Free Homecomings by C. P. Snow

Robinson, ‘I don’t want to touch on painful topics, but I think perhaps you’ll agree that it’s not unreasonable for me to ask for an explanation.’
    ‘Do you think you deserve it?’
    ‘Sir,’ he flared up, like a man in a righteous temper, ‘I don’t see that anything in our respective positions in the intellectual world entitles you to talk to me like that.’
    ‘You know very well why my wife is quitting,’ I said. ‘You’ve made too much mischief. She isn’t ready to stand any more.’
    He smiled at me sympathetically, putting his temper aside as though it were a mackintosh.
    ‘Mischief ?’ he said.
    ‘ Mischief ,’ he repeated, reflectively, like one earnestly weighing up the truth. ‘It would help me if you could just give me an example of what sort of mischief I’m supposed to be guilty of, just as a rough guide.’
    I said that he had spread slander about her.
    ‘Remember,’ he said, in a friendly merry manner, ‘remember you’re a lawyer, so you oughtn’t to use those words.’
    I said that his slander about the book had sickened her.
    ‘Do you really think,’ he said, ‘that a sane man would be as foolish as you make me out to be? Do you think I could possibly go round blackguarding anyone who was supporting me? And blackguarding her very stupidly, according to your account, because for the sum she lent me she could have published her book several times over. I’m afraid, I don’t like to say it, but I’m afraid you’ve let Sheila’s difficulties infect you.’
    For a second his bland reasonableness, his trick of making his own actions sound like a neurotic’s invention, his sheer euphoria, kept me silent.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ve let poor Sheila’s state infect you. I suppose it is the beginning of schizophrenia, isn’t it?’
    ‘I am not going to discuss my wife,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think it profitable to discuss your motives–’
    ‘As for her book,’ he said, ‘I assure you, it has real merit. Mind you, I don’t think she’ll ever become a professional writer, but she can say original things, perhaps because she’s a little different from most of us, don’t you know?’
    ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you,’ I said. ‘Except to arrange how you can pay my wife’s money back.’
    ‘I was afraid she might feel like that–’
    ‘This is final,’ I said.
    ‘Of course it is,’ said Robinson with his gay, wholehearted laugh. ‘Why, I knew you were going to say that the very moment you came into the room!’
    I had been strung up for a quarrel. It was a frustration to hear my words bounce back. If he had been a younger man, I might have hit him. As it was, he regarded me with sympathy, with humour in his small, elephantine eyes, the middle parting geometrically precise in his grandfatherly hair.
    ‘You’ve done her harm,’ I said in extreme bitterness, and regretted the words as soon as they were out.
    ‘ Harm ?’ he inquired. ‘Because of her association with me? What kind of harm?’
    He spread out his hands.
    ‘But, as you said, this isn’t the time or place to consider the troubles of poor Sheila. You came here to take her money out, didn’t you? Always recognize the inevitable, I’m a great believer in that. Don’t you think it’s time we got down to business?’
    I had run into another surprise. As I sat beside his desk, listening to Robinson’s summary of his agreement with Sheila and his present situation, I realized he was a man of unusual financial precision and, so far as I could judge, of honesty. It was true that, cherishing his own secretiveness, he concealed from me, just as he had originally concealed from Sheila, some of his sources of income and his expectations of money to come. Somehow he had enough money to continue in his office and to pay Miss Smith; meanwhile, he was postponing his first ‘list’ until the autumn; it struck me, was he glad of the excuse? Daydreaming, planning, word-spinning