“You believe I’ve got my sentence, don’t you? I may get time off for good conduct — but you don’t believe that I can get out altogether. A bit of luck can make a difference on the surface. And I need to struggle, because that can make a little difference too. But really, whatever happens to me, I can never change. I’m always sentenced to be myself. Isn’t that what you believe? Please tell me.”
I did not reply for a moment. Then I said: “I can’t alter what you say — enough to matter.”
“Just so,” he said.
He cried: “It’s too stark for me. I can’t believe it.”
He said quietly: “I can’t believe as you do, Lewis. It would make life pointless. My life isn’t all that important, but I know it better than anyone else’s. And I know that I’ve been through misery that I wouldn’t inflict on a living soul. No one could deserve it. I couldn’t deserve it, whatever I’ve done or whatever I shall do. You know that—”
“Yes, I know that,” I said, with anguished pity.
“If you’re right, I’ve gone through that quite pointlessly. And I shall again. I can’t leave it behind. If you’re right, it could happen to others. There must be others who go through the same. Without reason, according to you. Just as a pointless joke.”
“It must happen to a few,” I said. “To a few unusual men.”
“I can’t accept a joke like that,” he said. “It would be like living in a prison governed by an imbecile.”
He was speaking with passion and with a resentment I had never heard. Now I could feel what the terrible nights had done to him. Yet they had not left him broken, limp, or resigned. He was still choosing the active way. His whole body, as he leaned over the bridge, was vigorous with determination and purpose.
Neither of us spoke for some time. I too looked down. The brilliant colours had left the sky and water, and the reflections of the willows were dark by now.
“There’s something else,” said Roy. His tone was sad and gentle.
He added, after a pause: “I don’t know how I’m going to say it. I’ve needed to say it all night. I don’t know how I can.”
He was still gazing down into the water.
“Dear old boy,” he said, “you believe something that I’m not strong enough to believe. There might come a time — there might come a time when I was held back — because of what you believe.”
I muttered.
“I’ve got a chance,” he said. “But it will be a near thing. I need to have nothing hold me back. You can see that, can’t you?”
“I can see that,” I said.
“You believe in predestination, Lewis,” he said. “It doesn’t prevent you battling on. It would prevent me, you know. You’re much more robust than I am. If I believed as you believe, I couldn’t go on.”
He went on: “I think you’re wrong. I need to act as though you’re wrong. It may weaken me if I know what you’re thinking. There may be times when I shall not want to be understood. I can’t risk being weakened, Lewis. Sooner than be weakened, I should have to lose everything else. Even you.”
A punt passed under the bridge and broke the reflections. The water had ceased swirling before he spoke again.
“I shan’t lose you,” he said. “I don’t think I could. You won’t get rid of me. I’ve never felt what intimacy means, except with you. And you—”
“It is the same with me.”
“Just so,” said Roy.
He added very quietly: “I wouldn’t alter anything if I could help it. But there may come a time when I get out of your sight. There may come a time when I need to keep things from you.”
“Has that time come?” I asked.
He did not speak for a long time.
“Yes,” he said.
He was relieved to have it over. As soon as it was done, he wanted to assure me that nearly everything would be unchanged. On the way back to the college, he arranged to see me in London with an anxiety, a punctiliousness, that he never used to show. Our meetings had always been casual, accidental, comradely: now he was telling me that they would go on unchanged, our comradeship would not be touched; the only difference was that some of his inner life might be concealed.
It was the only rift that had come between us. During the time we had known each other, his life had been wild and mine disordered, but our relation had been profoundly smooth, beyond anything in my experience. We had never had a quarrel, scarcely an irritable word.
It made his rejection of intimacy hard for me to bear. I was hurt, sharply, sickly and bitterly hurt. I had the same sense of deprivation as if I had been much younger. Perhaps the sense of deprivation was stronger now; for, while as a younger man my vanity would have been wounded, on the other hand I should still have looked forward to intimacies more transfiguring even than this of ours; now I had seen enough to know that such an intimacy was rare, and that it was unlikely I should ever take part in one again.
Yet he could do no other than draw apart from me. If he were to keep his remnant of hope, he could do nothing else. For I could not hope on his terms: he had seen into me, and that was all.
It had been bitter to watch him suffer and know I could not help. That was a bitterness we all taste, one of the first facts we learn of the human condition. It was far more bitter to know that my own presence might keep him from peace of mind. It was the harshest of ironies: for he was he, and I was I, as Montaigne said, and so we knew each other: just because of that mutual knowledge, I stood in his way.
I had thought I was a realistic man — and yet I took it with dismay and cursed that we are as we are. But I tried not to make the change harder for him. As I told Joan in the spring, I had learned more from Roy than he from me. I had watched the absolute self-forgetfulness with which he spent himself on another, the self-forgetfulness he had so often given to me. I was not capable of his acts of selflessness, I was not made like him. But I could try to mutate him in practice. There was no question what I must do. I had to preserve our comradeship in the shape he wished, without loss of spirits and without demur. I had to be there, without trouble or pride, if he should want me.
20: A Young Woman in Love
Roy and Joan became lovers during that summer. I wondered who had taken the initiative — but it was a question without meaning. Roy was ardent, fond of women, inclined to let them see that he desired them, and then wait for the next move: in his self-accusation to Winslow, he said that he “coaxed invitations” from women, and that was no more than the truth. At the same time, Joan was a warm-blooded young woman, direct and canalised in all she felt and did. She was not easily attracted to men; she was fastidious, diffident, desperately afraid that she would lack physical charm to those she loved. But she had been attracted to Roy right back in the days when she thought he was frivolous and criticised his long nose. She had not known quite what it meant, but gradually he came to be surrounded by a haze of enchantment; of all men he was the first she longed to touch. She stayed at her window to watch him walk through the court. She thought of excuses to take a message to his rooms.
She told herself that this was her first knowledge of lust. She had a taste for the coarse and brutal words, the most direct and uncompromising picture of the facts. This was lust, she thought, and longed for him. She saw him with Rosalind and others, women who were elegant, smart, alluring, and she envied them ferociously, contemptuously and with self-abasement. She thought they were fools; she thought none of them could understand him as she could; and she could not believe that he would ever look at her twice.
She found, incredulously, that he liked her. She heard him make playful love to her, and she repeated the words, like a charm, before she went to sleep at night. At once her longing for him grew into dedicated love, love undeviating, whole-hearted, romantic and passionate. And that love became deeper, richer, pervaded all her thoughts, during the months her father lay dying and Roy sat with them in the Lodge.