Homecomings (34 page)

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘this can all wait.’

‘The country won’t stop?’ With a gesture as lively as an undergraduate’s, he brushed the quiff of grey hair off his forehead. ‘You see, I’m looking for someone to brag to. And there’s no one else in this part of London whom I can decently brag to, at least for long enough to be satisfactory.’

He had just, calling at the Athenaeum, received the offer of an honorary degree, not from his own university but from St Andrews. ‘Which is entirely respectable,’ said Davidson. ‘Of course, it doesn’t make the faintest difference to anything I’ve tried to do. If in twenty years five people read the compositions of an obsolete critic of the graphic arts, it won’t be because some kind academic gentleman gave him an LL.D. In fact, it’s dubious whether critics ought to get any public recognition whatever. There’s altogether too much criticism now, and it attracts altogether too much esteem. But still, if any criticism is going to attract esteem, I regard it as distinctly proper that mine should.’

I smiled. I had witnessed a good many solid men receive honours, men who would have dismissed Davidson as bohemian and cranky: solid men who, having devoted much attention to winning just such honours, then wondered whether they should accept them, deciding, after searching their souls, that they must for their wives’ and colleagues’ sakes. By their side, Austin Davidson was so pure.

‘The really pressing problem is,’ said Davidson, ‘to make sure that all one’s acquaintances have to realize the existence of this excellent award. They have a curious tendency not to notice anything agreeable which comes one’s way. On the other hand, if someone points out in a very obscure periodical that Austin Davidson is the worst art critic since Vasari, it’s quite remarkable how everyone I’ve ever spoken to has managed to fix his eyes on that.

‘Of course,’ Davidson reflected happily, ‘I suppose one would only be kept completely cheerful if they had a formula to include the name in most public announcements. Something like this. “Since the Provost and Fellows of Eton College have been unable to secure the services of Mr Austin Davidson, they have appointed as Headmaster…” Or even “Since HM has not been successful in persuading Mr Austin Davidson of the truths of revealed religion, he has elevated to the See of Canterbury…”’ He was so light-hearted, I did not want to see him go, the more so as I knew now he had detected nothing about Margaret and me. A few months before, I had been hyper-aesthetized for the opposite reason, hoping to hear him bring out her name.

Enjoying himself, he also did not want to part. It was getting too late for tea in the cafés near Whitehall, and Davidson drank little: so I suggested a place in Pimlico, and, as Davidson had a passion for walking, we started off on foot. He lollopped along, his steps thudded on the dank pavement; his fancies kept flicking out. When we passed the dilapidated rooms-by-the-hour-or-night hotels of Wilton Road, he jerked with his thumb at one, a little less raffish, with its door shut and the name worse for wear over the fanlight.

‘How much should I have to pay you to spend a night there?’

‘You pay the bill too?’

‘Certainly I pay the bill.’

‘Well then, excluding the bill, three pounds.’

‘Too much,’ said Davidson severely, and clumped on.

I had wanted to escape that meeting, and it turned out a surprise: so did another which I did not want to escape – with his daughter Helen. When she telephoned and said, not urgently so far as I could hear, that she would like to see me, I was pleased: and I was pleased when I greeted her on the landing of my flat.

It was years since I had seen her; and, as soon as I could watch her face under my sitting-room light, I wondered if I should have guessed her age. She was by now in her late thirties, and her cheeks and neck were thinning; her features, which had always had the family distinction without her sister’s bloom, had sharpened. Yet, in those ways passing or already passed into scraggy middle-age, she nevertheless had kept, more than any of us, the uncovered-up expression of her youth: she had taken on no pomp at all, not even the simple pomp of getting older: there was nothing deliberate about her, except for the rebellious concern about her clothes, which, I suspected, had by now become automatic, even less thought-about than Margaret’s simplicity. Her glance and smile were as light as when she was a girl.

‘Lewis,’ she said at once, ‘Margaret has told me about you two.’

‘I’m glad of it.’

‘Are you?’ She knew enough about me to be surprised: she knew that, holding this secret, I would not have shared it with my own brother, intimate though we were.

‘I’m glad that someone knows whom we can trust.’

Staring at me over the sofa-head, Helen realized that I meant it, and that this time, unlike all others, the secrecy was pressing me in. The corners of her eyes screwed up: her mouth was tart, almost angry, with the family sarcasm.

‘That’s not the most fortunate remark ever made,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I wasn’t very anxious to come to see you today.’

‘Have you brought a message from her?’ I cried.

‘Oh, no.’

For an instant I was relieved; she was more tense than I was.

‘Margaret knows that I was coming here,’ she said. ‘And I believe she knows what I was going to say.’

‘What is it?’

She spoke fast, as though beset until she had it out: ‘What you’re planning with Margaret is wrong.’

I gazed at her without recognition and without speaking.

After a time, she said, quite gently, now she had put the worst job behind her: ‘Lewis, I think you ought to answer for yourself.’

‘Ought I?’

‘I think so. You don’t want to frighten me off, do you? You’ve done enough of that with other people, you know.’

I had always had respect for her. After a pause, I said: ‘You make moral judgements more easily than I do.’

‘I dare say I overdo it,’ said Helen. ‘But I think you go to the other extreme. And that has certain advantages to you when you’re planning what you’re planning now.’

‘Do you think I’m specially pleased with myself about it?’

‘Of course you’re worried.’ She studied me with her sharp bright eyes. ‘But I don’t know, I should have said you seemed much happier than you used to be.’

She went on: ‘You know I wish you to be happy, don’t you?’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘And I wish it for her too,’ said Helen.

Suddenly, across the grain of feeling she smiled.

‘When a woman comes to anyone in your predicament and says “Of course, I wish both of you well, I couldn’t wish anyone in the world better,
but
–” it means she’s trying to break it up. Quite true. But still I love her very much, and I was always fond of you.’

There was a silence.

She cried out, sharp, unforgiving: ‘But the child’s there. That’s the end of it.’

‘I’ve seen him–’ I began.

‘It didn’t stop you?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t understand you.’ Then the edge of her voice turned away. ‘I’m ready to believe that you and she could make something more valuable for each other than she and Geoffrey ever could. I always hoped that you’d get married in the first place.’

She said: ‘But just because you’re probably right for each other, just because you’re capable of being good to and for each other, you can’t go back to it now.’

For the first time I was irritated and confused, I stumbled to find an answer in her own terms.

‘You can’t,’ she said, pushing my retort aside, ‘take the slightest risk about the child. It’s not only for his sake, it’s for hers, because you know what it would mean for her, if anything went wrong with him.’

‘I’m not afraid that anything would go wrong.’

‘You can’t take the risk.’ She went on: ‘If things didn’t go right for the child, then it wouldn’t matter if you felt it wasn’t your fault and that he’d never have coped anyway. What do you think she would feel?’

She said: ‘She must see this as well as I do. I can’t understand her.’

I began to answer her. Whatever Margaret and I did, I said, there was no way open of behaving as we wished to behave. Each of us knew the responsibilities, I said.

‘If anything went wrong with him, she’d never forgive herself.’

‘Whether she does–’

‘It would be there, coming between you, for the rest of your lives,’ Helen said.

‘I’ve imagined even that,’ I replied.

‘You’ve no right to do it,’ she burst out. I had been forcing down anger, but hers had broken loose.

‘You must let us answer for ourselves,’ I said.

‘That’s too easy,’ she cried. She was gentler than her sister; I had seen violent temper released in her before. ‘I’d better tell you now, if you go ahead with this, I won’t give either of you the slightest help, I won’t make things easier for you by half an hour.’

‘Do you hope that will change our minds?’

‘I hope so very much,’ she said. ‘If I can stop her coming to you, I shall do it.’

I tried to control myself, and meet her case.

As I spoke, I was thinking that in Helen maternal love was stronger beyond comparison than any other. It was her unassuageable deprivation that she had not had children, and she still went from doctor to doctor. She had the maternal devotion of a temperament emotional but sexually cool; she could not but help feel that the love for a child was measured on the same plane as sexual love.

To Margaret that would have been meaningless. For her, those loves were different in kind. Almost as maternal as her sister, she had scarcely spoken to me about the boy, and yet all along she had been thinking what Helen had just threatened us with. Her feeling for the child was passionate. It had more ferocity than Helen’s would have had, yet it could not cancel out that other feeling which pulled her as it were at right angles – that feeling which, unlike Helen’s idea of it, was at root neither gentle nor friendly, that feeling which, although it contained an element of maternal love, was in totality no nearer to that love than it was to self-destruction or self-display.

Helen’s insight was acute. I was thinking; she had learnt more than most, and all she said about human actions you could trust – unless they were driven by sex. Then it was as though the drawing-pins had worked loose, the drawing-pins which fitted so accurately when she charted a description of a nephew sucking up to an aunt. Suddenly, if she had to describe sexual feeling, the paper was flapping, she was not hopelessly far away but the point never quite fitted. Somehow she sketched out friendships and trust and a bit of play and imagined that was sexual love. I remembered how many observers I had listened to and read, whose charts flapped loose exactly as hers did – observers wicked as well as high-minded, married as well as Jane Austen’s men and women. Often their observations sounded cosy when you were not in trouble, but when you were they might as well have been nonsense verse.

Yet I could not shrug off Helen’s warning about the child. When I was younger, I might have thought that, by explaining to myself why she felt so deeply, I was explaining it away. Now I could not delude myself so conveniently.

I had to answer something to which there was no straight answer, telling her that for my part I would accept the penalties and guilt, and that I believed the tie between us would bear what the future laid upon it.

I had made up my mind, I told her: I did not know whether Margaret would come to me, but I was waiting for her.

NEXT morning after breakfast – the sky over the park was so brilliant in November sunshine that I hushed the give-away words, the secret irked me more – I rang up Margaret: I had to tell her of my conversation with her sister, without softening any of her sister’s case.

‘I knew she was against us,’ came Margaret’s voice.

‘She said nothing that we hadn’t thought,’ I said, reporting Helen’s words about the child.

‘Perhaps we should have told each other.’

‘It has made no difference.’

‘I never expected her to be so much against us.’ There was a note of rancour in Margaret’s tone, a note almost of persecution, very rare in her. Anxiously, I thought that the weeks of deception were wearing her down: they had begun to tell on me, who was better adapted for them: in so many ways she was tougher, and certainly braver, than I was, but not in this.

I said that we must meet. No, there was no one to look after the child. Tomorrow? Doubtful.

‘We must settle it,’ I said, for the first time forcing her.

‘It will be easier next week.’

‘That’s too long.’

The receiver went dead, as though we had been cut off. Then she said a word and stopped. She, usually so active, could not act: she was in a state I also knew, when it was easier to think of disrupting one’s life, so long as the decision were a week ahead, than to invent an excuse to go for a walk that afternoon.

At last: ‘Lewis.’ Her voice had the hardiness, the hostility of resolve. When I replied, it came again: ‘I’ll go for tea to my father’s on Friday, you can call and find me there.’

For the moment relieved, waiting for the Friday which was two days ahead, I arrived at Whitehall in the dazzling morning: odd, it struck me sometimes, to arrive there after such a scene, to meet one’s colleagues with their shut and public faces, and confront them with one’s own.

That particular morning, as it happened, was not routine: I had to go straight to Rose’s room, where I was required for two interviews of which the second was to be George Passant’s.

On Rose’s desk chrysanthemums bulged from the vases, the burnt smell bit into the clean, hygienic air, along with Rose’s enthusiastic thanks to me for sparing time that morning, which in any case I was officially obliged to do.

‘Perhaps we might as well get round the table,’ he said, as usual punctual, as usual unhurried. The two others took their places, so did I, and the first interview began. I knew already – I had heard Rose and Jones discuss the man – that the result was not in doubt. He was an ex-regular officer who had entered the Department late in the war, and they agreed – his work had not come my way – that he was nowhere near the standard of the administrative class.