But I was too late. Sitting in the drawing-room when I got home, Sheila was doing nothing at all. No book, no chess-men, not even her gramophone records — she was sitting as though she had been there for hours, staring out of the lighted room into the January night.
After I had greeted her and settled down by the side of the fire, she said: ‘Have you heard his latest?’
She spoke in an even tone. It was no use my pretending.
I said yes.
‘I’m handing in my resignation,’ she said.
‘I’m glad of that,’ I replied.
‘I’ve tried as much as I can,’ she said, without any tone.
In the same flat, impassive voice, she asked me to handle the business for her. She did not wish to see Robinson. She did not care what happened to him. Her will was broken. If I could manage it, I might as well get her money back. She was not much interested.
As she spoke, discussing the end of the relation with no more emotion than last week’s accounts, she pointed to the grate, where there lay a pile of ash and some twisted, calcined corners of paper.
‘I’ve been getting rid of things,’ she said.
‘You shouldn’t have done,’ I cried.
‘I should never have started,’ she said.
She had burned all, her own holograph and two typescripts. But, against the curious farcical intransigence of brute creation, she had not found it so easy as she expected. The debris in the grate represented a long time of sitting before the fire, feeding in papers. In the end, she had had to drop most of the paper into the boiler downstairs. Even that night, she thought it faintly funny.
However, she had destroyed each trace, so completely that I never read a sentence of hers, nor grasped for certain what kind of book it was. Years later, I met the woman who had once been Miss Smith and Robinson’s secretary, and she mentioned that she had glanced through it. According to her, it had consisted mostly of aphorisms, with a few insets like ‘little plays’. She had thought it was ‘unusual’, but had found it difficult to read.
The morning after Sheila burned her manuscript, I kept my appointment with Robinson. In the Maiden Lane attic, the sky outside pressed down against the window; as I entered, Robinson switched on a single light in the middle of the ceiling.
‘How are you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve conquered that fibrositis, it must have made life miserable.’
Courteous and also cordial, he insisted on putting me in the comfortable chair and fitting a cushion to ease the backache of six months before. His eyes were suspicious, but struck me as gay rather than nervous.
I began: ‘I was coming to see you on my own account—’
‘Any time you’ve got nothing better to do,’ said Robinson.
‘But in fact I’ve come on my wife’s.’
‘I haven’t seen her for two or three weeks; how is she?’
‘She wants,’ I said, ‘to finish any connexion with you or what you call your firm or anything to do with you.’
Robinson blushed, as he had done at our dinner party. That was the one chink in his blandness. Confidentially, almost cheerfully, he asked: ‘Shouldn’t you say that was an impulsive decision?’
He might have been a friend of years, so intimate that he knew what my life had been, enduring an unbalanced wife.
‘I should have advised her to take it.’
‘Well,’ said Robinson, ‘I don’t want to touch on painful topics, but I think perhaps you’ll agree that it’s not unreasonable for me to ask for an explanation.’
‘Do you think you deserve it?’
‘Sir,’ he flared up, like a man in a righteous temper, ‘I don’t see that anything in our respective positions in the intellectual world entitles you to talk to me like that.’
‘You know very well why my wife is quitting,’ I said. ‘You’ve made too much mischief. She isn’t ready to stand any more.’
He smiled at me sympathetically, putting his temper aside as though it were a mackintosh.
‘Mischief?’ he said.
‘Mischief,’ he repeated, reflectively, like one earnestly weighing up the truth. ‘It would help me if you could just give me an example of what sort of mischief I’m supposed to be guilty of, just as a rough guide.’
I said that he had spread slander about her.
‘Remember,’ he said, in a friendly merry manner, ‘remember you’re a lawyer, so you oughtn’t to use those words.’
I said that his slander about the book had sickened her.
‘Do you really think,’ he said, ‘that a sane man would be as foolish as you make me out to be? Do you think I could possibly go round blackguarding anyone who was supporting me? And blackguarding her very stupidly, according to your account, because for the sum she lent me she could have published her book several times over. I’m afraid, I don’t like to say it, but I’m afraid you’ve let Sheila’s difficulties infect you.’
For a second his bland reasonableness, his trick of making his own actions sound like a neurotic’s invention, his sheer euphoria, kept me silent.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ve let poor Sheila’s state infect you. I suppose it is the beginning of schizophrenia, isn’t it?’
‘I am not going to discuss my wife,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think it profitable to discuss your motives—’
‘As for her book,’ he said, ‘I assure you, it has real merit. Mind you, I don’t think she’ll ever become a professional writer, but she can say original things, perhaps because she’s a little different from most of us, don’t you know?’
‘I’ve got nothing to say to you,’ I said. ‘Except to arrange how you can pay my wife’s money back.’
‘I was afraid she might feel like that—’
‘This is final,’ I said.
‘Of course it is,’ said Robinson with his gay, wholehearted laugh. ‘Why, I knew you were going to say that the very moment you came into the room!’
I had been strung up for a quarrel. It was a frustration to hear my words bounce back. If he had been a younger man, I might have hit him. As it was, he regarded me with sympathy, with humour in his small, elephantine eyes, the middle parting geometrically precise in his grandfatherly hair.
‘You’ve done her harm,’ I said in extreme bitterness, and regretted the words as soon as they were out.
‘Harm?’ he inquired. ‘Because of her association with me? What kind of harm?’
He spread out his hands.
‘But, as you said, this isn’t the time or place to consider the troubles of poor Sheila. You came here to take her money out, didn’t you? Always recognize the inevitable, I’m a great believer in that. Don’t you think it’s time we got down to business?’
I had run into another surprise. As I sat beside his desk, listening to Robinson’s summary of his agreement with Sheila and his present situation, I realized he was a man of unusual financial precision and, so far as I could judge, of honesty. It was true that, cherishing his own secretiveness, he concealed from me, just as he had originally concealed from Sheila, some of his sources of income and his expectations of money to come. Somehow he had enough money to continue in his office and to pay Miss Smith; meanwhile, he was postponing his first ‘list’ until the autumn; it struck me, was he glad of the excuse? Daydreaming, planning, word-spinning about the revival of past glories, that was one thing. Putting it to the test was another. Maybe he would like that date deferred.
No one could have procrastinated less, however, about repaying Sheila: he offered to write her a cheque for £300 that day, and to follow it with two equal instalments on 1 June and 1 September.
‘Interest?’ he asked, beaming.