Homecomings (30 page)

He was provoking me: it was enviable, it was admirable: I wanted to prove it wasn’t.

Suspicious of myself, I changed the subject. Just to keep the conversation easy, I asked him what he thought of some news from the morning’s paper.

‘Oh yes,’ he said indifferently, ‘a parent who came in mentioned it.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I haven’t any idea.’

‘It’s pretty plain, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘But, you see, I haven’t read a morning paper.’

‘Are you as busy as all that?’ I tried to be companionable.

‘No,’ he said, with pleasure, tilting his head back like someone who had taken a finesse. ‘It’s a matter of general policy. Twelve months ago we decided not to take a daily paper. It seemed to me that far more days than not, it was going to make me slightly miserable without any gain to anyone, and with just conceivably a fractional loss of efficiency to myself. In any case I don’t believe in adding to the world’s stock of misery, even if it’s through my own. So we decided the sensible course was to stop the paper.’

‘I couldn’t do that,’ I broke out.

‘Quite seriously,’ said Geoffrey, ‘if a lot of us only bit off what we could chew, and simply concentrated on the things we can affect, there’d be less tension all round, and the forces of sweetness and light would stand more chance.’

‘I believe you’re dangerously wrong,’ I said.

Again he was provoking me; the irritation, which would not leave me alone at that table, was jagging my voice; this time I felt I had an excuse. Partly it was that this kind of quietism was becoming common among those I knew and I distrusted it. Partly Geoffrey himself seemed to me complacent, speaking from high above the battle; and, like many people who led useful and good lives, even like many who had a purity of nature, he seemed insulated by his self-regard.

Suddenly Margaret spoke to me.

‘He’s absolutely right,’ she said.

She was smiling, she was trying to speak easily, as I tried to speak to Geoffrey, but she was worried and angry.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘We’ve got to deal with things that are close enough to handle,’ she said.

‘I don’t believe,’ I said, getting angrier, ‘that you can cut yourself off from the common experience around you. And if you do, I am sure you lose by it.’

‘Lose by it how?’

‘Lose by it as a person. Just like very optimistic people who shut off anything that is painful to see. I should have thought you’d diminish yourself unless you suffer your sufferings as well as enjoy your joys.’

Margaret gave a smile half malicious, as though gratified that my temper had gone higher than hers.

‘The trouble,’ she said, ‘with the very realistic men who live in this world, like you, is that they’re so hopelessly unpractical when it comes to the point. You don’t think Geoffrey’s realistic, but he’s so much more practical than you are that you don’t begin to start. He likes dealing with children and he likes being happy. Hasn’t it occurred to you that no one except you worries whether they’re “diminishing themselves” or not?’

I was getting the worst of it; I could not overbear her – I was hurt because she had taken his side with such an edge.

In return, I found myself talking to hurt.

I reminded her that I had never been comfortable about recipes for the good life – like those of her father’s friends twenty years before – which depended on one’s being an abnormally privileged person.

‘To be honest,’ I looked at Geoffrey and then at her, ‘yours doesn’t seem to me a great improvement. Your whole attitude would be unthinkable unless you happened to have one of the very few jobs which is obviously benevolent, and unless both of you happened to come from families who were used to doing good rather than having good done to them.’

‘Lewis,’ she called out my name for the first time for three years, but furiously, ‘that’s quite unfair!’

‘Is it?’ I asked her, watching the flush mount from her neck.

‘Well, I wouldn’t deny,’ said Geoffrey, with exasperating fairness and a contented, judicious smile, ‘that there may be something in it.’

‘Do you really say that I patronize anyone?’ she cried.

‘With individuals, no, I shouldn’t say so. But when you think about social things, of course you do.’

Her eyes were dark and snapping; her cheeks were flushed; it was as I remembered her when angry, the adrenalin was pumping through her, all pallor had left her and she looked spectacularly well.

‘I must say,’ Geoffrey remarked pacifically, ‘I’m inclined to think he’s right.’

‘I suppose you’ll say I’m a snob next?’ Her eyes, still snapping, were fixed on me.

‘In a rarefied sense, yes.’

Geoffrey reminded her that it was half past one, time to give Maurice his meal. Without speaking, her shoulders set with energy, with anger against me, she took the tray and led us to the nursery.

‘There he is,’ said Geoffrey, as I got my first glance at the child.

His pen was just outside a strong diagonal of sunlight; sitting with his back to the bars, like an animal retreating at the zoo, he was slowly tearing a magazine to pieces. I had only my brother’s boy to compare him with, and despite what I had heard of his manual precocity, I could not see it. I just saw him tearing up the paper with that solemn, concentrated inefficiency characteristic of infants, which made his hand and elbow movements look like those of a drunken man photographed in slow motion.

I did not go up to him, but went on watching as, after Margaret spoke to him, he continued obsessively with his task. He was, and the sight wounded me though I had prepared for it, a most beautiful child. The genes had played one of their tricks, and had collected together in him the best looks of parents and grandparents, so that already, under the india-rubber fat, one could pick out the fine cheekbones of his mother and the poise of his father’s neck. It was easy to imagine him as a young man, dark, indrawn, hard to approach and gaining admirers just because of that.

Margaret was telling him that his meal was ready, but he replied that he did not want it.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, with that matter-of-fact gentleness she showed to a lover.

The little boy was gripping a ping-pong ball, and, as soon as she lifted him from his pen, he began to lam it at a looking-glass over the mantelpiece, and then at a picture near the cot.

Geoffrey left, to fetch something missing from the tray, but the boy paid no notice, and went on throwing the ball. As he let fly, I was scrutinizing the boneless movement of his shoulder, as fluid as though he were double-jointed. Margaret said to me: ‘It’s a nice way for him to be.’

‘Isn’t he rather strong?’ I asked.

She was smiling at me, the quarrel smoothed away by the animal presence of her son. As she stood with him thigh-high beside her, she could not conceal – what at her father’s party she remained silent about, when Geoffrey was so voluble – her passion for the child. It softened and filled out her face, and made her body lax. Pained again, as by the boy’s good looks, I knew that I had not seen her look more tender.

‘It’s nice for him just to chuck himself about,’ she said.

I caught her meaning. Like many of the sensitive, she had wished often, especially before she gained the confidence that she could make a man happy, that her own childhood had been less refined, had been coarser and nearer the earth.

I put in a remark, to let her know I understood, She smiled again: but Maurice began shouting, violent because she was talking away from him.

While he had his meal I remained outside the circle of attention, which was lit by the beam of sun gilding the legs of the high chair. Geoffrey sat on one side, Margaret in front, the child facing her with unflickering eyes. After two or three spoonfuls he would not eat until she sang; as I listened, it occurred to me that, when I had known her, I had not once heard her singing voice. She sang, her voice unexpectedly loud and deep; the child did not take his eyes off her.

The robust sound filled the room: Geoffrey, smiling, was watching the boy: the beam of sunlight fell on their feet, as though they were at the centre of a stage, and the spotlight had gone slightly off the mark.

The meal was over, Geoffrey gave the child a sweet, for an instant the room went dead quiet. They were still sitting with the sunlight round their feet, as Margaret gazed at her son, either unselfconscious or thinking she was not observed. Then after a moment she raised her head, and I felt rather than saw, for I had looked away, that her glance had moved from the child to me. I turned towards her: her eyes did not fall, but her face went suddenly sad. It was only for a second. She gazed again at the little boy, and took his hand.

It had only been for a second, but I knew. I should have known before, when we parted after her father’s party, certainly when she quarrelled with me in defence of Geoffrey at the dining-table, if I had not desired it too much: I knew now that she was not free of me, any more than I of her.

In the hot room, noisy now with the boy’s demands, I felt, not premonition, not responsibility, not the guilt that would have seemed ineluctable if I had seen another in my place, but an absolute exaltation, as though, all in one move, I had joy in my hands and my life miraculously simple. I did not recognize any fear mixed with the joy, I just felt happy and at one.

IT was a September afternoon when I was waiting, for the first time since her marriage, to meet Margaret alone. It was the day on which I had been helping to interview Gilbert Cooke. Half an hour before I was due at our rendezvous he entered, having already heard from Hector Rose that he was safe.

‘So I diddled them, did I?’ he said, not so much with pleasure as a kind of gloating triumph: which was the way in which he, who did not expect much success, greeted any that came to him. Actually, this was more than a success, for in fact, though not in form, it settled his career for life. Hector Rose was deciding his final judgement on each of the men in the Department who wished to be established in the service; once a week, a committee of four of us sat and interviewed; George Passant’s turn would arrive soon.

‘It can’t come unstuck now, can it?’ Gilbert said, flushed, his eyes bloodshot. I told him that Rose’s nomination would have to be accepted.

‘Damn it,’ cried Gilbert, ‘I never reckoned on finishing up as a Civil Servant.’

‘What did you reckon on?’ I knew he would scarcely be able to answer: for in his career he had always been a curiously vague and unselfseeking man.

‘Oh,’ he said, looking badgered, ‘there was a time when I thought I might make something of it as a soldier. That was before the doctors did me in the eye. And then I thought I might collect some cash with that old shark Lufkin. I don’t know. But the last thing I should ever have dreamt of was finding myself here for good. To tell you the honest truth,’ he burst out, ‘I should never have credited that I was clever enough!’

Oddly, in a certain restricted sense, he was not: he had nothing of the legalistic accuracy and lucidity of the high-class Civil Servant: the deficiency would stop him going very far, as Rose and the others had agreed that day: he would most likely get one rung higher and stop there.

Nevertheless, he had put up a good performance before those men so different from himself. He was so little stiff that Rose felt his own stiffness soften, and enjoyed the sensation: sometimes his refusal to stay at a distance, his zest for breathing down one’s neck, made him paradoxically welcome to correct and buttoned natures. Hector Rose and his colleagues did not over-value him much; they were too experienced, and their judgement too cool for that; they were probably right to keep him; but still, there was no doubt that, if the decision had been a closer thing, he had the advantage that respectable men liked him.

I wondered what they would have thought, if they had guessed at his wilder activities. For instance, it would have startled them to know that, sitting in my office that afternoon, I – after being a friend for a dozen years and his boss for several – was frightened of him. Frightened, that is, of his detective work. I did not dare let out a hint that I was slipping away for tea. Even then I was still nervous of his antennae, as though they might pick up the secret in the air.

Thus, sweating and fretted, I was late when at last I reached the café opposite St James’s Park tube station. Margaret was sitting there, stubs of cigarettes in the ashtray. She looked anxious, but unreproachful and glad.

‘I’ll tell you why I was late,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter, you’re here now.’

‘No, I’d better tell you.’ I could not have got away from Gilbert, I explained, without the danger of his finding out that I was meeting her.

‘Oh well,’ she said. She spoke as though she had not admitted to herself the thought of concealment. At the same moment, her face was flushed with happiness and a kind of defiant shame. Firmly, she began to ask me what I had been doing.

‘I told you, nothing that matters.’

‘No,’ she said, still with energy and animation, ‘I don’t even know where you’re living. You know much more about me than I do about you.’

I told her what I was busy with. I said that I was not held any longer by the chessboard of power: I had gone as far as I intended in the official life.

‘I thought so,’ she said with pleasure, understanding my present better than my past.

‘I am not sure that it would have happened but for you.’

‘It would,’ she said. The cups of tea steamed, a cigarette end smouldered against the metal ashtray, the smell was acrid: I saw her as though the smoked glass of care had been snatched from in front of my eyes. Twenty minutes before I had been on edge lest anyone, as it might be Gilbert, should pass the window and see us sitting there. Now, although we were smiling at each other and our faces would have given us away to an acquaintance, I felt that secrets did not matter, or more exactly that no one could notice us; I had been taken by one of those states, born of understanding, desire, and joy, in which we seem to ourselves anonymous and safe. It was a state which I had seen dangerous to discreet men going through an illicit love-affair, when suddenly, in a fugue of astonished bliss, such a man can behave as if he believed himself invisible.