Sheltered in a corner in the inner dining-room, she did not speak much. Once, as though apologizing for her shyness, she gave me a smile like her sister’s, at the same time kind and sensuous. She made some remark about the people round us, commented admiringly on a woman’s clothes, then fell into silence, looking down at her hands, fiddling with her wedding-ring.
I asked her about her husband. She replied as directly as usual, looking a little beyond my face as if seeing him there, seeing him with a kind of habitual, ironic affection. I believed that she had known little of physical joy.
Suddenly she raised her eyes, which searched mine as Margaret’s did. She said: ‘You’d like it better if I didn’t speak.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
‘If I thought I could make things worse, I wouldn’t come near either of you — but they’re as bad as they can be, aren’t they?’
‘Are they?’
‘Could things be worse, tell me?’
‘I don’t think it’s as bad as that.’
To Margaret and me, holding to each other with the tenacity that we each possessed, truly it did not seem so bad: but Helen was watching me, knowing that words said could not be taken back, that there are crystallizations out of love, as well as into it. She knew of my deception over Sheila’s suicide: did she think that this was such a crystallization? That as a result Margaret could not regain her trust?
‘You know, Lewis, I mind about you both.’
‘Yes, I know that.’
It was easy, it was a relief, to reply with her own simplicity.
‘When I first saw you together,’ she said, ‘I was so happy about it.’
‘So was I.’ I added: ‘I think she was too.’
‘I know she was.
‘I thought you had been lucky to find each other, both of you,’ she was saying. ‘I thought you had both chosen very wisely.’
She leant towards me.
‘What I’m afraid of,’ she broke out, quietly and clearly, ‘is that you are driving her away.’
I knew it, and did not know it. Margaret was as tenacious as I was; but she was also more self-willed, and far less resigned. In a human relation she was given to action, action came as naturally and was as much a release as in a more public setting it came to Paul Lufkin or Hector Rose. Sometimes I felt that, although her will was all set to save us, she was telling herself that soon she must force the issue. Once or twice I thought I had detected in her what I had heard called ‘the secret planner’, who exists in all of us often unrecognized by ourselves and who, in the prospect of disaster, even more so in the prospect of continuing misery, is working out alternative routes which may give us a chance of self-preservation, a chance of health.
‘There’s still time,’ said Helen, and now she was nerving herself even harder, since there was a silence to break, ‘to stop driving her away.’ She pulled on her left glove and smoothed it up to the elbow, concentrating upon it as if its elegance gave her confidence, made her the kind of woman with a right to say what she chose.
‘I hope there is.’
‘Of course there is,’ she said. ‘Neither of you will ever find the same again, and you mustn’t let it go.’
‘That is true for me. I am not sure it’s true for her.’
‘You must believe it is.’
She was frowning, speaking as though I were obtuse.
‘Look, Lewis,’ she said, ‘I love her, and of course I’m not satisfied about her, because what you are giving each other isn’t enough for her, you know that, don’t you? I love her, but I don’t think I idealize her. She tries to be good, but I don’t think she was given the sort of goodness that’s easy and no trouble. She can’t forget herself enough for that, perhaps she wants too many different things, perhaps she is too passionate.’
She was not using the word in a physical sense.
‘And you — you wouldn’t do for everyone, would you, but you can match her all along the line, you’re the one person she needn’t limit herself with, and I believe that’s why it was so wonderful for her. She’d be lucky to have a second chance.
‘I don’t think that she’d even look for one,’ Helen went on. ‘But I wasn’t thinking mainly of her.’
Helen’s tone was for a second impatient and tart, she was in control of herself: and I was taken aback. All along I had assumed that she had forced herself to tax me for Margaret’s sake. ‘I think it’s you who stand to lose,’ she said. ‘You see, she wouldn’t expect so much again, and so long as she found someone to look after, she could make do with that.’
I thought of the men Margaret liked, the doctor Geoffrey Hollis, other friends.
‘Could you make do?’ Helen asked insistently.
‘I doubt it.’
After Helen’s intervention I tried to hearten both Margaret and myself. Sometimes I was hopeful, I could show high spirits in front of her: but my spirits were by nature high, despite my fears. I had lost my judgement: sometimes I remembered how Sheila had lost hers, I remembered the others I had seen at a final loss, the unavailing and the breakdowns: now I knew what it was like.
I tried to bring her back, and she tried with me. When I was with her she made-believe that she was happy, so as to fight the dread of another sadness, the menace of a recurrent situation. I wanted to believe in her gaiety, sometimes I did so: even when I knew she was putting it on for my sake.
One evening I went to her, the taxi jangling in the cold March light. As soon as I saw her, she was smiling, and on the instant the burden fell away. After we had made love, I lay there in the dark, in the quiet, comforted by a pleasure as absolute as any I had known. Drowsily I could shake off the state in which, somewhere deep among my fears, she took the place of Sheila. At first I had seemed to pick her out because she was so unlike; yet of late there had been times in which I saw Sheila in my dreams and knew that it was Margaret. I had even, not dreaming but in cold blood, discovered points of identity between them; I had gone so far as to see resemblances in Margaret’s face.
I was incredulous that I could have thought so, feared so, as I lay there with her warm against my arms.
In the extreme quiet I heard a catch of her breath, and another. At once I shifted my hand and drew it lightly over her cheek: it was wet and slippery with tears.
The last hour was shattered. I looked down at her, but we had no fire that night, the room was so dark that I could scarcely see her face, even for the instant before she turned it further from me.
‘You know how easily I cry,’ she muttered. I tried to soothe her; she tried to soothe me.
‘This is a pity,’ she said in anger: then she cried again.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said mechanically. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
I could not find the loving kindness to know that for her physical delight was a mockery, when there was this distance between us.
I had no self-knowledge left. I felt only uselessness and what seemed like self-contempt. Walking with her in the park later that night, I could not speak.
26: From the Last Light to the First
WHEN she walked with me across the park that night, and on other nights in the weeks that followed, the cold spring air taunted us; often we hoped that all would come well, that we should have confidence in each other again.
Then, one morning in May, I heard of Roy Calvert’s death. He had been my closest friend: though my friendships with George Passant and Charles March and my brother had been strong, this was different in kind. I had come to know him when I was most distracted about Sheila; he had seemed the most fortunate of men, he had given me sympathy more penetrating than anyone else’s, but he too was afflicted, with a melancholy that in the end made his life worthless. I had tried to support him; for a while, perhaps, I was some use, but not for long. Now he was dead, and I could not get away from my sadness. It stayed like smoked glass between me and the faces in the streets.