‘Sometimes I can’t help thinking that people won’t see sense in time. I don’t mean that people are wicked. I don’t even mean they’re stupid. But we’re all in a mad bus, and the only thing we’re all agreed on is to prevent anyone getting to the wheel.’
We were climbing up the steps. He said sharply: ‘Lewis, I could do with some advice.’
For a second, I was afraid he was thinking of resigning. Instead he went on: ‘I just don’t know what to do about Penelope and that young man.’
His tone had become even more worried and sombre. On the way across the Park he, who knew more about it than most men, had been gloomy over the military future. Now he spoke as though his daughter had really been the problem on his mind. He spoke exactly as a Victorian parent might have spoken, as though all the future were predictable and secure except for his daughter’s marriage, and the well-being of his grandchildren.
He was on his way, he said, to meet her in the Ladies’ Annexe of the club (the Athenaeum). Would I come too? It might help him out. He hadn’t the slightest idea of what had been happening, or what she planned. He did not know whether she and Arthur were secretly engaged, or had even thought of getting married. Arthur had, that summer, returned home to America. Francis did not know whether they had quarrelled.
He did not know – but this he didn’t say, for she was his daughter, and both of us were talking more prudishly than if she had been another girl – whether she had been sleeping with Arthur. For myself, in private, I thought it highly probable.
As we sat in the drawing-room of the Annexe, waiting for her, Francis looked more baffled than I had known him. Both he and his wife were lost. Penelope was more obstinate than either of them, and she wasn’t given to explaining herself. She had never been an academic girl: she had taken some sort of secretarial course, and she showed about as much interest in Francis’ scientific friends as she would have done in so many Amazonian Indians. At present, however, she was prepared to recognize their existence. It had occurred to her that some of them lived in the United States; no doubt one could be persuaded to give her a job.
‘I’ve got to stop it,’ said Francis, as we went on waiting. ‘I can’t have her going over.’ He spoke resolutely, like King Lear in the storm, and about as convincingly. He had already ordered a bottle of champagne, with the air of a man trying to keep an exigent girl-friend in a good temper.
At last she came in, with her flouncing walk, flushed, handsome, frowning. ‘I thought it was number twelve,’ she said. She gazed at us firmly giving us the blame for her own mistake.
‘As you see,’ I replied, ‘you thought wrong.’
‘It used to be number twelve.’
‘Never.’
‘I remember
going
to number twelve.’ She spoke with an extreme display of mumpsimus, persisting confidently in error.
‘In that case, either you remember wrong, or you went to the wrong place before.’
She stopped lowering, and gave me an open, happy grin. I could imagine what Arthur and others saw in her.
With a healthy thirst, she put down two glasses of champagne.
Francis’ manner to her was courteous but uneasy, very much as when he was talking to Hector Rose. He told her that—from Oxford was dining with them. ‘How old is he?’ Penelope sat up.
‘Forty-seven or eight.’
Penelope sank back.
‘Now if you’d ever seen him,’ I remarked, ‘you’d certainly have put on a new dress.’
‘Of course I shouldn’t.’ Then a thought struck her. ‘Does he know people in America?’
‘Why America?’ I said, trying to help Francis out.
‘Oh, I’m going there this fall or next spring.’
Francis cleared his throat. Screwing himself up, he said: ‘I’m sorry, Penny, but I wish you’d get that out of your mind.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m afraid it can’t happen.’
‘We’ll see.’
Francis took the plunge.
‘I don’t mean that we couldn’t find a way for you to earn your keep. I expect we could–’
‘Then let’s get going!’ said Penelope, with enthusiasm.
‘That isn’t the point. Don’t you see it isn’t?’
Francis paused: then rushed on: ‘Don’t you see, we can’t let you deposit yourself on young Plimpton’s doorstep?’
‘Why not?’
Penelope stretched herself luxuriously, with the poised expression of one who has said her last word for the evening.
Francis continued a one-sided conversation, without answers. Didn’t she see that they couldn’t let her? Didn’t she realize that they had to behave like responsible persons?
Suddenly his tone became gentler, and even more embarrassed. He said: ‘All that’s bad enough, but there’s something worse.’
This time she responded: ‘What’s that?’
‘My dear girl, I’m not going to ask you what your feelings are for young – Arthur, or what his are for you. I don’t think any of us is entitled to ask that.’
She gazed at him with splendid grey eyes, her face quite unreadable.
‘But suppose you do care for him, and something went wrong? You’re both very young, and the chances are that something will go wrong. Well, if you’ve gone over to be with him, and then you’re left alone – that’s a risk I just can’t think of your taking.’
Penelope gave a gnomic smile and said: ‘When I go to America I may not see Arthur at all.’
It was still September. In the middle of the morning, the telephone rang on my desk. My personal assistant was speaking: someone called Ellen Smith was on the line, asking to talk to me urgently. The name meant nothing: what did she want? No, said the PA, she had refused to say. I hesitated. This was one of the occupational risks. Then I said, ‘All right, put her through.’
‘My name is Ellen Smith.’ The voice was brisk and cultivated. ‘I’ve met you once before.’
I said ‘Yes?’ But I did not remember.
‘I think Roger – Roger Quaife – has told you, hasn’t he?’
Now I understood.
‘He’s given me permission,’ she went on, ‘to talk to you myself. Do you mind?’
Would I call at her flat one evening, when she had got back from her job? That would be better than saying anything on the telephone, didn’t I agree? She didn’t want to impose on me, but she was worried. She hoped I could bear it.
She sounded precise, nervous, active. I had no impression of her at all. On the way to her flat in Ebury Street, I thought to myself that it was well-placed for Westminster – chance or not? But about her, I did not know whether she was single or married, nor anything else.
When she opened the door to me, the first thing I felt was the obvious, the banal irony. She seemed familiar, yet I could not place her. She shook hands with an expression both diffident and severe. She was small and slender, but not at all frail, dark-haired, wearing a white jersey over a black skirt. She was no younger than Caro. By the side of Caro, the confident, the splendid, she would have looked insignificant. One memory, though not about herself, came back with the relevance of someone telling one the time, and I remembered Caro, gay in the drawing-room at Lord North Street, roaring with laughter and saying the woman a wife needs to fear isn’t the raving beauty, but that little grey mouse in the corner. It seemed the most cut and dried of ironies to remember that, and then to follow Ellen Smith into her chic, small sitting-room. I still could not recall meeting her, anything about her.
She poured me a drink. She drew her legs on to the sofa, the tumblers on the table between us.
‘It’s kind of you to come,’ she said.
‘Nonsense,’ I replied, a little over-heartily.
‘Is it nonsense?’ She looked at me. For an instant I had Caro’s eyes in mind, bold, full, innocent. These eyes were not bold, but deeper-set, lit up with attention, lit up with insight. Then the contrast faded out. I was studying her face, not beautiful, not pretty, but fine and delicate. The delicacy, the acuteness of her expression, struck one more when one looked up from her strong shoulders. She smiled, diffidently and honestly. ‘This is damned awkward,’ she said.
Suddenly a memory flashed back – was it because my fingers were cold against the glass? The Ambassadorial house in Regent’s Park, the night of Suez, the wife of J C Smith.
So this was she. Yes, it was awkward, though that was not what she meant. Smith, Collingwood’s nephew, fanatical, dedicated, so people said about him: I had read some of his speeches and articles: they had a curious gritty violence. They were shot through with a conspiratorial feeling of history and politics: and yet I had met young Conservative members who worshipped him. The wife of J C Smith. Yes, it was awkward. I said something muted, such as, the less she fretted the better.
This time her smile was brilliant.
‘That’s easier said than done, you know.’
I tried to take the edge off both of us. I asked what she had been doing that day. She told me that she had been out as usual at her job. She seemed to be working in a reference library. We mentioned the names of acquaintances, among them Lord Lufkin. I said that I had once worked for him. ‘I’m sure that was good for you,’ she said with a faint flash of mischief. Strained as she was, her spirits did not take much to revive them. She did not forget about my comfort, either. The glass was refilled, the cigarette-box was open. She broke out: ‘I am not fretting about him and me. You do believe that, don’t you?’
She went on: ‘I’m happy about us. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. And I think he’s happy too. It sounds too conceited to live, but I think he’s happy too.’
She had no conceit at all, I was thinking, far too little for her own good.
She had spoken so directly that I could do the same. I asked, where was her husband, what had happened to her marriage? She shook her head.
‘I’ve got to tell you,’ she said. ‘It sounds ugly. If I heard it about someone else, I should write her off. I know I should.’ She said that, beside Roger, only her husband’s parents knew the truth about him. It was to be kept a dead secret. Then she said, flat and hard: ‘He’s in a mental home.’ It wasn’t certain that he would get better, she said. His constituency had been told that he was ill and might not contest his seat at the next election.
‘It’s been coming on for years. Yes, and that hasn’t stopped me. I saw the chance to be happy, and I took it.’ She looked at me with an expression honest, guilty and stern. ‘I’m not going to make excuses. But you might believe this. It sounds disloyal, but if he hadn’t been getting unbalanced I should have left him long ago. I tried to look after him. If it hadn’t been for that, I should have left him long before Roger came along.’ She gave a sharp-eyed smile, not merciful to herself. ‘There’s something wrong with a woman who falls for a man she can’t endure and then for one she can’t marry, isn’t there?’
‘It could be bad luck.’
‘It’s not all bad luck.’ Then she said, without pretence: ‘But, do you know, just now I can’t feel that there’s much wrong with me. You can understand that, can’t you?’
She laughed out loud. One couldn’t doubt her warmth, her ardour, her capacity for happiness. And yet I felt that this was not a life for which she was made. Plenty of women I knew in London made the best of this sort of bachelor life in flats like this – though hers was brighter, more expensive, than most of theirs. Plenty of women came back from offices as she did, looked after their little nests, waited for their men. Some of them could take it: light come, light go. Some even felt their blood run hotter because they had to keep a secret, because the curtains were drawn and they were listening – alone – for the snap of the lift-door. Looking at Ellen, I was sure that, though she would bear it in secrecy if she couldn’t get him any other way, she was paying a price, maybe higher than she knew.
I asked how long had their affair been going on.
‘Three years,’ she said.
That set me back. Three years. All the time I had known him well. For an instant I was piqued, at having noticed nothing.
There was a silence. Her eyes, dark blue, painfully honest, were studying me. She said: ‘I want to ask you something. Very seriously.’
‘Yes?’ I replied.
‘Ought I to get out of it?’
I hesitated.
‘Is that a fair question?’ I asked.
‘Isn’t it?’
I said: ‘But could you get out of it?’
Her eyes stayed steady. She did not reply. After a moment she said: ‘I couldn’t do him harm. We’ve been good for each other. You’d expect him to be good for me, of course, but somehow it isn’t all one-sided. I don’t know why, but sometimes I think I’ve been good for him.’ She was speaking simply, tentatively: then she broke out: ‘Anyway, it would be the end for me if I let him go.’
Her voice had risen; tears had come. With a rough, schoolgirlish gesture, she brushed her cheeks with the back of her fingers. Then she sniffled, and made herself go on in a braver tone. ‘But I couldn’t do him harm, you know that, don’t you?’
‘I think I do.’
‘I believe in what he’s doing. You believe in it, isn’t that true?’ She said she wasn’t ‘political’, but she was shrewd. She knew where his position was weak.
She gave a sharp smile: ‘I’m not fooling you, am I? I’m not the sort of person to make gestures. Naturally I couldn’t do him harm. I couldn’t bear to damage his career, just because it’s him. But I couldn’t bear to damage him – because I’m pretty selfish. If he suffered any sort of public harm because of him and me, he’d never really forgive me. Do you think he would?’
I noticed, not for the first time, her curious trick of throwing questions at me, questions about herself which I could not have enough knowledge to answer. In another woman, it would have seemed like an appeal for attention – ‘Look at
me!
– an opening gambit to intimacy, to flirtation. But she was not thinking of me at all as a man, only as someone who might help her. This was her method, not precisely of confiding, so much as of briefing me, so that if the chance came I could be some use.
I said something non-committal.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it would be the end.’
In an even, realistic, almost sarcastic tone, she added: ‘So I get the rough end of the stick however I play it.’