‘I’m sorry to bring you back here, my dear chap,’ he said. ‘We ought to be out in the fresh air.’ Disciplined, powerful, polite, he did not really mind; but he was too efficient a man to stay there working for the sake of it, or to keep me. He worked fourteen hours a day in wartime, but there was nothing obsessive about it; he just did it because it was his job and the decisions must be made. The only thing obsessive about him was his superlative politeness. That afternoon, with Margaret and her sister outside in the park, Rose many times expressed his sorrow and desolation at taking up my time.
He was forty-five that year, one of the youngest of heads of departments, and looked even younger. His eyes were heavy-lidded and bleached blue, his fair hair was smoothed back. He was one of the best-thought-of Civil Servants of his day. I had much respect for him, and he some for me, but our private relation was not comfortable, and while we were waiting for the telephone call we had nothing spontaneous to say to each other.
‘I really am most exceedingly sorry,’ he was saying.
The words sounded effusive and silly: in fact he was the least effusive and silly of men, and, of those I knew, he was with Lufkin the one with most aptitude for power. Since the war began he had been totally immersed in it, carrying responsibility without a blink. It was a lesson to me, I sometimes thought, about how wrong one can be. For, in the great political divide before the war, it was not only Lufkin’s business associates who were on the opposite side to me. Bevill, the old aristocratic handyman of a politician, had been a Municheer: so had Rose and other up-and-coming Civil Servants. I had not known Rose then: if I had done, I should have distrusted him when it came to a crisis. I should have been dead wrong. Actually, when war came, Bevill and Rose were as whole-hearted as men could be. Compared with my friends on the irregular left, their nerves were stronger.
Rose continued to apologize until the call came through. Then, with remarkable speed, he asked me for one fact and wrote his comment to the Minister. He wrote it in the form of a question: but it was a question to which only a very brash minister could have given the wrong answer.
‘Ah well,’ said Rose, ‘that seems to conclude your share in the proceedings, my dear Eliot. Many many many thanks. Now I hope you’ll go and find some diversions for a nice Saturday afternoon.’
His politeness often ended with a malicious flick: but this was just politeness for its own sake. He was not interested in my life. If he had known, he would not have minded: he was not strait-laced, but he had other things to speculate about.
Released into the park, I was looking for Margaret — among the uniforms and summer frocks lying on the grass, I saw her, crowded out some yards away from our rendezvous. She was stretched on her face in the sunshine, her head turned to her sister’s, both of them engrossed. Watching the two faces together, I felt a kind of intimacy with Helen, although I had not spoken to her. Some of her expressions I already knew, having seen them in her sister’s face. But there was one thing about her for which Margaret had not prepared me at all.
Sitting erect, her back straight, her legs crossed at the ankles, she looked smart: unseasonably, almost tastelessly smart in that war-time summer, as if she were a detached observer from some neutral country. The black dress, the large black hat, clashed against that background of litter, the scorched grass, the dusty trees.
She was twenty-nine that year, four years older than Margaret, and she seemed at the same time more poised and more delicate. In both faces one could see the same shapely bones, but whereas in Margaret’s the flesh was firm with a young woman’s health, in her sister’s there were the first signs of tightness — the kind of tightness that I had seen a generation before among some of my aunts, who stayed cared-for too long as daughters and settled down at Helen’s age to an early spinsterhood. Yet Helen had married at twenty-one, and Margaret had told me that the marriage was a happy one.
They were so engrossed that Margaret did not notice me on the path. She was talking urgently, her face both alive and anxious. Helen’s face looked heavy, she was replying in a mutter. Their profiles, where the resemblance was clearest, were determined and sharp. I called out, and Margaret started, saying, ‘This is Lewis.’
At once Helen smiled at me; yet I saw that it was an effort for her to clear her mind of what had gone before. She spoke one or two words of formal greeting. Her voice was lighter than Margaret’s, her speech more clipped; but she intimated by the energy with which she spoke a friendliness she was too shy, too distracted, to utter.
As I sat down — ‘Be careful,’ she said, ‘it’s so grimy, you have to take care where you sit.’
Margaret glanced at her, and laughed. She said to me: ‘We were clearing off some family business.’
‘Dull for other people,’ said Helen. Then, afraid I should think she was shutting me out, she said quickly, ‘Dull for us, too, this time.’
She smiled, and made some contented-seeming remark about the summer weather. Only a trace of shadow remained in her face; she did not want me to see it, she wanted this meeting to be a successful one.
Yet each of the three of us was tongue-tied, or rather there were patches of silence, then we spoke easily, then silence again. Helen might have been worrying over her sister and me, but in fact it was Margaret who showed the more concern. Often she looked at Helen with the clucking, scolding vigilance that an elder sister might show to a beloved younger one, in particular to one without experience and unable to cope for herself.
As we sat together in the sunshine, the dawdling feet of soldiers and their girls scrabbling the path a few yards away, Helen kept being drawn back into her thoughts; then she would force herself to attend to Margaret and me, almost as though the sight of us together was a consolation. Indeed, far from worrying over her sister, she seemed happiest that afternoon when she found out something about us. Where had we met, she had never heard? When exactly had it been?
Shy as she was, she was direct with her questions, just as I had noticed in other women from families like theirs. Some of the concealments which a man of my kind had learned, would have seemed to Helen, and to Margaret also, as something like a denial of integrity. Helen was diffident and not specially worldly: but, if Margaret had hidden from her that she and I were living together, she would have been not only hurt but shocked.
For minutes together, it pulled up her spirits, took her thoughts out of herself, to ask questions of Margaret and me: I believed that she was making pictures of our future. But she could not sustain it. The air was hot, the light brilliant; she sat there in a brooding reverie.
20: A Darkening Window
HOPING that Helen might talk to her sister if they were alone, I left them together in the Park, and did not see Margaret again until the following Monday evening. She had already told me over the telephone that she would have to dine with Helen that night: and when we met in a Tothill Street pub Margaret said straight away: ‘I’m sorry you had to see her like this.’
‘I like her very much,’ I said.
‘I hoped you would.’ She had been looking forward for weeks to my meeting with Helen: she wanted me to admire her sister as she did herself. She told me again, anxious for me to believe her, that Helen was no more melancholy than she was, and far less self-centred.
‘No one with any eyes would think she was self-centred.’
‘It’s such an awful pity!’ she cried.
I asked her what it was.
‘She thought she was going to have a child at last. Then on Saturday she knew she wasn’t.’