by C. P. Snow
‘Do tell me.’
‘Mrs Henry Wood.’
Even then, flattering her for his own purposes, he could not resist that piece of diablerie, that elaborate let-down. She sounded a modest woman, but there was disappointment and mild protest in her voice: ‘But she was nothing like so good as George Eliot.’
Robinson rapidly recovered himself.
‘George Eliot had all the talent in the world, and not a particle of genius. Mrs Henry Wood had very little talent and just a tiny vestige of the real blessed thing. That’s what people ought to have said about you, and believe me it’s the most important thing that can be said about any writer. I should like to have the responsibility of making them say it about you. Does anyone realize it?’
‘No one’s ever told me.’
‘I always say it takes an entrepreneur with a bit of his own genius to recognize a writer who has it too. That’s why it’s a providential occasion, you and I meeting here tonight. I should like to put over another piece of the real thing before I die. I’m absolutely sure I could do it for you.’
‘What firm is yours, Mr Robinson?’
Robinson laughed.
‘At present I can’t be said to have a firm. I shall have to revive the one I used to have. Haven’t you heard of R S Robinson?’
She looked embarrassed.
‘Oh dear,’ he said, with one of his bursts of hilarious honesty, ‘if you’d been at a party like this twenty-five years ago and hadn’t heard of me, I should have left you and gone to find someone interesting. But you will hear of R S Robinson’s again. We’re going to do things together, you and I. I assure you, we’re bound to put each other on the map.’
Then I tapped him on the arm. He looked up to see who I was. With complete good humour he cried: ‘Why, it’s Lewis Eliot! Good evening to you, sir!’
I smiled at the young woman, but Robinson, sparkling with cunning, did not intend me to talk to her. Instead, he faced into the room, and said, either full of hilarity or putting on a splendid show of it: ‘Is this a fair sample of the post-war spirit, should you say?’
I broke in: ‘It’s a long time since I met you last.’
Robinson was certain that I was threatening his latest plan, but he was not out-faced. He had not altered since the morning I recovered Sheila’s money; his suit was shabby and frayed at the cuffs, but so were many prosperous men’s after six years of war. He said to the young woman, with candour, with indomitable dignity: ‘Mr Eliot was interested in my publishing scheme a few years ago. I’m sorry to say that nothing came of it then.’
‘What have you been doing since?’ I asked.
‘Nothing much, sir, nothing very much.’
‘What did you do in the war?’
‘Nothing at all.’ He was gleeful. He added: ‘You’re thinking that I was too old for them to get me. Of course I was, they couldn’t have touched me. But I decided to offer my services, so I got a job in – (he gave me the name of an aircraft firm) – and they subsidized me for four years and I did nothing at all.’
The young woman was laughing: he took so much delight in having no conscience that she also felt delight. Just as Sheila used to.
‘How did you spend your time?’ she asked.
‘I discovered how to be a slow clerk. Believe me, no one’s applied real intelligence to the problem before. By the time I left, I could spin a reasonable hour’s work out into at least two days. And that gave me time for serious things, that is, thinking out the programme you and I were talking about before Mr Eliot joined us.’
He grinned at me with malicious high spirits, superiority and contempt.
‘I suppose you’ve been doing your best for your country, sir?’ Just as I remembered him, he felt a match for any man alive.
I inquired: ‘Have you got a job now?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Robinson.
I wondered if, with his bizarre frugality, he had saved money out of his wages at the factory. Then I spoke across him to his companion: ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced, have we?’
Soon after I heard her name I left them, to Robinson’s surprise and relief. I left them with Robinson’s triumphant ‘Good evening to you, sir’ fluting across the room, and muttered to Betty that I was slipping away. Alone in that room, she knew that something had gone wrong for me; disappointed after the promise of the early evening, she could read in my face some inexplicable distress.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
She was right. I had been upset by the sound of the young woman’s name. As soon as I heard it, I knew she was a cousin of Charles March’s.
She was likely, therefore, to be a woman of means, and in fact Robinson would not be pouring flattery over her if she were not. But that did not matter; it would be easy to pass word to Charles about Robinson; it was not for her sake that I left the party, went out into Glebe Place, turned down towards the Embankment, and, without realizing it, towards the house I had lived in years before. I was not driven so because of anything that happened at that party; no, it was because, for the first time for years, my grief over Sheila had come back, as grinding as when, after her death, I went into our empty room.
At the first murmur of Robinson’s voice, I had felt a presentiment; listening to what otherwise might have amused me, I had been rigid, nails against my palms, but still impervious, until, when I asked the young woman her name, the reply set loose a flood of the past. Yet I had only heard that name before in circumstances entirely undramatic, having nothing to do with Sheila or her death: perhaps Charles March had mentioned it in the days we saw each other most often, before either of us had married, walking about in London or at his father’s country-house. That was all; but the flood that name set loose drove me down the dark turning of Cheyne Row towards the river.
Down Cheyne Row the windows were shining, from the pub at the Embankment corner voices hallooed; I was beset as though I were still married and was going through the back streets on my way home.
I was not seeing, nor even remembering: it was not her death that was possessing me: it was just that, walking quickly beside the bright houses, their windows open to the hot evening breeze, I had nothing but a sense of failure, loss, misery. The year before, when I received bad news, fresher and more sharply wounding, the news of Margaret’s child, I could put a face on it, and make myself shove the sadness away. Now this older sadness overcame me: my stoicism would not answer me. I felt as I had not done since I was eight years old, tears on my cheeks.
Soon I was standing outside the house, which, since I left it in the spring after Sheila died, I had not been near, which I had made detours not to see. Yet the sight dulled my pain, instead of sharpening it. One outer wall had been blasted down, so that, where Mrs Wilson used to have her sitting-room, willowherb was growing, and on the first floor a bath jutted nakedly against the cloud-dark sky. The light from an Embankment lamp fell on the garden-path where grass had burst between the flags.
Gazing up at the house, I saw the windows boarded up. Among them I could pick out those of our bedroom and the room next door. In that room Sheila’s body had lain. The thought scarcely touched me, I just looked up at the boards, without much feeling, sad but with a kind of hypnotized relief.
I did not stay there long. Slowly, under the plane trees, past the unpainted and sun-blistered houses, I walked along the Embankment to my flat. The botanical gardens were odorous in the humid wind, and on the bridge the collar of lights was shivering. Once the thought struck me: had I come home? Was it the same home, from which I had not been able to escape? The lonely flat – how different was it from the house I had just stood outside?
33: Pathology of Spectators
DURING the rest of that year, I was on the edge of two dramas. The first was secret, known only by a handful of us, and was going to overshadow much of our lives; it was the result of those meetings of old Bevill’s early in the war, of the intrigues of Lufkin and the science of men like my brother; it was
the making of the atomic bomb. The second was public, open each morning for a week to anyone who read newspapers, and important to not more than half a dozen people of whom, although I did not fully realize it till later, I was one.
Innocent, tossed about by blind chance, Norman Lacey, and through him Vera, lost their privacy that autumn – for Norman’s father was tried at the Old Bailey. If he was guilty, the crime was a squalid one; but the after-effects of the trial ravaged those two, so that for a time I thought that Norman at least would not recover. What they went through, how she was strong enough to carry them both, was a story by itself – but for me, the lesson was how poorly I myself behaved.
Norman and Vera asked help from me, help which would be embarrassing, and possibly a little damaging, for me to give. They looked to me to go into court with a piece of evidence which could do neither them, nor Norman’s father, any practical good, and might do me some practical harm. It was evidence so trivial that no lawyer would have subpoenaed me to give it. All it did in effect was to show that I knew them well; clutching at any hope, they had a sort of faith that my name might protect them.
It was the kind of demand which, had it come from an acquaintance, I should have evaded with a clear conscience. I had taken some responsibility for these two; they thought I had given them intimacy, could I just shut it off when otherwise I had to accept the consequences?
As soon as I had smelt the danger ahead of them, I had wanted excuses to absent myself. It was a dilemma I did not like, any more than I liked my own feelings. I did what I had not done for years, and asked advice. I did not want worldly advice; I longed for Margaret’s; indeed, one night I read through the Hollises in the London directory, wondering whether they might have returned to the town, knowing that I had a true reason for writing to her, knowing also that it was a pretext. At last I went with my trouble to George Passant.
A few months past, the young woman he had been pursuing with such adolescent ardour had closed their years of argument and gone back home. She had refused to marry him; she had refused to sleep with him; and George, comically frustrated for a man of passion, seemed to an observer to have got nothing out of it. But that was not what he thought. ‘It’s been a magnificent affair!’ he cried, as though his gusto had mysteriously slipped into the wrong groove. As he grew older, he seemed to luxuriate more and more in his own oddity.
Nevertheless when on an autumn night we went into the Tothill Street pub and I confessed the story, he was surprisingly prosaic.
‘It would be absolutely ridiculous for you to take the slightest risk,’ he said.
I had told him my relations with Vera and Norman as accurately as I could. I had also told him of the police investigations, which I could confide to no one else: with George, however uproarious his own life was being, any secret was safe.
As he listened to me, he looked concerned. It occurred to me that he took pride in my public reputation. He did not like to see me rushing into self-injury as he might have done himself: he had always had a streak of unpredictable prudence: that evening, he was speaking as sensibly as Hector Rose.
‘If you could make any effective difference to the old man’s [Lacey’s] chance of getting off then we might have to think again,’ said George, ‘though I warn you I should be prepared to make a case against that too. But that question doesn’t arise, and there is obviously only one reasonable course of action.’
George ordered pints of beer, facing me with his aggressive optimism, as though the sane must triumph.
‘I’m not so sure,’ I said.
‘Then you’re even more incapable of reason than I ever suspected.’
‘They’ll feel deserted,’ I said. ‘Especially the young man. It may do him a certain amount of harm.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said George, ‘I can’t take into account every personal consequence of every action. Particularly as the poor chap’s going to have such harm done him anyway that I can’t believe your demonstrating a little common sense would matter a button in the general catastrophe.’
‘There’s something in that,’ I replied.
‘I’m glad you’re showing signs of recognition.’
‘But I took them both up,’ I said. ‘It’s not so good to amuse myself with them when they’re not asking anything – and then not to stand by them now.’
‘I can’t admit that they’ve got the slightest claim on you.’ George’s voice rose to an angry shout. He pulled down his waistcoat and, his tone still simmering, addressed me with a curious formality.
‘It’s some considerable time since I have spoken to you on these matters. I should like to make it clear that everyone who has had your friendship has had the best of the bargain. I am restricting myself to talking of your friendships, I had better emphasize that. With some of your women, I couldn’t give you such a testimonial. So far as I can make out, you treated Margaret Davidson badly and stupidly. I shouldn’t be surprised if the same weren’t true of Betty Vane and others. I expect you ought to reproach yourself over some of those.’
I was thinking, George was not so inattentive as he seemed.
‘But I don’t admit that anyone alive has any right to reproach you about your friendships. I should like to see anyone contradict me on that point,’ said George, still sounding angry, as though he were making a furious debating speech. But his face was open and heavy with affection. ‘I can work it out, I might remind you that I can work it out as well as anyone in London, exactly what you’ve given to those two. You’ve been available to them whenever they’ve wanted you, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve never protected yourself, have you? You’ve let them come to you when you’ve been tired and ill?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘You’ve let them take precedence over things you enjoy. You’ve kept away from smart parties because of them, I should be surprised very much if you haven’t.’
I smiled to myself. Even now, George kept a glittering image of ‘smart parties’ and of the allure they must have for me. Yet he was exerting his whole force, he was speaking with a thumping sweetness.
‘I know what you’ve given them. A good many of us can tell from personal experience, and don’t forget my experience of you goes back farther than the others. Sometimes I’ve thought that you haven’t the faintest idea of how people appreciate what you’ve done for them. I should like to inform you that you are known to be a preposterously unselfish friend. I have the best of reasons for knowing it.’
George was a human brother. He fought with his brother men, he never wanted to be above the battle. He did not understand the temptation, so insidious, often so satisfying to men like me, of playing God: of giving so much and no more: of being considerate, sometimes kind, but making that considerateness into a curtain with which to shut off the secret self I could not bear to give away. Some of what he said was true: but that was because, in most of the outward shows of temperament, what one loses on the swings one gains on the roundabouts. Because I had been so tempted to make myself into a looker-on, I asked little of those I was with. I was good-natured, sometimes at a cost to myself, though not at a fundamental cost. I had become unusually patient. I was fairly tolerant by temperament, and the curve of my own experience made me more so. Judged by the ordinary human standards, I was interested and reliable. All that, I had gained – it was what George saw, and it was not quite negligible – by non-participation. But what George did not see was that I was being left with a vacuum inside me instead of a brother’s heart.
In the end, I gave the evidence. I tried to accept my responsibility to Vera and Norman as though I felt it. So far as the gossip reached me, I did not lose much; although I did not recognize it for months to come, I gained something.
That winter, sitting alone in my room, I thought often of myself as I had done on the night of Munich; but had learned more of myself now, and disliked it more. I could not help seeing what had gone wrong with me and Margaret and where the
profound fault lay. It could have seemed the legacy that Sheila had left me: that was an excuse; the truth was meaner, deeper, and without any gloss at all. It was the truth that showed itself in my escape into looking-on. I knew now how much there was wrong with those who became spectators. Mr Knight was a spectator of the world of affairs, because he was too proud and diffident to match himself against other men: and I could see how his pride-and-diffidence was as petty as vanity, he would not match himself because they might see him fail. Superficially, unlike Mr Knight, I was not vain: but in my heart, in my deepest relations, it was the same with me.
There was another comparison distinctly less congenial. There was someone else who looked on, and felt lifted above ordinary mortals as she did so. Mrs Beauchamp – yes, we had something in common. Yes, Mr Knight and she and I were members of the same family.
Lonely in that first winter of peace, I thought of how joyful Margaret and I had been at first, and how towards the end I had gone to her, the taxi racketing in the steely light, guilt beating on me like rain upon the window. I could understand more of it now. First I had tried to make her into a dream image, a kind of anti-Sheila: then I had transformed her into Sheila come again: I had been afraid to see her as she was, just herself, someone whose spirit was as strong as mine.
Although I did not know it, I was gaining something.
Just as, when Margaret at last admitted defeat about our relation, I had seen in her a secret planner devising (almost unknown to herself) a way out – so now, myself defeated, disliking what I had come to, the secret planner began to work in me.
Often, when a branch of one’s life has withered, it is others who first see the sap rise again. One is unconscious of a new start until it is already made: or sometimes, in the same instant, one knows and does-not-know. Perhaps when, believing myself preoccupied over Vera and Norman, I furled through the telephone directory for Margaret’s address, I was already committing myself to a plan which might reshape my life; perhaps, months earlier, when I stood outside the house of my first marriage and thought I had no hope of any other home, hope was being born.
