Homecomings (10 page)

‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ said Cooke.

‘They’d take you as a principal tomorrow.’

‘How could they think I was any use to them?’

A little drunk, half-irritated that he would not trust my judgement, half-touched by his modesty, I said: ‘Look here. Would you like to work in my place?’

‘You don’t mean there would be a chance?’

‘I can take the first step tomorrow.’

Gilbert regarded me with bold eyes, determined to see the catch in it, diffident about thanking me. From that instant he just wanted a comradely evening. Brandy by the fire: half-confidences: the stories, gilded at the edges, of youngish men on a happy alcoholic night. One thing struck me about Gilbert’s stories. He was an adventurous, versatile man, always on the move: but he was meticulously pure in speech, and, although he spoke of women with liking, he did not talk openly of sex.

Next morning, in the breakfast-room of my club, the coal-fire crackled and spurted: the unfolded newspapers glinted on the table under the light; in the street outside the pavement looked dark with cold. Although I had a headache, it was not enough to put me off my breakfast, and food was still good, so early in the war. I ate the kidneys and bacon, and, indulging my thirst, went on drinking tea; the firelight was reflected back from the grey morning mist outside the windows. Acquaintances came to the tables, opening their
Times
. It was all warmed and cared-for, and I enjoyed stretching out the minutes before I rang up Sheila. At a quarter past nine, I thought, she would be getting up. In comfort, I drank another cup of tea.

When I got through to our house, the telephone burred out perhaps twenty times, but I was not anxious, thinking that Sheila must still be asleep. Then I heard Mrs Wilson’s voice.

‘Who is it?’

I asked, was Sheila up.

‘Oh, Mr Eliot,’ came the thin, complaining voice.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Something’s happened. I think you ought to come back straightaway. I think you must.’

I knew.

‘Is she all right physically?’

‘No.’

‘Is she dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s killed herself?’

‘Yes.’

I was sick with shock, with the first numbness; I heard myself asking: ‘How did she do it?’

‘It must have been her sleeping tablets, there’s the empty bottle lying by the side of her.’

‘Have you called a doctor?’

‘I’m afraid she’s been dead for hours, Mr Eliot. I only found her ten minutes ago, and I didn’t know what to do.’

I said that I would arrange everything, and be with her in half an hour.

‘I’m very sorry about it myself. I was very fond of her, poor soul. It was a great shock for me, finding her,’ came Mrs Wilson’s voice, in a tone of surprise, aggrievement, injury. ‘It was a great shock for me.’

At once I rang up Charles March. I must have a doctor whom I could trust, I thought. As I waited, it occurred to me that neither Sheila nor I had used a regular doctor in London. Apart from my lumbago, we had been physically healthy people.

Charles was out at a patient’s. I left a message, saying that I needed him with extreme urgency. Then I went into the street and took a taxi home. In the freezing morning the desolate Park skimmed by, Exhibition Road, the knot of shop-lights by South Kensington Station. Twice the smell of the taxi’s leather made me retch. I seemed at a distance from my own pain: somehow, dimly, numbly, I knew that grief and remorse were gnawing inside me, twisting my bowels with animal deprivation, with the sensual misery of loss. And also I felt the edge of a selfish and entirely ignoble fear. I was afraid that her suicide might do me harm; I shied from thinking of what kind of harm, but the superstitious reproach hung upon me, mingled with remorse. The fear was sharp, practical and selfish.

In the hall, Mrs Wilson’s eyes were bloodshot, and she squeezed her handkerchief and pressed it into the corner of one eye and then the other: but her manner had the eagerness, the zest, of one living close to bad news.

‘She’s not in the bedroom, Mr Eliot,’ she whispered. ‘She did it in her old sitting-room.’

I wondered whether it was a chance, or whether she had chosen it.

‘Did she leave any letters?’ I asked, and I also was near whispering.

‘I couldn’t see anything, I looked round, of course, but I couldn’t see a piece of paper in the room. I went up with her tea, Mr Eliot, and I knocked on the bedroom door, and no one answered, and I went in and there was no one there–’

Although Mrs Wilson wished to follow me, I went upstairs alone. The sitting-room curtains were drawn, though I did not know by whom, it might have been by Mrs Wilson a few minutes before. In the half-light I was struck by the dread that came on me as a child when I went into the room where my grandfather’s body was stretched out. Before looking at her, I pulled the curtains open; the room stood bare to the leaden light. At last I forced my eyes towards the divan.

She was lying on her back, dressed in a blouse and skirt such as she wore in the house on an ordinary afternoon, her head a quarter turned towards the window. Her left hand was by her side and her right fell across her breast, the thumb wide apart from the fingers. The lines of her face were so softened by death that they had become only grazes, as though her living face had been photographed through muslin; her cheeks, which had never hollowed, now were as full as when she was a girl. Her eyes were open and enormous: on her mouth there was a defensive, deprecatory, astonished grin, exactly the grin she wore when she was taken at a loss and exclaimed ‘Well, I’m damned’.

There was, just visible because of the tablets she had taken, a dried trickle of saliva down the side of her chin, as though she had dribbled in her sleep.

I stared for a long time, gazing down at her. However one read her expression, the moment of death seemed not to have been tragic or unhappy. I did not touch her; perhaps, if she had looked sadder, I should have done.

By the divan stood the bedside table, just as on the night of Munich, when she had placed my bottle of aspirin there for me. Now another bottle rested on the cherry wood, but empty and without its stopper, which she must have dropped on to the floor. Beside the bottle was a tumbler, containing about three fingers’ depth of water, stale with the night’s bubbles. There was nothing else at all. Into that room she brought nothing but her bottle and the glass of water.

I searched for a note as though I were a detective. In that room – in the bedroom – in my study – I studied the envelopes in the wastepaper baskets, looking for any line to her parents or me. In her handbag I found her pen unfilled. On her writing-desk the paper was blank. She had gone without a word.

Suddenly I was angry with her. I was angry, as I looked down at her. I had loved her all my adult life; I had spent the years of my manhood upon her; with all the possessive love that I had once felt for her, I was seared because she had not left me a goodbye.

Waiting for Charles March, I was not mourning Sheila. I had room for nothing but that petty wound, because I had been forgotten; the petty wound, and also the petty fear of the days ahead. As I waited there, I was afraid of much, meeting the Knights, going to the office, even being seen by my friends.

WHILE Charles March was examining her I went into the bedroom, where I gazed out of the window, aware of nothing but fears and precautions. The only recognition that I gave to Sheila was that my eyes kept themselves away from any glance at her bed, at the undisturbed immaculate bed.

There I stayed until Charles’ step outside warned me. I met the concerned glance from his sharp, searching eyes, and we walked together to the study.

‘This is bound to be a horror for you,’ he said. ‘And nothing that I or anyone else can say is going to alter that, is it?’

Nowadays Charles and I did not see each other often. When I first came to London as a poor young man to read in chambers, he had befriended me. We were the same age, but he was rich and had influential relatives. Since then he had changed his way of life, and become a doctor. When we met, the old intuitive sympathy sparked between us. But that morning he did not realize how little I was feeling, or what that little was.

‘There is no doubt, I suppose?’ I asked.

‘You don’t think so yourself?’ he answered.

I shook my head, and he said: ‘No, there’s no doubt. None at all.’

He added, with astringent pity: ‘She did it very competently. She had a very strong will.’

‘When did she do it?’ I had gone on speaking with neutrality. He was studying me protectively, as though he were making a prognosis.

‘Some time last night, I think.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was out for the evening. I was having a cheerful time at a club, as a matter of fact.’

‘I shouldn’t take that to heart, if I were you.’

He leaned forward in his chair, his eyes brilliant in the dark room, and went on: ‘You know, Lewis, it wasn’t such an intolerable wrench for her to die as it would be for you or me. She wasn’t so tied to life as we are. People are as different in the ways they die as in the ways they live. Some go out as though they were shrugging their shoulders. I imagine that she did. I think she just slipped out of life. I don’t think she suffered much.’

He had never liked her, he had thought her bad for me, but he was speaking of her with kindness. He went on: ‘You’re going to suffer a lot more, you know.’

He added: ‘The danger is, you’ll feel a failure.’

I did not respond.

‘Whatever you’d done or been, it wouldn’t have helped her,’ he said, with energy and insistence.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘that doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters, if you’re going to feel you’ve failed. And no one but yourself can be any good to you there.’

Again I did not respond.

He gazed at me sternly: he knew that my emotions were as strong as his: he had not seen them dead before. He was using his imagination to help me, he did not speak for some time, his glance stayed hard and appraising as he reached a settlement in his own mind.

‘The only thing I can do for you now is superficial, but it might help a little,’ he said, after a silence.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Does anyone else know about her?’

‘Only Mrs Wilson,’ I said.

‘Would she keep quiet?’

‘It’s possible,’ I replied.

‘If necessary, could you guarantee it?’

I did not reply at once. Then I said: ‘If necessary, I think I could.’

Charles nodded. He said: ‘I expect it will make you just a little worse to have other people knowing about her death, I know it would me. You’ll feel that your whole life with her is open to them, and that they’re blaming you. You’re going to take too much responsibility on yourself whatever happens, but this will make it worse.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘Well, I can save you that,’ he broke out.

He went on: ‘It won’t help much, but it will a little. I’m willing to sign a certificate that she died a natural death.’

Charles was a bold man, who lived in close touch with moral experiences. Perhaps he had that special boldness, that ability to act in moral isolation, that one found most commonly in men born rich. Between perjuring himself, which he would dislike more than most, and leaving me exposed he had made his choice.

I was not altogether surprised: in fact, in sending for him rather than for any of the doctors near, I had some such hope half-concealed.

I was tempted. Quickly I was running through the practical entanglements: if there was any risk to him professionally I could not let him run it. We had each been thinking of that, while he questioned me. Could I answer absolutely for Mrs Wilson? Who else need know the truth? The Knights must, as soon as they arrived. But they would keep the secret for their own sakes.

I thought it over. As I did so, I had little insight into my own motives. It was not entirely, or even mainly, because of practical reasons or scruples about Charles’ risk that I answered: ‘It’s not worth it.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

Charles went on persuading me until he was convinced that my mind was made up. Then he said that he was relieved. He left to inquire about the inquest, while I telephoned the Knights. I told Mrs Knight the bare news and asked them to come that afternoon. She sounded reliable and active in the face of shock, but she cried: ‘I don’t know how he’ll get through it.’

That same afternoon I had to go to a committee, among civil, sensible strangers.

Back in the house, blacked-out early on the December night, I could not stay still until the Knights came. Mrs Wilson had gone out to shop, getting a meal ready for them, and I was alone in the empty house. Yet no house seemed empty while someone lay dead: the reverse was true, there was a claustrophobic pressure, although I had not visited the sitting-room again.

In my restlessness I turned over Sheila’s books once more, re-read the letters in her desk, in the silly hope that I might find news of her. By a fluke, I did find just a little, not among her books or papers, but in her bag. Expecting nothing, I picked out her engagement diary and rifled through it; most of the pages shone bare, since the appointments with Robinson in January and February: since then, she had seen almost no one. But in the autumn pages I caught sight of a few written words – no, not just words, whole sentences.

It was an ordinary small pocket book, three inches by two, and she had scaled down her writing, which as a rule was elegant but had a long-sighted tallness. There were only seven entries, beginning in October, a week after the afternoon which she referred to as her ‘crack-up’. As I read, I knew that she had written for herself alone. Some of the entries were mere repetitions.

4 November: Ten days since the sensation in my head. No good. No one believes me.

12 November: January 1st bad enough anyway. Seems hopeless after something snapped in head.

28 November: Told I must go on. Why should I? That’s the one comfort, I needn’t go on.