We sat in the drawing-room, one each side of the fireplace, Mr Knight smoking a pipe of the herb-tobacco which out of valetudinarian caution he had taken to years before. The smell invaded me and I felt a tension nearly intolerable, as though this moment of sense, the smell of herb tobacco, was not to be endured, as though I could not wait to hear a word. But when he did speak, beginning with one of his circuitous wind-ups, he astonished me: the subject he wanted to get clear before they left next day was no more intimate than the lease of the house.
When I married Sheila, I had had no capital, and Mr Knight had lent us the money to buy a fourteen years’ lease, which had been in Sheila’s name. This lease still had six years to run, and Mr Knight was concerned about the most business-like course of action. Presumably, after all that had happened, and regardless of the fact that the house was too large for a man alone, I should not wish to go on living there? If it were his place to advise me, he would advise against. In that case, we ought to take steps about disposing of the lease. Since the loan had been for Sheila’s sake as well as mine, he would consider it wiped off, but perhaps I would think it not unreasonable, as he did himself, particularly as Sheila’s own money would come to me under her will, that any proceeds we now derived from the lease should go to him?
Above all, said Mr Knight, there was a need for speed. It might be possible to sell a house before the war developed: looking a few months ahead, none of us could guess the future, and any property in London might be a drug on the market. I had always found him one of the most puzzling and ungraspable of men, but never more so than now, when he took that opportunity to show his practical acumen. I promised to put the house in the agents’ hands within a few days.
‘I’m sorry to lay this on your shoulders too,’ he said, ‘but your shoulders are broad — in some ways—’
His voice trailed away, as though in the qualification he might be either envying me or pitying me. I was staring into the fire, not looking at him, but I felt his glance upon me. In a quiet tone he said: ‘She always took her own way.’
I did not speak.
‘She suffered too much.’
I cried out: ‘Could any man have made her happy?’
‘Who can say?’ replied Mr Knight.
He was trying to comfort me, but I was bitter because that one cry had escaped against my will.
‘May she find peace,’ he said. For once his heavy lids were raised, he was looking directly at me with sad and acute eyes.
‘Let me say something to you,’ he remarked, his words coming out more quickly than usual, ‘because I suspect you are one of those who take it on themselves to carry burdens. Perhaps one is oneself, perhaps one realizes the danger of those who won’t let themselves forget.’
For an instance his tone was soft, indulgent with self-regard. Then he spoke sharply: ‘I beg you, don’t let this burden cripple you.’
I neither would nor could confide. I met his glance as though I did not understand.
‘I mean the burden of my daughter’s death. Don’t let it lie upon you always.’
I muttered. He made another effort: ‘If I may speak as a man thirty years older, there is this to remember — time heals most wounds, except the passing of time. But only if you can drop the burdens of the past, only if you make yourself believe that you have a life to live.’
I was gazing, without recognition, into the fire; the smell of herb tobacco wafted across. Mr Knight had fallen silent. I reckoned that he would leave me alone now.
I said something about letting the house. Mr Knight’s interest in money did not revive; he had tried for once to be direct, an ordeal for so oblique a man, and had got nowhere.
For minutes, ticked off by the clock, again the only sound in the room, we stayed there; when I looked at him his face was sagging with misery. At last he said, after neither of us had spoken for a long while, that we might as well go to bed. As we went out to the foot of the stairs, he whispered: ‘If one doesn’t take them slowly, they are a strain on one’s heart.’
I made him rest his hand on my shoulder, and cautiously, with trepidation, he got himself from tread to tread. On the landing he averted his eyes from the door of the room in which her body lay.
Again he whispered: ‘Good night. Let us try to sleep.’
13: A Smooth Bedcover
IT was three nights later when, blank to all feeling, I went into the bedroom and switched on the light. Blankly, I pulled off the cover from my own bed; then I glanced across at hers, smooth, apple-green under the light, undisturbed since it was made four days before. All of a sudden, sorrow, loss, tore at me like a spasm of the body. I went to the bed and drew my hands along the cover, tears that I could not shed pressing behind my eyes, convulsed in the ravening of grief. At last it had seized me. The bed was smooth under the light. I knelt beside it, and wave after wave of a passion of the senses possessed me, made me grip the stuff and twist it, scratch it, anything to break the surface, shining quietly under the light.
Once, in an exhausted respite, I had a curious relief. The week to come, some friends had invited us to dinner. If she had been alive, she would have been anxious about going, she would have wanted me to make excuses and lie her out of the evening, as I had done so many times.
Then the grief flooded through me again. In the derangement of my senses, there was no time to come: all time was here, in this moment, now, beside this bed.
I learned then, in that devastation, that one could not know such loss without craving for an after-life. My reason would not give me the illusion, not the fractional hope of it — and yet I longed to pray to her.
Part Two
The Self-defeated
14: Loan of a Book
OUTSIDE the window, in the September sunshine, a couple of elderly men were sitting in deckchairs drinking tea. From my bed, which was on the ground floor of a London clinic, I could just see past them to a bed of chrysanthemums smouldering in the shadow. The afternoon was placid, the two old men drank with the peace of cared-for invalids; for me it was peaceful to lie there watching them, free from pain. True, Gilbert Cooke would be bringing me work, I should have to be on my feet by Thursday; but there was nothing the matter with me, I could lie idle for another twenty-four hours.
That day was Tuesday, and I had only entered the clinic on the previous Saturday afternoon. Since Sheila’s death nearly two years before (this was the September of 1941) I had been more on the move than ever in my life, and the pain in my back had not been giving me much rest. It was faintly ludicrous: but, in the months ahead, I was going to be still more occupied, and it was not such a joke to think of dragging myself through meetings as I had been doing, or, on the bad days, holding them round my office sofa. It was not such a joke, and also it watered one’s influence down: in any kind of politics, men listened to you less if you were ill. So I had set aside three days, and a surgeon had tried manipulating me under an anaesthetic. Although I was incredulous, it seemed to have worked. Waiting for Cooke that afternoon, I was touching wood in case the pain returned.
When Gilbert Cooke came in, he had a young woman with him whose name, when he made an imperious gobbled introduction, I did not catch. In fact, taking from him at once some papers marked urgent, I only realized some moments afterwards, absent in my reading, that I had not heard her name. Then I only asked for it with routine politeness. Margaret Davidson. He had mentioned her occasionally, I recalled; she was the daughter of the Davidson whom he had talked of at the Barbican dinner and whom I had been surprised to hear that Gilbert knew.