It was only lately, when he had been married for years, that he had had a family himself. There had been a time during my separation from Margaret when he and I had sympathized with each other, knowing that we both wanted children and might be deprived of them. As I looked at him I remembered that we had spoken without reserve.
Nevertheless, if he had just been a doctor and not an intimate friend, I should have asked more questions. As it was, I went into the bedroom, where Margaret had nearly finished packing her dressing-case. She was wearing a coat over her nightgown: as I held her in my arms, she said: ‘You might as well go to that dinner tonight.’
Then she added: ‘I’d rather be there than where I shall be. Yes, I’d even rather be at Lufkin’s.’
It might have been intended as a jibe, but as I held her, it told me more. I did not need even to think or reply: this was the communication, deeper than emotion or sensuality, though there is sensuality in it, which two people close together cannot save each other from. I knew that her nerve for once had faltered: her imagination was showing her a lonely, hygienic room, the bedside light. Brave in so many ways, she had her phobias, she dreaded a lonely room: she even felt the sense of injustice that cropped up in her, in and out of place. Why did she have to go through with it, while others were enjoying themselves?
Enjoying themselves at Lufkin’s — it was, however, not a reasonable description of people’s behaviour there; it never had been, it still was not. I arrived ready to be elated, with the peculiar lightheadedness of an ordeal put off: for at breakfast time, a few hours after Margaret arrived at the clinic, they had told me that the child might be born within forty-eight hours, then at five o’clock had said that it was not likely for a week and that I could safely spend the night out.
Just as there used to be in Lufkin’s suite, there was drink, there was noise: in my light-headedness I could take the first and put up with the second, but as for elation, it did not bear up in many under Lufkin’s inflexible gaze. The curious thing was that he believed it did. When the women left us, and Lufkin, as always indifferent to time, began a business talk that lasted an hour, he had a satisfied smile as though all his guests were feeling jolly.
Nearly all of them belonged to his own staff. He had not been forgiven by his fellow-tycoons for taking an honour from their enemies and socially they cold-shouldered him. Not that he gave any sign of caring: he just went on inviting to dinner the younger bosses with whom by now he had filled the top places in his firm: men more educated, more articulate than the old ones, looking and speaking more like Civil Servants, and in his presence sounding less like a chorus of sycophantic cherubim. And yet, when he made a pronouncement which they believed to be nonsense and which everyone round the table knew they believed to be nonsense, none of them said so, though several of them had gone so far that Lufkin could do them neither harm nor good. His mana was as strong as ever.
I was glad to watch it all again. It gave me — I was relaxed, I should enjoy my sleep that night, the worry of the dawn, because it was put off, was washed away — the luxury of recalling a past less happy. Nights at that damped-down table before the war: other able men choosing their words: back to the Chelsea house. It seemed to me strange that I could have lived that life.
I had another reminder of it, before Lufkin let us go from the table. There had been talk of a legal case the firm was concerned with, and, among the names of the barristers, Herbert Getliffe’s came up.
‘You devilled for that chap once, Lewis, or am I wrong?’ said Lufkin. On such points he was never wrong.
I asked whether he knew Getliffe. To nod to, said Lufkin.
I asked whether Getliffe would soon be going to the Bench.
Not on your life, said Lufkin.
He sounded positive, even for him.
‘What’s happened?’ I inquired.
‘Well, within these four walls, he’s blotted his copy-book. He’s been doing some jiggery pokery with his income tax, and they’ve had to be persuaded not to prosecute him.’ Lord Lufkin said it not so much with malice, as with the certainty and satisfaction of inside knowledge. ‘I’ve got no pity for the damned fool. It not only does him harm, which I can bear reasonably philosophically, but it does harm to the rest of us. Anyway, he won’t be able to live this one down.
‘That chap’s finished,’ said Lufkin, declaring the conversation closed.
When, after midnight, the party broke up he drove me home himself, less off-handed with me than the others because I was no longer a member of his court. Sitting back as the car paced through the Mall, up St James’s, past the club windows, I felt a moment’s disquiet, mysterious and heavy, the first that night; and then once more the sense of privilege and power which I still was subject to in his company. The car, as opulent as he was austere, moved up Piccadilly, past the Ritz, the Green Park. There were not enough men for the top jobs, Lufkin was saying: the number of top jobs was going up as society became more complex, and the number of competent men had not gone up at all. True, the rewards weren’t much these days: perhaps we should have to deal out a few perks. If we didn’t find enough good men to run the show, Lufkin said, the country was sunk.
For once his tone had lost its neutrality and become enthusiastic; but when the car drew up in front of my flat, he spoke as bleakly as though I were a stranger. What he said was: ‘Give my regards to your charming wife.’
As I thanked him for the dinner, he went on: ‘She’ll have received some flowers from me this evening.’ He said it just as bleakly, as though his only gratification was that he had mastered the etiquette and had all the apparatus of politeness at his command.
Out of a deep sleep, into which I had fallen as soon as I left Lufkin and went straight to bed, I heard a distant burr, and my heart was thudding with dread before I was awake enough to be conscious that it was the telephone. As I stumbled across the room, across the hall, switched on and was dazzled by the light, my throat was sewn-up. The telephone burred loudly now, like all the bad news I had ever had to hear.
As I took up the receiver Charles March’s voice came at once, unusually loud even for him, so that I had to hold the instrument inches away: ‘Lewis? Is that you?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’ve got a son.’
‘Are they safe?’
‘I think they’re pretty well.’
His voice came to me, still loud, but affectionate and warm: ‘You’ve had good luck for once and I envy you.’
His own children were girls, he had wanted a son and had apologized for it as a piece of Jewish atavism: but he knew that I did too.
I could not see them until the morning, he said. He told me the time her labour started, and the time of the birth; he was full of happiness because he could give me some. ‘It’s not often we’ve had anything good to tell each other, don’t you agree?’ His voice spoke out of our long friendship. He said that I could do with some rest myself and that I was to get back to bed now.
I neither could nor wanted to. I dressed and went down into the street, where the night air was thundery and close. Just as, when expecting a joy and suddenly dashed with disappointment, one has moments when the joy is still expected — just so, the shadow of fear can survive the opposite shock, the shock of happiness. I was still shaken, out of comparison more so than I had been at Lufkin’s table: for an instant, it reached me that this was a happy night, and then I reverted to feeling, with a hallucinatory sharpness, that it had not yet occurred.
As I walked across the park the thundery cloud-cap was so low that it was hard to make out the interlocking couples on the grass; I passed close by, in the headaching and stale air, the seat where Margaret and I had sat in the desolating night when it seemed that we had worn each other out. Yet that was unrealizable too, as unrealizable as Charles March’s news.