Charles Snow - Homecomings

‘It can’t come unstuck now, can it?’ Gilbert said, flushed, his eyes bloodshot. I told him that Rose’s nomination would have to be accepted.

‘Damn it,’ cried Gilbert, ‘I never reckoned on finishing up as a Civil Servant.’

‘What did you reckon on?’ I knew he would scarcely be able to answer: for in his career he had always been a curiously vague and unselfseeking man.

‘Oh,’ he said, looking badgered, ‘there was a time when I thought I might make something of it as a soldier. That was before the doctors did me in the eye. And then I thought I might collect some cash with that old shark Lufkin. I don’t know. But the last thing I should ever have dreamt of was finding myself here for good. To tell you the honest truth,’ he burst out, ‘I should never have credited that I was clever enough!’

Oddly, in a certain restricted sense, he was not: he had nothing of the legalistic accuracy and lucidity of the high-class Civil Servant: the deficiency would stop him going very far, as Rose and the others had agreed that day: he would most likely get one rung higher and stop there.

Nevertheless, he had put up a good performance before those men so different from himself. He was so little stiff that Rose felt his own stiffness soften, and enjoyed the sensation: sometimes his refusal to stay at a distance, his zest for breathing down one’s neck, made him paradoxically welcome to correct and buttoned natures. Hector Rose and his colleagues did not over-value him much; they were too experienced, and their judgement too cool for that; they were probably right to keep him; but still, there was no doubt that, if the decision had been a closer thing, he had the advantage that respectable men liked him.

I wondered what they would have thought, if they had guessed at his wilder activities. For instance, it would have startled them to know that, sitting in my office that afternoon, I — after being a friend for a dozen years and his boss for several — was frightened of him. Frightened, that is, of his detective work. I did not dare let out a hint that I was slipping away for tea. Even then I was still nervous of his antennae, as though they might pick up the secret in the air.

Thus, sweating and fretted, I was late when at last I reached the café opposite St James’s Park tube station. Margaret was sitting there, stubs of cigarettes in the ashtray. She looked anxious, but unreproachful and glad.

‘I’ll tell you why I was late,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter, you’re here now.’

‘No, I’d better tell you.’ I could not have got away from Gilbert, I explained, without the danger of his finding out that I was meeting her.

‘Oh well,’ she said. She spoke as though she had not admitted to herself the thought of concealment. At the same moment, her face was flushed with happiness and a kind of defiant shame. Firmly, she began to ask me what I had been doing.

‘I told you, nothing that matters.’

‘No,’ she said, still with energy and animation, ‘I don’t even know where you’re living. You know much more about me than I do about you.’

I told her what I was busy with. I said that I was not held any longer by the chessboard of power: I had gone as far as I intended in the official life.

‘I thought so,’ she said with pleasure, understanding my present better than my past.

‘I am not sure that it would have happened but for you.’

‘It would,’ she said. The cups of tea steamed, a cigarette end smouldered against the metal ashtray, the smell was acrid: I saw her as though the smoked glass of care had been snatched from in front of my eyes. Twenty minutes before I had been on edge lest anyone, as it might be Gilbert, should pass the window and see us sitting there. Now, although we were smiling at each other and our faces would have given us away to an acquaintance, I felt that secrets did not matter, or more exactly that no one could notice us; I had been taken by one of those states, born of understanding, desire, and joy, in which we seem to ourselves anonymous and safe. It was a state which I had seen dangerous to discreet men going through an illicit love-affair, when suddenly, in a fugue of astonished bliss, such a man can behave as if he believed himself invisible.

Her hand was on the table, and I touched her fingers. We had made love together many times, we had none of that surprise to come: but, at the touch, I shivered as though it were a complete embrace.

‘Let me talk to you,’ I said.

‘Can’t we leave it?’ she cried.

‘Can we?’

‘It’d be better to leave it, just for a while.’ She spoke in a tone I had not heard — it held both joy and fear, or something sharper than fear.

‘I used to be pretty expert at leaving things just for a while,’ I said, ‘and it wasn’t an unqualified success.’

‘We’re peaceful now,’ she broke out.

She added: ‘When a thing is said, we can’t come back where we were.’

‘I know it.’ There was a hush. I found myself trying to frame the words, just as when she first forced me on that evening years before — with an inarticulateness more tormenting to one used to being articulate, with the dumbness I only knew when I was compelled to dredge my feelings. ‘It is the same with me,’ I said at length, ‘as when I first met you.’

She did not move or utter.

‘I hope,’ I said, the words dragging out, ‘it is the same with you.’

She said: ‘You don’t hope: you know.’

The room was dark; in the street the sun had gone out. She cried — her voice was transformed, it was light with trust, sharp with the curiosity of present joy: ‘When were you certain it was the same with you?’

‘Some time ago.’

‘Was it that night at my father’s?’

‘If not before,’ I answered. ‘I’ve thought of you very much. But I was afraid my imagination might be cheating me.’

‘What time that night?’

‘I think when you were standing there, before we spoke.’

I asked: ‘When were you certain?’

‘Later.’

She added: ‘But I wanted you to come that night.’

‘If we hadn’t met again there, we should have soon,’ I said.

‘I talked about you to my father. I lied to myself, but I was trying to improve the chances of meeting you—’

‘You needn’t worry, I should have seen to it that we did.’

‘I’m not worrying,’ she said. ‘But I wanted to tell you that we’re both to blame.’

To both of us, blame seemed remote or rather inconceivable; the state of happiness suffused us with its own virtue.

We said no more except chit-chat. Yes, when she could get Helen to look after the child again, she would let me know. It was time for her to go. We went out into the street, where the light had that particular density which gives both gentleness and clarity to the faces of passers-by. The faces moved past us, softly so it seemed, as I watched Margaret put her foot on the taxi-step and she pressed my hand.

IN the same café a week later Margaret sat opposite me, her face open and softened, as though breathing in the present moment. When I first met her I had been enraptured by her capacity for immediate joy, and so I was now. There had been none of the dead blanks of love between us, such as a man like me might have run into. Once there had been struggle, resentment, and dislike, but not the dead blank.

In the aura from the table-lamp, she was smiling. Outside the window the afternoon light was muted, so that on the pavement faces stood out with a special delicacy. She took the sight in, content and rapacious, determined to possess the moment.

‘It’s like last week,’ she cried. ‘But last week it was a few shades darker, wasn’t it?’