Before they arrived, Sheila stood by the mantelpiece; I put an arm round her, tried to tease her into resting, but she was rigid. She drank four or five glasses of sherry standing there. It was rare for her to drink at all. But for a time the party went well. Mrs Getliffe greeted us with long, enthusiastic stares from her doglike brown eyes, and cooed about the beauties and wonders of the flat. Her husband was the most valuable of guests; he was always ready to please, and he conceived it his job to make the party go. Incidentally, he provided me with a certain amusement, for I had often heard him profess a cheerful anti-Semitism. In the presence of one of the most influential of Jewish solicitors, I was happy to see that his anti-Semitism was substantially modified.
We gave them a good meal. With her usual technical competence, Sheila was a capable cook, and though I knew little of wine I had learned where to take advice. At any party, Getliffe became half-drunk with his first glass, and stayed in that expansive state however much he drank. He sat by Sheila’s side; he had a furtive eye for an attractive woman, and a kindly one for a self-conscious hostess who needed a bit of help. He chatted to her, he drew the table into their talk. He was not the kind of man she liked, but he set her laughing. I had never felt so warm to him.
Henriques was his subdued, courteous, and observant self. I hoped that he was approving. With his wife, I exchanged gossip about the March family. I smiled down the table at Sheila, to signal that she was doing admirably, and she returned the smile.
It was Getliffe, in the excess of his bonhomie, who brought about the change. We had just finished the sweet, and he looked round the table with his eyes shining and his face open.
‘My friends,’ he said, ‘I’m going to call you my friends at this time of night’ — he gazed at Henriques with his frank man-to-man regard. ‘I’ve just had a thought. When I wake up in the night, I sometimes wonder what I should do if I could have my time over again. I expect we all do, don’t we?’
Someone said yes, of course we did.
‘Well then,’ said Getliffe triumphantly, ‘I’m going to ask you all what you’d really choose — if God gave you the chance on a plate. If He came to you in the middle of the night and said “Look here, Herbert Getliffe, you’ve seen round some of this business of life by now. You’ve done a lot of silly little things. Now you can have your time over again. It’s up to you. You choose.”’
Getliffe gave a laugh, fresh, happy, and innocent.
‘I’ll set the ball rolling,’ he said. ‘I should make a clean sweep. I shouldn’t want to struggle for the prizes another time. Believe me, I should just want to do a bit of good. I should like to be a country parson — like your father’ — he beamed at Sheila: she was still — ‘ready to stay there all my life and giving a spot of comfort to a few hundred souls. That’s what I should choose. And I bet I should be a happier man.’
He turned to Mrs Henriques, who said firmly that she would devote herself to her co-religionists, instead of trying to forget that she was born a Jewess. I came next, and said that I would chance my luck as a creative writer, in the hope of leaving some sort of memorial behind me.
On my left, Mrs Getliffe gazed adoringly at her husband. ‘No, I shouldn’t change at all. I should ask for the same again, please. I couldn’t ask anything better than to be Herbert’s wife.’
Surprisingly, Henriques said that he would elect to stay at Oxford as a don.
We were all easy and practised talkers, and the replies had gone clockwise round at a great pace. Now it was Sheila’s turn. There was a pause. Her head was sunk on to her chest. She had a wineglass between her fingers; she was not spinning it, but tipping it to and fro. As she did so, drops of wine fell on the table. She did not notice. She went on tipping her glass, and the wine fell.
The pause lasted. The strain was so acute that they turned their eyes from her.
At last: ‘I pass.’ The words were barely distinguishable, in that strangulated tone.
Quick to cover it up, Getliffe said: ‘I expect you’re so busy taking care of old L S — you can’t imagine anything else, either better or worse, can you! For better, for worse,’ he said, cheerfully allusive. ‘Why, I remember when L S first pottered into my Chambers—’
The evening was broken. She scarcely spoke again until they said goodbye. Getliffe did his best, the Henriques kept up a steady considerate flow of talk, but they were all conscious of her. I talked back, anything to keep the room from silence; I even told anecdotes; I mentioned with a desperate casualness places and plays to which Sheila and I had been and how we had argued or agreed.
They all went as early as they decently could. As soon as the front door closed, Sheila went straight into the spare room, without a word.
I waited a few minutes, and then followed her in. She was not crying: she was tense, still, staring-eyed, lying on the divan by her gramophone. She was just replacing a record. I stood beside her. When she was so tense, it did harm to touch her.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.
‘Speak for yourself.’
‘I tell you, it doesn’t matter.’
‘I’m no good to you. I’m no good to myself. I never shall be.’ She added, ferociously: ‘Why did you bring me into it?’
I began to speak, but she interrupted me: ‘You should have left me alone. It’s all I’m fit for.’
As I had so often done, I set myself to ease her. I had to tell her once again that she was not so strange. It was all that she wanted to hear. At last I persuaded her to go to bed. Then I listened, until she was breathing in her sleep.
She slept better than I did. I dozed off, and woke again, and watched the room lighten as the morning light crept in. Pity, tenderness, morbid annoyance crowded within me, took advantage of my tiredness, as I lay and saw her body under the clothes. The evening would do me harm, and she had not a single thought for that. She turned in her sleep, and my heart stirred.
It was full dawn. By ten o’clock I had to be in court.
One night that autumn I arrived home jaded and beset. I had been thinking all day of the rumours about George Passant. One explanation kept obtruding itself that: George had shared with Jack Cotery in a stupid, dangerous fraud. George — in money dealings the most upright of men. Often it seemed like a bad dream. That night I could not laugh it away.
Sheila brought me a drink. It was not one of her light-hearted days, but I had to talk to her.
‘I’m really anxious,’ I said.
‘What have I done?’
‘Nothing special.’ I could still smile at her. ‘I’m seriously anxious about old George.’
She looked at me, as though her thoughts were remote. I had to go on.
‘I can hardly believe it,’ I said, ‘but he and some of the others do seem to have got themselves into a financial mess. I hope to God it’s not actionable. There are rumours that they’ve gone pretty near the edge.’
‘Silly of them,’ she said.
I was angry with her. My own concerns, the lag in my career, the dwindling of my prospects, those she could be indifferent to, and I was still bound to cherish her. But now at this excuse my temper flared, for the first time except in play since we were married. I cried ‘Will you never have a spark of ordinary feelings? Can’t you forget yourself for a single instant? You are the most self-centred woman that I have ever met.’
She stared at me.
‘You knew that when you married me.’
‘I knew it. And I’ve been reminded of it every day since.’
‘It’s your own fault,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have married someone who didn’t pretend to love you.’
‘Anyone who married you’, I said, ‘would have found the same. Even if you fancied you loved him. You’re so self-centred that you’d be a drag on any man alive.’