There was the same comparison in my mind as I thought of Margaret’s nature. She had enough spirit to be exciting — but she seemed tender, equable, easy-going. An hour after she had left, I was making day-dreams of her so.
That evening, lying in bed outside the beam of sunlight, I basked in a kind of uncommitted hope; sometimes homesick images of the past filtered in, as well as the real past that I feared. But I was happy with the illusion of free will, as though with this girl who had just left me bliss was mine if I chose it.
Nevertheless I need do nothing; I had admitted nothing to myself beyond recall; I could refrain from seeing her again without more than a spasm of regret and reproach for my own cowardice.
For that night, I could rest in an island of peace, hoarding my chance of bliss as I used to hoard sweets as a child, docketing them away in a bookshelf corner so that they were ready when I felt inclined.
15: Confidential Offer
STILL acting as though uncommitted, I invited Margaret and Gilbert Cooke together, three times that autumn. For me, there was about those evenings the suspense, the inadmissible charm, that abides in a period of waiting for climactic news, as it were an examination result, from which one is safe until the period is up. The meeting in a pub, where Gilbert and I went together from the office and found her waiting: the communiqués in the evening papers: the wartime streets at night: the half-empty restaurants, for London was not crowded that year: the times at dinner when we spoke of ourselves, the questions unspoken: the return alone to Pimlico in the free black night.
One evening in late November Gilbert had accompanied me out of the office for a drink in my club, as he often did. That day, as on most others, we went on discussing our work, for we were engrossed in it. Much of the time since Sheila’s death, I had thought of little else: nor had Gilbert, intensely patriotic, caught up in the war. He had by now picked up some of the skills and language of the professional Civil Servants we were working with: our discussion that evening, just as usual, was much like the discussions of two professionals. I valued his advice: he was both tough and shrewd, and tactically his judgement was better than mine.
There was just one point, however, at which our discussion was not simply business-like. Gilbert had developed Napoleonic ambitions, not for himself, but for me: he saw me rising to power, with himself as second-in-command: he credited me with the unsleeping cunning he had once seen in Paul Lufkin, and read hidden meanings in moves that were quite innocent. Either as result or cause, his curiosity about my behaviour was proliferating so that I often felt spied upon. He was observant quite out of the ordinary run. He would not ask a disloyal question, but he had a gossip-writer’s nose for information. I was fond of him, I had got used to his inquisitiveness, but lately it had seemed to be swelling into a mania.
We could be talking frankly about policy, with no secrets between us, when I happened to mention a business conversation with the Minister. A look, knowing and inflamed, came into Gilbert’s eyes: he was wondering how he could track down what we had said. He was even more zestful about my relations with the Permanent Secretary, Sir Hector Rose. Gilbert knew that the Minister wished me well; he was not so sure how I proposed to get on terms with Rose. About any official scheme, Gilbert asked me my intentions straight out, but in pursuit of a personal one he became oblique. He just exhibited his startling memory by quoting a casual remark I had made months before about Hector Rose, looked at me with bold, hinting eyes, and left it there.
So that I was taken unawares that night when, after we had settled a piece of work, he darted a glance round the bar, making certain no one had come in, and said: ‘How much are you interested in Margaret?’
I should have been careful with anyone, with him more than most.
‘She’s very nice,’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘She’s distinctly intelligent.’
Gilbert put down his tankard and stared at me.
‘What else?’
‘Some women would give a lot for her skin and features, don’t you think?’ I added: ‘I suppose some of them would say she didn’t make the best of herself, wouldn’t they?’
‘That’s not the point. Are you fond of her?’
‘Yes. Aren’t you?’
His face overcast and set so that one could see the double chins, Gilbert stared at the little round table on which our tankards stood. He said: ‘I’m not asking you just for the fun of it.’
With angry energy he was twisting into the carpet the heel of one foot, a foot strong but very small for so massive a man.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said and meant it, but I could go no further. Ill-temperedly, he said: ‘Look here, I’m afraid you might be holding off her because of me. I don’t want you to.’
I was saying something neutral, when he went on: ‘I’m telling you not to worry. She’d make someone a wonderful wife, but it won’t be me. I should slip away, whether you want to do anything about it or not.’
He faced me with a fierce opaque gaze of one about to insist on giving a confidence.
‘You’re wondering why she wouldn’t be the wife for me?’
He answered the question: ‘I should be too frightened of her.’
He had started the conversation intending to be kind, not only to me, but to Margaret. For he did not like the spectacle of lonely people: he could not help stirring himself and being a matchmaker. Yet, getting on towards forty, he was still a bachelor himself. People saw this self-indulgent, heavy-fleshed, muscular man, taking women out, dropping them, returning to his food and drink and clubs: and some, the half-sophisticated, wrote him down as a homosexual. They were crass. The singular thing was that Gilbert was better understood by less sophisticated persons; Victorian aunts who had scarcely heard of the aberrations of the flesh would have understood him better than his knowledgeable acquaintances.
In fact, if one forgot his inquisitiveness, he was much like some of his military Victorian forebears. He was as brave as those Mutiny soldiers, and like them good-natured, more than that, sentimental with his friends: and he could have been as ferocious as they were. His emotional impulses were strong beyond the normal, his erotic ones on the weak side. It was that disparity which gave him his edge, made him formidable and also unusually kind, and which, of course, kept him timorous with women.
He wanted to explain, he went on to tell me so over the little table in the bar, that he was frightened of Margaret because she was so young. She would expect too much: she had never had to compromise with her integrity: she had not seen her hopes fail, her spirits were still overflowing.
But, if she had been older and twice married, he would have been even more frightened of her — and would have given another reason just as eloquent and good.
16: Fog Above the River
IN the week after that talk with Gilbert, I wrote twice to Margaret, asking her to come out with me, and tore the letters up. Then, one afternoon at the end of December, I could hold back no longer, but, as though to discount the significance of what I was doing, asked my secretary to ring up Margaret’s office. ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t find her,’ I said. ‘If she’s not in, don’t leave a message. It doesn’t matter in the least.’ As I waited for the telephone to ring, I was wishing to hear her voice, wishing that she should not be there.