Homecomings by C. P. Snow Page B

time a doctor in Pimlico. I told him, in sharper tones than I used to myself, that Sheila was in a state of acute anxiety, and I described it: was it any use bringing in another psychiatrist? The trouble was, as he knew, she had consulted one before, and given him up with ridicule. Charles promised to find someone, who would have to be as clever and as strong-willed as she was herself, whom she might just conceivably trust. But he shook his head. ‘I doubt if he’ll be able to do much for her. All he might do is take some of the responsibility off you.’
    On 20 December, Charles rang me up at the office and gave me a doctor’s name and address. It happened to be the day I was bringing my first substantial piece of departmental business – the business from which Sheila had called me away a fortnight before – to an issue. In the morning I had three interviews, in the afternoon a committee. I got my way, I was elated, I wrote a minute to my superior. Then I telephoned the doctor whom Charles had recommended; he was not at his surgery and would not be available for a fortnight, but he could see my wife in the first week in January, 4 January. That I arranged, and, with a throb of premonition, my own work shelved for a day or two, free to attend to her, I telephoned home.
    I felt an irrational relief when she answered. I asked: ‘How are you?’
    ‘Much the same.’
    ‘Nothing’s happened?’ I asked.
    ‘What could have happened?’
    Her voice sharpened: ‘I should like to see you. When shall you be here?’
    ‘Nothing wrong since this morning?’
    ‘No, but I should like to see you.’
    I knew her tone, I knew she was at her worst. I tried to coax her, as sometimes one does in the face of wretchedness, into saying that she was not so bad.
    Flatly the words came to my ear: ‘I’m not too bad to cope.’
    She added: ‘I want to see you. Shall you be long?’
    When I went into the hall, she was waiting there for me.
    She began to speak before I had taken my coat off, and I had to put my arm round her shoulders and lead her into the drawing-room. She was not crying, but I could feel beneath my hand the quiver of her fibres, the physical sign that frightened me most.
    ‘It’s been a bad day,’ she was saying. ‘I don’t know whether I can go on. It’s no use going on if it’s too hard.’
    ‘It won’t be too bad,’ I said.
    ‘Are you sure?’
    I was ready with the automatic consolation.
    ‘Have I got to go on? Can I tell them I shan’t be able to come on January 1st?’
    That was what she meant, I had assumed, by ‘going on’; she spoke like that, whenever she winced away from this ordeal to come, so trivial to anyone else.
    ‘I don’t think you ought,’ I said.
    ‘It wouldn’t matter much to them.’ It was as near pleading as she had come.
    ‘Look,’ I said, ‘if you get out of this, you’ll get out of everything else in the future, except just curling up into yourself, now won’t you? It’s better for you to come through this, even if it means a certain amount of hell. When you put it behind you, all will be well. But this time you mustn’t give up.’
    I was speaking sternly. I believed what I said; if she surrendered over this test, she would relapse for good and all into her neurosis; I was hoping, by making my sympathy hard, to keep her out of it. But also I spoke so for a selfish reason. I wanted her to take this job so that she would be occupied and so at least partially off my hands. In secret, I looked forward to January as a period of emancipation.
    I thought of mentioning the doctor whom Charles March had recommended, and the appointment that I had made. Then I decided against.
    ‘You ought to go through with it,’ I said.
    ‘I knew you’d say that.’ She gave me a smile, not bitter, not mechanical, quite transformed; for a second her face looked youthful, open, spiritual.
    ‘I’m sorry for giving you so much trouble,’ she said, with a curious simplicity. ‘I should