Charles Snow - Homecomings

I said: ‘Yes, we must save him from everything we can.’

It was a signal of understanding between us. But Geoffrey, who had also heard her affirmation, appeared to have missed it. He replied, as though illness was the only point: ‘Well, even if he does show any signs, which incidentally is much less likely than not, you needn’t take it too tragically. We should be pretty incompetent if we didn’t get it in time. And children are very tough animals, you ought to remember that.’

He said it with detached satisfaction. Then, in a totally different tone, he said: ‘I’m glad I was able to do something for your child.’

In the constricted office, he was sitting on the desk, above us, and, as he spoke he looked down first at her, then at me. In the same tone which was sharp, insistent, not so much benevolent as condescending, he said: ‘I’m glad I was able to do something for you.’

He was free with us now. Before, he had been constrained, because he was a man, light-natured but upright, who did not find forgiveness easy, who indeed felt not revengeful but inferior and ineffective in the presence of those whom he could not forgive. Now he had us under an obligation. His was the moral initiative. He was ready to be fond of her again: he was even ready to like me. He felt happy, released, and good.

So, it might have seemed incongruous, did we. She, and I also, had previously felt for him that resentment which one bears towards someone to whom one has done wrong and harm — a resentment in which there lurks a kind of despising mockery, a dislike in which one makes him smaller than he is. Now he had been powerful when we were abject. We had been in his hands; and, for both of us, for her more violently, but for me also, the feeling swept hidden shame away.

He sat there, above us, his head near the light bulb. Margaret and I looked up at him; her face was blanched with sleeplessness and anxiety, her irises were blood-streaked; so must mine have been. He showed no sign of a broken night: as usual, vain about his appearance, he had his hair elegantly brushed and parted, he smelt of shaving powder.

He was happy: we were sleepy with joy.

JUST over a fortnight later, on a humid July afternoon, the clouds so dense that some windows were already lit at six o’clock, Margaret called at my office to take me home. She was wearing a summer frock, and in the heat she was relaxed with pleasure, with delectable fatigue, coming from the hospital, where she had been arranging for the child to return to us next day.

He was well and cheerful, she said. So was Maurice, who had escaped the infection altogether: there was no one in her charge to worry her now, she was lazy with pleasure, just as she had been when Gilbert first brought her into my sick-room.

Just then there sounded Rose’s punctilious tap at the door. As soon as he saw Margaret, whom as it happened he had not met, he broke into apologies so complex and profuse that even I began to feel embarrassed. He was so extremely sorry: he had looked forward all these years to the pleasure of meeting Mrs Eliot: and now he had just butted in, he was making a nuisance of himself, he only wanted to distract her husband for a moment, but even that was an infliction. They had neither of them got better at casual introductions: Rose, inflexibly, wearing his black coat and striped trousers in the steaming heat, went on talking according to his idea of gallantry, his eyes strained; Margaret faced him as she might as a girl at one of her father’s exhibitions, hating the social forms, doing her best to be easy with an awkward and aspiring clerk.

I saw that they mildly liked each other, but only as partners in distress. When Rose had finished his piece of business with me, which with his usual economy took five minutes, he made his protracted and obsequious goodbyes. After he had at last departed, I told her that he was one of the most formidable men I had known, in some ways the most formidable: she had heard it before, but now in the flesh she could not credit it. But she was too tired, too happy to argue; she did not want to disagree, even on the surface: she said, let us go home.

As soon as we had left the well-like corridors of the old building and went into the street, we pushed against the greenhouse air: sweat pricked at the temples: it was in such weather, I remembered, holding Margaret’s arm, that I first walked from Lufkin’s office to the Chelsea house, getting on for twenty years before.

Now, in the same weather, we turned the other way, sauntered up Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square, and there got a bus. I told her how I had once sat on a bus close by with old Bevill, and he had mentioned her father’s name, which gave me a card of re-entry into her life. As the bus spurted and braked up Regent Street, we talked about the child as we might have done in bed between waking and sleeping, the diary of his days, the conspiracy of hope which, during his illness, we had put away as though we had never played with it.

We talked of the children and then put them aside: along Oxford Street we were talking of ourselves. We talked at random, of the first nights we spent together, of what we had feared for each other in the last month, of thoughts of each other during the years we were separated.

As we got off at Marble Arch and walked along the pavement rustling with litter, under the trees, Margaret gave a smile of pretended sarcasm, and said: ‘Yes, I suppose there are some who’d say we had come through.’

I put my arm round her and held her to me as we walked slowly, as slowly as though we planned to spin the evening’s happiness out. The vestigial headache, seeping in with the saturated air, seemed like a sensual ache. There was a smell of hot grass and fumes, and, although the lime was almost over, just once I fancied that I caught the last of it.

Her smile sharp, she said: ‘I suppose some would really say that we’d come through.’

She had more courage than I had. She was not anything like so given to insuring herself: her spirit was so strong that when she rejoiced, she rejoiced without qualification. To her, victories were absolute; at that moment, as we walked together, she had all of them she wanted: she wanted no more than this. And yet, by a perversity which she would not lose, she, whose fibres spoke of complete happiness, could not use the words.

That evening she had to dissimulate her faith, put on a smile that tried to be ironic, and deny the moment in which we stood. Just as I had done so often: but now it was I, out of comparison more suspicious of fate than she was, who spoke without troubling to placate it.

We were in sight of home. A light was shining in one room: the others stood black, eyeless, in the leaden light. It was a homecoming such as, for years, I thought I was not to know. Often in my childhood, I had felt dread as I came near home. It had been worse when I went, as a young man, towards the Chelsea house. Now, walking with Margaret, that dread had gone. In sight of home my steps began to quicken, I should soon be there with her.

It was a homecoming such as I had imagined when I was lonely, but as one happening to others, not to me.