Charles Snow - Homecomings

Even Vera, who was brimful of more emotion than she seemed to understand, was chiefly preoccupied in Norman’s company that night with the unrewarding problems of my domestic arrangements. Why should I live in such discomfort?

‘It’s not logical,’ she said.

I told her that it would not make much difference to me.

‘I’m not convinced about that,’ she said.

I told her that it was sometimes a psychological help not to give a thought about how one lived.

Vera shook her head.

‘You’d be just as independent in a proper service flat,’ she said.

She had missed the point, but I saw Norman looking at me.

‘You want someone to run the place for you,’ said Vera. She added: ‘Please don’t think I’m saying anything against Mrs Beauchamp. She’s as kind as anyone you’ll ever get, I knew that the first time I saw her. Of course, she’s the motherly type.’

I was thinking, Vera was as unperceptive about people as anyone I knew, when suddenly I was distracted by a smile from Norman, a smile which, loving and clear-eyed, reflected precisely the same thought. It was a smile of insight. Suddenly I took to him. I felt a sharper sympathy with him than I could with her.

I encouraged him to come and see me, although I soon knew what I was letting myself in for; most of the time it was hard work.

As I knew him better, I discovered that my impressions had been right, it was true that he had a natural understanding of others: more than that, he often made me feel that he was genuinely good. But that understanding and goodness seemed to be linked in him, as I had known them once or twice before, with a crippling infirmity. He was a neurotic; he was beset by anxiety, so that he could barely cope with his life.

Much as I liked him, honestly as I wished to do my best for him and Vera and see them happy, I found it a tax to listen to the unwindings of an anxiety neurosis, which nearly always to an outsider seemed mechanical and tedious, for hours an evening and for evenings on end. Once he was started on his ‘condition’, as he called it, it was a joke at my expense that I had once thought him inarticulate. Yet, if my listening was any good to him, I had to continue.

I did not know whether I was any use to him, except that anyone ready to listen and not disapprove gave him an hour or two’s relief. He had been to doctors, spending a disproportionate amount of his pay for years, but now he had lost hope in them. He gained hope, though, with a neurotic’s fitfulness, as I told him a few sensible platitudes: that he wasn’t unique, that plenty of others — more than he thought — didn’t find themselves easy to live with. I had not done much better than he had, I told him; he ought to be warned by my example, and not give way to his nature. Otherwise he would fmd himself living as a looker-on, self-indulgent and alone.

The better I knew him, though, the more I liked him and the less I thought of his chances. By the end of the year, when he was repeating to me the stories that I knew by heart, I was coming to believe that he was too far gone.

One night in December, not long after Norman had left me, Mrs Beauchamp’s head came ectoplasmically round the door. She had not made the instantaneous appearance with which she greeted the departure of a woman visitor; it must have been ten minutes since the door clicked to, but I was still sitting in my chair.

‘You’re looking tired, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ she whispered.

I felt it: to be any support to Norman, one needed to have one’s patience completely under control, to show no nerves at all.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find you just a little something to eat, which I’d invite you to have upstairs, if I had got my place quite shipshape, which I haven’t been able to.’

Although I was hungry, I regarded Mrs Beauchamp with qualified enthusiasm. These fits of good nature were spontaneous enough, and had no motive except to cheer one up — but in retrospect she admired them, realized how she had performed services right outside the contract, and so felt justified in lying in bed an hour later.

Mrs Beauchamp returned into my room with a tin of salmon, a loaf of bread, two plates, one fork and one knife.

‘If you don’t mind me cleaning the cutlery after you’ve had a little snack,’ she said. ‘Somehow I haven’t been able to manage all the washing-up.’

Thus I got through my salmon, and then sat by while Mrs Beauchamp munched hers. Despite the shiny look of enjoyment on her face she felt obliged to remark: ‘Of course, it isn’t the same as fresh.’

Suddenly I was reminded of my mother, to whom fresh salmon was one of the emblems of the higher life which she had so proudly longed for.

‘But I like to think of you having something tasty last thing at night. I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but I do my best, Mr Eliot.’

She looked at me with an expression at the same time invulnerable, confident and ingratiating.

‘Some do their best and some don’t , Mr Eliot,’ she whispered. ‘That’s why it’s so unfair on people like you and me, if I may say so of both of us, who really set themselves out to do their best. Do you think anyone appreciates us? Do you think so?’

Mrs Beauchamp was becoming more excited: as she did so her expression stayed firm and impassive, but her eyes popped, and her cheeks became more shiny: her voice sank into a more insidious whisper.

I shook my head.

‘When I think of the help that you try to give people — and so do I, if you don’t mind me saying so, in my own way, without pushing myself forward — when I think of the help we give, and then what certain persons do! Sometimes I wonder if you ever let yourself realize what those people do , Mr Eliot.’

She went on whispering: ‘I scarcely dare think of it.’

Her voice became still more hushed: ‘If we looked out of that window, Mr Eliot, we could see the windows on the other side of the square. Have you ever thought what we should see if we pulled the blinds ? It’s terrible to think of. Sometimes I fancy what it would be like if I became invisible, like the man in the film, and had to go and stand in all the rooms in the square, one after another, so that I should be there in the corner and couldn’t help seeing what people do.’

Mrs Beauchamp, day-dreaming of a voyeuse’s paradise, seeping herself into invisibility, sat enormous in her pink satin, cheeks flaming and eyes dense.

‘If I had to watch all that, Mr Eliot,’ she said, ‘I doubt if I should ever be the same again.’

I said that I was sure she would not be.

‘Rather than do what some people do,’ she said, ‘I’d stay as I am for ever with my own little place upstairs, looking after myself as well as I can, and doing my best for my tenants and friends, if you don’t mind me calling you that, Mr Eliot. People may laugh at me for doing my best, but they needn’t think I mind. Some of them don’t like me, you don’t have to pretend, Mr Eliot, I’m not such a softy as I look and I tell you they don’t like me. And I don’t mind that either. If a person does her best it doesn’t matter what people think of her. I expect they believe I’m lonely. But I am happier than they are, Mr Eliot, and they know it. No one’s ever said — there’s poor old Mrs Beauchamp, she wants someone to look after her, she’s not fit to live by herself.’

It was quite true. No one had thought of her so.

‘I shouldn’t be very pleased if anyone did say that,’ Mrs Beauchamp remarked in a whisper, but with ferocity.

Then affable, glutinous again, she said: ‘What I say is, the important thing is to grow old with dignity. I know you will agree with me, Mr Eliot. Of course, when I come to the evening of my life, and I don’t regard myself as quite there yet, if some decent good man had the idea that he and I might possibly join forces, then I don’t say I should turn down the proposition without thinking it over very, very seriously.’