‘Whom is she supposed to be leaving me for?’
She replied, still in the same social, defensive voice: ‘They say she prefers women.’
There was not a word of truth in it, and I told Betty so.
She was puzzled, cross because I was speaking so harshly, though it was only what she had foreseen.
I cross-questioned her. ‘Where did this start?’
‘Everyone says so.’
‘Who does? Where do they get it from?’
‘I’m not making it up,’ she said. It was a plea for herself, but I did not think of her then.
I made her search her memory for the first rumour.
The effort of searching calmed her: in a moment her face lightened a little. ‘I’m sure it came,’ she said, ‘from someone who knew her. Isn’t she working with someone? Hasn’t she something to do with that man who looks like a frog? The second-hand bookseller?’
Robinson had had a shop once, but had given it up years before: I could scarcely believe what I seemed to be hearing, but I exclaimed: ‘Robinson? Do you mean him?’
‘Robinson? He’s got beautiful white hair, parted in the middle? He knows her, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, he started the word round that she’s mad about women.’
I parted from Betty at the corner of Tite Street without taking her to her flat, blaming her because she had brought bad news. The falser the gossip, it sometimes seemed, the more it seared. On my way home, I continued angry with Betty: I should have liked to have believed that she had garbled it, she who was both truthful and loyal.
But Robinson? It made no sense: he could not have done it, for reason of self-interest alone. No one had more to risk from upsetting her.
I wondered whether I should tell Sheila the rumour, and decided not to. Maybe in itself it would not disturb her much; I was not sure: we had both lived in a society which set out to tolerate all the kinds of sex. And yet gossip, this gossip that pawed, had something degrading about it, especially for one like Sheila. The story that it originated in Robinson, credible or incredible, had been shameful for me to hear, let alone Sheila; if I could, I wanted to spare her that.
Instead of telling her the gossip that night, I listened to her invoking my help for Robinson. He planned to start with three books in the following spring. ‘That may be all he ever does,’ said Sheila, with her business feet on the ground, ‘but if they are all right—’ She meant, though she did not finish, for the phrase was too high-falutin for her, that she would have achieved a purpose: she thought she would have saved his self-respect.
The trouble was, of the foreign books he had counted on, he had only acquired the rights of one. The balloons he had blown up at our dinner table had most of them exploded, she admitted that; he had believed in his own fancies, he always did, he had only to wish for a property hard enough to feel that he possessed it. Yet, in another sense, he kept his judgement. Nothing would make him substitute bad, or even mediocre, books for those he had fancied were in the bag; either something good, or nothing.
Could I help him find an author? There must be one or two pioneer works going begging, and she knew that I had friends among writers. In fact, although she neither had, nor pretended to have, even a remote acquaintance with my official life, she assumed that it was to writing I should devote myself in the end. Mysteriously, the thought gave her some pleasure.
Could I help Robinson?
I wrote several letters on his behalf, because Sheila had asked me; one reply was encouraging enough for her to act on. Then, a fortnight later, I had other news of him.
I was working in the Lufkin suite, when a telephone call came through. Betty Vane was speaking in a sharp, agitated, seemingly angry voice: could she see me soon? That same afternoon she sat in an armchair by my desk, telling me that she was unlucky. More gossip had reached her, and in decency she could not keep it from me. She did not say it, but she knew my temperament, she had watched me last time: I should not be pleased with her for bringing such news. Still, there seemed to her no choice.
By now the rumours were proliferating. Sheila was not only eccentric but unbalanced, the gossip was going round. She had spent periods in the hands of mental specialists; she had been in homes. This explained the anomalies in our married life, why we had given up entertaining, why she was not seen outside the house for weeks at a time, why we had not dared to have a family.
Some of the rumours referred to me, such as that I had married her, knowing her condition, only because her parents had bribed me with a settlement. Mainly they aimed at her, and the most cruel was that, if we had been poor and without influence, she would have been certified.
Nearly all this gossip was elaborate, circumstantial, spun out with rococo inventiveness, at one or two points just off-true; much of it an outsider could believe without bearing her any ill will, once he had observed that she was strange. One or two of the accretions, notably the more clinical, seemed to have been added as the rumours spread from the point of origin. But the original rumours, wonderfully and zestfully constructed, with a curious fluid imagination infusing them, were unlike any I had heard.
This time I could not pretend doubt to myself, not for a minute; there was only one man who could have begun to talk in such a style. I knew it, and Betty knew I knew it.
She said that she had denied the stories where she could.
‘But who believes you when you deny a good story?’ she asked, realistic, obscurely aggrieved.
Walking along the river that evening, the summer air touching the nostrils with pollen, with the rotting, sweet water smell, I found my steps heavy. That morning, I had left Sheila composed, but now I had to warn her; I could see no way out. It had become too dangerous to leave her ignorant. I did not know how to handle the news, or her.
I went upstairs to our bedroom, where she was lying on her bed, reading. Although it was rarely that I had her — (as our marriage went on, it was false to speak of making love, for about it there was, though she did not often refuse me, the one-sidedness of rape) — nevertheless she was easier if I slept in the same room. That evening, sitting on my own bed, I watched her holding her book under the reading-lamp, although the sunlight was beginning to edge into the room. The windows were wide open, and through them came the smell of lime and petrol; it was a hot still night.
It was the heat, I took it for granted, that had sent Sheila to lie down. She was wearing a dressing-gown, smoking a cigarette, with a film of sweat on her forehead. She looked middle-aged and plain. Suddenly, I felt close to her, close with the years of knowledge and the nights I had seen her so, and my heart and body yearned for her.
‘Hot,’ she said.
I lay back, longing not to break the peace of the moment.
In the room, the only sound was Sheila’s turning a page: outside, the skirl of the embankment traffic. On her bed, which was the farther from the window, Sheila’s back was half turned to me, so as to catch the lamplight on the book.
In time — perhaps I put off speaking for half an hour — I called her name.
‘Hallo,’ she said, without stirring.
‘We ought to talk a bit.’
‘What about?’ She still spoke lazily, she had caught nothing ominous yet.
‘Robinson.’
All of a sudden she turned on her back, with her eyes staring at the ceiling.
‘What about him?’
I had been thinking out the words to use, and I answered: ‘If I were you, I should be careful how much you confide in him.’
There was a long silence. Sheila’s face did not move, she gave no sign that she had heard.
At last she said, in a high cold voice: ‘You’re telling me nothing that I don’t know.’