‘Oh well,’ she said. She spoke as though she had not admitted to herself the thought of concealment. At the same moment, her face was flushed with happiness and a kind of defiant shame. Firmly, she began to ask me what I had been doing.
‘I told you, nothing that matters.’
‘No,’ she said, still with energy and animation, ‘I don’t even know where you’re living. You know much more about me than I do about you.’
I told her what I was busy with. I said that I was not held any longer by the chessboard of power: I had gone as far as I intended in the official life.
‘I thought so,’ she said with pleasure, understanding my present better than my past.
‘I am not sure that it would have happened but for you.’
‘It would,’ she said. The cups of tea steamed, a cigarette end smouldered against the metal ashtray, the smell was acrid: I saw her as though the smoked glass of care had been snatched from in front of my eyes. Twenty minutes before I had been on edge lest anyone, as it might be Gilbert, should pass the window and see us sitting there. Now, although we were smiling at each other and our faces would have given us away to an acquaintance, I felt that secrets did not matter, or more exactly that no one could notice us; I had been taken by one of those states, born of understanding, desire, and joy, in which we seem to ourselves anonymous and safe. It was a state which I had seen dangerous to discreet men going through an illicit love-affair, when suddenly, in a fugue of astonished bliss, such a man can behave as if he believed himself invisible.
Her hand was on the table, and I touched her fingers. We had made love together many times, we had none of that surprise to come: but, at the touch, I shivered as though it were a complete embrace.
‘Let me talk to you,’ I said.
‘Can’t we leave it?’ she cried.
‘Can we?’
‘It’d be better to leave it, just for a while.’ She spoke in a tone I had not heard — it held both joy and fear, or something sharper than fear.
‘I used to be pretty expert at leaving things just for a while,’ I said, ‘and it wasn’t an unqualified success.’
‘We’re peaceful now,’ she broke out.
She added: ‘When a thing is said, we can’t come back where we were.’
‘I know it.’ There was a hush. I found myself trying to frame the words, just as when she first forced me on that evening years before — with an inarticulateness more tormenting to one used to being articulate, with the dumbness I only knew when I was compelled to dredge my feelings. ‘It is the same with me,’ I said at length, ‘as when I first met you.’
She did not move or utter.
‘I hope,’ I said, the words dragging out, ‘it is the same with you.’
She said: ‘You don’t hope: you know.’
The room was dark; in the street the sun had gone out. She cried — her voice was transformed, it was light with trust, sharp with the curiosity of present joy: ‘When were you certain it was the same with you?’
‘Some time ago.’
‘Was it that night at my father’s?’
‘If not before,’ I answered. ‘I’ve thought of you very much. But I was afraid my imagination might be cheating me.’
‘What time that night?’
‘I think when you were standing there, before we spoke.’
I asked: ‘When were you certain?’
‘Later.’
She added: ‘But I wanted you to come that night.’
‘If we hadn’t met again there, we should have soon,’ I said.
‘I talked about you to my father. I lied to myself, but I was trying to improve the chances of meeting you—’
‘You needn’t worry, I should have seen to it that we did.’
‘I’m not worrying,’ she said. ‘But I wanted to tell you that we’re both to blame.’
To both of us, blame seemed remote or rather inconceivable; the state of happiness suffused us with its own virtue.
We said no more except chit-chat. Yes, when she could get Helen to look after the child again, she would let me know. It was time for her to go. We went out into the street, where the light had that particular density which gives both gentleness and clarity to the faces of passers-by. The faces moved past us, softly so it seemed, as I watched Margaret put her foot on the taxi-step and she pressed my hand.
40: Happiness and Make-believe
IN the same café a week later Margaret sat opposite me, her face open and softened, as though breathing in the present moment. When I first met her I had been enraptured by her capacity for immediate joy, and so I was now. There had been none of the dead blanks of love between us, such as a man like me might have run into. Once there had been struggle, resentment, and dislike, but not the dead blank.
In the aura from the table-lamp, she was smiling. Outside the window the afternoon light was muted, so that on the pavement faces stood out with a special delicacy. She took the sight in, content and rapacious, determined to possess the moment.
‘It’s like last week,’ she cried. ‘But last week it was a few shades darker, wasn’t it?’
We had not much time. She would have to be home by six, to let her sister go. With a mixture of triumph, humility, and confusion she had told Helen that it was I she was meeting.
She was not used to lying, I thought. She had not before done anything unstraightforward or that caused her shame.
She was happy sitting there opposite me. But I knew that she was, to an extent and for the first time, making believe. What she had replied, when I had declared myself the week before, was true. As we talked, she felt a joy she could not restrain: together, we were having an intimation of a life more desirable than we had known. But I knew that for her, though not for me, it was not quite real. It was a wonderful illusion; but the reality was when she got back to her husband and the child.
In a marriage unhappier than hers, I could not forget how, returning to Sheila in the evening, I gained just one recompense, a feeling of moral calm: and I was sure that in Margaret’s own home, in a marriage which was arid but for the child, it was just that moral calm which she knew. It came upon her when she went home after our meeting, at the first sight of the child. It did not so much wipe away the thought of our meeting as make it seem still delectable but unreal.
It was that which I had to break. I did not want to: we were in a harmony that seemed outside of time: we could go on talking as though it were a conversation more serene than any the most perfect marriage could give, with no telephone bell, no child’s voice, to interrupt. But my need was too great, I could not leave it there.
Once more I was dredging for what I had to say.
‘When I told you,’ I began, ‘that it was the same with me, there is one difference.’
‘Is there?’ She said it with doubt and reluctance.
I went on: ‘In our time together you were right and I was wrong.’
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does, because there is a difference now. I hope I’ve changed a little in myself, I know I’ve changed in what I want.’
Her eyes were as brilliant as when she was angry: she did not speak.
I said: ‘I want for us exactly what you always did.’
‘I never thought I should hear you say that!’
She had cried out with joy: then, in an instant, her tone was transformed.
‘Other things have changed too,’ she said.
She looked straight at me, and asked: ‘Are you sure?’
In a time so short that I could not measure it, her mood had flickered as I had never seen in her, from triumphant joy to bitterness and shame, and then to concern for me.