Homecomings (8 page)

‘How are you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve conquered that fibrositis, it must have made life miserable.’

Courteous and also cordial, he insisted on putting me in the comfortable chair and fitting a cushion to ease the backache of six months before. His eyes were suspicious, but struck me as gay rather than nervous.

I began: ‘I was coming to see you on my own account–’

‘Any time you’ve got nothing better to do,’ said Robinson.

‘But in fact I’ve come on my wife’s.’

‘I haven’t seen her for two or three weeks; how is she?’

‘She wants,’ I said, ‘to finish any connexion with you or what you call your firm or anything to do with you.’

Robinson blushed, as he had done at our dinner party. That was the one chink in his blandness. Confidentially, almost cheerfully, he asked: ‘Shouldn’t you say that was an impulsive decision?’

He might have been a friend of years, so intimate that he knew what my life had been, enduring an unbalanced wife.

‘I should have advised her to take it.’

‘Well,’ said Robinson, ‘I don’t want to touch on painful topics, but I think perhaps you’ll agree that it’s not unreasonable for me to ask for an explanation.’

‘Do you think you deserve it?’

‘Sir,’ he flared up, like a man in a righteous temper, ‘I don’t see that anything in our respective positions in the intellectual world entitles you to talk to me like that.’

‘You know very well why my wife is quitting,’ I said. ‘You’ve made too much mischief. She isn’t ready to stand any more.’

He smiled at me sympathetically, putting his temper aside as though it were a mackintosh.

‘Mischief ?’ he said.

‘
Mischief
,’ he repeated, reflectively, like one earnestly weighing up the truth. ‘It would help me if you could just give me an example of what sort of mischief I’m supposed to be guilty of, just as a rough guide.’

I said that he had spread slander about her.

‘Remember,’ he said, in a friendly merry manner, ‘remember you’re a lawyer, so you oughtn’t to use those words.’

I said that his slander about the book had sickened her.

‘Do you really think,’ he said, ‘that a sane man would be as foolish as you make me out to be? Do you think I could possibly go round blackguarding anyone who was supporting me? And blackguarding her very stupidly, according to your account, because for the sum she lent me she could have published her book several times over. I’m afraid, I don’t like to say it, but I’m afraid you’ve let Sheila’s difficulties infect you.’

For a second his bland reasonableness, his trick of making his own actions sound like a neurotic’s invention, his sheer euphoria, kept me silent.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ve let poor Sheila’s state infect you. I suppose it
is
the beginning of schizophrenia, isn’t it?’

‘I am not going to discuss my wife,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think it profitable to discuss your motives–’

‘As for her book,’ he said, ‘I assure you, it has real merit. Mind you, I don’t think she’ll ever become a professional writer, but she can say original things, perhaps because she’s a little different from most of us, don’t you know?’

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you,’ I said. ‘Except to arrange how you can pay my wife’s money back.’

‘I was afraid she might feel like that–’

‘This is final,’ I said.

‘Of course it is,’ said Robinson with his gay, wholehearted laugh. ‘Why, I knew you were going to say that the very moment you came into the room!’

I had been strung up for a quarrel. It was a frustration to hear my words bounce back. If he had been a younger man, I might have hit him. As it was, he regarded me with sympathy, with humour in his small, elephantine eyes, the middle parting geometrically precise in his grandfatherly hair.

‘You’ve done her harm,’ I said in extreme bitterness, and regretted the words as soon as they were out.

‘
Harm
?’ he inquired. ‘Because of her association with me? What kind of harm?’

He spread out his hands.

‘But, as you said, this isn’t the time or place to consider the troubles of poor Sheila. You came here to take her money out, didn’t you? Always recognize the inevitable, I’m a great believer in that. Don’t you think it’s time we got down to business?’

I had run into another surprise. As I sat beside his desk, listening to Robinson’s summary of his agreement with Sheila and his present situation, I realized he was a man of unusual financial precision and, so far as I could judge, of honesty. It was true that, cherishing his own secretiveness, he concealed from me, just as he had originally concealed from Sheila, some of his sources of income and his expectations of money to come. Somehow he had enough money to continue in his office and to pay Miss Smith; meanwhile, he was postponing his first ‘list’ until the autumn; it struck me, was he glad of the excuse? Daydreaming, planning, word-spinning about the revival of past glories, that was one thing. Putting it to the test was another. Maybe he would like that date deferred.

No one could have procrastinated less, however, about repaying Sheila: he offered to write her a cheque for £300 that day, and to follow it with two equal instalments on 1 June and 1 September.

‘Interest?’ he asked, beaming.

‘She wouldn’t take it.’

‘I suppose she wouldn’t,’ said Robinson with curiosity.

At once he proposed that we should go round to his solicitor’s. ‘I never believe in delay,’ said Robinson, putting on a wide-brimmed hat, an old overcoat trimmed with fur at the collar and sleeves. Proud of his incisiveness, behaving like his idea of a businessman (although it was as much like Paul Lufkin’s behaviour as a Zulu’s), he walked by my side through Covent Garden, the dignified little figure not up to my shoulder. Twice he was recognized by men who worked in the publishers’ or agents’ offices round about. Robinson swept off his grand hat.

‘Good morning to you, sir,’ he cried affably, with a trace of patronage, just as R S Robinson, the coterie publisher, might have greeted them in 1913.

His face gleamed rosy in the drab morning. He looked happy. It might have seemed bizarre to anyone but him that he should have spent all his cunning on acquiring a benefactor, and then used equal ingenuity in driving the benefactor away. Yet I believed he had done it before, it was one of the patterns of his career. To him it was worth it. The pleasures of malice, the pleasures of revenge against one who had the unbearable impertinence to lean down to him – they were worth a bigger price than he had ever had to pay.

And more than that, I thought, as we sniffed the smell of fruit and straw in the raw air, Robinson walking with the assurance of one going to a reputable business rendezvous, it was not only the pleasure of revenge against a benefactor. There was something more mysterious which sustained him. It was a revenge, not against Sheila, not against a single benefactor, but against life.

When I reached home that afternoon, I heard the gramophone playing. That worried me; it worried me more when I found her not in the drawing-room, not in our bedroom, but in the sitting-room where I had spent the night of Munich and which to her was a place of bad luck. In front of her, the ash-tray must have held thirty stubs. I began to say that I had settled with Robinson. ‘I don’t want to hear anything about it,’ she said, in a harsh flat tone.

I tried to amuse her, but she said: ‘I don’t want to hear anything about it.’

She put on another record, shutting out, not only the history of Robinson, but me too.

IN the summer, I no longer spent half my time away from Sheila. We were waiting for the war to begin; I slept each night in our bedroom, saw her waking and sleeping without break, as I had not done for years. As soon as war came, I assumed that I should go on living beside her in the Chelsea house, as long as one could foresee.

Those September nights, we were as serene, as near happy, as ever in our marriage. I used to walk, not from Millbank now but Whitehall, for I had already taken up my government job, all along the embankment, often at eight o’clock and after; the air was still warm, the sky glowed like a cyclorama; Sheila seemed glad to see me. She was even interested in the work I was doing.

We sat in the garden, the night sounding more peaceful than any peace-time night, and she asked about the Department, how much the Minister did, to what extent he was in the pocket of his Civil Servants, just where I – as one of his personal assistants – came in. I told her more of my own concerns than I had for a long while. She laughed at me for what she called my ‘automatic competence’, meaning that I did not have to screw myself up to find my way about the world.

I was too much immersed in my new job to notice just when and how that mood broke up. Certainly I had no idea until weeks later that to herself she thought of a moment of collapse as sharp as the crack of a broken leg – and she thought also of as sharp a cause. All I knew was that, in the well-being of September, she had, unknown to me, arranged to join someone’s staff on the first of January. It was work that needed good French, which she had, and seemed more than usually suitable. She described it to me with pleasure, almost with excitement. She said: ‘I expect it will turn out to be R S R all over again,’ but she spoke without shadow. It was a gibe she could only have made in confidence and optimism.

Soon afterwards, not more than a fortnight later, I came home night following night to what seemed to me signs of the familiar strain, no different from what we each knew. I was disappointed the first time I came home to it; I was irritated, because I wanted my mind undistracted; I set myself to go through the routine of caring for her. Persuading her to leave her records and come to bed: talking to her in the darkness, telling her that, just as worse bouts had passed, so would this: discussing other people whose lives were riven by angst – it domesticated her wretchedness a little to have that label to pin on. It was all repetitive, it was the routine of consolation that I knew by heart, and so did she. Sometimes I thought you had to live by the side of one like Sheila to understand how repetitive suffering is.

All the time I was looking after her, absent-mindedly, out of habit; it seemed like all the other times; it did not occur to me to see a deterioration in her, or how far it had gone. Not even when she tried to tell me.

One night, early in November, I came out of my first sleep, aware that she was not in her bed. I listened to her outside the door, heard a match strike. None of this was novel, for when she could not sleep she walked about the house smoking, considerate of me because I disliked the smell of tobacco smoke at night. The click of the bedroom door, the rasp of a match, the pad of feet in the corridor – many nights they had quietly woken me, and I did not get to sleep again until she was back in bed. This time it was no different, and according to habit I waited for her. The click of the door again: the slither of bedclothes, the spring of the bed. At last, I thought, I can go back to sleep: and contentedly, out of habit, called out – ‘All right?’

For an instant she did not answer; then her voice came: ‘I suppose so.’

I was jerked back into consciousness, and again I asked: ‘
Are
you all right?’

There was a long pause, in the dark. At last a voice: ‘Lewis.’

It was very rare for her to address me by my name. I said, already trying to soothe her: ‘What is it?’

Her reply sounded thin but steady: ‘I’m in a pretty bad way.’

At once I switched on my bedside lamp, and went across to her. In the shadow, for my body came between the light and her face, I could see her, pale and still; I put my arm round her, and asked what was the matter.

All of a sudden her pride and courage both collapsed. Tears burst from her eyes and, in the transformation of moments, her face seemed decaying, degenerate, almost as though it were dissolving.

‘What is the matter?’

‘I’m worried about January 1st.’

She meant the job she had to take up that day.

‘Oh, that!’ I said, unable to keep down an edge of anticlimax, of sheer boredom.

I ought to have known that anything could be a trigger for her anxiety: but nothing, I knew also, was more boring than an anxiety one did not share.

‘You must understand,’ she cried, for once making an appeal.

I tried to speak in the tone that she would trust. Soon – in those states she was easy to persuade – she trusted me as she had done before.

‘You do see, don’t you?’ she cried, the tears stopping as she broke into speech that was incoherent, excited, little like her own. ‘The other day, three weeks ago next Monday, it was in the afternoon just after the post came, I realized that on January 1st I was going to get into the same state as I did over R S R. It is bound to happen, you do see that, don’t you? There will be just the same kind of trouble, and it will all gather round me day after day.’

‘Look,’ I said, reasoning with her carefully, for long ago I had found the way that reassured her most, ‘I daresay there’ll be trouble, but it won’t be the same kind. There’s only one R S R, you know.’

‘There’s only one me,’ she said, with a splinter of detachment. ‘I suppose I was really responsible for the fiasco.’

‘Truly I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Robinson would have behaved the same to me.’

‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘I’ve never done any good.’

Her face was excited and pressing. ‘You must understand, as soon as I get among new people, I shall be caught in the same trap again.’

I was shaking my head, but she broke out, very high: ‘I tell you, I realized it that afternoon just after the post came. And I tell you, in the same second I felt something go in my brain.’

She was trembling, although she was not crying any more. I asked her, with the sympathy of one who has heard it before and so is not frightened, about her physical symptoms. Often, in a state of anxiety, she had complained of hard bands constricting her head. Now she said that there had been continual pressure ever since that afternoon, but she would not describe the physical sensation that began it. I thought she was shy, because she had been exaggerating. I did not realize that she was living with a delusion, in the clinical sense. I had no idea, coaxing her, even teasing her, how much of her judgement had gone.