I thought of other friends, like her comfortably off, who could not accept their lives. The social climate was overawing them. They could not take their good luck in their stride. If one had a talent for non-acceptance, it was a bad generation into which to be born rich. The callous did not mind, nor did the empty, nor did those who were able not to take life too hard; but among my contemporaries I could count half a dozen who were afflicted by the sick conscience of the rich.
Sheila was not made for harmony, but perhaps her mother’s money impeded her search for it. If she had been a man, she might, like Charles March, have insisted on finding a job in which she could feel useful; one of Charles’ reasons for becoming a doctor was to throw away the burden of guilt; she was as proud and active as he, and if she had been a man she too might have found a way to live. If she had been a man, I thought idly and lovingly as I came outside her house, she would have been happier. I looked up at her window. The light shone rosy through the curtains. She was there, alone in her room, and in the swell of love my heart sank and rose.
I ran upstairs, threw my arm round her waist, said that it had been a false alarm and that I should soon be quite recovered. ‘It makes me feel drunk,’ I said, and pressed her to me.
‘You’re certain of it?’ she said, leaning back in the crook of my elbow.
I told her that I was certain.
‘You’re going to become tough again? You’ll be able to go on?’
‘Yes, I shall go on,’
‘I’m glad, my dear. I’m glad for your sake.’ She had slipped from my arms, and was watching me with a strange smile. She added: ‘And for mine too,’
I exclaimed. I was already chilled.
She said: ‘Now I can ask your advice.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m in love. Quite honestly. It’s very surprising. I want you to tell me what to do.’
She had often tortured me with the names of other men. There had been times when her eye was caught, or when she was making the most of a new hope. But she had never spoken with this authority. On the instant, I believed her. I gasped, as though my lungs were tight. I turned away. The reading lamp seemed dim, so dim that the current might be failing. I was suddenly drugged by an overwhelming fatigue; I wanted to go to sleep.
‘I had to tell you,’ she was saying.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘You weren’t fit to take it,’ she said.
‘This must be the only time on record’, I said, ‘when you’ve considered me.’
‘I may have deserved that,’ she replied. She added: ‘Believe me. I’m hateful. But this time I tried to think of you. You were going through enough. I couldn’t tell you that I was happy.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘Just after you went to France,’
I was stupefied that I had not guessed.
‘You didn’t write to me for weeks,’ I said.
‘That was why. I hoped you’d get well quickly.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m no good at deceit.’
I sat down. For a period that may have been minutes — I had lost all sense of time — I stared into the room. I half knew that she had brought up a chair close to mine. At last I said ‘What do you want me to do?’
Her reply was instantaneous ‘See that I don’t lose him.’
‘I can’t do that,’ I said roughly.
‘I want you to,’ she said. ‘You’re wiser than I am. You can tell me how not to frighten him away.’ She added: ‘He’s pretty helpless. I’ve never liked a man who wasn’t. Except you. He can’t cope very well. He’s rather like me. We’ve got a lot in common.’
I had heard other ‘we’s’ from her, taunting my jealousy, but not in such a tone as this. She dwelt on it with a soft and girlish pleasure. I was chained there. I fell again into silence. Then I asked peremptorily who he was.
She was eager to tell me. She spoke of him as Hugh. It was only some days later, when I decided to meet him, that I learned his surname. He was a year or two older than Sheila and me, and so was at that time about twenty-seven. He had no money, she said, though his origins were genteel. Some of his uncles were well off, and he was a clerk at a stockbroker’s, being trained to go into the firm. ‘He hates it,’ she said. ‘He’ll never be any good at it. It’s ridiculous.’ He had no direction or purpose; he did not even know whether he wanted to get married.
‘Why is he the answer?’ I could not keep the question back.
She answered: ‘It’s like finding part of myself.’
She was rapt, she wanted me to rejoice with her. ‘I must show you his photograph,’ she said. ‘I’ve hidden it when you came. Usually it stands—’ She pointed to a shelf at the head of the divan on which she slept. ‘I like to wake up and see it in the morning.’
She was more girlish, more delighted to be girlish, than a softer woman might have been. She went to a cupboard, bent over, and stayed for a second looking at the photograph before she brought it out. Each action and posture was, as I had observed the first time I visited that room, more flowing and relaxed than a year ago. When I first observed that change, I did not guess that she was in love. Her profile was hard and clear, as she bent over the photograph; her lips were parted, as though she wanted to gush without constraint. ‘It’s rather a nice face,’ she said, handing me the picture. It was a weak, and sensitive face. The eyes were large, bewildered, and idealistic. I gave it back without a word. ‘You can see’, she said, ‘that he’s not much good at looking after himself. Much less me. I know it’s asking something, but I want you to help. I’ve never listened to anyone else, but I listen to you. And so will he.’
She tried to make me promise to meet him. I was so much beside myself that I gave an answer and contradicted myself and did not know what I intended. It was so natural to look after her; to shield this vulnerable happiness, to preserve her from danger. At the same time, all my angry heartbreak was pent up. I had not uttered a cry of that destructive rage.
She was satisfied. She felt assured that I should do as she asked. ‘Now what shall I do for you?’ she cried in her rapture. ‘I know,’ she said, with a smile half-sarcastic, half-innocent as she brought out her anticlimax. ‘I shall continue your musical education.’ Since my first visit to Worcester Street, she had played records each time I went — to disguise her love. Yet it had been a pleasure to her. She knew I was unmusical, often she had complained that it was a barrier between us, and she liked to see me listening. She could not believe that the sound meant nothing. She had only to explain, and my deafness would fall away.
That afternoon, after her cry ‘What shall I do for you?’, she laid out the records of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Side by side, we sat and listened. Sheila listened, her eyes luminous, transfigured by her happiness. She listened and was in love.
The noise pounded round me. I too was in love.
The choral movement opened. As each theme came again, Sheila whispered to make me recognize it. ‘Dismisses it,’ she said, sweeping her hand down, as the first went out. ‘Dismisses it,’ she said twice more. But at the first sound of the human voice, she sat so still that she might have gone into a trance.
She was in love, and rapt. I sat beside her, possessed by my years of passion and devotion, consumed by tenderness, by desire, and by the mania of revenge, possessed by the years whose torments had retraced themselves to breaking point as she stood that night, oblivious to all but her own joy. She was carried away, into the secret contemplation of her love. I sat beside her, stricken and maddened by mine.