It was early in September 1940 that the Germans began their long bombardment of London, and found us quite unprepared. I mean that my wife and I, domestically speaking, were quite unprepared. Our daily life is governed by trivial needs, and at that time Doris was gravely concerned with the difficulty of getting name-tabs to sew into the boys’ shirts and underclothes. We had been undecided, or indecisive, about what to do with William, who, though a couple of months over fourteen, was going off to his public school for the first time; and several dozen name-tabs were needed for his outfit. This urgent task, which was never quite completed, weighed far more heavily on Doris’s mind than the lurid destruction of London’s docks. It was on a Sunday—a day I shall always remember—that the lower banks of the Thames went up in flame and filthy smoke, and Doris sat in tears because William’s wardrobe lacked the proper marks of identification.
After the boys had gone—their school was in the Midlands, and seemed safe enough—I said to Doris, ‘There’s no need for you to stay in London, you had better go down to The Hawthorns.’ That was a small house I had bought, a few years before, on the outskirts of Great Missenden.
‘But what will you do?’ she asked.
‘I’ll manage well enough,’ I said; though I had, in fact, given the matter little thought. At that time, when we were under a nightly bombardment, it was easier to live from day to day than to make elaborate plans for the future. At the office I had to think ahead, for we had large Government contracts—with all Britain blacked-out my trade was booming—but about my private life I was fairly indifferent.
Doris needed little persuasion from me—the nightly racket was a sufficient argument—and by the end of the month I was living a bachelor’s life that, so far as the general discomfort permitted, I found not uncongenial. I had a faithful, elderly cook who, for purely sentimental reasons, refused to leave London, and she was helped by a daily woman whose truculent temper was quite unperturbed by the howling of alarms and the shattering impact of bombs. But before the end of November my house had disappeared, and my good cook was dead.
I was at the office, working late that night, and my secretary, Miss Simpson, had stayed on to help me. It was a very noisy night, and when she went out to buy some sandwiches, or what she could get, I took from a cupboard a bottle of whisky that I had been keeping for an emergency. We ate cheese sandwiches, drank a little whisky and water, and worked for another hour or two. Then I telephoned for my car. Our Government contracts entitled me to a car, and I was allowed to keep Briggs, my driver who had been with me for seven or eight years. Miss Simpson lived with her mother in Camden Town, and when Briggs had dropped me, he would take her home. Or so we anticipated.
But the fire-engines reached my house before we did. That is to say, they reached the site where my house had been. There was very little of it left, and a policeman, walking heavily on a pavement covered with crisply splitting glass, refused to let me go near the still-smoking ruin. ‘They found the body of an elderly woman,’ he said. ‘Would you expect anyone else to have been there?’
‘No one else,’ I said, and felt myself desolated—blown open and scoured by unmeaning terror—as if I, like my house, lay in ruins. I was trembling from head to foot and could do nothing to control my chattering teeth, my shaking knees. I had left Miss Simpson in the car, but suddenly she appeared beside me. She took me by the arm and led me away.
‘You had better come home with me,’ she said. ‘We have a spare room, because my brother’s in Iceland. He used to be an accountant, but now he’s a Gunner.’
I had brought the bottle of whisky with me—because the night was so noisy I had intended to give Briggs a tot—and when we came to Miss Simpson’s house in Camden Town she asked him to come in too. Her mother was a plump and florid woman in her early fifties, and in the house there were a lot of Chinese pictures—not very good ones—and Oriental-looking furniture. (The late Mr. Simpson, I discovered, had at one time been employed in the Chinese Customs Service.) The four of us sat down together and drank whisky and water. I was very much upset by our old cook’s death, and of what we talked about I remember very little other than a remark, quite casually made by Mrs. Simpson, which struck a very foreign note in our conversation. ‘As Buddhists,’ she said, ‘our attitude to death is rather different from yours.’
I slept comfortably enough in the spare room, and Briggs lay on a sofa. In the morning Mrs. Simpson said, ‘If you like to stay here till you find a more suitable place, Mr. Gaffikin, you’ll be very welcome, and no trouble, I assure you.’ I thanked her, but thought it unlikely I should return.
I went down to Great Missenden to tell Doris what had happened, and to get some clothes. I took Miss Simpson with me—her name was Lilian, I had discovered—and Briggs drove us. Doris was so upset by my news that she was no help at all, and Miss Simpson undertook to pack a couple of suitcases with what she thought I would need. Till that day I had never really looked at her; or, more accurately, I had never looked at her as anything more than a useful, agreeable, and animate piece of office furniture. She had been my secretary for about six months, and during all that time we had been incessantly busy, and I had grown accustomed to her as a person whom I liked and on whom I could depend. But I had grown accustomed to a secretary, not to a woman with her own claim to attention: her own claim and her own responses.
It was in the motor-car, on our way back to London, that I became aware—and that with some surprise—of her individuality and her attractions. She was, in fact, a very good-looking young woman, with a precisely shaped and rather florid mouth, excellent teeth, and heavily lashed, lustrous eyes that were not quite the same colour, one being grey-blue, the other grey-green; they were long and a little tilted at the outer corners. Or was that my fancy, after hearing that she had been born in Shanghai?
We talked about Buddhism, I remember. It was a subject of which I knew next to nothing, and of which I never learnt much, because I could never learn anything clear-cut and definite. But conversation on a theme which had nothing to do with business—which was utterly remote from business—seemed to make it more natural for me to accept the invitation, which Lilian renewed, to return to Camden Town; and for a week or more, till I found good, quiet rooms in a small hotel, I slept in her mother’s house.
Late in January I had to go to Manchester, and Lilian came with me. We had adjoining rooms at the Midland Hotel, and used only one of them. There is no need, I feel, to explain how that came about, or why. We had endured together those long months during which London was a shaken target for the German bombers, and like everyone else we had lived with heightened emotions. We had known fear and despair, excitement and sometimes moments of exaltation. We had grown used to each other, and genuinely fond of each other; and both of us had been strangers to love for a long time. Lilian was twenty-seven.
What is important is what followed our first night together; and that was nearly four years of happiness. A happiness almost serene, and in the circumstances of war strangely secure. Or so we thought it.
In June 1941 Mrs. Simpson had a stroke and died two days later—her florid complexion was due to high blood-pressure—and after that Lilian and I lived openly together; though when I say ‘openly’ I don’t mean that we advertised the fact, and I saw no need to tell Doris. At that time it was hardly possible to sell a house in London, and we continued to live in Camden Town; but I used my club to give me an address, and Doris thought I slept there. So far as I was aware, she knew nothing of Lilian except that I had a very good and dependable secretary.
I was ceaselessly busy during those years, but now I don’t mind admitting that much of what I did was increasingly done at Lilian’s instigation. She became, in effect, the mistress of my business, as well as mine. She had the better brain for business, and with no apparent difficulty combined housekeeping with office work, and neither diminished her capacity for love.
She was a remarkable woman who became more beautiful by love, and in the deep calm of her nature could laugh and be gay. But she had, I must admit, one peculiarity that I learnt to accept only with difficulty. When I first learnt of it, indeed, it threatened to create a forbidding barrier between us; though the barrier was apparent only to me.
She believed implicitly in reincarnation, and was quite certain that in previous existences she had been Mme. de Sévigné, a Persian shepherd, and a dormouse. ‘Other things and people too, of course. But those are the ones I clearly remember,’ she said.
‘Why Mme. de Sévigné?’ I asked.
‘Have you read her letters?’
‘At Cambridge, I think. But I don’t remember much about them.’
‘Read them again, and I’m sure you’ll understand. Again and again she speaks in the way I think, as if we’re both following the same pattern of thought; and I seem to feel with her feelings. I wasn’t very good at French when I first read her, but before turning a page I always knew what she was going to say next. Sometimes I used to write it down, and though usually my grammar was wrong, and I made mistakes in spelling, there was no mistake in the meaning of what I wrote. It was the same as hers. Always.’
‘And that was the very first time you had read her letters?’
‘I was only sixteen. And my French, as I told you, wasn’t very good.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘if I accept Mme. de Sévigné——’
‘You’ve got to, because there’s no doubt about it. Look at my eyes: even some of her physical characteristics have been repeated.’
‘They’re not quite the same colour,’ I said.
‘Their colour is quite different; and her eyes were the same as mine. And my hair, my skin——’
‘You have beautiful hair, and your complexion—well, I’m not going to flatter you, but it flatters a dog-rose and depreciates cream.’
‘So did hers,’ she said coolly.
Her manner and her confidence were slightly unnerving. She did not usually speak in so commanding a tone—a tone that defied argument—and I realised the strength of her conviction, though I still thought it absurd. I decided, however, that I must not accept her belief—and the seriousness of her belief—without a struggle; and I took the risk of being mildly facetious.
‘Can I still retain a doubt about the dormouse?’ I asked.
‘Have you ever seen a dormouse waking up after hibernation?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I thought not. Because if you had——’
‘Would I recognise you?’
‘You would see what it’s like to wake out of a sleep that might have gone on for ever and ever. A sleep so long that memory of what happened before had become quite dim. The eyes of a dormouse, when it’s waking up, are almost transparent, and if you have the proper sort of sympathy you can see right into its puzzled mind. It’s trying to remember—and that’s what I have to do every morning.’
‘You sleep very soundly,’ I admitted.
‘Though it’s a long, long time since I was a dormouse.’
‘Before you were a Persian shepherd?’
‘You’re not laughing at me, are you?’
‘I’m beginning to feel there’s rather a lot of us for one bed.’
She sat up—the light was still on—and said, ‘I’m not going to stay here unless you take me seriously.’
‘But a Persian shepherd——’
‘I went there when I was nineteen, with a woman who was writing a book. I was her secretary. We lived with nomads for weeks and weeks. In a tent. The people were Bakhtiaris, and they accepted me as if I were one of themselves. The sheep would follow me as if I were, and I remembered the look of the country.’
I felt extremely uncomfortable when Lilian first told me all this, and I don’t think I ever really believed her. In the office she was so very efficient, and it was far from easy to recognise in a woman who could talk toughly to tough Lancashire businessmen the reincarnation of Mme. de Sévigné and a Bakhtiari shepherd; to say nothing of the dormouse. But she herself was quite untroubled by her background—if that was her background—and very rarely spoke of it. Nor did she speak of her religion, unless I asked her to, or seem burdened by any obligation to it, other than meditation.
She told me that according to Buddha’s teaching there was no ultimate reality in things. They existed only because we thought they did; and an added difficulty, at least to my mind, was that thought itself might be an illusion. That, it seemed to me, was a possible explanation of her belief that she had, at different times, been Mme. de Sévigné and a dormouse; but I refrained from saying so. As comment it would have been frivolous, as criticism superficial; and I did not want to quarrel with her.
One day, however, I bought a translation of Mme. de Sévigné’s letters—or rather, a selection of them in the Everyman edition, and second-hand at that—and I found them uncommonly fascinating. To begin with, I admit, I read them with the rather mischievous purpose of teasing Lilian—or even trying to catch her out—by suddenly referring to some episode in French history, of a domestic sort, with which she, as the reincarnation of an important seventeenth-century personage, ought to be familiar; but I was captured by their charm and continued to read them for their own interest.
By the spring of 1943 Lilian had taken on a great deal of really responsible work in the office, and one day, when I was feeling tired, she went on my behalf to Leeds—or was it Bradford? Manchester, perhaps.—At any rate, she had to spend the night there, wherever it was, and in her absence I read the whole of the Everyman selection and enjoyed myself thoroughly. I had, moreover, an uncommon stroke of luck. In that hungry year, an outstanding stroke of luck. A Scotch client, for whom I had done some small service that I have quite forgotten, came in and presented me with a dozen gull’s eggs and a twelve-pound salmon.
I took them to my club, and made a bargain with the Secretary. I offered him, for the club, half of the salmon in return for its being boiled, and enough lettuce to fill a salad-bowl. He was well pleased, and let me buy a couple of bottles of champagne and a wedge of cheese. The following day I took the tail-half of the salmon out to Camden Town, and in readiness for Lilian’s return set out a dinner that was a perfect banquet for war-time. Gull’s eggs, cold salmon, a salad, and champagne! What could be better?
Lilian, as I expected, had done a good job in Manchester—or possibly in Leeds—and being a girl with a hearty appetite she was delighted to see our well-furnished table. We sat down with the greatest good humour, and as I poured a second or third glass of champagne I said—with no thought of catching her out, but simply because I was interested in what I had read—I said to her, ‘I have only just learnt—what I feel I should have known before—that La Rochefoucauld died of gout.’
‘Poor man,’ she said, ‘so sweet and so reasonable. He was strangled by it.’
‘Strangled?’
‘It begins in the big toe, but when it becomes chronic it can cause congestion in the kidneys and the chest, and what killed him certainly appeared to be strangulation. Bossuet was with him when he died.’
I doubted the likelihood of any modern doctor’s agreement with her description of the disease, but I hesitated to say so because of a sudden feeling that I didn’t really know the woman sitting on the opposite side of the table. She continued to eat and drink—almost impatiently she held out her glass, she helped herself to more salmon—but, in a way that I find impossible to describe, her mind had become remote, and that manifestly so. She went on talking in the most friendly fashion—with great vivacity, indeed—but with an unfamiliar condescension as if we were strangers, side by side in deck-chairs on an ocean liner, who had been led into conversation by narrow escape from some passing danger; collision with another ship, perhaps.
‘It was less than a month after they burnt La Voisin,’ she said. ‘My God, what a woman! But I suppose you have never heard of her?’
Indeed, I had not, until the night before, and I thought it no great sin to say, ‘La Voisin? Who was she?’
‘A midwife, married to a shopkeeper, who practised abortion and sold love-potions or poison according to your need. She had plenty of customers, some of them very distinguished. Mme. de Bouillon bought poison for her tedious old husband, the duke, but when she was accused she only laughed, and got off because she had persuaded the old dotard to go with her to the court of enquiry.’
‘What happened to La Voisin?’
‘She was put to the torture—ordinary and hard—and ate well immediately afterwards. She boasted about her customers, and said Racine had poisoned an actress called—now what was her name? No, I have forgotten. She sang bawdy songs to her gaolers in Vincennes, and when they brought her to Paris, to be burnt, she kicked the confessor and knocked the crucifix out of the cart. I saw her passing the Hôtel de Sully. She kicked and fought before they could pull her down from the tumbrel, and when they set her on the faggots and covered her with straw, she shouted and swore through the smoke till the smoke choked her.’
All that Lilian told me she could, admittedly, have learnt from the published letters of Mme. de Sévigné—even from the selection in the Everyman edition that I had bought—but the manner in which she related the story was not that of an actress who had learnt a given part; unless she was an exceptionally good actress. She told her story with the animation of lively reminiscence, and the disapproval of a moralist whose personal inhibitions could not exclude a generous interest in the curious misdeeds of less-disciplined people.
‘It was a great age for poisoning,’ she said reflectively, ‘though most of the available poisons weren’t very efficient. A few years before they burnt La Voisin, Mme. de Brinvilliers—she was the Marquise de Brinvilliers—made nine attempts to poison her father, all unsuccessful.’
‘And then gave up?’
‘No, the tenth time she was lucky. And then she poisoned her brother. They burnt her too. She was very brave about it.’
I felt a strong disinclination to probe farther into her memory—though I told myself it could be no real, no genuine memory—and with some difficulty turned the conversation to safer, more mundane topics. For a little while a certain remoteness still coloured her manner, but gradually she reverted to her normal style, and for a long time we talked, easily enough, of current fears and problems, and our neighbours in business.
But before going to bed—I had drunk, perhaps, a glass too much—I said, ‘I still don’t understand why you feel you’ve inherited her identity. She was devoted, for most of her life, to a daughter whom she had lost by marriage to a man who lived in Provence—by the distance, in those days, of Provence from Paris—and by the coldness of her daughter’s nature——’
‘And what happened to me?’ cried Lilian, rising from her chair with an expression on her face, and a gesture of her arms, that recalled, I must admit, the theatricality of a bygone stage convention.—I thought of Bernhardt, though I had never seen her.—‘I told you once, and we agreed that I should never speak of it again, that we should never discuss it. But do you think silence has made me forget?’
Poor Lilian. It might have been better for her if we had spoken more of the great tragedy of her life—it would have given her relief—and I confess it was by my fault that the ban of silence was imposed. I have a strong dislike for tragedy—especially the hurts of other people—and when, with a fine honesty, she had told me of her earlier involvement with a young man, and its sad conclusion, I had asked her to tell me no more about it.
At the age of twenty-two she had fallen deeply in love with a youngish married man called Frank, estranged from his wife, who had got her with child and then gone off to fight in Spain; where he was killed. Of the rights and wrongs of the affair—of the reality or intensity of Frank’s love, that is—I know nothing; but the news of his death prostrated Lilian, and she lost the child of which she was pregnant. To my apprehension—and in the apprehension, I imagine, of most men and women of a wordly sort—the miscarriage or premature birth should have been cause for relief and gratitude; but to Lilian it was the source of unhealing grief—a grief intolerably added to the death of a man for whom I still can entertain no friendly feeling—and over the broken peace of our sumptuous dinner-table she still stood like the theatrical image of a sorrow whose reality could not be doubted.
‘She lost a daughter by distance and marriage and the coldness of Madelonne’s nature,’ she exclaimed, ‘and I lost mine by war and no-marriage and the coldness of death-before-life—and what’s colder than that? I am left with a love that has no goal, no target, and nothing to wrap with love. You may not believe in me, or what I say, but you can’t disbelieve in sorrow. You can’t disbelieve in the waste of love, and the wound it leaves.’
‘No,’ I said, and we both sat down.
We sat down, and for a long time, I think, sat quietly, saying nothing. It was Lilian who first recovered equanimity—she was a good woman, a better creature than I am —and with a self-mocking laugh she got up, and came to me, and kissed me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You gave me a heavenly dinner—yes, heavenly, for nothing is more truly celestial than gull’s eggs, growing in the sky—and I repaid you with hysteria. But forgive me—and let’s finish the champagne.’
The war—that abominable war—evoked, for temporary consolation, much passionate love, but I doubt if any temporarily coupled pair loved with a deeper and more satisfying love than that which united Lilian and me; though neither of us went to bed with a spirit of virginity, and each of us was haunted by an indissoluble memory: she of Frank, who died in Spain and was, I feel, less worthy of her love than she believed; and I of Mary Armstrong, whom twice only I had kissed, and then with little more than a passing cousin’s peck—but of whom I dreamt and was to dream again.
Because of Lilian I was introduced to the letters of Mme. de Sévigné, which gave me much pleasure, and because of them, to the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, from whom I learnt that I was guilty of the greatest sin of all, of paresse, or intellectual indolence. It was at first a great burden to bear—the knowledge of that sin—and I tried to relieve it by reading some of Lilian’s books on Buddhism; which would, I hoped, convince me that both paresse and sin were no more than illusion. But though I found it easy to believe in La Rochefoucauld’s pessimism—his genial and stimulating pessimism—I got no satisfaction from the woolly texture and intangible teachings of Buddhism; though that was where I hoped for belief. In the middle of a war it would have been some comfort to believe that all life was an illusion and death itself a fiction. But that mercy was denied me.
The nearest I came to it was one morning in—of all improbable places—Blackpool. At intervals I had to go to Manchester; Lilian usually came with me, and it once happened that we did our business with surprising ease, and were left with an unexpectedly free week-end. So we went to Blackpool. It was early spring, there was no one there—or so I remember it—and on a calm and empty Sunday morning, under a slightly veiled and placid sun, we walked along the beach and eventually sat down to watch a pale and lapsing sea that slowly and slyly retreated as we watched it.
Then I turned to look at Lilian, and for a moment—it was some trick of the light, of course—it seemed that she was there only in outline. She was, as a matter of fact, quite sturdily built, but for that moment I saw her transparent as a shadow, and with a little cry of alarm I leaned forward and caught her by the hand.
‘I thought you had left me,’ I said.
‘Only for a minute,’ she said, and laughed.
‘You mustn’t,’ I said. ‘I love you too much.’
She kissed me and said, ‘Take care, or you’ll make me believe in reality.’
‘You do.’
‘As much as I can,’ she said.
‘You feel the temptation?’
‘When I’m with you. Then it seems a very real temptation. When I say I love you, I go as near reality as anyone can.’
‘But you do love me. Almost as much as I love you.’
‘I admit the illusion. I rejoice in the illusion. But it remains illusion.’
‘My love for you,’ I said, ‘brings me closer to reality than I’ve ever been before. As an emotion it speaks something more like the truth than I have ever spoken before.’
‘It may be close to reality, it may be like the truth, but it isn’t, in fact, either truth or reality.’
‘Imperfection,’ I said—rather ponderously, I now admit—‘is implicit in the human condition.’
‘You dream,’ she said. ‘You’ve told me about your dreams. More than once you’ve said that your dreams seem to have as compelling a sense of reality as anything you do when you’re awake; as anything that happens between breakfast-time and bedtime—but when you wake up you realise, of course, that they were dreams and nothing more. Well, what you do between breakfast-time and bedtime may only be another dream: a dream of the gods in which we are just the figments of their dream.’
I said nothing to that. It introduced a very discomfiting sensation, both physical and mental. I felt—and this I remember very clearly—as if my body had shrunk, and between my clothes and my skin there was an interval of space filled with some mild, electrical disturbance; or as if my skull held a pool of still water in which thought like a single goldfish swam.
Then Lilian said, ‘Are you sure that in all your dreaming you have never dreamt of previous incarnation?’
‘Quite sure,’ I said. ‘I remember my dreams—my important dreams—and I’ve no recollection of anything like that except a very infantile experience of becoming a Jack Russell terrier. A little terrier dog,’ I explained, ‘that’s very fond of digging holes. We had one when I was a child, and for a couple of years I think I loved it more dearly than anything else in the world. It used to dig furiously in some odd corner of the garden—to my mother’s extreme annoyance—and it had the delightful habit of pausing in its work to look up, with excited and informative eyes, as if to say,” This is a really splendid dig, and in no time at all we’re going to find something pretty sensational.” I got into the habit of digging holes myself—I was only five or six, I suppose—but an old-fashioned thrashing or two put a stop to that. So I took to dreaming instead. I used to dream I had become a Jack Russell terrier, and side by side with Rip—that was his name—I used to dig away, and when he looked up to tell me, “Now we’re going to find something really worth while,” I would look at him and say, “Any minute now. We’re bound to find it this time.”’
‘That was one of your incarnations,’ said Lilian solemnly.
‘Oh, nonsense,’ I replied. ‘I was a very small boy, in love with a small dog, and I wanted to identify myself with him. I wanted to communicate with him. And in my dreams I turned a wish into a fact. That’s the simple and obvious explanation.’
‘What’s obvious and simple isn’t always true,’ said Lilian. ‘When you were a little boy you fell in love with a little dog, as many little boys do. Because little boys have in their unconscious minds a memory of the early days of mankind, when men didn’t feel they were different in essence from their animals. And they weren’t, of course. In previous incarnations some of them, or many of them, had been the animals who lay by the fire or guarded the sheep or went hunting with their masters.’
‘I think it’s true,’ I said, ‘that we’ve become too far estranged from animals, but for the rest of what you say—no, I find it too difficult to believe.’
That was a conversation we had in—when was it?—April or May 1944. And the other day, or perhaps a couple of years ago—for my memory of time, my very concern with time, seems to grow fainter year by year—I dreamt the dream I have recorded in another chapter: a dream in which I recognised myself as a very cowardly Anglo-Saxon monk, with a Celtic tonsure, who lived, and ran away, in or about (I suppose) the first half of the ninth century. And that was a dream which Lilian would certainly have recognised, with the greatest pleasure, as proof of a previous incarnation. But Lilian, alas, did not live to hear my account of it.
Our conversation, on that day in Blackpool, came to an end when she brought argument to conclusion with a sudden laugh. ‘I’m beginning,’ she said, ‘to feel a strong illusion of hunger.’ She stood up and laughed again, as though she had made a good joke. And hand in hand we walked back all the way to our hotel.
I still don’t know how to describe our life together. It was wholly and extraordinarily happy, and perfectly normal. But we lived, all the time, in the violent abnormality of war, with our emotions like fiddle-strings responding to rough strokes of disaster or the hard, exultant rub of triumph; and again and again I would remember—even in the most intimate moments of embracement—that I was holding someone whose concept of the physical world, whose assessment of herself and me, were radically different from mine. Perhaps, however, that knowledge increased my ardour. I was often conscious of the desire—an urgent desire—to make her admit my reality.
It is no exaggeration to say that I lived out the war under her shelter; and I am not unduly flattering myself when I say that I made her happy. Or, at the least, gave her a fairly satisfying illusion of happiness. It was on a night in early December 1944 that she died.
Her brother came home on leave, and we decided that I should live at my club while he slept in the house in Camden Town. I had met him twice before, and he knew of our relationship. But he was tired, he had been ill and needed a rest—he had said so in his letters—and I told Lilian, ‘Take a few days off, and look after him.’ He had done well, he had served arduously and honourably. They dined with me on the evening of his return—he bemedalled and wearing a lieutenant-colonel’s badges—and Briggs, who was still with me, drove them to Camden Town.
That night the house, where I had slept the night before, was struck by a V2 rocket, and demolished as completely as my house in 1940.
Not until then did I begin to believe in her doctrine of reincarnation. But when the first shock of grief—of loss and grief—began to subside, I felt a growing disinclination to accept the reality of her death; and disinclination gradually became a denial of reality. For some time, I think, I was a little unbalanced. Otherwise I would not have gone down to Great Missenden to live with Doris. Not that she suspected anything, for Briggs was completely trustworthy, and my doctor told her I had been overworking and must be well cared for if I was to avoid a complete breakdown.
I wasn’t as ill as that, of course. Before leaving London I made proper provision at the office, where the two partners I had taken in were by then quite capable of running the business—we had no difficulties facing us at the end of 1944—and to Doris’s great delight I got Robert out of the Army with the plea that my disability made his presence essential in a family firm. That saved him from service overseas—a benefit I much regretted in later years—and gave him a head-start in the City of which he took full advantage.
Meanwhile I, at Great Missenden, fully expected to meet Lilian, in some new incarnation, whenever I went for a walk or came home again. A robin sitting on a spade in the garden, a grey kitten coming carefully out of a shop-door, a friendly spaniel writhing its greeting—these, and sometimes an unknown human being with strange eyes or a lilting walk, would stop my heart with a sudden expectancy of recognition; but disappointment always followed. A little unbalanced I might be, but not so far off centre as to be deceived, for more than a moment, by an ordinary greedy robin, a neighbour’s cocker spaniel, or some foreign refugee who had settled in the village.
Slowly I recovered, and stopped looking into the eyes of every pony that pushed its head over a fence. She had once told me, I remembered, that some inadvertent fault committed in a forgotten existence might prevent reincarnation for many hundreds of years. We become inured to loss, but not without the loss of something in ourselves, and it was after Lilian’s death that I submitted, more or less openly, to that impulse of retreat from life—of what is commonly called life—which began, I suppose, after the war—the first war, I mean—and was reinforced by my discovery that Doris was a stranger whom I no longer loved. For a long time I was very unhappy.