George Arbuthnot was a novelist by trade – a rather sordid social comedy was his line – and he had not been broadcasting for long. But already he was popular on the air, potentially far more popular than he would ever be as a fabricator in finical prose of witty if unedifying drawing-room romances. The microphone had brought to the surface a sort of secondary personality, perhaps more effective than genuine, the chief characteristic of which was an abounding and cheerful moral earnestness. Arbuthnot’s confident voice with its buoyant nervous tone momentarily smoothed out life’s difficulties for thousands. During a precious fifteen minutes weekly his hearers could believe that all might yet be well with their particular private world.
But Arbuthnot’s own private world was a mess. He had married a beautiful and slightly crazy girl whose completely amoral nature caught his rather cynical professional interest. It had not been a sensible thing to do; craziness and amorality are not likely to go with hard-wearing domestic virtues; and certainly the wise and confident voice on the air would have condemned the alliance out of hand. Arbuthnot was paying for his rashness now.
His wife had taken a lover, a disgusting man called Rupert Slade, whose suave manners and faint contemptuous smile he had come violently to loathe. And unfortunately the situation left Arbuthnot – humiliatingly as if he were a weak-willed wronged husband in one of his own novels – baffled and indecisive. For one thing it was Slade who, being in on broadcasting, had got him this new means of adding substantially to his income. Probably Slade could do him no harm in that matter now. He was too well established as a star performer. Still, the thing added to life’s awkwardness.
And so when he came home from delivering his weekly talk Arbuthnot was often irritated and restless. He was restless tonight – more so than he could remember for some time. It was as if he were endeavouring to thrust back into the depths of his mind impulses to which it would be dangerous to give conscious attention. He tried a cigar, he tried the gramophone, he tried a book which had been listed as “Curious” in his bookseller’s catalogue. But nothing served. The book was obscene without being in the least amusing – which might be the plight, Arbuthnot gloomily reflected, in which he would eventually find himself as a novelist when the sands of his talent began to run low. As for music – well, by that he was secretly bored at any time. And the cigar for some reason kept going out.
He got up and prowled the living-room of the apartment. He stood before its handsome but unwelcoming electric radiator and thought it was like his wife. His brow darkened, and his chin went up; almost one might have thought that he had achieved one of those clear-cut decisions that he so confidently recommended over the air – and that in the novels were so seldom achieved. But the issue of this appeared not so very dramatic after all. He stubbed out the unsatisfactory cigar, switched off the cheerless radiator, moved to a door, opened it and spoke down a passage.
“Roper,” he called, “I shan’t be writing tonight, and I’m going to bed. Don’t either of you wait up, for Mrs Arbuthnot will be very late.”
George Arbuthnot flicked off the lights and left the living-room in darkness.