And yet, I could not be sure why she had been so uncivil to Margaret. It had not been necessary, not even as a ruse. At their only other encounter, she had thought Margaret rude: was she getting her own back? Or had she genuinely forgotten Margaret’s face? No one had indulged less in petty spite — just for a second, had she been doing so?
Just as I had got out of the room, on the balcony on my way downstairs to Margaret, someone intercepted me. For minutes I was pegged there, the glasses tinkling on the trays as they were carried past, the noise climbing in amplitude and pitch, Gilbert leaning from the door and taking note.
Over the banisters, when I broke away, I saw Margaret standing about down below.
‘I feel a bit badgered,’ I said as soon as I reached her, all tension leaving me.
‘So do I.’
‘Still, we’re here, and it’s worth it.’
She called out my name, quietly but with all her force, more of an endearment than any could be. Her expression was brilliant, and until she spoke again I totally misread it.
‘Isn’t it?’ I cried.
In the same quiet and passionate tone, she said: ‘We’re deceiving ourselves, aren’t we?’
‘About what?’
‘About us.’
‘I’ve never been so sure,’ I said.
‘It’s too late. Haven’t we known all along it’s too late?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘I’m just not strong enough,’ she said. I had never known her ask for pity before.
‘You will be,’ I said, but I had lost my nerve.
‘No. It’s too late. I knew it, tonight. I knew it,’ she said.
‘We can’t decide anything now.’ I wanted to soothe her.
‘There’s nothing to decide.’ She used my name again, as though that was all she could tell me.
‘There will be.’
‘No, it’s too hard for me.’
‘Come out with me—’
‘No. Please get me a taxi and let me go home.’
‘We shall have to forget all this.’
For an instant I heard my voice hard.
‘There’s no future in it,’ she cried, using the slang flatly instead of her own words. ‘Let me go home.’
‘I shall speak to you tomorrow.’
‘It will be cruel if you do.’
Guests were passing us on their way out, and looking at her, knowing that she was near breaking-point, I could do nothing. I called out to the porter and asked him to find a cab. She thanked me, almost effusively, but I shook my head, my eyes still on her, trying to make my own choice, trying not to be crippled by the habits of defeat, the recurrent situations, the deepest traps within me.
42: Apparent Choice
LISTENING the next afternoon to George Passant talking of his future, I said nothing of mine. For months, almost for years, since my resolve about Margaret began to form, I had not hinted even at a hope, except to her; but it was not only secretiveness that kept me reticent with George, it was something like superstition. For I had telephoned Margaret that morning, insisting that we should meet and talk it out, and she had given way.
‘Assuming that I’m kept in this department, which I take it is reasonable, then I may as well plan on living in London for the rest of my life,’ said George.
His interview was arranged for a fortnight hence; and George, with the optimism which he had preserved undented from his youth, through ill-luck and worse than ill-luck, took the result for granted.
‘I haven’t any idea,’ I said — it was true, but I could not help being alarmed by George’s hubris — ‘what Rose intends to do about you.’
‘Whatever we think of Rose,’ George replied comfortably, ‘we have to admit that he’s a highly competent man.’
‘His personal choices are sometimes odd.’
‘I should have said,’ George was unaffected, ‘that he paid some attention to justice.’
‘I don’t deny that,’ I said. ‘But—’
‘In that case we’re reasonably entitled to consider that he’s pretty well informed of what I’ve done here.’
‘Within limits that’s probably so.’
‘You’re not going to tell me,’ George was getting argumentative, ‘that a man as competent as Rose isn’t going to see a certain slight difference in effectiveness between what I’ve done here and what some of those other nice young gentlemen from upper-class Bastilles (George meant public schools) have twittered about trying to do. Take old Gilbert. He’s not a bad chap to have a drink with, he’s always been exceedingly pleasant to me, but God preserve my eternal soul, I can shift more in an afternoon than Gilbert can manage dimly to comprehend in three weeks’ good hard slogging.’
‘You’re preaching to the converted,’ I said.
‘Well, if you’re handsome enough to concede that simple point,’ George replied, ‘you can perhaps understand why I don’t propose to indulge in unnecessary worry.’
Yet I, who was upset by George’s kind of hope, lived with my own; I found it driving me almost as though I were obeying another person’s instructions: I found it driving me, a little absurdly, to talk to a lawyer about divorce. Just as it was slipping out of control, I asserted some caution, even more absurdly: so that, setting out to talk to a lawyer, I did not go to one of the divorce experts whom I had known when I was practising at the Bar, but instead, as though avoiding going under a ladder at the last minute, just paid as it were a friendly call on my old master, Herbert Getliffe.
The morning was dark: murk hung over the river, and in chambers the lights were on. It might have been one of the autumn mornings nearly twenty years before, when I sat there, looking out of the window, with nothing to do, avid for recognition, bitter because it would not come. But I felt no true memory of that past: somehow, although I had not revisited the place for years, no trigger released the forces of past emotion, my sense of faint regret was general and false. No trigger clicked, even when I read the list of names at the foot of the staircase, a list where my own name had stood as late as the end of the war: Mr Getliffe, Mr W Allen…they had been there before my time. No trigger clicked, even when I went into Getliffe’s room, smelt the tobacco once so familiar, and met the gaze of the bold, opaque and tricky eyes.
‘Why, it’s old L S,’ said Herbert Getliffe, giving me his manly, forthright handshake. He was the only man alive who called me by my initials: he did it with an air both hearty and stern, as though he had just been deeply impressed by a code of gravitas. In fact, he was a man of immense cunning, mercurial and also impressionable. His face was fat and rubbery, his lips red and, despite himself, even in his most magisterial acts there was an imp not far from his eyes. When I had worked in his chambers he had treated me with a mixture of encouragement and lavish unscrupulousness: since then we had kept an affection, desultory and suspicious, for each other. Even now, it surprised me that he was one of the more successful silks at the common law bar: but that was the fact.
I had only seen him once or twice since the night of the Barbican dinner before the war, when I went home to Sheila drunk and elated. I asked how he was getting on.
‘It would be ungrateful to grumble,’ he replied in a stately fashion. ‘One manages to earn one’s bread and butter’ — as usual, he could not keep it up, and he winked — ‘and a little piece of cake.’
‘What about you, L S?’ He was genuinely curious about others, it was one of his strengths. ‘Every time I hear about you, you seem to be flourishing.’