Homecomings (21 page)

Sometimes, in the midst of a long official gathering, I thought, not without a certain enjoyment, of how baffled these people would be if they saw the acquaintances with whom I proposed to spend that night. For now I had been long enough in the office to be taken for granted: since the Minister lost his job, I did not possess as much invisible influence as when I was more junior, but in official eyes I had gone up, and the days were stable, full of the steady, confident voices of power. Then I went home from one of Hector Rose’s committees, back to the dingy flat.

Just after Margaret said goodbye, I had to move out of the Dolphin block and, not in a state to trouble, I took the first rooms I heard of, in the square close by. They took up the ground floor of one of the porticoed Pimlico houses; the smell of dust was as constant as a hospital smell; in the sitting-room the sunlight did not enter, even in high summer, until five o’clock. In that room I listened to the acquaintances who came to see me; it was there that Vera Allen, my secretary, suddenly broke out of her reserve and told me of the young man whom Gilbert had identified. He seemed to love her, Vera cried, but he would neither marry nor make love to her. That was, on the surface, a story commonplace enough, in contrast to some of the others which came my way.

Of my old friends, the only one I saw much of was Betty Vane, who came in to make the flat more liveable, just as she had busied herself for me after Sheila’s death. She knew that I had lost Margaret: about herself she volunteered nothing, except that she had left her job and found another in London, leaving me to assume that she and I were in the same state.

Irritable, undemanding, she used to clean up the room and then go with me round the corner to the pub on the Embankment. Through the open door the starlings clamoured: we looked at each other with scrutiny, affection, blame. We had been friends on and off for so long, and now we met again it was to find that the other had got nowhere.

When she or any other visitor let herself out last thing at night, there was likely to be a pad and scuffle outside my door and a soft, patient, insidious knock. Then round the door would insinuate a podgy shapeless face, a great slack heavy body wrapped in a pink satin dressing-gown. It was Mrs Beauchamp, my landlady, who lived on the floor above mine and who spent her days spying from her room above the portico and her nights listening to steps on the stairs and sounds from her tenants’ rooms.

One night, just after Betty had left, she went through her routine: ‘I was just wondering, Mr Eliot, I know you won’t mind me asking, but I was just wondering if you had a drop of milk?’

The question was a matter of form. With each new tenant, she cherished a hope of heart speaking unto heart, and, as the latest arrival, I was going through the honeymoon period. As a matter of form, I asked her if she could manage without the milk for that night’s supper.

‘Ah, Mr Eliot,’ she breathed, a trifle ominously, ‘I’ll do what I can.’

Then she got down to business.

‘That was a very nice young lady if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Eliot, that seemed to be coming to see you when I happened to be looking down the street tonight, or at least, not exactly young as some people call young, but I always say that none of us are as young as we should like to be.’

I told her Betty was younger than I was: but as she thought me ten years older than my real age, Mrs Beauchamp was encouraged.

‘I always say that people who aren’t exactly young have feelings just the same as anyone else, and sometimes their feelings give them a lot to think about, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Eliot,’ she said, with an expression that combined salacity with extreme moral disapproval. But she was not yet satisfied.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ she said, ‘if you told me that that nice young lady had come of a very good family.’

‘Shouldn’t you?’

‘Now, Mr Eliot, she does or she doesn’t. I’m sorry if I’m asking things I shouldn’t, but I like to feel that when anyone does the same to me I don’t send them away feeling that they have made a
faux pas
.’

‘As a matter of fact she does.’

‘Breeding will out,’ Mrs Beauchamp exhaled.

The curious thing was, she was an abnormally accurate judge of social origin. The derelicts who visited me she put down to my eccentricity: the respectable clerks from the lower middle classes, like Vera Allen and her Norman, Mrs Beauchamp spotted at once, and indicated that I was wasting my time. Of my Bohemian friends, she detected precisely who was smart and who was not.

She went on to tell me the glories of her own upbringing, the convent school – ‘those dear good nuns’ – and of Beauchamp, who was, according to her, entitled to wear
seventeen distinguished ties
. Improbable as Mrs Beauchamp’s autobiography sounded when one saw her stand oozily in the doorway, I was coming to believe it was not totally untrue.

Whenever I answered the telephone in the hall, I heard a door click open on the next floor and the scuffle of Mrs Beauchamp’s slippers. But I could put up with her detective work, much as I used, before he touched a nerve, to put up with Gilbert Cooke’s.

All this time, since the day when he told Margaret’s sister of the suicide, I had been meeting Gilbert in the office; I talked business with him, even gossiped, but I had not once let fall a word to him about my own concerns. He was the first to notice signs of anyone withdrawing, but this time I was not sure that he knew the reason. I was quite sure, however, that he had discovered the break with Margaret, and that he was expending some effort to observe how I was living now.

Coming into my office one evening in the autumn, he said imperiously and shyly: ‘Doing anything tonight?’

I said no.

‘Let me give you dinner.’

I could not refuse and did not want to, for there was no pretence about the kindness that brimmed from him. As well as being kind, he was also, I recognized once more, sensitive: he did not take me to White’s, since he must have imagined – the last thing I should have mentioned to anyone, to him above all – how I linked our dinner there with the night of Sheila’s death. Instead, he found a restaurant in Soho where he could order me one or two of my favourite dishes, the names of which he had stored away in that monstrous memory. He proceeded to bully me kindly about my new flat.

‘It’s near the Dolphin, isn’t it?’ (He knew the address.) ‘It’s one of those eighteen-fortyish houses, I suppose. Not much good in air-raids, you must move out if they start again,’ he said, jabbing his thumb at me. ‘We can’t let you take unnecessary risks.’

‘What about you?’ I said. His own flat was at the top of a ramshackle Knightsbridge house.

‘It doesn’t matter about me.’

Brushing my interruption aside, he got back to the subject, more interesting to him, of my living arrangements.

‘Have you got a housekeeper?’

I said I supposed that one could call Mrs Beauchamp that.

‘Doesn’t she make you comfortable?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘I don’t know,’ he cried impatiently, ‘why you don’t do something about it!’

‘Don’t worry yourself,’ I said, ‘I genuinely don’t mind.’

‘What is she like?’

I wanted to warn him off, so I smiled at him, and said: ‘To put it mildly, she’s just a bit inquisitive.’

When I had spoken I was sorry, since it suddenly struck me as not impossible that Gilbert would find occasion to have a tête-à-tête with Mrs Beauchamp. For the moment, however, he laughed, high-voiced, irritated with me.

The meal went on agreeably enough. We talked official shop and about the past. I thought again, everything Gilbert said was his own; in his fashion he was a creative man. He was being lavish with the drink, and now there was half a bottle of brandy standing before us on the table. It was a long time since I had drunk so much. I was cheerful, I was content for the evening to stretch out. As I was finishing some inconsequential remark I saw Gilbert leaning over the table towards me, his big shoulders hunched. His eyes hot and obsessive, he said: ‘I can tell you something you’ve been waiting to know.’

‘Never mind,’ I replied, but I was taken off guard.

‘Have you seen Margaret since she got married?’

‘No.’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t!’ He laughed, satisfied, on top. ‘Well, you needn’t get too bothered about her. I think she’ll be all right.’

I wanted to cry out, ‘I don’t intend to listen’, just as I had avoided going near anyone who knew her or even hearing the date of her wedding. The only news I had not been able to escape was that she was married. I wanted to shout in front of Gilbert’s inflamed eyes – ‘I can stand it, if I don’t hear.’ But he went on: Geoffrey Hollis had taken a job at a children’s hospital, they were living at Aylesbury.

‘I think she’ll be all right,’ said Gilbert.

‘Good.’

‘He’s head over heels in love with her, of course.’

‘Good,’ I said again.

‘There is one other thing.’

‘Is there?’ I heard my own voice dull, mechanical, protecting me by thrusting news away.

‘She’s going to have a child.’

As I did not reply, he continued: ‘That will mean a lot to her, won’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course,’ said Gilbert, ‘she can’t have started it more than a month or two–’

While he was talking on, I got up and said that I must have an early night. There were no taxis outside, and together we walked up Oxford Street: I was replying to his chat affably if absently: I did not feel inimical; I already knew what I was going to do.

The next morning I sat in my office thinking of how I was going to say it, before I asked Vera Allen to fetch Gilbert in. He slumped down in the easy chair beside my desk, relaxed and companionable.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I want you to transfer to another branch.’

On the instant he was braced, his feet springing on the floor, like a man ready to fight.

‘Why?’

‘Will it do any good to either of us to answer that?’

‘You just mean, that you want to get rid of me, after four years, without any reason, and without any fuss?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean that.’

‘I won’t accept it.’

‘You must.’

‘You can’t force me.’

‘I can,’ I replied. I added: ‘If necessary, I shall.’ I was speaking so that he would believe me. Then I added in a different tone: ‘But I shan’t have to.’

‘Why do you think you can get away with it?’

‘Because I need you to go to make things easier for me.’

‘Good God,’ cried Gilbert, his eyes angry and puzzled, ‘I don’t think I deserve that.’

‘I’ve got great affection for you, you know that,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very good to me in all kinds of ways, and I shan’t forget it. But just now there are parts of my life I don’t want to be reminded of–’

‘Well?’

‘While you’re about, you can’t help reminding me of them.’

‘How do you mean, I can’t help it?’

‘You can see.’

Hotly, angrily, without self-pity or excuse, Gilbert said: ‘It’s my nature. You know how it is.’

I knew better than he thought; for in my youth I had been as tempted as most men by the petty treachery, the piece of malice warm on the tongue at a friend’s expense, the kind of personal imperialism, such as he had shown the night before, in which one imposes oneself upon another. Even more I had been fascinated by the same quicksands in other men. As to many of us when young, the labile, the shifting, the ambivalent, the Lebedevs and the Fyodor Karamazovs, had given me an intimation of the depth and wonder of life. But as I grew up I began to find it not only unmagical, but also something like boring, both in others and myself. At the age when I got rid of Gilbert Cooke I found it hard to imagine the excitement and attention with which, in my young manhood, I had explored the transformation-scene temperament of an early friend. As I got near forty, my tastes in character had changed, I could not give that attention again. If I had still been able to, I could have taken Gilbert as an intimate friend.

WHEN I told Rose that I wished to transfer Gilbert Cooke, I had an awkward time.

‘Of course, I have only a nodding acquaintance with your dashing activities, my dear Lewis,’ said Rose, meaning that he read each paper word by word, ‘but I should have thought the present arrangement was working reasonably well.’

I said that I could see certain advantages in a change.

‘I must say,’ replied Rose, ‘that I should like to be assured of that.’

‘It would do Cooke good to get a wider experience–’

‘We can’t afford to regard ourselves as a training establishment just at present. My humble interest is to see that your singular and admirable activities don’t suffer.’ He gave his polite, confident smile. ‘And forgive me if I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that they will suffer if you let Master Cooke go.’

‘In many ways that’s true,’ I had to say in fairness.

‘I shouldn’t like us to forget that he showed a certain amount of moral courage, possibly a slightly embarrassing moral courage, over that Lufkin complication last year. I scored a point to his credit over that. And I have an impression that he’s been improving. He’s certainly been improving appreciably on paper, and I’ve come to respect his minutes.’

As usual, Hector Rose was just. He was also irritated that I would not let him persuade me. He was even more irritated when he learned how I proposed to fill Gilbert’s place. For, finding me obstinate, and cutting the argument short, he admitted that they could probably give me an ‘adequate replacement’; it was the end of 1943, there were plenty of youngish officers invalided out, or a few capable young women ‘coming loose’.

No, I said, I would not take a chance with anyone I did not know through and through; the job was going to get more tangled, and parts of it were secret; I wanted someone near me whom I could trust as I did myself.

‘I take it that this specification is not completely in the air, and you have some valuable suggestion up your sleeve?’

I gave the name: George Passant. The man who had most befriended me in my youth, although I did not tell Rose that. He had been working as a solicitor’s managing clerk in a provincial town for twenty years. The only point in his favour in Rose’s eyes was that his examination record was of the highest class.