Homecomings by C. P. Snow Page A

her mouth, she had nothing new to say. She had fetched me home just to work over the moving belt of anxiety – the bits and pieces came round and round before us – Robinson, January 1st, her ‘crack-up’. My impatience not quite suppressed, dully I said: ‘We’ve been over all this before.’
    ‘I know it,’ she said.
    ‘I’ve told you,’ I said mechanically, ‘worse things have passed, and so will this.’
    ‘Will it?’ She gave a smile, half-trusting, half-contemptuous, then broke out: ‘I’ve got no purpose. You’ve got a purpose. You can’t pretend you haven’t.’ She cried out: ‘I’ve said before, I’ve handed in my resignation.’
    I was tired of it, unable to make the effort of reassurance, irked that she had dragged me from the work I wanted to do. With the self-absorption that had now become complete, she dismissed all my life except the fraction of it I spent supporting her. We were sitting by the fire in the drawing-room. I heard myself using words that, years before, I had used in her old sitting-room. For there, in my one attempt to part from her, I had said that our life together was becoming difficult for me. Now I was near repeating myself.
    ‘This is difficult for me,’ I said, ‘as well as for you.’
    She stared at me. Whether or not the echo struck her, I did not know. Perhaps she was too drawn into herself to attend. Or perhaps she was certain that, after all that had happened, all that had changed, I could no longer even contemplate leaving her.
    ‘It is difficult for me,’ I said.
    ‘I suppose it is,’ she replied.
    On that earlier occasion, I had been able to say that for my own sake I must go. But now, as we both knew, I could not. While she was there, I had to be there too. All I could say was: ‘Make it as easy for me as you can.’
    She did not reply. For a long time she gazed at me with an expression I could not read. She said, in a hard and final tone: ‘You’ve done all you could.’

 
     
9:   A Goodbye in the Morning
     
    UP to 20 December there was no change that I noticed. As I lived through those days they seemed no more significant than others. Later, when I tried to remember each word she and I said, I remembered also the signs of distress she showed about January 1st, and the new job. She was still too proud to ask outright, but she was begging me to find an excuse to get her out of it.
    Otherwise she had fits of activity, as capricious as they used to be. She put on a mackintosh, in weather that was already turning into bitter winter, walked all day along the river, down to the docks, past Greenwich, along the mud-flats. When she got home, flushed with the cold, she looked as she must have done as a girl, after a day’s hunting. She was cheerful that night, full of the enjoyment of her muscles; she shared a bottle of wine with me and fell asleep after dinner, a little drunk and happily tired. I did not believe in those flashes of cheerfulness, but also I did not totally believe in her distress. It did not seem, as I watched her, to have the full weight of her nature behind it.
    Her moods fluctuated, not as my friend Roy Calvert’s did in cycles of depression, but in splinters from hour to hour; more exactly, her moods could change within a single moment, they were not integral; sometimes she spoke unlike an integral person. But that had always been so, though it was sharper now. She still made her gibes, and, the instant she did so, I felt the burden of worry evanesce. This phase was nothing out of the ordinary, I thought, and we should both come through it, much as we had done for the past years.
    In fact, I behaved as I had seen others do in crises, acting as though the present state of things would endure for ever, and occasionally, as it were with my left hand and without recognizing it, showing a sense of danger.
    One day I got away from my meetings and confided in Charles March, one of the closest friends of my young manhood, who was at this