Yes, I said, things had gone comparatively well.
‘You go from power to power, don’t you? Backstairs secrets and gentlemen in little rooms with XYZ after their names, all clamping collars round our necks,’ he said, with a kind of free association. He broke out: ‘There was a time when I used to think you’d become an ornament here.’ He grinned: ‘In that case, just about this year of grace we should have begun to cut each other’s throats.’
‘I’m sure we should,’ I said.
Getliffe, his mood changing within the instant, looked at me in reproach.
‘You mustn’t say those things, L S. You mustn’t even think them. There’s always room at the top and people like you and me ought to help each other.
‘Do you know,’ he added in a whisper, ‘that just now one has to turn down cases one would like to take?’
‘Too busy?’
‘One’s never too busy for a thousand smackers,’ said Getliffe frowning: he was, unexpectedly so after the first impression he made, one of the most avaricious of men.
‘Well then?’
‘One comes to a stage when one doesn’t want to drop any bricks.’
He was coy, he repeated his allusion, looked at me boldly like a child expecting to be caught out, but would not explain. Then I realized. There would be vacancies on the Bench soon, Getliffe was in the running, and throughout his whole career he would have sacrificed anything, even his great income, to become a judge. As he sat there that morning I thought I was seeing him almost on top of his world, Getliffe in excelsis, one of the few men I had ever seen in sight of all he wanted. It was to him at that moment that I had to let my secret out.
‘Herbert,’ I mentioned it casually, ‘I may want, it isn’t certain but I may, a bit of advice about a divorce case.’
‘I thought your poor wife was dead,’ Getliffe replied, and his next words overlay the first: ‘I’m very sorry to hear it, L S.’
‘I may want some professional advice about how to get it through as painlessly as possible.’
‘I’ve always been happily married,’ Getliffe reproved me. ‘I’m thankful to say that the thought of divorce has never come into either of our heads.’
‘Anyone would like to be in your position,’ I told him. ‘But—’
‘I always say,’ Getliffe interrupted, ‘that it takes a sense of humour to make a success of marriage. A sense of humour, and do-unto-others — especially one other — as-you-would-they-should-do-unto-you. That’s what it takes.’
‘Some of us aren’t quite as lucky.’
‘Anyway,’ said Getliffe, suddenly curious, ‘what position are you in?’
I knew that, although tricky, he was also discreet. I told him that I had known a woman, whose name did not matter at present, before her marriage: she had been married under four years and had a child not yet three: now she and I had met again, and wished to get married ourselves.
‘Well, L S, I’ve got to tell you what I think as man-to-man, and I’ve got to tell you that your decent course is to get out.’
‘No, I shan’t do that,’ I said.
‘I’ve thought of you as a fellow-sinner, but I’ve never thought of you as heartless, you know.’
He looked at me without expression, and for an instant his tricks, his moral indignation and boasting dropped away: ‘Tell me, old chap, is this desperately important for you?’
I said the one word: ‘Yes.’
‘I see.’ His tone was kind.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s no use saying any more about what I think. I can tell you the best chap to go to, of course, but you probably know that yourself. But, if you must, I should go to — Do you know that he’s pulling in £20,000 a year these days? It’s a very easy side of the profession, L S, and sometimes one wishes that one hadn’t started off with one’s principles.’
‘At this stage,’ I said, ‘I doubt if he could say anything that you and I don’t know. You see, the woman I want to marry has nothing to complain of from her husband.’
‘Will he play? Between you and me and these four walls, I shouldn’t if I were in his shoes.’
‘It wouldn’t be reasonable to ask him, even if we felt able to,’ I replied. ‘He happens to be a doctor.’
Getliffe regarded me with a hot-eyed, flustered look: ‘Tell me, L S, are you co-habiting with her?’
‘No.’
I was not sure that he believed me. He was, at one and the same time, deeply religious, prudish, and sensuaclass="underline" and, as a kind of combined result, he was left with the illusion that the rest of mankind, particularly those not restrained by faith, spent their whole time in regulated sexual activity.
Recovering from his excitement, he became practical about legal ways and means, which I was conversant with, which normally I should have found tiresome or grittily squalid, but which that morning gave me a glow of confidence. The smoke-dark sky, the reading-lamp on Getliffe’s desk, the tobacco smelclass="underline" the hotel evidence we should want: the delay between the suit being filed and the hearing: the time-lag before the decree absolute: as I discussed them, I had forgotten how much I had invented, talking to Getliffe. It sounded down-to-earth, but for me it was the opposite.
The next afternoon, the November cloud-cap still lay low over the town, and looking out from my flat, past the reflection of the lamp in the window whose curtains were not drawn, I saw the park prematurely grey. Each instant I was listening for the lift outside, for Margaret for the first time had promised to come to me there. She was not yet due, it was only ten to four, but I had begun to listen for her early. With five minutes still to go, I heard the grinding and cranking of the antique machine, and went out on to the dark landing. The lights of the lift slowly moved up; there she was in the doorway, her cheeks pink from the cold air, hands tucked inside her fur coat, her eyes brilliant as though she were relaxed at being in the warm.
Straightaway she came into my arms, the fur comforting under my palms as I held her. After we had kissed, but while she was still close to me, she said: ‘I’ve thought about being with you.’
She added: ‘It’s been a long time.’
As she took off her coat her movements were assured, flowing and without nerves: she was enjoying herself; she was so different from the woman who had left me at the party that I was both delighted and taken aback. Somehow I felt that, high as her spirits were, they were still deluding her.
Sitting on the sofa, she held out her feet to the electric fire, and I took my place beside her and put my arm round her. It was all as simple, as domestic, as though we had never parted.
‘I’m sorry about that night,’ she said.
‘I was afraid.’
‘You needn’t have been.’
‘I didn’t believe it was the end.’
‘It’s not so easy to end as all that, is it?’ she said, with a sarcastic smile but her eyes light.
‘I hope it’s not,’ I said. ‘I don’t only hope it, but I think it.’
‘Go on thinking it,’ she cried, leaning back against my arm.
We were both looking across the room towards the windows, where, the sky having darkened and closed in, we saw nothing but the images of the room’s lights. We were each in that state — and we knew it in the other — which was delectable and deceptive, lazy on the tide of unadmitted desire.
‘I don’t want to move,’ she said.
It was some time, it might only have been seconds, before she made herself sit straight and look at me. She had the air of positive resolve which comes to one when cutting through a tangle. She had gone through nights, just as I had, when all seemed simple: then next morning the tangle was unresolvable again. That afternoon, she had come feeling all was clear.