I told him that money was not a problem. Still executive, he said: ‘I’ve known it to be useful to have somewhere to live where people don’t expect to find you. I could arrange to let you have this house for six months.’
Margaret said she might take him at his word. She would want somewhere to live with the child until we could be married.
Davidson was satisfied. He had no more to contribute. Once more he studied his daughter’s face with pleasure, then his eyes dropped to their habitual level. Although he did not openly suggest that we should finish the game, his glance began to stray towards the board.
46: Last Train to a Provincial Town
EACH morning, as I telephoned Margaret, the winter sky heavy over the trees outside, I heard her forcing her voice to hearten me. At last, so near the time when I trusted her to come to me, I was jealous. I could not stand the thought of her life from day to day, I had to switch my imagination off. I could not stand the thought of her keeping his spirits up; I went through those prosaic miseries of the imagination in which one is tormented by the hearth-glow of another’s home, even if it is an unhappy home.
I told myself her part was the harder, but I began to be frightened of the telephone, as though it did nothing but force me to think of her home, of the two of them together.
As we talked, I never inquired about the exact date of his Membership. It was partly that I was trying to keep my side of the bargain, she was to choose her time: but it was also that I did not want to know, either that or anything else about him.
Christmas passed. On a morning just as I was getting ready to ring her up, the telephone bell rang. I heard her voice, though it was distorted and forced.
‘It will be all right.’
‘You’ve told him?’ I cried.
‘Yes, I’ve told him.’
‘Is all well?’
‘All will be well.’ She was crying.
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
‘Very soon?’ I burst out. She said: ‘For a long time he wouldn’t believe it.’
‘When shall I fetch you?’
‘I had to make him believe me.’
‘The sooner I’m with you—’
‘He can’t understand why this has happened to him.’
‘Has he accepted it?’
‘Yes, but he’s bitter.’
She had deceived herself when we talked of him, she was saying. I replied, if that was true, I had deceived myself as much. Then crying, sometimes dragged back to the night just past (for they had talked right through it) she was asking, as she had not done before, for me to reassure her, to tell her what we should give each other.
When would she come to me? Not that day, she said, in a tone that made me feel there was one last way in which she was trying to look after him. Not that day, but the next.
‘At last,’ she said, in a tone neither sad nor young.
That same evening, I was having a drink with George Passant, who had served his final day at the office and was returning to the provincial town by the last train. We met in a public house, for George had not adapted himself to clubs: there he sat by the fire, enjoying himself as comfortably as in our youth. I told him again, as I had done many times, how angry I was with the Department, and how I still uselessly thought of methods by which I might have presented the case better.
‘It was a nuisance,’ said George. ‘But anyway I had three interesting years, I wouldn’t have been without them for the world.’
Somehow he could still draw a line across the past, regard it with an invulnerable optimism as though it had happened to someone else.
‘The more I think of it,’ said George, with a complacent smile, ‘the better it seems. I’ve had three remarkably interesting years and done some work which I know the value of better than anyone else. The value in question is incidentally considerable. In the process I’ve been able to estimate the ability of our hierarchical superiors and there’s no danger that I shall be tempted to get them out of proportion. And also I’ve managed to seize the opportunity for a certain amount of private life. Which all constitutes a pretty fair return for a very minor bit of humiliation.’
When he first heard that he had been rejected, he had broken into a comminatory rage, cursing all who had ever been in authority over him, all officials, all members of the new orthodoxy, all who conspired to keep him in the cold. But very soon he had been exaggeratedly reasonable, pointing out ‘Of course, I couldn’t expect anything different…’ and he would produce some ingenious, highly articulated and quite unrealistic interpretation of why Rose, Jones, and Osbaldiston found it necessary to keep him out.
So now he sat comfortably by the fire, drinking his beer, proving to me that he was not damaged.
‘All I hope is that you invite me up here pretty regularly,’ said George. ‘In future, an occasional visit to London will be essential to my well-being.’
It might have been some new night-spot he had discovered: it might have been the balm, mysterious to all but himself, of meeting successful acquaintances: probably it was both, but I did not attend, for I had meant to tell him my news and this was the opening.
‘Of course,’ I said.
I had listened while Margaret, rejoicing in candour, had broken our secret to her father, Myself, I had not said anything, open or implicit, even to my brother or to a friend as old as George — except when, to my own astonishment, I came out with it to Getliffe. Even with George that night I did not wish to talk: I still wanted to be timid with fate: I found myself speaking with an obliqueness I could not quite control.
‘Next time you come,’ I said, ‘there’s just a faint possibility that I may not be alone.’
‘I’ll give you plenty of notice,’ said George obtusely.
‘I mean, I may have someone in my flat.’
George chuckled.
‘Oh well, she won’t be there forever.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘it’s not quite inconceivable, of course, it’s too early to say—’
George was puzzled. He had not often heard me so incoherent; he had not heard me anything like so incoherent twenty years before, when my friends and I told glorious stories of fornications we had not yet in fact committed. At last I made it clear enough, and he was on his feet towards the bar, saying in a great voice: ‘Well, this is a new start, and I’m damned if we don’t have a celebration!’
Superstitiously I tried to stop him, but he turned on me: ‘Is this a new start or isn’t it?’
‘I hope it is.’
‘Don’t sit on the blasted fence. Of course it is, and I’m not going to be done out of celebrating it.’
George continued in that state of noisy argumentative well-being until, when he had drunk more, he said: ‘There’s a certain beautiful symmetry in the way we stand tonight. You’re just coming out of your old phase of existence — just at the precise moment that I am neatly returning to mine.’
He laughed out loud, not rancorously, not enviously, but with a curious pleasure, pleasure it seemed in the sheer pattern of events. He was a happy man: he always had been, but was growing even happier in middle age, when it seemed to all external eyes that he had totally failed. As he said, he was returning to his old existence, to the provincial town, to the firm of solicitors, where he would continue not as partner but as managing clerk: and there, one would have bet that night, George first to do so, he would stay for the rest of his life. But he breathed in a happiness that begins to visit some in middle age: it was the happiness which comes to those who believe they have lived according to their nature. In George’s own view he had been himself, he had lived as himself, more than anyone round him. He blamed his external calamities to that cause and still thought — partly as a consolation, partly because in the happiness of his senses it seemed true — that he had had the best of the bargain.