Charles Snow - Homecomings

There was a haze of home-sickness over us, shimmering with pleasure, and it stayed as we went out to eat. Out to eat better than I had eaten all that year, for Betty, even though she was not living in London, kept an eye on up-and-coming restaurants; she took as much care about it, I thought, as a lonely, active and self-indulgent man. Thus, at a corner table in Percy Street, we questioned each other with the content, regard, melancholy, and comfort of old friends — edged by the feeling, shimmering in the home-sick haze, that with different luck we might have been closer.

I inquired about the people she was meeting and what friends she had made, in reality inquiring whether she had found a lover or a future husband. It sounded absurd of me to be euphemistic and semi-arch, as circuitous as Mr Knight, to this woman whom I knew so well and whose own tongue was often coarse. But Betty was coarse about the body — and about her emotions as inhibited as a schoolgirl. She just could not utter, I knew from long ago, anything that she felt about a man. Even now, she sounded like a girl determined not to let herself be teased. Yes, she had seen a lot of people at the factory: ‘Some of them are interesting,’ she said.

‘Who are they?’

‘Oh, managers and characters like that.’

‘Anyone specially interesting?’ I was sure she wanted to talk.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she blurted out, ‘there’s someone I rather like.’

I asked about him — a widower, a good deal older than she was, moderately successful.

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘you’ve never met people of that kind before.’

‘He’s a nice man.’

‘It sounds all right,’ I said affectionately.

‘It might be all right,’ she said with a touch of the hope she never quite lost, with absolute lack of confidence.

‘My dear, I beg you,’ I broke out, ‘don’t think so little of yourself.’

She smiled with embarrassment. ‘I don’t know about that—’

‘Why in God’s name shouldn’t it be all right?’

‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘I’m not everyone’s cup of tea.’

She spoke out firmly. She was relieved to have confessed a little, even in such a strangulated form. She shut up, as though abashed at her own outpouringness. Sharply, she began to talk about me. In a moment she was saying: ‘What about that girl who rushed out of the pub?’

‘I met her last autumn,’ I replied.

‘Is it serious?’

‘Yes, it is.’

Betty nodded.

She said, in a companionable, almost disapproving tone: ‘You have had such a rotten time. This isn’t another of them, is it?’

‘Far from it.’

She stared at me.

‘It would be nice,’ she said, her voice going suddenly soft, ‘if you could be happy.’

She added: ‘There’s no one who deserves it more.’

In the restaurant corner, the air was warm with a sentimental glow. Betty was a realistic woman: about herself realistic to an extent that crippled her: to most people she did not give the benefit of the doubt. But about me her realism had often been blurred, and she thought me a better man than I was.

How much better than I was — I could not avoid a glint of recognition an hour after. I had gone glowing from the restaurant to Margaret’s room, where she was talking to Helen. When I arrived they were happy. Helen’s spirits had revived; like Margaret, she did not give up easily. I gathered she had been to a doctor; and then she refused to talk further that evening of her own worry. When I came in, it was clear that they had been talking instead — with pleasure and amusement — about Margaret and me.

In the midsummer evening, the folding door between Margaret’s bedroom and sitting-room was thrown open; their chairs were opposite each other round the empty grate in the sitting-room, which in the winter we had never used. Outside in the street, still light although it was getting on for ten, children were playing, and just across the area, close to the window and on a level with our chairs, passed the heads and shoulders of people walking along the pavement. It might have been the ‘front room’ of my childhood.

In it, Helen, dressed with the same exaggerated smartness as in the park, looked more than ever out of place. I thought for an instant how different they were. Despite her marriage, despite her chic, something of my first impression of her lingered, the touch of the clever, delicate, and spinsterish. And yet they had each the same independence, the same certainty that they were their own judges, bred in through the family from which Margaret, more than her sister, had rebelled, bred in each one just as much as the mole over the hip which she had told me was a family mark. About Helen there was nothing of Margaret’s carelessness; and yet in other ways so unlike her sister, Margaret, who rejoiced in giving me pleasure, who had the deep and guiltless sensuality of those women to whom giving pleasure is a major one, answered just as deliberately for herself.

‘You oughtn’t to live like this, you know,’ Helen said, glancing about the room, ‘it is really rather messy. Miles says you’d do far better—’

‘Oh, Miles,’ Margaret said. ‘He would.’ They were speaking of Helen’s husband, whom they both appeared to regard with a kind of loving depreciation, as though they were in some way leagued in a pact to save him from himself. Yet from what I had heard he was a successful man, amiable, self-sufficient, regarding responsibility as a kind of privilege. ‘It’s lucky he chose the right one of us.’

‘Very lucky,’ said Helen, ‘you would have made him quite miserable.’ When she spoke of him her face grew tender, content. It was a maternal contentment: like a warm-hearted and dutiful child, he gave her almost all she desired.

Margaret smiled back at her, and for a second I thought I saw in her face a longing for just such a contentment, just such a home; ordered, settled, the waiting fire, the curtains drawn against the night.

‘It wouldn’t have been my sort of thing,’ she said.

It was at this moment that I felt my talk with Betty, which had left me in such a glow, had suddenly touched a trigger and released a surge of sadness and self-destruction.

It seemed like another night, drinking with Betty, going home to Sheila — not a special night, more like many nights fused together, with nothing waiting for me but Sheila’s presence.

That night lay upon this. I was listening to Margaret and Helen, my limbs were heavy, for an instant I felt in one of those dreams where one is a spectator but cannot move.

When Margaret had talked, earlier that evening, of the children her sister wanted, she was repeating what she had told me before; and, just as before, she was holding something back.

I had thought, when I saw them together in that room half an hour before, that, unlike in so much, they were alike in taking their own way. But they were alike at one other point. It was not only Helen who longed for children; Margaret was the same. Once we had spoken of it, and from then on, just as tonight, she held back. She did not wish me to see how much she looked forward to her children. If she did let me see it, it would lay more responsibility upon me.

Listening to them, I felt at a loss with Helen because she was confident I should make her sister happy.

When she got up to go, I said how much I had enjoyed the evening. But Margaret had been watching me: after seeing her sister to the door, she returned to the empty sitting-room and looked at me with concern.

‘What is the matter?’ she said.

I was standing up. I took her in my arms and kissed her. Over her head, past the folding doors, I could see the bed and the windows beyond, lit up by the afterglow in the west. With an effort, disproportionately great, I tried to throw off the heaviness, and said: ‘Isn’t it time we talked too?’