Soon he looked at Irene with an odd expression. His face, like that of many with a quickly changing inner life, was emotional but hard to read, ‘I think I must be going now,’ he said. Her eyes sharpened.
‘Goodbye,’ said Hankins, and the revolving door sucked round behind him, sucking empty air.
He had gone so quickly that they might have arranged to meet again, when I was disposed of.
Irene stared at me with full eyes.
‘I had to see him,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t sit down under things any longer.’
‘What are you going to do?’
She did not reply, but continued to stare at me as though I knew. Just for a second, on her mouth there appeared a tart smile. She settled herself against the arm of her chair, and I noticed that her shoulders were getting rounder. In the last year she had thickened both in the throat and the upper arm. It was easy to imagine her in middle age, lolling in her dressing-gown.
‘Fancy the old thing pulling in a regular salary at last,’ she said.
‘Both of them have done pretty well for themselves,’ I replied.
She looked puzzled. I had to explain that ‘both of them’ meant Hankins and Martin, the two men who had meant most to her. They were coming to the top of their professions at the same time.
‘The top?’ she said.
‘The head of Barford,’ I replied.
‘Oh.’ She fixed me with a glance which seemed malicious, regretful, sympathetic.
‘And as for Hankins,’ I said, ‘so far as there is anything left of literary London, this job will put him in the middle of it.’
‘He’ll dote on that!’ she cried. Quietly she added: ‘And so should I.’
She spoke straight out: ‘It would suit me better than anything I have ever had with Martin, or anything that I could ever have.’
Once more she gave me a glance edged with fellow-feeling. Without explanation, with her expression malicious and ominous, she went on: ‘I’m not cut out for it. I can see Martin going on patiently and getting a bit drier every year. What sort of life do you think that means for me?’
We looked at each other, without speaking for some moments. I said: ‘But you’re going to live it, aren’t you?’
‘You don’t think I’m going off with E H?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I could stop his marriage. I could have everything I wanted ten years ago. Why shouldn’t I now?’
‘You won’t,’ I said.
‘You’re positive?’ Suddenly she slumped down, her hand fell on her breast, her tone no longer brittle, but flat, lazily flat, as she said: ‘You’re right.’
She went on: ‘I never knew where I was with E H. I never even knew if he needed me. While Martin doesn’t need me — he could get on without me or anyone else, but he wants me! He always has! I never had much faith that anyone would, until he came along.’
So at last, under the palm trees of that aseptic lounge, preoccupied by the suspicion, which she had provoked, of a crucial turn in Martin’s life, I was given a glimpse of what bound Irene to him. In the past I had speculated often. Why should she, in the ultimate run, be anchored to Martin instead of Hankins? I had looked for qualities in Martin which could make some women love him, rather than another man. They were present, but they did not count.
It was true that Martin was the stronger: it was true also that Martin was, if these cant terms mean anything, the more masculine. Hankins was one of those men, and they are not uncommon, who invest much emotion in the pursuit of women without having the nature for it; he thought he was searching for the body’s rapture, but his profoundest need was something less direct, the ambience of love, its meshes of unhappiness, its unfulfilled dreams, its tears for the past and its images of desire. Many women found it too delicate, but not Irene.
With her, there was a hypnotic charm about his capacity for feeling; he could feel as she did, he had the power to enter into, as all important, each emotion of love. It was that which she first loved in him, and which held her fascinated for years, her whom other women obtusely thought was searching only for a partner in bed. Against that emotional versatility Martin could not compete. Yet never once, if she had been faced with the choice, would she have left Martin.
The real reason which delivered her to Martin lay not in him, but in herself.
She had just told it to me, so simply that it was difficult to believe. In fact, Irene had suffered all her life from a diffidence which seemed at a first glance, the last one would expect in her. In her childhood, even more totally than with other girls, love and marriage filled her daydreams: those daydreams had not left her alone all her life; yet they had never been accompanied by the certainty of the fibres, that she had it in her to draw the love she coveted. More than most she studied herself in the looking-glass, but not with narcissistic pleasure; only with a mixture of contemptuous liking and nervousness that such a face, such a body, might never bring what she craved.
In the hotel lounge, hearing the revolving doors swing round, I thought of another woman so different from Irene that any resemblance seemed like a joke. Nora Luke, dowdy, professionally striving, in the home a scolding faithful housewife — Irene, once notorious for her love affairs, the most reckless of women — yet in secret they had found life difficult in the same manner. At the root of their nature they were sisters.
Irene had spoken simply, and maybe it was as simple as she said. Hankins, so tentative and undecided himself, she had never had the confidence to reach for; while Martin, all else forgotten, was the one man who wanted enough to stay with her at any cost, to give the assurance, so far as she was capable of accepting it, that he would stay steady, that he would be there to make her feel that she was as lovable as, her nerves twitching under the adventuress’ skin, she had never since she was a child been able to believe,
That night, she had sent Hankins away. It was only after he had gone that I realized this was the end between them, that under the lamps of Portman Square they had spoken the last words. Hankins pushing round the door might have been leaving her for half an hour; in fact, they would not meet again: it was curious that he, at any other time so eloquent, had gone in silence.
Irene smiled at me, as though, sitting before her looking-glass, she was putting on her dashing face.
‘He will have me on his hands,’ she said. She was speaking of Martin.
She added: ‘I shall be a drag on him in this new game.’
She was keeping me in the dark, she was obscurely triumphant.
‘What are you telling me?’ I asked.
‘You knew, of course you knew, about this offer that Martin had last week?’
I said yes.
‘You knew he expected it before it came?’
‘He must have expected it for weeks.’
‘I guessed as much.’
She went on, not knowing the break between Martin and me, but knowing something I did not. For days (it must have been during the first sittings of the Committee, and he might have had inside information, probably from Mounteney) he was excited that the job was coming his way. She said that he was lively, active, restless with high spirits; she remembered how he had talked to his son one evening, talked to the three-year-old-boy as though they were both adults and he was letting himself boast.
‘Well, Lewis,’ Martin had said to the child, ‘now I’m going further than anyone in the family’s ever gone. It will give you a good start. You’ll be able to build on it, won’t you?’
In the next few days Irene felt a change. She could not ask him; with her, in his own home, he let his moods run more than I had seen him, but she dared not to try to penetrate them. It was still several days before the offer was made. For the only time she could remember, Martin stayed away from the laboratory without a reason. The weather had turned foggy; he sat silent by the fire. He did not ask her advice, but occasionally spoke of the advantages of being the Barford superintendent, of the entertaining she could do there. Occasionally also he spoke of some disadvantages, as though laughing them off.