Soon someone recognized me, and, opposite one of the non-representational patterns, I was caught up in an argument. In a group of five or six I was the oldest man, and they treated me with respect, one even called me ‘sir’. It was an argument such as we knew by heart in those years, about the future of abstract art. I was talking with the fluency of having been through those tricks before, talking with the middle-aged voice, the practised party voice. They called me ‘sir’, they thought me heterodox, they were not as accustomed to debating or so ready for shock tactics. None of them knew that, five minutes before, I had been nervous and lost.
All the time I was arguing, I was staring over them and past them, just as though I were a young man on the make, looking out at a party for someone more useful than his present company. I had seen no sign of her, but, as the minutes seeped on, I could not keep my glance still.
At last I saw her. She came out of the crowd by the wall opposite ours and farther down the room; she was speaking to a woman, and she spread out her hands in a gesture I had often seen, which suddenly released her animation and gaiety. As she talked my glance was fixed on her: it was many instants before her eyes came my way.
She hesitated in front of a neglected picture and stood there by herself. A young man at my side was speaking insistently, heckling me with polite questions. She was walking towards us. As she came inside our group, the young man halted his speech.
‘Go on,’ said Margaret.
Someone began to introduce me to her.
‘We’ve known each other for years,’ she said, protectively and gently. ‘Go on, I don’t want to interrupt.’
As she stood, her head bent down and receptive, I saw her for an instant as though it were first sight. Excitement, a mixture of impatience and content, had poured into my nerves — but that seemed disconnected from, utterly uncaused by, this face which might have been another stranger’s. Pale, fine rather than pretty, just missing beauty, lips and nostrils clean-cut, not tender until she smiled — it was an interesting face, but not such a face as in imagination I admired most, not even one that, away from her, I endowed her with.
Then the first sight shattered, as I thought she had changed. Five years before, when I had first met her, she could have passed for a girclass="underline" but now, at thirty, she looked her full age. Under the light, among the dark hair glinted a line of silver; her skin which, with her blend of negligence and subfusc vanity she used to leave untouched, was made up now, but there were creases round her mouth and eyes. Suddenly I remembered that when I knew her there were some broken veins just behind her cheekbones, odd for so young and fine-skinned a woman; but now under the powder they were hidden.
Standing in the middle of this group she was not embarrassed, as she would have been once. She rested there, not speaking much nor assertively, but a woman among a crowd of younger men: now there was no disguising her energy, her natural force.
The light seemed brighter on the eyes, the pictures farther away, the crowd in the room noisier, voices were high around me, questions came at me, but I had dropped out of the argument. Once, glancing at Margaret, I met her eyes: I had not spoken to her alone. At last the group moved on, and we were left just for an instant isolated, no one listening to us. But now the chance had come, I could not speak: the questions I wanted to ask, after three years of silence, would not come to the tongue, I was like a stutterer needing to bring out his dreaded consonant. We gazed at each other, but I could not utter. The silence tightened between us.
Foolishly I creaked out some remark about the pictures, asking how she liked them, as banal a question as though she was a boring acquaintance with whom I had to make my ration of conversation. In the midst of that nonsense my voice broke away from me, and I heard it sound intense, intimate and harsh.
‘How are you?’
Her tone was kinder, but just as edged: ‘No, how are you?’
Her eyes would not leave mine. Each willed the other to answer first; I gave way.
‘I haven’t much to tell you,’ I said.
‘Tell me what there is.’
‘It could be worse.’
‘You’ve always been ready to bear it, haven’t you?’
‘No, my life isn’t intolerable,’ I said, trying to tell her the precise truth.
‘But what?’
‘There’s not much in it,’ I replied.
‘Yes, I was afraid so.’
‘Were you?’
‘People often talk about you, you know.’
The crowd pressed upon us, they parted me from her, although before we had to talk at large, she was muttering about something she wished for me. She had begun to say it with an impatient, eager smile.
As I was speaking to the newcomers, I noticed a tall youngish man detach himself from another group and whisper to Margaret, who was glancing in my direction.
She looked tired, she seemed to be wanting to go home, but soon she beckoned to me.
‘You haven’t met Geoffrey, have you?’ she said to me. He was a couple of inches taller than my six feet, very thin, long-handed, and long-footed; he was thirty-five, good-looking in a lantern-jawed fashion, with handsome eyes and deep folds in his cheeks. The poise of his head was arrogant, other men would judge him pleased with his looks; but there was nothing arrogant about him as we shook hands, he was as short of conversation as I had been with Margaret a few minutes before, and just as I had opened imbecilely about the pictures, so did he. He had known about me and Margaret long before he married her; now his manner was apologetic, quite unlike his normal, so I fancied, as he asked my opinion of the pictures, in which his interest was, if possible, less than mine.
Margaret said they must be going soon, Helen would be waiting up for them.
‘That’s my sister-in-law,’ Geoffrey explained to me, still over-embarrassed, over-considerate. ‘She’s sitting in with the infant.’
‘She still hasn’t any of her own?’ I asked Margaret. I recalled the times when, joyful ourselves, we had arranged her sister’s well-being, the conspiracies of happiness. Margaret shook her head: ‘No, poor dear, she had no luck.’
Geoffrey caught her eye, and he said, in what I took to be his confident doctor’s voice: ‘It’s a thousand pities she didn’t get some sensible advice right at the beginning.’
‘But yours is well?’ I spoke to both of them, but once more I was asking Margaret.
It was Geoffrey who replied.
‘He’s all right,’ he said. ‘Of course, if you’re not used to very young children, you might get him out of proportion. Actually, for general development, he’d certainly be in the top ten per cent of two-year-olds, but probably not in the top five.’
His tone was exaggeratedly dry and objective, but his eyes were innocent with love. He went on, with the pretence of objectivity which professionals believe conceals their pride: ‘Only yesterday, it’s simply an example, he took a flash lamp to pieces and put it together again. Which I couldn’t have done at the age of four.’