When she spoke, I said: ‘I don’t suppose you happen to be free tonight, do you?’
There was a pause. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Come and see me then. We’ll go out somewhere.’
‘Lovely.’
It sounded so easy, and yet, waiting for her that night in my flat in Dolphin Square, where I had moved after Sheila’s death, I was nervous of what I did not know. It was not the nervousness that I should have felt as a younger man. I longed for an unexacting evening: I hoped that I could keep it light, with no deep investment for either of us. I wished that I knew more of her past, that the preliminaries were over, with no harm done.
Restlessly I walked about the room, imagining conversations, as it might have been in a day-dream, which led just where I wanted. The reading-lamp shone on the backs of my books, on the white shelves; the room was cosy and confined, the double curtains drawn.
It was seven by my watch, and on the instant the door-bell buzzed. I let her in, and with her the close smell of the corridor. She went in front of me into the sitting-room, and, her cheeks pink from the winter night, cried: ‘Nice and warm.’
When she had thrown off her coat and was sitting on the sofa, we had less to say to each other than on the nights we had dined à trois. Except for a few minutes in restaurants, this was the first time we had been alone, and the words stuck. The news, the bits of government gossip, rang like lead; the conversations I had imagined dropped flat or took a wrong turn; I felt she also had been inventing what she wanted us each to say.
She asked about Gilbert, and the question had a monotonous sound as though it had been rehearsed in her mind. When those fits and starts of talk, as jerky as an incompetent interview, seemed to have been going on for a long time, I glanced at my watch, hoping it might be time for dinner. She had been with me less than half an hour.
Soon after, I got up and went towards the bookshelves, but on my way turned to her and took her in my arms. She clung to me; she muttered and forced her mouth against mine. She opened her eyes with a smile: I saw the clear and beautiful shape of her lips. We smiled at each other with pleasure but much more with an overmastering, a sedative relief.
Although the lids looked heavier, her eyes were bright; flushing, hair over her forehead, she began to laugh and chatter. Enraptured, I put my hands on her shoulders.
Then, as if she were making a painful effort, her face became sharp and serious, her glance investigatory. She looked at me, not pleading, but screwing herself up to speak. She said: ‘I want to ask you something. It’s important.’
Since I touched her, I had thought all was going as I imagined it. She was pliant, my reverie was coming true at last. I was totally unprepared to see her face me, a person I did not know.
My face showed my surprise, my let down, for she cried: ‘You don’t think I want to upset you, do you, now of all times?’
‘I don’t see why you should,’ I said.
‘I’ve got to ask — before it’s too late.’
‘What is it?’
‘When you were with Sheila’ — I had not talked much of her, but Margaret spoke as though she knew her — ‘you cared for her, I mean you were protecting her all the while. There wasn’t any more to it, was there?’
After a pause, I said: ‘Not much.’
‘Not many people could have done it,’ she said. ‘But it frightens me.’
Again I did not want to speak: the pause was longer, before I said: ‘Why should it?’
‘You must know that,’ she said.
Her tone was certain, not gentle — my experience and hers might have been open before us.
‘It wasn’t a relationship,’ she went on. ‘You were standing outside all the time. Are you looking for the same thing again?’ Before I had replied, she said: ‘If so—’ Tears had come to her eyes. ‘It’s horrible to say it, but it’s no good to me.’
Still crying, she said: ‘Tell me. Are you looking for the same thing again?’
In my own time, in my own fashion, I was ready to search down into my motives. With pain, certainly with resentment, I knew I had to search in front of her, for her. This answer came slower even than my others, as though it had been dragged out. I said: ‘I hope not.’ After a silence, I added: ‘I don’t think so.’
Her face lightened, colour came back to her cheeks, although the tears still marked them. She did not ask me to repeat or explain: she took the words as though they were a contract. Her spirits bubbled up, she looked very young again, brilliant-eyed, delighted with the moment in which we both stood.
In a sharp, sarcastic, delighted voice, she said: ‘No wonder they all say how articulate you are.’
She watched me and said: ‘You’re not to think I’m rushing you. I don’t want you bound to anything — except just that one thing. I think I could stand any tangle we get into, whatever we do — but if you had just needed someone to let you alone, just a waif for you to be kind to, then I should have had to duck from under before we start.’
She was smiling and crying. ‘You see, I shouldn’t have had a chance. I should have lost already, and I couldn’t bear it.’
She stroked my hand, and I could feel her shaking. She would have let me make love to her, but she had called on her nerves so hard that what she wanted most, for the rest of the night, was a breathing space.
Going out of the flat to dinner, we walked, saying little, as it were absently, along the embankment. It was foggy, and in the blackout, the writhing fog, our arms were round each other; her coat was rough under my hand, as she leant over the parapet, gazing into the high, dark water.
17: Business on New Year’s Day
ON the morning of New Year’s Day, when I entered the Minister’s office, he was writing letters. The office was not very grand; it was a cubby hole with a coal fire, the windows looking out over Whitehall. The Minister was not, at a first glance, very grand either. Elderly, slight, he made a profession of being unassuming. When he left the office he passed more unnoticed even than his Civil Servants, except in a few places: but the few places happened to be the only ones where he wanted notice, and included the Carlton Club and the rooms of the party manager.
His name was Thomas Bevill, and he was a cunning, tenacious, happy old man; but mixed with his cunning was a streak of simplicity that puzzled one more the closer one came. That morning of 1 January 1942, for instance, he was writing in his own round schoolboyish hand to everyone he knew whose name was in the Honours List.
No one was more hard-baked about honours than Bevill, and no one was more skilled in obtaining them for recipients convenient to himself. ‘Old Herbert had better have something, it’ll keep him quiet.’ But when on New Year’s Day the names came out, Bevill read them with innocent pleasure, and all the prizewinners, including those he had so candidly intrigued for, went up a step in his estimation. ‘Fifty-seven letters to write, Eliot,’ he said with euphoria, as though knowing that number in the Honours List reflected much credit both on them and him.
A little later his secretary came in with a message: ‘Mr Paul Lufkin would be grateful if the Minister could spare time to see him, as soon as possible.’
‘What does this fellow want?’ Bevill asked me.
‘One thing is certain,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t want to see you just to pass the time of day.’
At that piece of facetiousness, Bevill gave a simple worldly chuckle.
‘I expect he wants to know why his name isn’t in the list this morning.’ His mind wandered back. ‘I expect he wants to be in next time.’