When I returned to the flat, Margaret and Charles were sitting in the drawing-room. Margaret caught my eye: Charles caught the glance that passed between us. He too had a suspicion. But it had better remain a suspicion. Margaret had had enough of parents like some of her father’s friends, who in the name of openness insisted on telling their children secrets they did not wish to hear.
It was not until after dinner that I spoke to Margaret. She went into the bedroom, and sat, doing nothing, at her dressing table. I followed, and said: “I think you’d guessed, hadn’t you?”
“I think I had.”
I took her hands and said, using my most intimate name for her: “You’ve got to be prepared.”
“I am,” she said. Her eyes were bright, but she was crying. She burst out: “It oughtn’t to have come to this.”
“I’m afraid it may.”
“Tell me what to do.” She was strong, but she turned to me like a child.
All her ties were deep, instinctual. Her tongue, as sharp as her father’s, wasn’t sharp now.
“I’ve failed him, haven’t I?” she cried. But she meant also, in the ambiguity of passionate emotion, that he had failed her because his ties had never been so deep.
“You mustn’t take too much upon yourself,” I said.
“I ought to have given him something to keep going for—”
“No one could. You mustn’t feel more guilty than you need.” I was speaking sternly. She found it easy to hug guilt to herself — and it was mixed with a certain kind of vanity.
She put her face against my shoulder, and cried. When she was, for an instant, rested, I said: “I haven’t told you everything.”
“What?” She was shaking.
“He wants us to help him do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s never been too good at practical things, has he?” I spoke with deliberate sarcasm. “He wants us to find him the drugs.”
“Oh, no!” Now her skin had flushed with outrage or anger.
“He asked me.”
“Hasn’t he any idea what it would mean?”
Again I spoke in our most intimate language. Then I said: “Look, I needn’t have told you. I could have taken the responsibility myself, and you would never have known. There was a time when I might have done that.”
She gazed at me with total trust. Earlier in our marriage I had concealed wounds of my own from her, trying (I thought to myself) to protect her, but really my own pride. That we had, with humiliation and demands upon each other, struggled through. We had each had to become humbler, but it meant that we could meet each other face to face.
“Can you imagine,” she cried, “if ever you got into his state — and I hope to God that I’m dead before that — can you imagine asking young Charles to put you out?”
All her life, since she was a girl, she had been repelled by, or found quite wanting in human depth, the attitude of her father’s friends. To her, they seemed to apply reason where reason wasn’t enough, or oughtn’t to be applied at all. It wasn’t merely that they had scoffed at all faiths (for despite her yearning, she had none herself, at least in forms she could justify): more than that, they had in her eyes lost contact with — not with desire, but with everything that makes desire part of the flow of a human life.
“Tell me what to do,” she said again.
“No,” I replied, “I can’t do that.”
“I just don’t know.” Usually so active in a crisis, she stayed close to me, benumbed.
“I will tell you this,” I said. “If it’s going to hurt you too much to give him the stuff, that is, if it’s something you think you won’t forget, then I’m not going to do it either. Because you’d find that would hurt you more.”
“I don’t know whether I ought to think about getting hurt at all. I suppose it’s him I ought to be thinking about, regardless—”
“That’s not so easy.”
“He wants to kill himself.” Now she was speaking with her father’s clarity. “According to his lights, he’s got a perfect right to. I haven’t got any respectable right to stop him. I wish I had. But it’s no use pretending. I haven’t. All I can do is make it a bit more inconvenient for him. It would be easy for us to slip him the stuff. It would take him some trouble to find another source of supply. So there’s no option, is there? I’ve got to do what he wants.”
The blood rushed to her face again. Her whole body stiffened. Her eyes were brilliant. “I can’t,” she said, in a voice low but so strong that it sounded hard. “And I won’t.”
I didn’t know what was right: but I did know that it was wrong to press her.
Soon she was speaking again with her father’s clarity. The proper person for him to apply to for this particular service would be one of his friends. After all — almost as though she were imitating his irony — there was nothing they would think more natural.
Obviously he had to be told without delay that we were failing him. “He’ll be disappointed,” I said. “He’s looking forward to it like a treat.”
“He’ll be worse than disappointed,” said Margaret.
“I’d better tell him,” I said, trying to take at least that load from her.
“That’s rough on you.” She glanced at me with gratitude.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “But I can talk to him, there’s no emotion between us.”
“There’s no emotion between him and anyone else now, though, is there?” she said.
Once more she stiffened herself.
“No, I must do it,” she said.
She looked more spirited, brighter, than she had done that night. Hers was the courage of action. She could not stand the slow drip of waiting or irresolution, which I was better at enduring: but when the crisis broke and the time for action had arrived, when she could do something, even if it were distasteful, searing, then she was set free.
So, with the economy of those who know each other to the bone, we left it there. We returned to the drawing-room, where Charles, who was reading, looked at us, curiosity fighting against tact. “You’re worried about him, I suppose,” he allowed himself to say.
9: Trick of Memory
ALL through those weeks, I was being badgered by messages from the Pateman family. One had arrived during Charles’ break; another the evening after Austin Davidson made his request, the same day that Margaret went to him with our answer. Dick Pateman’s messages came by telephone, in the form of protracted trunk calls (who paid the bills? I wondered): he had been found a place at a Scottish university, but that made him more dissatisfied. But his dissatisfaction was not so grinding as that of his father, who wrote letters of complaint about his son’s treatment and his own. There was, I knew it well, a kind of blackmail of responsibility: once you did the mildest of good turns, natures such as these — and there were more than you imagined — took it for granted that you were at their mercy. Well, after the June Court, I had decided to pay them a last visit and say that that was the end.
Meanwhile, Margaret had faced her father: and the result was not what we expected. True, he had been bitter, he had been intellectually scornful. He regarded what he called her “mental processes” as beneath contempt. And yet, she could not be sure, was he also feeling relieved, or perhaps reprieved? At any rate, he seemed both more active and less despairing: and physically, after his announcement to us and his quarrel with her, he had, for days which lengthened into weeks, something like a remission. If that had happened to anyone else, he would have thought it one of fate’s jokes, though in slightly bad taste. During Margaret’s visits, daily though uninvited, he produced ironies of his own, but didn’t speculate on that one. As for her, she dared not say a word, in case this state were a fluke, something the mind-body could hold stable for a little while, before the collapse.