Homecomings (6 page)

It was unlike her to go in for rhetoric, but I was so relieved that she was stable again, so touched by the strained and surreptitious apology, that I scarcely listened to her, and instead just put my other hand over hers.

WHEN Sheila taxed Robinson with spreading slander he was not embarrassed; he just said blandly that his enemies were making mischief. When I accompanied her to his office a few days later, he received us with his twinkling old-fashioned politeness, quite unabashed, as though her accusations were a breach of taste which he was ready to forget.

He had taken two garret rooms in Maiden Lane. ‘Always have the kind of address that people expect from you,’ he said, showing me writing-paper headed R S Robinson, Ltd, 16 Maiden Lane, London WC2. ‘It sounds like a big firm, doesn’t it? How is anyone to know anything different?’ he said, with his gusto in his own subtlety, his happy faith that all men were easy to bamboozle.

He was dead sober, but his spirits were so roaringly high that he seemed drunk. As he spoke of his dodges, he hiccupped with laughter – pretending to be a non-existent partner, speaking over the telephone as the firm’s chief reader, getting his secretary to introduce him by a variety of aliases. He called to her: she was typing away in the little room beyond his, the only other room he rented, just as she was the only other member of his staff. She was a soft-faced girl of twenty, straight from a smart secretarial college – as I later discovered, the daughter of a headmaster, blooming with sophistication at being in her first London job, and confident that Robinson’s was a normal way for literary business to be done.

‘We impressed him, didn’t we, Miss Smith?’ he said, speaking of a recent visitor, and asking Miss Smith’s opinion with much deference.

‘I think we did,’ she said.

‘You’re sure we did, aren’t you? It’s very important, and I thought you were sure.’

‘Well, we can’t tell till we get his letter,’ she said, with a redeeming touch of realism.

‘Don’t you think he must have been impressed?’ Robinson beamed and gleamed. ‘We were part of the editorial department, you see,’ he explained to Sheila and me, ‘just part of it, in temporary quarters, naturally–’

He broke off, and with a sparkle in his eye, an edge to his voice, said: ‘I’ve got an idea that Sheila doesn’t altogether approve of these bits of improvisation.’

‘It’s waste of time,’ she said. ‘It gets you nowhere.’

‘You know nothing at all about it,’ he said, in a bantering tone, but rude under the banter.

‘I know enough for that.’ Sheila spoke uncomfortably and seriously.

‘You’ll learn better. Three or four good books
and
a bit of mystification, and people will take some notice. Putting a cat among the pigeons – I’m a great believer in that, because conventional people can’t begin to cope. You’re an example, Sheila, the minute you hear of something unorthodox you’re helpless, you can’t begin to cope. Always do what conventional people wouldn’t do. It’s the only way.’

‘Others manage without it,’ said Sheila.

‘They haven’t got along on negative resources for forty years, have they? Do you think you could have done?’ He maintained his bantering tone.

Often, when boasting of his deceits, he sounded childlike and innocent. He had a child’s face: also, like many of the uninhibited, he had a child’s lack of feeling. Much of his diablerie he performed as though he did not feel at all: and somehow one accepted it so.

But that was not all. There was a fibre in him which had brought him through a lifetime of begging, cajoling, using his arts on those he believed his inferiors. This fibre made him savage anyone who had been of use to him. It filled him with rancour that
anyone
should have power and money, when he had none. That afternoon he had been charming to Miss Smith, as though he considered her opinion as valuable as any of ours, or more so: he propitiated me because I had done nothing for him, and might even be an enemy: but to Sheila, who through the injustice of life had the power and will to befriend him, he could not help showing his teeth.

I was in a delicate position that afternoon. I should have liked to be brutal; but all I could safely do was to demonstrate that he ought to bear me in mind. For Sheila was not ready to cut her losses. It was not a matter of the money, which was trivial, nor of any feeling for him, which had not decided her in the first place and had turned to repulsion now. But her will had always been strong, and she had set it to do something for this man. He had turned out more monstrous than she reckoned on, but that was neither here nor there; her will would not let her go.

All I could do was listen while Robinson and Sheila discussed a manuscript, which he admired and she thought nothing of. He said goodbye to us at the top of the stairs, gleaming and deprecatory, like a host after a grand party. I was sure that, the instant the door closed behind him, he grinned at Miss Smith, congratulating himself on how he had ridden off the afternoon.

That summer, while I was reading the papers with an anxiety which grew tighter each month, Sheila paid less and less attention to the news. Her politics had once been like mine, she had hoped for and feared much the same things. But in the August and September of ’38, when for the first time I began listening to the wireless bulletins, she sat by as though uninterested, or went out to continue reading a manuscript for Robinson.

On the day of Munich she disappeared without explanation in the morning, leaving me alone. I could not go out myself, because for some days I had been seized with lumbago, which had become a chronic complaint of mine, and which gave me nights so painful that I had to move out of our room during an attack. All that day of Munich, I was lying on a divan in what, when we first bought the house, had been Sheila’s sitting-room; but since it was there that I had once told her I could stand it no longer, a decision I went back on within an hour, she no longer used it, showing a vein of superstition that I had not seen in her before.

Like those of our bedroom, the windows looked over the garden, the trees on the embankment road, the river beyond; from the divan, as the hours passed that day, I could see the tops of the plane trees against the blue indifferent sky.

The only person I spoke to from morning to late evening was our housekeeper, Mrs Wilson, who brought me lemonade and food which I could not eat. She was a woman of sixty, whose face bore the oddity that a mild, seeping, lifelong discontent had not aged, but had rather made it younger; the corners of her mouth and eyes ran down, her mouth was pinched, and yet she looked like a woman in early middle age whose husband was neglecting her.

Just after she had come up with tea, I heard her step on the stairs again, quick instead of, as usual, reproachfully laborious. When she entered her cheeks were flushed, her expression was humorous and attractive, and she said: ‘They say there isn’t going to be a war.’ She went on, repeating the word which was going through the streets, that the Prime Minister was off to Munich. I asked her to fetch me an evening paper. There it was, as she said, in the stop-press news. I lay there, looking at the trees, which were now gilded by the declining sun, the pain lancinating my back, forgetting Sheila, lost in the fear of what would come, as lost as though it were a private misery.

About seven o’clock, when through the window the sky was incandescent in the sunset, Sheila’s key turned in the lock downstairs. Quickly I took three aspirins, so as to be free from pain for half an hour. When she came she said, bringing a chair to the side of the divan: ‘How have you been?’

I said, not comfortable. I asked how her day had gone. Not bad, she said. She volunteered the information (in my jealous days, I had learned how she detested being asked) that during the afternoon she had called at Maiden Lane. He still insisted that he would bring out a book in the spring. She did not guarantee it, she said, with a jab of her old realism.

I was impatient, not able to attend. I said: ‘Have you heard the news?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s as bad as it can be.’

Since tea-time I had wanted to talk to a friend who thought as I did. Now I was speaking to Sheila as I should have spoken years before, when she still had part of her mind free. It would have been a little surcease, to speak out about my fears.

‘It’s as bad as it can be,’ I repeated.

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Don’t you think it is?’ I was appealing to her.

‘I suppose so.’

‘If you can have much hope for the future–’

‘It depends how much the future interests you,’ said Sheila.

Her tone chilled me; but I was so desolate that I went on.

‘One can’t live like that,’ I cried.

Sheila replied: ‘You say so.’

As she stared down at me, with the sunset at her back, I could not make out her expression. But her voice held a brittle pity, as she said: ‘Try and rest. Anyway, this will give us a bit of time.’

‘Do you want a bit of time on those terms?’

She said: ‘It might give us time to get R S R a book out.’

It sounded like a frivolity, a Marie-Antoinettish joke in bad taste: but that would have been preferable. For she had spoken out of all that was left of her to feel, out of dread, obsessive will, the inner cold.

I shouted: ‘Is that all you’re thinking of, tonight of all nights?’ She did not speak again. She filled my glass with lemonade, and inspected the aspirin bottle to see that I had enough. For a time she sat silently beside me, in the room now taken over by the darkness. At last she said: ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’

I said no, and in poised, quiet steps she left me.

It was hot that night, and I did not sleep more than an hour or two. The attacks of pain kept mounting, so that I writhed on the bed and the sweat dripped off me; in the periods of respite, I lay with thoughts running through my mind, dark and lucid after the day’s news, lucid until the next bout of pain. For a long time I did not think of Sheila. I was working out repetitively, uselessly, how much time there was, when the next Munich night would follow, what the choice would be. As the hours passed, I began to ask myself, nearer the frontier of sleep, how much chance there was that we should be left – no, not we, I alone – with a personal life? More and more as the morning came, the question took on dream-shapes but stayed there: if this happened or that,
what should I do with Sheila
?

I took it for granted that I was tied to her. In the past years when I faced, not just the living habit of marriage, but the thought of it, I knew that other men would have found it intolerable: that did not support me, for it made me recognize something harsher, that this was what my nature had sought out. Not because I took responsibility and looked after others: that was true but superficial, it hid the root from which the amiable and deceptive parts of my character grew.

The root was not so pretty. It was a flaw or set of flaws, which both for good and ill, shaped much of how I affected others and the way my life had gone. In some ways I cared less for myself than most men. Not only to my wife, but to my brother, to my friend Roy Calvert, to others, I devoted myself with a lack of self-regard that was, so far as it went, quite genuine. But deeper down the flaw took another shape. Had Sheila been thinking of it when, in our bedroom, she broke out about people helping others
for reasons of their own
?

At the springs of my nature I had some kind of pride or vanity which not only made me careless of myself but also prevented me going into the deepest human relation on equal terms. I could devote myself; that was all right; so long as I was not in turn understood, looked after, made to take the shames as well as the blessedness of an equal heart.

Thus, so far as I could see within, I had been in search of such a marriage as I found with Sheila – where I was protecting her, watching her face from day to day, and getting back no more interest, often indeed far less, than she would spend on her housekeeper or an acquaintance in a Chelsea pub. It was a marriage in which I was strained as far as I could bear it, constantly apprehensive, often dismally unhappy; and yet it left me with a reserve and strength of spirit, it was a kind of home.

There was a lot of chance, I knew, in human relations; one cannot have seen much unless one believed in chance; I might have been luckier and got into a relation less extreme; but on the whole, I had to say of myself what I should have said of others – in your deepest relations, there is only one test of what you profoundly want: it consists of what happens to you.

And yet, no one can believe himself utterly foredoomed. I was not ready to accept that I was my own prisoner. In the early morning, after the night of Munich, I recognized the question, which now formed itself quite clear:
what shall I do with Sheila
? interspersed among the shapes of the future. Once I had tried to leave her; I could not do so again. Often, though, I had let myself imagine a time in which I might be set free.

Now, in that desolate night, among the thoughts of danger, there entered the inadmissible hope, that somehow I should get relief from the strain of watching over her. In the darkness of the months to come, I might at least (I did not will it, but the hope was there) be freed from the sight of her neurosis. It could happen that I need be responsible no more. As the pain abated and the sky lightened I lay on the threshold of sleep, with the dream-thought that, throwing responsibility away, I should then find something better.

FEW of my acquaintances liked Sheila. Many men had been attracted to her and several had loved her, but she had always been too odd, too self-centred and ungiving, to evoke ordinary affection. As she grew older and the bones of her character showed through, that was more than ever true. Some of the helpless whom she was kind to idolized her, and so did those who worked for her, including Mrs Wilson, who was the last person to express unconsidered enthusiasm. Apart from them, I had no one to talk to about her when the rumours began to spread; no one I knew in the Chelsea bars and parties would defend her, except one or two, like Betty Vane, who would do so for my sake.