Monday went by, after the weekend when I stood outside her house. Tuesday. Wednesday. I longed that we could have some friend in common, so that I could hear of her and drop a remark, as though casually, that I was waiting. A friend could help us both, I thought, could put in a word for me. Apart from our meetings — I was glad to think so, for it shifted the blame outside ourselves, gave me something which could be altered and so a scrap of hope — we had none of the reminders of each other, the everyday gossip, of people who lived in the same circle. My friends inhabited a different world: so far as they knew her, they hated her; while hers I did not know at all.
I was impelled to discover what I could about Tom Devitt. I dug my nails into the flesh, and willed that I must put him out of my mind, together with the scene at the Edens’ — together with Sheila and what I felt for her. On the Monday after I returned from the farm, however, I found myself making an excuse to go to the reference library. There was some point not covered by my textbook. In the library I looked it up, but I could safely have left it; it was of no significance at all, and for such a point I should never have troubled to come. I browsed aimlessly by the shelves which contained Who’s Who, Whitaker, Crockford (where I had already long since looked up the Reverend Laurence Knight), and the rest. Almost without looking, I was puffing out the Medical Directory. Devitt A T N; the letters seemed embossed. It did not say when he was born, but he had been a medical student at Leeds and qualified in 1914 (when she and I were nine years old, I thought with envy). In the war, he had been in the RAMC, and had been given a Military Cross (again I was stabbed with envy). Then he had held various jobs in hospitals: in 1924 he had become registrar at the infirmary; I did not know then what the hospital jobs meant, nor the title registrar. I should have liked to know how good a career it had been, and what his future was.
The Thursday of that week was a bright cold sunny day of early January. In the afternoon I was working in my overcoat, with a blanket round my legs. When I looked up from my notebook I could see, for the table stood close to the window, the pale sunlight silvering the tiles.
Someone was climbing up the attic stairs. There was a sharp knock, and my door was thrown open. Sheila came into the room. With one hand she shut the door behind her, but she was looking at me with a gaze expressionless and fixed. She took two steps into the room, then stopped quite still. Her face was pale, hard, without a smile. Her arms were at her sides. I had jumped up, forgetting everything but that she was here, my arms open for her; but when she stayed still, so did I, frozen.
‘I’ve come to see you,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I haven’t seen you since that night. You’re thinking about that night.’ Her voice was louder than usual.
‘I’m bound to think of it.’
‘Listen to this: I did it on purpose.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘Because you made me angry.’ Her eyes were steady, hypnotic in their glitter. ‘I’ve not come to tell you that I’m sorry.’
‘You ought to be,’ I said.
‘I’m not sorry.’ Her voice had risen. ‘I’m glad I did it.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said in anger.
‘I tell you, I’m glad I did it.’
We were standing a yard apart. Her arms were still at her sides, and she had not moved. She said ‘You can hit me across the face.’
I looked at her, and her eyes flickered.
‘You should,’ she said.
As I looked at her, in the bright light from the window behind my back, I saw the whites of her eyes turn bloodshot. Then tears formed, and slowly trickled down her cheeks. She did not raise a hand to touch them. As she cried, dreadfully still, the hard fierce poise of her face was dissolved away, and her beauty, and everything I recognized.
I took her by the shoulders, and led her, very gently, to sit on the bed. She came without resistance, as though she were a robot. I kissed her on the lips, told her for the first time in words that I loved her, and wiped away the tears.
‘I love you,’ I said.
‘I don’t love you, but I trust you,’ cried Sheila, in a tone that tore my heart open for myself and her. She kissed me with a sudden desperate energy, with her mouth forced on to mine; her arms were convulsively tight; then she let go, pressed her face into the counterpane, and began to cry again. But this time she cried with her shoulders heaving, with relief; I sat on the bed beside her, holding her hand, waiting till she was exhausted; and in those moments I was possessed by the certainty that no love of innocence, no love in which she had been only the idol of my imagination, could reach as deep as that which I now knew.
For now I had seen something frightening, and I loved her, seeing something of what she was. I felt for her a curious detached pity in the midst of the surge of love — and I realized that it was the first ignorant forerunner of pity that I had felt for her in her mother’s drawing-room. I felt a sense of appalling danger for her, and, yes, for me: of a life so splintered and remote that I might never reach it; of cruelty and suffering that I could not soften. Yet I had never felt so transcendentally free. Holding her hand as she cried, I loved her, I believed that she in part loved me, and that we should be happy.
She raised her head, sniffed, blew her nose, and smiled. We kissed again. She said ‘Turn your head. I want to see you.’
She smiled, half-sarcastically, half-tearfully, as she inspected me. She said ‘You look rather sweet with lipstick on.’
I told her that her face, foreshortened as I saw it when I kissed her, was different from the face that others saw: its proportions quite changed, its classical lines destroyed, much more squashed, imperfect, and human.
I asked her again about Christmas Eve.
‘Why did you do it?’
She said ‘I’m hateful. I thought you were too possessive.’
‘Possessive?’ I cried.
‘You wanted me too much,’ said Sheila.
I inquired about Tom. We were sitting side by side, with arms round each other. In the same heartbeat I was jealous and reassured.
‘Do you love him?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Sheila. She exclaimed in a high voice: ‘I wish I did. He’s a good man. He’s too good for me He’s a better man than you are.’
‘He loves you,’ I said.
‘I think he wants to marry me,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I don’t love him.’ Then she said: ‘Sometimes I think I shall never love anyone.’
She pulled down my face and kissed me.
‘I don’t love you, but I trust you. Get me out of this. I trust you to get me out of this.’
I heard her say once more: ‘I don’t love you, but I trust you.’
I told her that I loved her, the words set free and pouring over: I was forced to speak, able to speak, deliriously happy to speak, as I had never yet spoken to a human being. ‘Get me out of this’ — that cry turned the key in the lock. I did not know what she meant, and yet it lured me on. I was utterly released, there was no pride, no reserve left, as there was when my mother, when Marion, invaded me with love. Seeing her at last as a person, not just an image in a dream, I threw aside my own burden of self. I told her, the words came bursting out, of every feeling that had possessed me since we first met. In this other nature, remote from anything I knew, I could abandon all, except my passion for her. In her arms, hearing that mysterious and remote cry, I lost myself.
Part Four
The First Surrender