Charles Snow - Homecomings

Of all those I knew, there was only one exception. It was Paul Lufkin himself. He had taken his time, had tried to stay laodicean, but at last he had come down coldly among the dissidents. No one could guess whether it was a business calculation or a human one or both. There he sat, neat-headed, up at the benefactors’ table, listening to the other bosses, impassively aware that they sneered about how he was trying to suck up to the Opposition, indifferent to their opinion or any other.

But he was alone, up among the tycoons: so was I, three or four grades down. So I felt a gulp of pleasure when I heard Gilbert Cooke trumpeting brusquely, on the opposite side of the table not far from me, telling his neighbours to make the most of the drinks, since there would not be a Barbican dinner next year.

‘Why not?’

‘We shall be fighting,’ said Gilbert.

‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ said someone.

‘Let’s hope it will,’ said Cooke, his face imperative and flushed. Men were demurring, when he brought his hand down on the table.

‘If it doesn’t come to that,’ he said, ‘we’re sunk.’

He gazed round with hot eyes: ‘Are you ready to see us being sunk?’

He was the son of a regular soldier, he went about in society, he was less used to being over-awed than the people round him. Somehow they listened, though he badgered and hectored them, though he was younger than they were.

He saw me approving of him, and gave a great impudent wink. My spirits rose, buoyed up by this carelessness, this comradeship.

It was not his fault that recently I had seen little of him. He had often invited me and Sheila out, and it was only for her sake that I refused. Now he was signalling comradeship. He called out across the table, did I know the Davidsons? Austin Davidson?

It was a curious symbol of alliance tossed over the heads of those respectable businessmen. Davidson was an art connoisseur, a member of one of the academic dynasties, linked in his youth with high Bloomsbury. No, I called out, I knew his work, of course, but not him. I was recalling to myself the kind of gibes we used to make a few years before about those families and that group: how they carried fine feelings so far as to be vulgar: how they objected with refined agony to ambition in others, and slipped as of right into the vacant place themselves. Those were young men’s gibes, gibes from outside a charmed circle. Now they did not matter: Davidson would have been an ally at that dinner; so was Gilbert, brandishing his name.

When Gilbert drove me home I had drunk enough to be talkative and my spirits were still high. We had each been angry at the dinner and now we spoke out, Gilbert not so anxious as I about the future but more enraged; his fighting spirit heartened me, and it was a long time since I had become so buoyant and reassured.

In that mood I entered the bedroom, where Sheila was lying reading, her book near the bedside lamp, as it had been the evening we quarrelled over Robinson: but now the rest of the room was in darkness, and all I could see was the lamp, the side of her face, her arm coming from the shoulder of her nightdress.

I sat on my bed, starting to tell her of the purgatorial dinner — and then I became full of desire.

She heard it in my voice, for she turned on her elbow and stared straight at me.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ she said, cold but not unfriendly, trying to be kind.

On her bed, just as I was taking her, too late to consider her, I saw her face under mine, a line between her eyes carved in the lamplight, her expression worn and sad.

Then I lay beside her, on us both the heaviness we had known often, I the more guilty because I was relaxed, because, despite the memory of her frown, I was basking in the animal comfort of the nerves.

In time I asked: ‘Anything special the matter?’

‘Nothing much,’ she said.

‘There is something?’

For an instant I was pleased. It was some sadness of her own, different from that which had fallen on us so many nights, lying like this.

Then I would rather have had the sadness we both knew — for she turned her head into my shoulder, so that I could not watch her face, and her body pulsed with sobbing.

‘What is the matter?’ I said, holding her to me. She just shook her head.

‘Anything to do with me?’ Another shake.

‘What then?’

In a desperate and rancorous tone, she said: ‘I’ve been weak-minded.’

‘What have you done?’

‘You knew that I’d been playing with some writing. I didn’t show it to you, because it wasn’t for you.’

The words were glacial, but I held her and said, ‘Never mind.’

‘I’ve been a fool. I’ve let R S R know.’

‘Does that matter much?’

‘It’s worse than that, I’ve let him get it out of me.’

I told her that it was nothing to worry about, that she must harden herself against a bit of malice, which was the worst that could happen. All the time I could feel her anxiety like a growth inside her, meaningless, causeless, unreachable. She scarcely spoke again, she could not explain what she feared, and yet it was exhausting her so much that, as I had known happen to her before in the bitterness of dread, she went to sleep in my arms.

WHEN Sheila asked Robinson for her manuscript back, he spent himself on praise. Why had she not written before? This was short, but she must continue with it. He has always suspected she had a talent. Now she had discovered it, she must be ready to make sacrifices.

Reporting this to me, she was as embarrassed and vulnerable as when she confessed that she had let him blandish the manuscript out of her. She had never learned to accept praise, except about her looks. Hearing it from Robinson she felt half-elated, she was vain enough for that, and half-degraded.

Nevertheless, he had not been ambivalent; he had praised with a persistence he had not shown since he extracted her promise of help. There was no sign of the claw beneath. It made nonsense of her premonition, that night in my arms.

Within a fortnight, there was a change. A new rumour was going round, more detailed and factual than any of the earlier ones. It was that Sheila had put money into Robinson’s firm (one version which reached me multiplied the amount by three) but not really to help the arts or out of benevolence. In fact, she was just a dilettante who was supporting him because she wrote amateur stuff herself and could not find an easier way to get it published.

That was pure Robinson, I thought, as I heard the story — too clever by half, too neat by half; triumphant because he could expose the ‘lie in life’. To some women, I thought also, it would have seemed the most innocuous of rumours. To Sheila — I was determined she should not have to make the comparison. I telephoned Robinson at once, heard from his wife that he was out for the evening, and made an appointment for first thing next day. This time I meant to use threats.

But I was too late. Sitting in the drawing-room when I got home, Sheila was doing nothing at all. No book, no chess-men, not even her gramophone records — she was sitting as though she had been there for hours, staring out of the lighted room into the January night.

After I had greeted her and settled down by the side of the fire, she said: ‘Have you heard his latest?’

She spoke in an even tone. It was no use my pretending.

I said yes.

‘I’m handing in my resignation,’ she said.

‘I’m glad of that,’ I replied.

‘I’ve tried as much as I can,’ she said, without any tone.

In the same flat, impassive voice, she asked me to handle the business for her. She did not wish to see Robinson. She did not care what happened to him. Her will was broken. If I could manage it, I might as well get her money back. She was not much interested.