Charles Snow - Homecomings

I did not reply. She called out an endearment, in astonishment, in acknowledgment of danger.

‘We must have it out,’ she said.

‘Let it go.’

After a pause she said, her voice thickening: ‘That’s too easy. I can’t live like that.’

‘Let it go, I tell you.’

‘No.’

As a rule people thought her younger than she was, but now she looked much older. She said: ‘You can’t get rid of Gilbert.’

‘I don’t think that anything can stop me.’

‘Except that it would be a wrong and unfair thing to do. And you are not really so unfair.’

‘I’ve told you my reason,’ I cried.

‘That’s not your reason. You’re lying to yourself.’

My temper was rising again. I said: ‘I’m getting tired of this.’

‘You’re pretending that Gilbert was acting out of malice, and you know it isn’t true.’

‘I know more of men like Gilbert than you ever will. And I know much more of malice.’

‘He’s been perfectly loyal to you in every way that matters,’ she said, conceding nothing. ‘There’s no excuse on earth for trying to shift him out of your office. I couldn’t let you do it.’

‘It is not for you to say.’

‘It is. All Gilbert has done is just to treat you as he treats everyone else. Of course he’s inquisitive. It’s all right when he’s being inquisitive about anyone else, but when he touches you — you can’t bear it. You want to be private, you don’t want to give and take like an ordinary man.’ She went on: ‘That’s what has maddened you about Gilbert. You issue bulletins about yourself, you don’t want anyone else to find you out.’ She added: ‘You are the same with me.’

Harshly I tried to stop her, but her temper was matching mine, her tongue was cooler. She went on: ‘What else were you doing, hiding the way she died from me?’

I had got to the pitch of sullen anger when I did not speak, just stood choked up, listening to her accusations.

‘With those who don’t want much of you, you’re unselfish, I grant you that,’ she was saying. ‘With anyone who wants you altogether, you’re cruel. Because one never knows when you’re going to be secretive, when you’re going to withdraw. With most people you’re good,’ she was saying, ‘but in the end you’ll break the heart of anyone who loves you.

‘I might be able to stand it,’ she was saying, ‘I might not mind so much, if you weren’t doing yourself such harm.’

Listening to her, I was beyond knowing where her insight was true or false. All she said, her violence and her love, broke upon me like demands which pent me in, which took me to a breaking point of pride and anger. I felt as I had done as a boy when my mother invaded me with love, and at any price I had, the more angry with her because of the behaviour she caused in me, to shut her out.

‘That’s enough,’ I said, hearing my own voice thin but husky in the confining room, as without looking at her I walked to the door.

In the street the afternoon light was still soft, and the mild air blew upon my face.

SOON I went back to her, and when we took Helen out to dinner in January, we believed that we were putting a face on it, that we were behaving exactly as in the days of our first happiness. But, just as subtle bamboozlers like R S Robinson waft about in the illusion that their manoeuvres are impenetrable, whereas in fact they are seen through in one by the simplest of men — so the controlled, when they set out to hide their moods, take in no one but themselves.

Within a few weeks, Helen rang me up at the office saying that she was in London for the day, and anxious to talk to me. My first impulse was to put her off. It was uneasily that I invited her to meet me at a restaurant.

I had named the Connaught, knowing that of all her family she was the only one who liked the atmosphere of the opulent and the smart. When I arrived there, finding her waiting in the hall, I saw she was on edge. She was made up more than usual, and her dress had a rigid air of stylishness. She might like the atmosphere, but she could not help the feeling that she had been brought up to despise it; perhaps the slight edge of apprehension, of unfamiliarity, with which, even after all these years, she was troubled whenever she entered a world which was not plain living and high thinking, was one of its charms for her. She did not, as Betty Vane did, take it for granted; for her it had not lost its savour. But added to this temperamental unease, was uneasiness at what she had to say to me.

Sheltered in a corner in the inner dining-room, she did not speak much. Once, as though apologizing for her shyness, she gave me a smile like her sister’s, at the same time kind and sensuous. She made some remark about the people round us, commented admiringly on a woman’s clothes, then fell into silence, looking down at her hands, fiddling with her wedding-ring.

I asked her about her husband. She replied as directly as usual, looking a little beyond my face as if seeing him there, seeing him with a kind of habitual, ironic affection. I believed that she had known little of physical joy.

Suddenly she raised her eyes, which searched mine as Margaret’s did. She said: ‘You’d like it better if I didn’t speak.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

‘If I thought I could make things worse, I wouldn’t come near either of you — but they’re as bad as they can be, aren’t they?’

‘Are they?’

‘Could things be worse, tell me?’

‘I don’t think it’s as bad as that.’

To Margaret and me, holding to each other with the tenacity that we each possessed, truly it did not seem so bad: but Helen was watching me, knowing that words said could not be taken back, that there are crystallizations out of love, as well as into it. She knew of my deception over Sheila’s suicide: did she think that this was such a crystallization? That as a result Margaret could not regain her trust?

‘You know, Lewis, I mind about you both.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

It was easy, it was a relief, to reply with her own simplicity.

‘When I first saw you together,’ she said, ‘I was so happy about it.’

‘So was I.’ I added: ‘I think she was too.’

‘I know she was.

‘I thought you had been lucky to find each other, both of you,’ she was saying. ‘I thought you had both chosen very wisely.’

She leant towards me.

‘What I’m afraid of,’ she broke out, quietly and clearly, ‘is that you are driving her away.’

I knew it, and did not know it. Margaret was as tenacious as I was; but she was also more self-willed, and far less resigned. In a human relation she was given to action, action came as naturally and was as much a release as in a more public setting it came to Paul Lufkin or Hector Rose. Sometimes I felt that, although her will was all set to save us, she was telling herself that soon she must force the issue. Once or twice I thought I had detected in her what I had heard called ‘the secret planner’, who exists in all of us often unrecognized by ourselves and who, in the prospect of disaster, even more so in the prospect of continuing misery, is working out alternative routes which may give us a chance of self-preservation, a chance of health.

‘There’s still time,’ said Helen, and now she was nerving herself even harder, since there was a silence to break, ‘to stop driving her away.’ She pulled on her left glove and smoothed it up to the elbow, concentrating upon it as if its elegance gave her confidence, made her the kind of woman with a right to say what she chose.

‘I hope there is.’

‘Of course there is,’ she said. ‘Neither of you will ever find the same again, and you mustn’t let it go.’