I said I was sure she was mistaken.  Canon Thesiger—­

“Oh,” she said, “it wasn’t Daddy.  He wouldn’t have minded.  It was Mummy.  She never could bear poor Jimmy.”

“But,” she went on, “you’re his friend.  And he worked it for you.  They can’t get over those two things.”

I remember wondering whether deep down in her heart she meant that my marriage would knit her and Jimmy closer?

I wondered whether Jimmy, in his wisdom, had calculated on that, too?

* * * * *

At that time I didn’t realize the innocence that went with Jimmy’s wisdom.  I think I credited him with insight that I know now he never had.  I know now that, even afterwards—­at the very worst—­he had no misgivings.  All the Hampstead time, all through the Edwardes Square time he was happy.  And afterwards—­well—­happiness wasn’t the word for it; he lived in a sort of ecstasy.  Which shows how little in those days she had let him see.

It was in nineteen-ten, their last year in Edwardes Square, that the tension began.  Norah and I were married in the autumn of nineteen-nine, and we were living in my flat in Brunswick Square.  In what I made out during this period I had Norah to help me, and she had wonderful lights.

I never could keep track of Jimmy’s accelerating material progress, but the Year-Books tell me that his fourth novel came out in the spring of nineteen-nine, and his first successful play was produced in the summer of that year, and ran for the whole season and on through the winter, and I remember that in nineteen-ten he was attacking another novel and another play, which—­But it’s the attack that is the important thing, the thing that fixes nineteen-ten for me.

You cannot go on attacking, for years on end, with concentrated and increasing violence, and not suffer for it.  The first effects of Jimmy’s appalling travail may have been beneficent, but its later workings were malign.  There’s no other word for it.  In nineteen-ten Jimmy was beginning to show signs of exhaustion.  Not of his creative energy or anything belonging to it, though he prophesied a falling off after Novel Three, and declared that he could detect it.  Nobody else could have detected it.  The exhaustion was in Jimmy himself, and more especially and fatally in the Jimmy who struggled against what he called “the damnable tendency to do the sort of thing your father does.”

He couldn’t keep it up.  He couldn’t stand for ever the double strain of attacking and defending himself against his tendency.  There’s no doubt that when he was tired he got careless.  I have known him come upstairs after dinner, entirely sober, but looking rather drunk, with his hair curling over his forehead and his tie crooked and the buttons of his irreproachable little waistcoat all undone.  I have known him do the oddest things with chairs and get into postures inconceivable to ordinary men.  I have known him drop his aitches for a whole evening because he was too dead beat to hang on to them.  And Norah, going home with me, would say, “Poor Jimmy—­he does get it very badly when he’s tired.”