Homecomings (23 page)

WE were busy that winter sketching out a new project, and on many nights George Passant and my secretary worked later than I did at the office and then went on to my flat to get a draft finished. At the flat they met some of my acquaintances; George, whose eyes brightened at the sight of Vera Allen, did not know what had happened to me, nor speculate much about it.

It would not have occurred to him that I was getting consolation from being a looker-on. It would have occurred to him even less that, just occasionally, when I was listening, trying to give sensible advice, there came thoughts which I had to use my whole will to shut out. In that rational, looking-on, and on the whole well-intended existence, I would suddenly have my attention drained away, by something more actual than a dream, in which a letter was on the way from Margaret, asking me to join her.

George would have believed none of that. To him I appeared quieter and more sober than I used to be, but still capable of high spirits. He assumed that I must have some secret source of satisfaction, and often, if we were left alone in the flat, he would say with an air of complacence, correct and smug: ‘Well, I won’t intrude on your private life.’

Then he would walk happily off up the square, twiddling his stick and whistling.

On the nights she came home with us, Vera Allen used to leave when she thought George was still occupied, so that he would not have an excuse to walk with her to the bus. He remained good-humoured and aware of her until one evening, when they arrived at the flat half an hour before me, there was a constraint between them so glaring that it was almost tactless not to refer to it. That evening it was George who left first.

When I heard his steps clumping defiantly along the pavement, I gazed with amusement at Vera. She was standing up ready to hand me papers, not showing any tiredness after the night’s work, her figure neat and strong as a dancer’s. It was that figure which made her seem so comely, for her face, with features flattened and open, was not beautiful, was scarcely even pretty; yet behind the openness of her expression, there was some hint – often I had thought it illusory, but that did not matter – of hidden hopes which tempted men, which made a good many speculate on how surprising she might be in one’s arms. But most men, unlike George, knew it was futile.

She was a simple, direct, and modest young woman. Although she was only twenty-seven, her husband had been killed four years before. Now she was in love again, with an absolute blinkered concentration of love, so that she seemed to breathe and eat only as means to the end of having Norman to herself. They were not lovers, but she had not a second’s recognition of the flesh to spare for any other man. She was – as far as I could guess about her – both passionate and chaste. I smiled at her. She trusted me now. I asked: ‘What’s the matter with Mr Passant?’

Vera’s eyes, clear and unblinking, met mine: there might have been a tinge of colour on her cheeks and necks, as she considered.

‘I should have thought he was a little highly strung, Mr Eliot.’

She paused, like a politician issuing a statement, and added: ‘Yes, he is
on the highly strung side
. I don’t think I can put it better than that.’

I nearly told her I did not think she could have put it worse. Vera, although not sophisticated, was also not coy: but she had a knack of finding insipid words which satisfied herself though no one else, and then of gripping onto them as though they were so many umbrellas. Highly strung. From now on she would firmly produce that egregious phrase whenever George was mentioned. What did it mean? Amorizing, importunate, randy, gallant? Something like that: I doubted if she had made a distinction, or could recognize at sight the difference between a violently sensual man like George and some of her flirtatious hangers-on. She just put them impartially aside. For a woman of her age, she was curiously innocent.

But there was one authority who did not regard her so. Soon after I had asked her about George – she would not give away any more – I let her out, and, as I was returning along the hall-passage to my room, heard an excited, insinuating voice from the next landing.

‘Mr Eliot! Mr Eliot!’

‘Yes, Mrs Beauchamp?’ I called out irritably. I could not see her, this was early in 1944, the black-out was still on, and the only light was from the blue-painted bulb in the hall.

‘I must have, that is if you can spare the time of course, I must have a little private word
entre nous
.’

I went up the stairs and made her out, in the spectral light, standing outside her own closed door.

‘I think I must tell you, Mr Eliot, I’m sure I shouldn’t be doing my duty if I didn’t.’

‘Don’t worry too much.’

‘But I do worry when it’s my duty, Mr Eliot, I’m the biggest worrier I’ve ever met.’

It was clear that I had not yet found a technique for dealing with Mrs Beauchamp.

‘You see, Mr Eliot,’ she whispered triumphantly, ‘before you came in this evening the door of your room just happened to be open and I just happened to be going upstairs, actually I had just been doing a bit of shopping, not that I should ever think of looking in your room if I didn’t hear a noise, but I thought, I know Mr Eliot would want me to pay attention to that, I know you would, Mr Eliot, if you’d seen what I’d seen.’

‘What did you see?’

‘Always respect another person’s privacy, Major Beauchamp used to say,’ she replied. ‘I’ve always done my best to live up to that, Mr Eliot and I know you have,’ she added puzzlingly as though I, too, had sat under Major Beauchamp’s moral guidance.

‘What did you see?’

‘
Écrasez l’infâme
,’ said Mrs Beauchamp.

In a whisper, fat-voiced and throbbing, she broke out: ‘Oh, I’m sorry for that poor friend of yours, poor Mr Passant!’

This seemed to me an absurd let-down; to imagine that George, having been turned down, was going out heartbroken into the night, was too much even for Mrs Beauchamp.

‘He’ll get over it,’ I said.

‘I’m sure I don’t quite follow you,’ she replied virtuously.

‘I mean, Mr Passant won’t worry long because a young woman doesn’t feel free to have dinner with him.’

Speaking to Mrs Beauchamp I often found myself, as if hypnotized by her example, becoming more and more genteel.

‘If it were only that!’

Dimly, I could perceive her hands clasped over her vast unconfined bust.

‘Oh, if only it were that!’ She echoed herself.

‘What else could it be?’

‘Mr Eliot, I’ve always been afraid you’d think too well of women. A gentleman like you is always apt to, I know you do if you don’t mind my saying so, you put them on a pedestal and you don’t see their feet of clay. So did Major Beauchamp and I always prayed he’d never have reason to think different, because it would have killed him if he had and I hope it never will you, Mr Eliot. That secretary of yours, I don’t like to speak against someone who you are so good to, but I’m afraid I have had my eyes on her from the start.’

That did not differentiate Vera sharply from any other woman who came to the house, I thought.

‘Looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth,’ said Mrs Beauchamp with a crescendo of indignation. She added: ‘
Cherchez la femme!
’

‘She’s a friend of mine, and I know her very well.’

‘It takes a woman to know another woman, Mr Eliot. When I looked into the room tonight, with the door happening to be open and hearing that poor man cry out, I saw what I expected to see.’

‘What in God’s name was that?’

‘I saw that young woman, who’s so nice and quiet when she wants to be with gentlemen like you, like a ravening beast seeking for whom she may devour.’

‘What are you wanting to tell me?’ I said. ‘Do you mean that Mr Passant was trying to seduce her, or that she was encouraging him, or what?’

‘Nice people talk about men seducing women,’ Mrs Beauchamp remarked in an oozing, saccharine whisper. ‘Nice people like you, Mr Eliot, can’t believe that it’s the other way round, it’s not even six of one and half a dozen of the other, you should have seen what I saw when I was going up those stairs!’

‘Perhaps I should.’

‘No, you shouldn’t, I should have kept your eyes away from that open door.’

‘Now what was it?’

‘It’s only that I don’t like to tell you, Mr Eliot.’

But Mrs Beauchamp could not hold back any longer.

‘Because I saw that young woman, at least I suppose she’d call herself a young woman, and even from where I was I could see that she was crammed with the lust of the eye and the pride of life, I saw her standing up with her arms above her head, and offering herself with the light full on, ready to gobble up that poor man, and he was cowering away from her, and I could see he was shocked, he was shocked to the soul. If that door hadn’t been open, Mr Eliot, I don’t like to imagine what she would have been doing. As it was, it was a terrible thing for me to have to see.’

I suppose she must have seen something: what the scene had actually been, I could not even guess. Just for an instant, such was the mesmerism of her Gothic imagination, I found myself wondering whether she was right – which, the next day in cold blood, I knew to be about as probable as that I myself should make proposals to Mrs Beauchamp on the landing outside her door. I could make no sense of it. It was conceivable that Vera had been slapping George’s face, but though George was awkward he was not brash, he was slow moving until he was certain a woman wanted him. Anyway, they had somehow planted themselves in a moment of farce; and when I saw them in the office, Vera tweeded and discreet, George bowing his great head over the papers, I should have liked to know the answer.

Constraint or no constraint, they had to work at close quarters, for we were occupied more intensely and secretly than before on a new project. It was in fact not so much a new project, as an administrator’s forecast of what was to be done if the Barford experiment succeeded. It happened to be the kind of forecast for which the collaboration of George and me might have been designed. George was still out of comparison better than I was at ordering brute facts: within weeks, he had comprehended the industrial structures on which we had to calculate with an accuracy and speed that only two men I knew could have competed with, one of those two being Hector Rose. On the other hand, George lacked what I was strong in, a sense of the possible, the nose for what not to waste time thinking about. It was I who had to pick my way through conferences with Lufkin and other firms’ equivalents of Lufkin.

When I had to negotiate with Lufkin, he was as reasonable as though our previous collision had never occurred. For my part I realized that I had been quite wrong in keeping him out: we should have gained three months if the first contract had gone to him. No one held it against me: it had been one of those decisions, correct on the surface, for which one gathered approval instead of blame. Yet I had not made a worse official mistake. It was clear enough now that, if the Barford project came off, we should be fools to keep Lufkin out again.

When, in the late spring, I delivered my report to Rose, he first expressed his usual mechanical enthusiasm: ‘I must thank you and congratulate you, if you will allow me, my dear Lewis, I do thank you most warmly for doing this job for us.’

I was so used to his flourishes, taking the meaning out of words, that I was surprised when he said, in his rarer and dryer tone: ‘This looks about the best piece of work you’ve done here.’

‘I think it may be,’ I said.

‘It really does suggest that we can see our way through the next three years without looking unnecessarily imbecile. It really does look as though we might possibly do ourselves some good.’

He was meaning high praise, the plan seemed to him realistic; and that was praise from a master.

Very pleased, I replied: ‘I don’t deserve much of the credit.’

‘May I inquire who does?’

‘Passant has done at least sixty per cent of the job and probably nearer seventy per cent.’

‘My dear Lewis, that’s very handsome of you, but I don’t think you need indulge in quite such excessive magnanimity.’

He was smiling, polite, rigid, closed.

‘It’s perfectly true,’ I said, and described what George had done. Patient as always, Rose heard me out.

‘I am very much obliged to you for that interesting example of job analysis. And now, my dear chap, you must allow others the pleasure of deciding just how much credit is due to you and how much to your no doubt valuable acquisition.’

Meanwhile George walked about with a chuff smile, complacent because he knew the merit of his work, complacent because he was certain it was recognized. For years he had endured being underestimated and, now that at last he was among his intellectual equals, he felt certain that he would get his due. At one time that impervious optimism had annoyed me, but now I found it touching, and I was determined to make Rose admit how good he was. For Rose, however antagonistic to George, would think it his duty to give him a fair deal.

Oblivious of all this, George went happily about, although, after his first weeks in London, he did not accompany me on reflective bachelor strolls at night. An absent-minded, unfocused look would come into his eyes as we took our after-office drink and, like a sleepwalker, he would go out of the pub, leaving me to walk back to Pimlico alone.

Curiously enough, it was from Vera, wrapped in her own emotions, neither observant nor gossipy, that I received a hint. One evening in May, as she came in for the last letters of the day, she stared out of the window with what – it was quite untypical of her – looked like a simper.

‘We don’t seem to be seeing as much of Mr Passant, do we?’ she said.

‘Haven’t you?’

‘Of course not,’ she flushed. She went on: ‘Actually, there’s a story going about that he has found someone who is keeping him busy.’

When she told me, it sounded both true and the last thing one would have expected. For the girl who was taking up George’s time was a typist in another department, virginal, obstinate, and half his age; their exchanges seemed to consist of a prolonged argument, suitable for the question-and-answers of an old-fashioned women’s magazine, of whether or not he was too old for her. Even to Vera, it seemed funny that George should be so reduced; but, so the story ran, he was captivated, he was behaving as though he were the girl’s age instead of his own. No one would have thought he was a sensualist; he was only eager to persuade her to marry him. I remembered how he had tried to get married once before.