It was not long before George and I got out of the congratulating crowd, and walked together towards the middle of the town. The sky was low and yellowish-dark. Lights gleamed into the sombre evening. We passed near enough to see the window of the office where I had worked. For a long time we walked in silence.
Then George said, defiantly, that he must go on. ‘I’ve not lost everything,’ he said. ‘Whatever they did, I couldn’t have lost everything.’
Then I heard him rebuild his hopes. He could not forget the scandal; curiously, it was Getliffe’s speech, that perhaps saved him from prison, which brought him the deepest rancour and the deepest shame. From now on, he would often have to struggle to see himself unchanged. Yet he was cheerful, brimming with ideas and modest plans, as first of all he thought of how he would earn a living. He wanted to leave the town, find a firm similar to Eden’s, and then work his way through to a partnership.
He developed his plans with zest. I was half-saddened, half-exalted, as I listened. It brought back the nights when he and I had first walked in those streets. Just as he used to be, he was eager for the future, and yet not anxious. He was asking only a minor reward for himself. That had always been so; I remembered evenings similar to this, with the shop windows blazing and the sky hanging low, when George was brimful of grandiose schemes for the group, of grandiose designs for my future. For himself, he had never asked more than the most improbable of minor rewards, a partnership with Eden. I remembered nights so late that all the windows were dark; there were no lights except on the tram standards; we had walked together, George’s great voice rang out in that modest expectation — and the dark streets were lit with my own ravenous hopes.
Walking by his side that evening, I felt the past strengthen me now. Just as I used to be, I was touched and impatient at his diffidence, heartened by his appetite for all that might come. Yet, even for him, it would be arduous beyond any imagining to rebuild a life. With the strength and hope he had given me as a young man and which, even in his downfall, he gave me still, I thought of his future — and of mine.
We went into a café, sat by an upstairs window, and looked over the roofs out to the wintry evening sky. George was facing what it would cost to rebuild his life. As he came to think of his private world, the group that had started as Utopia and ended in scandal, his face was less defiant and sanguine than his words. He could not blind himself to what he must go through, and yet he said: ‘I’m going to work for the things I believe in. I still believe that most people are good, if they’re given the chance. No one can stop me helping them, if I think another scheme out carefully and then put my energies into it again. I haven’t finished. You’ve got to remember I’m not middle-aged yet. I believe in goodness. I believe in my own intelligence and will. You don’t mean to tell me that I’m bound to acquiesce in crippling myself?’
He was so much braver than I was. He was facing self-distrust, which as a young man he had scarcely known at all. He realized that there were to be moments when he would ask what was to become of him. Yet he would cling to some irreducible fragment of his hope. It was born with him, and would die only when he died. And it strengthened me, sitting by him in the café that evening, as I heard it struggle through, as I heard that defiant voice coming out of his scandal, downfall, and escape.
It strengthened me in my different fashion. I should never be so brave, nor have so many private refuges. My life up to now had been more direct than his. I had to come to terms with a simpler conflict. Listening to George that evening, I was able to think of my ambition and my marriage more steadily than I had ever done.
My ambition was as imperative now as in the days when George first helped me. I did not need proof of that — but if I had, Eden’s decision would have made it clear. It was not going to dwindle. If I died with it unfulfilled, I should die unreconciled: I should feel that I had wasted my time. I should never be able to comfort myself that I had grown up, that I had gone beyond the vulgarities of success. No, my ambition was part of my flesh and bone. In ten years, the only difference was that now I could judge what my limits were. I could not drive beyond them. They seemed to be laid down in black and white, that evening after George’s trial.
Much of what I had once imagined for myself was make-believe. I never should be, and never could have been, a spectacular success at the Bar. That I had to accept. At the very best, I could aim at going about as far as Getliffe. It was an irony, but such was my limit. With good luck I might achieve much the same status — a large junior practice, silk round forty, possibly a judgeship at the end.
That was the maximum I could expect. It would need luck, It would mean that my whole life should change before too late. As it was now, with Sheila unhinging me, I should not come anywhere near. As it was now — steadily I envisaged how I should manage. One could make it too catastrophic, I knew. I should not lose much of my present practice. I might even, as my friends became more influential, increase it here and there. Perhaps, as the years went on, I should harden myself and be able to work at night without caring how she was. At the worst, even if she affected me as in the last months, I could probably earn between one thousand pounds and two thousand pounds a year, and do it for the rest of my life. I should become known as a slightly seedy, mediocre barrister — with the particular seediness of one who has a brilliant future behind him.
Could I leave her? I thought of her more lovingly now than in my anger after Eden’s decision. I remembered how she had charmed me. But the violence of my passion had burned out. Yes, I could leave her — with sorrow and with relief. At the thought, I felt the same emancipation as when, that morning at breakfast, she announced that she might not return. I should be free of the moment-by-moment extortion. I could begin, without George’s bravery but with my own brand of determination, to rebuild my hopes — not the ardent hopes of years before, nothing more than those I could retain, now I had come to terms. They were enough for me, once I was free.
There was nothing against it, I thought. She was doing me harm. I had tried to look after her, and had failed. She would be as well off without me. As for the difference to me — it would seem like being made new.
George and I were still sitting by the café window. Outside, the sky had grown quite dark over the town. More and more as I grew older, I had come to hide my deepest resolves. George was always the most diffident of men at receiving a confidence — and that day of all days, he had enough to occupy him.
Yet suddenly I told him that my only course was to separate from Sheila, and that I should do so soon.
I waited. I told myself that I wished to make the break seem unforced: I was waiting for an occasion when, for her as well as me, it would be natural to part. Perhaps I hoped that she would go off again herself. Nothing was much changed. Week after week I went to Chambers tired and came home heavy-hearted. All the old habits returned, the exhausted pity, the tenderness that was on the fringe of temper, the reminder of passionate and unrequited love. It was a habit also to let it drift. For my own sake, I thought, I had to fix a date.
In the end, it was the early summer before I acted, and the occasion was much slighter than others I had passed by. I had given up any attempt to entertain at our house, or to accept invitations which meant taking her into society. More and more we had come to live in seclusion, as our friends learned to leave us alone. But I had a few acquaintances from my early days in London, who had been kind to me then. Some of them had little money, and had seen me apparently on the way to success, and would be hurt if I seemed to escape them. Theirs were the invitations I had never yet refused, and since our marriage Sheila had made the effort to go with me. Indeed, of all my various friends, these had been the ones with whom she was least ill at ease.