‘Oh, I was never up to their clan as a brain, I don’t see why they should.’
In fact, able active men of thirty-five, with decent academic careers, permanently exempt from call-up, were bound soon to be at a premium. I told him so.
‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ said Cooke.
‘They’d take you as a principal tomorrow.’
‘How could they think I was any use to them?’
A little drunk, half-irritated that he would not trust my judgement, half-touched by his modesty, I said: ‘Look here. Would you like to work in my place?’
‘You don’t mean there would be a chance?’
‘I can take the first step tomorrow.’
Gilbert regarded me with bold eyes, determined to see the catch in it, diffident about thanking me. From that instant he just wanted a comradely evening. Brandy by the fire: half-confidences: the stories, gilded at the edges, of youngish men on a happy alcoholic night. One thing struck me about Gilbert’s stories. He was an adventurous, versatile man, always on the move: but he was meticulously pure in speech, and, although he spoke of women with liking, he did not talk openly of sex.
Next morning, in the breakfast-room of my club, the coal-fire crackled and spurted: the unfolded newspapers glinted on the table under the light; in the street outside the pavement looked dark with cold. Although I had a headache, it was not enough to put me off my breakfast, and food was still good, so early in the war. I ate the kidneys and bacon, and, indulging my thirst, went on drinking tea; the firelight was reflected back from the grey morning mist outside the windows. Acquaintances came to the tables, opening their Times. It was all warmed and cared-for, and I enjoyed stretching out the minutes before I rang up Sheila. At a quarter past nine, I thought, she would be getting up. In comfort, I drank another cup of tea.
When I got through to our house, the telephone burred out perhaps twenty times, but I was not anxious, thinking that Sheila must still be asleep. Then I heard Mrs Wilson’s voice.
‘Who is it?’
I asked, was Sheila up.
‘Oh, Mr Eliot,’ came the thin, complaining voice.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Something’s happened. I think you ought to come back straightaway. I think you must.’
I knew.
‘Is she all right physically?’
‘No.’
‘Is she dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s killed herself?’
‘Yes.’
I was sick with shock, with the first numbness; I heard myself asking: ‘How did she do it?’
‘It must have been her sleeping tablets, there’s the empty bottle lying by the side of her.’
‘Have you called a doctor?’
‘I’m afraid she’s been dead for hours, Mr Eliot. I only found her ten minutes ago, and I didn’t know what to do.’
I said that I would arrange everything, and be with her in half an hour.
‘I’m very sorry about it myself. I was very fond of her, poor soul. It was a great shock for me, finding her,’ came Mrs Wilson’s voice, in a tone of surprise, aggrievement, injury. ‘It was a great shock for me.’
At once I rang up Charles March. I must have a doctor whom I could trust, I thought. As I waited, it occurred to me that neither Sheila nor I had used a regular doctor in London. Apart from my lumbago, we had been physically healthy people.
Charles was out at a patient’s. I left a message, saying that I needed him with extreme urgency. Then I went into the street and took a taxi home. In the freezing morning the desolate Park skimmed by, Exhibition Road, the knot of shop-lights by South Kensington Station. Twice the smell of the taxi’s leather made me retch. I seemed at a distance from my own pain: somehow, dimly, numbly, I knew that grief and remorse were gnawing inside me, twisting my bowels with animal deprivation, with the sensual misery of loss. And also I felt the edge of a selfish and entirely ignoble fear. I was afraid that her suicide might do me harm; I shied from thinking of what kind of harm, but the superstitious reproach hung upon me, mingled with remorse. The fear was sharp, practical and selfish.
In the hall, Mrs Wilson’s eyes were bloodshot, and she squeezed her handkerchief and pressed it into the corner of one eye and then the other: but her manner had the eagerness, the zest, of one living close to bad news.
‘She’s not in the bedroom, Mr Eliot,’ she whispered. ‘She did it in her old sitting-room.’
I wondered whether it was a chance, or whether she had chosen it.
‘Did she leave any letters?’ I asked, and I also was near whispering.
‘I couldn’t see anything, I looked round, of course, but I couldn’t see a piece of paper in the room. I went up with her tea, Mr Eliot, and I knocked on the bedroom door, and no one answered, and I went in and there was no one there—’
Although Mrs Wilson wished to follow me, I went upstairs alone. The sitting-room curtains were drawn, though I did not know by whom, it might have been by Mrs Wilson a few minutes before. In the half-light I was struck by the dread that came on me as a child when I went into the room where my grandfather’s body was stretched out. Before looking at her, I pulled the curtains open; the room stood bare to the leaden light. At last I forced my eyes towards the divan.
She was lying on her back, dressed in a blouse and skirt such as she wore in the house on an ordinary afternoon, her head a quarter turned towards the window. Her left hand was by her side and her right fell across her breast, the thumb wide apart from the fingers. The lines of her face were so softened by death that they had become only grazes, as though her living face had been photographed through muslin; her cheeks, which had never hollowed, now were as full as when she was a girl. Her eyes were open and enormous: on her mouth there was a defensive, deprecatory, astonished grin, exactly the grin she wore when she was taken at a loss and exclaimed ‘Well, I’m damned’.
There was, just visible because of the tablets she had taken, a dried trickle of saliva down the side of her chin, as though she had dribbled in her sleep.
I stared for a long time, gazing down at her. However one read her expression, the moment of death seemed not to have been tragic or unhappy. I did not touch her; perhaps, if she had looked sadder, I should have done.
By the divan stood the bedside table, just as on the night of Munich, when she had placed my bottle of aspirin there for me. Now another bottle rested on the cherry wood, but empty and without its stopper, which she must have dropped on to the floor. Beside the bottle was a tumbler, containing about three fingers’ depth of water, stale with the night’s bubbles. There was nothing else at all. Into that room she brought nothing but her bottle and the glass of water.
I searched for a note as though I were a detective. In that room — in the bedroom — in my study — I studied the envelopes in the wastepaper baskets, looking for any line to her parents or me. In her handbag I found her pen unfilled. On her writing-desk the paper was blank. She had gone without a word.
Suddenly I was angry with her. I was angry, as I looked down at her. I had loved her all my adult life; I had spent the years of my manhood upon her; with all the possessive love that I had once felt for her, I was seared because she had not left me a goodbye.
Waiting for Charles March, I was not mourning Sheila. I had room for nothing but that petty wound, because I had been forgotten; the petty wound, and also the petty fear of the days ahead. As I waited there, I was afraid of much, meeting the Knights, going to the office, even being seen by my friends.
11: Claustrophobia in an Empty House
WHILE Charles March was examining her I went into the bedroom, where I gazed out of the window, aware of nothing but fears and precautions. The only recognition that I gave to Sheila was that my eyes kept themselves away from any glance at her bed, at the undisturbed immaculate bed.