At the same time I could not help feeling a kind of warmth, not affection so much as a visceral warmth. In the midst of his anxiety, he had been half-pleased to confess. Not with just the pleasure displayed by men higher-minded than he was, as they modestly admit a conquest — no, with a pleasure deeper than that, something more like joy. Looking at him as he sat, still gazing at the lake, not meeting my eyes, I should have guessed that he had not had much to do with women. But his emotions were powerful and, perhaps, so could his passions be. As he sat there, his face heavy, thinking of the dangers, he seemed comforted by what had happened to him — like a man for whom the promise of life is still there. I set myself to ask a practical question. What were the chances of it coming out?
‘She’s worried. I’ve never known her lose her nerve before.’
I said, probably she had never had to cope with a scandal. But the technique was all worked out. Go to a good tough lawyer. Tell everything.
‘You’ve no reason to think that any rumours have gone round already, have you? I certainly haven’t.’
Roger shook his head.
‘Then it ought to be fairly easy to stop the hole.’
He did not respond, or look at me. He stared into the distance. In a moment, knowing that I was giving him no comfort, I broke off.
I said: ‘I’m sure this can be handled. You ought to tell her that. But even if it couldn’t be, and the worst came to the worst — is it the end of the world?’ I meant, as I went on to say, that the people he lived amongst were used to scandals out of comparison more disreputable than this.
‘You’re fooling yourself,’ he said harshly. ‘It isn’t so easy.’ I wondered, was he holding something back? Was she very young? ‘Is there something special about it?’ I said. ‘Who is she?’
It seemed that he could not reply. He sat without speaking, and then in a burst of words put me off.
‘It isn’t important what’s done. It is important who does it. There are plenty of people — you know as well as I do — who want an excuse to knife me. Don’t you accept that this would be a reasonable excuse?’
‘You haven’t told me how.’
‘There’s an old maxim in the Anglican church. You can get away with unorthodox behaviour. Or you can get away with unorthodox doctrine. But you can’t get away with both of them at the same time.’
For an instant, his spirits had flashed up. In the same sharp, realistic, almost amused tone, he added: ‘Remember, I’ve never been one of the family. Perhaps, if I had been, I could get away with more.’
What was ‘the family’?
The inner circle of privilege, the Caves, Wyndhams, Collingwoods, Diana’s friends, the Bridgewaters, the people who, though they might like one another less than they liked Roger, took one another for granted, as they did not take him.
‘No,’ I said, ‘you’ve never been one of them. But Caro is.’ I brought in her name deliberately. There was a silence. Then he answered the question I had not asked. ‘If this thing breaks, Caro will stand by me.’
‘She doesn’t know?’
He shook his head, and then broke out with violence: ‘I won’t have Caro hurt.’ It sounded more angry than anything he had said. Had he been talking about one worry, about the practical risk that still seemed to me unreal, in order to conceal another from himself? What kind of guilt did he feel, how much was he tied? All of a sudden, I thought I understood at last his outburst on Sammikins’ behalf at Basset. It had seemed uncomfortable, untypical, not only to the rest of us but to himself. Yes, it had been chivalrous, it had been done for Caro’s sake. But it had been altogether too chivalrous. It had the strain, the extravagant self-abnegation, of a man who gives his wife too many sacrifices, just to atone for not giving her his love.
‘Isn’t Caro going to be hurt anyway?’ I said.
He did not reply.
‘This affair isn’t ready to stop, is it?’
‘Not for either of us. Not for—’ He hesitated. He still had not told me the woman’s name. Now he wanted to, but at last brought out the pronoun, not the name.
‘Can you give her up?’
‘No,’ said Roger.
Beneath the layers of worry, there was something else pressing him. Part joy: part something else again, which I could feel in the air, but to which I could not put a name — as though it were a superstitious sense, a gift of foresight.
He leaned back, and did not confide any more.
To the left, above the trees, the light from a window shone out — an office window, perhaps in Roger’s Ministry, though I could not be sure — a square of yellow light high in the dark evening.
Part Three
Privacy
21: Breakfast
It was the morning after Roger had talked to me in the Park, and Margaret and I were sitting at breakfast. From the table, I could look down at the slips of garden running behind the Tyburn chapel. I glanced across at my wife, young-looking in her dressing-gown, fresh, not made up. Sometimes I laughed at her for looking so fresh in the morning: for in fact it was I who woke up easily, while she was slumbrous, not at her best, until she had sat beside the window and drunk her first cups of tea.
That morning she was not too slumbrous to read my expression. She knew that I was worrying, and asked me why. At once I told her Roger’s story. I didn’t think twice about telling her; we had no secrets, I wanted to confide. She wasn’t intimate with Roger as I was, nor with Caro either, and I didn’t expect her to be specially concerned. To my surprise, her colour rose. Her cheeks flushed, making her eyes look bluer still. She muttered: ‘Damn him.’
‘He’ll be all right—’ I was consoling her; but she broke out:
‘Never mind about him. I was thinking of Caro.’
She said: ‘You haven’t given her a thought, have you?’
‘There are two other people as well — ‘He’s behaved atrociously, and she’s the one who’s going to face it.’
As a rule, she was no more given to this kind of moral indignation than I was myself. Already her temper was high and mine was rising. I tried to quieten us both, and said, in the shorthand we were used to, that Roger wasn’t the first person in the world to cut loose: others had done the same.
‘If you mean that I damaged someone else to come to you,’ she flared up, ‘that’s true.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
I had spoken without thinking.
‘I know you didn’t.’ Her temper broke, she smiled. ‘You know, I’d behave the same way again. But I haven’t much to be proud of in that respect.’
‘Nor have I.’
‘You didn’t betray your own marriage. That’s why I can’t brush off Roger betraying his.’
‘You say I’m not giving Caro a thought?’ Once more we were arguing, once more we were near to quarrelling. ‘But how much are you giving him?’
‘You said yourself, he’ll be all right, he’ll come through,’ she said scornfully. Just then she had no feeling for him at all. ‘Do you know what it’s going to be like for her — if they break up?’ She went on with passion. ‘Shock. Humiliation. Loss.’
I was forced to think, Caro had been happy, she had paraded her happiness. She had done much for him — perhaps too much? Had he never accepted it, or the way her family looked at him?