He noticed, of course, that I was frightened. He did not take it as seriously as I did. Like many men who possess courage, he did not value it much. Without my knowing, he took a flat for me in Dolphin Square, the great steel-and-concrete block on the embankment, about a mile from my house. He told me mischievously, sensibly, that it was important I should be able to sleep. He also told me that he had consulted Francis Getliffe upon the safest place in the safest type of building. London was emptying, and it was easy to have one’s pick. He had incidentally given Francis the impression that he was enquiring for his own sake. He made it seem that he was abnormally preoccupied about his own skin. It was the kind of trick that he could not resist bringing out for Francis. Francis replied with scientific competence — “between the third and seventh floor in a steel frame” — and thought worse of Roy than ever. Roy grinned.
For himself, Roy did not pay any attention to such dangers. He gave most acquaintances the impression that he did not care at all. They thought the war had not touched him.
He worked rather unenthusiastically in a comfortable government job. He stayed at the office late, as we all did, but he did not tire himself with the obsessed devotion that he had once spent on his manuscripts. At night he went out into the dark London streets in search of adventure. He found a lot of reckless love affairs. He gave parties in the flat in Connaught Street, he went all over the town in chase of women, and often, just as I used to find so strange when he was a younger man, he went to bed with someone for a single night and then forgot her altogether. Rosalind often came to see him, but, when the air-raids started, she tried to persuade him to meet her out of London. He would not go.
It was an existence which people blamed as irresponsible, trivial, out of keeping with the time. He attracted a mass of disapproval, heavier than in the past. Even Lady Muriel wondered how he could bear to be out of uniform. I told her that, having once been forced into this particular job, he would never get permission to leave. But she was baffled, puzzled, only partially appeased. All her young relations were fighting. Even Humphrey was being trained as an officer in motor torpedo boats. She was too loyal to condemn Roy, but she did not know what to think.
I saw more of him than I had done since my early days in Cambridge. Our intimacy had returned, more unquestioning because of the time we had been kept at a distance. We knew each other all through now, and we depended on each other more than we had ever done. For these were times when only the deepest intimacy was any comfort. Casual friends could not help; they were more a tax than strangers. We were each in distress; in our different ways we were hiding it. We had both aged; I had become guarded, middle-aged, used to the official life, patient and suspicious; he was lighter in speech than ever, not serious now even though it hurt others not to be serious, dissipated, purposeless and without hope. He was still kind by nature, perhaps more kind than when he thought he would come through; he was often lively; but he could see no meaning in his life.
No one could know why we had changed so much, unless they knew all that had happened to us. That we had never told in full. We each had women friends to whom we confided something; Joan knew a great deal about Roy, and there were others who understood part of his story. It was the same with me. It was only in extremity that we needed to be known for what we truly were. That extremity had now come for both of us. We needed to be looked at by eyes that had seen everything, would not be fooled, were clear and pitiless, and whose knowledge was complete; we needed too the compassion of a heart which had known despair. So we turned to each other for comfort, certain that we should find knowledge, acceptance, humour and love.
I knew that he was suffering more than I. It was not the war, though it had become tied up with that — for many states of unhappiness are like a vacuum which fills itself with whatever substance comes to hand. The vacuum would remain, if whatever was now filling it were taken away. So with Roy: the cause lay elsewhere. War or no war, he would have been tormented. If there had been no war, the vacuum would have filled itself with a different trouble. For the wound could not heaclass="underline" as soon as he realised that his melancholy was an act of fate, that he could not throw off his affliction by losing himself in faith, he could see nothing to look forward to.
Brave as he was, full of life as he was, he was not stoical. Many blows he would have taken incomparably better than I; wherever his response could be active, he was better fitted to cope. But this affliction — it was easy to think so, but I believed it was true — I should have put up with more stubbornly than he. He could not endure the thought of a life preyed on meaninglessly, devastated all for nothing. For him, the realisation was an acute and tragic experience. He could not mask it, cushion it, throw it aside. It took away the future with something of the finality that stunned the old Master when he was told that he was dying of cancer. Roy felt that he was being played with. He felt intensely humiliated — that he should be able to do nothing about it, that his effort and will did not begin to count! Angrily, hopelessly, frantically, he rattled the bars of his cage.
I could not forget the darkness of his face that morning in the college garden. For him it had been the starkest and bitterest of hours. He could not recover from it. Though for the next year or more he did not undergo the profoundest depression again, he never entered that calm beautiful high-spirited state in which his company made all other men seem leaden; with me he was usually subdued, affectionately anxious to help me on, controlled and sensible. His cries of distress only burst out in disguise, when he talked about the war.
He hated it. He hated that it should ever have happened. He hated any foreseeable end.
He did not simply dread, as I did, that England might be defeated. He knew what I felt; he felt my spirits fall and rise with the news, in the bad days he encouraged me. But his own dread was nothing like so simple. He shared mine up to a point; he too was chilled by the thought that his own country might lose; but he went further. He had an intensely vivid picture of what defeat in this war must bring. He could not shut it out from his imagination. He could not stand the thought for his own country — and scarcely less for Germany. Whatever happened, it seemed to him hideous without relief. Any world in which it could come about seemed meaningless — as meaningless as a life shadowed by the caprice of fate.
So he watched me through the bright and terrible summer of 1940 with protective sympathy, with a feeling more detached and darker than mine. And, as the news got a little better in my eyes, as it became clear through the winter that the war would not end in sudden disaster, I had to accept that he could not share my pleasure and relief. For me the news might turn better; for him all news about the war was black, and brought to his mind only the desert waste to come.
It was an evening in the early spring of 1941, and already so dark that I had to pick my way from the bus stop to Dolphin Square. It had become a habit to arrive home late, in the dark, tired and claustrophobic. I had to pull my curtains and tamper with a fitting, before I could switch on the light. I lay on my sofa, trying to rouse myself to go down to the restaurant for dinner, when Roy came in. He usually called in at night, if he was not entertaining one of his young women.