In the past two years I had seen him little, for he was flying in the Air Force, and, though Margaret and he knew what the other meant to me, they had never met. Yet it was true that each had disliked the sound of the other’s name. Roy was not fond of women of character, much less if they had insight too; if I were to marry again, he would have chosen for me someone altogether more careless, obtuse, and easy-going.
In return she suspected him of being a poseur, a romantic fake without much fibre, whose profundity of experience she mostly discounted and for the rest did not value. In her heart, she thought he encouraged in me much that she struggled with.
At the news of his death she gave no sign, so far as I could see through the smear of grief, of her dislike, and just wanted to take care of me. I could not respond. I was enough of an official machine — as I had been in the weeks after Sheila’s death — to be civil and efficient and make sharp remarks at meetings: as soon as I was out of the office I wanted no one near me, not even her. I recalled Helen’s warning; I wanted to pretend, but I could not.
It did not take her long to see.
‘You want to be alone, don’t you?’ she said. It was no use denying it, though it was that which hurt her most. ‘I’m less than no help to you. You’d better be by yourself.’
I spent evenings in my own room, doing nothing, not reading, limp in my chair. In Margaret’s presence I was often silent, as I had never been with her before. I saw her looking at me, wondering how she could reach me, clutching at any sign that I could give her — and wondering also whether all had gone wrong, and if this was the last escape.
On a close night, near mid-summer, the sky was not quite dark, we walked purposelessly round the Bayswater streets and then crossed over to Hyde Park and found an empty bench. Looking down the hollow towards the Bayswater Road we could see the scurf of newspapers, the white of shirts and dresses in couples lying together, shining out from the grass in the last of the light. The litter of the night, the thundery closeness: we sat without looking at each other: each of us was alone, with that special loneliness, containing both guilt and deprivation, containing also dislike and a kind of sullen hate, which comes to those who have known extreme intimacy, and who are seeing it drift away. In that loneliness we held each other’s hand, as though we could not bear the last token of separation.
She said quietly, in a tone of casual gossip, ‘How is your friend Lufkin?’
We knew each other’s memories so well. She was asking me to recall that once, months before, when we were untroubled, we had met him by chance, not here, but on the path nearer the Albert Gate.
‘I haven’t seen him.’
‘Does he still feel misunderstood?’
Again she was making me recall. She had taught me so much, I told her once. She had said: ‘So have you taught me.’ Most of the men I talked to her about had never come near her father’s world: she had not realized before what they were like.
‘I’m sure he does.’
‘Snakes-in-the-grass.’ It was one of Lufkin’s favourite exclamations, confronted with yet another example, perpetually astonishing to him, of others’ duplicity, self-seeking, and ambition. Margaret could not believe that men so able could live cut off from their own experience. It had delighted her, and, searching that night for something for us to remember, she refound the phrase and laughed out loud.
For a while we talked, glad to be talking, of some of the characters I had amused her with. It was a strange use for those figures, so grand in their offices, so firm in their personae, I thought later, to be smiled over by the two of us, clutching on to the strand of a love-affair, late at night out in the park.
We could not spin it out, we fell back into silence. I had no idea of how the time was passing, now that the night had come down. I could feel her fingers in mine, and at last she called my name, but mechanically, as though she were intending an endearment but was remote. She said: ‘A lot has happened to you.’
She did not mean my public life, she meant the deaths of Sheila and Roy Calvert.
‘I suppose so.’
‘It was bound to affect you, I know that.’
‘I wish,’ I said, ‘that I had met you before any of it happened.’
Suddenly she was angry.
‘No, I won’t listen. We met when we did, and this is the only time together we shall ever have.’
‘I might have been more—’
‘No. You’re always trying to slip out of the present moment, and I won’t take it any more.’
I answered sullenly. The present moment, the existent moment — as we sat there, in the sultry darkness, we could neither deal with it nor let it be. We could not show each other the kindness we should have shown strangers: far less could we allow those words to come out which, with the knowledge and touch of intimacy, we were certain could give the other a night’s peace. If she could have said to me, it doesn’t matter, leave it, some day you’ll be better and we’ll start again — If I could have said to her, I will try to give you all you want, marry me and somehow we shall come through — But we could not speak so, it was as though our throats were sewn up.
We stayed, our hands touching, not tired so much as stupefied while the time passed: time not racing hallucinatorily by, as when one is drunk, but just pressing on us with something like the headaching pressure of the thundery air in which we sat. Sometimes we talked, almost with interest, almost as though we were going out for the first time, for the first meal together, about a play that ought to be seen or a book she had just read. After another bout of silence, she said in a different tone: ‘Before we started, I asked what you wanted from me.’
I said yes.
‘You said, you didn’t want anything one-sided, you didn’t want the past all over again.’
I replied: ‘Yes, I said that.’
‘I believed you,’ she said.
Over Park Lane the sky was not so densely black, there was a leaden light just visible over the roofs. The sight struck more chilly than the dark had been. The midsummer night was nearly over. She asked: ‘It looks as though we have come to a dead end?’
Even then, we wanted to hear in each other the sound of hope.
27: View of a Swinging Door
WITHOUT seeing Margaret again I went off travelling on duty, and it was a fortnight before I returned to London. The day I got back, I found a note on my desk. Margaret had telephoned, would I meet her that evening in the foyer of the Café Royal? At once I was startled. We had never gone there before, it was a place without associations.
Waiting, a quarter of an hour before the time she fixed, I stared at the swinging door and through the glass at the glare outside. The flash of buses, the dazzle of cars’ bonnets, the waft of the door as someone entered but not she — I was at the stretch of waiting. When at last the door swung past and showed her, minutes early, I saw her face flushed and set; but her step, as she came across the floor, was quick, light, and full of energy.
As she greeted me her eyes were intent on mine; they had no light in them, and the orbits had gone deeper and more hollow.