Homecomings (12 page)

I learned then, in that devastation, that one could not know such loss without craving for an after-life. My reason would not give me the illusion, not the fractional hope of it – and yet I longed to pray to her.

The Self-defeated

OUTSIDE the window, in the September sunshine, a couple of elderly men were sitting in deckchairs drinking tea. From my bed, which was on the ground floor of a London clinic, I could just see past them to a bed of chrysanthemums smouldering in the shadow. The afternoon was placid, the two old men drank with the peace of cared-for invalids; for me it was peaceful to lie there watching them, free from pain. True, Gilbert Cooke would be bringing me work, I should have to be on my feet by Thursday; but there was nothing the matter with me, I could lie idle for another twenty-four hours.

That day was Tuesday, and I had only entered the clinic on the previous Saturday afternoon. Since Sheila’s death nearly two years before (this was the September of 1941) I had been more on the move than ever in my life, and the pain in my back had not been giving me much rest. It was faintly ludicrous: but, in the months ahead, I was going to be still more occupied, and it was not such a joke to think of dragging myself through meetings as I had been doing, or, on the bad days, holding them round my office sofa. It was not such a joke, and also it watered one’s influence down: in any kind of politics, men listened to you less if you were ill. So I had set aside three days, and a surgeon had tried manipulating me under an anaesthetic. Although I was incredulous, it seemed to have worked. Waiting for Cooke that afternoon, I was touching wood in case the pain returned.

When Gilbert Cooke came in, he had a young woman with him whose name, when he made an imperious gobbled introduction, I did not catch. In fact, taking from him at once some papers marked urgent, I only realized some moments afterwards, absent in my reading, that I had not heard her name. Then I only asked for it with routine politeness. Margaret Davidson. He had mentioned her occasionally, I recalled; she was the daughter of the Davidson whom he had talked of at the Barbican dinner and whom I had been surprised to hear that Gilbert knew.

I glanced up at her, but she had withdrawn to near the window, getting out of our way.

Meanwhile Gilbert stood by my bed, a batch of papers in his hand haranguing me with questions.

‘What have they been doing to you?’

‘Are you fit for decent company at last?’

‘You realize you must stay here until you’re well enough not to embarrass everyone?’

I said I would take the committee on Thursday. He replied that it was out of the question. When I told him how I should handle that day’s business he said that, even if I were fool enough to attend, I could not use those methods.

‘You can’t get away with it every time,’ he said, jabbing his thumb at me in warning. He stood there, his massive shoulders humped, his plethoric face frowning at me. After the fussy, almost maternal concern with which he looked after my health, as he had done since he came into my office, he turned brusquer still. He was talking to me like a professional no-man, just as he used to talk to Paul Lufkin. He did so for the same reason – because he regarded me as a success.

Working under me for nearly two years of war, Gilbert had seen me promoted; he had his ear close to the official gossip. He magnified both what I had done and what was thought of it, but it was true enough that I had made, in those powerful anonymous
couloirs
, some sort of reputation. Partly I had been lucky, for anyone as close to the Minister as I was could not help but attract attention: partly, I had immersed myself in the job, my life simplified for the first time since I was a boy, with no one to watch over, no secret home to distract me.

To Gilbert, who had joined my branch soon after Sheila died, I now seemed an important man. As a consequence, he was loyal and predatory about my interests when I was not present, but face to face insisted on back-chat.

On the coming Thursday we should have to struggle with a problem of security. Some people in one of the ‘private armies’ of the time were busy with a project that none of us believed in; but they had contrived so to enmesh themselves in security that we could not control them. I knew about their project: they knew that I knew: but they would not talk to me about it. I told Gilbert that their
amour propre
might be satisfied if we went through a solemn minuet: they must be asked to explain themselves to the Minister, which they could not refuse to do: he would then repeat the explanation to me: then on Thursday both they and I could hint obliquely at the mystery.

It was the kind of silly tactic that any official was used to. I made some remark that it was dangerous to give secrets to anyone with exaggerated self-esteem: it was bad for business, and worse for his character.

I heard a stirring by the window. I looked at the young woman, who had been sitting quietly there without a word, and to my astonishment saw her face transfigured by such a smile that I felt an instant of ease, almost of expectancy and happiness. Never mind that my piece of sarcasm had been mechanical: her smile lit up her eyes, flushed her skin, was kind, astringent, lively, content.

Until that moment I had scarcely seen her, or seen her through gauze as one sees a stranger one does not expect to meet again. Perhaps I should have noticed that her features were fine-cut. Now I looked at her. When she was not smiling her face might have been austere, except for the accident that her upper lip was short, so that I could not help watching the delicate lines of her nostril and the peak of her lip. As she smiled her mouth seemed large, her face lost its fine moulding: it became relaxed with good nature and also with an appetite for happiness.

Looking at her, I saw how fine her skin was. She had used very little make-up, even on the lips. She was wearing a cheap plain frock – so cheap and plain that it seemed she had not just picked up the first in sight, but deliberately chosen this one.

As she sat by the window, her amusement drying up, she had a curious gaucheness, like an actor who does not know what to do with his hands. This posture, at the same time careless and shy, made her look both younger and frailer than she was in fact. The little I knew of her was collecting in my mind. She must be about twenty-four, I thought, twelve years younger than Gilbert or me. When she laughed again, and her head was thrown back, she did not look frail at all.

I smiled at her. I began to talk to her and for her. I was beating round for something to link us. She was working in the Treasury – no, she was not easy about the people or her job.

Acquaintances in Cambridge – we exchanged names, but no more.

How should I occupy myself tomorrow, I asked, staying here in this room?

‘You oughtn’t to do anything,’ she said.

‘I’m not good at that,’ I replied.

‘You ought to do as Gilbert tells you.’ She had taken care to bring him in, she broke the duologue, she smiled at him. But she spoke to me again: she was positive.

‘You ought to rest all the week.’

I shook my head; yet a spark had flashed between us.

No, I said, I should just have tomorrow to bask in and read – I was short of books, what would be best for the day in bed? She was quick off the mark.

‘You want something peaceful,’ she said.

Not a serious novel, we agreed – not fiction at all, maybe – journals that one could dip into, something with facts in them. Which were the most suitable journals, Bennett’s, Gide’s, Amiel’s?

‘What about the Goncourts?’ she asked.

‘Just what I feel like,’ I said.

I asked, how could I possibly lay my hand on the books by tomorrow?

‘I’ve got them at home,’ she said.

Suddenly the air held promise, danger, strain. I had not enough confidence to go ahead; I needed her to make the running, to give me the sign I longed for; I was waiting for her to say that she would bring a book, or send it to me. Yet I could feel, as she folded her fingers in her lap, that she was diffident too.

If it had been Sheila when I first knew her – some half memory made me more constrained – she would not have given a thought that Gilbert had brought her into the room: she would have announced, in ruthlessness and innocence, that she would deliver the book next morning. But Margaret would not treat Gilbert so, even though their relation appeared to be quite slight. She was too good-mannered to give me the lead I sought. But, even if Gilbert had not been present, could she have done so? She was not only too gentle, but perhaps also she was too proud.

Looking at her, her head no longer thrown back, her eyes studying me, I felt that she had a strong will, but no more confidence that moment than I had myself.

It was Gilbert who snapped the tension off. He would arrange, he said, brusque and cheerful, to get the books round to the clinic first thing next morning. Soon afterwards they left, Margaret saying goodbye from the door: as soon as I heard their steps in the corridor, I was suffused with happiness.

In a beam of evening sun which just missed my bed, the motes were spinning. Outside it, in the twilight, I cherished my happiness, as though by doing so I could stretch it out, as though, by letting myself live in the moment of recognition between this young woman and me half an hour before, I could stay happy.

Several times since Sheila’s death, my eyes had lit up at the sight of a woman, but I had not been able to free myself enough, it had come to nothing. The qualms were not buried; this could come to nothing too. But, just as the old do not always or even most of the time feel old, so someone whose nerve is broken can forget past disasters and cherish the illusions of free will. I felt as free to think of this young woman as if I had not met Sheila, as if I were beginning.

It occurred to me that I had never been able to remember my first meeting with Sheila. It was the second time I could remember, her face already lined, handsome and painted, at nineteen looking older than Margaret in the middle twenties. Yes, I was comparing Margaret with her, as I did when letting my imagination dwell on any woman; it appeared that I had to make sure there was no resemblance, to be convinced that anyone I so much as thought of was totally unlike what I had known.

There was the same comparison in my mind as I thought of Margaret’s nature. She had enough spirit to be exciting – but she seemed tender, equable, easy-going. An hour after she had left, I was making day-dreams of her so.

That evening, lying in bed outside the beam of sunlight, I basked in a kind of uncommitted hope; sometimes homesick images of the past filtered in, as well as the real past that I feared. But I was happy with the illusion of free will, as though with this girl who had just left me bliss was mine if I chose it.

Nevertheless I need do nothing; I had admitted nothing to myself beyond recall; I could refrain from seeing her again without more than a spasm of regret and reproach for my own cowardice.

For that night, I could rest in an island of peace, hoarding my chance of bliss as I used to hoard sweets as a child, docketing them away in a bookshelf corner so that they were ready when I felt inclined.

STILL acting as though uncommitted, I invited Margaret and Gilbert Cooke together, three times that autumn. For me, there was about those evenings the suspense, the inadmissible charm, that abides in a period of waiting for climactic news, as it were an examination result, from which one is safe until the period is up. The meeting in a pub, where Gilbert and I went together from the office and found her waiting: the communiqués in the evening papers: the wartime streets at night: the half-empty restaurants, for London was not crowded that year: the times at dinner when we spoke of ourselves, the questions unspoken: the return alone to Pimlico in the free black night.

One evening in late November Gilbert had accompanied me out of the office for a drink in my club, as he often did. That day, as on most others, we went on discussing our work, for we were engrossed in it. Much of the time since Sheila’s death, I had thought of little else: nor had Gilbert, intensely patriotic, caught up in the war. He had by now picked up some of the skills and language of the professional Civil Servants we were working with: our discussion that evening, just as usual, was much like the discussions of two professionals. I valued his advice: he was both tough and shrewd, and tactically his judgement was better than mine.

There was just one point, however, at which our discussion was not simply business-like. Gilbert had developed Napoleonic ambitions, not for himself, but for me: he saw me rising to power, with himself as second-in-command: he credited me with the unsleeping cunning he had once seen in Paul Lufkin, and read hidden meanings in moves that were quite innocent. Either as result or cause, his curiosity about my behaviour was proliferating so that I often felt spied upon. He was observant quite out of the ordinary run. He would not ask a disloyal question, but he had a gossip-writer’s nose for information. I was fond of him, I had got used to his inquisitiveness, but lately it had seemed to be swelling into a mania.

We could be talking frankly about policy, with no secrets between us, when I happened to mention a business conversation with the Minister. A look, knowing and inflamed, came into Gilbert’s eyes: he was wondering how he could track down what we had said. He was even more zestful about my relations with the Permanent Secretary, Sir Hector Rose. Gilbert knew that the Minister wished me well; he was not so sure how I proposed to get on terms with Rose. About any official scheme, Gilbert asked me my intentions straight out, but in pursuit of a personal one he became oblique. He just exhibited his startling memory by quoting a casual remark I had made months before about Hector Rose, looked at me with bold, hinting eyes, and left it there.

So that I was taken unawares that night when, after we had settled a piece of work, he darted a glance round the bar, making certain no one had come in, and said: ‘How much are you interested in Margaret?’