Charles Snow - Homecomings

‘You never know what might happen,’ he said, and blew out wonderful prospects like so many balloons. With three books they would remember him again, he said, and he gave up balloon blowing and spoke of the books he would bring out. He stopped flattering Sheila or using the other dodges which he believed infallible, and all of a sudden one saw that his taste had stayed incorrupt. It was a hard, austere, anti-romantic taste, similar to Sheila’s own.

‘I could do for them,’ he said, ‘what I did before.’

‘You want some money,’ said Sheila.

‘I only want enough to put someone on the map,’ he cried.

She asked: ‘Is money all you need?’

‘No. I want someone like you to keep people from getting the wrong impression. You see, they sometimes think I’m a bit of an ass.’

He was not putting on one of his acts. He had said it angrily, hotly, out of resentment, not trying to get round her. But soon he was master of himself again, enough to calculate that he might extract an answer that night. He must have calculated also that she was on his side and would not shift — for he made an excuse to go to the lavatory, so as to leave the two of us alone.

As soon as I returned without him to the dining-table, where we were still sitting, Sheila said the one word: ‘Well?’

We had been drinking brandy, and with a stiff mass-production gesture, she kept pushing the decanter with the side of her little finger.

‘Well?’ she said again.

I believed, then and afterwards, that if I had intervened I could have stopped her. She still trusted me, and no one else. However much she was set on helping him, she would have listened if I had warned her again. But I had already decided not to. She had found an interest, it would do more good than harm, I thought.

‘If you want to risk it,’ I said, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t.’

‘Do you think any better of him?’

I was thinking, he had raised the temperature of living for her. Then I realized that he had done the same for me. If she was taken in, so was I.

I grinned and said: ‘I must say I’ve rather enjoyed myself.’

She nodded, and then said after a pause: ‘He wouldn’t be grateful, would he?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Don’t soften it.’ Her great eyes swung round on me like searchlights. ‘No one’s grateful for being looked after. He’d be less grateful than most.’

It was the kind of bitter truth that she never spared herself or others, the only kind of truth that she thought worth facing. Who else, I wondered, would have faced it at that moment, just as she was committing herself? Other people could do what she was doing, but not many with that foresight of what lay ahead.

We sat silent, her eyes still levelled at mine, but gradually becoming unfocused, as though looking past me, looking a great distance away.

‘If I don’t do it,’ she said, ‘someone else will. Oh well, I suppose it’s more important to me than it is to him.’

Soon afterwards Robinson came back. As he opened the door, we were quiet, and he thought it was because of him. His manner was jaunty, but even his optimistic nerve was strained, and as he sat down he played, too insidiously, too uneasily, his opening trick.

‘Mrs Eliot, I’ve been thinking, you really ought to write a book yourself.’

‘Never mind about that,’ she said in a cold, brittle tone.

‘I mean it very much.’

‘Never mind.’

The words were final, and Robinson looked down at the table.

She remarked, as though it were obvious: ‘I may as well tell you straight away, I will do what I can to help.’

For the second time that night, Robinson flushed to the temples. In a mutter, absent-minded, bewildered, he thanked her without raising his eyes, and then took out a handkerchief and wiped it hard across his forehead.

‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind, sir, if I have another little drink?’ he said to me, forcing his jollity. ‘After all, we’ve got something to celebrate.’ He was becoming himself again. ‘After all, this is an historic occasion.’

AFTER that February evening, Sheila told me little of her dealings with Robinson, but I knew they preoccupied her. When, in the early summer, she heard that her parents wished to spend a night in our house, she spoke as though it were an intolerable interruption.

‘I can’t waste the time,’ she said to me, her mouth working.

I said that we could hardly put them off again; this time Mr Knight was visiting a specialist.

‘Why can’t I put them off? No one will enjoy it.’

‘It will give more pain not to have them.’

‘They’ve given enough pain in their time. Anyway,’ she said, ‘just for once I’ve got something better to do.’

She wrote back, refusing to have them. Her concentration on Robinson’s scheme seemed to have become obsessive, so that it was excruciating for her to be distracted even by a letter. But Mrs Knight was not a sensitive woman. She replied by return, morally indignant because Sheila had made an excuse not to go home to the vicarage last Christmas, so that we had not seen them for eighteen months; Sheila’s father, for all Mrs Knight’s care and his own gallantness, would not always be there for his daughter to see; she was showing no sense of duty.

Even on Sheila, who dreaded their company and who blamed her torments of self-consciousness upon them, the family authority still held its hold. No one else could have overruled her, but her mother did.

So, on a morning in May, a taxi stopped at the garden gate, and, as I watched from an upstairs window, Mr and Mrs Knight were making their way very slowly up the path. Very slowly, because Mr Knight was taking tiny steps and pausing between them, leaning all the time upon his wife. She was a big woman, as strong as Sheila, but Mr Knight tottered above her, his hand on her heavy shoulder, his stomach swelling out from the middle chest, not far below the dog collar; he was teetering along like a massive walking casualty, helped out of battle by an orderly.

I went out on to the path to greet them, whilst Sheila stayed at the door.

‘Good morning, Lewis,’ said Mr Knight very faintly.

‘No talking till we get him in,’ Mrs Knight announced.

‘I’m sorry to lay my bones among you,’ whispered Mr Knight.

‘Don’t strain yourself talking, dear,’ said Mrs Knight.

At last the progress ended in an armchair in the drawing-room, where Mr Knight closed his eyes. It was a warm morning, and through a half-open window blew a zephyr breath.

‘Is that too much for you, dear?’ said Mrs Knight, looking accusingly at me.

‘Perhaps a little,’ came a whisper from the armchair. ‘Perhaps a little.’

At once Mrs Knight rammed the window up. She acted as though she had one thought alone, which was to keep her husband alive.

‘How are you?’ I asked, standing by the chair.

‘As you see,’ came the answer, almost inaudible.

‘What do the doctors say?’

‘They know very little, Lewis, they know very little.’

‘So long as we can keep him free from strain,’ said Mrs Knight implacably.

‘I sleep night and day,’ breathed Mr Knight. ‘ Night and day .’

Once more he composed his clever, drooping, petulant face. Then he whispered, ‘Sheila! Sheila, I haven’t seen my daughter!’ As she came near, he turned his head, as though by a herculean effort, through a few degrees, in order to present her his cheek to be kissed. Sheila stood over him, strained, white-faced. For an instant it looked to me as though she could not force herself. Then she bent down, gave him a token kiss, and retreated out of our circle into the window seat.