Charles Snow - Homecomings

His politeness often ended with a malicious flick: but this was just politeness for its own sake. He was not interested in my life. If he had known, he would not have minded: he was not strait-laced, but he had other things to speculate about.

Released into the park, I was looking for Margaret — among the uniforms and summer frocks lying on the grass, I saw her, crowded out some yards away from our rendezvous. She was stretched on her face in the sunshine, her head turned to her sister’s, both of them engrossed. Watching the two faces together, I felt a kind of intimacy with Helen, although I had not spoken to her. Some of her expressions I already knew, having seen them in her sister’s face. But there was one thing about her for which Margaret had not prepared me at all.

Sitting erect, her back straight, her legs crossed at the ankles, she looked smart: unseasonably, almost tastelessly smart in that war-time summer, as if she were a detached observer from some neutral country. The black dress, the large black hat, clashed against that background of litter, the scorched grass, the dusty trees.

She was twenty-nine that year, four years older than Margaret, and she seemed at the same time more poised and more delicate. In both faces one could see the same shapely bones, but whereas in Margaret’s the flesh was firm with a young woman’s health, in her sister’s there were the first signs of tightness — the kind of tightness that I had seen a generation before among some of my aunts, who stayed cared-for too long as daughters and settled down at Helen’s age to an early spinsterhood. Yet Helen had married at twenty-one, and Margaret had told me that the marriage was a happy one.

They were so engrossed that Margaret did not notice me on the path. She was talking urgently, her face both alive and anxious. Helen’s face looked heavy, she was replying in a mutter. Their profiles, where the resemblance was clearest, were determined and sharp. I called out, and Margaret started, saying, ‘This is Lewis.’

At once Helen smiled at me; yet I saw that it was an effort for her to clear her mind of what had gone before. She spoke one or two words of formal greeting. Her voice was lighter than Margaret’s, her speech more clipped; but she intimated by the energy with which she spoke a friendliness she was too shy, too distracted, to utter.

As I sat down — ‘Be careful,’ she said, ‘it’s so grimy, you have to take care where you sit.’

Margaret glanced at her, and laughed. She said to me: ‘We were clearing off some family business.’

‘Dull for other people,’ said Helen. Then, afraid I should think she was shutting me out, she said quickly, ‘Dull for us, too, this time.’

She smiled, and made some contented-seeming remark about the summer weather. Only a trace of shadow remained in her face; she did not want me to see it, she wanted this meeting to be a successful one.

Yet each of the three of us was tongue-tied, or rather there were patches of silence, then we spoke easily, then silence again. Helen might have been worrying over her sister and me, but in fact it was Margaret who showed the more concern. Often she looked at Helen with the clucking, scolding vigilance that an elder sister might show to a beloved younger one, in particular to one without experience and unable to cope for herself.

As we sat together in the sunshine, the dawdling feet of soldiers and their girls scrabbling the path a few yards away, Helen kept being drawn back into her thoughts; then she would force herself to attend to Margaret and me, almost as though the sight of us together was a consolation. Indeed, far from worrying over her sister, she seemed happiest that afternoon when she found out something about us. Where had we met, she had never heard? When exactly had it been?

Shy as she was, she was direct with her questions, just as I had noticed in other women from families like theirs. Some of the concealments which a man of my kind had learned, would have seemed to Helen, and to Margaret also, as something like a denial of integrity. Helen was diffident and not specially worldly: but, if Margaret had hidden from her that she and I were living together, she would have been not only hurt but shocked.

For minutes together, it pulled up her spirits, took her thoughts out of herself, to ask questions of Margaret and me: I believed that she was making pictures of our future. But she could not sustain it. The air was hot, the light brilliant; she sat there in a brooding reverie.

HOPING that Helen might talk to her sister if they were alone, I left them together in the Park, and did not see Margaret again until the following Monday evening. She had already told me over the telephone that she would have to dine with Helen that night: and when we met in a Tothill Street pub Margaret said straight away: ‘I’m sorry you had to see her like this.’

‘I like her very much,’ I said.

‘I hoped you would.’ She had been looking forward for weeks to my meeting with Helen: she wanted me to admire her sister as she did herself. She told me again, anxious for me to believe her, that Helen was no more melancholy than she was, and far less self-centred.

‘No one with any eyes would think she was self-centred.’

‘It’s such an awful pity!’ she cried.

I asked her what it was.

‘She thought she was going to have a child at last. Then on Saturday she knew she wasn’t.’

‘It’s as important as that, is it?’ I said. But she had told me already how her sister longed for children.

‘You saw for yourself, didn’t you?’

‘How much,’ I asked, ‘is it damaging her marriage?’

‘It’s not. It’s a good marriage,’ she said. ‘But still, I can’t help remembering her when she was quite young, even when she was away at school, she used to talk to me about how she’d bring up her family.’

She was just on the point of going away to meet Helen when Betty Vane came in.

As I introduced them, Betty was saying that she had telephoned the office, got Gilbert Cooke and been told this was one of my favourite pubs — meanwhile she was scrutinizing Margaret, her ears sharp for the tone in which we spoke. Actually Margaret said little: she kept glancing at the clock above the bar: very soon she apologized and left. It looked rude, or else that she was deliberately leaving us together: it meant only that, if she had had to seem off-hand to anyone, she would make sure it was not to her sister.

‘Well,’ said Betty.

For an instant I was put out by the gust of misunderstanding. I made an explanation, but she was not accepting it. She said, her eyes friendly and appraising: ‘You’re looking much better, though.’

I had not seen her for some time, though now I was glad to. When Sheila died, it had been Betty who had taken charge of me. She had found me my flat, moved me out of the Chelsea house; and then, all the practical help given and disposed of, she got out of my way; she assumed I did not want to see her or anyone who reminded me of my marriage. Since then I had met her once or twice, received a couple of letters, and that was all.

Unlike most of our circle, she was not working in London, but in a factory office in a Midland town. The reason for this was singular: she, by a long way the most loftily born of my friends, was the worst educated; in the schoolroom at home she had scarcely been taught formally at all; clever as she was, she did not possess the humblest of educational qualifications, and would have been hard-pushed to acquire any.

Here she was in the middle thirties, opposite me across the little table in the pub, her nose a bit more peaked, her beautiful eyes acute. She had always liked her drink and now she was putting down bitter pint for pint with me: she did not mention Sheila’s name or any trouble she had seen me through, but she enjoyed talking of the days past; she had a streak of sentiment, not about any special joy, but just about our youth.