Throughout that interview with the Minister, despite the old man’s wiliness, flattery and distrust, it was Lufkin who held the moral initiative.
18: The Sweetness of Life
ON the ceiling, the wash of firelight brightened; a shadow quivered and bent among the benign and rosy light; there was the noise of a piece of coal falling, the ceiling flickered, faded, and then glowed. It might have been a holiday long forgotten or an illness in childhood, as I lay there in a content so absolute that it was itself a joy, not just a successor of joy, gazing up at the ceiling. In the crook of my arm Margaret’s neck was resting; she too was gazing up.
Despite the blaze the air in the room was cold, for Margaret had to eke out her ration of coal, and the fire had not been lighted until we arrived. Under the bedclothes our skins touched each other. It was nine o’clock, and we had come to her room two hours before, as we had done often on those winter evenings. The room was on the ground floor of a street just off Lancaster Gate, and in the distance, through the cold wartime night, came the sough of traffic, washing and falling like the tide over a pebbly beach.
She was speaking, in spasms of talk that trailed luxuriously away, of her family, and how blissful and intimate they had been. Her hair on my shoulder, her hip against mine, that other bliss was close too; she had slipped into talking of it, once I had given her a cue. For I had mentioned, grumbling lazily in bed, that soon I should have some quite unnecessary exertion, since the Chelsea house I used to live in had been damaged in a raid the year before and its effective owner had begun pestering me with another list of suggestions.
‘That’s Sheila’s father?’ Margaret had said.
I said yes, for an instant disturbed because I had let the name creep in. Without any constraint, she asked: ‘How did they get on?’
‘Not well.’
‘No, I shouldn’t have thought they would,’ she said.
Running through my mind were letters from the rectory, business-like, ingenious, self-pitying, assuming that my time was at Mr Knight’s disposal. Reflectively, Margaret was saying: ‘It was different with me.’ She had always loved her father — and her sister also. She spoke of them, both delicately and naturally; she was not inhibited by the comparison with Sheila; she had brought it to the front herself.
Yet she too had rebelled, I knew by now — rebelled against her father’s disbeliefs. It was not as easy as it sounded, when she told me their family life used to be intense and happy, and that anyone who had not known it so could not imagine what they had missed.
It was nine o’clock, and there was another hour before I need go out into the cold. By half past ten I had to be back in my own flat in case the Minister, who was attending a cabinet committee after dinner, wanted me. I had another hour’s grace in which I could hide in this voluptuous safety, untraceable, unknown. Though it was not only to be safe and secret that we came to her room rather than mine, but also because she took pleasure in it, because she seized the chance, for two or three hours among the subterranean airless working days, of looking after me.
I gazed at her face, her cheekbones sharp in the uneven light; she was relaxed because I was happy, just as I had seen her abandoned because she was giving me pleasure. Used as I was to search another’s face for signs of sadness, I had often searched hers, unable to break from the habit, the obsession, sensitive beyond control that she might be miserable.
One night, not long before, this obsession had provoked a quarrel, our first. All that evening she had been subdued, although she smiled to reassure me; as we whispered in each other’s arms, her replies came from a distance. At last she got up to dress, and I lay in bed watching her. Sitting naked in front of the looking-glass, with her back to me, her body fuller and less girlish than it appeared in clothes, she was brushing her hair. As she sat there, I could feel, with the twist of tenderness, how her carelessness about dress was a fraud. She made up little, but that was her special vanity; she had that curious kind of showing-off which wraps itself in the unadorned, even the shabby, but still gleams through. It was a kind of showing-off that to me contained within it some of the allure and mystery of sensual life.
In the looking-glass I saw the reflection of her face. Her smile had left her, the sweet and pleasure-giving smile was wiped away, and she was brooding, a line tightened between her eyebrows. I cried out: ‘What’s the matter?’
She muttered an endearment, tried to smooth her forehead, and said: ‘Nothing.’
‘What have I done?’
I expected her moods to be more even than mine. I was not ready for the temper which broke through her.
She turned on me, the blood pouring up into her throat and cheeks, her eyes snapping.
‘You’ve done nothing,’ she said.
‘I asked you what was the matter.’
‘It’s nothing to do with us. But it soon will be if you assume that you are to blame every time I’m worried. That’s the way you can ruin it all, and I won’t have it.’
Shaken by her temper, I nevertheless pressed her to tell me what was on her mind. She would not be forced. Her wiry will stood against mine. At last, however, seeing that I was still anxious, with resentment she told me; it was ludicrously hard for me to believe. The next day, she was due to go to a committee as the representative of her branch, and she was nervous. Not that she had ambition in her job, but she felt humiliated if she could not perform creditably. She detested ‘not being equal to things’. She was, as the Civil Servants said, ‘good on paper’, but when it came to speaking in committee, which men like me had forgotten could ever be a strain, she was so apprehensive that she spent sleepless hours the night before.
It occurred to me, thinking her so utterly unlike Sheila as to be a diametrical opposite, that I had for once caught her behaving precisely as Sheila would have done.
After she had confided, she was still angry: angry that I was so nervous about causing her unhappiness. It was not a show of temper just for a bit of byplay; it had an edge and foreboding that seemed to me, feeling ill-used, altogether out of proportion.
This night, as we lay together watching the luminescence on the ceiling, the quarrel was buried. When I looked at her face, the habit of anxiety became only a tic, for in her eyes and on her mouth I saw my own serenity. She was lazier than usual; as a rule when I had to make my way back to my telephone at Dolphin Square, she accompanied me so as to make the evening longer, though it might mean walking miles in the cold and dark; that night, stretching herself with self-indulgence, she stayed in bed. As I said good night I pulled the blankets round her, and, looking down at her with peace, saw the hollow of her collar-bone shadowed in the firelight.
19: Two Sisters
IT was not until a Saturday afternoon in May that Margaret could arrange for me to meet her elder sister. At first we were going for a walk in the country, but a despatch-box came in, and I had to visit the Permanent Secretary’s office after lunch. As I sat there answering Hector Rose’s questions, I could see the tops of the trees in St James’s Park, where I knew the young women were waiting for me. It was one of the first warm days of the year and the windows were flung open, so that, after the winter silence in that office, one seemed to hear the sounds of spring.
Before Rose could write his minute to the Minister, he had to ring up another department. There was a delay, and as we sat listening for the telephone Rose recognized the beauty of the afternoon.