I wondered if, with his bizarre frugality, he had saved money out of his wages at the factory. Then I spoke across him to his companion: ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced, have we?’
Soon after I heard her name I left them, to Robinson’s surprise and relief. I left them with Robinson’s triumphant ‘Good evening to you, sir’ fluting across the room, and muttered to Betty that I was slipping away. Alone in that room, she knew that something had gone wrong for me; disappointed after the promise of the early evening, she could read in my face some inexplicable distress.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
She was right. I had been upset by the sound of the young woman’s name. As soon as I heard it, I knew she was a cousin of Charles March’s.
She was likely, therefore, to be a woman of means, and in fact Robinson would not be pouring flattery over her if she were not. But that did not matter; it would be easy to pass word to Charles about Robinson; it was not for her sake that I left the party, went out into Glebe Place, turned down towards the Embankment, and, without realizing it, towards the house I had lived in years before. I was not driven so because of anything that happened at that party; no, it was because, for the first time for years, my grief over Sheila had come back, as grinding as when, after her death, I went into our empty room.
At the first murmur of Robinson’s voice, I had felt a presentiment; listening to what otherwise might have amused me, I had been rigid, nails against my palms, but still impervious, until, when I asked the young woman her name, the reply set loose a flood of the past. Yet I had only heard that name before in circumstances entirely undramatic, having nothing to do with Sheila or her death: perhaps Charles March had mentioned it in the days we saw each other most often, before either of us had married, walking about in London or at his father’s country-house. That was all; but the flood that name set loose drove me down the dark turning of Cheyne Row towards the river.
Down Cheyne Row the windows were shining, from the pub at the Embankment corner voices hallooed; I was beset as though I were still married and was going through the back streets on my way home.
I was not seeing, nor even remembering: it was not her death that was possessing me: it was just that, walking quickly beside the bright houses, their windows open to the hot evening breeze, I had nothing but a sense of failure, loss, misery. The year before, when I received bad news, fresher and more sharply wounding, the news of Margaret’s child, I could put a face on it, and make myself shove the sadness away. Now this older sadness overcame me: my stoicism would not answer me. I felt as I had not done since I was eight years old, tears on my cheeks.
Soon I was standing outside the house, which, since I left it in the spring after Sheila died, I had not been near, which I had made detours not to see. Yet the sight dulled my pain, instead of sharpening it. One outer wall had been blasted down, so that, where Mrs Wilson used to have her sitting-room, willowherb was growing, and on the first floor a bath jutted nakedly against the cloud-dark sky. The light from an Embankment lamp fell on the garden-path where grass had burst between the flags.
Gazing up at the house, I saw the windows boarded up. Among them I could pick out those of our bedroom and the room next door. In that room Sheila’s body had lain. The thought scarcely touched me, I just looked up at the boards, without much feeling, sad but with a kind of hypnotized relief.
I did not stay there long. Slowly, under the plane trees, past the unpainted and sun-blistered houses, I walked along the Embankment to my flat. The botanical gardens were odorous in the humid wind, and on the bridge the collar of lights was shivering. Once the thought struck me: had I come home? Was it the same home, from which I had not been able to escape? The lonely flat — how different was it from the house I had just stood outside?
33: Pathology of Spectators
DURING the rest of that year, I was on the edge of two dramas. The first was secret, known only by a handful of us, and was going to overshadow much of our lives; it was the result of those meetings of old Bevill’s early in the war, of the intrigues of Lufkin and the science of men like my brother; it was the making of the atomic bomb. The second was public, open each morning for a week to anyone who read newspapers, and important to not more than half a dozen people of whom, although I did not fully realize it till later, I was one.
Innocent, tossed about by blind chance, Norman Lacey, and through him Vera, lost their privacy that autumn — for Norman’s father was tried at the Old Bailey. If he was guilty, the crime was a squalid one; but the after-effects of the trial ravaged those two, so that for a time I thought that Norman at least would not recover. What they went through, how she was strong enough to carry them both, was a story by itself — but for me, the lesson was how poorly I myself behaved.
Norman and Vera asked help from me, help which would be embarrassing, and possibly a little damaging, for me to give. They looked to me to go into court with a piece of evidence which could do neither them, nor Norman’s father, any practical good, and might do me some practical harm. It was evidence so trivial that no lawyer would have subpoenaed me to give it. All it did in effect was to show that I knew them well; clutching at any hope, they had a sort of faith that my name might protect them.
It was the kind of demand which, had it come from an acquaintance, I should have evaded with a clear conscience. I had taken some responsibility for these two; they thought I had given them intimacy, could I just shut it off when otherwise I had to accept the consequences?
As soon as I had smelt the danger ahead of them, I had wanted excuses to absent myself. It was a dilemma I did not like, any more than I liked my own feelings. I did what I had not done for years, and asked advice. I did not want worldly advice; I longed for Margaret’s; indeed, one night I read through the Hollises in the London directory, wondering whether they might have returned to the town, knowing that I had a true reason for writing to her, knowing also that it was a pretext. At last I went with my trouble to George Passant.
A few months past, the young woman he had been pursuing with such adolescent ardour had closed their years of argument and gone back home. She had refused to marry him; she had refused to sleep with him; and George, comically frustrated for a man of passion, seemed to an observer to have got nothing out of it. But that was not what he thought. ‘It’s been a magnificent affair!’ he cried, as though his gusto had mysteriously slipped into the wrong groove. As he grew older, he seemed to luxuriate more and more in his own oddity.
Nevertheless when on an autumn night we went into the Tothill Street pub and I confessed the story, he was surprisingly prosaic.
‘It would be absolutely ridiculous for you to take the slightest risk,’ he said.
I had told him my relations with Vera and Norman as accurately as I could. I had also told him of the police investigations, which I could confide to no one else: with George, however uproarious his own life was being, any secret was safe.
As he listened to me, he looked concerned. It occurred to me that he took pride in my public reputation. He did not like to see me rushing into self-injury as he might have done himself: he had always had a streak of unpredictable prudence: that evening, he was speaking as sensibly as Hector Rose.
‘If you could make any effective difference to the old man’s [Lacey’s] chance of getting off then we might have to think again,’ said George, ‘though I warn you I should be prepared to make a case against that too. But that question doesn’t arise, and there is obviously only one reasonable course of action.’
George ordered pints of beer, facing me with his aggressive optimism, as though the sane must triumph.