‘Lewis,’ she said at last. ‘I want to ask you something.’
‘Darling?’
‘Weren’t you terribly embarrassed—?’
‘Whatever at?’
‘At coming in wet. And meeting strangers for the first time in that fancy dress.’
She laughed.
‘You did look a bit absurd,’ she added.
‘I didn’t think about it,’ I said.
‘Didn’t you really mind?’
‘No.’
‘I can’t understand you,’ she said. ‘I should have curled up inside.’ Then she said: ‘You are rather wonderful.’
I laughed at her. I said that, if she were going to admire me for anything, she might choose something more sensible to admire. But she was utterly serious. To her self-conscious nerves, it was incredible that anyone should be able to master such a farce.
‘I curled up a bit myself this afternoon,’ she said, a little later.
‘When?’
‘When they were making fools of themselves in front of you.’
‘Good God, girl,’ I said roughly, lovingly, ‘they’re human.’
She tightened her grip on my hand.
At the end of a lane we came in sight of the farm. There was one more field to cross, and the lights blazed out in the windy darkness. I asked her to come in.
‘I couldn’t,’ she said. I had an arm round her shoulders as we stood. Suddenly she hid her face against my coat. I asked her again.
‘I must go,’ she said. She looked up at me, and for the first time I kissed her, while the wind and my own blood sang and pounded in my ears. She drew away, then threw her arms round my neck, and I felt her mouth on mine.
‘I must go,’ she said. I touched her cheek, wet in the rain, and she pressed my hand. Then she walked down the lane, dark that night as a tunnel-mouth, her strong, erect stride soon losing her to sight against the black hedges. I waited there until I could hear nothing, no footsteps, nothing but the sound of the wind.
I returned to the group, who were revelling in a celebration. Jack was starting on his new business, and after supper George sat in our midst, predicting success for us all, for me most of all, complacent with hope about all our futures. It was not until the next, Sunday, night I spoke to George alone. The others had gone back by the last bus; I was staying till the morning, in order to have the first comfort of my emancipation. That night, when we were left alone, George confided more of his own strange, violent, inner life than he had ever done before. He gave me part of his diary, and there I sat, reading by the light of the oil lamp, while George smoked his pipe by my side.
When I had finished, George made an inquiry about my love affair. He had only two attitudes towards his friends’ attachments. First, he responded with boisterous amusement. Then, when he decided that one was truly in love, he adopted an entirely different manner, circumlocutory, obscure, packed with innuendo, which he seemed to have decided was the height of consideration and tact. In the summer he had jovially referred to Sheila as that ‘handsome bitch’, but for some time past he had spoken of her, with infinite consideration, in his second manner. On that Sunday night his actual opening was ‘I hope you reached your destination safely yesterday afternoon?’
I said that I had.
‘I hope that it all turned out to be’ — George pulled down his waistcoat and cleared his throat — ‘reasonably satisfactory?’
I said that it did.
‘Perhaps I can assume’, said George, ‘that you’re not completely dissatisfied with your progress?’
I could not keep back a smile — and it gave me right away.
Even after that visit to Sheila’s house I still did not tell her simply how much I loved her. Her own style seemed to keep my tongue playful and sarcastic; I made jokes about joy and hope and anguish, as though it were all a game. I was not yet myself released.
Once or twice she kept me waiting at a meeting place. The minutes passed, the quarters; I performed all the tricks that a lover does to cheat time, to make it stand still, to pretend not to notice, so as suddenly to see her there. It was an anguish like jealousy, and, like jealousy, when at last she came, it was drowned in the flood of relief.
I complained. But still my words were light; I did not speak from the angry pain of five minutes before. I scolded her, I asked her not to expose me to looks of schadenfreude in the café — but I did it with the playful sarcasm that had become our favourite way of speaking to one another. Nevertheless, it was my first demand. She obeyed. At our next meeting, she was ten minutes early. She was trying to behave, and I was gay; but she was also strained and ill-tempered, as though it were an effort to subdue her pride even by an inch.
During my next visit to eat dinners at the Inn, I was waiting for a letter. It was the beginning of December, I was in London for my usual five nights, and I had made Sheila promise to write to me. Hopefully I looked for a letter on the hall table the morning after I arrived. I used to stay in a boarding house in Judd Street, rather as though, with a provincial’s diffidence, I did not want to be separated too far from my railhead at St Pancras. The dining-room, the hall, the bedroom, all smelt heavily of beeswax and food; the dining-room was dark, and we used to sit down to breakfast at eight o’clock in the winter gloom; there were twelve or so round the table — maiden ladies living there on a pittance, clerks, transients like myself. Through having students pass through the house, the landlady had acquired the patter of examinations. With a booming heartless heartiness, she used to encourage them, and me in my turn, by giving them postcards on the day of their last paper. On the postcard she had already written ‘I got through, Mrs Reed’; she exhorted one to post it to her as soon as the result was known.
After each breakfast on that stay, I went quickly to the hall table. There lay the letters, pale blue in the half-dark — not many in that house: none for me, on the first morning, the second, the third. It was the first time I had been menaced by the post.
Just as when I waited for her, I went through all the calculations of a lover. She could not have written before Monday night, it was more likely she would wait till Tuesday, there was no collection in the village after tea, it was impossible that I could get the letter by Wednesday morning. I was beginning to learn, in those few days, the arithmetic of anxiety and hope.
So, carrying with me that faint ache of worry, knowing that when I returned to the boarding house my eyes would fly to the hall table, I went out to eat my dinners at the Inn. On two of the nights I joined a party of my Cambridge acquaintances, Charles March among them; we went away from dinner to drink and talk, before they caught their train from Liverpool Street.
They were the kind of acquaintances on whom I should have sharpened my wits, if I had gone to a university. I had not yet spoken to Charles March alone, but him I felt kinship with, and wanted for a friend. The others I liked well enough, but no better than many of my friendly acquaintances in the town. I was soon easy among them, and we talked with undergraduate zest. When I was alone I compared their luck and mine. Some of them would be rivals. Now that I knew something of them, how did my prospect look?
I thought that, for intellectual machinery, between me and Charles March there was not much in it. I had no doubt that George Passant, both in mental equipment and in horsepower, was superior to both of us — but Charles March and I had a great deal more sense. Of those other Cambridge acquaintances, I did not believe that any of them, for force and precision combined, could compete with either Charles March or me, much less George Passant.
I was reassured to find it so. And I went on, once or twice, to envy them their luck. One of these young men was the son of an eminent KC, and another of a headmaster: Charles March’s family I guessed to be very rich. With that start, what could I not have done? I should have given any of them a run for their money, I thought. By their standards, by the standards of the successful world from which they came, it would have been long odds on my being a success. Whereas now I had, in my young manhood, to take an effort and endure a strain that they did not even realize. I felt a certain rancour.