With five minutes to go before the last train left, we arrived at St Pancras. I told George, as we walked down the platform in the cold, the red lights smeared out by an eruption of sulphur smoke, that this was the identical train I used to catch, going home from London after eating dinners at the Inn. But George’s capacity to respect the past, never large, was full up for one night. He merely said absently: ‘I expect you did,’ and instead gazed with absorption into a first-class carriage. There a fat, high-coloured, pursy man of about thirty, elegantly dressed, was waving a finger with stern, prissy disapproval at a companion, seedy, cheerful-looking, and twenty years older. As we left them to it George, gazing out under the dome, into the smoky dark, yelled with laughter.
‘It might have been me!’ he shouted. ‘It might have been me! That young chap is like A—’
Whistles were blowing, the train was ready to leave London, and he was thinking of nothing but his internal joke.
‘Like A—’ he cried, looking down at me from the window. ‘Like A— expecting me to sympathize because he’s hard pressed on three thousand a year. And immediately giving me advice on how much I ought to save out of eight hundred.’
47: Middle of the Night
THE room was dark as I woke up: at the edge of the curtains lurked the fringes of luminescence which, with a kind of familiar comfort, told me that it was the middle of the night. I felt happy; at the same time I was taking ease and comfort, not only from the familiar fringe of light, but also from a scent in the bedroom which was strange there. Basking, I stretched and sat up, looking down at Margaret asleep. In the dimness I could just make out her face, turned into the pillow, one arm thrown above her head, the other trailing at her side. She was fast asleep, and, when I bent and put my mouth to her shoulder, the warm flesh did not move, her breathing did not so much as catch, went on slow and steady in the relaxed air.
Often in the past months I had woken up, seen the fringe of light round the window curtains, had become conscious of my worries about her and known that it would be a long time before I got off to sleep again. Now I was rested; I had only to turn over — it was odd to look into the darkness with nothing on my mind, to sleep as deeply as she was sleeping.
Just then it was a luxury to stay awake. I got out of bed and went towards the door, which we had left open so that we could hear a sound from the child’s room: he, too, was peacefully asleep. Walking quietly through the dark rooms, I felt there was no resistance between me and the air, just as I had sometimes felt on warm evenings in the streets of towns. Yes, I could think of the problems ahead of us, many of them the same problems over which I had worried through the broken nights: but I thought of them without worry, almost without emotion, as though they were there to be picked up. Perhaps that was a state, it seemed to me later, in which men like Lufkin or Rose lived much of their lives.
Standing by the sitting-room window I looked down at the road, where the lights of cars kept giving form to the bushes by the park edge. The cars and lorries went by below: above them, the lamps suspended over the middle of the road swung in the night wind: watching them, I was happy without resistance. I had woken into a luminous happiness, and it stayed with me.
Part Five
Another Homecoming
48: Birth of a Son
WAITING in the dark bedroom I heard Margaret’s steps as she returned to bed. I asked if anything was the matter, and in a matter-of-fact whisper she told me to cover my eyes, she was going to switch on the light.
Then she said: ‘Well, it’s no use saying that I hope I’m not going to disturb you.’ Her tone was sarcastic and calm. For an instant, not calm myself, I nevertheless recalled her father laughing at me in the same tone, one afternoon when he interrupted my work at the office.
‘I’m pretty certain,’ she said, ‘that it’s coming early.’
She was a fortnight from he r time, and I was startled.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing to upset you. I’m quite glad.’
She sounded so happy, above all so calm, that I could not help but respond. What could I do for her, I asked?
‘I think it might be as well to ask Charles March to come round.’
Charles March, who had moved to a practice north of the park, had looked after her during her pregnancy: when we were waiting for him after I had telephoned, I told Margaret, trying to match her nerve, that I only seemed to meet him at the crises of my life.
‘This isn’t a bad one, though,’ she said.
‘I touch wood more than you do,’ I replied.
‘You are superstitious, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘When I first noticed it, I couldn’t believe it. And I daren’t ask you, because I thought I must be wrong.’
I had drawn the curtains. Outside the window a red-brick parapet solidified the first morning sunshine: below and beyond were gardens misty, washed-out in the dawn, but glaring bricks glowed near, a starling stood immobile on the wall, harshly outlined as if it were cardboard.
Margaret was sitting up in bed, pillows behind her, twitting me not only to give me reassurance, but also because she was steady-hearted and full of a joy I could not share. For her the child was living now, something to love.
As Charles March examined her, and I stood gazing down from the sitting-room into the park, I felt afraid for her because we were happy. I was afraid for the child because I wanted it. I had a special reason for fear, as Charles March had told me that we ought not to have another.
Down below, the first bus sped along in the milky light. Since she came to me, we had been happy. Beforehand, we had both taken it for granted that to reshape a life took effort, humility, and luck; I did not know whether I could manage it. That we should stay together, was certain: in the world’s eyes we should bring it off, but we should judge ourselves by what we saw in each other’s. Up to now we had been blessed.
In a true relation — I had evaded it for so long — one could not absent oneself, one could not be above the battle, one fought it out. It was hard for me to learn, but we were able to know each other so. Only in one aspect, I thought, had she found me absenting myself — and only she would have perceived it. She perceived it when she saw me with her boy, Maurice, Geoffrey’s child; for with him I was not natural, I did not let myself go. I was well-disposed to him through conscience, not through nature, and she knew it. I was as considerate as I could be, but that was my old escape, turning myself into a benevolent spectator.
It made us more than ever anxious for children of our own.
After we married, in the late summer of the year she came to me, which was 1947, four months passed before she conceived. She had watched me play with the little boy during those months: he liked me because I was patient and more even-tempered than she was. When she became pregnant she felt happiness for me first, and only later love for the coming child.
That September dawn, listening to the rumble of Charles’ voice through the walls, I left the sitting-room window and found myself restlessly dawdling into Maurice’s nursery: his cot was empty and most of his toys had gone, for Helen had taken him for the next fortnight. There I was glancing at one of his picture-books when Charles March found me.
He was not shaved, his eyes were sharp with a doctor’s interest, with his own fellow-feeling: he would drive her to the clinic, he said, and, with a sarcastic flick not unlike hers, added that it was better to err on the safe side.