‘I hope she’ll marry me,’ he said. He smiled in a friendly, almost bantering way. ‘It’s a pity I didn’t find her when you found Sheila.’ (He didn’t know it, he hadn’t guessed it, but that night, as we talked, I was thinking how I could break my marriage.) ‘I didn’t expect to find everything I wanted in one person then, did I? Still, I ought to have married someone by now, I ought to have made myself.’
‘As a result of this trouble—’
George broke out again: ‘They’ve tried to insinuate that everything I’ve done was because I was sex-crazy. They’ve tried to explain away the best years of my life — by saying I spent them doing nothing but plot to get a few minutes of pleasure. I ought to have known they would do it. I trusted them too much. It’s senseless letting your faith in goodness run away with you. It would have been easy to shape things differently. I shall profit by it now. Marriage with Daphne will leave me free. As it was, I shan’t blame myself. It was bad luck things went the way they did. It wasn’t my fault — but when they did, well, they were all round me, I’m not a celibate, my taste is pretty wide. And so I gave them the chance to destroy everything I’d spent all these years in building.’
He paused, then said, in a flat voice, with all the bitterness gone: ‘That’s why, you see, I’ve got to show them that it hasn’t affected me. I’ve got to show them for certain that I’m keeping on.’
I could not help but feel that he meant something different and more tormenting. It was himself in whose sight he needed to be seen unchanged. In his heart a voice was saying: ‘You can’t devote yourself again. You never have. Your enemies are right. You’ve deceived yourself all this time. And now you know it, you can’t begin deceiving yourself again.’
There were to be times — I felt at this moment — when he would want to give up struggling against that voice. There were to be times, darker than now, when he would have to see himself and ask what was to become of him. Yet, in those dark moments, would he — as he was now — be drawing a new strength from his own self-searching, even from his own self-distrust?
After his last remark, both he and I were still eager for what life would bring him. He could still warm himself and everyone round him with his own hope.