Homecomings

Homecomings

A Strangers and Brothers Novel

C.P. Snow

To

William Cooper

PART 1

HOMECOMING

1

Lighted Window Seen from the Street

It was a February afternoon of smoky sunshine, as I walked home along the embankment to my wife. The river ran white in the sun, the plume from a tug’s funnel came out blue as cigarette-smoke; on the far bank the reflections from windows shone through haze, and down towards Chelsea where I was walking, the smoke was so thick that the skyline, the high chimneys, had smudged themselves into it.

The day was a Tuesday, the year 1938; I had not been home since the Thursday before, which was my usual routine, as I had to spend half my week in Cambridge. I felt an edge of anxiety, a tightness of the nerves, as I always did going home after an absence, even an absence as short as this. Ever since I could remember, seeking deep into my childhood, I had felt this dread on the way home, this dread of what might be waiting for me.

It was nothing serious, it was just one of the reasonless anxieties one had to live with, it was no worse than that. Even now, when sometimes it turned out not so reasonless, I had got used to it. On those Tuesday evenings, walking home from Millbank to Chelsea along the river, I was anxious as I always had been, returning home, but I had put out of mind the special reason why.

Yet that day, as soon as I reached Cheyne Walk, my eyes were straining before I was in sight of our house. When I did see it, the picture might to a stranger have looked serene and enviable. The drawing-room lights were already on, first of the houses along that reach; the curtains had not been drawn, and from the road, up the strip of garden, one could see the walls, high with white-painted panels. If I had been a stranger, looking up the garden from Cheyne Walk, that glimpse of a lighted room would have had for me the charm of domestic mystery and peace.

As I walked up the path, I did not know how she would be.

The hall was brilliantly lit, pemicketily tidy, the hall of a childless couple. No voice greeted me. I went quickly inside the drawing-room. Here also the lights attacked me, as in the dazzle I saw my wife. Saw her quiet, composed, pre-occupied. For she was sitting at a small table, away from the ¿replace, looking down at a chess-board. On the board were only a few pieces, each of them much bigger than an ordinary chess-man, part of an Indian set which, out of some whim, Sheila had bought herself the year before. So far as I could see, she was uot playing a game, but working out a problem. She looked up.

‘Hallo, you’re in, are you?’ she said. ‘You’d better help me with this.’

I was flooded with relief relief so complete as to be happiness, just as I always was when I found her free from strain. Whatever I had expected, it was not this. I drew up a chair opposite her, and, as she bent her head and glanced at the board, I looked through the tall pieces at her forehead, the lines of which were tightened, not as so often with her own inner care, but with simple calculation.

‘I don’t see it,’ she said, and smiled at me with great light-filled grey eyes.

At this time she was thirty-three, the same age within months as I was myself. But she looked much older than her age. When I first fell in love with her, as long ago as fourteen years before, men had thought her beautiful. Since then her face had changed, though I, who had watched it as no one else had, would have been the last to recognize how much.

The lines, which when she was a girl had been visible on her forehead and under her eyes, were now deep; her fine, strong nose had sharpened; her expression had become both harder and more still, drawn and fixed with unhappiness. Only her eyes were untouched, and they, so large that they might have been mournful as a lemur’s, had not shared in the sadness of her face. Even at her worst, they could still look lively, penetrating, not-taken-in; just as her body, beneath the lined, overwrought face, was strong, almost heavy, the body of a woman powerful, healthy and still young.

Seeing her through the chess pieces, I noticed none of these changes, for I was only concerned with her state from day-to-day. I knew the slightest change in her expression, but I could not see what would be obvious to others. Trying to keep her steady, over the hours, the days, the years, I had lost my judgement about whether she was getting better or worse. All I knew was that tonight she was gay, anxiety-free, and that for this night, which was as far as I could see ahead, there was nothing to worry about.

I had loved her all through my young manhood, and, although my love had changed because of what had happened to us, I loved her still. When I first met her, I thought that the luck was on her side; she was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was comfortably off, above all she did not love me when 1 passionately loved her. That meant that she had power over me, and I none over her; it meant that she could tantalize me for years, she could show me the cruelty of one who feels nothing. It meant also, but I did not realize it then, that she was the more to be pitied. For it turned out that it was not only me she could not love, but anyone. She craved to; she tried to find someone to love; she tried to find psychiatrists and doctors who would tell her why she could not. Then, all else failing, she fell back on me, who still loved her, and let me marry her.

It could not have gone well. It might have gone a little better, I sometimes thought, if we had had children, which each of us longed for. But we were left with nothing but ourselves.

‘I must get it out,’ she said, staring long-sightedly at the board. With two fingers she touched a piece shaped like a howdahed elephant, which in a European set would have been a castle. Out of anxious habit, my glance fixed, not on the strong broad-tipped fingers, but on the nails. Once again that night I was relieved. Though they were not painted, they were clean and trimmed. There had been times when her sense of deprivation froze her into stupor, when she no longer took care of herself. That frightened me, but it had not happened for some years. Usually she dressed well enough, and as she walked by the embankment pubs or along the King’s Road, people saw a woman with her head high, a muscular stride, a face handsome and boldly made up.

‘You’d better start again systematically,’ I said.

‘Teach me,’ said Sheila.

It was like her to be willing to take a lesson in the theory of chess problems. It was like her also not to have asked a single question about what I had been doing, although she had not seen me for four days. Cambridge, my London job, they did not exist for her. From before our marriage, from the time when she no longer hoped that all would come well for her, she had become more shut up within herself. In fact, trying to look after her, I had broken my career.

When I married, I thought I knew what it would be like. I should have to watch over her dreads; I had seen something of the schizoid clill; I could imagine how tasks trivial to the rest of us were ordeals to her, how any arrangement in the future, even the prospect of going to a dinner party, could crack her nerves. But I had been borne along by passionate love for her, physical passion pent up for years, and perhaps more than that. So I went into it, and, like others before me, soon knew that no imaginative forecast of what a life will be is anything like that life lived from day to day.

I did my best for her. It scarcely helped her at all. But it left me without much energy free. When we married, I had just got a foot in at the Bar, I was being thought of as a rising junior. Unless I parted from Sheila, I could not keep up that struggle. And so I found less strenuous jobs, a consulting one with Paul Lufkin’s firm and a law fellowship at Cambridge, the latter taking me away from the Chelsea house three or four nights a week. When she was at her most indrawn, sitting by her gramophone for hours on end, I was glad, although it was a cowardly relief, to get away.

That February evening, as we sat opposite each other at the chess table in the bright room, I thought of none of these things. It was quite enough that she seemed content. It gave me—what sometimes can exist in the unhappiest of marriages, although an outsider does not realize its power—a kind of moral calm. Habit was so strong that it could wipe away ambitions put aside, crises of choice, a near-parting, all that had gone on in my secret life with her: habit was sitting near her, watching her nails, watching for the tic, the pseudo-smile, that came when strain was mastering her.

‘I saw R.S.R. today,’ she said out of the blue.

‘Did you?’

‘I’ve got an idea he was looking for me.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ I said.

‘We had a drink. He was in good form.’

Once that would have been a way to provoke my jealousy. Not now. I welcomed anything that would give her interest or hope. She still had bursts of activity in which she lost herself—once or twice, for those were the thirties, in politics; but usually in trying to help some lame dog whom she had met by chance. A little backstreet café where she went by herself—I found that she had lent the proprietor money to keep on the lease. A derelict curate, terrified that he was going to be prosecuted—she was on call for him at any time he wanted. Utterly uninterested in my goings on, her family’s, her old friends’, she could still become absorbed in those of someone new. With them she was selfless, they gave her a flash of hope, she became like the young woman I had first known.

‘He began to talk very airily about getting himself financed again,’ said Sheila.

‘He’s not losing any time, is he?’

‘I wonder if I could do anything for him,’ she said.

‘Plenty of people have tried, you know,’ I said.

It was true. I had only met R. S. Robinson once; he was a man of sixty, who before 1914 had made a reputation as the editor of an avant-garde monthly. Since then, he had been a hanger-on of letters, ghosting for agents, bringing out uncommercial magazines, losing money, making enemies, always ready with a new project. It was not long since he had manoeuvred an introduction to Sheila; the manoeuvres had been elaborate, he might as well have shouted out loud that he had heard she was well-off.

‘Yes, plenty have tried,’ she said. ‘So much the worse for them.’

She gave me a realistic jeering smile. She always met her down-and-outs with her eyes open. She added: ‘But that isn’t much comfort for him, is it?’

‘But if other people have got involved,’ I said, some secondhand rumour running through my mind, ‘it isn’t encouraging for you.’

‘You’ve heard things against him?’

‘Of course.’

‘I expect,’ said Sheila, ‘he’s heard things against me.’

She gave a curious mocking laugh, almost brazen-sounding, a sign that her hopes were high. It was a long time since I had seen them so.

‘Perhaps even against you,’ she said.

I smiled back, I could not depress her; at moments like this her spirits could still make mine spring from the earth. But I said:

‘I tell you, he’s run through plenty of well-wishers. There must be something the matter.’

‘Of course there’s something the matter. If not,’ she said, ‘he wouldn’t have any use for me.’ Again she smiled:‘Look, it’s those with something the matter who need someone. I should have thought even you might have grasped that by now.’

She stood up, went over to the fireplace, grasped the mantelpiece and arched her back.

‘We’re all right for money, aren’t we?’ she asked. Just for once, she, who usually spoke so nakedly, was being disingenuous. She knew our financial state as well as I did. She would not have been her father’s daughter otherwise. Actually, prepared to throw money away as she was, she had a shrewd business head. She knew exactly just how much money need not trouble us. With my earnings and her income, we drew in more than two thousand a year, and lived well within it, even though we kept up this comfortable home and had a housekeeper to look after us.

I nodded yes, we were all right.

‘That’s one thing settled then.’

‘As long,’ I said, ‘as you’re not going to be too disappointed—’

‘I don’t expect too much.’

‘You mustn’t expect anything,’ I said.

‘But he is a gifted man, isn’t he?’ cried Sheila, her face softer and less worn.

‘I think he is,’ I said.

‘I might be able to get him going again,’ she said.

She went on, wistfully and yet with something like bravado:

‘That would be something. If I haven’t done anything else, that would be something, wouldn’t it?’

2

Two Kinds of Business Method

On the track of someone she might serve, Sheila worked as fast as a confidence trickster. It must have been that same week, probably the very next day, that R. S. Robinson came to dine. Certainly I arrived straight from Lufkin’s office; for long afterwards the juxtaposition struck me as ironic.

I had spent all day in Lufkin’s suite. To begin, he had asked me to be available in the early morning and had then kept me waiting, which was not unusual, for a couple of hours. Outside his office, in an anteroom so thickly carpeted that men walked through it with no noise at all, I passed the time with the member of Lufkin’s entourage whom I knew best, a man of my own age called Gilbert Cooke. He was a kind of personal assistant to Lufkin, in theory giving advice on export problems, just as in theory I gave advice on legal ones; but in practice Lufkin used us both as utility men. The company was one of the smaller oil-businesses, but the smallness was relative, and in 1938, the fourth year of Lufkin’s chairmanship, he had already a turnover of thirty million pounds. He had also his own legal staff, and when he offered me a consultant’s job he did not want another lawyer; but it suited him to pick up young men like me and Cooke, keep them on call, and then listen to them.

In the ante-room, Gilbert Cooke pointed to the office door.

‘He’s running behind time,’ he said, as though Lufkin were a train. Cooke was fleshy, powerfully muscled, with a high-coloured Corinthian face and hot brown eyes; he gave at once an impression of intimacy, kindness and considerable weight of nature. In fact, he spoke as though we were more intimate than we actually were.

‘How is Sheila just now?’ he asked me while he waited, as though he knew the whole history.

I said she was well, but he was not put off.

‘Are you absolutely sure she’s been to the right doctor?’ he said.

I said she had not been near one for some time.

‘Who did she go to?’

He was intrusive, pressing, but kind: it was hard to remember that he had only been inside our house twice. He had taken me often enough to his clubs, we had talked politics and games and Lufkin’s business, but I had not given him a confidence.

At last we were shown into Lufkin’s office: in that suite, as one moved from room to room, the air wafted against the skin like warm breath.

Lufkin sat up straight in a hard chair. He scarcely greeted us: he was inconsiderate, but also informal and without pomp. He was off-hand in personal relations because he was so bad at them, and yet, perversely, they gave him pleasure.

‘You know the point?’ he said.

Yes, we had both been briefed.

‘What do I do?’

It sounded as though we should have finished in ten minutes. In actuality, it took all day, and nothing we said mattered much. Lufkin sat there, indifferent to time, straight, bony, skull-faced. He was only ten years older than Cooke or me; his skin was dark, and his business enemies put it about that he looked Jewish and that his name was Jewish, while as a matter of fact his father was a nonconformist parson in East Anglia.

The point before us was simple enough. He had been asked whether he wanted to buy another distributing business; should he? From the beginning of the talk, throughout the long, smoky, central-heated, unromantic hours, two things stood out. First, this was a point on which neither Cooke’s judgement nor mine was worth much—certainly no more than that of any moderately intelligent man round the office. Second, I was sure that, whatever we or anyone else argued, Lufkin had already made up his mind to buy.

Yet all day Cooke behaved like a professional no-man. He became argumentative and rude, oddly so for a middle-rank employee in the presence of a tycoon. The tone of the discussion was harsh and on the whole impersonal; the arguments were prosaic. Cooke was loquacious, much more than Lufkin or me: he went on pestering, not flattering: as I listened, I knew that he was closer to Lufkin than most people in the firm, and wondered why.

Most of the men Lufkin bought had a bit of professional success behind them; but Cooke had nothing to show but social connexions, except for his own curious kind of personal force.

Once, in the middle of the afternoon, after we had lunched on sandwiches and coffee, Cooke switched from his factual line. Suddenly, staring at Lufkin with his full eyes, he said:

‘I’m afraid you’re liable to overstretch yourself.’

‘Maybe.’ Lufkin seemed willing to consider the idea.

‘I mean, with any empire like yours’—their eyes met, and Lufkin smiled bleakly—‘there comes a time when you’ve got to draw in your horns, or else—’

‘What do you say to that, Eliot?’

I said that the firm was short of men, and that the able men were spread thin. He ought to acquire a dozen future managers before he bought much more.

‘I agree that,’ he said. For half-an-hour he got down to detail, and then asked:

‘That make you feel any better, Cooke?’

‘No, it seems easy to you, but it’s not easy.’

‘What seems easy?’

‘Biting off more than anyone can chew.’

Underneath his remote, off-hand manner, Lufkin was obscurely gratified. But he had a knack of pushing away his own gratification, and we returned to figures again.

The sky outside the office windows darkened, the air seemed more than ever hot. Nothing was settled. There had scarcely been a flight of fancy all day. No one would have guessed, though it was the truth, that Lufkin was a man of remarkable imagination; nor that this marathon talk was his technique of coming to the point of action; nor that Gilbert Cooke was swelling with pride, ardent but humble, at being in on anything so big.

When at last we parted, it was nearly seven and still nothing was settled. The whole range of facts about the new business had been re-sorted, except the purchase price, which Lufkin had only mentioned once, and then obliquely. ‘There’s always money for a good business,’ he had added indifferently, and passed on. And yet that purchase price gave a tang to the repetitive, headachey hours, the only tang I was left with on the way to Chelsea in the cold taxi, for it could not have been less than a million pounds.

When I reached home, I met a different kind of business method. R. S. Robinson was already there in the drawing-room; he was standing plumply by the fire, soft silver-shining hair venerable above smooth baby skin. He looked comfortable, he looked sedate; behind his spectacles, his eyes glinted from Sheila to me, sharp with merriness and suspicion. He made no secret that he wanted Sheila’s backing for a sum as great as he could persuade out of her, as great as a thousand pounds.

‘I’ve not come here just for the sake of your intelligent conversation,’ he told her. His voice was fluent, modulated, flattering, high-spirited.

‘I mustn’t come on false pretences, must I?’ he said. ‘I warn you, I’m a dangerous man to let into your house.’

A thousand was the maximum which he let himself imagine; he did not hope to get away with so much, although he was not too delicate to mention it. He set himself to persuade her, and incidentally me as a possible influence, with all the art of which he was so proud.

Strange, I was thinking as we tasted our drinks, that fifteen, sixteen years before, he had been part of our youth. For he had done, on his own account, a little coterie publishing in the days of the English Review, the Imagists, the rebels of the first war. It had been R. S. Robinson who had published a translation of Leopardi’s poems under the inept title of Lonely Beneath the Moon. Both Sheila and I had read it just before we met, when we were at the age for romantic pessimism, and to us it had been magical.

Since then everything he had touched had failed. He was trying to raise money from Sheila for another publishing firm, but himself was not able to put down five pounds. And yet we could not forget the past, and he did not want to, so that, as he stood between us on our own hearthrug, it was not Sheila, it was not I, it was he who dispensed the patronage.

‘I was telling Mrs Eliot that she must write a book,’ he told me soon after I joined them.

Sheila shook her head.

‘I’m sure you could,’ he said to her. He turned on me: ‘I’ve just noticed that you, sir, you have artists’ hands.’ He had lost no time getting out his trowel; but Sheila who shrank with self-consciousness at any praise, could take it from him. Unlike our Chelsea acquaintances of our own generation, he had not begun by using our christian names, but instead went on calling me ‘sir’ and Sheila ‘Mrs Eliot,’ even when he was speaking with insidious intimacy face-to-face.

Standing between us, he dispensed the patronage; he had dignity and presence, although he was inches shorter than Sheila, who was tall for a woman, and did not come up to my shoulder. Round-shouldered and plump, he touched a crest of his silver hair.

He had come to the house in a dinner-jacket, which had once been smart and was now musty, while neither Sheila nor I had dressed; and it was Robinson who set to work to remove embarrassment.

‘Always do it,’ he advised us, as we went into the dining-room. I asked him what.

‘Always put people at a disadvantage. When they tell you not to dress, take no notice of them. It gives you the moral initiative.’

‘You see,’ he whispered to Sheila, sitting at her right hand, ‘I’ve got the moral initiative tonight.’

In the dining-room he congratulated Sheila on the fact that, since the food came up by the serving hatch, we were alone.

‘So I needn’t pretend, need I?’ he said, and, tucking into his dinner, told stories of other meals back in the legendary past, at which he had tried to raise money to publish books—books, he did not let us forget, that we had all heard of since.

‘I expect you’ve been told that I was better off then?’ He looked up from his plate to Sheila, with a merry, malicious chuckle.

‘Don’t you believe it. People always get everything wrong.’ Stories of multiple manoeuvres, getting promises from A on the strength of B and C, from B on the strength of A and C … ‘The point is, one’s got to refuse to play the game according to the rules,’ he advised Sheila. Stories of personal negotiations of such subtlety and invention as to make my business colleagues of the afternoon seem like different animals.

All the time, listening to him, I had spent most of my attention, as throughout our marriage, watching how Sheila was. She had turned towards him, the firm line of her nose and lip clear against the wall; her face had lost the strained and over-vivid fixity, there was no sign of the tic. Perhaps she did not show the quiet familiar ease that sometimes visited her in the company of her protégés; but she had never had a protégé as invincible as this. It took me all my time to remember that, on his own admission, Robinson was destitute, keeping an invalid wife and himself on £150 a year. More than anything, Sheila looked—and it was rare for her—plain mystified.

Just for an instant, out of dead habit, I wondered if he had any attraction for her. Maybe, those who are locked in their own coldness, as she was, mind less than the rest of us about the object of attraction, about whether it is unsuitable or grotesque in others’ eyes. Doing a good turn for this man of sixty, whom others thought fantastic, Sheila might have known a blessed tinge of sexual warmth. At any rate, her colour was high, and for an hour I could feel responsibility lifted from me; she had managed to forget herself.

Robinson, as natural about eating as about his manoeuvres, asked her for a second helping of meat, and went on with his recent attempts at money raising. Some prosperous author, who had known him in his famous days, had given him an introduction to an insurance company. Robinson digressed, his elephant eyes glinting, to tell us a scandalous anecdote about the prosperous author, a young actor, and an ageing woman; as he told it, Robinson was studying Sheila, probing into her life with me.

Pressing the story on her, but drawing no response, he got going about the insurance company. They had made him go into the City, they had given him coffee and wholemeal biscuits, and then they had talked of the millions they invested in industrial concerns.

‘They talked to me of millions,’ he cried.

‘They didn’t mean anything,’ I said.

‘They should be more sensitive,’ said Robinson. ‘They talked to me of millions when all I wanted was nine hundred pounds.’

I was almost sure he had dropped the figure from a thousand for the sake of the sound, just as, in the shops where my mother used to buy our clothes, they did not speak of five shillings, but always of four and eleven three.

‘What’s more,’ said Robinson, ‘they didn’t intend to give me that. They went on talking about millions here and millions there, and when I got down to brass tacks they looked vague.’

‘Did they offer anything?’ said Sheila.

‘Always know when to cut your losses,’ Robinson said in his firm, advising tone. It occurred to me that, in a couple of hours, he had produced more generalizations on how to run a business than I had heard from Paul Lufkin in four years.

‘I just told them, You’re treating me very badly. Don’t talk of millions to people who need the money, and I left them high and dry.’

He sighed. ‘Nine hundred pounds.’

At the thought of humiliation turned upside down, Sheila had laughed out loud, for the first time for months. But now she began asking questions. Nine hundred pounds: that would go nowhere. True, he had kept his old imprint all those years, he could publish a book or two and get someone else to distribute it—but what good was that? Surely if he did that, and it went off half-cock, he had dissipated his credit, and had finished himself for good?

Robinson was not used to being taken by surprise. He flushed: the flush rose up his cheeks, up to the forehead under the white hair. Like many ingenious men, he constantly underrated everyone round him. He had made his judgement of this beautiful hag-ridden woman; he thought she would be the softest of touches. He had marked her down as a neurotic. He was astonished she should show acumen. He was upset that she should see through him.

For, of course, he contrived to be at the same time embarrassingly open and dangerously secretive. Was he even truthful about his own penury? He had been trying on Sheila an alternative version of his technique of multiple approach. This time he was working on several people simultaneously, telling none of them about the others.

‘Always keep things simple,’ he said, trying to wave his panache.

‘Not so simple that they don’t make sense,’ said Sheila, smiling but not yielding.

Soon she got some reason out of him. If he could collcct it, he wanted several thousand; at that period, such a sum would let him publish, modestly but professionally, for a couple of years. That failing, however, he still wanted his nine hundred. Even if he could only bring out three books under the old imprint, the name of R. S. Robinson would go round again.

‘You never know what might happen,’ he said, and blew out wonderful prospects like so many balloons. With three books they would remember him again, he said, and he gave up balloon blowing and spoke of the books he would bring out. He stopped flattering Sheila or using the other dodges which he believed infallible, and all of a sudden one saw that his taste had stayed incorrupt. It was a hard, austere, anti-romantic taste, similar to Sheila’s own.

‘I could do for them,’ he said, ‘what I did before.’

‘You want some money,’ said Sheila.

‘I only want enough to put someone on the map,’ he cried.

She asked: ‘Is money all you need?’

‘No. I want someone like you to keep people from getting the wrong impression. You see, they sometimes think I’m a bit of an ass.’

He was not putting on one of his acts. He had said it angrily, hotly, out of resentment, not trying to get round her. But soon he was master of himself again, enough to calculate that he might extract an answer that night. He must have calculated also that she was on his side and would not shift—for he made an excuse to go to the lavatory, so as to leave the two of us alone.

As soon as I returned without him to the dining-table, where we were still sitting, Sheila said the one word:

‘Well?’

We had been drinking brandy, and with a stiff mass-production gesture, she kept pushing the decanter with the side of her little finger.

‘Well?’ she said again.

I believed, then and afterwards, that if I had intervened I could have stopped her. She still trusted me, and no one else. However much she was set on helping him, she would have listened if I had warned her again. But I had already decided not to. She had found an interest, it would do more good than harm, I thought.

‘If you want to risk it,’ I said, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t.’

‘Do you think any better of him?’

I was thinking, he had raised the temperature of living for her. Then I realized that he had done the same for me. If she was taken in, so was I.

I grinned and said:

‘I must say I’ve rather enjoyed myself.’

She nodded, and then said after a pause:

‘He wouldn’t be grateful, would he?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Don’t soften it.’ Her great eyes swung round on me like searchlights. ‘No one’s grateful for being looked after. He’d be less grateful than most.’

It was the kind of bitter truth that she never spared herself or others, the only kind of truth that she thought worth facing. Who else, I wondered, would have faced it at that moment, just as she was committing herself? Other people could do what she was doing, but not many with that foresight of what lay ahead.

We sat silent, her eyes still levelled at mine, but gradually becoming unfocused, as though looking past me, looking a great distance away.

‘If I don’t do it,’ she said, ‘someone else will. Oh well, I suppose it’s more important to me than it is to him.’

Soon afterwards Robinson came back. As he opened the door, we were quiet, and he thought it was because of him. His manner was jaunty, but even his optimistic nerve was strained, and as he sat down he played, too insidiously, too uneasily, his opening trick.

‘Mrs Eliot, I’ve been thinking, you really ought to write a book yourself.’

‘Never mind about that,’ she said in a cold, brittle tone.

‘I mean it very much.’

‘Never mind.’

The words were final, and Robinson looked down at the table.

She remarked, as though it were obvious:

‘I may as well tell you straight away, I will do what I can to help.’

For the second time that night, Robinson flushed to the temples. In a mutter, absent-minded, bewildered, he thanked her without raising his eyes, and then took out a handkerchief and wiped it hard across his forehead.

‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind, sir, if I have another little drink?’ he said to me, forcing his jollity. ‘After all, we’ve got something to celebrate.’ He was becoming himself again. ‘After all, this is an historic occasion.’

3

The Point of a Circuitous Approach

After that February evening, Sheila told me little of her dealings with Robinson, but I knew they preoccupied her. When, in the early summer, she heard that her parents wished to spend a night in our house, she spoke as though it were an intolerable interruption.

‘I can’t waste the time,’ she said to me, her mouth working.

I said that we could hardly put them off again; this time Mr Knight was visiting a specialist.

‘Why can’t I put them off? No one will enjoy it.’

‘It will give more pain not to have them.’

‘They’ve given enough pain in their time. Anyway,’ she said, ‘just for once I’ve got something better to do.’

She wrote back, refusing to have them. Her concentration on Robinson’s scheme seemed to have become obsessive, so that it was excruciating for her to be distracted even by a letter. But Mrs Knight was not a sensitive woman. She replied by return, morally indignant because Sheila had made an excuse not to go home to the vicarage last Christmas, so that we had not seen them for eighteen months; Sheila’s father, for all Mrs Knight’s care and his own gallantness, would not always be there for his daughter to see; she was showing no sense of duty.

Even on Sheila, who dreaded their company and who blamed her torments of self-consciousness upon them, the family authority still held its hold. No one else could have overruled her, but her mother did.

So, on a morning in May, a taxi stopped at the garden gate, and, as I watched from an upstairs window, Mr and Mrs Knight were making their way very slowly up the path. Very slowly, because Mr Knight was taking tiny steps and pausing between them, leaning all the time upon his wife. She was a big woman, as strong as Sheila, but Mr Knight tottered above her, his hand on her heavy shoulder, his stomach swelling out from the middle chest, not far below the dog collar; he was teetering along like a massive walking casualty, helped out of battle by an orderly.

I went out on to the path to greet them, whilst Sheila stayed at the door.

‘Good morning, Lewis,’ said Mr Knight very faintly.

‘No talking till we get him in,’ Mrs Knight announced.

‘I’m sorry to lay my bones among you,’ whispered Mr Knight.

‘Don’t strain yourself talking, dear,’ said Mrs Knight.

At last the progress ended in an armchair in the drawing-room, where Mr Knight closed his eyes. It was a warm morning, and through a half-open window blew a zephyr breath.

‘Is that too much for you, dear?’ said Mrs Knight, looking accusingly at me.

‘Perhaps