We filled our glasses, settled into the easy chairs by the fire, and talked casually for a few minutes.
‘It’s a long while,’ said George comfortably, ‘since we came down here together.’ I was touched by the sentimentality, unselfconscious and unashamed; perhaps, I thought, it came the easier to George, for, in spite of all his emotional warmth, he was less bound to the past than any of us, far less than Morcom or myself. Perhaps to those like him, solid in the core of their personalities, four-square in themselves, feeling intensely within the core but not stretching out tentacles to any other life, it is easier to admit the past — because it does not matter much, as he showed in our separation. While to Morcom, tied inseparably to a thousand moments of the past, it came too near the truth to acknowledge its softening hand, except by a smile of pretended sarcasm.
After that remark, we argued amiably; George had lost little of his buoyant appetite for ideas. I enjoyed his mental gusto for its own sake, and also because it was impeding the purpose which brought me there.
‘We had some rather good talk tonight,’ he said, after a time, with the change of his manner to an elated but uneasy defence that still covered him when he talked of the group: ‘Didn’t you think so?’
‘Yes. I confess—’
‘Of course you’ve got to remember the relevant circumstances,’ said George hurriedly. ‘The kind of people they would have been if they had been left to their own devices. You’ve got to remember that. Not that they’re not an extremely good collection. They’re better than they’ve ever been, of course. We’ve had some reorientations. I’ve reconsidered some of my opinions.’
‘Still,’ I said, ‘I was glad to see some of the old gang. Particularly Olive. Though I thought she was too much upset—’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ George replied. ‘She’s had something to put up with, you know. You can’t deny that she was magnificently frank about it — she got the whole affair in its right proportion. There aren’t many people who’d do that.’
Obstinately he repeated: ‘She was magnificently frank.’
‘I could find another name for it,’ I said. ‘But still, I wasn’t thinking of her being upset by a love affair. I thought there might possibly be some other cause.’
A frown, or something less (the fixity with which he would at any time have heard a criticism), came into his face.
‘What else could be the matter with her?’
‘I didn’t know her circumstances, since her father died. I thought — perhaps — money—’
‘Ridiculous,’ George interrupted. ‘Completely ridiculous. Her father left her a hundred and fifty a year of her own — and the reversion of the rest of the money when her mother dies.’
‘It can’t be that, then,’ I said. ‘I just felt there might be trouble.’
‘With no justification at all.’
‘Everything is all right?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said George, ‘I wondered why you were asking about our affairs.’
‘I was worried.’
‘I think I should have been approached first.’
I half-expected a burst of anger; but instead his manner was more formal than exasperated.
‘If I could have got you alone before she spoke—’
‘I was prepared to believe that might be the reason.’
‘You understood what I meant to ask?’
‘I gathered it.’
‘George, I can speak out with you. I meant — it’s easy to get into financial tangles that are dangerous. If so, you could trust me to help, couldn’t you?’
‘I know exactly what you meant.’
‘Will you let me ask the same question — now?’
‘I’ve got nothing to add.’ Each reply had been stiff and distant.
‘I can’t do this again, you know.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Everything’s completely well with them? With yourself?’
‘I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life,’ George raised his voice. I put in a question about his position in the firm.
‘I’ve dismissed that business for the time being. I had to make a deliberate choice between the successes I considered important — and the successes’ — he laughed — ‘that an ordinary man with his little house and his little motor car would consider important. I decided that I couldn’t achieve them both, and so I was prepared to sacrifice the trivial ones. Just as you — have sacrificed some successes that I should consider essential. You’ve repressed all your social sense — well, I should simply have found it impossible to make a spiritual hermit of myself. Even — if it does give the Edens of this world a chance to humiliate me for ever.’
As I had often done when George was talking, I listened to the different levels of self-explanation. I heard nothing that bore on the apprehension. After we had talked on for a few moments, I said: ‘The trouble about these choices — I’m not saying that you oughtn’t to have made this one — is that you couldn’t help yourself.’
‘I could certainly help myself—’
‘Anyway it does mean a certain practical inconvenience. Money and so on. How’s that treating you?’
George’s face opened in a chuckle. ‘I’m harassed sometimes, as you might expect. I haven’t borrowed from you recently, but you mustn’t imagine you’re completely immune.’ He passed on to stories of the group in the last years. He got up to close the windows for the night: he said in a quiet voice: ‘I’ve gained more from the last year or two than all the rest of my life. I know you all think I’m incapable of any sort of change. You haven’t noticed that I’m more suggestible than any of you.’ He looked over the fields, in the darkness. ‘I’ve had my effect on these people — and they don’t think it, but they’ve had an effect on me. And I’m better and happier because it’s happened that way.’
24: The First Inquiries
MORCOM was away that weekend. I asked Roy to tell him that I had been in the town, and had called on George and Olive.
Through the autumn, a busy time for me, I was often uneasy. The visit had not brought anything like reassurance; but there seemed nothing I could do. As the months passed, though, I began to feel that my anxieties had run away with me. I heard nothing more until a Friday night in December.
I was tired after a day’s work, lying on my sofa with a novel, which, when those moments came to have a significance they did not then possess (through the memory of action, so to speak, which is halfway between involuntary memory — recalled for instance by a smell — and that which we force back), I remembered as Thomas Wolfe’s first book. The telephone bell rang. It was a trunk call, and among the murmurs, clangings, and whispers of the operation, I had the meaningless apprehension that sometimes catches hold as one listens and waits.
Then I heard Roy’s voice: ‘Is that, you, Lewis?’
The words were precise and clear, isolated in sound.
‘Yes.’
‘You should come down tonight. There’s a train in half an hour. It would be good if you caught that.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘You should come at once. Morcom and I are certain you should come at once. Can you?’
‘Can’t you tell me? Is it necessary?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t you tell—?’
‘I’ll meet you at the station.’
Through the carriage window the lights of villages moved past. As my anger with Roy for leaving me uncertain became sharper, the lights became circled in mist and passed increasingly slow. We stopped at a station; the fog whirled under its lamps. At last the platform. The red-brick walls shone in the translucency; as I got out, the raw air caught at the throat.