Homecomings (3 page)

A thousand was the maximum which he let himself imagine; he did not hope to get away with so much, although he was not too delicate to mention it. He set himself to persuade her, and incidentally me as a possible influence, with all the art of which he was so proud.

Strange, I was thinking as we tasted our drinks, that fifteen, sixteen years before, he had been part of our youth. For he had done, on his own account, a little coterie publishing in the days of the
English
Review
, the Imagists, the rebels of the first war. It had been R S Robinson who had published a translation of Leopardi’s poems under the inept title of
Lonely Beneath the Moon
. Both Sheila and I had read it just before we met, when we were at the age for romantic pessimism, and to us it had been magical.

Since then everything he had touched had failed. He was trying to raise money from Sheila for another publishing firm, but himself was not able to put down five pounds. And yet we could not forget the past, and he did not want to, so that, as he stood between us on our own hearthrug, it was not Sheila, it was not I, it was he who dispensed the patronage.

‘I was telling Mrs Eliot that she must write a book,’ he told me soon after I joined them.

Sheila shook her head.

‘
I’m sure you could
,’ he said to her. He turned on me: ‘I’ve just noticed that you, sir, you have artists’ hands.’ He had lost no time getting out his trowel; but Sheila who shrank with self-consciousness at any praise, could take it from him. Unlike our Chelsea acquaintances of our own generation, he had not begun by using our christian names, but instead went on calling me ‘sir’ and Sheila ‘Mrs Eliot’, even when he was speaking with insidious intimacy face-to-face.

Standing between us, he dispensed the patronage; he had dignity and presence, although he was inches shorter than Sheila, who was tall for a woman, and did not come up to my shoulder. Round-shouldered and plump, he touched a crest of his silver hair.

He had come to the house in a dinner-jacket, which had once been smart and was now musty, while neither Sheila nor I had dressed; and it was Robinson who set to work to remove embarrassment.

‘Always do it,’ he advised us, as we went into the dining-room. I asked him what.

‘Always put people at a disadvantage. When they tell you not to dress, take no notice of them. It gives you the moral initiative.’

‘You see,’ he whispered to Sheila, sitting at her right hand, ‘I’ve got the moral initiative tonight.’

In the dining-room he congratulated Sheila on the fact that, since the food came up by the serving hatch, we were alone.

‘So I needn’t pretend, need I?’ he said, and, tucking into his dinner, told stories of other meals back in the legendary past, at which he had tried to raise money to publish books – books, he did not let us forget, that we had all heard of since.

‘I expect you’ve been told that I was better off then?’ He looked up from his plate to Sheila, with a merry, malicious chuckle.

‘Don’t you believe it. People always get everything wrong.’ Stories of multiple manoeuvres, getting promises from A on the strength of B and C, from B on the strength of A and C… ‘The point is, one’s got to refuse to play the game according to the rules,’ he advised Sheila. Stories of personal negotiations of such subtlety and invention as to make my business colleagues of the afternoon seem like different animals.

All the time, listening to him, I had spent most of my attention, as throughout our marriage, watching how Sheila was. She had turned towards him, the firm line of her nose and lip clear against the wall; her face had lost the strained and over-vivid fixity, there was no sign of the tic. Perhaps she did not show the quiet familiar ease that sometimes visited her in the company of her protégés; but she had never had a protégé as invincible as this. It took me all my time to remember that, on his own admission, Robinson was destitute, keeping an invalid wife and himself on £150 a year. More than anything, Sheila looked – and it was rare for her – plain mystified.

Just for an instant, out of dead habit, I wondered if he had any attraction for her. Maybe, those who are locked in their own coldness, as she was, mindless than the rest of us about the object of attraction, about whether it is unsuitable or grotesque in others’ eyes. Doing a good turn for this man of sixty, whom others thought fantastic, Sheila might have known a blessed tinge of sexual warmth. At any rate, her colour was high, and for an hour I could feel responsibility lifted from me; she had managed to forget herself.

Robinson, as natural about eating as about his manoeuvres, asked her for a second helping of meat, and went on with his recent attempts at money raising. Some prosperous author, who had known him in his famous days, had given him an introduction to an insurance company. Robinson digressed, his elephant eyes glinting, to tell us a scandalous anecdote about the prosperous author, a young actor, and an ageing woman; as he told it, Robinson was studying Sheila, probing into her life with me.

Pressing the story on her, but drawing no response, he got going about the insurance company. They had made him go into the City, they had given him coffee and wholemeal biscuits, and then they had talked of the millions they invested in industrial concerns.

‘They talked to me of
millions
,’ he cried.

‘They didn’t mean anything,’ I said.

‘They should be more sensitive,’ said Robinson. ‘They talked to me of millions when all I wanted was nine hundred pounds.’

I was almost sure he had dropped the figure from a thousand for the sake of the sound, just as, in the shops where my mother used to buy our clothes, they did not speak of five shillings, but always of four and eleven three.

‘What’s more,’ said Robinson, ‘they didn’t intend to give me that. They went on talking about millions here and millions there, and when I got down to brass tacks they looked vague.’

‘Did they offer anything?’ said Sheila.

‘Always know when to cut your losses,’ Robinson said in his firm, advising tone. It occurred to me that, in a couple of hours, he had produced more generalizations on how to run a business than I had heard from Paul Lufkin in four years.

‘I just told them, “You’re treating me very badly. Don’t talk of millions to people who need the money,” and I left them high and dry.’ He sighed. ‘Nine hundred pounds.’

At the thought of humiliation turned upside down, Sheila had laughed out loud, for the first time for months. But now she began asking questions. Nine hundred pounds: that would go nowhere. True, he had kept his old imprint all those years, he could publish a book or two and get someone else to distribute it – but what good was that? Surely if he did that, and it went off half-cock, he had dissipated his credit, and had finished himself for good?

Robinson was not used to being taken by surprise. He flushed: the flush rose up his cheeks, up to the forehead under the white hair. Like many ingenious men, he constantly underrated everyone round him. He had made his judgement of this beautiful hag-ridden woman; he thought she would be the softest of touches. He had marked her down as a neurotic. He was astonished she should show acumen. He was upset that she should see through him.

For, of course, he contrived to be at the same time embarrassingly open and dangerously secretive. Was he even truthful about his own penury? He had been trying on Sheila an alternative version of his technique of multiple approach. This time he was working on several people simultaneously, telling none of them about the others.

‘Always keep things simple,’ he said, trying to wave his panache.

‘Not so simple that they don’t make sense,’ said Sheila, smiling but not yielding.

Soon she got some reason out of him. If he could collect it, he wanted several thousand; at that period, such a sum would let him publish, modestly but professionally, for a couple of years. That failing, however, he still wanted his nine hundred. Even if he could only bring out three books under the old imprint, the name of R S Robinson would go round again.

‘You never know what might happen,’ he said, and blew out wonderful prospects like so many balloons. With three books they would remember him again, he said, and he gave up balloon blowing and spoke of the books he would bring out. He stopped flattering Sheila or using the other dodges which he believed infallible, and all of a sudden one saw that his taste had stayed incorrupt. It was a hard, austere, anti-romantic taste, similar to Sheila’s own.

‘I could do for them,’ he said, ‘what I did before.’

‘You want some money,’ said Sheila.

‘I only want enough to put someone on the map,’ he cried.

She asked: ‘Is money all you need?’

‘No. I want someone like you to keep people from getting the wrong impression. You see, they sometimes think I’m a bit of an ass.’

He was not putting on one of his acts. He had said it angrily, hotly, out of resentment, not trying to get round her. But soon he was master of himself again, enough to calculate that he might extract an answer that night. He must have calculated also that she was on his side and would not shift – for he made an excuse to go to the lavatory, so as to leave the two of us alone.

As soon as I returned without him to the dining-table, where we were still sitting, Sheila said the one word: ‘Well?’

We had been drinking brandy, and with a stiff mass-production gesture, she kept pushing the decanter with the side of her little finger.

‘Well?’ she said again.

I believed, then and afterwards, that if I had intervened I could have stopped her. She still trusted me, and no one else. However much she was set on helping him, she would have listened if I had warned her again. But I had already decided not to. She had found an interest, it would do more good than harm, I thought.

‘If you want to risk it,’ I said, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t.’

‘Do you think any better of him?’

I was thinking, he had raised the temperature of living for her. Then I realized that he had done the same for me. If she was taken in, so was I.

I grinned and said: ‘I must say I’ve rather enjoyed myself.’

She nodded, and then said after a pause: ‘He wouldn’t be grateful, would he?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Don’t soften it.’ Her great eyes swung round on me like searchlights. ‘No one’s grateful for being looked after. He’d be less grateful than most.’

It was the kind of bitter truth that she never spared herself or others, the only kind of truth that she thought worth facing. Who else, I wondered, would have faced it at that moment, just as she was committing herself? Other people could do what she was doing, but not many with that foresight of what lay ahead.

We sat silent, her eyes still levelled at mine, but gradually becoming unfocused, as though looking past me, looking a great distance away.

‘If I don’t do it,’ she said, ‘someone else will. Oh well, I suppose it’s more important to me than it is to him.’

Soon afterwards Robinson came back. As he opened the door, we were quiet, and he thought it was because of him. His manner was jaunty, but even his optimistic nerve was strained, and as he sat down he played, too insidiously, too uneasily, his opening trick.

‘Mrs Eliot, I’ve been thinking, you really ought to write a book yourself.’

‘Never mind about that,’ she said in a cold, brittle tone.

‘I mean it very much.’

‘Never mind.’

The words were final, and Robinson looked down at the table.

She remarked, as though it were obvious: ‘I may as well tell you straight away, I will do what I can to help.’

For the second time that night, Robinson flushed to the temples. In a mutter, absent-minded, bewildered, he thanked her without raising his eyes, and then took out a handkerchief and wiped it hard across his forehead.

‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind, sir, if I have another little drink?’ he said to me, forcing his jollity. ‘After all, we’ve got something to celebrate.’ He was becoming himself again. ‘After all, this is an historic occasion.’

AFTER that February evening, Sheila told me little of her dealings with Robinson, but I knew they preoccupied her. When, in the early summer, she heard that her parents wished to spend a night in our house, she spoke as though it were an intolerable interruption.

‘I can’t waste the time,’ she said to me, her mouth working.

I said that we could hardly put them off again; this time Mr Knight was visiting a specialist.

‘Why can’t I put them off? No one will enjoy it.’

‘It will give more pain not to have them.’

‘They’ve given enough pain in their time. Anyway,’ she said, ‘just for once I’ve got something better to do.’

She wrote back, refusing to have them. Her concentration on Robinson’s scheme seemed to have become obsessive, so that it was excruciating for her to be distracted even by a letter. But Mrs Knight was not a sensitive woman. She replied by return, morally indignant because Sheila had made an excuse not to go home to the vicarage last Christmas, so that we had not seen them for eighteen months; Sheila’s father, for all Mrs Knight’s care and his own gallantness, would not always be there for his daughter to see; she was showing no sense of duty.

Even on Sheila, who dreaded their company and who blamed her torments of self-consciousness upon them, the family authority still held its hold. No one else could have overruled her, but her mother did.

So, on a morning in May, a taxi stopped at the garden gate, and, as I watched from an upstairs window, Mr and Mrs Knight were making their way very slowly up the path. Very slowly, because Mr Knight was taking tiny steps and pausing between them, leaning all the time upon his wife. She was a big woman, as strong as Sheila, but Mr Knight tottered above her, his hand on her heavy shoulder, his stomach swelling out from the middle chest, not far below the dog collar; he was teetering along like a massive walking casualty, helped out of battle by an orderly.

I went out on to the path to greet them, whilst Sheila stayed at the door.