“I haven’t failed you,” said Udal, “because of Rosalind?”
“Of course not.” Roy was utterly surprised: had she been on Udal’s mind all the time?
“You see,” Udal went on, “I’m thinking of marrying her.”
“Good luck to you,” said Roy. He was taken aback, he gave a bewildered smile, full of amusement, memory, chagrin and shock. “Give her my love.”
“It isn’t certain,” said Udal.
Udal was lying back in his chair, and I watched his face, heavy featured and tranquil. It was a complete surprise to me. I wondered if he could be as confident as he seemed. I wondered about Rosalind, and why she had done it.
Then Roy leaned forward, so that his eyes gleamed in the firelight. He did not speak again about Rosalind. Instead, he said, very quietly: “Could there be a world, Ralph, in which God existed — but with some people in it who were never allowed to believe?”
“It would be a tragic world,” said Udal.
“Why shouldn’t it be tragic?” Roy cried. “Why shouldn’t there be some who are rejected by God from the beginning?”
“It isn’t my picture of the world,” said Udal.
Suddenly Roy’s face, which had been sombre, set and haunted, lit up in his most lively and impish smile.
“No,” he said, “yours is really a very nice domestic place, isn’t it? Tragic things don’t happen, do they? You’re an optimistic old creature in the long run, aren’t you?”
Udal could not cope with that lightning change of mood. Roy baited him, as though everything that night had passed in fun. It was in the same light, teasing tone that Roy said a last word to Udal before we went to bed.
“I expect you think I ought to have tried harder to believe, don’t you? If one tries hard enough, things happen, if you’re an optimistic old creature, don’t they? I did try a bit, Ralph. I even pretended to myself that I did believe. It didn’t come off, you know. I could have gone on pretending, of course, I could have pretended well enough to take you in. I’ve done that before now. I could even have taken old Lewis in. I could have taken everyone in — except myself and God. And there wouldn’t have been much point in that, would there?”
We walked with Udal through the courts towards the guestroom. On the way back, I stumbled over a grass verge: there was no moon, the lamps in the court had been put out at midnight, and I could not see in the thick darkness. Roy took my arm, so that he could steer me.
“I shouldn’t like to lose you just yet,” he said.
I knew that he was smiling. I also knew that he was within an inch of confiding. There had been horror behind what he had said a few minutes before — and yet there was still hope. It was not easy just at that moment to reject our intimacy.
The moment passed. He took me to the foot of my staircase.
“Good night, old boy. Sleep well.”
“Shall you?” I said.
There I could see him smile.
“I might,” he said. “You never know. I did, last Tuesday.”
25: A Nest of People
Roy went back to Berlin just after Christmas. I did not hear from him, but one morning in February I received a letter with the Boscastle crest. It was from Joan, saying that she urgently wanted to talk to me about Roy — “don’t misunderstand me,” she wrote with her bleak and painful honesty. “There is nothing to say about him and me. I want your advice on something much more important, which concerns him alone.”
She suggested that she should give me dinner at her London club. I nearly let her, for I was far less considerate than Roy in the way I behaved to my women friends. Part of this was due to my taste for the company of beautiful women — for beautiful women needed, of course, much less attention, could be entertained much more casually, since one’s bad manners did not touch their self-respect. It was this taste of mine which drew me to Lady Boscastle; I should no doubt have fallen in love with her, if we had been born in the same generation. Roy did not share at all the taste for beauty, and some people found the difference between us the opposite of what they had expected.
But I had learned much from him, and I took Joan to the Berkeley. She dressed herself up, and, though her mission was an anxious one, she was glad to be there. As she sat on the other side of the table, I thought her face was becoming better looking as she grew older; she had lost the radiance of happy love, but the handsome structure of her cheekbones was beginning to give her distinction; it was a face in which character was showing through the flesh.
She went straight to it.
“I’m very worried about Roy,” she said, and told me her news. Houston Eggar had recently got a promotion, after steady and resolute pushing; he had left Rome and been sent to Berlin as an extra counsellor. Late in January, he had written out of the blue to Lord Boscastle about Roy. He said that he was presuming upon his wife’s relationship to Lord Boscastle’s family; he knew that Roy was a friend of theirs, and the whole matter needed to be approached with the utmost discretion. I thought as I listened that Eggar was in part doing his duty, in part showing his natural human kindness, and in part — and probably a very large part — seizing an opportunity of getting into Lord Boscastle’s good books. If he exerted himself, he could be valuable to Eggar’s career. But thoughts of Eggar soon vanished as Joan described his report. It sounded factual, and we both believed it.
Roy, so Eggar said, was being a great social success in Berlin. He was being too great a social success. He was repeatedly invited to official and party functions. He was friendly with several of the younger party leaders. With some of them he had more influence than any Englishman in Berlin. “I wish I could be satisfied,” ran Eggar’s letter, which Joan gave to me, “that he was using his influence in a manner calculated to help us through this difficult period. It is very important that Englishmen with contacts in the right quarters should give the authorities here the impression that they are behind the policy of HMG. Calvert has gone too far in the direction of encouraging the German authorities that they have the sympathy and understanding of Englishmen like himself. I can give you chapter and verse of several unfortunate remarks.”
Eggar had done so. They had the tone of Roy. Some of them might have been jokes, uttered with his mystifying solemnity. One or two had the touch, light, first-hand and grave, which Joan and I had heard him use when he was most in earnest. And Eggar also quoted a remark in “very embarrassing circumstances” about the Jewish policy: at an august official dinner, Roy had recklessly denounced it. “You’re a wonderful people. You’re brave. You’re gifted. You might begin a new civilisation. I wish you would. I’m speaking as a friend, you see. But don’t you think you’re slightly mad? Your treatment of the Jews — why need you do it? It’s unnecessary. It gets you nowhere. It’s insane. Sometimes I think that, whatever else you do, it will be enough to condemn you.”
It had been said in German, and I did not recognise the phrases as typically Roy’s. But the occasion was exactly in his style. It had given offence to “important persons”, and Eggar seemed as concerned about that as about the other “indiscretions”. All his reporting seemed objective, and Joan and I were frightened.
We were not simply perturbed, as Eggar was, that he might commit a gaffe at an awkward time. Eggar obviously thought that he was a frivolous and irresponsible young man, who was flirting with a new creed. Eggar was used to Englishmen in society who for a few months thought they had discovered in Rome or Berlin a new way of life, and in the process made things even more difficult for a hard-working professional like himself. To him, Roy was just such another.