Charles Snow - Homecomings

Then I tapped him on the arm. He looked up to see who I was. With complete good humour he cried: ‘Why, it’s Lewis Eliot! Good evening to you, sir!’

I smiled at the young woman, but Robinson, sparkling with cunning, did not intend me to talk to her. Instead, he faced into the room, and said, either full of hilarity or putting on a splendid show of it: ‘Is this a fair sample of the post-war spirit, should you say?’

I broke in: ‘It’s a long time since I met you last.’

Robinson was certain that I was threatening his latest plan, but he was not out-faced. He had not altered since the morning I recovered Sheila’s money; his suit was shabby and frayed at the cuffs, but so were many prosperous men’s after six years of war. He said to the young woman, with candour, with indomitable dignity: ‘Mr Eliot was interested in my publishing scheme a few years ago. I’m sorry to say that nothing came of it then.’

‘What have you been doing since?’ I asked.

‘Nothing much, sir, nothing very much.’

‘What did you do in the war?’

‘ Nothing at all .’ He was gleeful. He added: ‘You’re thinking that I was too old for them to get me. Of course I was, they couldn’t have touched me. But I decided to offer my services, so I got a job in — (he gave me the name of an aircraft firm) — and they subsidized me for four years and I did nothing at all .’

The young woman was laughing: he took so much delight in having no conscience that she also felt delight. Just as Sheila used to.

‘How did you spend your time?’ she asked.

‘I discovered how to be a slow clerk . Believe me, no one’s applied real intelligence to the problem before. By the time I left, I could spin a reasonable hour’s work out into at least two days. And that gave me time for serious things, that is, thinking out the programme you and I were talking about before Mr Eliot joined us.’

He grinned at me with malicious high spirits, superiority and contempt.

‘I suppose you’ve been doing your best for your country, sir?’ Just as I remembered him, he felt a match for any man alive.

I inquired: ‘Have you got a job now?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Robinson.

I wondered if, with his bizarre frugality, he had saved money out of his wages at the factory. Then I spoke across him to his companion: ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced, have we?’

Soon after I heard her name I left them, to Robinson’s surprise and relief. I left them with Robinson’s triumphant ‘Good evening to you, sir’ fluting across the room, and muttered to Betty that I was slipping away. Alone in that room, she knew that something had gone wrong for me; disappointed after the promise of the early evening, she could read in my face some inexplicable distress.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

She was right. I had been upset by the sound of the young woman’s name. As soon as I heard it, I knew she was a cousin of Charles March’s.

She was likely, therefore, to be a woman of means, and in fact Robinson would not be pouring flattery over her if she were not. But that did not matter; it would be easy to pass word to Charles about Robinson; it was not for her sake that I left the party, went out into Glebe Place, turned down towards the Embankment, and, without realizing it, towards the house I had lived in years before. I was not driven so because of anything that happened at that party; no, it was because, for the first time for years, my grief over Sheila had come back, as grinding as when, after her death, I went into our empty room.

At the first murmur of Robinson’s voice, I had felt a presentiment; listening to what otherwise might have amused me, I had been rigid, nails against my palms, but still impervious, until, when I asked the young woman her name, the reply set loose a flood of the past. Yet I had only heard that name before in circumstances entirely undramatic, having nothing to do with Sheila or her death: perhaps Charles March had mentioned it in the days we saw each other most often, before either of us had married, walking about in London or at his father’s country-house. That was all; but the flood that name set loose drove me down the dark turning of Cheyne Row towards the river.

Down Cheyne Row the windows were shining, from the pub at the Embankment corner voices hallooed; I was beset as though I were still married and was going through the back streets on my way home.

I was not seeing, nor even remembering: it was not her death that was possessing me: it was just that, walking quickly beside the bright houses, their windows open to the hot evening breeze, I had nothing but a sense of failure, loss, misery. The year before, when I received bad news, fresher and more sharply wounding, the news of Margaret’s child, I could put a face on it, and make myself shove the sadness away. Now this older sadness overcame me: my stoicism would not answer me. I felt as I had not done since I was eight years old, tears on my cheeks.

Soon I was standing outside the house, which, since I left it in the spring after Sheila died, I had not been near, which I had made detours not to see. Yet the sight dulled my pain, instead of sharpening it. One outer wall had been blasted down, so that, where Mrs Wilson used to have her sitting-room, willowherb was growing, and on the first floor a bath jutted nakedly against the cloud-dark sky. The light from an Embankment lamp fell on the garden-path where grass had burst between the flags.

Gazing up at the house, I saw the windows boarded up. Among them I could pick out those of our bedroom and the room next door. In that room Sheila’s body had lain. The thought scarcely touched me, I just looked up at the boards, without much feeling, sad but with a kind of hypnotized relief.

I did not stay there long. Slowly, under the plane trees, past the unpainted and sun-blistered houses, I walked along the Embankment to my flat. The botanical gardens were odorous in the humid wind, and on the bridge the collar of lights was shivering. Once the thought struck me: had I come home? Was it the same home, from which I had not been able to escape? The lonely flat — how different was it from the house I had just stood outside?

DURING the rest of that year, I was on the edge of two dramas. The first was secret, known only by a handful of us, and was going to overshadow much of our lives; it was the result of those meetings of old Bevill’s early in the war, of the intrigues of Lufkin and the science of men like my brother; it was the making of the atomic bomb. The second was public, open each morning for a week to anyone who read newspapers, and important to not more than half a dozen people of whom, although I did not fully realize it till later, I was one.

Innocent, tossed about by blind chance, Norman Lacey, and through him Vera, lost their privacy that autumn — for Norman’s father was tried at the Old Bailey. If he was guilty, the crime was a squalid one; but the after-effects of the trial ravaged those two, so that for a time I thought that Norman at least would not recover. What they went through, how she was strong enough to carry them both, was a story by itself — but for me, the lesson was how poorly I myself behaved.

Norman and Vera asked help from me, help which would be embarrassing, and possibly a little damaging, for me to give. They looked to me to go into court with a piece of evidence which could do neither them, nor Norman’s father, any practical good, and might do me some practical harm. It was evidence so trivial that no lawyer would have subpoenaed me to give it. All it did in effect was to show that I knew them well; clutching at any hope, they had a sort of faith that my name might protect them.