‘I can’t tell you anything about him,’ she replied.
‘You’re not giving me much to go on,’ I told her.
‘I’d like to tell you the whole story, but I can’t,’ she said, with the air of a little girl put on her honour.
I was thinking, a good many men were frightened of her, she was so sharp-eyed and suspicious, her self-distrust making her seem distrustful of others. But when she let herself depend on anyone her faith was blind.
‘Do you love him?’ I asked her.
Without hesitation, straight and confiding, she replied: ‘No.’
‘Do you respect him?’ For her, no relation would be tolerable without it. This time she hesitated. At last she said: ‘I think so.’
She added: ‘He’s a curious man.’
I looked at her. She smiled back, a little resentfully.
‘On the face of it,’ I said, ‘I can’t possibly say go ahead, can I? But you know more than I do.’
‘I’ve not been exactly successful so far.’
‘I just don’t see what the advantages are. For you, I mean.’
For the first time that evening she gazed at me with affection.
‘We’re all getting on, you know. You’re nearly forty, and don’t you forget it. I was thirty-seven this March.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good reason.’
‘We haven’t all got your patience.’
‘I still don’t think it’s a good reason for you.’
She gave a cracking curse.
‘I haven’t got all that to look forward to,’ she said.
She was so unsure of herself that she had to break in, before I could reply: ‘Let’s skip it. Let’s go to a party.’
A common acquaintance had invited her, she wanted to take me. In the taxi, on the way to Chelsea, she was smiling with affection, the awkwardness had gone, the resented confidence; we might have just met, I might have been giving her a lift to a party, each of us pleasurably wondering whether anything would come of it. After all the years she had gone to parties, she still had the flush, the bright eye, the excited hope that something, someone, might turn up.
As soon as we arrived at the studio, I saw a man I knew; pushing into the corner of the room, he and I stood outside the crowd and he told me about a new book. While I was listening, I caught a voice from the window-seat behind us. From the first words, I recognized it. It was R S Robinson’s.
He was sitting with his back to me, his beautiful hair shining silver, his neck red. Listening to him was a woman of perhaps thirty, who looked intelligent, amiable and plain. It was soon clear that she had recently published a novel.
‘I have to go back a long way to find a writer who opens the window of experience to me as you do,’ he was saying. ‘Not that you do it all the time. Sometimes you’re rather tantalizing, I must tell you. Sometimes you give me the sensation that you are opening a window but not running up the blinds. But at your best, in those first thirty pages — I have to go back a long way. Who do you think I have to go back to?’
‘You’re making too much of it,’ came the woman’s voice, abashed, well-bred.
‘I have to go back a long way.’ Robinson was speaking with his old authority, with the slightly hectoring note of one whose flattery is rejected and who has to double it: ‘Beyond my dear Joyce — I’m not telling you that your achievement is equal to his, but I do say your vision is nearer to the springs of life. I have to go back beyond him. And beyond poor old Henry James. Certainly beyond George Eliot. They can say what they like, but she was heavy as porridge most of the time, and porridgy writers have to be much greater than she was. Those first pages of yours aren’t porridgy at all, they’re like one’s first taste of first-class pâté. I have to go back a bit beyond her, why I don’t mind going back to — you won’t guess who—’
‘Do tell me.’
‘Mrs Henry Wood.’
Even then, flattering her for his own purposes, he could not resist that piece of diablerie, that elaborate let-down. She sounded a modest woman, but there was disappointment and mild protest in her voice: ‘But she was nothing like so good as George Eliot.’
Robinson rapidly recovered himself.
‘George Eliot had all the talent in the world, and not a particle of genius. Mrs Henry Wood had very little talent and just a tiny vestige of the real blessed thing. That’s what people ought to have said about you, and believe me it’s the most important thing that can be said about any writer. I should like to have the responsibility of making them say it about you. Does anyone realize it?’
‘No one’s ever told me.’
‘I always say it takes an entrepreneur with a bit of his own genius to recognize a writer who has it too. That’s why it’s a providential occasion, you and I meeting here tonight. I should like to put over another piece of the real thing before I die. I’m absolutely sure I could do it for you.’
‘What firm is yours, Mr Robinson?’
Robinson laughed.
‘At present I can’t be said to have a firm. I shall have to revive the one I used to have. Haven’t you heard of R S Robinson?’
She looked embarrassed.
‘Oh dear,’ he said, with one of his bursts of hilarious honesty, ‘if you’d been at a party like this twenty-five years ago and hadn’t heard of me, I should have left you and gone to find someone interesting. But you will hear of R S Robinson’s again. We’re going to do things together, you and I. I assure you, we’re bound to put each other on the map.’
Then I tapped him on the arm. He looked up to see who I was. With complete good humour he cried: ‘Why, it’s Lewis Eliot! Good evening to you, sir!’
I smiled at the young woman, but Robinson, sparkling with cunning, did not intend me to talk to her. Instead, he faced into the room, and said, either full of hilarity or putting on a splendid show of it: ‘Is this a fair sample of the post-war spirit, should you say?’
I broke in: ‘It’s a long time since I met you last.’
Robinson was certain that I was threatening his latest plan, but he was not out-faced. He had not altered since the morning I recovered Sheila’s money; his suit was shabby and frayed at the cuffs, but so were many prosperous men’s after six years of war. He said to the young woman, with candour, with indomitable dignity: ‘Mr Eliot was interested in my publishing scheme a few years ago. I’m sorry to say that nothing came of it then.’
‘What have you been doing since?’ I asked.
‘Nothing much, sir, nothing very much.’
‘What did you do in the war?’
‘Nothing at all.’ He was gleeful. He added: ‘You’re thinking that I was too old for them to get me. Of course I was, they couldn’t have touched me. But I decided to offer my services, so I got a job in — (he gave me the name of an aircraft firm) — and they subsidized me for four years and I did nothing at all.’
The young woman was laughing: he took so much delight in having no conscience that she also felt delight. Just as Sheila used to.
‘How did you spend your time?’ she asked.
‘I discovered how to be a slow clerk. Believe me, no one’s applied real intelligence to the problem before. By the time I left, I could spin a reasonable hour’s work out into at least two days. And that gave me time for serious things, that is, thinking out the programme you and I were talking about before Mr Eliot joined us.’
He grinned at me with malicious high spirits, superiority and contempt.
‘I suppose you’ve been doing your best for your country, sir?’ Just as I remembered him, he felt a match for any man alive.
I inquired: ‘Have you got a job now?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Robinson.