The better I knew him, though, the more I liked him and the less I thought of his chances. By the end of the year, when he was repeating to me the stories that I knew by heart, I was coming to believe that he was too far gone.
One night in December, not long after Norman had left me, Mrs Beauchamp’s head came ectoplasmically round the door. She had not made the instantaneous appearance with which she greeted the departure of a woman visitor; it must have been ten minutes since the door clicked to, but I was still sitting in my chair.
‘You’re looking tired, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ she whispered.
I felt it: to be any support to Norman, one needed to have one’s patience completely under control, to show no nerves at all.
‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find you just a little something to eat, which I’d invite you to have upstairs, if I had got my place quite shipshape, which I haven’t been able to.’
Although I was hungry, I regarded Mrs Beauchamp with qualified enthusiasm. These fits of good nature were spontaneous enough, and had no motive except to cheer one up — but in retrospect she admired them, realized how she had performed services right outside the contract, and so felt justified in lying in bed an hour later.
Mrs Beauchamp returned into my room with a tin of salmon, a loaf of bread, two plates, one fork and one knife.
‘If you don’t mind me cleaning the cutlery after you’ve had a little snack,’ she said. ‘Somehow I haven’t been able to manage all the washing-up.’
Thus I got through my salmon, and then sat by while Mrs Beauchamp munched hers. Despite the shiny look of enjoyment on her face she felt obliged to remark: ‘Of course, it isn’t the same as fresh.’
Suddenly I was reminded of my mother, to whom fresh salmon was one of the emblems of the higher life which she had so proudly longed for.
‘But I like to think of you having something tasty last thing at night. I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but I do my best, Mr Eliot.’
She looked at me with an expression at the same time invulnerable, confident and ingratiating.
‘Some do their best and some don’t, Mr Eliot,’ she whispered. ‘That’s why it’s so unfair on people like you and me, if I may say so of both of us, who really set themselves out to do their best. Do you think anyone appreciates us? Do you think so?’
Mrs Beauchamp was becoming more excited: as she did so her expression stayed firm and impassive, but her eyes popped, and her cheeks became more shiny: her voice sank into a more insidious whisper.
I shook my head.
‘When I think of the help that you try to give people — and so do I, if you don’t mind me saying so, in my own way, without pushing myself forward — when I think of the help we give, and then what certain persons do! Sometimes I wonder if you ever let yourself realize what those people do, Mr Eliot.’
She went on whispering: ‘I scarcely dare think of it.’
Her voice became still more hushed: ‘If we looked out of that window, Mr Eliot, we could see the windows on the other side of the square. Have you ever thought what we should see if we pulled the blinds? It’s terrible to think of. Sometimes I fancy what it would be like if I became invisible, like the man in the film, and had to go and stand in all the rooms in the square, one after another, so that I should be there in the corner and couldn’t help seeing what people do.’
Mrs Beauchamp, day-dreaming of a voyeuse’s paradise, seeping herself into invisibility, sat enormous in her pink satin, cheeks flaming and eyes dense.
‘If I had to watch all that, Mr Eliot,’ she said, ‘I doubt if I should ever be the same again.’
I said that I was sure she would not be.
‘Rather than do what some people do,’ she said, ‘I’d stay as I am for ever with my own little place upstairs, looking after myself as well as I can, and doing my best for my tenants and friends, if you don’t mind me calling you that, Mr Eliot. People may laugh at me for doing my best, but they needn’t think I mind. Some of them don’t like me, you don’t have to pretend, Mr Eliot, I’m not such a softy as I look and I tell you they don’t like me. And I don’t mind that either. If a person does her best it doesn’t matter what people think of her. I expect they believe I’m lonely. But I am happier than they are, Mr Eliot, and they know it. No one’s ever said — there’s poor old Mrs Beauchamp, she wants someone to look after her, she’s not fit to live by herself.’
It was quite true. No one had thought of her so.
‘I shouldn’t be very pleased if anyone did say that,’ Mrs Beauchamp remarked in a whisper, but with ferocity.
Then affable, glutinous again, she said: ‘What I say is, the important thing is to grow old with dignity. I know you will agree with me, Mr Eliot. Of course, when I come to the evening of my life, and I don’t regard myself as quite there yet, if some decent good man had the idea that he and I might possibly join forces, then I don’t say I should turn down the proposition without thinking it over very, very seriously.’
32: Outside the House
ON an evening in May, just after the German war had ended, Betty Vane called on me. I had seen little of her during the spring: once or twice she had rung up, but I had been busy with Vera or Norman or some other acquaintance; Betty, always ready to believe she was not wanted, had been put off. Yet she was one of the people I liked best and trusted most, and that evening when she came in, bustling and quick-footed, I told her that I had missed her.
‘You’ve got enough on your hands without me,’ she said.
It sounded ungracious. She had never been able to produce the easy word. She was looking at me, her eyes uncomfortable in her beaky face.
She said curtly: ‘Can you lend me fifty pounds?’
I was surprised, for a moment — because previously when she was hard-up I had pressed money on her and she would not take it. She was extravagant, whenever she had money she splashed it round: she was constantly harassed about it, she lived in a clutter of card debts, bills, pawnshops, bailiffs. Hers was, however, the poverty of someone used to being dunned for a hundred pounds when behind her there were trusts of thousands. She had invariably refused to borrow from me, or from anyone who had to earn his money. Why was she doing so now? Suddenly I realized. Bad at easy words, bad at taking favours, she was trying to repay what I had just told her: this was her way of saying that she in turn trusted me.
As she put my cheque into her bag, she said in the same curt, forbidding tone: ‘Now you can give me some advice.’
‘What is it?’
‘It involves someone else.’
‘You ought to know by now that I can keep quiet,’ I said.
‘Yes, I know that.’
She went on awkwardly: ‘Well, a man seems to be getting fond of me.’
‘Who is he?’
‘I can’t tell you.’ She would say nothing about him, except that he was about my own age. Her explanation became so constrained as to be almost unintelligible — but now she was speaking of this man ‘liking her’, of how he wanted to ‘settle down’ with her. Every time she had confided in me before, it had been the other way round.
‘What shall I do?’ she asked me.
‘Do I know him?’