‘I believe he’s right,’ said Lewis to Pen over lunch. This now took place in a wine bar instead of a pub, as before; they ate slices of quiche and salad, and drank a couple of glasses of rosé. This seemed to be the approved diet of the contemporary man, although it left Lewis hungry. He was, however, so used to feeling hungry, that he was more or less resigned to the condition lasting out his lifetime, and possibly continuing beyond it. The one thing that put him off ideas of an after-life was its immateriality. This was a frivolous attitude, of which he was ashamed, but he was ashamed of so much these days, and there seemed to be no solution to any of it. Nevertheless, he hoped he was not going to develop one of those gourmet appetites that are simply an excuse for over-indulgence. He hoped he was never going to be found extolling a hill village in Provence for the quality of its mushrooms, or remembering a particularly amusing bottle of Pinot noir when he could remember practically nothing else.
‘I believe I am set in my ways,’ he said, spearing a slice of tomato. ‘How does one avoid it? I mean, life catches up with you, takes you by surprise. Life, in fact, is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won’t be got rid of.’
‘I’m very much afraid that I’m now within shouting distance of forty,’ said Pen, pushing aside his plate and lighting a cigarette. ‘You’re younger than me, of course, although I’ve never held it against you.’
‘Not much,’ said Lewis. ‘Younger, I mean.’
‘I’m about to make an announcement, Lewis. I’m too old to learn about computers. Goldsborough’s right; it is a skill for the young. Basically I belong to the age of the quill pen. I doubt if I could fit in if the place changed radically, as it promises to do.’
‘You don’t mean you’re thinking of leaving?’ said Lewis, horrified.
‘I’m afraid so. I’m going home to Wales, to help my father for a while. He has quite a substantial library, and he’s always been a little hurt that I haven’t offered to catalogue it. And I can help generally; there’s no shortage of work around the place.’
The ‘place’, Lewis knew, was a fairly substantial estate, farmed by Pen’s older brother, Alexander, called Sandy.
‘What about George?’ he asked, swallowing his dismay.
‘Well, that’s what’s good about the idea. George is thinking of establishing himself in Ludlow – he says the market’s steadier in a country town. Less spectacular, but steadier. In time we’ll buy a place together. I might even go into the business.’
‘But Pen, this is quite a shock.’
‘Yes, I know, and in many ways I hate to do it. I hate change as much as you do, Lewis; I’m a creature of habit too. It’s just that the time has come to make other plans; I really don’t want to have to learn about bytes and cursors. I couldn’t have done this without George, of course.’ Nevertheless he looked harassed and bemused at the prospect. ‘Now, what about you? You’ll stay on, will you? Or will you?’
‘Until Jessica is older, yes, I suppose I will.’
Pen made a slight gesture of impatience. ‘She’s not exactly company for you, is she? I mean, she will be in time, but that’s still a long way off. Later on is time to think of her as being real company. That gives you a few years to play with. Why not do something desperate, Lewis? My feeling is that you could always come back if you wanted to. The house is still in your name, isn’t it?’
‘Where could I go?’ he said sadly. ‘What could I do? I am what I am, a poor clerk. I’ll never be anything different.’
‘I can’t stand that sort of talk, Lewis. If you feel like that then it’s time to reinvent yourself. And what about the house, anyway? You haven’t made it over to Tissy, have you?’
‘The funny thing is, I’ve loved that house all my life, and now I hate to go back to it. I always thought of leaving it to Jessica, but these days I’m not so sure. Wouldn’t it be better to sell it and leave her the money to buy something for herself?’
‘Sell the house?’ Pen in his turn was sincerely shocked.
‘I dread the house, Pen. I feel like a curator, a caretaker. As long as I’m there nothing will change. I think of my mother a lot, something I haven’t done for a long time. I think of how she lived in that house after my father died, of how lonely she must have been. I feel as if I’m turning into her. Does that sound mad? It’s true, nevertheless. And right through everything that’s happened to me I’ve gone on looking at the same view, out of the same windows; I’ve walked the same streets. I don’t think I can bear to live there much longer. Yet where would I go?’
‘Well, I suppose you could buy a small flat somewhere, closer to town.’
‘It’s all very unsettling,’ Lewis said restlessly. ‘I thought the computers were bad enough until I heard your news. Life will not be the same without you.’ He spoke the words mockingly, but knew that they were serious.
‘You won’t lose sight of me entirely. We’ll keep the house in London – can’t do without the opera, you know. But we shan’t see each other every day, that’s true. That’s why I think you ought to consider some sort of a change, Lewis. Don’t give up like this. Don’t give way to melancholy. You used not to be like this, you know.’
‘When were you thinking of leaving?’ he asked, as a dreadful sadness took hold of him.
‘I thought I’d go home for Christmas and stay for a while. The end of the year seems to be a good time to make changes. So I’ll be around for another six months. George is close to selling up, but he’ll wait until he gets his price. And in the meantime I can start looking for a house for us. That way my parents can get used to the idea, and I’ll be on hand if they ever need me. Oh, by the way, someone was asking for you. An American. You were in with Goldsborough. He said he’d look in again this afternoon.’
They walked back together in silence, each absorbed in what had passed between them. To Lewis the prospect was dispiriting. He did not doubt that he could master the computer, although the process would not be exhilarating; still, he was not enough of a Luddite to object to machines just because they were machines. What unsettled him was the thought of doing all this without the comfort of Pen in the background. I think like a boy, he said to himself. A boy who doesn’t want to go to school without his friend. It was true, but it seemed to him that the friendships of men proceeded in this fashion. With Pen he had always been at his best, at his most reticent, his most natural, and Pen had responded in the same fashion. It was a mode that suited them both. In many ways they were strangers to each other’s way of life, and although nothing was hidden between them in the matter of intimacies, love affairs, and, in one case, marriage, they found it easier to take knowledge of these for granted, as if discussion beyond the established facts were unnecessarily intrusive. Lewis knew that Pen was conversant with his affairs, just as he knew about Pen’s, but neither had thought to have views on what the other had done or was doing. Moments of exceptional derangement, such as the night of Pen’s argument with George, and Lewis’s abortive seduction of Emmy, were passed over by mutual consent: the facts were known, even unhesitatingly accepted, but judgment was never passed.
This was very agreeable to both of them. All that each required of the other was a brief statistical acquaintance with the main points of reference. Lewis had regarded Pen as his safe and steady companion through many a difficult year, one from whom no harm would come. And now he was to lose him. There was no doubt of this, despite the projected visits to the opera. He would continue to see him from time to time, but he would lose what was essential to him, Pen’s constant and tactful company. The idea that in years to come he would look up from his desk, or rather his keyboard, and not see Pen’s elegant head across the room, not have his presence as a marker for the day, distressed him unutterably. What would be intolerable would be to continue down the same road in increasing solitude. At home there was no one. I
n Mrs Harper’s establishment he sensed that the arrangement which had held good for a while – Tissy’s new-found freedom, her mother’s confinement to the house and the child – might soon undergo a major realignment. With the doctor gone he suspected that Mrs Harper might reclaim her daughter’s company, or rather demand it, for it would not be lightly bestowed. She was a powerful character: he had always known that. And she was lonely. Maybe she always had been. Maybe behind that original basilisk stare there was a woman whom her lover had made lonely. Maybe for a woman of that generation, of that particular education in her Belgian convent, life with a lover instead of a husband would mean loneliness, inevitably; the irregularity would offend her. That was what had made her seem so unpleasant, so eager to marry off her daughter, to protect her from a similar fate. That the daughter might have been rendered impotent, insubstantial, by her mother’s decisions, and above all by her peculiar reticence, her concealment of all information, no longer seemed to him surprising. He got on rather well with her these days, although he noticed that she was reverting to her earlier truculence. But if she were to annexe Tissy again, as she already had done once, there would be no further point in his presence. They would be inseparable, arm in arm, as he had first seen them, all those years ago, and if he wanted his wife back, always supposing that he still wanted his wife back, he would be as truly importunate as he had always felt, and had always been made to feel, by these very same people, whose family he had once thought, hopelessly, that he might join.
Tissy’s attitude to all this was somehow not to be relied upon. While he had managed not to take her feminism seriously, nor the possibility of Gilbert Bradshaw, he knew very well how early habits, early routines, could clasp one in a deathly embrace, and could be similarly unrelenting, permitting of no negotiation. He sighed inwardly as he thought of the combat he would have to mount to win Tissy over a second time, if that were possible.
The truth of the matter was that he no longer entirely wanted to. Just as the prospect of going back to the beginning of the index and transcribing it all over again disheartened him he did not see how he could do the same thing with his ruin of a marriage. For it was a ruin; that was beyond all doubt. Whatever reservations he had about living alone, he recognized the fact that he would continue to do so. The sound of his feet on the summer pavements as he turned down the familiar street, the dying of the long light evenings that he so dreaded, were now, in a curious way, part of him, the authentic part. There was no ambiguity in them. That was his feeling now. To live alone was his destiny, and probably always had been. And it seemed natural to him, in later life, to be denied the exaltation of his early days. A coldness had grown on him, without in any way disturbing what he felt to be his innocence. Despite all his hopeful, even prayerful endeavours, he was now a colder man. He remained well-disposed. It was just that he no longer knew the world. If he had known it he would still have trusted it. But he was denied access; the world had grown away from him. His bright future, in which he so ardently believed, had disappeared, and had taken something of himself with it. He would still have liked to embrace the world, which he now perceived as flawed, but those to whom he would naturally have stretched out his arms had gone, subsumed into their own affairs or into ancient matters which he had merely disturbed, not resolved.
There was also the matter of the house. What he had said to Pen was true: he hated to go home. For all the comforts of custom and routine he hated to go home. Once he stepped inside his own front door he felt dread, and as the evening wore on he underwent an oppression from which only the prospect of sleep could deliver him. Vite, soufflons la lampe … He knew that it was irrational to displace his feelings on to the house, which stood there, blameless, in the late evening light, but he was becoming afraid of it. It reminded him that nothing had changed, that nothing ever would change, that he would grow old with the same wistfulness that he had known as a boy, as his mother’s son, kept to her side by his care of her, and hers of him. And he was getting older all the while. He was only two years off forty, when they said that life began. But they said it, he reckoned, to cheer themselves up, knowing that by then the die was cast.
He was in charge of the library for most of the time, since Goldsborough was either in America or at one of his training sessions. Looking over the great room from his desk, Lewis regretted the long winter evenings, the dusky afternoons, the clicking on of the lights, the collective sigh as concentration was momentarily disturbed. The sunlight, streaming through dusty windows, seemed to him a vast aberration, making him feel out of place, out of time. Perhaps Goldsborough was right. Perhaps he was too old to adjust to new methods. He now saw a warning in Goldsborough’s remarks which he had not noticed when he had first heard them, only that morning. A shift in all their destinies seemed to have taken place in the meantime. Pen’s leaving he now accepted as something that had already happened. He saw himself as friendless, mute, confined to the library or to the house, a relic left by his lost youth. The important thing, he decided, was to come to terms with this, not to make too much of a fuss. He had had no more to bear than any other man. He still knew that in order to obtain grace he would have to play his part. Nevertheless, he did little work that afternoon. Heavy-heartedness set in and he began to fear the evening, although the sun was still high in the sky and would not set until late. He might have a meal out, he thought. Somehow he could not face his daughter when this sad mood was on him. Nor could he yet face the decisions that would be forced on him when he confronted his daughter’s mother, as he was eventually bound to do. He went into the office and telephoned Mrs Harper.
‘I shan’t be round this evening, Thea,’ he said. ‘Pressure of work,’ he added, unnecessarily, since no one ever asked him about his work.
‘I see.’
He noticed that her voice had lapsed into the lustreless timbre he associated with the early days.
‘Everything all right?’
‘I suppose so.’ There was resignation all round, it seemed. Then there was a brief gear change into a sharper mode. ‘Tissy’s allowance is about due, isn’t it? There have been expenses.’
‘I’ll bring the cheque tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Although I thought it wasn’t due until next week. In fact I know it isn’t, Thea.’
‘Yes, but there have been expenses, as I said. Children grow very fast, you know. I don’t think you appreciate that. But then you wouldn’t know anything about it, would you? I’m the one who does the worrying.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow evening,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk about it then.’
When he got back to his desk he found it occupied by a stranger. The stranger was young, slight, severe, finely fitted out in a lightweight summer suit of a muted but unmistakable transatlantic cut. Lewis remembered Pen saying something about an American: he assumed that this must be the man he meant. If he had thought about the matter at all in the general rush of events, it was to imagine some weighty representative of an international concern, one of Goldsborough’s correspondents who had inadvertently come to the library on the wrong day, when Goldsborough was facing challenges in the psychology department. Yet this American, if this was the one in question, looked more like a minor Spanish grandee. Had he worn a ruff he might have been painted by El Greco, might have stood in as one of the mourners at the burial of Count Orgaz. He had the same precise face, the same narrow head, the same suffering nostrils. This man trailed clouds of an imprecise glory, vaguely connected with ancestors and money, though not the sort of money in which Goldsborough was interested. Goldsborough money was gross, impersonal, set off against tax. The visitor’s money must be understood as delicate, fluent, understated. This impression went with the small ivory hand which was reaching out to touch the opaline goblet in which Lewis kept his pens and pencils. The hand was framed in precisely one inch of immaculate cuff. The nails, Lewis could see, were finely, perhaps professionally manicured. The stranger seemed entirely at home seated at Lewis’s desk, and for one insan
e moment Lewis wondered if this were his replacement, smuggled in by Goldsborough while he, Lewis, had been making a telephone call. His panic was absurd, he knew, unreasonable. Nevertheless he reached his desk quite smartly, and waited for the man to express confusion, to, at least, struggle to his feet, overcome by embarrassment. When he did neither of these things it became clear that he had mistaken the desk for one that could be used by the general reader. Indeed, only the fact that it was set at right angles to the room distinguished it from the others. Lewis’s appointments were modest: only the opaline goblet, at which the American was now staring in some puzzlement, proclaimed that the desk had an owner. But might not some fey academic, some exquisite, have brought this fetish along to assist him in contemplation, unable to work without the sight of this possession which would establish his identity, allay his anxiety? Might not the owner be in the grip of the true anxiety, the anxiety of leaving home, without having yet made the transition to this other home, where he would spend the rest of his life?
‘Can I help you?’ asked Lewis.
‘I’m looking for a Dr Percy? Dr Lewis Percy?’
‘I am Lewis Percy.’ He felt his usual embarrassment in pronouncing his name.
The stranger extended his overbred hand.
‘Howard Millinship.’
‘Not the Howard Millinship who wrote that article on Mérimée? How very nice to meet you. I thought it was an impressive piece of work. That examination of the Spanish taste in nineteenth-century France, and the distinction between the true Spanish taste and Spanish kitsch. I thought it very well worked out, and very well written, if I may say so. But what can I do for you? Did you want to work in the library? Let me find you a place. This one is mine, I’m afraid.’
‘I read your book,’ said the American. ‘That’s why I’m here. Is there anywhere we can talk? Your office, for example?’
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