Now he tried to restore himself by summoning well-tried thoughts. Every time the radio or television was turned on, every time you saw a newspaper, the figure nine million was used, with the information that these refugees had no future, or none of a normal kind. (India's short, sharp, efficient war that reprieved these same nine million was of course months in the future.) But there was nothing to be done; the catastrophe had the same feeling as the last, which had been Nigeria: a large number of people would die of starvation or would be murdered, but there was no power strong enough to stop this.
It was this feeling of helplessness that seemed to be the new factor; each time there was something of the kind, the numbers of people grew larger, and the general helplessness augmented. Yet all that had happened was that great catastrophes were being brought to the general attention more forcefully than in the past. Not long ago, as recently as thirty years ago, it had been commonplace for small paragraphs in newspapers to say that six, seven, eight million people had died, were dying of starvation, in China: communism had put an end to famine, or to the world's hearing about it. A very short time ago, a decade, several million might die in a bad season in India: the green revolution had (possibly temporarily) checked that. In Russia millions had died in the course of some great scheme or other: the collectivization of the peasants, for instance.
The most shocking thing that had happened to his generation was the event summed up by the phrase 'six million Jews'. Although so many millions of people had been killed or had died in that war, and in a thousand awful ways, it was that one thing, the six million, which seemed worst. Because, of course, as everyone knew, it had been willed and deliberate murder... Was it really any more deliberate than the nine million of Stalin's forcible collectivization? And how about that nine, or ninety, million — the never-to-be-known figure for the deaths of black men in Africa caused by white men in the course of bringing civilization to that continent? (This figure, whatever it was, never could accumulate about it the quality of senseless horror that had the figure for the death camps and gas chambers under Hitler. Why not?) During the next twelve months, between twelve and twenty-four million would die of starvation in the world (the figure depended on the source of calculation) . The twelve months after, this figure would double — by the end of a decade, the numbers of people expected to die annually of hunger was beyond calculation... These figures, and many more, clicked through his well-stocked journalists head, and against them he heard Walter's voice rather tetchy, critical, saying that there would only be thirty people for the Twenty-Four-Hour Fast.
Yes, of course it was ridiculous to think on these lines and particularly when you were tired; he had been thrown off balance worse than he knew. He would sleep for a little — no, no, better not, he would rather not, he would not go to his bed unless Rosemary could be with him. Well, there were things that he ought to be doing he was sure: for one thing, he had not read the newspapers for three days, or listened to the news, He regarded it as his responsibility to read all the newspapers every day, as if knowing what was bad could prevent worse. He did not want to read the papers; he wanted to sit down and wait quietly for his wife. This made him guilty, and he was associating his reluctance to plunge into the misery and threat of the newspapers with the brutalizing of everybody, everyone's acceptance of horror as normal. Well, it was normal — when had storms of blood and destruction not swept continuously over the globe?
His will was being attacked: he had no will. This was why he needed to see Rosemary. This thought, he knew, had put a small whimsical grimace on to his face; the grimace was for the benefit of an observer. The observer was himself: it was there for the sake of his pride — a very odd thing had happened between him and his wife. For a long time, in fact for most of the marriage, they would have said that they were unhappily married. It had been a war marriage of course, like those of most of their contemporaries. It had begun in passion, separation, dislocation. They had felt, on beginning to live together for the first time, when they had been married for nearly six years, that their good times had been stolen from them. Then three children: they had turned Rosemary into an obsessed, complaining woman; so he had seen her, and so she now saw herself during that period. He was most often out of England, and had many affairs, some of them serious. He knew she had been in love with someone else: she, like himself, had refused to consider a divorce because of the effect on the children. There was of course nothing remarkable in this history: but some of the men the knew had divorced, leaving first wives to bring up children. He knew that many of his friends' wives, like Rosemary, had been obsessed with grievance at their lot, yet had been dutiful mothers.
Various unhappy balance had been achieved by himself and Rosemary, always regarded as second-best. Best was in fantasy, or what other people had. Then the children grew up, and were not longer there to be cooked for, worried about, shopped for, nursed — suddenly these two people who had been married thirty years discovered they were enjoying each other. They could not use the word 'a second honeymoon' because they had never had a first. Jack remembered that at the other end of what now seemed like a long tunnel of responsibility, worry, guilt — relieved by frequent exile whose enjoyability caused more guilt — had been a young woman with whom he had been more in love than with anybody since. He relaxed into the pleasures of his home, pleasure with Rosemary, who, appreciated at last, took on energy and poise, lost her listlessness, her reproach, her patience under neglect.
It had been the completeness of her revival that was the only thing disturbing about their being in love again: Jack lived marvelling that so little a thing as his own attention should be enough to nourish this creature, to burnish her with joy. He could not help being guilty anew that so little an effort towards self-discipline would have produced the kindness which could have made this woman's life happy, instead of a martyrdom. Yet he knew he had not been capable of even so small an effort: he had found her intolerable, and the marriage a burden, and that was the truth. But the thought he could not come to terms with was this: what sort of a creature was she, to be fed and made happy by the love of a creature like himself?
And Rosemary was not the only woman he observed enjoying a new lease of life. At parties of 'the Old Guard' it was enough simply to look around at the wives of the same age as his own wife, the women recently released from nursery and kitchen, to see many in the same condition, without having to ask if a second honeymoon was in progress — and here was another source of unease. He was not able to ask, to discuss frankly, or even to raise the matter at all, and yet these were friends, he had been with them, worked with them, faced a hundred emergencies with them — but they did not have with each other the friendship of the king that would enable them to talk about their relationships with each other, with their wives, their wives with them. Yet this was friendship, or at least it was as close to friendship as he was likely to get. Intimacy he had known, but with women with whom he was having affairs. Intimacy, frankness, trust, had, as it were, been carried inside him, to be bestowed on loved women, and withdrawn when that love had ended because he was married. So it was not that he had not know perfect intimacy; it was that he had known it with several people, one after another. What was left now of these relationships was a simplicity of understanding when he met these woman again — those that he did meet, for after all, many of these affairs had taken place, in other countries. But even now he had to admit that this state had never been achieved with his wife, as good as their relation now was: for what he could not share with her was a feeling he could not control that he had to value her less for being so satisfied — more, fulfilled — with so little. Himself.