Homecomings Read online

  ‘But he is a gifted man, isn’t he?’ cried Sheila, her face softer and less worn.

  ‘I think he is,’ I said.

  ‘I might be able to get him going again,’ she said.

  She went on, wistfully and yet with something like bravado: ‘That would be something. If I haven’t done anything else, that would be something, wouldn’t it?’

  2: Two Kinds of Business Method

  ON the track of someone she might serve, Sheila worked as fast as a confidence trickster. It must have been that same week, probably the very next day, that R S Robinson came to dine. Certainly I arrived straight from Lufkin’s office; for long afterwards the juxtaposition struck me as ironic.

  I had spent all day in Lufkin’s suite. To begin, he had asked me to be available in the early morning and had then kept me waiting, which was not unusual, for a couple of hours. Outside his office, in an ante-room so thickly carpeted that men walked through it with no noise at all, I passed the time with the member of Lufkin’s entourage whom I knew best, a man of my own age called Gilbert Cooke. He was a kind of personal assistant to Lufkin, in theory giving advice on export problems, just as in theory I gave advice on legal ones; but in practice Lufkin used us both as utility men. The company was one of the smaller oil-businesses, but the smallness was relative, and in 1938, the fourth year of Lufkin’s chairmanship, he had already a turnover of thirty million pounds. He had also his own legal staff, and when he offered me a consultant’s job he did not want another lawyer; but it suited him to pick up young men like me and Cooke, keep them on call, and then listen to them.

  In the ante-room, Gilbert Cooke pointed to the office door.

  ‘He’s running behind time,’ he said, as though Lufkin were a train. Cooke was fleshy, powerfully muscled, with a high-coloured Corinthian face and hot brown eyes; he gave at once an impression of intimacy, kindness and considerable weight of nature. In fact, he spoke as though we were more intimate than we actually were.

  ‘How is Sheila just now?’ he asked me while he waited, as though he knew the whole history.

  I said she was well, but he was not put off.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure she’s been to the right doctor?’ he said.

  I said she had not been near one for some time.

  ‘Who did she go to?’

  He was intrusive, pressing, but kind: it was hard to remember that he had only been inside our house twice. He had taken me often enough to his clubs, we had talked politics and games and Lufkin’s business, but I had not given him a confidence.

  At last we were shown into Lufkin’s office: in that suite, as one moved from room to room, the air wafted against the skin like warm breath.

  Lufkin sat up straight in a hard chair. He scarcely greeted us: he was inconsiderate, but also informal and without pomp. He was off-hand in personal relations because he was so bad at them, and yet, perversely, they gave him pleasure.

  ‘You know the point?’ he said.

  Yes, we had both been briefed.

  ‘What do I do?’

  It sounded as though we should have finished in ten minutes. In actuality, it took all day, and nothing we said mattered much. Lufkin sat there, indifferent to time, straight, bony, skull-faced. He was only ten years older than Cooke or me; his skin was dark, and his business enemies put it about that he looked Jewish and that his name was Jewish, while as a matter of fact his father was a nonconformist parson in East Anglia.

  The point before us was simple enough. He had been asked whether he wanted to buy another distributing business; should he? From the beginning of the talk, throughout the long, smoky, central-heated, unromantic hours, two things stood out. First, this was a point on which neither Cooke’s judgement nor mine was worth much – certainly no more than that of any moderately intelligent man round the office. Second, I was sure that, whatever we or anyone else argued, Lufkin had already made up his mind to buy.

  Yet all day Cooke behaved like a professional no-man. He became argumentative and rude, oddly so for a middle-rank employee in the presence of a tycoon. The tone of the discussion was harsh and on the whole impersonal; the arguments were prosaic. Cooke was loquacious, much more than Lufkin or me: he went on pestering, not flattering: as I listened, I knew that he was closer to Lufkin than most people in the firm, and wondered why.

  Most of the men Lufkin bought had a bit of professional success behind them; but Cooke had nothing to show but social connexions, except for his own curious kind of personal force.

  Once, in the middle of the afternoon, after we had lunched on sandwiches and coffee, Cooke switched from his factual line. Suddenly, staring at Lufkin with his full eyes, he said: ‘I’m afraid you’re liable to overstretch yourself.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Lufkin seemed willing to consider the idea.

  ‘I mean, with any empire like yours’ – their eyes met, and Lufkin smiled bleakly – ‘there comes a time when you’ve got to draw in your horns, or else–’

  ‘What do you say to that, Eliot?’

  I said that the firm was short of men, and that the able men were spread thin. He ought to acquire a dozen future managers before he bought much more.

  ‘I agree that,’ he said. For half-an-hour he got down to detail, and then asked: ‘That make you feel any better, Cooke?’

  ‘No, it seems easy to you, but it’s not easy.’

  ‘What seems easy?’

  ‘Biting off more than anyone can chew.’

  Underneath his remote, off-hand manner, Lufkin was obscurely gratified. But he had a knack of pushing away his own gratification, and we returned to figures again.

  The sky outside the office windows darkened, the air seemed more than ever hot. Nothing was settled. There had scarcely been a flight of fancy all day. No one would have guessed, though it was the truth, that Lufkin was a man of remarkable imagination; nor that this marathon talk was his technique of coming to the point of action; nor that Gilbert Cooke was swelling with pride, ardent but humble, at being in on anything so big.

  When at last we parted, it was nearly seven and still nothing was settled. The whole range of facts about the new business had been re-sorted, except the purchase price, which Lufkin had only mentioned once, and then obliquely. ‘There’s always money for a good business,’ he had added indifferently, and passed on. And yet that purchase price gave a tang to the repetitive, headachey hours, the only tang I was left with on the way to Chelsea in the cold taxi, for it could not have been less than a million pounds.

  When I reached home, I met a different kind of business method. R S Robinson was already there in the drawing-room; he was standing plumply by the fire, soft silver-shining hair venerable above smooth baby skin. He looked comfortable, he looked sedate; behind his spectacles, his eyes glinted from Sheila to me, sharp with merriness and suspicion. He made no secret that he wanted Sheila’s backing for a sum as great as he could persuade out of her, as great as a thousand pounds.

  ‘I’ve not come here just for the sake of your intelligent conversation,’ he told her. His voice was fluent, modulated, flattering, high-spirited.

  ‘I mustn’t come on false pretences, must I?’ he said. ‘I warn you, I’m a dangerous man to let into your house.’

  A thousand was the maximum which he let himself imagine; he did not hope to get away with so much, although he was not too delicate to mention it. He set himself to persuade her, and incidentally me as a possible influence, with all the art of which he was so proud.

  Strange, I was thinking as we tasted our drinks, that fifteen, sixteen years before, he had been part of our youth. For he had done, on his own account, a little coterie publishing in the days of the English Review, the Imagists, the rebels of the first war. It had been R S Robinson who had published a translation of Leopardi’s poems under the inept title of Lonely Beneath the Moon. Both Sheila and I had read it just before we met, when we were at the age for romantic pessimism, and to us it had been magical.

  Since then everything he had
touched had failed. He was trying to raise money from Sheila for another publishing firm, but himself was not able to put down five pounds. And yet we could not forget the past, and he did not want to, so that, as he stood between us on our own hearthrug, it was not Sheila, it was not I, it was he who dispensed the patronage.

  ‘I was telling Mrs Eliot that she must write a book,’ he told me soon after I joined them.

  Sheila shook her head.

  ‘I’m sure you could,’ he said to her. He turned on me: ‘I’ve just noticed that you, sir, you have artists’ hands.’ He had lost no time getting out his trowel; but Sheila who shrank with self-consciousness at any praise, could take it from him. Unlike our Chelsea acquaintances of our own generation, he had not begun by using our christian names, but instead went on calling me ‘sir’ and Sheila ‘Mrs Eliot’, even when he was speaking with insidious intimacy face-to-face.

  Standing between us, he dispensed the patronage; he had dignity and presence, although he was inches shorter than Sheila, who was tall for a woman, and did not come up to my shoulder. Round-shouldered and plump, he touched a crest of his silver hair.

  He had come to the house in a dinner-jacket, which had once been smart and was now musty, while neither Sheila nor I had dressed; and it was Robinson who set to work to remove embarrassment.

  ‘Always do it,’ he advised us, as we went into the dining-room. I asked him what.

  ‘Always put people at a disadvantage. When they tell you not to dress, take no notice of them. It gives you the moral initiative.’

  ‘You see,’ he whispered to Sheila, sitting at her right hand, ‘I’ve got the moral initiative tonight.’

  In the dining-room he congratulated Sheila on the fact that, since the food came up by the serving hatch, we were alone.

  ‘So I needn’t pretend, need I?’ he said, and, tucking into his dinner, told stories of other meals back in the legendary past, at which he had tried to raise money to publish books – books, he did not let us forget, that we had all heard of since.

  ‘I expect you’ve been told that I was better off then?’ He looked up from his plate to Sheila, with a merry, malicious chuckle.

  ‘Don’t you believe it. People always get everything wrong.’ Stories of multiple manoeuvres, getting promises from A on the strength of B and C, from B on the strength of A and C… ‘The point is, one’s got to refuse to play the game according to the rules,’ he advised Sheila. Stories of personal negotiations of such subtlety and invention as to make my business colleagues of the afternoon seem like different animals.

  All the time, listening to him, I had spent most of my attention, as throughout our marriage, watching how Sheila was. She had turned towards him, the firm line of her nose and lip clear against the wall; her face had lost the strained and over-vivid fixity, there was no sign of the tic. Perhaps she did not show the quiet familiar ease that sometimes visited her in the company of her protégés; but she had never had a protégé as invincible as this. It took me all my time to remember that, on his own admission, Robinson was destitute, keeping an invalid wife and himself on £150 a year. More than anything, Sheila looked – and it was rare for her – plain mystified.

  Just for an instant, out of dead habit, I wondered if he had any attraction for her. Maybe, those who are locked in their own coldness, as she was, mindless than the rest of us about the object of attraction, about whether it is unsuitable or grotesque in others’ eyes. Doing a good turn for this man of sixty, whom others thought fantastic, Sheila might have known a blessed tinge of sexual warmth. At any rate, her colour was high, and for an hour I could feel responsibility lifted from me; she had managed to forget herself.

  Robinson, as natural about eating as about his manoeuvres, asked her for a second helping of meat, and went on with his recent attempts at money raising. Some prosperous author, who had known him in his famous days, had given him an introduction to an insurance company. Robinson digressed, his elephant eyes glinting, to tell us a scandalous anecdote about the prosperous author, a young actor, and an ageing woman; as he told it, Robinson was studying Sheila, probing into her life with me.

  Pressing the story on her, but drawing no response, he got going about the insurance company. They had made him go into the City, they had given him coffee and wholemeal biscuits, and then they had talked of the millions they invested in industrial concerns.

  ‘They talked to me of millions,’ he cried.

  ‘They didn’t mean anything,’ I said.

  ‘They should be more sensitive,’ said Robinson. ‘They talked to me of millions when all I wanted was nine hundred pounds.’

  I was almost sure he had dropped the figure from a thousand for the sake of the sound, just as, in the shops where my mother used to buy our clothes, they did not speak of five shillings, but always of four and eleven three.

  ‘What’s more,’ said Robinson, ‘they didn’t intend to give me that. They went on talking about millions here and millions there, and when I got down to brass tacks they looked vague.’

  ‘Did they offer anything?’ said Sheila.

  ‘Always know when to cut your losses,’ Robinson said in his firm, advising tone. It occurred to me that, in a couple of hours, he had produced more generalizations on how to run a business than I had heard from Paul Lufkin in four years.

  ‘I just told them, “You’re treating me very badly. Don’t talk of millions to people who need the money,” and I left them high and dry.’ He sighed. ‘Nine hundred pounds.’

  At the thought of humiliation turned upside down, Sheila had laughed out loud, for the first time for months. But now she began asking questions. Nine hundred pounds: that would go nowhere. True, he had kept his old imprint all those years, he could publish a book or two and get someone else to distribute it – but what good was that? Surely if he did that, and it went off half-cock, he had dissipated his credit, and had finished himself for good?

  Robinson was not used to being taken by surprise. He flushed: the flush rose up his cheeks, up to the forehead under the white hair. Like many ingenious men, he constantly underrated everyone round him. He had made his judgement of this beautiful hag-ridden woman; he thought she would be the softest of touches. He had marked her down as a neurotic. He was astonished she should show acumen. He was upset that she should see through him.

  For, of course, he contrived to be at the same time embarrassingly open and dangerously secretive. Was he even truthful about his own penury? He had been trying on Sheila an alternative version of his technique of multiple approach. This time he was working on several people simultaneously, telling none of them about the others.

  ‘Always keep things simple,’ he said, trying to wave his panache.

  ‘Not so simple that they don’t make sense,’ said Sheila, smiling but not yielding.

  Soon she got some reason out of him. If he could collect it, he wanted several thousand; at that period, such a sum would let him publish, modestly but professionally, for a couple of years. That failing, however, he still wanted his nine hundred. Even if he could only bring out three books under the old imprint, the name of R S Robinson would go round again.

  ‘You never know what might happen,’ he said, and blew out wonderful prospects like so many balloons. With three books they would remember him again, he said, and he gave up balloon blowing and spoke of the books he would bring out. He stopped flattering Sheila or using the other dodges which he believed infallible, and all of a sudden one saw that his taste had stayed incorrupt. It was a hard, austere, anti-romantic taste, similar to Sheila’s own.

  ‘I could do for them,’ he said, ‘what I did before.’

  ‘You want some money,’ said Sheila.

  ‘I only want enough to put someone on the map,’ he cried.

  She asked: ‘Is money all you need?’

  ‘No. I want someone like you to keep people from getting the wrong impression. You see, they sometimes think I’m a bit of an ass.’

  He was not putting
on one of his acts. He had said it angrily, hotly, out of resentment, not trying to get round her. But soon he was master of himself again, enough to calculate that he might extract an answer that night. He must have calculated also that she was on his side and would not shift – for he made an excuse to go to the lavatory, so as to leave the two of us alone.

  As soon as I returned without him to the dining-table, where we were still sitting, Sheila said the one word: ‘Well?’

  We had been drinking brandy, and with a stiff mass-production gesture, she kept pushing the decanter with the side of her little finger.

  ‘Well?’ she said again.

  I believed, then and afterwards, that if I had intervened I could have stopped her. She still trusted me, and no one else. However much she was set on helping him, she would have listened if I had warned her again. But I had already decided not to. She had found an interest, it would do more good than harm, I thought.

  ‘If you want to risk it,’ I said, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t.’

  ‘Do you think any better of him?’

  I was thinking, he had raised the temperature of living for her. Then I realized that he had done the same for me. If she was taken in, so was I.

  I grinned and said: ‘I must say I’ve rather enjoyed myself.’

  She nodded, and then said after a pause: ‘He wouldn’t be grateful, would he?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Don’t soften it.’ Her great eyes swung round on me like searchlights. ‘No one’s grateful for being looked after. He’d be less grateful than most.’

  It was the kind of bitter truth that she never spared herself or others, the only kind of truth that she thought worth facing. Who else, I wondered, would have faced it at that moment, just as she was committing herself? Other people could do what she was doing, but not many with that foresight of what lay ahead.

  We sat silent, her eyes still levelled at mine, but gradually becoming unfocused, as though looking past me, looking a great distance away.

  ‘If I don’t do it,’ she said, ‘someone else will. Oh well, I suppose it’s more important to me than it is to him.’