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Roger always showed signs of persecution-mania in the Ritz. He did not like it when we knew people at other tables whom he didn’t know and, when the waiter brought him the wrong dish by mistake, he began on a set-piece which I had heard him use before in this same place. “Fashionable restaurants are the same all over the world,” he said. “There are always exactly twenty per cent more tables than the waiters can manage. It’s a very good thing for the workers’ cause that no one except the rich know the deficiencies of the luxury world. Think of the idea Hollywood gives of a place like this,” he said, warming to his subject. “A maître d’hôtel like an ambassador, bowing famous beauties across acres of unencumbered carpet—and look at poor Lorenzo there, sweating under his collar, jostling a way through for dowdy Middle West Americans ...” But it was not a success. Lucy, I could see, thought it odd of him to complain when he was a guest. I pointed out that the couple whom Roger condemned as Middle West Americans were in fact called Lord and Lady Settringham, and Andrew led the conversation, where Roger could not follow it, to the topic of which ambassadors looked like maîtres d’hôtel. The woman-novelist began a eulogy of the Middle West which she knew and Roger did not. So he was left with his theme undeveloped. All this was worth five pounds to me, and more. I thought it typical of the way Lucy had been brought up that she returned my invitation in a day or two. Roger got in first on the telephone. “I say, are you free on Wednesday evening?” “I’m not sure. Why?” “I wondered if you’d dine with us.” “Not at half past six for the Finsbury Theatre?” “No. I work late these days at the Red China Supply Committee.” “What time then?” “Oh, any time after eight. Dress or not, just as you feel like it.” “What will you and Lucy be doing?” “Well, I suppose we shall dress. In case anyone wants to go on anywhere.” “In fact, it’s a dinner party?” “Well, yes, in a kind of way.” It was plain that poor Roger was dismayed at this social mushroom which had sprung up under his nose. As a face-saver the telephone call was misconceived, for a little note from Lucy was already in the post for me. It was not for me to mock these little notes; I had begun it. But an end had to be made to them, so I decided to answer this by telephone, choosing the early afternoon when I assumed Roger would be out. He was in, and answered me. “I wanted to speak to Lucy.” “Yes?” “Just to accept her invitation to dinner.” “But you’ve already accepted.” “Yes, but I thought I’d better just tell her.” “I told her. What d’you think?” “Ah, good, I was afraid you might have forgotten.” I had come badly out of that. From first to last the whole episode of the dinner was calamitous. It was a party of ten, and one glance round the room showed me that this was an occasion of what Lucy had been brought up to call “duty.” That is to say, we were all people whom for one reason or another she had felt obliged to ask. She was offering us all up together in a single propitiatory holocaust to the gods of the schoolroom. Even Mr. Benwell was there. He did not realize that Lucy had taken the house furnished and was congratulating her upon the decorations; “I like a London house to look like a London house,” he was saying. Roger was carrying things off rather splendidly with a kind of sardonic gusto which he could often assume in times of stress. I knew him in that mood and respected it. I knew, too, that my presence added a particular zest to his performance. Throughout the evening I caught him in constant enquiry of me; was I attending to this parody of himself? I was his audience, not Lucy. The fate in store for myself was manifest as soon as I came into the room. It was Lucy’s cousin Julia, the younger of the two girls Basil had told me of, the one whose début had been so disturbed by Lucy’s marriage. It would not, I felt, be a grave setback. Julia had that particular kind of succulent charm—bright, dotty, soft, eager, acquiescent, flattering, impudent—that is specially, it seems, produced for the delight of Anglo-Saxon manhood. She had no need of a London season to find a happy future. “Julia is staying with us. She is a great fan of yours,” said Lucy in her Pont Street manner; a manner which, like Roger’s, but much more subtly, had an element of dumb crambo in it. What she said turned out to be true.

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In the criminal code of Haiti, Basil tells me, there is a provision designed to relieve unemployment, forbidding farmers to raise the dead from their graves and work them in the fields. Some such rule should be observed against the use of live men in books. The algebra of fiction must reduce its problems to symbols if they are to be soluble at all. I am shy of a book commended to me on the grounds that the “characters are alive.” There is no place in literature for a live man, solid and active. At best the author may maintain a kind of Dickensian menagerie, where his characters live behind bars, in darkness, to be liberated twice nightly for a brief gambol under the arc lamps; in they come to the whip crack, dazzled, deafened and doped, tumble through their tricks and scamper out again, to the cages behind which the real business of life, eating and mating, is carried on out of sight of the audience. “Are the lions really alive?” “Yes, lovey.” “Will they eat us up?” “No, lovey, the man won’t let them”—that is all the reviewers mean as a rule when they talk of “life.” The alternative, classical expedient is to take the whole man and reduce him to a manageable abstraction. Set up your picture plain, fix your point of vision, make your figure twenty foot high or the size of a thumbnail, he will be life-size on your canvas; hang your picture in the darkest corner, your heaven will still be its one source of light. Beyond these limits lie only the real trouser buttons and the crepe hair with which the futurists used to adorn their paintings. It is, anyway, in the classical way that I have striven to write; how else can I now write of Lucy? I met her first after I had been some weeks in London; after my return, in fact, from my week at the seaside. I had seen Roger several times; he always said, “You must come and meet Lucy,” but nothing came of these vague proposals until finally, full of curiosity, I went with Basil uninvited. I met him in the London library, late one afternoon. “Are you going to the young Simmondses’?” he said. “Not so far as I know.” “They’ve a party today.” “Roger never said anything to me about it.” “He told me to tell everyone. I’m just on my way there now. Why don’t you come along?” So we took a taxi to Victoria Square, for which I paid. As it turned out, Roger and Lucy were not expecting anyone. He went to work now, in the afternoons, with a committee who were engaged in some fashion in sending supplies to the Red Army in China; he had only just come in and was in his bath. Lucy was listening to the six o’clock news on the wireless. She said, “D’you mind if I keep it on for a minute? There may be something about the dock strike in Madras. Roger will be down in a minute.” She did not say anything about a drink so Basil said, “May I go and look for the whisky?” “Yes, of course. How stupid of me. I always forget. There’s probably some in the dining room.” He went out and I stayed with Lucy in her hired drawing room. She sat quite still listening to the announcer’s voice. She was five months gone with child—“Even Roger has to admit that it’s proletarian action,” she said later—but as yet scarcely showed it in body; but she was pale, paler, I guessed, than normal, and she wore that incurious, self-regarding expression which sometimes goes with a first pregnancy. Above the sound of the wireless I heard Basil outside, calling upstairs, “Roger. Where do you keep the cork-screw?” When they got to the stock prices, Lucy switched off. “Nothing from Madras,” she said. “But perhaps you aren’t interested in politics.” “Not much,” I said. “Very few of Roger’s friends seem to be.” “It’s rather a new thing with him,” I said. “I expect he doesn’t talk about it unless he thinks people are interested.” That was outrageous, first because it amounted to the claim to know Roger better than I did and, secondly, because I was still smarting from the ruthless boredom of my last two or three meetings with him. “You’d be doing us all a great service if you could keep him to that,” I said. It is a most painful experience to find, when one has been rude, that one has caused no surprise. That is how Lucy received my remark. She merely said, “We’ve got to go out almost at once. We’re going to the theatre in Finsbury and it starts at seven.” “Very inconvenient.” “It suits the workers,” she said. “They have to get up earlier than we do, you see.” Then Roger and Basil came in with the drinks. Roger said, “We’re just going out. They’re doing the Tractor Trilogy at Finsbury. Why don’t you come too. We could probably get another seat, couldn’t we, Lucy?” “I doubt it,” said Lucy. “They’re tremendously booked up.” “I don’t think I will,” I said. “Anyway join us afterwards at the Café Royal.” “I might,” I said. “What have you and Lucy been talking about?” “We listened to the news,” said Lucy. “Nothing from Madras.” “They’ve probably got orders to shut down on it. I.D.C. have got the BBC in their pocket.” “I.D.C.?” I asked. “Imperial Defence College. They’re the new hush-hush crypto-fascist department. They’re in up to the neck with I.C.I. and the oil companies.” “I.C.I.?” “Imperial Chemicals.” “Roger,” said Lucy, “we really must go if we’re to get anything to eat.” “All right,” he said. “See you later at the Café.” I waited for Lucy to say something encouraging. She said, “We shall be there by eleven,” and began looking for her bag among the chintz cushions. I said, “I doubt if I can manage it.” “Are we taking the car?” Roger asked. “No, I sent it away. I’ve had him out all day.” “I’ll order some taxis.” “We could drop Basil and John somewhere,” said Lucy. “No,” I said, “get two.” “We’re going by way of Appenrodts,” said Lucy. “No good for me,” I said, although, in fact, they would pass the corner of St. James’s where I was bound. “I’ll come and watch you eat your sandwiches,” said Basil. That was the end of our first meeting. I came away feeling badly about it, particularly the way in which she had used my Christian name and acquiesced in my joining them later. A commonplace girl who wanted to be snubbing, would have been conspicuously aloof and have said “Mr. Plant,” and I should have recovered some of the lost ground. But Lucy was faultless. I have seen so many young wives go wrong on this point. They have either tried to force an intimacy with their husbands’ friends, claiming, as it were, continuity and identity with the powers of the invaded territory or they have cancelled the passports of the old régime and proclaimed that fresh application must be made to the new authorities and applicants be treated strictly on their merits. Lucy seemed serenely unaware of either danger. I had come inopportunely and been rather rude, but I was one of Roger’s friends; they were like his family to her, or hers to him; we had manifest defects which it was none of her business to reform; we had the right to come to her house unexpectedly, to shout upstairs for the corkscrew, to join her table at supper. The question of intrusion did not arise. It was simply that as far as she was concerned we had no separate or individual existence. It was, as I say, a faultless and highly provocative attitude. I found that in the next few days a surprising amount of my time, which, anyway, was lying heavy on me, was occupied in considering how this attitude, with regard to myself, could be altered. My first move was to ask her and Roger to luncheon. I was confident that none of their other friends—none of those, that is to say, from whom I wished to dissociate myself—would have done such a thing. I did it formally, some days ahead, by letter to Lucy. All this, I knew, would come as a surprise to Roger. He telephoned me to ask, “What’s all this Lucy tells me about your asking us to luncheon?”