It was a long time since I heard my own temper running loose. Davidson was looking at me with a friendly and companionable frown.
‘Yes,’ he remarked, ‘my daughter said you must be feeling something like that.
‘I asked her about you,’ he went on casually, and added, with a simplicity that was at the same time arrogant and pure: ‘I’ve never fancied myself at judging people when I first meet them. So I have to find out about them in my own fashion.’
For a fortnight I was immersed in that kind of comfort which is like a luxurious cocoon as one delays before a longed-for and imminent fate, which I had also known after my first meeting with Margaret. I was still not calculating; I, who had calculated so much, went about as though the machine had been switched off; now that I had a card of re-entry into the Davidson family, I still felt the future free.
I still felt so, when I wrote a note to Davidson, telling him I had a little more information about the Sawbridge case, if he chose to call. He did calclass="underline" he seemed satisfied: afterwards we walked together down Victoria Street. It was a blazing hot day, people were walking in the shade, but Davidson insisted on keeping to the other side.
‘We mustn’t miss a second of this sun,’ he said, as though it were a moral axiom.
He walked with long strides, his head down, his feet clumpingly heavy on the pavement for so spare a man. His shirt-sleeves hung beneath his cuffs, over-long and unbuttoned. Shabby as he was, passers-by noticed him; he was the most striking and handsome figure in the street. I thought how like that shabby carelessness was to Margaret’s.
Suddenly he said: ‘I’m giving a show at my house next week.’ A private view, he explained, for two young painters. ‘Would that interest you?’
‘Very much,’ I said. I said it eagerly, without any guard.
Not looking at me, Davidson lolloped along.
‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Do you know anything about pictures? It’s a waste of your time and mine if you don’t, don’t you know.’
‘I know a little.’
‘You’re not bluffing, are you?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I’d better ask you a few questions.’
There and then, in Victoria Street in the sweating sunshine, as we passed offices of consultant engineers, Davidson gave me a brisk viva. Embarrassed, anxious to pass, doing my best, I nevertheless felt a twinge of amusement, as a comparison struck me. To Davidson, whose taste had no use for concealments, this was a matter to be cleared up in the open; it was just a question of whether I was equipped to look at pictures or not; there were no overtones, no other motives, on his side or mine.
It did not occur to him that I was snatching at the chance to meet his daughter again. Yet he was a man who, so I had heard and I had no reason to doubt it, had once been well-known for his love-affairs. Sheila’s father, the Reverend Laurence Knight, had been a faithful husband, living obscurely all his life in a country vicarage: yet, in Davidson’s place, he would have known precisely what I was after, not now, when it was easy to see, but within minutes of our first meeting. Mr Knight, incidentally, would have tantalized me and then found some excuse for holding back the invitation.
Davidson did not go in for any flourishes: he just formed his opinion, and announced: ‘You’d never have made a living at it, don’t you know.’
I was in suspense; I agreed.
‘It might just be worth your while to come along,’ he said, staring at the pavement in front of him. ‘But only just.’
Waiting in my flat on the evening of the private view I saw the sky over Hyde Park turn dark, sodden with rain to come. Standing by the window, I kept glancing at my watch, although it was still not time to leave, and then gazed out again over the trees into the leaden murk. Then I looked back into the room. On the little table by the sofa the reading-lamp was gleaming, and a book which I had left open shone under the light.
It was peaceful, it never seemed so peaceful. For an instant I wanted to stay there, and not go out. It would be easy to stay; I need only telephone and make an apology, in that party I should not be missed, the significance I was giving it was my own invention, and besides myself no living person knew. I looked at the lamp and the sofa, with a stab almost of envy.
Then I turned back to the window, reading my watch, impatient that it was still not time to go.
Part Four
37: Smell of Leaves in the Rain
IN the hall of Davidson’s house the brightness, clashing with the noise of the party within, took me aback; it was Davidson himself who came to greet me.
‘You decided it was worth while, did you?’ he asked.
As I was putting my coat down, he said: ‘I met someone who knew you this morning.’ He gave the name of an elderly acquaintance. ‘She was anxious to get in touch with you. I’d better hand this over before I forget.’ It was a card with an address and telephone number.
I asked if it could wait, but Davidson had discharged his commission and was not interested any more.
‘If you fancy yourself at the telephone, there’s one under the stairs,’ he said. He spoke in a severe minatory voice, as though telephony were a difficult art, and it was presumptuous on my part to pretend to have mastered it. In fact Davidson, who was so often the spokesman of the modern, whose walls were hung with the newest art, had never come to terms with mechanical civilization. Not only did he go deaf if he put a receiver to his ear: even fountain pens and cigarette lighters were white-man’s magic which he would have no dealings with.
While I was making my call, which turned out to be of no possible importance, I was by myself listening to the continuum of noise from the unknown rooms. I felt a prickle of nervousness not, it seemed, because Margaret might be there, but just as though I had ceased to be a man of forty, experienced at going about amongst strangers: I felt as I might have done when I was very young.
When at last I went in I stayed on the outskirts of the room trying to put myself at ease. I looked away from the picture, from the unknown people, out through the window to a night so dark, although it was only nine o’clock in July, that the terrace was invisible: in the middle distance twinkled the lamps along Regent’s Park. Down below the window lights, the pavement was bone-white, the rain had still not fallen.
Then I walked round the room, or rather the two rooms which, for the show, had had their dividing doors folded. There must have been sixty or seventy people there, but apart from Davidson, alert and unpompous among a knot of young men, I did not see a face I knew. Along one long wall were hung a set of non-representational paintings, in which geometrical forms were set in a Turnerian sheen. Along the other were some thickly painted portraits, not quite naturalistic but nearly so. Trying to clamp myself down to study them, I could not settle to it.
I found myself falling back into the refuge I had used at twenty. I used to save my self-respect by the revenges of my observation, and I did so now. Yes, most of the people in these rooms were different animals from those one saw at Lufkin’s dinners or round the committee tables with Hector Rose: different animals in an exact, technical sense: lighter-boned, thinner, less heavily muscled, their nerves nearer the surface, their voices more pent-in: less exalting in their bodies strength than so many of Lufkin’s colleagues — and yet, I was prepared to bet, in many cases more erotic. That was one of the paradoxes which separated these persons from the men of action; I thought of acquaintances of mine in Lufkin’s entourage who walked with the physical confidence, the unself-conscious swagger, of condottieri; but it was not they who were driven, driven to obsession by the erotic life, but men as it might be one or two I saw round me that night, whose cheeks were sunken and limbs shambling, who looked, instead of bold and authoritative like Lufkin’s colleagues, much younger than their years.