Homecomings (24 page)

‘Isn’t it amusing?’ said Vera, with fellow-feeling, with a lick of malice. ‘I say good luck to him!’

I was thinking, with a spectator’s impatience, that she and George would have been well matched. She might be dense, or humourless, or self-deceiving, but George would have minded less than most men, and underneath it she was as strong as he was. Instead, she had found someone who it seemed could give her nothing, which was a singular triumph for the biological instinct. Now, to cap it all, George was doing the same. Yet she was totally committed, and so perhaps was he. Speculating about them both, I felt extreme curiosity, irritation, and a touch of envy.

INTO my dusty bedroom, where the morning light was reflected on the back wall, Mrs Beauchamp entered with the breakfast tray at times which tended to get later. Breakfast itself had reached an irreducible minimum, a small pot of tea and a biscuit.

‘I do what I can, Mr Eliot,’ said Mrs Beauchamp, not apologetically but with soft and soothing pride.

While she stood there, as though expecting congratulations, and then paddled about on the chance of more exposures of human wickedness, I picked up the newspaper. Each morning, gripped by an addiction I could not control, like one compelled to touch every pillarbox in the street, I had to run my eye down the column of Births, searching for the name of Hollis. After Gilbert’s final piece of gossip, this habit had taken hold of me long before Margaret’s child could possibly be born: and, each morning I did not find the name, I felt a superstitious relief and was ready to pander to Mrs Beauchamp.

One morning in May – we were waiting for the invasion, there was a headline on the outside of
The Times
– I was giving way to the addiction, the routine tic, scanning through the ‘H’s before I opened the paper.

The name stood there. It stood there unfamiliar, as it might be in an alphabet like Russian, which I did not easily read and had to spell out. Margaret. A son.

‘Anything interesting, Mr Eliot?’ came Mrs Beauchamp’s unctuous voice, as from the end of an immense room.

‘Nothing special.’

‘There never is, is there?’

‘An old friend of mine has just had a child, that’s all.’

‘There was a time when I should have liked a little one, Mr Eliot, if I may put it like that. But then when I saw what they grew up into, I must say I thought I’d had a blessing in disguise.’

When I got rid of her, I read the notice meaninglessly time and time again, the paper still unopened. Despite my resolutions, I could not drive the thought down, the thought of seeing her. I wrote a note, in words that were no different from when I used to write to her, to say I had read the news.

I knew the wisdom of those who cut their losses: how often had I advised others so? Don’t meet, don’t write, don’t so much as hear the name: come to terms, give your imagination to others, dismiss the one who has gone. That was what I had set myself, mainly for my own sake, perhaps with a relic of responsibility for her. It was not much help to remember it now; then at last I managed to tear the letter up.

Walking along the square, I was trying to domesticate the news. She would be very happy: even if she had not been happy without qualification before, which I did not wish to think of, this would make up for it. Maybe her children would become more important than her husband. That might have been so with me. Then as I thought of her, with detachment and almost with pleasure, the possessive anger broke through, as though my stomach had turned over and my throat stopped up. This child ought to have been mine.

I was trying to domesticate the news, to think of her gently as though we had known each other a long time before; she would be an over-careful mother, each mistake she made with the child she would take to heart; she did not believe so much in original endowment as I did, she believed that children were a bit more of a blank sheet; the responsibilities would weigh on her, would probably age her – but, with children, she would not think that her life was wasted.

As I thought of her gently, the anger stayed underneath.

With an attention more deliberate than before, I set myself to squeeze interest out of the people round me. It was then I really got to know the predicament of Vera and Norman. Towards the end of the summer, when the flying-bombs stopped and we could talk in peace, they visited me together several times: and then Norman took to coming alone.

When I first saw them together, I thought that beside her he was insignificant. He was small, with a sallow, delicate face; he had been unfit for the Army and had stayed in his Civil Service job which, like Vera, he had entered at sixteen. He seemed to have nothing to say, although his expression was sensitive and fine; when I tried to lead him on, throwing out casts about books or films, I found he was as uncultivated as she. They went to dances, listened to a little music, walked in the country at weekends; they were each earning about £400 a year, which to them meant comfort, and their lives were oddly free from outside pressure. To me, remembering the friends in my young manhood, whose origins were similar to theirs, Vera’s and Norman’s whole existence, interests and hopes seemed out of comparison more tame.

Even Vera, who was brimful of more emotion than she seemed to understand, was chiefly preoccupied in Norman’s company that night with the unrewarding problems of my domestic arrangements. Why should I live in such discomfort?

‘It’s not logical,’ she said.

I told her that it would not make much difference to me.

‘I’m not convinced about that,’ she said.

I told her that it was sometimes a psychological help not to give a thought about how one lived.

Vera shook her head.

‘You’d be just as independent in a proper service flat,’ she said.

She had missed the point, but I saw Norman looking at me.

‘You want someone to run the place for you,’ said Vera. She added: ‘Please don’t think I’m saying anything against Mrs Beauchamp. She’s as kind as anyone you’ll ever get, I knew that the first time I saw her. Of course, she’s the motherly type.’

I was thinking, Vera was as unperceptive about people as anyone I knew, when suddenly I was distracted by a smile from Norman, a smile which, loving and clear-eyed, reflected precisely the same thought. It was a smile of insight. Suddenly I took to him. I felt a sharper sympathy with him than I could with her.

I encouraged him to come and see me, although I soon knew what I was letting myself in for; most of the time it was hard work.

As I knew him better, I discovered that my impressions had been right, it was true that he had a natural understanding of others: more than that, he often made me feel that he was genuinely good. But that understanding and goodness seemed to be linked in him, as I had known them once or twice before, with a crippling infirmity. He was a neurotic; he was beset by anxiety, so that he could barely cope with his life.

Much as I liked him, honestly as I wished to do my best for him and Vera and see them happy, I found it a tax to listen to the unwindings of an anxiety neurosis, which nearly always to an outsider seemed mechanical and tedious, for hours an evening and for evenings on end. Once he was started on his ‘condition’, as he called it, it was a joke at my expense that I had once thought him inarticulate. Yet, if my listening was any good to him, I had to continue.

I did not know whether I was any use to him, except that anyone ready to listen and not disapprove gave him an hour or two’s relief. He had been to doctors, spending a disproportionate amount of his pay for years, but now he had lost hope in them. He gained hope, though, with a neurotic’s fitfulness, as I told him a few sensible platitudes: that he wasn’t unique, that plenty of others – more than he thought – didn’t find themselves easy to live with. I had not done much better than he had, I told him; he ought to be warned by my example, and not give way to his nature. Otherwise he would fmd himself living as a looker-on, self-indulgent and alone.

The better I knew him, though, the more I liked him and the less I thought of his chances. By the end of the year, when he was repeating to me the stories that I knew by heart, I was coming to believe that he was too far gone.

One night in December, not long after Norman had left me, Mrs Beauchamp’s head came ectoplasmically round the door. She had not made the instantaneous appearance with which she greeted the departure of a woman visitor; it must have been ten minutes since the door clicked to, but I was still sitting in my chair.

‘You’re looking tired, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ she whispered.

I felt it: to be any support to Norman, one needed to have one’s patience completely under control, to show no nerves at all.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find you just a little something to eat, which I’d invite you to have upstairs, if I had got my place quite shipshape, which I haven’t been able to.’

Although I was hungry, I regarded Mrs Beauchamp with qualified enthusiasm. These fits of good nature were spontaneous enough, and had no motive except to cheer one up – but in retrospect she admired them, realized how she had performed services right outside the contract, and so felt justified in lying in bed an hour later.

Mrs Beauchamp returned into my room with a tin of salmon, a loaf of bread, two plates, one fork and one knife.

‘If you don’t mind me cleaning the cutlery after you’ve had a little snack,’ she said. ‘Somehow I haven’t been able to manage all the washing-up.’

Thus I got through my salmon, and then sat by while Mrs Beauchamp munched hers. Despite the shiny look of enjoyment on her face she felt obliged to remark: ‘Of course, it isn’t the same as fresh.’

Suddenly I was reminded of my mother, to whom fresh salmon was one of the emblems of the higher life which she had so proudly longed for.

‘But I like to think of you having something tasty last thing at night. I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but I do my best, Mr Eliot.’

She looked at me with an expression at the same time invulnerable, confident and ingratiating.

‘Some do their best and
some don’t
, Mr Eliot,’ she whispered. ‘That’s why it’s so unfair on people like you and me, if I may say so of both of us, who really set themselves out to do their best. Do you think anyone appreciates us? Do you think so?’

Mrs Beauchamp was becoming more excited: as she did so her expression stayed firm and impassive, but her eyes popped, and her cheeks became more shiny: her voice sank into a more insidious whisper.

I shook my head.

‘When I think of the help that you try to give people – and so do I, if you don’t mind me saying so, in my own way, without pushing myself forward – when I think of the help we give, and then what certain persons
do!
Sometimes I wonder if you ever let yourself realize what those people
do
, Mr Eliot.’

She went on whispering: ‘I scarcely dare think of it.’

Her voice became still more hushed: ‘If we looked out of that window, Mr Eliot, we could see the windows on the other side of the square. Have you ever thought what we should see
if we pulled the blinds
? It’s terrible to think of. Sometimes I fancy what it would be like if I became invisible, like the man in the film, and had to go and stand in all the rooms in the square, one after another, so that I should be there in the corner and couldn’t help seeing what people do.’

Mrs Beauchamp, day-dreaming of a voyeuse’s paradise, seeping herself into invisibility, sat enormous in her pink satin, cheeks flaming and eyes dense.

‘If I had to watch all that, Mr Eliot,’ she said, ‘I doubt if I should ever be the same again.’

I said that I was sure she would not be.

‘Rather than do what some people do,’ she said, ‘I’d stay as I am for ever with my own little place upstairs, looking after myself as well as I can, and doing my best for my tenants and friends, if you don’t mind me calling you that, Mr Eliot. People may laugh at me for doing my best, but they needn’t think I mind. Some of them don’t like me, you don’t have to pretend, Mr Eliot, I’m not such a softy as I look and I tell you they don’t like me. And I don’t mind that either. If a person does her best it doesn’t matter what people think of her. I expect they believe I’m lonely. But I am happier than they are, Mr Eliot, and they know it. No one’s ever said – there’s poor old Mrs Beauchamp, she wants someone to look after her, she’s not fit to live by herself.’

It was quite true. No one had thought of her so.

‘I shouldn’t be very pleased if anyone did say that,’ Mrs Beauchamp remarked in a whisper, but with ferocity.

Then affable, glutinous again, she said: ‘What I say is, the important thing is to grow old with dignity. I know you will agree with me, Mr Eliot. Of course, when I come to the evening of my life, and I don’t regard myself as quite there yet, if some decent good man had the idea that he and I might possibly join forces, then I don’t say I should turn down the proposition without thinking it over very, very seriously.’

ON an evening in May, just after the German war had ended, Betty Vane called on me. I had seen little of her during the spring: once or twice she had rung up, but I had been busy with Vera or Norman or some other acquaintance; Betty, always ready to believe she was not wanted, had been put off. Yet she was one of the people I liked best and trusted most, and that evening when she came in, bustling and quick-footed, I told her that I had missed her.

‘You’ve got enough on your hands without me,’ she said.

It sounded ungracious. She had never been able to produce the easy word. She was looking at me, her eyes uncomfortable in her beaky face.

She said curtly: ‘Can you lend me fifty pounds?’

I was surprised, for a moment – because previously when she was hard-up I had pressed money on her and she would not take it. She was extravagant, whenever she had money she splashed it round: she was constantly harassed about it, she lived in a clutter of card debts, bills, pawnshops, bailiffs. Hers was, however, the poverty of someone used to being dunned for a hundred pounds when behind her there were trusts of thousands. She had invariably refused to borrow from me, or from anyone who had to earn his money. Why was she doing so now? Suddenly I realized. Bad at easy words, bad at taking favours, she was trying to repay what I had just told her: this was her way of saying that she in turn trusted me.