'There's no point in reproaching yourself. You couldn't help it.'
'No, but I ought to have been able to. Do sit down, James; you're getting on my nerves, prowling around like that.'
Dixon pulled the cane-bottomed chair to beside the bed. When he was settled and looking at Margaret, he was reminded of how he'd sat at her side, just like this, when he visited her in hospital after her suicide attempt. But she'd looked different then, thinner and weaker, with her hair drawn back to the nape of her neck; and, in a way, less distressing than she looked now. The sight of her smudged lipstick, her damp nose, her disordered, stiff hair filled him with a profound and tranquil depression. 'I'd better come back to the Welches' with you,' he said.
'My dear, I wouldn't hear of it. You'd better keep clear of that place as long as you can.'
'I don't care about any of that. And in any case I needn't come in. I'll just come back on the bus with you.'
'Don't be so ridiculous, James. It's absolutely unnecessary. I'm perfectly all right now. At least I will be when I've had another go at nice Mr Atkinson's whisky. Would you be an angel and pour me some?'
While he complied, Dixon thought with relief that he needn't go back on the bus with her. By now he could always tell what Margaret wanted, whatever she might say, and it was clear that this refusal of services was genuine. It wasn't that he didn't feel concern for her; he felt a lot, so much that the load was intolerable - intolerable, too, was the way in which to feel concern had now come, for him, to confuse itself utterly with the feeling of guilt. He gave her the cup, not looking at her; he said nothing, not for the familiar reason of not being able to say what he wanted to say, but because he could think of nothing to say.
'I'll just drink this and finish my cigarette, and then I'll be off. There's a bus at twenty to; it'll get me in nicely. Would you get me an ashtray, James?'
He brought her a copper one which bore the representation, in high-relief, of a small antique warship and the caption 'H.M. Torpedo-Boat Destroyer Ribble'. She dropped ash on to it, then sat up on the edge of the bed and, taking cosmetics from her handbag, began making up her face. Looking into her compact-mirror, she said conversationally: 'It's strange that it should end like this, isn't it? In such a very undignified fashion.' When he still said nothing, she went on, moving her mouth about now and then to put lipstick on it: 'But then it hasn't been very dignified all the way through, has it? It's just been me flying off the handle in one way and another, and you rather reluctantly trying to get me to grow up. No, that's not fair to you.' She worked lipstick over her mouth, then peered into the mirror again. 'You did all a man could do, and more than most would, believe me. You've got nothing to reproach yourself with. Really, I don't know how you stuck it. I'm afraid none of it's been much fun for you. Just as well you decided to call it quits.' She snapped the compact shut and put it into her handbag.
'You know I'm fond of you, Margaret,' Dixon said. 'It's just that it wouldn't work, that's all.'
'I know, James. Don't you worry about anything. I shall be all right.'
'You must always come to me if anything goes wrong. That I can do anything about.'
She smiled slightly at his reservation. 'Of course I will,' she said as if she were soothing him.
He raised his head and looked at her. Under the powder, her cheeks were still slightly mottled where the redness was fading, but with her glasses back on the slight puffiness round her eyes was scarcely noticeable. That she'd only recently finished being hysterical seemed incredible to him, as did the thought that he could ever have said to her anything important enough to make her hysterical. As he watched her, she put out her cigarette on H.M.S. Ribble and stood up, brushing the ash from her dress. 'That just about takes care of everything, I think,' she said lightly. 'Well, good-bye, James.'
Dixon smiled uncertainly. What a pity it was, he thought, that she wasn't better-looking, that she didn't read the articles in the three-halfpenny Press that told you which colour lipstick went with which natural colouring. With twenty per cent more of what she lacked in these ways, she'd never have run into any of her appalling difficulties: the vices and morbidities bred of loneliness would have remained safely dormant until old age. 'Are you sure you're all right?' he asked her.
'Stop worrying about me; I'm perfectly all right. Now I must be off, or I shall miss my bus, and that'll make me late for lunch, and you know what Mrs Neddy is about meal-times. Well, I dare say we shall run into each other before very long. Good-bye.'
'Good-bye, Margaret. See you soon.'
She went out without replying.
Dixon put his own cigarette out, jabbing at Ribble's bridge in a feeble rage he couldn't find any source for. He tried to tell himself that when he'd got over his own feelings of shock, he'd begin to be glad at having told Margaret what he'd been wanting to tell her for so long, but it wasn't convincing. He thought of his appointment with Christine the next day but one, and regarded it entirely without pleasure. Some part of what had happened in the last half-hour had spoilt all that, though he didn't know which part. Somewhere his path to Christine was blocked; it was all going to go wrong in some way he couldn't foresee. It wasn't that Margaret herself would take a hand in the matter and upset things by somehow alerting Bertrand and the senior Welches; it wasn't that he might be forced to withdraw his recent declarations to Margaret. It was something less unlikely than the first, harder to fight than the second, and much vaguer than either. It was just that everything seemed to be spoilt.
He began abstractedly brushing his hair in front of his small unframed mirror. He refused to think directly about Margaret's fit of hysterics. Soon enough, he knew, it would take its place with those three or four memories which could make him actually twist about in his chair or bed with remorse, fear, or embarrassment. It would probably supplant the present top-of-the-list item, the time he'd been pushed out in front of the curtain after a school concert to make the audience sing the National Anthem. He could hear his own voice now, saying in those flat tones, heavy with insincerity: 'And now… I want you all… to join with me, if you will… in singing….' And then he'd led off in a key that must have been exactly half an octave above or below the proper one. Switching every few notes, like everybody else, from one octave to the other, half a beat in front of or behind everybody else, he'd gone through the whole thing. Cheers, applause, and laughter had followed him when he ducked his burning face back through the curtains. He looked at his face now in the mirror: it looked back at him, humourless and self-pitying.
He picked up Atkinson's whisky-bottle and went to the door, intending to suggest a couple of pints of beer at the pub round the corner; then he turned back and picked up the letter to Johns. There seemed no point in not posting it.
XVII
DIXON plunged down the lodging-house stairs at eight-fifteen the next morning, not so much so as to be sure of being there while Johns read his letter as because he wanted, or rather had got, to spend a long morning in writing up his Merrie England lecture. He didn't like having to breakfast so early. There was something about Miss Cutler's cornflakes, her pallid fried eggs or bright red bacon, her explosive toast, her diuretic coffee which, much better than bearable at nine o'clock, his usual breakfast-time, seemed at eight-fifteen to summon from all the recesses of his frame every lingering vestige of crapulent headache, every relic of past nauseas, every echo of noises in the head. This retrospective vertigo collared him this morning as roughly as always. The three pints of bitter he'd drunk last night with Bill Atkinson and Beesley might, by means of some garbaged alley through the space-time continuum, have been preceded by a bottle of British sherry and followed by half a dozen breakfast-cups of red biddy. Holding his hands over his eyes, he circled the table like one trying to evade the smoke from a bonfire, then sat down heavily and saturated a plate of cornflakes with bluish milk. He was alone in the room.