Charles Snow - Homecomings

She sat up, her back against the bed-head, her eyes full on me.

‘Why should he be grateful?’

‘He’s tried to do you harm.’

‘Why should he be grateful?’ Her glacial anger was rising: it was long since I had seen it. ‘Why should he or anyone else be grateful just because someone interferes with his life? Interferes, I tell you, for reasons of their own. I wasn’t trying to do anything for R S R’s sake, I just wanted to keep myself from the edge, and well you know it. Why shouldn’t he say anything he wants? I don’t deserve anything else.’

‘You do,’ I said.

Her eyes had not left me; her face had gone harsh and cruel.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You’ve given years of your life to taking care of me, haven’t you?’

‘I shouldn’t call it that.’

‘What else would you call it? You’ve been taking care of someone who’s useless by herself. Much good has it done you.’ In a cold, sadic tone, she added: ‘Or me either.’

‘I know that well enough.’

‘Well, you’ve sacrificed things you value, haven’t you? You used to mind about your career. And you’ve sacrificed things most men want. You’d have liked children and a satisfactory bed. You’ve done that for me? — Why?’

‘You know the reason.’

‘I never have known, but it must be a reason of your own.’ Her face looked ravaged, vivid, exhausted, as she cried out: ‘And do you think I’m grateful?’

After that fierce and contemptuous cry, she sat quite still. I saw her eyes, which did not fall before mine, slowly redden, and tears dropped on to her cheeks. It was not often that she cried, but always in states like this. It frightened me that night even though I had watched it before — that she did not raise a hand but sat unmoving, the tears running down her cheeks as down a window pane, wetting the neck of her dressing-gown.

At the end of such an outburst, as I knew by heart, there was nothing for me to do. Neither tenderness nor roughness helped her; it was no use speaking until the stillness broke, and she was reaching for a handkerchief and a cigarette.

We were due at a Soho restaurant at half past eight, to meet my brother. When I reminded her, she shook her head.

‘It’s no use. You’ll have to go by yourself.’

I said that I could put him off without any harm done. ‘You go,’ she said. ‘You’re better out of this.’

I was uneasy about leaving her alone in that state, and she knew it.

‘I shall be all right,’ she said.

‘You’re sure?’

‘I shall be all right.’

So with the familiar sense of escape, guilty escape, I left her: three hours later, with the familiar anxiety, I returned.

She was sitting in almost the same position as when I went away. For an instant I thought she had stayed immobile, but then, with relief, I noticed that she had fetched in her gramophone; there was a pile of records on the floor.

‘Had a good time?’ she asked.

She inquired about my brother, as though in a clumsy inarticulate attempt to make amends. In the same constrained but friendly fashion, she asked: ‘What am I to do about R S R?’

She had been saving up the question.

‘Are you ready to drop him?’

‘I leave it to you.’

Then I knew she was not ready. It was still important for her, keeping him afloat; and I must not make it more difficult than need be.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you knew what he was like all along, and perhaps it doesn’t alter the position, when he’s behaving like himself—’

She smiled, lighter-hearted because I had understood.

Then I told her that one of us must let Robinson know, as explicitly as we could speak, that we had heard of his slanders and did not propose to stand them. I should be glad, and more than glad, to talk to him; but it would probably do more good if she took it on herself. ‘That goes without saying,’ she said.

She got up from her bed, and walked round to the stool in front of her looking-glass. From there she held out a hand and took mine, not as a caress, but as though she was clinching a bargain. She said in an uninflected tone: ‘I hate this life. If it weren’t for you, I don’t think I should stay in it.’

It was unlike her to go in for rhetoric, but I was so relieved that she was stable again, so touched by the strained and surreptitious apology, that I scarcely listened to her, and instead just put my other hand over hers.

WHEN Sheila taxed Robinson with spreading slander he was not embarrassed; he just said blandly that his enemies were making mischief. When I accompanied her to his office a few days later, he received us with his twinkling old-fashioned politeness, quite unabashed, as though her accusations were a breach of taste which he was ready to forget.

He had taken two garret rooms in Maiden Lane. ‘Always have the kind of address that people expect from you,’ he said, showing me writing-paper headed R S Robinson, Ltd, 16 Maiden Lane, London WC2. ‘It sounds like a big firm, doesn’t it? How is anyone to know anything different?’ he said, with his gusto in his own subtlety, his happy faith that all men were easy to bamboozle.

He was dead sober, but his spirits were so roaringly high that he seemed drunk. As he spoke of his dodges, he hiccupped with laughter — pretending to be a non-existent partner, speaking over the telephone as the firm’s chief reader, getting his secretary to introduce him by a variety of aliases. He called to her: she was typing away in the little room beyond his, the only other room he rented, just as she was the only other member of his staff. She was a soft-faced girl of twenty, straight from a smart secretarial college — as I later discovered, the daughter of a headmaster, blooming with sophistication at being in her first London job, and confident that Robinson’s was a normal way for literary business to be done.

‘We impressed him, didn’t we, Miss Smith?’ he said, speaking of a recent visitor, and asking Miss Smith’s opinion with much deference.

‘I think we did,’ she said.

‘You’re sure we did, aren’t you? It’s very important, and I thought you were sure.’

‘Well, we can’t tell till we get his letter,’ she said, with a redeeming touch of realism.

‘Don’t you think he must have been impressed?’ Robinson beamed and gleamed. ‘We were part of the editorial department, you see,’ he explained to Sheila and me, ‘just part of it, in temporary quarters, naturally—’

He broke off, and with a sparkle in his eye, an edge to his voice, said: ‘I’ve got an idea that Sheila doesn’t altogether approve of these bits of improvisation.’

‘It’s waste of time,’ she said. ‘It gets you nowhere.’

‘You know nothing at all about it,’ he said, in a bantering tone, but rude under the banter.

‘I know enough for that.’ Sheila spoke uncomfortably and seriously.

‘You’ll learn better. Three or four good books and a bit of mystification, and people will take some notice. Putting a cat among the pigeons — I’m a great believer in that, because conventional people can’t begin to cope. You’re an example, Sheila, the minute you hear of something unorthodox you’re helpless, you can’t begin to cope. Always do what conventional people wouldn’t do. It’s the only way.’

‘Others manage without it,’ said Sheila.

‘They haven’t got along on negative resources for forty years, have they? Do you think you could have done?’ He maintained his bantering tone.

Often, when boasting of his deceits, he sounded childlike and innocent. He had a child’s face: also, like many of the uninhibited, he had a child’s lack of feeling. Much of his diablerie he performed as though he did not feel at all: and somehow one accepted it so.