Charles Snow: Homecomings

Strange, I was thinking as we tasted our drinks, that fifteen, sixteen years before, he had been part of our youth. For he had done, on his own account, a little coterie publishing in the days of the English Review , the Imagists, the rebels of the first war. It had been R S Robinson who had published a translation of Leopardi’s poems under the inept title of Lonely Beneath the Moon . Both Sheila and I had read it just before we met, when we were at the age for romantic pessimism, and to us it had been magical.

Since then everything he had touched had failed. He was trying to raise money from Sheila for another publishing firm, but himself was not able to put down five pounds. And yet we could not forget the past, and he did not want to, so that, as he stood between us on our own hearthrug, it was not Sheila, it was not I, it was he who dispensed the patronage.

‘I was telling Mrs Eliot that she must write a book,’ he told me soon after I joined them.

Sheila shook her head.

‘ I’m sure you could ,’ he said to her. He turned on me: ‘I’ve just noticed that you, sir, you have artists’ hands.’ He had lost no time getting out his trowel; but Sheila who shrank with self-consciousness at any praise, could take it from him. Unlike our Chelsea acquaintances of our own generation, he had not begun by using our christian names, but instead went on calling me ‘sir’ and Sheila ‘Mrs Eliot’, even when he was speaking with insidious intimacy face-to-face.

Standing between us, he dispensed the patronage; he had dignity and presence, although he was inches shorter than Sheila, who was tall for a woman, and did not come up to my shoulder. Round-shouldered and plump, he touched a crest of his silver hair.

He had come to the house in a dinner-jacket, which had once been smart and was now musty, while neither Sheila nor I had dressed; and it was Robinson who set to work to remove embarrassment.

‘Always do it,’ he advised us, as we went into the dining-room. I asked him what.

‘Always put people at a disadvantage. When they tell you not to dress, take no notice of them. It gives you the moral initiative.’

‘You see,’ he whispered to Sheila, sitting at her right hand, ‘I’ve got the moral initiative tonight.’

In the dining-room he congratulated Sheila on the fact that, since the food came up by the serving hatch, we were alone.

‘So I needn’t pretend, need I?’ he said, and, tucking into his dinner, told stories of other meals back in the legendary past, at which he had tried to raise money to publish books — books, he did not let us forget, that we had all heard of since.

‘I expect you’ve been told that I was better off then?’ He looked up from his plate to Sheila, with a merry, malicious chuckle.

‘Don’t you believe it. People always get everything wrong.’ Stories of multiple manoeuvres, getting promises from A on the strength of B and C, from B on the strength of A and C… ‘The point is, one’s got to refuse to play the game according to the rules,’ he advised Sheila. Stories of personal negotiations of such subtlety and invention as to make my business colleagues of the afternoon seem like different animals.

All the time, listening to him, I had spent most of my attention, as throughout our marriage, watching how Sheila was. She had turned towards him, the firm line of her nose and lip clear against the wall; her face had lost the strained and over-vivid fixity, there was no sign of the tic. Perhaps she did not show the quiet familiar ease that sometimes visited her in the company of her protégés; but she had never had a protégé as invincible as this. It took me all my time to remember that, on his own admission, Robinson was destitute, keeping an invalid wife and himself on £150 a year. More than anything, Sheila looked — and it was rare for her — plain mystified.

Just for an instant, out of dead habit, I wondered if he had any attraction for her. Maybe, those who are locked in their own coldness, as she was, mindless than the rest of us about the object of attraction, about whether it is unsuitable or grotesque in others’ eyes. Doing a good turn for this man of sixty, whom others thought fantastic, Sheila might have known a blessed tinge of sexual warmth. At any rate, her colour was high, and for an hour I could feel responsibility lifted from me; she had managed to forget herself.

Robinson, as natural about eating as about his manoeuvres, asked her for a second helping of meat, and went on with his recent attempts at money raising. Some prosperous author, who had known him in his famous days, had given him an introduction to an insurance company. Robinson digressed, his elephant eyes glinting, to tell us a scandalous anecdote about the prosperous author, a young actor, and an ageing woman; as he told it, Robinson was studying Sheila, probing into her life with me.

Pressing the story on her, but drawing no response, he got going about the insurance company. They had made him go into the City, they had given him coffee and wholemeal biscuits, and then they had talked of the millions they invested in industrial concerns.

‘They talked to me of millions ,’ he cried.

‘They didn’t mean anything,’ I said.

‘They should be more sensitive,’ said Robinson. ‘They talked to me of millions when all I wanted was nine hundred pounds.’

I was almost sure he had dropped the figure from a thousand for the sake of the sound, just as, in the shops where my mother used to buy our clothes, they did not speak of five shillings, but always of four and eleven three.

‘What’s more,’ said Robinson, ‘they didn’t intend to give me that. They went on talking about millions here and millions there, and when I got down to brass tacks they looked vague.’

‘Did they offer anything?’ said Sheila.

‘Always know when to cut your losses,’ Robinson said in his firm, advising tone. It occurred to me that, in a couple of hours, he had produced more generalizations on how to run a business than I had heard from Paul Lufkin in four years.

‘I just told them, “You’re treating me very badly. Don’t talk of millions to people who need the money,” and I left them high and dry.’ He sighed. ‘Nine hundred pounds.’

At the thought of humiliation turned upside down, Sheila had laughed out loud, for the first time for months. But now she began asking questions. Nine hundred pounds: that would go nowhere. True, he had kept his old imprint all those years, he could publish a book or two and get someone else to distribute it — but what good was that? Surely if he did that, and it went off half-cock, he had dissipated his credit, and had finished himself for good?

Robinson was not used to being taken by surprise. He flushed: the flush rose up his cheeks, up to the forehead under the white hair. Like many ingenious men, he constantly underrated everyone round him. He had made his judgement of this beautiful hag-ridden woman; he thought she would be the softest of touches. He had marked her down as a neurotic. He was astonished she should show acumen. He was upset that she should see through him.

For, of course, he contrived to be at the same time embarrassingly open and dangerously secretive. Was he even truthful about his own penury? He had been trying on Sheila an alternative version of his technique of multiple approach. This time he was working on several people simultaneously, telling none of them about the others.

‘Always keep things simple,’ he said, trying to wave his panache.

‘Not so simple that they don’t make sense,’ said Sheila, smiling but not yielding.

Soon she got some reason out of him. If he could collect it, he wanted several thousand; at that period, such a sum would let him publish, modestly but professionally, for a couple of years. That failing, however, he still wanted his nine hundred. Even if he could only bring out three books under the old imprint, the name of R S Robinson would go round again.