I hoped for a child, with the unrealistic hope that it might settle alclass="underline" but of that there was no sign.
She wanted to meet no one — except those she discovered for herself. She had only visited her parents once since we married: that was at Christmas, as she kept some of her sense of formal duty. I myself had seen much more of Mr Knight, for we had struck up a bizarre companionship. Sheila let me go to the vicarage alone, while she hid herself in the flat or else went out in search of some of her nondescript cronies. They were an odd bunch. As in her girlhood, she was more relaxed with the unavailing, the down-and-out, even the pretentious, so long as they were getting nowhere. She would sit for hours in a little café talking to the waiter; she became the confidante of typists from decayed upper-class families who were looking for a man to keep them; she went and listened to writers who somehow did not publish, to writers who did not even write.
Some of my friends thought that, among that army of the derelict, she took lovers. I did not believe it. I did not ask; I did not spy any longer; I should have known. I did not doubt that she was faithful to me. No, from them she gained the pleasure of bringing solace. She had her own curious acid sympathy with the lost. She was touched by those, young and old, whose inner lives like her own were comfortless. It was in part that feeling which drew her to my attic in my student days.
I did not spy on her any longer. My obsessive jealousy had died soon after I possessed her. When she told me, as she still did, of some man who had taken her fancy, I could sympathize now, and stroke her hair, and laugh. I was capable of listening without the knife twisting within. I thought I should be capable, if ever I discovered a man who could give her joy, of bringing him to her arms. I thought I could do that; I who had, less than two years before, watched her window for hours in the bitter night — I who had deliberately set out to break her chance of joy.
Since then I had made love to her. Since then I had lain beside her in such dawns as this. Hugh was gone now, married, dismissed further into the past in her mind than in mine (I was still jealous of him, when all other jealousy was washed away). If ever she felt with another that promise of joy, I believed that I would scheme for her and watch over her till she was happy.
I did not think it was likely to happen. Her fund of interest seemed to have run low. She had gone farther along life’s road than I had, though we were the same age and though my years had been more packed than hers. It was to me she turned, hoping for a new idea to occupy her. At times she turned to me as though to keep her going, as though I had to live for two. It was that condition of blankness and anxiety that I feared most in her, and which most wore me down. Even in perfect love it would be hard to live for another. In this love it was a tax beyond my strength.
She looked after the flat with the same competence that she spent on her coins. She was abler than I had thought, and picked up any technique very quickly. She did more of the housework than she need have done, for we could have afforded another servant; perhaps as an expiation, perhaps to console me, Mr Knight had surprised us with a lavish marriage settlement, and between us our income was about two thousand pounds a year. She spent little of it on herself. Sometimes she helped out her cronies, or bought records or books. That was almost all. I should have welcomed any extravagance. I should have welcomed anything into which she could pour out her heart.
I had threatened Hugh that if he married her he would never know what to expect when he arrived home. No cruel prophecy had ever recoiled more cruelly. After a year of marriage, I used to stay in Chambers of an evening with one care after another piling upon me. My career. I was slipping: if I were to achieve half my ambition, this was the time when I ought to take another jump forward. It was not happening. My practice was growing very slightly, but no more. I could guess too clearly that I was no longer talked about as a coming man.
There was another care which had become darker since the summer. Hints kept reaching me of a scandal breaking round George Passant and the group. I had made inquiries, and they did not reassure me. George would not confide, but I felt there was danger creeping up. Oblivious and obstinate, George shut me out. I was terrified of what might happen to him.
With those cares upon me, I would leave Chambers at last, and set out home. I wanted someone to talk to, with the comfort of letting the despondency overflow. ‘My girl,’ I wanted to say, ‘things are going badly. My bit of success may have been a flash in the pan. And there’s worse news still.’ I wanted someone to talk to, and, in fact, when I got home, I might find a stranger. A stranger to whom I was bound, and with whom I could not rest until I had coaxed her to find a little peace. She might, at the worst, be absolutely still, neither reading nor smoking, just gazing into the room. She might have gone out to one of her down-at-heel friends. I could never sleep until she returned, although she tiptoed into the spare room, there to spend the night on the divan. Once or twice I had found her there in the middle of the night, smoking a chain of cigarettes, playing her records still fully dressed.
There was not one night that autumn of 1932, when I could reckon on going back to content.
My unperceptive friends saw me married to a beautiful and accomplished woman, and envied me. My wiser friends were full of resentment. One or two, guessing rightly that I was less a prisoner than before my marriage, dangled other women in front of me. They thought that I was being damaged beyond repair. Not even Charles March, whose temperament was closest to my own, had much good to say of her. No one was wise enough to realize that there was one sure way to please me and to win my unbreakable gratitude: that was to say not that they loved her — she received enough of that — but simply that they liked her. I wanted to hear someone say that she was sweet, and tried to be kind, and that she was harming only herself. I wanted them to be sorry for her, not for me.
Yet, lying beside her, I did not know how long I could stand it.
I was facing the corrosion of my future.
What idea had she of my other life? It seemed to her empty, and my craving for success vulgar. She did not invade me, she did not possess me, she did not wish to push me on. She knew me as a beseeching lover: she turned to me because I knew her and was not put off. For the rest, she left me inviolate and with my secrets. There was none of the give and take of equal hearts.
Lying beside her in the silver light of the October dawn, I did not know how long I could stand it.
She bore the same sense of formal duty to me as to her parents. Just as she visited them for Christmas, so she offered, once or twice, to entertain some legal acquaintances. ‘You want me to. I shall do it,’ she said. I did want it, but I knew before her first dinner party that nothing would be more of an ordeal. It was only recently that I had let her try again: and the result had been our dinner of the previous night.
I had mentioned that it was months since Henriques sent me a brief. She made some indifferent response; and then, some days later, she asked if she should invite the Henriques to the flat. I was so touched by the sign of consideration that I said yes with gusto, and told her (for the sake of some minor plan) to ask the Getliffes as well. For forty-eight hours before the dinner, she was wretched with apprehension. It tore open her diffidence, it exposed her as crippled and inept.