Charles Snow - Homecomings

Flatly the words came to my ear: ‘I’m not too bad to cope.’

She added: ‘I want to see you. Shall you be long?’

When I went into the hall, she was waiting there for me.

She began to speak before I had taken my coat off, and I had to put my arm round her shoulders and lead her into the drawing-room. She was not crying, but I could feel beneath my hand the quiver of her fibres, the physical sign that frightened me most.

‘It’s been a bad day,’ she was saying. ‘I don’t know whether I can go on. It’s no use going on if it’s too hard.’

‘It won’t be too bad,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

I was ready with the automatic consolation.

‘Have I got to go on? Can I tell them I shan’t be able to come on January 1st?’

That was what she meant, I had assumed, by ‘going on’; she spoke like that, whenever she winced away from this ordeal to come, so trivial to anyone else.

‘I don’t think you ought,’ I said.

‘It wouldn’t matter much to them.’ It was as near pleading as she had come.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘if you get out of this, you’ll get out of everything else in the future, except just curling up into yourself, now won’t you? It’s better for you to come through this, even if it means a certain amount of hell. When you put it behind you, all will be well. But this time you mustn’t give up.’

I was speaking sternly. I believed what I said; if she surrendered over this test, she would relapse for good and all into her neurosis; I was hoping, by making my sympathy hard, to keep her out of it. But also I spoke so for a selfish reason. I wanted her to take this job so that she would be occupied and so at least partially off my hands. In secret, I looked forward to January as a period of emancipation.

I thought of mentioning the doctor whom Charles March had recommended, and the appointment that I had made. Then I decided against.

‘You ought to go through with it,’ I said.

‘I knew you’d say that.’ She gave me a smile, not bitter, not mechanical, quite transformed; for a second her face looked youthful, open, spiritual.

‘I’m sorry for giving you so much trouble,’ she said, with a curious simplicity. ‘I should have been luckier if I could have cracked up altogether, shouldn’t I?’ Her imagination had been caught by an acquaintance who had solved her problems by what they called a ‘nervous breakdown’, and now seemed happy and at peace. ‘I couldn’t pull that off somehow. But I ought to have been able to manage by myself without wearing you out so much.’

As I listened I was moved, but, still trying to stiffen her nerve, I did not smile or show her much affection.

That night we played a couple of games of chess, and were in bed early. She slept quietly and next morning got up to have breakfast with me, which was unusual. Across the table her face looked more ravaged and yet more youthful without its makeup. She did not refer to what had been said the evening before; instead, she was talking, with amusement that seemed light and genuine, about my arrangements for the coming night. Gilbert Cooke had invited me to dinner at his club; getting back to Chelsea, I said, in the blackout, having had a fair amount of drink, was not agreeable. Perhaps it would be better if I slept at my own club. How much should I have had to drink? Sheila wanted to know — with a spark of the inquisitiveness about male goings-on, the impudence that one saw sometimes in much younger women, high-spirited, not demure, but brought up in households without brothers.

On those light, teasing terms, we said goodbye. I kissed her and, in her dressing-gown, she came to the door as I went down the path. At the gate I waved, and standing with her arms by her sides, poised, erect and strong, she smiled. It was too far away to see her clearly, but I thought her expression was both friendly and jibing.

AT White’s that night, Gilbert Cooke and I had a convivial dinner. He had invited me for a specific reason and yet, despite his unselfconscious raids into other people’s business, he could not confess this bit of his own until I helped him out. Then he was loose and easy, a man with an embarrassing task behind him; he ordered another bottle of wine and began to talk more confidentially and imperiously.

The favour he asked would not have weighed so heavy on most men. It appeared that he had been trying all ways to get into uniform, but he kept being turned down because he had once had an operation for mastoid. Gilbert was ashamed and sorry. He wanted to fight, with a lack of pretence that men of our age had felt twenty-five years before; in 1939 the climate, the social pressures, had changed; most other men I met in Gilbert’s situation blessed their luck, but he felt deprived.

However, by this time, he had accepted his loss; since he could not fight, he wished to do something in the war. Stay with Paul Lufkin?

‘Why does he want me to?’ Gilbert Cooke inquired with his suspicious, knowing, hot-eyed glance.

‘Because you’re useful to him, of course.’

‘No, he’s thinking out something deeper than that. I’d give fifty quid to know just what.’

‘Why in God’s name should he not want you to stay?’

‘Haven’t you realized he thinks about all of us five moves ahead?’

Gilbert’s face was shining, as he filled his glass and pushed the bottle across. I did not realize what he wanted me to (which seemed to me conspiratorial nonsense), but instead I did realize another thing. Which was that Gilbert, despite his independent no-man air in Paul Lufkin’s company, was at heart more than normally impressionable: he gave Lufkin brusque advice, but in private thought he was a great man: so that Lufkin received the pleasures of not being flattered, and of being deeply flattered, at one and the same time.

But Gilbert, as well as being susceptible to personality, was a sincere and patriotic man. The country was at war and with Lufkin, although Gilbert was hypnotized by the human drama, he was not doing anything useful. So this lavish bachelor dinner, this elaborate wind-up, led to nothing but a humble question, which he was too diffident to do more than hint at.

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that you’d like a job in a government department?’

‘If they’d possibly have me.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

‘Oh, I was never up to their clan as a brain, I don’t see why they should.’

In fact, able active men of thirty-five, with decent academic careers, permanently exempt from call-up, were bound soon to be at a premium. I told him so.

‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ said Cooke.

‘They’d take you as a principal tomorrow.’

‘How could they think I was any use to them?’

A little drunk, half-irritated that he would not trust my judgement, half-touched by his modesty, I said: ‘Look here. Would you like to work in my place?’

‘You don’t mean there would be a chance?’

‘I can take the first step tomorrow.’

Gilbert regarded me with bold eyes, determined to see the catch in it, diffident about thanking me. From that instant he just wanted a comradely evening. Brandy by the fire: half-confidences: the stories, gilded at the edges, of youngish men on a happy alcoholic night. One thing struck me about Gilbert’s stories. He was an adventurous, versatile man, always on the move: but he was meticulously pure in speech, and, although he spoke of women with liking, he did not talk openly of sex.

Next morning, in the breakfast-room of my club, the coal-fire crackled and spurted: the unfolded newspapers glinted on the table under the light; in the street outside the pavement looked dark with cold. Although I had a headache, it was not enough to put me off my breakfast, and food was still good, so early in the war. I ate the kidneys and bacon, and, indulging my thirst, went on drinking tea; the firelight was reflected back from the grey morning mist outside the windows. Acquaintances came to the tables, opening their Times . It was all warmed and cared-for, and I enjoyed stretching out the minutes before I rang up Sheila. At a quarter past nine, I thought, she would be getting up. In comfort, I drank another cup of tea.