She said: ‘You know you’ve done everything for me, don’t you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You’ve given me confidence I should never have had,’ she went on. ‘You’ve taken so many of the fears away.’

  Knowing me, she knew what might soften the parting for me.

  Suddenly she said: ‘I wish, I wish that you could say the same.’

  She had set herself to be handsome and protective to the end, but, she could not sustain it. Her tears had sprung out. With a quick, impatient, resolved gesture, she was on her feet.

  ‘I hope all goes well with you.’

  The words, doubtful and angry in their tone, heavy with her concern, were muffled in my ears. They were muffled, like a sad forecast, as I watched her leave me and walk to the door with a firm step. Not looking back, she pushed the door round, so hard that, after I had lost sight of her, the empty segments sucked round before my eyes, sweeping time away, leaving me with nothing there to see.

  Part Three

  Condition of a Spectator

  28: A Change of Taste

  AFTER Margaret gave me up, I used to go home alone when I left the office on a summer evening. But I had plenty of visitors to my new flat, people I cared for just enough to be interested to see, friendly acquaintances, one or two protégés. For me they were casual evenings, making no more calls on me than a night’s reading.

  Sometimes, in the midst of a long official gathering, I thought, not without a certain enjoyment, of how baffled these people would be if they saw the acquaintances with whom I proposed to spend that night. For now I had been long enough in the office to be taken for granted: since the Minister lost his job, I did not possess as much invisible influence as when I was more junior, but in official eyes I had gone up, and the days were stable, full of the steady, confident voices of power. Then I went home from one of Hector Rose’s committees, back to the dingy flat.

  Just after Margaret said goodbye, I had to move out of the Dolphin block and, not in a state to trouble, I took the first rooms I heard of, in the square close by. They took up the ground floor of one of the porticoed Pimlico houses; the smell of dust was as constant as a hospital smell; in the sitting-room the sunlight did not enter, even in high summer, until five o’clock. In that room I listened to the acquaintances who came to see me; it was there that Vera Allen, my secretary, suddenly broke out of her reserve and told me of the young man whom Gilbert had identified. He seemed to love her, Vera cried, but he would neither marry nor make love to her. That was, on the surface, a story commonplace enough, in contrast to some of the others which came my way.

  Of my old friends, the only one I saw much of was Betty Vane, who came in to make the flat more liveable, just as she had busied herself for me after Sheila’s death. She knew that I had lost Margaret: about herself she volunteered nothing, except that she had left her job and found another in London, leaving me to assume that she and I were in the same state.

  Irritable, undemanding, she used to clean up the room and then go with me round the corner to the pub on the Embankment. Through the open door the starlings clamoured: we looked at each other with scrutiny, affection, blame. We had been friends on and off for so long, and now we met again it was to find that the other had got nowhere.

  When she or any other visitor let herself out last thing at night, there was likely to be a pad and scuffle outside my door and a soft, patient, insidious knock. Then round the door would insinuate a podgy shapeless face, a great slack heavy body wrapped in a pink satin dressing-gown. It was Mrs Beauchamp, my landlady, who lived on the floor above mine and who spent her days spying from her room above the portico and her nights listening to steps on the stairs and sounds from her tenants’ rooms.

  One night, just after Betty had left, she went through her routine: ‘I was just wondering, Mr Eliot, I know you won’t mind me asking, but I was just wondering if you had a drop of milk?’

  The question was a matter of form. With each new tenant, she cherished a hope of heart speaking unto heart, and, as the latest arrival, I was going through the honeymoon period. As a matter of form, I asked her if she could manage without the milk for that night’s supper.

  ‘Ah, Mr Eliot,’ she breathed, a trifle ominously, ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  Then she got down to business.

  ‘That was a very nice young lady if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Eliot, that seemed to be coming to see you when I happened to be looking down the street tonight, or at least, not exactly young as some people call young, but I always say that none of us are as young as we should like to be.’

  I told her Betty was younger than I was: but as she thought me ten years older than my real age, Mrs Beauchamp was encouraged.

  ‘I always say that people who aren’t exactly young have feelings just the same as anyone else, and sometimes their feelings give them a lot to think about, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Eliot,’ she said, with an expression that combined salacity with extreme moral disapproval. But she was not yet satisfied.

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ she said, ‘if you told me that that nice young lady had come of a very good family.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you?’

  ‘Now, Mr Eliot, she does or she doesn’t. I’m sorry if I’m asking things I shouldn’t, but I like to feel that when anyone does the same to me I don’t send them away feeling that they have made a faux pas.’

  ‘As a matter of fact she does.’

  ‘Breeding will out,’ Mrs Beauchamp exhaled.

  The curious thing was, she was an abnormally accurate judge of social origin. The derelicts who visited me she put down to my eccentricity: the respectable clerks from the lower middle classes, like Vera Allen and her Norman, Mrs Beauchamp spotted at once, and indicated that I was wasting my time. Of my Bohemian friends, she detected precisely who was smart and who was not.

  She went on to tell me the glories of her own upbringing, the convent school – ‘those dear good nuns’ – and of Beauchamp, who was, according to her, entitled to wear seventeen distinguished ties. Improbable as Mrs Beauchamp’s autobiography sounded when one saw her stand oozily in the doorway, I was coming to believe it was not totally untrue.

  Whenever I answered the telephone in the hall, I heard a door click open on the next floor and the scuffle of Mrs Beauchamp’s slippers. But I could put up with her detective work, much as I used, before he touched a nerve, to put up with Gilbert Cooke’s.

  All this time, since the day when he told Margaret’s sister of the suicide, I had been meeting Gilbert in the office; I talked business with him, even gossiped, but I had not once let fall a word to him about my own concerns. He was the first to notice signs of anyone withdrawing, but this time I was not sure that he knew the reason. I was quite sure, however, that he had discovered the break with Margaret, and that he was expending some effort to observe how I was living now.

  Coming into my office one evening in the autumn, he said imperiously and shyly: ‘Doing anything tonight?’

  I said no.

  ‘Let me give you dinner.’

  I could not refuse and did not want to, for there was no pretence about the kindness that brimmed from him. As well as being kind, he was also, I recognized once more, sensitive: he did not take me to White’s, since he must have imagined – the last thing I should have mentioned to anyone, to him above all – how I linked our dinner there with the
night of Sheila’s death. Instead, he found a restaurant in Soho where he could order me one or two of my favourite dishes, the names of which he had stored away in that monstrous memory. He proceeded to bully me kindly about my new flat.

  ‘It’s near the Dolphin, isn’t it?’ (He knew the address.) ‘It’s one of those eighteen-fortyish houses, I suppose. Not much good in air-raids, you must move out if they start again,’ he said, jabbing his thumb at me. ‘We can’t let you take unnecessary risks.’

  ‘What about you?’ I said. His own flat was at the top of a ramshackle Knightsbridge house.

  ‘It doesn’t matter about me.’

  Brushing my interruption aside, he got back to the subject, more interesting to him, of my living arrangements.

  ‘Have you got a housekeeper?’

  I said I supposed that one could call Mrs Beauchamp that.

  ‘Doesn’t she make you comfortable?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he cried impatiently, ‘why you don’t do something about it!’

  ‘Don’t worry yourself,’ I said, ‘I genuinely don’t mind.’

  ‘What is she like?’

  I wanted to warn him off, so I smiled at him, and said: ‘To put it mildly, she’s just a bit inquisitive.’

  When I had spoken I was sorry, since it suddenly struck me as not impossible that Gilbert would find occasion to have a tête-à-tête with Mrs Beauchamp. For the moment, however, he laughed, high-voiced, irritated with me.

  The meal went on agreeably enough. We talked official shop and about the past. I thought again, everything Gilbert said was his own; in his fashion he was a creative man. He was being lavish with the drink, and now there was half a bottle of brandy standing before us on the table. It was a long time since I had drunk so much. I was cheerful, I was content for the evening to stretch out. As I was finishing some inconsequential remark I saw Gilbert leaning over the table towards me, his big shoulders hunched. His eyes hot and obsessive, he said: ‘I can tell you something you’ve been waiting to know.’