Rose continued to apologize until the call came through. Then, with remarkable speed, he asked me for one fact and wrote his comment to the Minister. He wrote it in the form of a question: but it was a question to which only a very brash minister could have given the wrong answer.
‘Ah well,’ said Rose, ‘that seems to conclude your share in the proceedings, my dear Eliot. Many many many thanks. Now I hope you’ll go and find some diversions for a nice Saturday afternoon.’
His politeness often ended with a malicious flick: but this was just politeness for its own sake. He was not interested in my life. If he had known, he would not have minded: he was not strait-laced, but he had other things to speculate about.
Released into the park, I was looking for Margaret – among the uniforms and summer frocks lying on the grass, I saw her, crowded out some yards away from our rendezvous. She was stretched on her face in the sunshine, her head turned to her sister’s, both of them engrossed. Watching the two faces together, I felt a kind of intimacy with Helen, although I had not spoken to her. Some of her expressions I already knew, having seen them in her sister’s face. But there was one thing about her for which Margaret had not prepared me at all.
Sitting erect, her back straight, her legs crossed at the ankles, she looked smart: unseasonably, almost tastelessly smart in that war-time summer, as if she were a detached observer from some neutral country. The black dress, the large black hat, clashed against that background of litter, the scorched grass, the dusty trees.
She was twenty-nine that year, four years older than Margaret, and she seemed at the same time more poised and more delicate. In both faces one could see the same shapely bones, but whereas in Margaret’s the flesh was firm with a young woman’s health, in her sister’s there were the first signs of tightness – the kind of tightness that I had seen a generation before among some of my aunts, who stayed cared-for too long as daughters and settled down at Helen’s age to an early spinsterhood. Yet Helen had married at twenty-one, and Margaret had told me that the marriage was a happy one.
They were so engrossed that Margaret did not notice me on the path. She was talking urgently, her face both alive and anxious. Helen’s face looked heavy, she was replying in a mutter. Their profiles, where the resemblance was clearest, were determined and sharp. I called out, and Margaret started, saying, ‘This is Lewis.’
At once Helen smiled at me; yet I saw that it was an effort for her to clear her mind of what had gone before. She spoke one or two words of formal greeting. Her voice was lighter than Margaret’s, her speech more clipped; but she intimated by the energy with which she spoke a friendliness she was too shy, too distracted, to utter.
As I sat down – ‘Be careful,’ she said, ‘it’s so grimy, you have to take care where you sit.’
Margaret glanced at her, and laughed. She said to me: ‘We were clearing off some family business.’
‘Dull for other people,’ said Helen. Then, afraid I should think she was shutting me out, she said quickly, ‘Dull for us, too, this time.’
She smiled, and made some contented-seeming remark about the summer weather. Only a trace of shadow remained in her face; she did not want me to see it, she wanted this meeting to be a successful one.
Yet each of the three of us was tongue-tied, or rather there were patches of silence, then we spoke easily, then silence again. Helen might have been worrying over her sister and me, but in fact it was Margaret who showed the more concern. Often she looked at Helen with the clucking, scolding vigilance that an elder sister might show to a beloved younger one, in particular to one without experience and unable to cope for herself.
As we sat together in the sunshine, the dawdling feet of soldiers and their girls scrabbling the path a few yards away, Helen kept being drawn back into her thoughts; then she would force herself to attend to Margaret and me, almost as though the sight of us together was a consolation. Indeed, far from worrying over her sister, she seemed happiest that afternoon when she found out something about us. Where had we met, she had never heard? When exactly had it been?
Shy as she was, she was direct with her questions, just as I had noticed in other women from families like theirs. Some of the concealments which a man of my kind had learned, would have seemed to Helen, and to Margaret also, as something like a denial of integrity. Helen was diffident and not specially worldly: but, if Margaret had hidden from her that she and I were living together, she would have been not only hurt but shocked.
For minutes together, it pulled up her spirits, took her thoughts out of herself, to ask questions of Margaret and me: I believed that she was making pictures of our future. But she could not sustain it. The air was hot, the light brilliant; she sat there in a brooding reverie.
HOPING that Helen might talk to her sister if they were alone, I left them together in the Park, and did not see Margaret again until the following Monday evening. She had already told me over the telephone that she would have to dine with Helen that night: and when we met in a Tothill Street pub Margaret said straight away: ‘I’m sorry you had to see her like this.’
‘I like her very much,’ I said.
‘I hoped you would.’ She had been looking forward for weeks to my meeting with Helen: she wanted me to admire her sister as she did herself. She told me again, anxious for me to believe her, that Helen was no more melancholy than she was, and far less self-centred.
‘No one with any eyes would think she was self-centred.’
‘It’s such an awful pity!’ she cried.
I asked her what it was.
‘She thought she was going to have a child at last. Then on Saturday she knew she wasn’t.’
‘It’s as important as that, is it?’ I said. But she had told me already how her sister longed for children.
‘You saw for yourself, didn’t you?’
‘How much,’ I asked, ‘is it damaging her marriage?’
‘It’s not. It’s a good marriage,’ she said. ‘But still, I can’t help remembering her when she was quite young, even when she was away at school, she used to talk to me about how she’d bring up her family.’
She was just on the point of going away to meet Helen when Betty Vane came in.
As I introduced them, Betty was saying that she had telephoned the office, got Gilbert Cooke and been told this was one of my favourite pubs – meanwhile she was scrutinizing Margaret, her ears sharp for the tone in which we spoke. Actually Margaret said little: she kept glancing at the clock above the bar: very soon she apologized and left. It looked rude, or else that she was deliberately leaving us together: it meant only that, if she had had to seem off-hand to anyone, she would make sure it was not to her sister.
‘Well,’ said Betty.
For an instant I was put out by the gust of misunderstanding. I made an explanation, but she was not accepting it. She said, her eyes friendly and appraising: ‘You’re looking much better, though.’
I had not seen her for some time, though now I was glad to. When Sheila died, it had been Betty who had taken charge of me. She had found me my flat, moved me out of the Chelsea house; and then, all the practical help given and disposed of, she got out of my way; she assumed I did not want to see her or anyone who reminded me of my marriage. Since then I had met her once or twice, received a couple of letters, and that was all.
Unlike most of our circle, she was not working in London, but in a factory office in a Midland town. The reason for this was singular: she, by a long way the most loftily born of my friends, was the worst educated; in the schoolroom at home she had scarcely been taught formally at all; clever as she was, she did not possess the humblest of educational qualifications, and would have been hard-pushed to acquire any.
Here she was in the middle thirties, opposite me across the little table in the pub, her nose a bit more peaked, her beautiful eyes acute. She had always liked her drink and now she was putting down bitter pint for pint with me: she did not mention Sheila’s name or any trouble she had seen me through, but she enjoyed talking of the days past; she had a streak of sentiment, not about any special joy, but just about our youth.
There was a haze of home-sickness over us, shimmering with pleasure, and it stayed as we went out to eat. Out to eat better than I had eaten all that year, for Betty, even though she was not living in London, kept an eye on up-and-coming restaurants; she took as much care about it, I thought, as a lonely, active and self-indulgent man. Thus, at a corner table in Percy Street, we questioned each other with the content, regard, melancholy, and comfort of old friends – edged by the feeling, shimmering in the home-sick haze, that with different luck we might have been closer.
I inquired about the people she was meeting and what friends she had made, in reality inquiring whether she had found a lover or a future husband. It sounded absurd of me to be euphemistic and semi-arch, as circuitous as Mr Knight, to this woman whom I knew so well and whose own tongue was often coarse. But Betty was coarse about the body – and about her emotions as inhibited as a schoolgirl. She just could not utter, I knew from long ago, anything that she felt about a man. Even now, she sounded like a girl determined not to let herself be teased. Yes, she had seen a lot of people at the factory: ‘Some of them are interesting,’ she said.
‘Who are they?’
‘Oh, managers and characters like that.’
‘Anyone specially interesting?’ I was sure she wanted to talk.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she blurted out, ‘there’s someone I rather like.’
I asked about him – a widower, a good deal older than she was, moderately successful.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘you’ve never met people of that kind before.’
‘He’s a nice man.’
‘It sounds all right,’ I said affectionately.
‘It might be all right,’ she said with a touch of the hope she never quite lost, with absolute lack of confidence.
‘My dear, I beg you,’ I broke out, ‘don’t think so little of yourself.’
She smiled with embarrassment. ‘I don’t know about that–’
‘Why in God’s name shouldn’t it be all right?’
‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘I’m not everyone’s cup of tea.’
She spoke out firmly. She was relieved to have confessed a little, even in such a strangulated form. She shut up, as though abashed at her own outpouringness. Sharply, she began to talk about me. In a moment she was saying: ‘What about that girl who rushed out of the pub?’
‘I met her last autumn,’ I replied.
‘Is it serious?’
‘Yes, it is.’
Betty nodded.
She said, in a companionable, almost disapproving tone: ‘You have had such a rotten time. This isn’t another of them, is it?’
‘Far from it.’
She stared at me.
‘It would be nice,’ she said, her voice going suddenly soft, ‘if you could be happy.’
She added: ‘There’s no one who deserves it more.’
In the restaurant corner, the air was warm with a sentimental glow. Betty was a realistic woman: about herself realistic to an extent that crippled her: to most people she did not give the benefit of the doubt. But about me her realism had often been blurred, and she thought me a better man than I was.
How much better than I was – I could not avoid a glint of recognition an hour after. I had gone glowing from the restaurant to Margaret’s room, where she was talking to Helen. When I arrived they were happy. Helen’s spirits had revived; like Margaret, she did not give up easily. I gathered she had been to a doctor; and then she refused to talk further that evening of her own worry. When I came in, it was clear that they had been talking instead – with pleasure and amusement – about Margaret and me.
In the midsummer evening, the folding door between Margaret’s bedroom and sitting-room was thrown open; their chairs were opposite each other round the empty grate in the sitting-room, which in the winter we had never used. Outside in the street, still light although it was getting on for ten, children were playing, and just across the area, close to the window and on a level with our chairs, passed the heads and shoulders of people walking along the pavement. It might have been the ‘front room’ of my childhood.
In it, Helen, dressed with the same exaggerated smartness as in the park, looked more than ever out of place. I thought for an instant how different they were. Despite her marriage, despite her chic, something of my first impression of her lingered, the touch of the clever, delicate, and spinsterish. And yet they had each the same independence, the same certainty that they were their own judges, bred in through the family from which Margaret, more than her sister, had rebelled, bred in each one just as much as the mole over the hip which she had told me was a family mark. About Helen there was nothing of Margaret’s carelessness; and yet in other ways so unlike her sister, Margaret, who rejoiced in giving me pleasure, who had the deep and guiltless sensuality of those women to whom giving pleasure is a major one, answered just as deliberately for herself.
‘You oughtn’t to live like this, you know,’ Helen said, glancing about the room, ‘it is really rather messy. Miles says you’d do far better–’
‘Oh, Miles,’ Margaret said. ‘He would.’ They were speaking of Helen’s husband, whom they both appeared to regard with a kind of loving depreciation, as though they were in some way leagued in a pact to save him from himself. Yet from what I had heard he was a successful man, amiable, self-sufficient, regarding responsibility as a kind of privilege. ‘It’s lucky he chose the right one of us.’
‘Very lucky,’ said Helen, ‘you would have made him quite miserable.’ When she spoke of him her face grew tender, content. It was a maternal contentment: like a warm-hearted and dutiful child, he gave her almost all she desired.
Margaret smiled back at her, and for a second I thought I saw in her face a longing for just such a contentment, just such a home; ordered, settled, the waiting fire, the curtains drawn against the night.
‘It wouldn’t have been my sort of thing,’ she said.