“I’ll talk to her about it.”
And that night I told her of my decision.
“Are you expecting me to come with you?,” she asked.
“It will be better for us both if I go alone. When I come back, you’ll have had time to think quietly . . .”
“I can picture you talking to your clerks like this,” Barbara mocked. “ ‘Your last chance, remember!’ . . .”
“To think quietly,” I repeated, “whether you would prefer me to live in Ireland. Conditions are becoming normal there . . .”
“You must really decide for yourself where you want to live,” she answered, without hinting whether she wished me to live alone.
A week later I sailed from Southampton.
If I had expected to find any striking change on my return, I should have been disappointed; but I fancy that I had by now ceased to look for the romantic reconciliations of the film-world. There was little enough change anywhere. My father-in-law had given me a farewell dinner on the night before I sailed; he gave me a dinner of welcome on the night that I returned. Tempers, I thought, were a little shorter; nerves a little thinner. The vague feeling that something decisive must soon happen reminded me of 1914, when the world expected a cataclysm and almost hoped for it.
“And certainly the conference has done nothing to avert it,” I told Bertrand at the end of dinner.