Charles Snow - Homecomings

ON an evening in May, just after the German war had ended, Betty Vane called on me. I had seen little of her during the spring: once or twice she had rung up, but I had been busy with Vera or Norman or some other acquaintance; Betty, always ready to believe she was not wanted, had been put off. Yet she was one of the people I liked best and trusted most, and that evening when she came in, bustling and quick-footed, I told her that I had missed her.

‘You’ve got enough on your hands without me,’ she said.

It sounded ungracious. She had never been able to produce the easy word. She was looking at me, her eyes uncomfortable in her beaky face.

She said curtly: ‘Can you lend me fifty pounds?’

I was surprised, for a moment — because previously when she was hard-up I had pressed money on her and she would not take it. She was extravagant, whenever she had money she splashed it round: she was constantly harassed about it, she lived in a clutter of card debts, bills, pawnshops, bailiffs. Hers was, however, the poverty of someone used to being dunned for a hundred pounds when behind her there were trusts of thousands. She had invariably refused to borrow from me, or from anyone who had to earn his money. Why was she doing so now? Suddenly I realized. Bad at easy words, bad at taking favours, she was trying to repay what I had just told her: this was her way of saying that she in turn trusted me.

As she put my cheque into her bag, she said in the same curt, forbidding tone: ‘Now you can give me some advice.’

‘What is it?’

‘It involves someone else.’

‘You ought to know by now that I can keep quiet,’ I said.

‘Yes, I know that.’

She went on awkwardly: ‘Well, a man seems to be getting fond of me.’

‘Who is he?’

‘I can’t tell you.’ She would say nothing about him, except that he was about my own age. Her explanation became so constrained as to be almost unintelligible — but now she was speaking of this man ‘liking her’, of how he wanted to ‘settle down’ with her. Every time she had confided in me before, it had been the other way round.

‘What shall I do?’ she asked me.

‘Do I know him?’

‘I can’t tell you anything about him,’ she replied.

‘You’re not giving me much to go on,’ I told her.

‘I’d like to tell you the whole story, but I can’t,’ she said, with the air of a little girl put on her honour.

I was thinking, a good many men were frightened of her, she was so sharp-eyed and suspicious, her self-distrust making her seem distrustful of others. But when she let herself depend on anyone her faith was blind.

‘Do you love him?’ I asked her.

Without hesitation, straight and confiding, she replied: ‘No.’

‘Do you respect him?’ For her, no relation would be tolerable without it. This time she hesitated. At last she said: ‘I think so.’

She added: ‘He’s a curious man.’

I looked at her. She smiled back, a little resentfully.

‘On the face of it,’ I said, ‘I can’t possibly say go ahead, can I? But you know more than I do.’

‘I’ve not been exactly successful so far.’

‘I just don’t see what the advantages are. For you, I mean.’

For the first time that evening she gazed at me with affection.

‘We’re all getting on, you know. You’re nearly forty, and don’t you forget it. I was thirty-seven this March.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good reason.’

‘We haven’t all got your patience.’

‘I still don’t think it’s a good reason for you.’

She gave a cracking curse.

‘I haven’t got all that to look forward to,’ she said.

She was so unsure of herself that she had to break in, before I could reply: ‘Let’s skip it. Let’s go to a party.’

A common acquaintance had invited her, she wanted to take me. In the taxi, on the way to Chelsea, she was smiling with affection, the awkwardness had gone, the resented confidence; we might have just met, I might have been giving her a lift to a party, each of us pleasurably wondering whether anything would come of it. After all the years she had gone to parties, she still had the flush, the bright eye, the excited hope that something, someone, might turn up.

As soon as we arrived at the studio, I saw a man I knew; pushing into the corner of the room, he and I stood outside the crowd and he told me about a new book. While I was listening, I caught a voice from the window-seat behind us. From the first words, I recognized it. It was R S Robinson’s.

He was sitting with his back to me, his beautiful hair shining silver, his neck red. Listening to him was a woman of perhaps thirty, who looked intelligent, amiable and plain. It was soon clear that she had recently published a novel.

‘I have to go back a long way to find a writer who opens the window of experience to me as you do,’ he was saying. ‘Not that you do it all the time. Sometimes you’re rather tantalizing, I must tell you. Sometimes you give me the sensation that you are opening a window but not running up the blinds. But at your best, in those first thirty pages — I have to go back a long way. Who do you think I have to go back to?’

‘You’re making too much of it,’ came the woman’s voice, abashed, well-bred.

‘I have to go back a long way.’ Robinson was speaking with his old authority, with the slightly hectoring note of one whose flattery is rejected and who has to double it: ‘Beyond my dear Joyce — I’m not telling you that your achievement is equal to his, but I do say your vision is nearer to the springs of life. I have to go back beyond him. And beyond poor old Henry James. Certainly beyond George Eliot. They can say what they like, but she was heavy as porridge most of the time, and porridgy writers have to be much greater than she was. Those first pages of yours aren’t porridgy at all, they’re like one’s first taste of first-class pâté . I have to go back a bit beyond her, why I don’t mind going back to — you won’t guess who—’

‘Do tell me.’

‘Mrs Henry Wood.’

Even then, flattering her for his own purposes, he could not resist that piece of diablerie, that elaborate let-down. She sounded a modest woman, but there was disappointment and mild protest in her voice: ‘But she was nothing like so good as George Eliot.’

Robinson rapidly recovered himself.

‘George Eliot had all the talent in the world, and not a particle of genius. Mrs Henry Wood had very little talent and just a tiny vestige of the real blessed thing. That’s what people ought to have said about you, and believe me it’s the most important thing that can be said about any writer. I should like to have the responsibility of making them say it about you. Does anyone realize it?’

‘No one’s ever told me.’

‘I always say it takes an entrepreneur with a bit of his own genius to recognize a writer who has it too. That’s why it’s a providential occasion, you and I meeting here tonight. I should like to put over another piece of the real thing before I die. I’m absolutely sure I could do it for you.’

‘What firm is yours, Mr Robinson?’

Robinson laughed.

‘At present I can’t be said to have a firm. I shall have to revive the one I used to have. Haven’t you heard of R S Robinson?’

She looked embarrassed.

‘Oh dear,’ he said, with one of his bursts of hilarious honesty, ‘if you’d been at a party like this twenty-five years ago and hadn’t heard of me, I should have left you and gone to find someone interesting. But you will hear of R S Robinson’s again. We’re going to do things together, you and I. I assure you, we’re bound to put each other on the map.’