‘Why here?’ I broke out.
‘You must know. I hope you know.’
She sat down: I had a drink ready, but she did not touch it.
‘I hope you know,’ she said.
‘Tell me then.’
She was speaking, so was I, quite unlike the choked hours in the park: we were speaking at our closest.
‘I am going to get married.’
‘Who to?’
‘Geoffrey.’
‘I knew it.’
Her face at the table came at me in the brilliant precision of a high temperature, sharp edged, so vivid that sight itself was deafening.
‘It is settled, you know,’ she said. ‘Neither of us could bear it if it wasn’t, could we?’
She was speaking still with complete understanding, as though her concern for me was at its most piercing, and mine for her; she was speaking also as one buoyed up by action, who had cut her way out of a conflict and by the fact of acting was released.
I asked: ‘Why didn’t you write and tell me?’
‘Don’t you know it would have been easier to write?’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I couldn’t let you get news like that over your breakfast and by yourself.’
I looked at her. Somehow, as at a long distance the words made me listen to what I was losing — it was like her, maternal, irrationally practical, principled, a little vain. I looked at her not yet in loss, so much as in recognition.
She said: ‘You know you’ve done everything for me, don’t you?’
I shook my head.
‘You’ve given me confidence I should never have had,’ she went on. ‘You’ve taken so many of the fears away.’
Knowing me, she knew what might soften the parting for me.
Suddenly she said: ‘I wish, I wish that you could say the same.’
She had set herself to be handsome and protective to the end, but, she could not sustain it. Her tears had sprung out. With a quick, impatient, resolved gesture, she was on her feet.
‘I hope all goes well with you.’
The words, doubtful and angry in their tone, heavy with her concern, were muffled in my ears. They were muffled, like a sad forecast, as I watched her leave me and walk to the door with a firm step. Not looking back, she pushed the door round, so hard that, after I had lost sight of her, the empty segments sucked round before my eyes, sweeping time away, leaving me with nothing there to see.
Part Three
Condition of a Spectator
28: A Change of Taste
AFTER Margaret gave me up, I used to go home alone when I left the office on a summer evening. But I had plenty of visitors to my new flat, people I cared for just enough to be interested to see, friendly acquaintances, one or two protégés. For me they were casual evenings, making no more calls on me than a night’s reading.
Sometimes, in the midst of a long official gathering, I thought, not without a certain enjoyment, of how baffled these people would be if they saw the acquaintances with whom I proposed to spend that night. For now I had been long enough in the office to be taken for granted: since the Minister lost his job, I did not possess as much invisible influence as when I was more junior, but in official eyes I had gone up, and the days were stable, full of the steady, confident voices of power. Then I went home from one of Hector Rose’s committees, back to the dingy flat.
Just after Margaret said goodbye, I had to move out of the Dolphin block and, not in a state to trouble, I took the first rooms I heard of, in the square close by. They took up the ground floor of one of the porticoed Pimlico houses; the smell of dust was as constant as a hospital smell; in the sitting-room the sunlight did not enter, even in high summer, until five o’clock. In that room I listened to the acquaintances who came to see me; it was there that Vera Allen, my secretary, suddenly broke out of her reserve and told me of the young man whom Gilbert had identified. He seemed to love her, Vera cried, but he would neither marry nor make love to her. That was, on the surface, a story commonplace enough, in contrast to some of the others which came my way.
Of my old friends, the only one I saw much of was Betty Vane, who came in to make the flat more liveable, just as she had busied herself for me after Sheila’s death. She knew that I had lost Margaret: about herself she volunteered nothing, except that she had left her job and found another in London, leaving me to assume that she and I were in the same state.
Irritable, undemanding, she used to clean up the room and then go with me round the corner to the pub on the Embankment. Through the open door the starlings clamoured: we looked at each other with scrutiny, affection, blame. We had been friends on and off for so long, and now we met again it was to find that the other had got nowhere.
When she or any other visitor let herself out last thing at night, there was likely to be a pad and scuffle outside my door and a soft, patient, insidious knock. Then round the door would insinuate a podgy shapeless face, a great slack heavy body wrapped in a pink satin dressing-gown. It was Mrs Beauchamp, my landlady, who lived on the floor above mine and who spent her days spying from her room above the portico and her nights listening to steps on the stairs and sounds from her tenants’ rooms.
One night, just after Betty had left, she went through her routine: ‘I was just wondering, Mr Eliot, I know you won’t mind me asking, but I was just wondering if you had a drop of milk?’
The question was a matter of form. With each new tenant, she cherished a hope of heart speaking unto heart, and, as the latest arrival, I was going through the honeymoon period. As a matter of form, I asked her if she could manage without the milk for that night’s supper.
‘Ah, Mr Eliot,’ she breathed, a trifle ominously, ‘I’ll do what I can.’
Then she got down to business.
‘That was a very nice young lady if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Eliot, that seemed to be coming to see you when I happened to be looking down the street tonight, or at least, not exactly young as some people call young, but I always say that none of us are as young as we should like to be.’
I told her Betty was younger than I was: but as she thought me ten years older than my real age, Mrs Beauchamp was encouraged.
‘I always say that people who aren’t exactly young have feelings just the same as anyone else, and sometimes their feelings give them a lot to think about, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Eliot,’ she said, with an expression that combined salacity with extreme moral disapproval. But she was not yet satisfied.
‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ she said, ‘if you told me that that nice young lady had come of a very good family.’
‘Shouldn’t you?’
‘Now, Mr Eliot, she does or she doesn’t. I’m sorry if I’m asking things I shouldn’t, but I like to feel that when anyone does the same to me I don’t send them away feeling that they have made a faux pas.’
‘As a matter of fact she does.’
‘Breeding will out,’ Mrs Beauchamp exhaled.
The curious thing was, she was an abnormally accurate judge of social origin. The derelicts who visited me she put down to my eccentricity: the respectable clerks from the lower middle classes, like Vera Allen and her Norman, Mrs Beauchamp spotted at once, and indicated that I was wasting my time. Of my Bohemian friends, she detected precisely who was smart and who was not.
She went on to tell me the glories of her own upbringing, the convent school — ‘those dear good nuns’ — and of Beauchamp, who was, according to her, entitled to wear seventeen distinguished ties. Improbable as Mrs Beauchamp’s autobiography sounded when one saw her stand oozily in the doorway, I was coming to believe it was not totally untrue.