Mr Knight looked down his nose, and very intently, at the passers-by across the place.
‘It is just possible’, he said, in an offhand whisper, ‘that my daughter may arrive in London this week. She is apt to carry out her intentions rather quickly. She speaks of returning to a house which she has actually lived in before. Yes, she has lived in London for a few months. I think I should like to give you the address, then perhaps if you ever find yourself near — The address is 68 Worcester Street SW1.’
He wrote it on a piece of club paper which he pulled from his pocket. He wrote it very legibly, realizing all the time that I knew that address as well as my own.
I rang the familiar number on the day that Mr Knight hinted that it was ‘just possible’ she might return. She answered. Her voice was friendly. ‘Come round,’ she said, as she might have done at any previous time. ‘How did you guess? I don’t believe it was clairvoyance.’ But she did not press me when we met. She took it for granted that I should be there, and seemed herself unchanged. She made no reference to Hugh, nor to her visit to the psychiatrist.
We sauntered hand in hand that night. For me, there was no future. This precarious innocent happiness had flickered over us inexplicably for a few days, perhaps adding up to a week in all, in our years together. Now it had chosen to visit us again.
She was sometimes airy, sometimes remote, but that had always been so. I did not want to break the charm.
For several days it seemed like first love. I said no word of her plans or mine. If this were an illusion, then let it shine a little longer. People called me clear-sighted, but if this were an illusion I did not want to see the truth.
On a warm September night we dawdled round St James’s Park, and sat by the water at the palace end. It was the calmest and most golden of nights. The lamps threw bars of gold towards us, and other beams swept and passed from cars driving along the Mall. On the quiet water, ducks moved across the golden bars and left a glittering shimmer in their wake.
‘Pretty,’ she said.
The sky was lit up over the Strand. From the barracks the Irish bagpipers began to play in the distance, marched round until the music was loud, and receded again.
We were each silent, while the band made several circuits. She was thinking. I was enchanted by the night.
She said: ‘Was it you who sent him away?’
I answered: ‘It was.’
The skirling came near, died away, came near again. Our silence went on. Her fingers had been laced in mine, and there stayed. Neither of us moved. We had not looked at each other, but were still gazing over the water. A bird alighted close in front of us, and then another.
She said: ‘It makes it easier.’
I asked: ‘What does it make easier?’
She said: ‘I’m no good now. I never shall be. I’ve played my last cards. You can have me. You can marry me if you like.’
Her tone was not contemptuous, not cruel, not bitter. It was resigned. Hearing her offer in that tone. I was nevertheless as joyful as though, when I first proposed to her in my student’s attic, she had said yes. I was as joyful as though we had suffered nothing — like any young man in the park that halcyon night, asking his girl to marry him and hearing her accept. At the same time, I was melted with concern.
‘I want you,’ I said. ‘More than I’ve ever done. But you mustn’t come to me if you could be happier any other way.’
‘I’ve done you great harm,’ she said. ‘Now you’ve done the same to me. Perhaps we deserve each other.’
‘That is not all of us,’ I said. ‘I have loved you. You have immeasurably enriched my life.’
‘You have done me great harm,’ she said, relentlessly, without any malice, speaking from deep inside. ‘I might have been happy with him. I shall always think it.’
I cried: ‘Let me get him back for you. I’ll bring him back myself. If you want him, you must have him.’
‘I forbid you,’ she said, with all her will.
‘If you want him—’
‘I might find out that it was not true. That would be worse.’
I exclaimed in miserable pity, and put my arm round her. She leant her head on my shoulder; the band approached; a long ripple ran across the pond, and the reflections quivered. I thought she was crying. Soon, however, she looked at me with dry eyes. She even had the trace of a sarcastic smile.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We can’t escape each other. I suppose it’s just.’
She stared at me.
‘I know it’s useless,’ she said. ‘But I want to tell you this. You need a wife who will love you. And look after you. And be an ally in your career. I can do none of those things.’
‘I know.’
‘I’ll try to be loyal,’ she went on. ‘That’s all I can promise. I shan’t be much good at it.’
A couple, arms round each other’s waists, passed very slowly in front of us. When they had gone by, I looked once more at the lights upon the water, and then into her eyes.
‘I know all this,’ I said. ‘I am marrying you because I can do nothing else.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are you marrying me?’
I expected a terrible answer — such as that we had damaged each other beyond repair, that, by turning love into a mutual torment, we were unfit for any but ourselves. In fact, she said: ‘It’s simple. I’m not strong enough to go on alone.’
Part Seven
The Decision
Lying awake in the early morning, I listened to Sheila breathing as she slept. It was a relief that she had gone to sleep at last. There had been many nights since our marriage when I had lain awake, restless because I knew that in the other bed she too was staring into the darkness. It had been so a few hours before, worse because at the end of our party with the Getliffes she had broken down.
The chink in the curtain was growing pale in the first light of day. I could just make out the shape of the room. It was nearly a year since we first slept there, when, after our marriage, we moved into this flat in Mecklenburgh Square. I could make out the shape of the room, and of her bed, and of her body beneath the clothes. I felt for her with tenderness, with familiar tenderness, with pity, and, yes, with irritation, irritation that I was forced to think only of her, that looking after her took each scrap of my attention, that in a few hours I should go to the courts tired out after a night of trying to soothe her.
I had thought that I could imagine what it would be like. One can never imagine the facts as one actually lives them, the moment-by-moment facts of every day. I had known that she dreaded company, and I was ready to give up all but a minimum. It seemed an easy sacrifice. After our marriage, I found it a constant drain upon my tenderness. Each sign of her pain made me less prepared to coax her into another party. She was cutting me off from a world of which I was fond — that did not matter much. She kept me away from the ‘useful’ dinner tables, and professionally I should suffer for it. I saw another thing. She was not getting more confident, but less. More completely since our marriage, she believed that she could not cope.
Often I wondered whether she would have been healed if she had known physical love. Mine she could tolerate at times: she had no joy herself, though there were occasions, so odd is the flesh, when she showed a playful pleasure, which drew us closer than we had ever been. I tried to shake off the failure and remorse, and tell myself that the pundits are not so wise as they pretend. In sexual life there is an infinite variety; and many pairs know the magic of the flesh in ways which to others would be just a mockery. In cold blood, I thought that those who write on these topics must have seen very little of life. But that reflection did not comfort me, when she was too strained for me to touch her.