I can’t express how I felt after that afternoon at the tennis club. I don’t believe anybody can have any idea of it. I relived every moment of the afternoon, recounted over and over again the humiliation and the shame, the foolish eagerness that had made me too keen to win, the unnecessary lie in which I had been caught out. I tried to reconstruct these scenes so that they would be more acceptable, to imagine what might have happened had I restrained myself, but the reality was too strong. Turning in endless anguish on the bed, I relived the afternoon, and thought how Sheila’s warm smile of welcome had been so quickly turned to the cold rejecting look which was the last thing I remembered of her. The hour hand of the clock showed two, three, four. Beside me May slept peacefully, unmoving, a statue in the bed. I slept for three hours then, sleep invaded by bad dreams of something coming towards me, pulling me and then letting go so that I whirled about in space.
At Palings’ next day things were no better. I dealt with the work mechanically, in a kind of dream. The letters I dictated were coherent, but they seemed to be produced by an outer shell whose doings left untouched my own warm, sensitive inner being. I saw Miss Murchison looking at me once or twice rather curiously, but there was nothing I could do about that. At four o’clock I could endure it no longer. I put on my hat and coat and told her that I felt unwell and was going home.
Instead I wandered down Regent Street and into Soho, where I went to a little club to which Uncle Dan had once taken me, and drank several glasses of whisky. With the second glass it was as though a weight pressing on my mind had been removed, or as though the inner being, the one who hadn’t been able to make contact with what was going on outside Palings, had been blended with the outer one. This sounds a ridiculous way to put it, no doubt, but it’s what I felt.
I must have stayed drinking longer than I intended, because when I looked at my watch it was seven o’clock. The time meant something to me. I remembered suddenly that to-day was Wednesday, our day for going to see mother, and that seven o’clock was the time we were due to arrive. I bought a packet of those tablets that are supposed to take away the smell from your breath, and then jumped on to a bus. I got to Baynard Road just after half past seven, and mother opened the door.
“I’m sorry, Mother, extremely sorry, but I had to work late. All to do with the reorganisation of the department and then Mr. Lacey invited me in to have a drink with him. At his club. He’s an important man in the firm, you know, not the kind of invitation you can refuse. Is May here?”
“Oh.” My mother sounded uncommonly grim. I reflected that if I had decided in advance to tell this tale I need not have worried about taking the tablets, which had left in my mouth a taste both dry and bitter. “Yes, May is here. Would you like to go upstairs and wash?”
“What’s that?” This was a very unusual thing for mother to say, she was not usually pernickety about that kind of thing.
“Go upstairs and wash.” In her voice there was the ring of authority I remembered from childhood. I went obediently up the stairs, turned on the hot-water tap in the tiny bathroom and confronted myself in the glass. There I saw the visible reason for my mother’s grimness. On my left cheek, smudged but still plainly to be seen for what it was, showed the mark of a pair of lips. I washed it off and went downstairs, much shaken. Of the occasion when those lips had stamped themselves upon my face I could remember nothing.
That evening passed uneasily. I revoked at sevens, kissed May savagely and against her will as we crossed the Common, and when we reached the flat collapsed on to the bed with my clothes still on, and fell asleep.