Charles Snow - Homecomings

Of my old friends, the only one I saw much of was Betty Vane, who came in to make the flat more liveable, just as she had busied herself for me after Sheila’s death. She knew that I had lost Margaret: about herself she volunteered nothing, except that she had left her job and found another in London, leaving me to assume that she and I were in the same state.

Irritable, undemanding, she used to clean up the room and then go with me round the corner to the pub on the Embankment. Through the open door the starlings clamoured: we looked at each other with scrutiny, affection, blame. We had been friends on and off for so long, and now we met again it was to find that the other had got nowhere.

When she or any other visitor let herself out last thing at night, there was likely to be a pad and scuffle outside my door and a soft, patient, insidious knock. Then round the door would insinuate a podgy shapeless face, a great slack heavy body wrapped in a pink satin dressing-gown. It was Mrs Beauchamp, my landlady, who lived on the floor above mine and who spent her days spying from her room above the portico and her nights listening to steps on the stairs and sounds from her tenants’ rooms.

One night, just after Betty had left, she went through her routine: ‘I was just wondering, Mr Eliot, I know you won’t mind me asking, but I was just wondering if you had a drop of milk?’

The question was a matter of form. With each new tenant, she cherished a hope of heart speaking unto heart, and, as the latest arrival, I was going through the honeymoon period. As a matter of form, I asked her if she could manage without the milk for that night’s supper.

‘Ah, Mr Eliot,’ she breathed, a trifle ominously, ‘I’ll do what I can.’

Then she got down to business.

‘That was a very nice young lady if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Eliot, that seemed to be coming to see you when I happened to be looking down the street tonight, or at least, not exactly young as some people call young, but I always say that none of us are as young as we should like to be.’

I told her Betty was younger than I was: but as she thought me ten years older than my real age, Mrs Beauchamp was encouraged.

‘I always say that people who aren’t exactly young have feelings just the same as anyone else, and sometimes their feelings give them a lot to think about, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Eliot,’ she said, with an expression that combined salacity with extreme moral disapproval. But she was not yet satisfied.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ she said, ‘if you told me that that nice young lady had come of a very good family.’

‘Shouldn’t you?’

‘Now, Mr Eliot, she does or she doesn’t. I’m sorry if I’m asking things I shouldn’t, but I like to feel that when anyone does the same to me I don’t send them away feeling that they have made a faux pas .’

‘As a matter of fact she does.’

‘Breeding will out,’ Mrs Beauchamp exhaled.

The curious thing was, she was an abnormally accurate judge of social origin. The derelicts who visited me she put down to my eccentricity: the respectable clerks from the lower middle classes, like Vera Allen and her Norman, Mrs Beauchamp spotted at once, and indicated that I was wasting my time. Of my Bohemian friends, she detected precisely who was smart and who was not.

She went on to tell me the glories of her own upbringing, the convent school — ‘those dear good nuns’ — and of Beauchamp, who was, according to her, entitled to wear seventeen distinguished ties . Improbable as Mrs Beauchamp’s autobiography sounded when one saw her stand oozily in the doorway, I was coming to believe it was not totally untrue.

Whenever I answered the telephone in the hall, I heard a door click open on the next floor and the scuffle of Mrs Beauchamp’s slippers. But I could put up with her detective work, much as I used, before he touched a nerve, to put up with Gilbert Cooke’s.

All this time, since the day when he told Margaret’s sister of the suicide, I had been meeting Gilbert in the office; I talked business with him, even gossiped, but I had not once let fall a word to him about my own concerns. He was the first to notice signs of anyone withdrawing, but this time I was not sure that he knew the reason. I was quite sure, however, that he had discovered the break with Margaret, and that he was expending some effort to observe how I was living now.

Coming into my office one evening in the autumn, he said imperiously and shyly: ‘Doing anything tonight?’

I said no.

‘Let me give you dinner.’

I could not refuse and did not want to, for there was no pretence about the kindness that brimmed from him. As well as being kind, he was also, I recognized once more, sensitive: he did not take me to White’s, since he must have imagined — the last thing I should have mentioned to anyone, to him above all — how I linked our dinner there with the night of Sheila’s death. Instead, he found a restaurant in Soho where he could order me one or two of my favourite dishes, the names of which he had stored away in that monstrous memory. He proceeded to bully me kindly about my new flat.

‘It’s near the Dolphin, isn’t it?’ (He knew the address.) ‘It’s one of those eighteen-fortyish houses, I suppose. Not much good in air-raids, you must move out if they start again,’ he said, jabbing his thumb at me. ‘We can’t let you take unnecessary risks.’

‘What about you?’ I said. His own flat was at the top of a ramshackle Knightsbridge house.

‘It doesn’t matter about me.’

Brushing my interruption aside, he got back to the subject, more interesting to him, of my living arrangements.

‘Have you got a housekeeper?’

I said I supposed that one could call Mrs Beauchamp that.

‘Doesn’t she make you comfortable?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘I don’t know,’ he cried impatiently, ‘why you don’t do something about it!’

‘Don’t worry yourself,’ I said, ‘I genuinely don’t mind.’

‘What is she like?’

I wanted to warn him off, so I smiled at him, and said: ‘To put it mildly, she’s just a bit inquisitive.’

When I had spoken I was sorry, since it suddenly struck me as not impossible that Gilbert would find occasion to have a tête-à-tête with Mrs Beauchamp. For the moment, however, he laughed, high-voiced, irritated with me.

The meal went on agreeably enough. We talked official shop and about the past. I thought again, everything Gilbert said was his own; in his fashion he was a creative man. He was being lavish with the drink, and now there was half a bottle of brandy standing before us on the table. It was a long time since I had drunk so much. I was cheerful, I was content for the evening to stretch out. As I was finishing some inconsequential remark I saw Gilbert leaning over the table towards me, his big shoulders hunched. His eyes hot and obsessive, he said: ‘I can tell you something you’ve been waiting to know.’

‘Never mind,’ I replied, but I was taken off guard.

‘Have you seen Margaret since she got married?’

‘No.’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t!’ He laughed, satisfied, on top. ‘Well, you needn’t get too bothered about her. I think she’ll be all right.’

I wanted to cry out, ‘I don’t intend to listen’, just as I had avoided going near anyone who knew her or even hearing the date of her wedding. The only news I had not been able to escape was that she was married. I wanted to shout in front of Gilbert’s inflamed eyes — ‘I can stand it, if I don’t hear.’ But he went on: Geoffrey Hollis had taken a job at a children’s hospital, they were living at Aylesbury.

‘I think she’ll be all right,’ said Gilbert.